Programming the opening night of a film festival must make for a tricky task. Whatever the remit of the festival proper, programmers tend to feel compelled to put a warm-hearted crowd-pleaser in front of the audience on the first night, which tends to attract a positive-but-underwhelmed critical reaction more often than not (with some exceptions:…
Ever since my childhood, anime has assumed a dangerous, forbidden aura. I can recall in my early teens as these Japanese animated movies and television shows began to encroach upon video stores’ territory, scant shelves and then populated aisles of big eyes, big swords and big breasts. Give or take an Astroboy, I never watched…
Hal uses intricate futurism to examine universal themes of bereavement and obligation. Running at a slim sixty minutes, it’s simplistic in its narrative and themes, but finds a gentle profundity and quiet beauty nonetheless. Ryôtarô Makihara’s anime feature begins with a robot idling in a peaceful stream; the tranquillity is shortly interrupted by the explosion…
Writing about TV on the Radio’s Nine Types of Light in 2011 – after it topped my albums of the year poll, I wrote: “I loved Dear Science, which was like the last half of a great house party, funky and fun but kinda morose at the same time. Nine Types of Light feels like…
Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook remains one of the best – and scariest – horror movies of 2014, with only Oculus providing any real competition (for further details, check out my review from earlier the year!). Halloween heralded both its home entertainment release and its international cinematic release, where it’s raked in much more dosh than…
The last time I wrote about the Brisbane Asia Pacific Film Festival, my attitude was one of scepticism. And, I’ll concede, a modicum of bitterness. You see, the birth of BAPFF meant the death of BIFF (the Brisbane International Film Festival), the latter cut down in its prime (at twenty-one years old!) to pave…
Let me introduce you to Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal). Who is Lou Bloom? Well, in his own words, he’s a hard worker. He sets high goals and he’s been told that he’s persistent. He’s looking for a job, and now he’s thinking that television news might be something that he could love as well as…
Jason Reitman’s Men, Women & Children has become the critical pariah of 2014, earning near-universal condemnation at its Toronto premiere and an abysmal 29% on Rotten Tomatoes. The main criticism is directed at its condescending, alarmist approach to social media, as though it might as well be titled Tumblr Madness. I’m not convinced that the…
The funeral is a fertile ground for familial drama in the cinema. It’s easy to see why, what with the reunion of family members long separated by distance and/or estrangement born of malignant buried secrets unearthing those secrets in the heightened emotionality necessarily produced by grief and nostalgia. There are countless films in the ‘genre’…
The Troubles (the violent Northern Ireland conflict between Catholics and Protestants) are defined by a moral and political complexity that’s difficult to successfully convey on film. Many of the movies that have succeeded in portraying the era – In the Name of the Father, The Outsider, Good Vibrations – avoid the problems of presenting either…
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