Tag: drama
Scrapper
Friday, September 22nd, 2023 Film Reviews,It’s no surprise that Charlotte Regan’s Scrapper should be drawing comparisons with Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun (2022): two debut features by young British directors, featuring dysfunctional fathers trying to bond with early teenage daughters. For reasons that remain mysterious to me, Aftersunhas generated an inordinate amount of gush from critics who seem to believe that vagueness, […]
Past Lives
Friday, September 8th, 2023 Film Reviews,It’s no surprise to learn that Celia Song’s Past Lives is strongly autobiographical, as no purely fictional tale could resist so many opportunities for dramatic or romantic cliché. The temptation of fiction is to improve on life, to fulfil fantasies and repair omissions by turning back the clock and – this time – getting it […]
BlackBerry
Friday, August 25th, 2023 Film Reviews,We’ve recently entered a new world of cinema in which product placement is the entire rationale for a movie. No longer is it sufficient for a character to swig a wellknown softdrink or flash an expensive watch – now the softdrink or the watch are the heroes of the film. We learn about their inventors’ […]
Gran Turismo
Friday, August 18th, 2023 Film Reviews,Not long ago, when people were asked to declare their hobbies and interests, they might list swimming or stamp collecting, visiting art galleries, or going to the opera. Nowadays, it’s increasingly likely the average person’s Number One pastime will be Shopping – with a capital ‘S’. The trend is reflected in our near-religious veneration for […]
Chevalier
Friday, August 4th, 2023 Film Reviews,Chevalier stretches the bounds of credibility from the very first scene. We are at a concert in Paris, in the late 18th century, where a cocksure Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is conducting his own music and playing the violin. When he invites requests from the audience, a black man in a periwig comes striding down the […]
Oppenheimer
Friday, July 28th, 2023 Film Reviews,No figure stands more squarely at the crossroads of 20th century science and politics than J. Robert Oppenheimer, forever known as “father of the atomic bomb”. An epic story requires an epic film, and Christopher Nolan has given Oppenheimer the treatment he demands, in a three-hour bio pic that manages to balance a portrait of […]
Reality & Driving Madeleine
Friday, July 7th, 2023 Film Reviews,Reality is a film that lives up to its title, with a script taken word-for-word from one woman’s experience of an actual FBI search. The protagonist is a young civil servant with the rather surreal name of Reality Winner (Sydney Sweeney) who arrives home from the supermarket to find two men waiting for her outside […]
The New Boy
Friday, June 16th, 2023 Film Reviews,Last week, at a screening of Warwick Thornton’s The New Boy, Nashen Moodley, the director of the Sydney Film Festival, recalled how “exhilarated” he was by Thornton’s debut feature, Samson & Delilah (2009). That film was widely praised, frequently spoken of as a landmark in local cinema, but it’s hard to believe it would leave […]
Saint Omer & One Fine Morning
Friday, June 9th, 2023 Film Reviews,Hollywood scriptwriters are on strike, protesting about poor rates of pay and the threat of being replaced by AI. There may be quality writing on cable TV, but the stuff we get in American action films and superhero flicks could already have been written by AI, or by a fridge, or a lawnmower. My most […]
Limbo
Friday, May 26th, 2023 Film Reviews,For the Catholic Church, Limbo was literally the outskirts of Hell, inhabited by those good people who died before Christ was born, and by infants without experience of baptism or sin. In common parlance, the word has come to mean a state of indecision, of forced inaction with no clear path in sight. For filmmaker […]