Film Reviews
In Search of Chopin
Saturday, August 23rd, 2014 Film Reviews,One wonders how Frédéric Chopin (1810-49) would have fared in terms of compartmentalisation if Phil Grabsky had been able to sit him down on the psychoanalyst’s couch. Born and raised a Pole, Chopin found his fame in Paris. He fell in love with Polish girls, but the great romance of his life came with the […]
20,000 Days on Earth
Saturday, August 23rd, 2014 Film Reviews,Perhaps the strangest fact one discovers about rock star, Nick Cave, in the documentary, 20,000 Days on Earth, is that he spends most of his time doing a good impersonation of a middle class accountant. It never seemed likely when I stood in the audience of those Birthday Party gigs in Sydney, where Cave would […]
Lucy
Saturday, August 16th, 2014 Film Reviews,“The average person uses 10% of their brain capacity,” reads the tag line for Luc Besson’s science fiction thriller, Lucy, “Today she will hit 100%.” It’s tempting to explore some variations on a theme: “The average person uses 10% of their brain capacity, but Luc Besson makes motion pictures using only a fraction of this […]
Palo Alto
Saturday, August 16th, 2014 Film Reviews,There never seems to be a week in Sydney without some sort of film festival. Although the French brand reigns supreme in terms of size and popularity, there are many well-regarded smaller events. For instance, KOFFIA – the 5th annual Korean Film Festival In Australia, has just opened, and will run until 21 August, before […]
A Most Wanted Man
Saturday, August 9th, 2014 Film Reviews,Like many contemporary directors, Anton Corbijn made his reputation with rock video clips, but where filmmakers such as Michel Gondry have carried the gimmicky style of the video clip into their features, Corbijn has taken the opposite approach. His movies are lean and understated, distinguished by psychological tension rather than spectacle. There have been only […]
The Selfish Giant
Saturday, August 9th, 2014 Film Reviews,Clio Barnard’s The Selfish Giant borrows its title from a children’s tale by Oscar Wilde but sets the action in a working-class town in West Yorkshire. Wilde’s fable concerns a grumpy giant who prevents a group of children from playing in his garden and is punished with perpetual winter. The disjunction between story and film […]
Deliver Us From Evil
Saturday, August 2nd, 2014 Film Reviews,Scott Derrickson, director of Deliver Us From Evil is obviously a film buff, as there is barely a scene in his hybrid horror/cop movie that won’t remind cinema-literate viewers of another scene in another film. The primary reference in this anthology of every fear and fancy that has taken up residence in the American psyche, […]
The Keeper of Lost Causes
Saturday, August 2nd, 2014 Film Reviews,An art critic of my acquaintance once boasted he had never read a detective novel. This claim was intended to make him seem an intellectual, but it only showed the narrowness of his mind. When writers such as André Gide and Francois Mauriac wrote admiringly of the detective stories of Georges Simenon, we can see […]
Reaching for the Moon
Saturday, July 26th, 2014 Film Reviews,“The art of losing isn’t hard to master;” wrote Elizabeth Bishop, in One Art, the poem that gets most traction in Bruno Barreto’s bio pic, Reaching for the Moon. “so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster.” It’s an obvious choice for a feature poem, as […]
Once My Mother
Saturday, July 26th, 2014 Film Reviews,Sophia Turkiewicz’s Once My Mother is the story of great resilience in the face of overwhelming odds – and I’m only talking about securing funding. Having been knocked back twice by the ABC and twice by SBS, Turkiewicz and her experienced producers, Rod Freedman and Bob Connolly, began passing the hat around Polish community groups […]