Film Reviews
The Burnt Orange Heresy
Friday, July 31st, 2020 Film Reviews,In The Square (2017), Ruben Östlund’s wicked send-up of the contemporary art scene, Claes Bang was a self-serving curator who couldn’t take a trick. In The Burnt Orange Heresy, Bang is back, as a louche art critic playing a dangerous game. It’s not uncommon for actors to get type-cast as tough guys, criminals or cowboys, […]
Babyteeth
Friday, July 24th, 2020 Film Reviews,Last year I spent some time trawling back over the history of Australian cinema, a process with mixed outcomes. It was exhilarating to rediscover the way local movies have captured moments of national anxiety and brash self-confidence. On the other hand, the boldness of past efforts, particularly during the 1970s, casts a withering light on […]
A White, White Day
Saturday, July 18th, 2020 Film Reviews,All nations are works in progress, but Iceland is a place in which even Nature is still experimenting. Volcanoes, glaciers, snow-topped mountains, chasms, hot springs, and a latitude that ensures whole days in summer when the sun never seems to set and days in winter when it barely shows its face. One imagines living in […]
The Booksellers
Thursday, July 9th, 2020 Film Reviews,As a general rule I’ve an aversion to reviews in which the critic begins by talking about him or herself. You know the routine: “Speaking as an young, Asian, gay, white-water rafter I feel uniquely qualified to talk about this movie…” But in this instance I’m compelled to begin with a confession: “My name is […]
Shirley
Thursday, July 2nd, 2020 Film Reviews,It may be the ultimate tribute to a novelist when she becomes the subject of someone else’s fiction, or it may be poetic justice. For the four children of American writer, Shirley Jackson (1916-65), it has been hard to recognise their mother in a new film by Josephine Decker. Although Shirley contains detailed portraits of […]
Greed
Thursday, June 25th, 2020 Film Reviews,Greed was the title of one of the cinema’s most legendary productions – an 8-hour silent epic of 1924, by Erich von Stroheim, cut by MGM to two-and-a-half hours. Movie historians have been searching for the missing six hours ever since. Greed, by the prolific British director, Michael Winterbottom, is a mere 104 minutes, and […]
It Must Be Heaven
Thursday, June 18th, 2020 Film Reviews,Elia Sulieman says he’d never seen a movie by Buster Keaton or Jacques Tati before he made his first feature in 1996. This may be true but these comics remain the inevitable points of comparison for his own style of silent humour. In It Must Be Heaven, Sulieman says exactly four words. When a New […]
Honeyland
Thursday, June 11th, 2020 Film Reviews,Honeyland is a deceptively sweet title for a documentary about a lonely life spent in a harsh, barren landscape. The place is the Republic of North Macedonia, known simply as “Macedonia” until last year when the name was changed to resolve a long-running dispute with the Greeks. The newly minted Republic is a land-locked country […]
Mrs. America
Friday, June 5th, 2020 Film Reviews,It takes a moment before one recognises those first four notes in the jazzy theme music for Mrs. America. It’s a ‘switched-on’ version of Beethoven’s Fifth – in the composer’s own famous words: “the sound of fate knocking on the door.” But for whom does it knock? Is it for Phyllis Schlafly, the formidable conservative […]
The Great
Thursday, May 28th, 2020 Film Reviews,With films based on actual people it’s always tempting to take a peek at the historical record. Fictional characters will invariably be created and genuine ones omitted, myths will be treated as facts. No-one can resist adding a dash – or a bucketload – of romance to prosaic reality. In the case of The Great […]