Mel Campbell
Tomatometer-approved critic
Mel Campbell is a freelance cultural critic, author and commentator from Melbourne, Australia. Mel co-hosted The Rereaders podcast (2016-18), was a Melbourne International Film Festival preview panellist (2012-14), was national film editor at The Thousands (2008-13), and co-founded pop-culture website The Enthusiast (2008-14). Mel's writing on film, television, fashion, literature and media has appeared at Screenhub, Junkee, The Guardian, Metro, The Age, The Big Issue, Crikey, i-D and many more. She is currently a columnist at Overland literary journal and teaches in the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne. She has co-written two romantic comedy novels with fellow film critic Anthony Morris: Nailed It! (2019) and The Hot Guy (2017); her first book was the nonfiction investigation Out of Shape: Debunking Myths about Fashion and Fit (2013). She tweets at @incrediblemelk and her personal website is The Look: reviews and essays about film, TV, clothes and history.
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie (2023) |
Fox’s quick wit illuminates this remarkable documentary … The effect is uncannily vivid and playful, like being in the passenger seat of the time-travelling DeLorean. - ScreenHub
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| Posted May 25, 2023
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Women Talking (2022) |
Perhaps this film is best described as a parable: a rich moral teaching tool in the form of a story. … I loved it, and have thought so much about it. I hope others also allow it to speak to them. - ScreenHub
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| Posted Feb 16, 2023
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Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (2022) |
The pleasure of this film isn’t really in identifying with Nancy’s sexual awakening … It’s the way Leo and Nancy anticipate and evade each other’s judgments, as the power balance shifts back and forth between them. - ScreenHub
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| Posted Aug 29, 2022
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Persuasion (2022) |
The idea that the film does not actually like its heroine is the most interesting thing about this adaptation … But ultimately, [its] other creative choices left me annoyed. - ScreenHub
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| Posted Aug 29, 2022
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Downton Abbey: A New Era (2022) |
The storytelling remains seductive, but the characters are noticeably older. They seem sleeker and more complacent, too … But maybe we’ve had enough upheaval in the past three years that this elegant fantasy past has become even more narcotic. - ScreenHub
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| Posted Aug 29, 2022
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The Lost City (2022) |
A story about the vicarious pleasures of romance fiction, and about the folly of either dismissing them as stupid or of taking them too seriously … The obviousness of the genre machinery isn’t really a flaw – it’s part of the fun. - ScreenHub
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| Posted Aug 29, 2022
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The Greenhouse (2021) |
I found myself exasperated by this film’s focus on atmosphere at the expense of developing characters and ideas so they deliver a satisfying emotional payoff. - ScreenHub
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| Posted Aug 28, 2022
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Shane (2022) |
A celebration rather than an examination of Warne’s place in Australian culture, made for people who already like Warnie and want to like him more. - ScreenHub
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| Posted Aug 28, 2022
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Dune (2021) |
The way Villeneuve repeats ceremonial motifs throughout the film is itself ceremonious. ... Instead of explaining its feudal, courtly world, it immerses the viewer in that world's formalist visual language. - The Look
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| Posted Dec 05, 2021
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Last Night in Soho (2021) |
A frustratingly inarticulate film, in which a director who has previously mobilised cinematic language seems happy to play aimlessly with nostalgic fantasies of his own. - The Look
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| Posted Nov 20, 2021
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William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet (1996) |
Luhrmann's style simply defibrillates Shakespeare's text. ... For me, it's the overblown carnality that makes it such a perfect adaptation of the source material, and that still leaps from the screen today. - ScreenHub
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| Posted Nov 09, 2021
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Long Story Short (2021) |
Even the delightful Spall can't overcome a flaccid script that ultimately shies from risk. - ScreenHub
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| Posted Jun 18, 2021
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I Met a Girl (2020) |
Ultimately, I Met A Girl never really succeeds in the project of bringing the viewer inside Devon's head. - ScreenHub
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| Posted May 25, 2021
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June Again (2021) |
Captures something satisfying amid the bittersweet knowledge of life's impermanence: that self-knowledge and care for others make it worth living. - ScreenHub
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| Posted May 25, 2021
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Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway (2021) |
Peter Rabbit 2 wanders further from its charming source material. Instead, it's an intermittently unpleasant franchise film about the unpleasantness of franchise storytelling. - ScreenHub
