Film Reviews
Dalíland
Friday, July 14th, 2023 Film Reviews,“Dalí was never in the art business,” recalled Amanda Lear, “he was in showbusiness.” As his long-serving model and muse, the statuesque pop idol could speak with authority. She had been a regular member of the maestro’s entourage, a witness to the antics that earned him notoreity in the mass media and the contempt of […]
Reality & Driving Madeleine
Friday, July 7th, 2023 Film Reviews,Reality is a film that lives up to its title, with a script taken word-for-word from one woman’s experience of an actual FBI search. The protagonist is a young civil servant with the rather surreal name of Reality Winner (Sydney Sweeney) who arrives home from the supermarket to find two men waiting for her outside […]
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
Friday, June 30th, 2023 Film Reviews,There are some sprightly octogenarians around, but nobody tops Indiana Jones. When we meet him in this long-awaited finale to the series, it’s during the last weeks of World War Two. A digitally rejuvenated Harrison Ford is battling the Nazis, getting out of one close scrape after another, while setting up the key plot device […]
Red, White & Brass
Friday, June 23rd, 2023 Film Reviews,Jennifer Lawrence, still considered one of Hollywood’s top drawcards, has appeared in only five films over the past six years. None were especially memorable, but her new effort, No Hard Feelings is a certified career killer. I never thought I’d see a big-name star degrade themselves so comprehensively as Robert De Niro did in Dirty […]
The New Boy
Friday, June 16th, 2023 Film Reviews,Last week, at a screening of Warwick Thornton’s The New Boy, Nashen Moodley, the director of the Sydney Film Festival, recalled how “exhilarated” he was by Thornton’s debut feature, Samson & Delilah (2009). That film was widely praised, frequently spoken of as a landmark in local cinema, but it’s hard to believe it would leave […]
Saint Omer & One Fine Morning
Friday, June 9th, 2023 Film Reviews,Hollywood scriptwriters are on strike, protesting about poor rates of pay and the threat of being replaced by AI. There may be quality writing on cable TV, but the stuff we get in American action films and superhero flicks could already have been written by AI, or by a fridge, or a lawnmower. My most […]
Renfield
Friday, June 2nd, 2023 Film Reviews,After watching Renfield I walked back to the car, switched on the ignition and was greeted by strains of Bela Lugosi’s Dead, by the original Goth band, Bauhaus. “No,” I thought. “Bela Lugosi is not dead! He’s very much alive and goes by the name of Nicolas Cage.” In the context of Cage’s roller-coaster career, […]
Limbo
Friday, May 26th, 2023 Film Reviews,For the Catholic Church, Limbo was literally the outskirts of Hell, inhabited by those good people who died before Christ was born, and by infants without experience of baptism or sin. In common parlance, the word has come to mean a state of indecision, of forced inaction with no clear path in sight. For filmmaker […]
Quant
Friday, May 19th, 2023 Film Reviews,Fashion is a frightening business to be in. Mary Quant Having just seen the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Karl Lagerfeld exhibition, I’m […]
Cairo Conspiracy
Friday, May 12th, 2023 Film Reviews,It would be fascinating to make a study of films that have rendered their makers persona non grata in certain countries. Cairo Conspiracy would certainly do the trick for Swedish-born filmmaker, Tarik Saleh, whose father was Egyptian. A ban, however, would be superfluous, because Saleh has been barred from returning to Egypt since 2017, when […]