Tag: drama
Last Night in Soho
Friday, November 26th, 2021 Film Reviews,Every movie made by British director, Edgar Wright, feels like a classic hits compilation album. With pop songs of the 1960s and 70s being belted out at regular intervals it gives the impression the action has been tailored to match the soundtrack. Baby Driver (2017) took its title from a Simon and Garfunkel song, and […]
No Time to Die
Friday, November 12th, 2021 Film Reviews,In almost every James Bond film our hero prevents a psychotic supervillain from realising his dream of world domination. For the makers of these movies world domination is an ambition fulfilled a long time ago. The trick nowadays is to maintain their iron grip on the hearts and minds of the viewing public. For a […]
The Many Saints of Newark
Thursday, November 4th, 2021 Film Reviews,It’s said that crime doesn’t pay but movies about crime seem to do very nicely. This may be the main reason why anyone would attempt a film based on a successful TV series such as The Sopranos. When viewers have spent weeks, months, even years in the company of favourite characters, the standard two hours […]
Antlers
Thursday, October 28th, 2021 Film Reviews,After months at home sampling streaming menus Australia is ready to go back to the movies. In November the floodgates will open with the Sydney Film Festival, the Italian Film Festival and the British Film Festival. The most high-profile new releases will include the long-delayed James Bond flick, No Time to Die; the latest superhero […]
The Last Duel
Thursday, October 21st, 2021 Film Reviews,Clang! Crunch! Swish! On leaving the cinema after seeing Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel, the sounds of battle still ring in one’s mind. Over two-and-a-half hours Scott unleashes a series of ferocious battle scenes, and a final showdown between two armoured combatants that leaves nothing to the imagination. As we remember from features such as […]
Lamb
Thursday, October 14th, 2021 Film Reviews,“It’s not a child, it’s an animal!” Or is it? After watching this strange, introverted chiller from Iceland you’ll never feel comfortable hearing someone refer to a baby as “a little lamb”. Like all Icelandic movies, Valdimar Johannsson’s debut feature, co-written with the novelist, Sjón, is strong on landscape. The screen is filled with sweeping […]
Nitram
Friday, October 8th, 2021 Film Reviews,Justin Kurzel may have a taste for dark, unhappy subjects, but he is a cut above most contemporary Australian directors. His first feature, Snowtown (2011), told the true story of serial killer, John Bunting, and those he drew into his orbit. It was a brutal but amazingly sophisticated debut. Ten years on, Kurzel and scriptwriter, […]
Birds of Paradise
Friday, October 1st, 2021 Film Reviews,At the Paris Opéra in the late 19th century the young ballerinas were referred to as the “petits rats”. Degas’s famous sculpture, The Little Dancer, was based on one such rat, a 14-year-old named Marie van Goethem, who was dismissed from the school soon after and would never be heard from again. It’s presumed Marie […]
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 […]
Chapelwaite
Friday, September 3rd, 2021 Film Reviews,Chapelwaite is based on Jerusalem’s Lot, a 1978 short story by Stephen King, America’s veteran monarch of horror pulp. Like most best-sellers King is a patchy writer but this hasn’t prevented his books from being turned into an endless stream of Hollywood movies, some of them as good as Carrie (1976) or The Shining (1980). […]