Film Reviews
Sydney Film Festival 2014
Saturday, June 14th, 2014 Film Reviews,Sydney’s passion for cinema is beyond dispute, but the annual Sydney Film Festival is as close as this hedonistic city gets to a religious experience. For two weeks diehards will submit themselves to four, possibly five films a day. It’s a luxury for those who don’t have to turn up at the office on Monday […]
Grace of Monaco
Saturday, June 7th, 2014 Film Reviews,In every photograph, French director, Olivier Dahan, is shown wearing a hat. Sometimes it’s a beret, but more often a baggy, brimmed affair that makes him look like a fashion-conscious engine driver. Although I’m no style guru, it seems a rather silly affectation. In theory a director’s dress sense shouldn’t have any relevance to the […]
The Trip to Italy
Saturday, June 7th, 2014 Film Reviews,Four years ago, Michael Winterbottom had a hit with The Trip, a six-part television series, in which British comedians, Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon drove around the Lake District, supposedly writing a series of restaurant reviews for the Observer. The series was condensed into a feature film that seduced audiences around the world. The Trip […]
Under the Skin
Saturday, May 31st, 2014 Film Reviews,Michel Faber’s novel, Under the Skin (2000), was that rarest of beasts: a science fiction story with real literary merit. I say that as a reader who has dipped into science fiction for decades and identified only a handful of authors – notably Philip K. Dick and Stanislaw Lem – that ever made me feel […]
My Sweet Pepper Land
Saturday, May 31st, 2014 Film Reviews,If you’ve ever wondered what sort of movies they’re making in Kurdistan nowadays, enlightenment is at hand. My Sweet Pepper Land, by Kurdish director, Hiner Saleem, is a dead ringer for those Hollywood westerns in which a new sheriff arrives in a violent frontier town, intent on restoring law and order. Needless to say, he […]
Ida
Saturday, May 24th, 2014 Film Reviews,Pawel Pawlikowski left Poland in 1971 at the age of 14, and settled with his family in England. In a peripatetic career as a filmmaker he completed a series of offbeat documentaries before making an acclaimed “quintessentially English” drama, My Summer of Love, in 2004. With Ida not only has he returned to his Polish […]
Godzilla
Saturday, May 24th, 2014 Film Reviews,When Godzilla rose out of the ocean in 1954 and proceeded to trash Tokyo, no-one could have foreseen that he would still be wreaking havoc 60 years later. The durability of the “king of the monsters” owes something to the personality he developed in the 1960s, and something to his connections with nuclear energy, which […]
The Zero Theorem
Saturday, May 17th, 2014 Film Reviews,After cutting his teeth with Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Terry Gilliam is habitually viewed as a maker of dark, fantastic comedies. The truth is that he makes essentially bleak films festooned with comic touches, like Rococo decorations on a coffin. The Zero Theorem has been mooted as the third part of a dystopian trilogy, along […]
The Broken Circle Breakdown
Saturday, May 17th, 2014 Film Reviews,Belgians have a reputation for pursuing individualism to the point of eccentricity. The Broken Circle Breakdown will confirm that reputation, but the film has a lot more to offer than mere quirkiness. Viewers who enter the cinema in one piece may emerge trying to reassemble the fragments, having experienced alternating extremes of exhilaration and tragedy, […]
Fading Gigolo
Saturday, May 10th, 2014 Film Reviews,New York is a city that has dealt with the problem of difference by dividing itself into tribes and villages. That tribalism is gently satirised in John Turturro’s Fading Gigolo, which is not a sex comedy but a comedy of ethnicity. Turturro plays Fioravante, a laid-back New Yorker of Italian extraction who scrapes a living […]