Film Reviews
Birds of Paradise
Friday, October 1st, 2021 Film Reviews,At the Paris Opéra in the late 19th century the young ballerinas were referred to as the “petits rats”. Degas’s famous sculpture, The Little Dancer, was based on one such rat, a 14-year-old named Marie van Goethem, who was dismissed from the school soon after and would never be heard from again. It’s presumed Marie […]
Schumacher
Thursday, September 23rd, 2021 Film Reviews,Formula One must be the most dangerous of spectator sports. Cars reach speeds in excess of 300 kph, requiring drivers with lightning fast reflexes, steely nerves, an intuitive feel for the track – and luck. If something goes wrong with your steering column when rounding a bend at 180 kph, no amount of skill will […]
Blood Brothers: Malcolm X & Muhammad Ali
Friday, September 17th, 2021 Film Reviews,“Destiny can take your best friend as an instrument to cause you harm and your worst enemy to do you good,” says Muhammad Ali a few minutes into this absorbing Netflix documentary. He is referring to black activist, Malcolm X, who had fallen out with Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam, a […]
The Chair
Friday, September 10th, 2021 Film Reviews,University life in America today is worthy of a stupendous black comedy series but The Chair ain’t it. To do justice to such a theme would require a writer as scabrous as Michel Houellebecq and a director as fearless – and surreal – as Luis Buñuel. Amanda Peet and Annie Julia Wyman, the creators of […]
Chapelwaite
Friday, September 3rd, 2021 Film Reviews,Chapelwaite is based on Jerusalem’s Lot, a 1978 short story by Stephen King, America’s veteran monarch of horror pulp. Like most best-sellers King is a patchy writer but this hasn’t prevented his books from being turned into an endless stream of Hollywood movies, some of them as good as Carrie (1976) or The Shining (1980). […]
Nine Perfect Strangers
Friday, August 27th, 2021 Film Reviews,“Wellness” is one of humanity’s oldest pursuits but the word dates from only 1950, when an American doctor, Halbert Dunn, combined “wellbeing” and “fitness” to create a neologism that now denotes a billion dollar industry. In the eight-part Hulu series, Nine Perfect Strangers, we follow a disparate group of people who have booked themselves into […]
Top Secret UFO Projects Declassified
Thursday, August 19th, 2021 Film Reviews,On 6 April, 1966, a UFO appeared in the Melbourne suburb of Clayton South. The saucer-shaped craft caused a stir among students of Westall High School who watched it fly overhead then land behind a nearby clump of trees. Shortly afterwards it ascended again at high speed and disappeared. Channel Nine sent a team to […]
Free Guy
Thursday, August 12th, 2021 Film Reviews,If you’re not currently in lockdown there are a handful of new releases to be sampled at the cinema. This includes Disney’s latest attempt to barnstorm the box office: Free Guy. Not the worst movie you’ll see this year, it’s almost wilfully shallow. There’s no shortage of promising themes but the filmmakers seem determined to […]
Naomi Osaka
Thursday, August 5th, 2021 Film Reviews,We’re all familiar with newspaper stories about torn hamstrings, stress fractures, busted knees and shoulders. The Age can devote an entire page to a champion footballer’s groin strain. But until recently nobody ever mentioned an athlete’s mental health unless it was to lament some lapse in concentration at a vital stage. “A brain explosion!” is […]
Black Widow
Friday, July 30th, 2021 Film Reviews,Over the years I’ve never found it a hardship to watch a movie that stars Scarlett Johansson, but with Black Widow any lingering spark of male fantasy went under the steamroller. Every time I sit through one of these superhero flicks I find myself asking: “Is it me, or is it the rest of the […]