Tag: drama
Farewell My Queen & Fast and Furious 6
Saturday, June 8th, 2013 Film Reviews,Everyone knows the story of doomed, frivolous Marie Antoinette whose life of pampered luxury was ended by the guillotine. The Queen’s personality was established in filmmakers’ minds by Stefan Zweig’s best-selling biography of 1932, subtitled The Portrait of an Average Woman, and she has never been allowed to deviate too far from that model. Among […]
The Great Gatsby & Happiness Never Comes Alone
Saturday, June 1st, 2013 Film Reviews,It has become a cliché to call Baz Luhrmann a director of video clips rather than motion pictures, but like so many clichés this one has the ring of truth. The Great Gatsby – long-awaited, much-talked-about, supremely overhyped – has arrived. It shows Luhrmann demonstrating his gift for lavish spectacle and his lack of almost […]
The Reluctant Fundamentalist & Sinister
Saturday, May 25th, 2013 Film Reviews,Mohsin Hamid says the structure of his novel of 2007, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, was partly based on Fred Zinnemann’s classic western, High Noon. Instead of Gary Cooper waiting for the baddies to arrive, we have a group of militant students in Lahore awaiting the police and a group of American agents. It sounds good in […]
A Place For Me & Broken
Saturday, May 18th, 2013 Film Reviews,Earlier this year I watched an old Hammer Horror called The Plague of the Zombies. As an alternative title for Josh Boone’s debut feature, A Place for Me, I’d respectfully suggest: The Plague of the Writers. It is a scenario worthy of any horror flick to find a family in which everyone – and their […]
The Place Beyond the Pines & Tabu
Saturday, May 11th, 2013 Film Reviews,Although I’m not much interested in the celebrity circuit, it was surprising to read, late last year, that Bradley Cooper had been named The Sexiest Man Alive by People magazine. By all accounts the most outraged constituency were fans of Ryan Gosling, the other Hollywood pin-up boy of our era. If it achieves nothing else, […]
Audi Festival of German Film & The Hunt
Saturday, May 4th, 2013 Film Reviews,Having done the stats on the French film industry earlier this year, the annual Audi Festival of German Films tempts me to take a quick look at Europe’s other great cinematic powerhouse. While the French clocked up 272 features in 2011, the Germans managed a respectable 212. This makes it the seventh biggest film producer […]
The Other Son & Haute Cuisine
Saturday, April 27th, 2013 Film Reviews,‘Switched at birth’ was a favourite plot device for Gilbert and Sullivan. It resolved a lot of tricky dilemmas and allowed true love to overcome barriers of class and kinship. By now the theme might seem as corny as a Victorian operetta, but a good device can always be relied upon for new twist. The […]
NO & The Company You Keep
Saturday, April 20th, 2013 Film Reviews,In old episodes of Get Smart, it was not uncommon for Secret Agent 86 to wish that some villain had used his powers “for niceness instead of evil”. No is the movie that applies this wishful thought to the advertising industry. It is 1988, in Chile. The military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet has been […]
Thérèse Desqueyroux & Hammer Horrors
Saturday, April 13th, 2013 Film Reviews,William Eggleston, whose work is showing at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, is known for introducing colour into contemporary art photography. It was not a popular innovation among his peers who were devoted to the medium of black-and-white. The unspoken wisdom is that the world seems far more profound when photographed in black-and-white, and irredeemably […]
Trance & Rust and Bone
Saturday, April 6th, 2013 Film Reviews,In a recent poll sponsored by HMV, Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting (1996) was voted the best British film of the past 60 years. Although such surveys have an unhappy resemblance to those ‘Greatest Hits of All Time’ polls run by commercial radio stations, Trainspotting deserves the kudos. It was a brilliantly original movie which sealed Boyle’s […]