Film Reviews
LFF 2012: The SapphiresTuesday, 16 October 2012
A film about an Aboriginal soul quartet in the Vietnam War should at least have originality covered. This adaptation of the hit Australian musical by Tony Briggs based on his mum and aunt's Saigon adventures rings most changes, though, in being a resolutely uplifting Aboriginal story. Australia’s deep racism in 1968 is well-caught when sisters Gail (Deborah Mailman), Cynthia (Miranda Tapsell) and Julie (Jessica Mauboy) powerfully harmonise at a spitefully rigged small-town talent contest. Read more... |
5 Broken CamerasTuesday, 16 October 2012
A story of six years of conflict in the West Bank set against more timeless details of life in the Palestinian town of Bil’in, 5 Broken Cameras brings the reality of resistance to the expansion of Israeli settlements – a conflict between unarmed locals and the Israeli army with its modern armaments - to the viewer in a far fuller way than we see in news reports. Read more... |
LFF 2012: Beware of Mr BakerMonday, 15 October 2012
In case you doubted the title, the great Cream drummer Ginger Baker breaks director Jay Bulger’s nose with a crack of his walking stick, after Bulger’s lived at his subject’s South African ranch for four months. Like a zoo-keeper thinking for a fatal second the tiger was his friend, Bulger found that Baker still bites. Read more... |
LFF 2012: In the HouseSunday, 14 October 2012
Balancing cool calculation with a touch of Potiche’s farce, In the House (Dans la Maison) sees French director François Ozon return to the story-within-a-story structure and enigmatic imposter subject matter of Swimming Pool. Read more... |
Skyfall: The World PremiereSaturday, 13 October 2012
This could be the best Bond yet: light on sex, heavy on storytelling, hard on action. This is 100 percent pure Bond - a distillation of beauty, action, surprises and locations. Let's start with the latter: perhaps it’s best to stay away from Istanbul, given Taken 2 and now the exciting chase scene in the opening of Skyfall. It's a chase scene, sure, but with stunts and camera angles that make you sit up and take just enough notice. Read more... |
Celebration DaySaturday, 13 October 2012
At the end of 2007 Led Zep’s reunion concert took “hottest ticket in town” to melting point. Everyone now knows 20 million fans chased 18,000 seats at the O2. What we hear less about is, given previous disastrous reunion efforts, how hard the pressure was on. And yet they pulled it off. Five years later people have still been asking for a tour. Earlier this week, however, the band categorically stated they’ve called it a day. Read more... |
LFF 2012: LoreSaturday, 13 October 2012
Australian Cate Shortland’s second film is a raw fairy tale about Nazi Germany, where indoctrinated, newly teenage Lore (Saskia Rosendahl) has always loved her war hero daddy. But when he returns from his SS unit’s long Belarus rampage in 1945, both parents are seized by the Allies, and she has to lead her abandoned siblings into the forest, to find their grandmother’s house. Read more... |
LFF 2012: SisterSaturday, 13 October 2012
Twelve-year-old Simon (Kacey Mottet Klein) likes to get the most out of the holiday season, in the Alps that loom above his nondescript town. The little tyke is a very adept thief, stealing skis and ski gear on the slopes, then selling them to his neighbours. Read more... |
LFF 2012: Robot & FrankFriday, 12 October 2012
Set in the near future on the outskirts of New York, Robot & Frank sees a grizzled ex-con warm to his mechanical helper, eventually enlisting him as a criminal accomplice. It might sound like the plot of a genre flick (Short Circuit springs to mind) but, like the robot in question, this little movie will knock you sideways with its soul. Read more... |
LFF 2012: SisterFriday, 12 October 2012
Twelve-year-old Simon (Kacey Mottet Klein) likes to get the most out of the holiday season, in the Alps that loom above his nondescript town. The little tyke is a very adept thief, stealing skis and ski gear on the slopes, then selling them to his neighbours. Read more... |
LFF 2012: 3Friday, 12 October 2012
With the gloriously deadpan comedies 25 Watts and Whisky, co-writers and directors Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll were the leading lights of Uruguayan cinema, not exactly heading the kind of renaissance seen in other Latin American countries in the 2000s – the country’s industry is miniscule – but certainly making two of the region’s most idiosyncratic films. Then Rebella killed himself, a tragedy that threw his friend into a grief that seemed to end his career also. Read more... |
LFF 2012: Dead EuropeFriday, 12 October 2012
The title couldn’t be more resonant, as the economic crisis makes the one-time First World visibly slip another notch. But in Tony Krawitz’s adaptation of Christos Tsolkias’s novel, the meaning is also literal: this is a bloody continent of unquiet ghosts. Read more... |
Ruby SparksFriday, 12 October 2012
From the makers of Little Miss Sunshine comes a funny, ethereal love story in the same vein as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Sunshine’s not all they have in common. Read more... |
LFF 2012: UndergroundFriday, 12 October 2012
As Julian Assange continues to hold the world’s authorities at bay behind embassy doors, this new biopic offers Young Assange: a Melbourne teenager among the first generation of computer hackers, who cracked the Pentagon’s code on the Gulf War’s eve. Read more... |
LFF 2012: Normal SchoolThursday, 11 October 2012
Argentine Celina Murga’s two feature films to date, Ana and the Others and A Week Alone, mark her out as one of the most original voices in a country chock full of talent. Those films are concerned with individuals – respectively, a young woman and a group of children – in search of an identity, in a society that is giving them little direction. Her first documentary, Escuela normal, investigates this question at source. Read more... |
LFF 2012: End of WatchWednesday, 10 October 2012
Often portrayed as corrupt or, at best, on the front line of a war zone, the officers of the LAPD are regulars on the big and small screen. On TV, Southland and The Shield have examined the LAPD in microscopic detail and earlier this year Rampart intermittently impressed with its focus on one cop in freefall. Read more... |
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