If you want to talk about the experience of the average moviegoer in 2014, you need to talk about blockbusters. Boyhood might be the recipient of cascades of praise from critics and award bodies alike at the moment, and stands a solid chance of picking up the Best Picture at the Academy Awards. And yet,…
Have you ever wondered what you’d get if you asked Walt Disney to make a James Bond film? Well, wonder no more. The Castle of Cagliostro centres on Lupin the Third, a gentleman thief inspired in equal part by Bond and fictional French burglar Arsène Lupin. It’s fair to say that, in retrospect, the ever-whimsical…
It seems like it’s nigh-impossible to talk about Israeli ‘workplace’ dramedy Zero Motivation without referencing Office Space. Give or take a Jarhead, though, I’d argue that Talya Lavie’s feature-length debut more closely resembles The Office (the UK version). Both The Office and Zero Motivation make paperwork integral to their story, for example; the former takes…
Last Saturday I made a mid-morning visit to GOMA’s Cinémathèque for a couple documentaries by Hong-Joon Kim on the subject of Korean cinema. It was hardly an accessible double feature: as a fellow critic commented, it was “too niche for its audience of five people,” presenting interesting but opaque oral histories. I expected the same…
It’s safe to say that The Dead Lands’ sold-out sessions are an outlier at the sparsely-attended screenings that have so far defined Brisbane Asia Pacific Film Festival. Perhaps this lends some insight into the movie-going demographics of our city, where a Chekhovian Palme d’Or recipient is outshone by the Maori cultural heritage championed in New…
Hong Sang-soo’s Hill of Freedom begins with a language teacher, Kwon (Young-hwa Seo) collecting a parcel of letters from an ex-lover named Mori (Ryô Kase). She begins to read – learning that Mori has travelled from Japan to Korea to visit her – but after only reading a fraction of his story, she is overcome…
Still Life is a drab, muted movie, but that’s to be expected from a film about people dying alone and unloved. John May (Eddie Marsan) is employed by the council to track down the loved ones of the recently deceased. We open with a montage of John attending a series of funerals alone; the sole…
The word ‘necessary’ is perfect to describe Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait, a film that is as difficult to watch as it is important. As explained by its opening title card, the film is constructed out of 1,001 images/videos taken from 1,001 Syrians – these videos, regularly drawn from crude cameraphones and interrupted by the trill…
The story told by Kitty Green’s documentary Ukraine is Not a Brothel is a fascinating one. But the appeal of this film is not the mystery it unravels as it examines the inner workings of Ukrainian feminist movement FEMEN, but the thoughtful and thought-provoking perspective provided by its Australian director. This is a sterling example…
Red Amnesia is a hard film to pin down. Xiaoshuai Wang’s film begins surveying a rundown old house and the brooding young man within, before leaping away to Shanghai to observe Deng (Lü Zhong), a recently widowed woman. She’s being hassled by mysterious phone calls with a sinister undertone, but the police aren’t interested in…
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