Tag: comedy
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 […]
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 […]
The Grand Budapest Hotel
Saturday, April 12th, 2014 Film Reviews,Walking into a preview of The Grand Budapest Hotel, a colleague wondered aloud if this was the film in which Wes Anderson would overcome his penchant for symmetry. In fact, The Grand Budapest Hotel must be the most maddeningly symmetrical movie ever produced! Frames are composed with a neatness and correctness that feels obsessive-compulsive. The […]
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 […]
Gloria
Saturday, March 1st, 2014 Film Reviews,Over the past few years there has been an increasing volume of films about old people having sex – or thinking about having sex, or remembering what it was like to have sex. What began as an interesting sub-genre now resembles a movement. The trickle has become a torrent. One may only speculate on the […]
The Great Beauty
Saturday, January 25th, 2014 Film Reviews,From one wild party to another. The Great Beauty (La Grande Bellezza) was the opening attraction of last year’s Italian Film Festival. This week it gets a theatrical release, having just been nominated for the Academy Award for the best Foreign Language Film. Whether it wins or not, director Paolo Sorrentino has made a movie […]
The Wolf of Wall Street
Saturday, January 25th, 2014 Film Reviews,With most films if we can’t find any sympathy for the lead characters it’s a bad night at the cinema. The Wolf of Wall Street is the exception to the rule. A three-hour roller coaster ride that keeps us clinging to the handrail from start to finish, this orgiastic vision of greed and excess on […]
Her
Saturday, January 18th, 2014 Film Reviews,Somebody had to make a film such as Her, and Spike Jonze was a good candidate. His last feature was an accomplished fairy tale, Where the Wild Things Are (2009); the previous one, the clever Adaptation (2002). In between there have been shorts, documentaries, and music video clips. Yet Jonze is a more mature filmmaker […]
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
Tuesday, January 7th, 2014 Film Reviews,Walter Mitty entered the world in 1939, in James Thurber’s New Yorker short story about an aging, hen-pecked husband who escapes into his daydreams. One minute Mitty is steering an “eight-engined Navy hydroplane” through a fearsome storm. In quick succession he is a renowned surgeon saving the life of an important patient; a crack shot […]
August: Osage County
Monday, January 6th, 2014 Film Reviews,A Hobbit movie gives little scope for method acting but August: Osage County offers the kind of roles that set actors salivating. Tracy Letts’s play won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and was brought to Australia by the Steppenwolf Theatre Company of Chicago in 2010. The year before had seen a production by the […]