One of the big attractions at the Melbourne International Film Festival this year is Frank Pavich’s documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune (2013). The film retells the story of cult Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s…
By telling the stories of Boni, Titi and Ho, Jalanan brings to the screen the hardships and precarious lives of marginalised people in one of the most economically promising Asian countries.
Courtesy of Jalanan Movie Team
Daniel Ziv’s documentary feature Jalanan (Streetside), currently screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival, is a film that seeks to move its audience. Documentaries sometimes invite viewers…
Australian poet and dramatist Christopher Barnett is the subject of These Heathen Dreams, a documentary screening at MIFF.
MIFF
I met the Australian poet Christopher Barnett in Nantes in 2009. He strode the narrow streets in his long leather coat, occasionally crossing the road in front of cars, staring drivers down. When I asked…
New Indian documentary cinema: Children of the Pyre.
MIFF
Rajesh Jala’s Children of the Pyre (2008) is one of seven documentary features in the India in Flux: Living Resistance strand at the 2014 Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF). The film is a finely…
A still from Pablo Mazzolo’s Photooxidation, one of the films on the Experimental Shorts program at MIFF.
MIFF
The nine films that comprise the Melbourne International Film Festival’s Experimental Shorts program confront viewers with questions about image, form and genre. The Experimental Shorts program is an annual…
Marion Cotillard stars in Two Days, One Night, currently screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival.
MIFF
Audiences familiar with Belgian directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardennes won’t need any recommendation to see their latest film, Two Days, One Night, which is on the program of the Melbourne International…
Rinko Kikuchi stars in Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter, currently screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival.
MIFF
For the most part we live in disenchanted times: everyday life and the political landscape seem increasingly dried of their magical possibilities. Instead they are filled with dross and drone, the relentless…
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
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 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
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…
Can we be Frank? (Inquisitive face, eyebrow raised…)
Artificial Eye Film Co Ltd UK
The run up to the release of Lenny Abrahamson’s latest film, Frank, was characterised by a certain amount of perplexity. Unsurprising, given the posters emblazoned with that enormous papier-mâché mask…
The differing depictions of ‘captaincy’ play key roles in the film.
Courtesy of Columbia Pictures
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
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…
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 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
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 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
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
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…