Studio Ghibli’s Isao Takahata’s adaptation of the ancient folk tale “The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter” is rendered in gorgeous hand-drawn animation that recalls both a children’s picture book and Japanese woodcuttings. This aesthetic and the title suggest the film’s shift in focus – rather than telling the story of the bamboo cutter who finds…
The nation-centric film festivals that flit their way through Australian capitals tend to offer the same sort of fare, for better or worse: a mix of arthouse indies, accessible comedies and the occasional crime drama. As a horror/thriller film, Shrew’s Nest is an outlier in the 2015 Spanish Film Festival lineup. Directors Juanfer Andrés and…
Spirited Away is not my favourite of Hayao Miyazaki’s films – that title goes to My Neighbour Totoro, now and forever – but it is perhaps his best. The story told here is deeply steeped in Japanese mythology yet imbued with resonant universality. As a child, who hasn’t fretted at being abandoned by their parents,…
The demise of the Brisbane International Film Festival left a vacuum in Brisbane’s cinematic culture. Thankfully, nature and cinephiles alike abhor vacuums, and events like GOMA’s Lynch exhibition, the Brisbane Asia Pacific Film Festival and, now, John Edmond and Huw Walmsley-Evans’ Queensland Film Festival have rushed to fill the void. As much as I enjoyed…
You probably heard about Banksy’s New York “residency” a year-and-a-half ago. An unassuming old man selling Banksy stencils – worth tens of thousands dollars at least – for a few bucks on the side of the street. The story about the locals charging people to view his graffito. “The response to it would be part…
Elijah Wood sure has slipped comfortably into B-movies after his stint at the Shire, hasn’t he? When I first stumbled upon Open Windows, I was expecting something along the lines of Wood’s bomb-in-a-piano thriller Grand Piano. There are similarities: both films are quintessential B-thrillers, escalating a catchy premise into something tense (and a little silly).…
The story told in The Green Prince is an astonishing one. Nadav Schirman’s documentary unfolds like a great John le Carré novel, threading its way through the twists and turns that bind two men on opposite sides of the Israel/Palestine conflict. One is Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of a prominent Hamas cleric, who spent…
As its title suggests, Dear White People is a statement as much as a film, tackling modern-day race relations. Justin Simien’s debut feature stages its satirical drama in Winchester University, a fictional American college where residential colleges are divided – and, ultimately, fractured – along race lines. Early on I fretted that its insistence on…
Living is Easy with Eyes Closed resembles an old Polaroid of the Andalusian seaside, yellowed by the summer sun and age alike. Despite its title – cribbed from “Strawberry Fields Forever” –it cuts through any nostalgic haze to present a clear-eyed portrait of 1966 Spain, its beauty and its injustice. The story told is an…
Samba (Omar Sy) and Alice (Charlotte Gainsbourg) are two people on the edge. Samba, an illegal immigrant whose spent the past decade in France, lives with the perpetual threat of deportation, while Alice, his caseworker, lives with a mental illness that recently culminated in a breakdown which put her career in jeopardy. Each of them…
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