Film Reviews
The Wolf of Wall Street
Saturday, January 25th, 2014 Film Reviews,With most films if we can’t find any sympathy for the lead characters it’s a bad night at the cinema. The Wolf of Wall Street is the exception to the rule. A three-hour roller coaster ride that keeps us clinging to the handrail from start to finish, this orgiastic vision of greed and excess on […]
Her
Saturday, January 18th, 2014 Film Reviews,Somebody had to make a film such as Her, and Spike Jonze was a good candidate. His last feature was an accomplished fairy tale, Where the Wild Things Are (2009); the previous one, the clever Adaptation (2002). In between there have been shorts, documentaries, and music video clips. Yet Jonze is a more mature filmmaker […]
Inside Llewyn Davis
Saturday, January 18th, 2014 Film Reviews,In The Folk Song Army the satirist Tom Lehrer took aim at the folk revival that swept the United States in the early 1960s. “You have to admire people who sing these songs,” he said. “It takes a certain amount of courage to get up in a coffee-house or a college auditorium and come out […]
The Book Thief
Saturday, January 11th, 2014 Film Reviews,Last month, for the first and only time in my experience, the author of the book behind the film was present at a preview. Markus Zusak has a German father and an Austrian mother, but he grew up in the Sydney suburbs. Zusak published his first young-adult novel, The Underdog (1999) at the age of […]
Short Term 12
Saturday, January 11th, 2014 Film Reviews,I’ve been in two minds this week about a second review: whether to go with Jonathan Teplitzy’s The Railway Man and its maudlin “true story” of an aging train-spotter who compulsively relives the nightmare of imprisonment by the Japanese in World War Two; or Short Term 12, an American indie about a young woman who […]
Philomena
Tuesday, January 7th, 2014 Film Reviews,Stephen Frears is one of the most versatile of British filmmakers, although the standard price of versatility is inconsistency. It’s hard to think of a truly great Frears film but there have been some very good ones. More of a tradesman than an artist, he has the ability to get an outstanding performance out of […]
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
Tuesday, January 7th, 2014 Film Reviews,Walter Mitty entered the world in 1939, in James Thurber’s New Yorker short story about an aging, hen-pecked husband who escapes into his daydreams. One minute Mitty is steering an “eight-engined Navy hydroplane” through a fearsome storm. In quick succession he is a renowned surgeon saving the life of an important patient; a crack shot […]
August: Osage County
Monday, January 6th, 2014 Film Reviews,A Hobbit movie gives little scope for method acting but August: Osage County offers the kind of roles that set actors salivating. Tracy Letts’s play won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and was brought to Australia by the Steppenwolf Theatre Company of Chicago in 2010. The year before had seen a production by the […]
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
Monday, January 6th, 2014 Film Reviews,J.R.R.Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings is reputedly the second bestselling novel of all time – after A Tale of Two Cities! A trilogy of some 1,800 pages, it is the sequel to The Hobbit, the fourth bestseller of all time, which clocks in at a mere 270 pages. Yet both stories have been turned […]
Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues
Saturday, December 21st, 2013 Film Reviews,It has been a whopping nine years since Will Ferrell starred in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004). This is an eternity compared to the speed with which Hollywood usually serves up sequels, although the delay may simply be due to the huge volume of film and TV work the hyperactive Ferrell has undertaken […]