Film Reviews

Tabu

Graham Fuller Sunday, 09 September 2012

A wondrous antidote to digital movies’ colonisation of the darkening continent of cinema, Miguel Gomes’s luminously black-and-white Tabu is a tripartite paean to the past: to the perils of Portuguese imperialism in Africa; to Hollywood silent movies as they transitioned to sound; to an adulterous affair that trapped its enraptured lovers for the remaining 50 years of their lives.

Anna Karenina: The Rave

Matt Wolf Thursday, 06 September 2012

A curtain rises at the start of Joe Wright’s thrilling film version of Anna Karenina only for the finish several hours later to be accompanied in time-honoured fashion by the words “the end”.

Anna Karenina: The Pan

alexandra Coghlan Thursday, 06 September 2012

“You can’t ask why about love,” Aaron Johnson’s Count Vronsky croons tenderly to his beloved, pink lips peeking indecently out through his flasher’s mac of a moustache. Maybe you can’t, but you certainly can ask why you’d take a thousand-page realist novel and choke it in the grip of meta-theatrical conceptualising and Brechtian by-play. Anna Karenina feels as though its director just discovered the fourth wall and felt the need to graffiti all over it: “Joe Wright woz ere.”

Shut Up and Play the Hits

Lisa-Marie Ferla Tuesday, 04 September 2012

According to US television anchor Stephen Colbert, there are only three ways to end your career as a rock star: overdose, overstay your welcome or write Spiderman: The Musical.

Comment

Lawless

Emma Simmonds Monday, 03 September 2012

Australian director John Hillcoat certainly knows what he likes, and what he likes is lawlessness. It’s the central focus of his brilliantly uncompromising film Ghosts… of the Civil Dead, which saw a high-security prison driven to bloody ruin, and of his scorching western The Proposition.

Total Recall

Karen Krizanovich Wednesday, 29 August 2012

There’s no Mars or Arnie, but the new Total Recall has science fiction goodness running through it. A mile of Blade Runner, a yard of Fifth Element, a furlong of Star Wars and an inch of RoboCop make up the distances in Len Wiseman’s glossy, brooding take on Paul Verhoeven’s beloved Nineties hit.

Comment

Cockneys vs Zombies

Karen Krizanovich Tuesday, 28 August 2012

If you hate zombies and East End gangster movies, Cockneys vs Zombies will wreck those prejudices. Expect to have them turned topsy-turvy by this pocket-sized dynamo of horror comedy. Visually, it gets the simple things right straightaway. The blood looks real(ish). The London locations are cheerily drearily evocative. Then there's the unique opportunity of seeing Goldfinger Bond Girl and all-around heroine Honor Blackman fire a machine gun.

Berberian Sound Studio

Emma Simmonds Monday, 27 August 2012

If in space no one can hear you scream, that’s certainly not a problem you’ll experience in a giallo sound studio. Known for their high anxiety and buckets of blood, the Italian giallos of the Sixties and Seventies gave us heinous horror, drenched in style. Directors such as Lucio Fulci, Mario Bava and Dario Argento enjoyed a reign of terror with their handsome barbarism benefitting from fantastically histrionic sounds and scores.

Circumstance

Tom Birchenough Friday, 24 August 2012

Recent Iranian cinema has seen the best of times - and the worst of times. From the 1990s onwards the phenomenon of the "Iranian New Wave" has captured worldwide festival attention, with directors like Abbas Kiarostami, and father and daughter pair Mohsen and Samara Makhmalbaf among the leaders of the list of those who brought a new view of their nation to international eyes.

F For Fake

Emma Simmonds Thursday, 23 August 2012

For all that’s been said about Orson Welles – usually focusing on his towering genius and sizable ego - he was above all a great contrarian. In interviews he was often genial and self-effacing and of course a scintillating raconteur. During his later years he could be avuncular, entertainingly unpredictable and very funny, like a mischievous lecturer.

The Three Stooges

Karen Krizanovich Wednesday, 22 August 2012

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who think The Three Stooges are funny and those who just don’t get it. People in the first category are much better people.

The Hitchcock Players: James Stewart, Rear Window

Josh Spero Wednesday, 22 August 2012

Hitchcock was fond of the locked-box mystery, but never in the obvious form: whether it’s the leads in Rope, stuck in their apartment with a body shut up in a trunk, or the survivors from a ship murderously bobbing along together in Lifeboat, the trap was all. James Stewart as LB Jefferies in Rear Window is another man locked in a box, this time kept in his apartment by his broken leg. But clever old Hitchcock – he sets the mystery outside the box.

Shadow Dancer

Matt Wolf Tuesday, 21 August 2012

There's not exactly an excess of colour in Shadow Dancer, the IRA-themed thriller that unfolds amid a bleached-out landscape of browns and greys, windswept waterfronts and drab, unwelcoming enclosures.

The Imposter

Karen Krizanovich Monday, 20 August 2012

In 1994, a boy vanishes from Texas. Over three years later, he is found by Interpol alive in Spain and shipped back to his family in San Antonio. As improbable as this is in itself, it marks the beginning of an even more incredible story revealed in gobsmacking glory by writer/director Bart Layton. This documentary proves not only that truth is stranger than fiction, but that sometimes truth is so strange it makes even the wildest imagination cower in the corner.

The Wedding Video

Matt Wolf Friday, 17 August 2012

The potential minefield that is the run-up to marriage brings filmgoers back to the altar once again courtesy The Wedding Video, an English romcom that is quite a bit better than one might at first expect.

Take This Waltz

Emma Simmonds Wednesday, 15 August 2012

The great Leonard Cohen has brought his trademark poetry and pain to a whole host of film and TV soundtracks: the cynical “Everybody Knows” accompanied the bump and grind of Atom Egoyan’s Exotica; the raggedly beautiful “Hallelujah” brought soul to Watchmen and best of all is his melancholic musical backdrop to Altman’s heartbreaking McCabe & Mrs. Miller.