Film Reviews
Alliance Française French Film Festival 2020
Friday, March 13th, 2020 Film Reviews,“I film, therefore I am.” If asked to guess who made this heroic declaration you might imagine it was some famous French director such as Henri-Georges Clouzot or Jean Renoir, or perhaps a more recent auteur, like Jean-Luc Godard or Agnès Varda. In fact, it was Charles Aznavour, the small, dark, weedy crooner who dominated […]
Dark Waters
Saturday, March 7th, 2020 Film Reviews,“Corporations are sociopathic,” says Mark Ruffalo, who plays a crusading lawyer in Dark Waters. It seems the only language universally understood by the upper echelons of American big business, is that of money. Unresponsive to moral imperatives and human suffering, able to buy all the necessary political favours, the corporation can only be hurt by […]
Motherless Brooklyn
Saturday, February 29th, 2020 Film Reviews,Edward Norton acquired the rights to Jonathan Lethem’s novel, Motherless Brooklyn, in 1998 but didn’t finish writing the script until 2012, by which time Lethem had published another six books. Filming would finally commence in February 2018 but a fire on set and resulting lawsuits set the project back by a further nine months. It […]
Emma
Thursday, February 20th, 2020 Film Reviews,There are many ways of reading Jane Austen (1775-1817). She may be the author who inspired every Mills & Boon romance but she is also one of the writers who feature in F.R.Leavis’s ‘Great Tradition’ of English literature along with George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad and D.H.Lawrence. What distinguishes Austen from the churners of […]
Birds of Prey
Thursday, February 13th, 2020 Film Reviews,Margot Robbie is not short of admirers nowadays but her performance in Birds of Prey (and the fantabulous emancipation of one Harley Quinn), has to be seen to be believed. I usually feel my brain turning to jelly at the prospect of every new, big-budget superhero flick, but there’s something about this particular lump of […]
A Hidden Life
Friday, February 7th, 2020 Film Reviews,Terrence Malick is the only Hollywood director to have translated a book by German philosopher, Martin Heidegger. I haven’t checked, but I’m fairly confident that Cecil B. DeMille or Steven Spielberg never felt the urge to dabble in the impenetrable utterances of the sage of Freiburg. Before he began making movies Malick lectured in philosophy. […]
A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood
Friday, January 31st, 2020 Film Reviews,“What the hell was that!?” said a colleague when we left the cinematheque after viewing A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood. As the usual routine is that we all shuffle out avoiding eye contact, jealously guarding our tiny insights, such an exclamation was – to say the least – unusual. I only wish I could […]
Australia Cinema: A Decade to Forget
Friday, January 24th, 2020 Film Reviews,Opening night at last year’s Sydney Film Festival drew the usual crowd of special invitees – many of them unlikely to attend another session. The film chosen to launch the festival was Rachel Ward’s Palm Beach, which chronicles the mid-life crises of a group of old friends who have come together to celebrate the lead […]
Bombshell
Thursday, January 16th, 2020 Film Reviews,It’s commonly believed that hatred pays a higher “psychological dividend” than peace, love and understanding. This debatable insight, which assumes the bleakest view of human nature, seems to be borne out by the success of Fox News. The formula pioneered by Murdoch svengali, Roger Ailes, was to turn the news into an adversarial contest with […]
Little Women
Friday, January 10th, 2020 Film Reviews,One can groan about the debased state of Hollywood but despite the relentless assembly line of blockbusters there are always new productions that shore up one’s faith in the cinema. The big surprise is that some of these films are re-makes of beloved golden oldies. I say “some” because the 2012 remake of Paul Verhoeven’s […]