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| Posted Mar 25, 2021
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The Dry (2021) |
The Dry frustrated me because it felt like an each-way bet: it has a go at both moody psychodrama and mystery narrative, but not emphatically enough to really satisfy on either ground. ... I found myself wishing for more... - ScreenHub
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| Posted Jan 08, 2021
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Baby Done (2020) |
Delightful ... former Harry Potter star Lewis never outshines popular stand-up comedian Matafeo, who effortlessly carries the film's dramatic moments as well as its comic ones. - ScreenHub
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| Posted Oct 27, 2020
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I Am Woman (2019) |
I Am Woman is at its best when it's energised by a profound affection for its subject ... Yet it suffers from a dull, cliché-sodden script which insists on squashing Reddy's career into a predictable biopic narrative arc. - ScreenHub
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| Posted Aug 28, 2020
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Babyteeth (2019) |
What I enjoyed about Babyteeth is how determinedly it works to undercut familiar genre tropes and to make its characters complex rather than likeable. - ScreenHub
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| Posted Jul 23, 2020
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Relic (2020) |
An assured cinematic exercise in dread [that] will resonate with anyone who's witnessed human frailty at confrontingly close quarters. - ScreenHub
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| Posted Jul 10, 2020
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Da 5 Bloods (2020) |
Da 5 Bloods is engaging because it's animated by complex, emotionally charged politics. It's a provocation, shot through with genuine pathos: a movie about the past that will always speak about what's going on. - ScreenHub
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| Posted Jun 16, 2020
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Dark Whispers - Volume 1 (2019) |
While not everything here will be to everyone's taste, the anthology is bursting with ideas and energetic visual approaches. - ScreenHub
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| Posted May 15, 2020
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Undertow (2018) |
Both visually sophisticated and thematically ambitious. ... But its metaphorical imagery - water and blood, death and birth - becomes so heavy-handed that it occasionally veers into ridiculousness. - ScreenHub
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| Posted Mar 05, 2020
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Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears (2020) |
Everything fans find delightful about this cosy crime romp is here [but] this film's success depends on its capacity for big-screen spectacle and flair. And unfortunately, The Crypt of Tears doesn't quite rise to the occasion. - ScreenHub
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| Posted Feb 27, 2020
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H Is for Happiness (2019) |
This warm and playful film has many wise observations to make about human nature. And it uses its vibrant mise-en-scène deliberately and astutely - never as a thoughtless grab-bag of quirks. - ScreenHub
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| Posted Feb 06, 2020
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Little Women (2019) |
Little Women is a beautifully made confection, a Christmas bonbon of a film. It's far wiser than the tale it tells. - ScreenHub
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| Posted Dec 19, 2019
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The Nightingale (2018) |
Its tenderness is striking: the way it infuses song with a longing for country that goes beyond language ... [A] challenging reminder that even sympathetic characters are enmeshed in systems of atrocity. - ScreenHub
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| Posted Dec 11, 2019
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Animals (2019) |
Sensual and beautifully textured. Hyde watches with tenderness but resists melodrama ... steering us gently towards the revelation that something more atavistic binds these two women. - ScreenHub
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| Posted Dec 11, 2019
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Little Monsters (2019) |
A wholesome, earnest film whose energy comes from the interplay between childhood innocence and adult responsibility, and a consequent rejection of adolescent cynicism. - ScreenHub
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| Posted Dec 11, 2019
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Judy & Punch (2019) |
Foulkes emphatically skewers vain, mediocre men and the violence they depend upon to secure women's fear in lieu of respect. Yet it manages to be funny... - ScreenHub
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| Posted Dec 11, 2019
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Danger Close: The Battle of Long Tan (2019) |
Grippingly depict[s] the intensely subjective experience of violence without centring individual heroes ... what makes it effective is Kriv Stenders' multifaceted approach. - ScreenHub
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| Posted Dec 11, 2019
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Hotel Mumbai (2018) |
Hotel Mumbai grants an equally intense subjectivity to its young terrorists as to their victims. Their callous fanaticism is only underscored when Maras reveals them as naïve doofuses... - ScreenHub
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| Posted Dec 11, 2019
