Tag: Fantasy
The Hunger Games: the Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes
Thursday, November 23rd, 2023 Film Reviews,It’s hard to believe it’s been eight years since the last Hunger Games movie, the fourth part of a ‘Hollywood trilogy’. Those films drew on the star power of Jennifer Lawrence as heroine, Katniss Everdeen, but the actor’s light has dimmed in recent years, the low point being the dismal sex comedy, No Hard Feelings […]
The Creator
Friday, September 29th, 2023 Film Reviews,Made for a mere US$80 million, The Creator is a cut-price Hollywood blockbuster. The usual bill for one of these extravaganzas is north of US$ 300 million, but British director, Gareth Edwards, has managed to eliminate the waste that causes those pesky budgets to blow out. In the process, he may have made himself the […]
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, […]