Tag: drama
Inside Llewyn Davis
Saturday, January 18th, 2014 Film Reviews,In The Folk Song Army the satirist Tom Lehrer took aim at the folk revival that swept the United States in the early 1960s. “You have to admire people who sing these songs,” he said. “It takes a certain amount of courage to get up in a coffee-house or a college auditorium and come out […]
The Book Thief
Saturday, January 11th, 2014 Film Reviews,Last month, for the first and only time in my experience, the author of the book behind the film was present at a preview. Markus Zusak has a German father and an Austrian mother, but he grew up in the Sydney suburbs. Zusak published his first young-adult novel, The Underdog (1999) at the age of […]
Short Term 12
Saturday, January 11th, 2014 Film Reviews,I’ve been in two minds this week about a second review: whether to go with Jonathan Teplitzy’s The Railway Man and its maudlin “true story” of an aging train-spotter who compulsively relives the nightmare of imprisonment by the Japanese in World War Two; or Short Term 12, an American indie about a young woman who […]
Philomena
Tuesday, January 7th, 2014 Film Reviews,Stephen Frears is one of the most versatile of British filmmakers, although the standard price of versatility is inconsistency. It’s hard to think of a truly great Frears film but there have been some very good ones. More of a tradesman than an artist, he has the ability to get an outstanding performance out of […]
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
Tuesday, January 7th, 2014 Film Reviews,Walter Mitty entered the world in 1939, in James Thurber’s New Yorker short story about an aging, hen-pecked husband who escapes into his daydreams. One minute Mitty is steering an “eight-engined Navy hydroplane” through a fearsome storm. In quick succession he is a renowned surgeon saving the life of an important patient; a crack shot […]
August: Osage County
Monday, January 6th, 2014 Film Reviews,A Hobbit movie gives little scope for method acting but August: Osage County offers the kind of roles that set actors salivating. Tracy Letts’s play won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and was brought to Australia by the Steppenwolf Theatre Company of Chicago in 2010. The year before had seen a production by the […]
Kill Your Darlings
Saturday, December 21st, 2013 Film Reviews,Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Lucien Carr. The first three were among the most famous writers of their generation, the last worked for 47 years as a news editor for United Press International. Yet in the formative years of the Beat Generation, Lucien Carr was the hippest of the hip. This brief, glittering […]
American Hustle
Saturday, December 14th, 2013 Film Reviews,There’s something irresistible in a wellmade film about con artists, who are invariably portrayed in a sympathetic light. Perhaps there’s not much difference between them, actors and directors. Filmmakers set out to con the viewer by creating an illusion, setting false trails and expectations. We, in turn, are happy to be conned. There are plenty […]
The Darkside
Saturday, December 7th, 2013 Film Reviews,Warwick Thornton’s The Darkside is one of those rare films that defies categorisation. It is being called a “documentary” for want of a better word, but it’s also a drama and a horror movie at one remove. A succession of wellknown actors tell us stories about ghosts and supernatural occurrences. These stories are word-for-word renditions […]
Mr. Pip
Saturday, November 16th, 2013 Film Reviews,Directing the Shrek movies and Chronicles of Narnia may seem a strange preparation for a movie about the bloody conflict in Bougainville in the early 1990s. It would be good to report that Andrew Adamson removes all doubts in his film adaptation of Lloyd Jones’s acclaimed novel, Mr. Pip, revealing himself as a truly versatile […]