Film Reviews
Dreams Come True
Saturday, January 29th, 2011 Art Column, Film Reviews,Was there ever a worse title for a show than Dreams Come True? It’s not just “cheesey”, to use a favourite expression of Tim Burton, it’s craven. In his role as a Hollywood über-director, Burton is still making films for Disney Studios but this is how he described his years as an in-house animation artist: […]
Tim Burton
Saturday, August 28th, 2010 Art Column, Film Reviews, International Art,In his bravura performance as the Joker in Batman (1989), Jack Nicholson delivers a line that says a lot about director, Tim Burton. “We mustn’t compare ourselves to regular people,” he tells Kim Basinger. “We’re artists.” One should never underestimate middle-class mediocrity as a spur to greater achievement. Burton’s entire career as graphic artist, animator, […]
United 93
Thursday, August 17th, 2006 Film Reviews,Don’t expect to see United 93 on your airline entertainment program – this is a film made for terrestial cinemas. Even on solid ground, there may be a limited audience for Paul Greengrass’s harrowing docu-drama on the events of September 11, 2001. The film is so brutally realistic one can hardly believe that this is […]
Tsotsi
Thursday, April 13th, 2006 Film Reviews,Tsotsi means “thug” in the dialect of the South African shantytowns. In the fifties and sixties, a tsotsi was a sharp dressing gangster – a spiv that could have stepped straight out of the Cotton Club. Little by little the term lost its glamour, and came to refer mainly to members of the youth gangs […]
Lord of War
Wednesday, February 1st, 2006 Film Reviews,There are movies that are remembered for one line of dialogue, or a piece of virtuosic cinematography. Perhaps when everyone has stopped arguing about whether Andrew Niccol’s Lord of War is a heavy-handed political satire that fails, or a darkly-comic dissection of the international arms trade, they will still remember the film’s opening sequence. On […]
Good night, and good luck
Thursday, December 15th, 2005 Film Reviews, Other Writing,When Woody Allen’s Manhattan hit the screens, way back in 1979, everyone was amazed at the glamour of its black-and-white cinematography. The movie was as seductive as a photo by Cartier-Bresson, Kertesz or Brassai. It conjured up nostalgia for the golden days of Hollywood, and lent a sharpness to the way characters were delineated. One […]
The Filth and the Fury
Tuesday, August 22nd, 2000 Film Reviews,It must have been December 1976 when the Sex Pistols had their first Australian airplay. I was sitting at home during the school holidays, listening to 2JJ (as it was then), trying to ignore the scratchy reception in my eagerness to hear the latest releases. Announcing that this was the new sensation in Britain, Mac […]
Romance
Saturday, March 25th, 2000 Film Reviews,“Most infidelities aren’t ugly, they just look as though they are.” Adam Phillips, Monogamy Given a normal passage into the Australian cinemas, an art house production such as Catherine Breillat’s Romance might draw only a small and discerning audience. If the film does rather better than expected, the censors can take the credit, since nothing […]
An Afternoon in Jurassic Park
Monday, October 17th, 1994 Film Reviews,Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, the highest grossing movie in the history of the cinema – “the film that shows that film is everywhere except in the film”. It is a movie that celebrates “the introversion of the exterior and the extroversion of the interior”, showing conclusively “that any attempt at total realism cannot escape the […]