Lilting is a sensory experience. Describing a film in this way typically refers to the two expected senses: sight and sound. Hong Khaou’s debut feature film evokes scent; given all the references to smell, I don’t think it’s accidental. It has the delicate odour of clean skin, that sickly sweet smell of warm milk. The…
Where T.S. Eliot found fear in a handful of dust, Christopher Nolan finds it in huge clouds of the stuff. Dust storms are consuming America’s failing agrarian communities decades from now. Blight ravages the planet’s few remaining crops as that dust brings illness and despair. This is a pre-apocalyptic world, a wasteland upon which mankind…
The generations that lived through the ‘Great War’ are, by-and-large, no more, and the stories told about the war begin to become just that, blurring the line between fact and fiction as the war moves from lived experience to history. Testament of Youth is adapted from a testament itself: Vera Brittain’s memoirs of World War…
Featuring the best performance of the year so far, the Sydney Film Prize-winning Two Days, One Night is a tale of injustice and persistence whose simplicity belies its emotional and political poignancy. The latest from two-time Palme d’Or winners Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne hews closely to their social realist/humanist template. It follows their trademark stripped-back…
Over at the Essential, I took a look at some of November’s upcoming home entertainment releases for Australian consumers, including a formidable Evil Dead boxset. Check it out.
The second episode of the 500Cast podcast has yours truly joining Brisbane critics Jesse Thompson and Laurence Barber to discuss Whiplash, Australian Cinema .. not to mention a quick quiz where we endeavour to differentiate quotes as relating to 2001: A Space Odyssey or Christopher Nolan’s latest, Interstellar. Check it out! Listen to the podcast…
I have no personal experience of sadomasochism, but if its pop-culture depictions are anything to go by, the one constant – aside from whips, chains and leather – is stilted role-play. For example, My Mistress – the debut feature of Brisbane director Stephen Lance – has us observe dominatrix Maggie (Emmanuelle Béart) leading an unnamed…
What defines the iconic horror villain? There are a few superficial commonalities to be found among the usual suspects: they’re almost invariably men, sometimes bald, always terrifying in their relentless opacity. If these are the criteria, then surely Terence Fletcher, as embodied by J.K. Simmons, qualifies. Fletcher is the conductor of the fictional Shaffer Music…
November last year introduced the inaugural British Film Festival, a breath of fresh air in an increasingly stale slate of nation-centric film festivals. It’s not that I don’t have a lot of respect for local festivals like the Italian, Israeli, French etc festivals – I only saw one of my favourite films of the year…
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