Tag: drama
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 […]
Mank
Friday, April 16th, 2021 Film Reviews,Herman J. Mankiewicz was the kind of character Hollywood couldn’t make up. On the contrary, it was Mankiewicz who made it up for Hollywood. Once the highest-paid scriptwriter in the business, ‘Mank’ is said to have worked on 95 movies, although he spent much of his time fixing other people’s scripts and often went uncredited. […]
The Trial of the Chicago 7
Friday, April 9th, 2021 Film Reviews,This year’s Academy Awards is shaping up as an unusually open event. From the eight nominees for Best Picture there are three by female directors, three more made for streaming platforms, with only a limited theatrical release. The directors are French, English, African-American, Korean-American and Chinese-American, with only three fitting the standard white male template. […]
The Father
Friday, April 2nd, 2021 Film Reviews,One rarely hears the adjective “Pinteresque” any more but it came surging to mind as I watched The Father. The edginess of Harold Pinter’s plays owed much to the way he incorporated elements of the Theatre of the Absurd (to use Martin Esslin’s wellknown term), without ever losing touch with plausible reality. In adapting his […]
French Exit
Friday, March 26th, 2021 Film Reviews,How you feel about French Exit will largely come down to your feelings about Michelle Pfeiffer – one of those timeless screen beauties with an army of rusted-on admirers. Pfeiffer dominates Azazel Jacobs’s offbeat comedy so completely that even when she isn’t on screen her presence can still be felt. Yet the cost of this […]