Film Reviews
Anomalisa
Thursday, February 4th, 2016 Film Reviews,It gets progressively harder to argue with Ecclesiastes 1:9: “there is no new thing under the sun”, but Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson have shaken my faith, with Anomalisa. It is the story of a dour, middle-aged Englishman named Michael Stone who has lived in the United States for many years without losing his accent. […]
Looking for Grace
Thursday, January 28th, 2016 Film Reviews,Looking for Grace is yet another Australian feature that makes a virtue out of vagueness. A small, quirky film, it unfolds like a detective story that never builds up dramatic momentum. The script is permeated with deadpan comedy that echoes the disjointed, inarticulate way so many Australians interact, but there are no great insights to […]
Room
Thursday, January 28th, 2016 Film Reviews,At the same time Room was being shown in preview there was a news story about a doctor in Sweden who kidnapped a woman and held her in a purpose-built bunker for a week. Her ordeal would have lasted longer if the kidnapper hadn’t lost his nerve and taken his victim to a police station […]
The Hateful Eight
Friday, January 22nd, 2016 Film Reviews,Each new film by Quentin Tarantino generates a storm of anticipation. We know what to expect, but initially The Hateful Eight took me by surprise. It is a long movie, divided into chapters, with an old-fashioned intermission. Instead of the usual gore fest the first half is all dialogue and scene-setting. If this appeals more […]
The Danish Girl
Friday, January 22nd, 2016 Film Reviews,When Gore Vidal’s novel, Myra Breckinridge, was made into a truly lamentable movie in 1970, transgender issues were hardly front page news. The idea that someone could feel like a woman trapped in a man’s body, or vice versa, was the stuff of ribald comedy. The wheel has turned so completely that transgenderism now occupies […]
Carol
Thursday, January 14th, 2016 Film Reviews,It’s difficult to make a great movie from a great novel. Even the best directors struggle to capture the psychological nuances, the purposeful construction of personalities and subplots. An author can tell us much that a director can only suggest, unless he or she wants to make an unbearably wordy film. In Carol, Todd Haynes […]
The Big Short
Thursday, January 14th, 2016 Film Reviews,Don’t feel too bad if you fail to understand what a Collateral Debt Obligation (CDO) is, or how it works. Many thousands of investors who bought these packages in the lead-up to the American housing market crash of 2008, had no idea what they were buying. Not many of the Wall Street brokers who were […]
Point Break
Thursday, January 7th, 2016 Film Reviews,There is no shortage of extraordinary nature cinematography in Point Break, but after watching The Revenant, it felt as artificial as a cartoon. The heavy imprint of CGI is all over this film, which is barely more than two hours of eye candy arranged over the flimsiest of plots. Before seeing this movie I would […]
The Revenant
Thursday, January 7th, 2016 Film Reviews,When he was receiving the Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director at last year’s Academy Awards, Alejandro González Iñárritu, was already preoccupied with his next feature. He had begun planning The Revenant as early as 2011 but put it on hold when lead actor, Leonardo DiCaprio, was required for The Wolf of Wall Street. […]
The Bélier Family
Wednesday, January 6th, 2016 Film Reviews,For a people convinced of their intellectual superiority over the rest of the planet, the French have an incurable fondness for low-brow comedy and feel-good stories. Perhaps they’re just like us, after all. This year’s box office smash in France was La Famille Bélier, a comedy, like The Intouchables (2011) that finds humour and inspiration […]