Tag: drama
Motherless Brooklyn
Saturday, February 29th, 2020 Film Reviews,Edward Norton acquired the rights to Jonathan Lethem’s novel, Motherless Brooklyn, in 1998 but didn’t finish writing the script until 2012, by which time Lethem had published another six books. Filming would finally commence in February 2018 but a fire on set and resulting lawsuits set the project back by a further nine months. It […]
Emma
Thursday, February 20th, 2020 Film Reviews,There are many ways of reading Jane Austen (1775-1817). She may be the author who inspired every Mills & Boon romance but she is also one of the writers who feature in F.R.Leavis’s ‘Great Tradition’ of English literature along with George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad and D.H.Lawrence. What distinguishes Austen from the churners of […]
Birds of Prey
Thursday, February 13th, 2020 Film Reviews,Margot Robbie is not short of admirers nowadays but her performance in Birds of Prey (and the fantabulous emancipation of one Harley Quinn), has to be seen to be believed. I usually feel my brain turning to jelly at the prospect of every new, big-budget superhero flick, but there’s something about this particular lump of […]
A Hidden Life
Friday, February 7th, 2020 Film Reviews,Terrence Malick is the only Hollywood director to have translated a book by German philosopher, Martin Heidegger. I haven’t checked, but I’m fairly confident that Cecil B. DeMille or Steven Spielberg never felt the urge to dabble in the impenetrable utterances of the sage of Freiburg. Before he began making movies Malick lectured in philosophy. […]
A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood
Friday, January 31st, 2020 Film Reviews,“What the hell was that!?” said a colleague when we left the cinematheque after viewing A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood. As the usual routine is that we all shuffle out avoiding eye contact, jealously guarding our tiny insights, such an exclamation was – to say the least – unusual. I only wish I could […]
Bombshell
Thursday, January 16th, 2020 Film Reviews,It’s commonly believed that hatred pays a higher “psychological dividend” than peace, love and understanding. This debatable insight, which assumes the bleakest view of human nature, seems to be borne out by the success of Fox News. The formula pioneered by Murdoch svengali, Roger Ailes, was to turn the news into an adversarial contest with […]
Little Women
Friday, January 10th, 2020 Film Reviews,One can groan about the debased state of Hollywood but despite the relentless assembly line of blockbusters there are always new productions that shore up one’s faith in the cinema. The big surprise is that some of these films are re-makes of beloved golden oldies. I say “some” because the 2012 remake of Paul Verhoeven’s […]
Jojo Rabbit
Tuesday, December 31st, 2019 Film Reviews,There’s something irresistible about a movie that flirts with a great taboo – a comedy about the Nazis. Mel Brooks did it with The Producers (1967), in which a Broadway show designed to offend and crash became a smash hit. Roberto Benigni made an attempt with Life is Beautiful (1997), although the humour was swallowed […]
Judy and Punch & Suzi Q
Friday, November 29th, 2019 Film Reviews,Not for the first time I’m left wondering how it is that Australian films have become so bleak and brutal. The latest example is Mirrah Foulkes’s debut feature, Judy and Punch, which has atttacted a lot of specious praise and been nominated for umpteen awards. The reasons, as far as I can tell, are as […]
The Report
Friday, November 22nd, 2019 Film Reviews,One of the last-resort strategies being used by Fox News to undermine the Trump impeachment case is to complain that it’s too boring to watch witness after witness pile ignominy on the President. The point was suprisingly echoed by an NBC reporter who complained the proceedings lacked “pizzazz” – a word defined by the dictionary […]