Film Reviews
The Place Beyond the Pines & Tabu
Saturday, May 11th, 2013 Film Reviews,Although I’m not much interested in the celebrity circuit, it was surprising to read, late last year, that Bradley Cooper had been named The Sexiest Man Alive by People magazine. By all accounts the most outraged constituency were fans of Ryan Gosling, the other Hollywood pin-up boy of our era. If it achieves nothing else, […]
Audi Festival of German Film & The Hunt
Saturday, May 4th, 2013 Film Reviews,Having done the stats on the French film industry earlier this year, the annual Audi Festival of German Films tempts me to take a quick look at Europe’s other great cinematic powerhouse. While the French clocked up 272 features in 2011, the Germans managed a respectable 212. This makes it the seventh biggest film producer […]
The Other Son & Haute Cuisine
Saturday, April 27th, 2013 Film Reviews,‘Switched at birth’ was a favourite plot device for Gilbert and Sullivan. It resolved a lot of tricky dilemmas and allowed true love to overcome barriers of class and kinship. By now the theme might seem as corny as a Victorian operetta, but a good device can always be relied upon for new twist. The […]
NO & The Company You Keep
Saturday, April 20th, 2013 Film Reviews,In old episodes of Get Smart, it was not uncommon for Secret Agent 86 to wish that some villain had used his powers “for niceness instead of evil”. No is the movie that applies this wishful thought to the advertising industry. It is 1988, in Chile. The military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet has been […]
Thérèse Desqueyroux & Hammer Horrors
Saturday, April 13th, 2013 Film Reviews,William Eggleston, whose work is showing at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, is known for introducing colour into contemporary art photography. It was not a popular innovation among his peers who were devoted to the medium of black-and-white. The unspoken wisdom is that the world seems far more profound when photographed in black-and-white, and irredeemably […]
Trance & Rust and Bone
Saturday, April 6th, 2013 Film Reviews,In a recent poll sponsored by HMV, Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting (1996) was voted the best British film of the past 60 years. Although such surveys have an unhappy resemblance to those ‘Greatest Hits of All Time’ polls run by commercial radio stations, Trainspotting deserves the kudos. It was a brilliantly original movie which sealed Boyle’s […]
Hyde Park on Hudson & Silence in the House of God
Saturday, March 30th, 2013 Film Reviews,Hard on the heels of Lincoln comes another movie about a great American President. But if Steven Spielberg seemed to be sending a message to Barack Obama about being steadfast and determined, it’s hard to know what Richard Michell is telling us about Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Hyde Park on Hudson. Allowing for its Spielbergisms, […]
Hara-Kiri & The Loneliest Planet
Saturday, March 23rd, 2013 Film Reviews,Takashi Miike is the cinema’s man of a thousand faces. He is astonishingly prolific for a contemporary filmmaker, having directed more than 60 movies since his debut in 1991, as well as stage and TV productions. Miike is notorious not only for the quantity of his films but for their bewildering variety. He is probably […]
Great Expectations & Performance
Saturday, March 16th, 2013 Film Reviews,In making the umpteenth version of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, British director, Mike Newell, resisted doing something ‘bold and audacious’ just for the novelty value. So far, so good, because the greatest crimes against the classics are committed when directors allow the preoccupations of our own age to disfigure those stories that have become part […]
Alliance Francaise French Film Festival 2013
Saturday, March 9th, 2013 Film Reviews,“Gwynplaine we are made for each other. The monster you are outside, I am inside.” Where do you get to hear – or at least read – lines like that? Only at the 24th Alliance Francaise French Film Festival, or until a featured item gets an Australian release. From an exceptionally strong program last year […]