Film Reviews
InfernoFriday, 14 October 2016
Dan Brown is famed for calamitous language massacres that sell by the kerchillion to tone-deaf Renaissance cryptogram junkies. His sentences hurt eyes and his plots numb skulls. But one thing you can say for Brown is he checks facts like an obsessive-compulsive über-nerd. When the books are transplanted to the big screen, he gets less control over this stuff. The result, in Inferno, is unintentionally comical to anyone (which means pretty much everyone) who knows Florence. Read more... |
American HoneyThursday, 13 October 2016
“It’s a business opportunity,” explains Jake (Shia LaBoeuf) to dreadlocked, wild-child Star (Sasha Lane). She’s eyeing him up in the aisles of a Midwestern Walmart while he dances around with a rag-tag, stoned young crew to Rihanna’s “We Found Love”. “We go door to door. We sell magazines. Come with us.” Sounds an unlikely proposition. Read more... |
LFF 2016: Snowden / The Birth of a Nation / ArrivalThursday, 13 October 2016
As an old Sixties lefty brought up on thrillers like The Parallax View, Oliver Stone loves ripping open great American political conspiracies, and inevitably he portrays CIA whistleblower Edward Snowden as a noble crusader for free speech and democratic accountability against the might of America's intelligence agencies. Read more... |
On the road with Bob Dylan: the mother of all rockumentariesWednesday, 12 October 2016
Dont Look Back is the Ur-rockumentary, the template for hundreds of hand-held rock tour films, a source of inspiration as well as a model to aspire to. Read more... |
LFF 2016: Elle/PatersonTuesday, 11 October 2016
Paul Verhoeven directing Isabelle Huppert as a woman seemingly unfazed by a violent rape sounds a recipe for outrage. Elle (★★★★) , though, provokes in subtle, lingering, sometimes comic ways. The rape of Michele (Huppert) mostly happens off-screen during the opening credits, though the ski-masked intruder’s violence in her plush, gated Paris house will be replayed as memory and fantasy. Read more... |
LFF 2016: A Monster Calls / A United KingdomSaturday, 08 October 2016
The cinema trailer for A Monster Calls ★★★★ looks faintly ludicrous, with its scenes of a giant tree stomping around the landscape, but don't be deceived. Read more... |
Blood FatherFriday, 07 October 2016
Having been to Hollywood hell and back, Mel Gibson is perfectly placed to play the battered big daddy par excellence. Here he is, in the person of John Link, ex-jailbird on parole, recovering alcoholic and former outlaw biker, now eking out a living as a tattooist on a trailer park in the California desert. Weatherbeaten and bearded like an escapee from a jungle PoW camp, Link looks like a man a coin-toss away from extinction. In his downbeat isolation, Link enjoys a little light... Read more... |
My Scientology MovieThursday, 06 October 2016
Can Louis Theroux bring anything new to the Scientology party? If you’ve seen Going Clear, Alex Gibney’s detailed documentary based on Lawrence Wright’s book, or watched Tom Cruise acting weird on YouTube, you already know that the Church’s great secrets are not so secret any more. We’ve heard about the aliens and the galaxies, the E-meters and the Operating Thetans, the elite Sea Org and the hellish conditions in the Hole. Read more... |
The Sleeping Beauty, Australian Ballet, cinema broadcastThursday, 06 October 2016
Australian Ballet's cinema broadcast on Tuesday night appears to have been a little under-publicised Read more... |
The Girl on the TrainWednesday, 05 October 2016
Much was anticipated from Tate Taylor's film version of Paula Hawkins's bestselling novel, but there really are times when the best plan is to stay home with a good book. Despite a high-octane girl-power cast and the lustrous screenwriting reputation of Erin Cressida Wilson, this thing clanks along like the 3am milk train to Exeter sidings. Read more... |
Blu-ray: The Emigrants/The New LandMonday, 03 October 2016
The Emigrants and The New Land have to be seen. In each, the story is gripping, the acting marvellous and the depiction of the period setting evocative and flawless. Any of these aspects would be reason enough to see a film, but the clincher is director Jan Troell’s adeptness at showing how the smallest details impact on destiny. Taking a moment’s rest from a menial task on a farm can lead to consequences which colour a whole life. But this is not where it stops. Read more... |
The First Monday in MayFriday, 30 September 2016
“I’m so tired of hearing that McQueen is the best show we’ve ever done. It’s become a bit of an albatross,” complains Andrew Bolton, curator of the New York Metropolitan museum’s costume institute (he’s from Blackburn, Lancashire, and loved the New Romantics as a teenager). Bolton’s huge hit, Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, took fashion as art to a new level in 2011. “It would be nice if China was able to knock it off its pedestal.” Read more... |
Under the ShadowFriday, 30 September 2016
We haven’t been here before. Tehran in 1980, bombed by its Iraqi invaders and jumpy with revolutionary fervour, is a place preoccupied with ordinary fear. Showing the normal if pressurised life he remembers from childhood in this demonised country is debutant writer-director Babak Anvari’s first coup. Letting this slide slowly into Persian myth and cinematic dread opens a new door in horror. The more arch A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night introduced the genre to the Iranian diaspora... Read more... |
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar ChildrenThursday, 29 September 2016
Tim Burton’s fans always want him to hit the sweet spot again, to give them another Beetlejuice or Edward Scissorhands. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is not quite there, but it’s not for lack of trying. The weakness lies in Jane Goldman’s script, adapted from the eponymous YA novel. There is way too much exposition – characters explain the plot to each other, not just at the outset, but throughout the movie. Read more... |
Free State of JonesWednesday, 28 September 2016
Given the fractious state of American politics, perhaps it's a suitable moment for a movie taking a look back at the American Civil War. However, despite heaving at the seams with good intentions and noble sentiments, Gary Ross's Free State of Jones ultimately can't justify its debilitating 140-minute running time. Read more... |
Swiss Army ManTuesday, 27 September 2016
Daniel Radcliffe has worked hard to put distance between himself and The Boy Who Lived. Onstage he’s been buck naked and learned to sing and tap. On screen he’s been the young Ginsberg, Dr Frankenstein’s sidekick and last week in Imperium went undercover to infiltrate American neo-Nazis. He now goes the extra thespian mile in Swiss Army Man, in which he plays a flatulent reanimated corpse with an erectile auto-function. Read more... |
Pages
latest in today
'We are bowled over!' Thank you for your messages...
