Tag: drama
Nine Perfect Strangers
Friday, August 27th, 2021 Film Reviews,“Wellness” is one of humanity’s oldest pursuits but the word dates from only 1950, when an American doctor, Halbert Dunn, combined “wellbeing” and “fitness” to create a neologism that now denotes a billion dollar industry. In the eight-part Hulu series, Nine Perfect Strangers, we follow a disparate group of people who have booked themselves into […]
Black Widow
Friday, July 30th, 2021 Film Reviews,Over the years I’ve never found it a hardship to watch a movie that stars Scarlett Johansson, but with Black Widow any lingering spark of male fantasy went under the steamroller. Every time I sit through one of these superhero flicks I find myself asking: “Is it me, or is it the rest of the […]
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 […]
Acute misfortune (for the viewer)
Friday, June 18th, 2021 Journals,When viewers of Acute Misfortune first catch sight of Daniel Henshall playing artist maudit, Adam Cullen, they may experience a flash of déjà vu. The quiet, menacing tones of John Bunting, mastermind of the Snowtown serial murders, are back on air. Justin Kurzel’s Snowtown (2011) is a movie I have no desire to watch again, […]
Martin Eden
Friday, June 18th, 2021 Film Reviews,Pietro Marcello’s Martin Eden is getting a limited release in Sydney and Melbourne but it deserves a much bigger audience. It’s a huge film – not in terms of running length, but in its themes, its characters and ambitions – the latest in an outstanding sequence of foreign-language titles that have overshadowed anything produced by […]
German Film Festival 2021
Saturday, June 5th, 2021 Film Reviews,It’s been years since I watched a film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, or thought much about this most decadent, irreverent of filmmakers. At the 2021 German Film Festival, Oskar Roehler’s unorthodox bio pic, Enfant Terrible, brings Fassbinder roaring back, and it’s not a pretty sight. Fassbinder was only 37 years old when he died in […]
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 […]
Ema
Friday, May 14th, 2021 Film Reviews,A traffic light suspended from a wire across a city street is on fire. As the camera pans back we see a figure in protective clothing holding a flame thrower. It’s clear from the first scene that Pablo Larráin’s Ema is going to be something special. Rules are going to be broken, conventions overturned. The […]
De Gaulle
Friday, May 7th, 2021 Film Reviews,Charles De Gaulle was an imposing figure, both physically and morally. Standing at 196 cms, he was a man almost everyone looked up to. As leader-in-exile of the French Resistance, the head of the provisional post-war government, and the nation’s dominant political figure of the 20th century, De Gaulle enjoyed an unshakable power and prestige. […]
Promising Young Woman & Sound of Metal
Friday, April 23rd, 2021 Film Reviews,In preparation for this year’s Academy Awards I’ve already reviewed six of the eight films nominated for Best Picture. Today I’ll take a look at the two that remain. I don’t know why it’s taken so long to catch up with Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman, as it’s one of the most talked-about films of […]