Film Reviews
Romeo and Juliet
Saturday, April 5th, 2014 Film Reviews,When an actor’s star is rising there is no point in pausing to ask whether they are actually right for a role. Douglas Booth may have been a bit too pretty and soft to play Noah’s son, Shem, but one could say the same about his portrayal of Romeo in Carlo Carlei’s new version of […]
German Film Festival
Saturday, March 29th, 2014 Film Reviews,No sooner have the French withdrawn their film festival for another year than their old rivals, the Germans, occupy the cinemas. The Audi Festival of German Films has just begun and will continue for the next fortnight. The press release boasts more than 50 features, shorts and documentaries “as tasty as Schnitzel, satisfying as Sauerbraten […]
Nymphomaniac Volumes I & II
Saturday, March 29th, 2014 Film Reviews,At a running time of four hours, Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac Volumes I & II, is one of the longest films to get a theatrical release in Australia this year. Is it one film or two? Perhaps there are actually three. The director’s cut which premiered in Berlin totals five and half hours, although only […]
Wadjda
Saturday, March 22nd, 2014 Film Reviews,Every week another movie promises to take us on a fantastic journey to a mysterious land. In this respect, Wadjda is more successful than all the big budget 3D epics churned out by the Hollywood studios. The mysterious land is Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and the journey proceeds along that slippery path from childhood to adulthood, […]
Half of a Yellow Sun
Saturday, March 22nd, 2014 Film Reviews,Unlike Saudi Arabia, where there is virtually no film industry, Nigeria is second only to India as a cinematic powerhouse. ‘Nollywood’ routinely produces more than a thousand movies a year but I’ve never seen a single example at an Australian venue. This is one of the reasons why Half of a Yellow Sun, an Anglo-Nigerian […]
The Monuments Men
Saturday, March 15th, 2014 Film Reviews,When you see German soldiers with flame throwers destroying works of art in one of the most striking scenes from The Monuments Men, remember that it never actually happened. The Raphael picture we see going up in flames is still listed as “missing” today, not officially torched. One might think the Nazis were bad enough […]
Hannah Arendt
Saturday, March 15th, 2014 Film Reviews,The jollities and distortions of The Monuments Men would not have impressed Hannah Arendt, the German-Jewish intellectual who wrote an impressively forensic account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, whom some describe as the architect of the Final Solution. Neither would they go down well with Margarethe von Trotta, who has made a long line […]
Tracks
Saturday, March 8th, 2014 Film Reviews,In April 1977 the 26 year-old Robyn Davidson set out with a dog and four camels to walk 2,700 kilometres from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean. Tracks, her memoir of the journey, was published in 1980 and became a world-wide best-seller. The film rights for the book were first sold in the early 1980s […]
Alliance Francaise French Film Festival
Saturday, March 8th, 2014 Film Reviews,Celebrating its 25th anniversaire, the Alliance Francaise French Film Festival returns this month to cinemas across the country. As the organisers continually remind us, this is now the biggest annual festival of French cinema outside of France. The appeal is pretty straightforward: ask most middle-class Australians for their favourite destination and France is always high […]
Le Weekend
Saturday, March 1st, 2014 Film Reviews,To turn from Gloria to Le Weekend is to become conscious of the gulf that separates 58 from the mid-60s. Instead of the problems of being a single mature-age woman, we meet with the frustrations of a couple who have been yoked together for 30 years, to the point where they can hardly imagine themselves […]