Film Reviews
How to Become a Tyrant
Saturday, July 17th, 2021 Film Reviews,Politics is a fascinating game, but hard to win. Under the yoke of a tyrant people clamour for democracy but after generations of democratic rule they hanker for a strongman to come and make all their decisions for them. As we watch the United States careening towards a complete crack-up, with millions of people obsessed […]
Charlie Chaplin: The Kid
Friday, July 9th, 2021 Film Reviews,“A picture with a smile – and perhaps, a tear,” The Kid was the first full-length feature directed by Charlie Chaplin. The film’s centenary is being celebrated with a progressive Chaplin retrospective that will unfurl in Australian cinemas for the rest of this year and into 2022, continuing a pandemic-era trend of revisiting classic movies […]
Elvis Presley: The Searcher
Friday, July 2nd, 2021 Film Reviews,There are many different Elvises, from the young hillbilly who set the music world alight with his very first recording to the bloated, drug-addled superstar, squeezed into a white jumpsuit with cape, playing to packed houses in Las Vegas casinos. In a week in which it’s impossible to get to the movies in many parts […]
The Mole Agent
Friday, June 25th, 2021 Film Reviews,Novelists have always enjoyed passing off fantasy as if it were reality but documentary makers seem to take a special pleasure in making fact resemble fiction. There have been numerous examples in recent years of documentaries telling stories that seemed too bizarre to be true, framed with all the stock devices of a mystery or […]
Martin Eden
Friday, June 18th, 2021 Film Reviews,Pietro Marcello’s Martin Eden is getting a limited release in Sydney and Melbourne but it deserves a much bigger audience. It’s a huge film – not in terms of running length, but in its themes, its characters and ambitions – the latest in an outstanding sequence of foreign-language titles that have overshadowed anything produced by […]
My Name is Gulpilil
Friday, June 11th, 2021 Film Reviews,It’s not widely appreciated what an electrifying effect Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout (1971) had on the Australian film industry. To put it bluntly, at that time there was no Australian film industry, only occasional features made in Australia by overseas directors. Michael Powell left two notable contributions: They’re a Weird Mob (1966) and Age of Consent (1969), […]
German Film Festival 2021
Saturday, June 5th, 2021 Film Reviews,It’s been years since I watched a film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, or thought much about this most decadent, irreverent of filmmakers. At the 2021 German Film Festival, Oskar Roehler’s unorthodox bio pic, Enfant Terrible, brings Fassbinder roaring back, and it’s not a pretty sight. Fassbinder was only 37 years old when he died in […]
King Otto
Thursday, May 27th, 2021 Film Reviews,We live in a deeply divided world, but when was it any different? One of Europe’s most ingrained divisions has been between the so-called Teutonic spirit and the Mediterranean spirit. It was a contrast that exercised the mind and the pen of artist, Emil Nolde, who saw the Germans as the embodiment of all things […]
Death of a Ladies Man
Friday, May 21st, 2021 Film Reviews,It’s fair to say that Canadian director, Matt Bissonnette, is a Leonard Cohen fan. His debut feature in 2002 was called Looking for Leonard, and now comes Death of a Ladies Man, inspired by Cohen’s album of 1977. I’m not quite sure how an album, or the title of an album, gets transformed into a […]
Ema
Friday, May 14th, 2021 Film Reviews,A traffic light suspended from a wire across a city street is on fire. As the camera pans back we see a figure in protective clothing holding a flame thrower. It’s clear from the first scene that Pablo Larráin’s Ema is going to be something special. Rules are going to be broken, conventions overturned. The […]