Film Reviews
The Age of Adaline
Saturday, April 25th, 2015 Film Reviews,Anyone who is still meditating on the fragility of life after watching Testament of Youth, may not be in the most receptive mood for The Age of Adaline. The story concerns a woman named Adaline Bowman (Blake Lively) who is permanently fixed at the age of 29 due to a freak – and utterly unconvincing […]
While We’re Young
Saturday, April 18th, 2015 Film Reviews,We all know the story of the fan that secretly hungers to supplant his or her idol. Look no further than All About Eve (1980), one of Hollywood’s finest moments. Noah Baumbach, the son of two film critics, can be relied upon to know all about this movie, and countless others. He also seems to […]
The Salt of the Earth
Saturday, April 18th, 2015 Film Reviews,When we’d finished watching The Salt of the Earth, my spouse said: “That film should be screened free of charge and everyone encouraged to see it.” This pretty much summed up my feelings as well, although I can’t imagine the Abbott government wanting everyone to view a film that speaks so poignantly about the poorest […]
Mommy
Saturday, April 11th, 2015 Film Reviews,Mommy is every mother’s horror movie. The story begins with a single mum crashing her car while on the way to collect a son who is being expelled from a special needs school. He has, apparently, set fire to a kitchen and put another boy in hospital. When the son arrives on the scene, ecstatic […]
X + Y
Saturday, April 11th, 2015 Film Reviews,You’ve probably seen him in Hugo (2011), Martin Scorsese’s sole foray into the ‘young adult’ genre. Asa Butterfield is now 17, and much taller, although this doesn’t mean he has escaped the frail and sensitive roles. In Morgan Matthews’s X + Y, Butterfield plays the second disturbed child to be seen at the movies this […]
Dior and I
Saturday, April 4th, 2015 Film Reviews,Fashion is usually considered a frivolous business, but at the top end it can get very dark indeed. Last year saw the release of two bio-pics of Yves Saint Laurent, in which the great designer’s mental and physical decay was charted in forensic detail. Closer to the present we have seen John Galliano go completely […]
Samba
Saturday, April 4th, 2015 Film Reviews,Four years ago, French filmmakers, Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano had such a huge hit with The Intouchables, it left one wondering what they could possibly do for an encore. The answer is Samba, another humanistic comedy-drama starring Omar Sy, the giant-sized wheelchair-pusher from the previous movie. The paradigm may be slightly different but the […]
A Little Chaos
Saturday, March 28th, 2015 Film Reviews,After watching Leviathan, a present-day tale with overtones of the Old Testament, it is almost a light relief to turn to A Little Chaos, Alan Rickman’s period drama of the Ancient Regime. Set in the court of the Sun King, Louis XIV, it is the story of a fictional landscape gardener, Sabine De Barra, and […]
Leviathan
Saturday, March 28th, 2015 Film Reviews,If you’ve ever wondered why the Russians drink so much, Leviathan has all the answers. No nation does ‘bleak’ so well, but the art lies in creating something both bleak and magnificent at the same time. Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Chekhov were exemplary, while Tarkovsky managed the feat better than any other modern Russian director. Enter […]
Big Eyes
Saturday, March 21st, 2015 Film Reviews,When New York Times art critic, John Canaday, wrote a scathing attack on the directors of the 1964 World’s Fair for choosing to hang a gigantic picture of 100 big-eyed children as a “theme painting”, the offending item was quickly removed. Those were the days! Art criticism (and the New York Times) were taken seriously. […]