charlie hunnam

True History of the Kelly Gang

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A topless George MacKay as Ned Kelly

You’d have thought that Ned Kelly would be an ideal fit with the movies – a glamorous outlaw, a rebel son of immigrants who fought the law (and the law won), a proto-superhero who had his own outfit, if you count a plate-steel suit as an outfit. And yet, of the modern versions (there are older, mostly lost-in-time versions going back as far as 1906), none quite hits the spot. The Mick Jagger one, from 1970, suffers from Mick Jagger being in it. The Heath Ledger one, from 2003, presented Kelly as a saint and so made him boring. And now True History of the Kelly Gang from 2019, a Justin Kurzel movie and … Read more

Deadfall

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Eric Bana and Olivia Wilde in Deadfall

Remember Eric Bana in Chopper, frightening everyone to death as Australia’s most gruesomely violent criminal, Mark “Chopper” Read? There are echoes of Bana the Bad in Deadfall, in which he plays one half of a psycho sibling pair who are heading, unwittingly as far as they and everyone else concerned can tell, for a showdown rendezvous at a Thanksgiving dinner. Deadfall isn’t half as good as Chopper, though it does give Bana a chance to show us he can still do ugly. If only writer Zach Dean and director Stefan Ruzowitzky had worked out some way of telling the other four stories they’re trying to tell with economy, leaving Bana with more screen … Read more