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Island of the Hungry Ghosts (2018) |
Affecting and disquieting, it's an audiovisual braided essay about displacement and the limits of empathy ... Hungry Ghosts, though, makes poetry of despair, inertia, failure... - ScreenHub
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| Posted Dec 11, 2019
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I Am Mother (2019) |
Anchored by a fantastically assured Clara Rugaard, I Am Mother is a speculative springboard for rich discussions about prosthetic nurturing and the moral cost of engineering the greater good. - ScreenHub
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| Posted Dec 11, 2019
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The King (2019) |
Edgerton plays Falstaff's drunken buffoonery as an old warrior's self-medication, not a fool's personality. But most of all I liked the fight scenes, which unromantically depict the grim, ugly slog of medieval combat. - ScreenHub
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| Posted Dec 11, 2019
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After the Wedding (2019) |
After the Wedding is one of those thoroughly inessential yet subtle and well-crafted films made for grown-ups who like sitting back and watching the inner turmoil of other grown-ups. - ScreenHub
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| Posted Dec 11, 2019
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Promised (2019) |
Promised lacks sophistication and craft ... Still, there's something charming about this film ... an imperfect movie that nonetheless captures something that feels real and valuable. - ScreenHub
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| Posted Dec 11, 2019
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Midsommar (2019) |
Despite the way Midsommar is being talked about as an 'extreme', disturbing cinemagoing experience, I found it joyful and uplifting. - ScreenHub
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| Posted Dec 11, 2019
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Palm Beach (2019) |
Embarrassingly vapid ... a film that asks its audience to show "unfunded empathy" for the travails of ageing, bourgeois husbands and wives looks less like escapist fun and more like oblivious contempt. - ScreenHub
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| Posted Dec 11, 2019
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Ophelia (2018) |
With time, Ophelia will reveal itself as this generation's Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves: lovingly crafted medieval pulp that speaks most eloquently to teenagers, and is enjoyed as high camp by everyone else. - ScreenHub
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| Posted Dec 11, 2019
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The White Crow (2018) |
The White Crow powerfully suggests that an appetite for appreciating art as well as performing it shaped Nureyev's fluid self. - ScreenHub
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| Posted Dec 11, 2019
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Parasite (2019) |
Impeccable, sustaining shocking plot twists and tonal shifts between suspense, poignant family drama and slapstick farce without ever sacrificing its visual flair and impudent sense of humour. - ScreenHub
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| Posted Dec 11, 2019
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Rocketman (2019) |
This is a very sentimental film - but then isn't that the pleasure of musicals? I'm here for Rocketman's exuberant mythologising. - ScreenHub
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| Posted Dec 11, 2019
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Top End Wedding (2019) |
In an Australian culture filled with cynical and combative politics, Top End Wedding feels radical - not because it seeks to break new ground, but because it finds joy in a shared homecoming. - ScreenHub
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| Posted Dec 11, 2019
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Woman at War (2018) |
Highlights not only the rage and ferocity of women's activism, but also its playfulness, generosity and tenderness. It's a delightful film: beautifully shot, full of joyous symbolism, and with a deft central performance from Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir. - ScreenHub
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| Posted Dec 11, 2019
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Pimped (2018) |
This could have been intriguing if the film's ideas were clearer. But they aren't. ... Mystery and ambiguity can be gripping and exciting onscreen, but as I watched Pimped I mainly felt bored and annoyed. - ScreenHub
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| Posted Dec 11, 2019
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Mary Queen of Scots (2018) |
A traditional and essentially conservative biopic that your mum might like if The Favourite is too weird. - ScreenHub
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| Posted Dec 11, 2019
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Booksmart (2019) |
Olivia Wilde's directorial debut jostles the ghosts of teen movies past to find its own voice ... [yet] Booksmart never quite gets to grips with the way money still matters. - ScreenHub
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| Posted Dec 11, 2019
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Emu Runner (2018) |
Emu Runner, like its heroine, is a quiet gem. Its simple and satisfyingly realised themes of family and identity will appeal to kids - ScreenHub
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| Posted Dec 11, 2019
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The Age of Innocence (1993) |
The Age of Innocence is vivid, even feverish, in its sensuous focus on detail. - The Look
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| Posted Aug 22, 2019
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