Tag: Fantasy
Asteroid City
Saturday, August 12th, 2023 Film Reviews,Whatever Wes Anderson is doing it might be better classified as ‘art’ rather than cinema. This was confirmed when he received invitations from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, and the Fondazione Prada in Milan, to create exhibitions in 2018-2020. The Prada had already shown its affection for the director by getting him to design a […]
Barbie
Friday, July 21st, 2023 Film Reviews,Barbie is the most unusual feminist statement ever to hit the cinema. It’s also a bizarre advertorial for the Mattel corporation, and one of the most original movies you’ll see in this or any other year. A word of warning: there is an awful lot of pink. From the moment she appeared in March 1959, […]
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
Friday, June 30th, 2023 Film Reviews,There are some sprightly octogenarians around, but nobody tops Indiana Jones. When we meet him in this long-awaited finale to the series, it’s during the last weeks of World War Two. A digitally rejuvenated Harrison Ford is battling the Nazis, getting out of one close scrape after another, while setting up the key plot device […]
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 […]
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 […]
Emily
Saturday, January 21st, 2023 Film Reviews,Emily Brontë remains one of the most mysterious figures in world literature. When she died at the age of 30 in 1848, she had written one novel and a sheaf of poems. The poems were immediately acclaimed for their “genius” but are little read today. The novel, Wuthering Heights, is a classic for the ages, […]
Avatar: The Way of Water
Thursday, December 15th, 2022 Film Reviews,We are told “the Way of Water has no beginning and no end,” which sounds like a perfect description of James Cameron’s long-awaited Avatar sequel. Anyone who hasn’t seen the original Avatar of 2009, or like me, has forgotten most of it, will get the disconcerting feeling of having entered the film at the half-way […]
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
Friday, November 18th, 2022 Film Reviews,A decade ago, it would have been unthinkable for Hollywood to produce a superhero film in which all the lead characters were black African women. Even less likely was that the United States would play the role of the villain – an irresponsible superpower that can’t be trusted to preserve world peace. Welcome to 2022, […]
Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris
Friday, October 28th, 2022 Film Reviews,One wonders what the late Jean-Luc Godard would have made of Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris. When the famous avant-garde director died last month, the tributes were predictably fulsome, but I can’t believe anyone actually enjoyed sitting through anything Godard made after about 1965. For the vast majority of people there is only one reason […]
Don’t Worry Darling
Friday, September 30th, 2022 Film Reviews,Don’t worry darling, you can look it up when you get home. This is the best advice I can offer to those who walk out of Olivia Wilde’s much-discussed movie, wondering what on earth it was all about. No film this year has been more thoroughly picked over by the gossip columnists, following reports of […]