Tag: comedy
Belfast
Friday, February 18th, 2022 Film Reviews,Among the great mysteries of contemporary cinema: how, in the space of one year, can a director make something as good as Belfast, and follow up with the ridiculous Death on the Nile? I don’t think one can lay the blame on an overbearing studio, or suggest that the best of Kenneth Branagh’s movies may […]
Licorice Pizza
Thursday, January 6th, 2022 Film Reviews,There are eagerly anticipated movies that turn out to be duds, and movies such as Licorice Pizza, which are better than might ever have been suspected. The duds are far more common, so when a film of real quality turns up one feels like cheering. Many believe Paul Thomas Anderson (b.1970) to be America’s greatest […]
The Films of 2022
Wednesday, January 5th, 2022 Film Reviews,Presuming we don’t emulate success stories such as Denmark and go leaping back into the bunker, 2022 should see a greater range of movies returning to local cinemas. It remains to be seen whether the film industry has been permanently altered by the pandemic, with a large number of people now content to stick with […]
The Movies: A Boxing Day Round-Up
Saturday, December 25th, 2021 Film Reviews,For those not turned feral by the Boxing Day sales, the day after Christmas is the traditional detox after all that festive activity. Yes, it’s supposed to be joyous, but it’s also stressful when one has to work harder at a holiday than at a regular job. Hence the popularity of the Boxing Day test […]
The Chair
Friday, September 10th, 2021 Film Reviews,University life in America today is worthy of a stupendous black comedy series but The Chair ain’t it. To do justice to such a theme would require a writer as scabrous as Michel Houellebecq and a director as fearless – and surreal – as Luis Buñuel. Amanda Peet and Annie Julia Wyman, the creators of […]
Free Guy
Thursday, August 12th, 2021 Film Reviews,If you’re not currently in lockdown there are a handful of new releases to be sampled at the cinema. This includes Disney’s latest attempt to barnstorm the box office: Free Guy. Not the worst movie you’ll see this year, it’s almost wilfully shallow. There’s no shortage of promising themes but the filmmakers seem determined to […]
Charlie Chaplin: The Kid
Friday, July 9th, 2021 Film Reviews,“A picture with a smile – and perhaps, a tear,” The Kid was the first full-length feature directed by Charlie Chaplin. The film’s centenary is being celebrated with a progressive Chaplin retrospective that will unfurl in Australian cinemas for the rest of this year and into 2022, continuing a pandemic-era trend of revisiting classic movies […]
Death of a Ladies Man
Friday, May 21st, 2021 Film Reviews,It’s fair to say that Canadian director, Matt Bissonnette, is a Leonard Cohen fan. His debut feature in 2002 was called Looking for Leonard, and now comes Death of a Ladies Man, inspired by Cohen’s album of 1977. I’m not quite sure how an album, or the title of an album, gets transformed into a […]
French Exit
Friday, March 26th, 2021 Film Reviews,How you feel about French Exit will largely come down to your feelings about Michelle Pfeiffer – one of those timeless screen beauties with an army of rusted-on admirers. Pfeiffer dominates Azazel Jacobs’s offbeat comedy so completely that even when she isn’t on screen her presence can still be felt. Yet the cost of this […]
Alliance Française French Film Festival 2021
Saturday, March 13th, 2021 Film Reviews,Last year as the world went into lockdown the Alliance Française French Film Festival was nipped in the bud – or, as the French say, dans l’œuf – in the egg. It may have seemed a cruel blow to this ever-popular movie marathon but the egg had already hatched. For the rest of 2020 a […]