Tag: drama
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 […]
Greta
Thursday, February 28th, 2019 Film Reviews,Few actors do “weird” as well as Isabelle Huppert. Whether she is playing a murderess, a swindler, a chilly business woman, an uptight teacher, or a rape victim who turns the tables, she remains aloof and self-contained. No matter what happens to her character in the course of a film she quickly recaptures her sangfroid. […]
Stan & Ollie
Friday, February 22nd, 2019 Film Reviews,There’s famous line attributed to actor, Edmund Gwenn, on his deathbed. When a sympathetic friend said: “This must be terribly difficult for you, Teddy,” he replied: “Not nearly as difficult as playing comedy.” I think of this line almost every time I see a comedy nowadays because so few are actually funny, even when the […]
At Eternity’s Gate
Thursday, February 14th, 2019 Film Reviews,With the maniacal gleam in his eye, his hagged, lean and hungry look, it’s amazing that it’s taken so long for Willem Dafoe to be cast as Vincent Van Gogh. He’s even got a Dutch name, although he was born in Wisconsin. Dafoe is 63 years old, while Van Gogh died at the age of […]
On the Basis on Sex
Friday, February 8th, 2019 Film Reviews,Karl Marx notoriously argued that the revolution would only arrive after capitalism had collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. Even allowing for the findings of the Banking Royal Commission that day may be a long way off, but it’s a longstanding idea that things have to get worse before they can get better. […]
Green Book
Thursday, January 31st, 2019 Film Reviews,This year’s Academy Awards is generating several fascinating dilemmas. First up, could the Academy give the prize for Best Picture to a film as frivolous and patched-together as Bohemian Rhapsody? Let’s not even get started on the sexual harrassment allegations levelled at director, Bryan Singer. Secondly, what has everybody got against A Star is Born? […]
Mary Queen of Scots
Thursday, January 24th, 2019 Film Reviews,Remember the Monty Python sketch: “Yoo are Mary Queen of Scots?” “I am” Crash, bang wallop! Well there’s plenty of bang in Josie Rourke’s new bio pic, but nothing to laugh about. There have been so many movies about the cousins and rival queens, Mary and Elizabeth, that I could spend this entire column listing […]
Storm Boy
Friday, January 18th, 2019 Film Reviews,Colin Thiele’s Storm Boy is a slender novel that has plucked Australian heartstrings ever since it was released in 1964. The first screen adaptation came along in 1976, and has proven to be no less enduring than the book. Directed by Henri Safran, who made only a handful of feature films but numerous TV programs, […]
Cold War
Friday, December 28th, 2018 Film Reviews,In Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) Alain Resnais set Marguerite Duras the task of writing a love story that would not seem insignificant alongside the brute fact of the atomic bomb. In Cold War, Pawel Pawlikowski gives us a love story that traverses the oppressive political landscape of the years following World War Two, when capitalism […]
Vice
Thursday, December 20th, 2018 Film Reviews,Dick Cheney will forever be known as the man who put the “vice” into “Vice President”. While the Trump administration continues to sink into a legal quagmire we can look back at Cheney and marvel at how he ever got away with it. His continuing prosperity, indeed his very existence, suggests that his contract with […]