Once My Mother isn’t necessarily an exemplar of expert filmmaking. Chronicling the life of director Sophia Turkiewicz’s mother, Helen, who travelled the perilous journey from war-torn Poland through a Siberian gulag and Zimbabwean refugee camp before arriving in Australia, some formal failings are understandable: Turkiewicz filmed the bulk of the documentary with no funding, meaning…
A great “video nasty” breaches the boundaries of good taste, finding something uncomfortably real behind them. Many video nasties lose their impact over time as censorship slackens, but that’s not the case with Maniac. This is thanks to Joe Spinell’s sweaty anti-charisma as the titular maniac, Frank Zito, combined with Tom Savini’s legendary makeup work (he’s…
It’s pretty easy to disparage Sex Tape, the second film in a year to feature product placement from Apple and YouPorn (the first? Don Jon). Its entire premise – a married couple (Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel) find themselves frantically hunting down stray iPads after their sex tape is inadvertently shared with friends and family…
Paris is Burning is a document of the New York drag ball subculture of the eighties, providing a precise record of the intricate minutiae that came to define these LGBTIQ gatherings: the language, the fashion, the behaviour –in such fascinating detail that it remains a cultural touchstone. Sub-cultures create meaning through specificity. You say this…
The Nobel Prize winning Diary of a Bad Year is a structurally unique piece of reflexivity, presented as three distinct texts combined on each page: the first, a piece of left-wing political commentary true to the Howard/Bush/Guantanamo Bay era; the second, the inner thoughts of the author of that commentary, “Señor C” (a barely-disguised analogue…
Fritz Lang’s tale of a community torn apart and then united by the threat of a child murderer has a lot to say about power in civilisation. The contrast between the police investigation – driven by increasingly draconian measures – and the criminal underworld’s approach to these tragedies demonstrates powerfully how the polite notion of…
If you pitched Next Goal Wins as a fictional film, you’d be laughed out of the office. This soccer documentary reproduces every cliché of inspirational sports films like The Mighty Ducks or Cool Runnings. The lowest-ranked soccer team in the world, American Samoa, who infamously lost 31-0 to the Socceroos in 2001, fill out the…
Austrian creature-feature The Station (titled Blood Glacier elsewhere, which, awesome) tries to emulate the classics of the genre. Its first half is John Carpenter’s The Thing with a dash of Alien, as scientists investigating a remote glacier discover a blood-like substance that infects and transforms anything it comes into contact with into a bloodthirsty mutant,…
It’s possibly unfair to complain about the predictability of Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Is it the filmmaker’s fault that the trailer prominently includes the climactic showdown between revolutionary, super-intelligent apes and police? Probably not. But when the predictability of the narrative is informed by a familiarity with Planet of the Apes or,…
Like the paper flowers that William Blake (Johnny Depp) finds absent natural scent, Dead Man is built on self-conscious artificiality. Jim Jarmusch’s neo-Western is as influenced by woodcut animation or a matinee performance of a silent-movie serial; where Sergio Leone’s post-modern approach the Western exaggerated the cinematic tropes of the genre, Jarmusch filters those conventions…
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