Tag: drama
The New Boy
Friday, June 16th, 2023 Film Reviews,Last week, at a screening of Warwick Thornton’s The New Boy, Nashen Moodley, the director of the Sydney Film Festival, recalled how “exhilarated” he was by Thornton’s debut feature, Samson & Delilah (2009). That film was widely praised, frequently spoken of as a landmark in local cinema, but it’s hard to believe it would leave […]
Saint Omer & One Fine Morning
Friday, June 9th, 2023 Film Reviews,Hollywood scriptwriters are on strike, protesting about poor rates of pay and the threat of being replaced by AI. There may be quality writing on cable TV, but the stuff we get in American action films and superhero flicks could already have been written by AI, or by a fridge, or a lawnmower. My most […]
Limbo
Friday, May 26th, 2023 Film Reviews,For the Catholic Church, Limbo was literally the outskirts of Hell, inhabited by those good people who died before Christ was born, and by infants without experience of baptism or sin. In common parlance, the word has come to mean a state of indecision, of forced inaction with no clear path in sight. For filmmaker […]
Cairo Conspiracy
Friday, May 12th, 2023 Film Reviews,It would be fascinating to make a study of films that have rendered their makers persona non grata in certain countries. Cairo Conspiracy would certainly do the trick for Swedish-born filmmaker, Tarik Saleh, whose father was Egyptian. A ban, however, would be superfluous, because Saleh has been barred from returning to Egypt since 2017, when […]
The Survival of Kindness
Thursday, May 4th, 2023 Film Reviews,Plenty of people will tell you that Rolf de Heer’s The Survival of Kindness is a “weird” film. That’s probably an understatement considering that all the dialogue is muttered in an incomprehensible language – or set of languages, and that most of the characters walk around wearing large, clunky gasmasks. Nobody has a name, and […]
Beau is Afraid
Friday, April 21st, 2023 Film Reviews,Ari Aster is a director who suffers from a bad case of David Lynch envy. His previous two features, Hereditary and Midsommar, were unusual enough to appeal to those with cultish tastes, but Beau is Afraid is more Twin Peaks than Twin Peaks. Alas, multiple peaks also entail multiple troughs, and this film lingers most […]
The Innocent
Friday, April 14th, 2023 Film Reviews,Although I didn’t get to write about this year’s French Film Festival, our national love affair with French cinema shows no signs of abating. As usual, a good percentage of the movies shown during the festival will get a local release. This comes as something of a relief, as we have gone into the annual […]
Air
Friday, April 7th, 2023 Film Reviews,Air is truly a film for our times. Essentially a two-hour advertisement for Nike, it is being acclaimed as stunning entertainment, and a potential “movie of the year”. We’ve come a long way from 1999, when Naomi Klein’s No Logo made the case against Nike and other big brands as shameless exploiters of the developing […]
Of an Age
Friday, March 31st, 2023 Film Reviews,Goran Stolevski announced his arrival as a force in Australian cinema with his debut feature of last year, You Won’t be Alone – a gender bending horror movie set in 19th century Macedonia. Those who responded enthusiastically to that weird, very original production, may find themselves less enamoured of his follow-up, Of an Age. You […]
EO
Saturday, March 25th, 2023 Film Reviews,Those journalists and foreign policy geeks Paul Keating recently called “donkeys”, might think better of the former PM after watching EO. In making this film, veteran director, Jerzy Skolimowski, has produced a strident defence of the donkey. “Some people say they are stupid, which is not right,” he says in the press release, “because they […]