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Articles on Film review

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This is a summer of truly awful blockbusters

I’m trying to figure out why I’m so disheartened with the movies this summer. It’s true that the season began badly. Marc Webb’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2 was a disappointment. The aerial sequences at the…
Brave New Clan presents the “X-factor” us mob see among ourselves all the time to a wider audience. Foxtel 2014

Indigenous Australia is deadly – and Leah Purcell shows it

Urban skyline, as seen from inside a medium-density apartment block, opens Australian director Leah Purcell’s Who We Are: Brave New Clan (2014), which was broadcast on Foxtel’s Bio Channel last night…
Guy Pearce plays Eric, alongside Robert Pattinson as Reynolds, in Australian director David Michod’s second feature film The Rover. Sydney Film Festival

The Rover brings unremitting fury to the Sydney Film Festival

The Sydney Film Festival Offical Competition this year has featured a range of male (and a few female) protagonists who are either without domicile, or whose domicile is severely threatened. I have already…
It’s impossible to overstate the way this kind of viewing makes Altman’s ouevre newly accessible. 3 Women, Sydney Film Festival

Framing Robert Altman at the Sydney Film Festival

For me the most exciting way to negotiate the ample program of the Sydney Film Festival (SFF) is to focus on its retrospectives, and this year the lens is on the American film directors Robert Altman and…
The differing depictions of ‘captaincy’ play key roles in the film. Courtesy of Columbia Pictures

Captain Phillips finds depth in human detail

This article contains spoilers. Paul Greengrass’ Captain Phillips advertises itself as little more than a tense, claustrophobic thriller – a dramatic re-telling of the 2009 incident in which Somali pirates…
Unsimulated sex often breaks the natural flow of fiction, disrupting our enjoyment. Magnolia Pictures/ Christian Geisnaes

Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac and the oddity of real sex on screen

According to the American actor Shia LaBeouf, instead of having an audition for Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac, he was asked to email a photograph of his penis. While Labeouf supposedly leapt at the opportunity…
Meryl Streep - Oscar worthy? Dominic Lipinski/PA

August: Osage County is less than the sum of its parts

This article contains spoilers. John Wells’ film August: Osage County tells the story of a family which has gathered for the funeral of its father. Ostensibly, they are also there to help its ill and drug-addicted…
Sometimes too much is just too much. Martin Scorsese’s latest film is swamped by its excesses. Paramount Pictures

The Wolf of Wall Street is a howling disappointment

The Wolf of Wall Street is Martin Scorsese’s Scarface – and that isn’t meant as a compliment. I watched Brian De Palma’s 1983 film again recently. I had been looking forward to it: the Blu-ray edition…
Avatar, the most commercially successful film in history, has a strong environmental message. Flickr: rxau

Cinema classics: the best energy & environment films

The motion picture was born of industrial revolution, the first image in history whose base materials were electrical and chemical energy. Cinema exhibited the laws of motion on a white rectangle for all…
HG Wells (left) with actors on the set of Things to Come, a 1936 adaptation of his futuristic novel. James Vaughan

Cinema classics: five of the best science and technology films

Cinema did not emerge from a eureka moment, but rather through the incremental innovations of pioneers such as the Lumière brothers, Étienne-Jules Marey and Thomas Edison. So it is unsurprising that filmmakers…
It’s a film about the vision and style of Cormac McCarthy – but does it work? Twentieth Century Fox

Review: The Counselor, a film that talks like a book

The Counselor is a collaboration between one of the last century’s literary greats, novelist Cormac McCarthy, and one of the filmmakers who has helped define contemporary, mainstream American cinema, director…
The Brad Pitt zombie action thriller World War Z has a strong enough premise to give us pause to think. Image from shutterstock.com

Tipping the balance towards humanity in World War Z

Could a dire new infection sweep the world in a matter of weeks? Might the disease be so strange that it alters the behaviour of people beyond recognition, making them predatory and fearless? Could a great…
Does Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby fail to meet its grandiose expectations? AAP/Warner Bros

The Great Gatsby: death by glitter or a thought-provoking spectacle?

It’s impossible to see a film with the hype of Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby without preconceptions. The build-up to this film has been overwhelming with trailers splashed across screens everywhere…
Chasing Ice is trying to get us out of the climate change hole we’ve dug for ourselves. EPA/Baard Ness

Chasing Ice bewitches eyes but won’t change minds

Science seems to be failing to change the minds of those who are sceptical about the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Chasing Ice - a film by Jeff Orlowski, playing in Australia currently - tries…
Jude Law and Catherine Zeta-Jones as psychiatrists discussing the treatment of Side Effects’ protagonist Emily Taylor. Village Roadshow

Side effects of the Hollywood treatment: pharma ethics dumped for thriller plot

When a drug returns more than a billion dollars in sales, it hits blockbuster status. So, notching up over US$11 billion in 2011 antidepressants are bona fide showstoppers. But these little pills have…
Ageing couple Gorges and Ann Laurant (Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva) negotiate illness and death in Amour. EPA Claudio Onorati

The thorny issue of home care in Michael Haneke’s Amour

During our lifetime, we face a series of developmental tasks that are universal to the human condition. The last of these stages comes in our final years, when we face our mortality, reflect back upon…
Bradley Cooper as Pat Solitano in Silver Linings Playbook. Roadshow Publicity

Romcom’s silver lining is its portrayal of mental illness

From Psycho onward, film portrayals of the mentally ill have contributed to the stigma faced by people with these conditions. Films tend to create and reinforce stereotypes of the mentally ill as “homicidal…
Pi finds a strange and beautiful island where life can’t survive. wildfox76/Flickr

Life of Pi’s acidic island a warning for our warming world

The recently released film Life of Pi directed by Ang Lee and based on Yann Martel’s novel of the same name, is a fable for our climate change times. Much of the plot involves the struggles of a teenage…

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