Tag: romance
Passengers
Friday, January 13th, 2017 Film Reviews,Writing in the 1920s Aldous Huxley denounced the joyless “Good Time” that had made people into passive consumers of art and entertainment. Huxley regretted that the cinema had killed off amateur theatrics, while music making at home had been supplanted by the gramophone. He believed this indulgence in instant entertainment led to a crippling sense […]
Captain Fantastic
Saturday, September 10th, 2016 Film Reviews,We all know mum and dad can really inflict damage on a child’s psyche, even though they may have only the best of intentions. Matt Ross’s Captain Fantastic is a film about a father whose love for his children might be ruining them for life, even as he prepares them to meet every conceivable challenge. […]
Arab Film Festival
Thursday, July 28th, 2016 Film Reviews,This week found me at the opening of the Arab Film Festival in Parramatta for a Lebanese movie called Halal Love. The place was packed with a noisy, bustling crowd estimated by the festival directors as 70 percent Muslim, 30 percent non-Muslim. As a celebration of the strength and diversity of Arab culture in Sydney’s […]
Love & Friendship
Friday, July 22nd, 2016 Film Reviews,On the occasion of her 19th birthday Jane Austen’s father bought her a mahogany writing desk. Today it might have been a new laptop, but the intention was the same: to encourage his daughter’s literary hobby, which seemed quite harmless. He was less relaxed about her growing tendency for flirting with young males at the […]
A Month of Sundays & Pawno
Friday, April 29th, 2016 Film Reviews,‘Fun’ is not a term one associates with contemporary Australian cinema, which has mistaken humourlessness for high seriousness. I’m not pining for slapstick comedy, only for films that can hold an up-tempo mood for more than a minute at a time. The Dressmaker came close last year, while Last Cab to Darwin – a film […]
Spanish Film Festival 2016
Thursday, April 14th, 2016 Film Reviews,In the days of the infamous Motion Picture Production Code, which stretched from 1930 until the 1960s, Hollywood’s movie makers were constrained from producing any film that might lower the moral standards of its audience. This meant crime could never pay, while law-breakers always suffered for their sins. Innocence and goodness were invariably rewarded. For […]
45 Years
Friday, February 19th, 2016 Film Reviews,It’s with some reluctance that I turn to Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years as the second review for this week, as it’s hard to recommend a film that is little more than a slow, grinding, self-absorbed portrait of old age and its miseries. There are, at least, a few psychological subtleties to be unravelled, whereas my […]
Brooklyn
Friday, February 12th, 2016 Film Reviews,Brooklyn has arrived at the cinema at the same time as new a Nicholas Sparks romance, appropriately titled The Choice. Yes viewers, if you are partial to a bit of romantic drama there is a clear choice. On one hand the clichéd, cardboard-cutout world of The Choice, with characters that would have been rejected from […]
The Danish Girl
Friday, January 22nd, 2016 Film Reviews,When Gore Vidal’s novel, Myra Breckinridge, was made into a truly lamentable movie in 1970, transgender issues were hardly front page news. The idea that someone could feel like a woman trapped in a man’s body, or vice versa, was the stuff of ribald comedy. The wheel has turned so completely that transgenderism now occupies […]
Carol
Thursday, January 14th, 2016 Film Reviews,It’s difficult to make a great movie from a great novel. Even the best directors struggle to capture the psychological nuances, the purposeful construction of personalities and subplots. An author can tell us much that a director can only suggest, unless he or she wants to make an unbearably wordy film. In Carol, Todd Haynes […]