Tag: drama
The Nest
Friday, February 5th, 2021 Film Reviews,Filmmakers often wax nostalgic when they look back on the 1960s, but nobody seems to remember the 1980s with much affection. It was the era of Reagan and Thatcher, when the finance industry was deregulated and fortunes made overnight. It laid the foundations for the exorbitant wealth of the present day, with its roller-coaster markets, […]
Only the Animals
Friday, January 29th, 2021 Film Reviews,Only the Animals sounds like half of a proposition that needs to be completed. After watching Domink Moll’s ingenious mystery I’d venture: “Only the animals understand that life is a matter of instinct and impulse.” Or perhaps: “Only the animals know how strange humans really are…” There are six main characters in a tale that […]
The Dry
Saturday, January 23rd, 2021 Film Reviews,As Australia Day looms so does another round of Australian movies. If you’re feeling patriotic you can now watch Glendyn Ivin’s Penguin Bloom, in which a disabled Naomi Watts finds new hope through a magpie. Coming soon is Stephen Johnson’s High Ground, an historical drama set in Arnhem Land, where Simon Baker treads a blood-stained […]
Ammonite
Friday, January 15th, 2021 Film Reviews,An ammonite is a mollusc with a distinctive spiral shell that flourished in the Devonian period, (400 million years ago) and died out at the end of the Cretaceous, (roughly 66 million BCE). In biological terms that was a pretty good run. Homo sapiens will be lucky to survive for even a fraction of this […]
Wonder Woman 1984
Friday, January 8th, 2021 Film Reviews,No movie in 2017 was more overrated than Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman. It was as if critics and fans were responding to the film they’d hoped to see, rather than whatever ended up on screen. The movie’s one saving grace was the luminous Gal Gadot as the embodiment of everyone’s fantasy Amazon. The inevitable sequel, […]
The Trouble with Being Born
Friday, December 11th, 2020 Film Reviews,For a small, relatively low-key science fiction movie, The Trouble with Being Born by Austrian director Sandra Wollner has generated a lot of controversy. The feature was removed from the program of this year’s Melbourne Film Festival on the advice of two forensic psychologists who allegedly did not watch it in its entirety. There’s so much […]
Kajillionaire
Friday, November 6th, 2020 Film Reviews,Miranda July made a big splash with her debut feature, You, Me and Everyone We Know in 2005. She may not have challenged the superhero flicks at the box office, but she became an overnight sensation on the Indie circuit. A performance artist, actor and novelist, July is an all-round creative personality who treats her […]
Corpus Christi
Friday, October 23rd, 2020 Film Reviews,According to that famous former nun, Karen Armstrong: “The great sages of religion have always said that you don’t start out deciding metaphysical questions about the existence of God or the viability of the resurrection. You first live in a certain way.” Polish director, Jan Komasa, provides a dramatic illustration of this idea in Corpus […]
On the Rocks
Friday, October 9th, 2020 Film Reviews,Born into Hollywood aristocracy, Sofia Coppola was playing small roles in her father’s films while still in nappies. She made a promising directorial debut in 1999 with The Virgin Suicides, but it was her second movie, Lost in Translation (2003), that established her as a rising star. A beautiful, melancholy, funny film about an impossible […]
St. Ali Italian Film Festival 2020
Friday, October 2nd, 2020 Film Reviews,This year the celebrations are slightly muted, but the Italian Film Festival is back. Normally the wine and coffee would be flowing freely, with a few glamorous movie stars on hand for premieres. In place of the usual demonstrative Italianisms, director, Elysia Zeccola, says audiences will have to be content blowing kisses to each other. […]