Tag: film festival
A Silence & Spanish Film Festival 2024
Sunday, June 30th, 2024 Film Reviews,A Silence doesn’t announce that it’s Based on a True Story, but its origins are not hard to find. In this film by Belgian director, Joachim Lafosse, the crime that looms in the background is that of paedophile, rapist and serial killer, Marc Dutroux, who kidnapped, imprisoned and tortured a series of young girls from […]
Charlie Chaplin: The Kid
Friday, July 9th, 2021 Film Reviews,“A picture with a smile – and perhaps, a tear,” The Kid was the first full-length feature directed by Charlie Chaplin. The film’s centenary is being celebrated with a progressive Chaplin retrospective that will unfurl in Australian cinemas for the rest of this year and into 2022, continuing a pandemic-era trend of revisiting classic movies […]
German Film Festival 2021
Saturday, June 5th, 2021 Film Reviews,It’s been years since I watched a film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, or thought much about this most decadent, irreverent of filmmakers. At the 2021 German Film Festival, Oskar Roehler’s unorthodox bio pic, Enfant Terrible, brings Fassbinder roaring back, and it’s not a pretty sight. Fassbinder was only 37 years old when he died in […]
Jewish International Film Festival 2021
Friday, February 26th, 2021 Film Reviews,No-one could ever accuse the Jewish International Film Festival of taking soft options. Most festivals choose to screen something suitably light-hearted on opening night but the 2021 JIFF was launched with Yaron Silberman’s Incitement, a film about the 1995 assassination of Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin. Incitement was crammed with political dialogue and small, significant […]
Jean-Pierre Melville
Thursday, October 15th, 2020 Film Reviews,With Hollywood saving its blockbusters for better days the cinemas are turning to classic and foreign films to fill the void. This is not a stopgap, but a great opportunity. If only a small percentage of regular cinema-goers take the chance to broaden their horizons it would be marvellous thing for film culture in this […]
St. Ali Italian Film Festival 2020
Friday, October 2nd, 2020 Film Reviews,This year the celebrations are slightly muted, but the Italian Film Festival is back. Normally the wine and coffee would be flowing freely, with a few glamorous movie stars on hand for premieres. In place of the usual demonstrative Italianisms, director, Elysia Zeccola, says audiences will have to be content blowing kisses to each other. […]
Sydney Film Festival 2019 & Tolkien
Thursday, June 13th, 2019 Film Reviews,Week two of the Sydney Film Festival rolls on but most of the interesting features are due to get local releases. As I’m reluctant to write too much about a movie that deserves a review in its own right, I’ll talk briefly about the festival, then segue to the new bio pic of J.R.R.Tolkien, which […]
Alliance Française French Film Festival 2019
Thursday, March 7th, 2019 Film Reviews,Aside from the Indians, the French are probably the greatest talkers in the world. We Aussies, by comparison, are notably inarticulate. Perhaps that’s why we have such an inexhaustible affection for the annual Alliance Française French Film Festival, an event packed with movies in which characters babble on and on in a language which most […]
Lavazza Italian Film Festival 2018
Friday, September 14th, 2018 Film Reviews,In 2014 Paolo Sorrentino won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film for The Great Beauty, a movie that updated Fellini’s La Dolce Vita for the age of Silvio Berlusconi. The headliner at this year’s Lavazza Italian Film Festival is Sorrentino’s Loro, a bio pic of the former Italian Prime Minister, that paints a […]
Sydney Film Festival 2018: Fashion Documentaries
Thursday, May 31st, 2018 Film Reviews,This year the Sydney Film Festival turns 65 but has no thoughts of retirement. On the contrary, with more than 250 films being screened over a mere 12 days, the SFF is operating at the peak of its powers. Arriving at a time of year when good new releases are scarce it offers something for […]