I had a melodramatic couple of days at the Brisbane Asia Pacific Film Festival. Starting with Michael Rowe’s Canadian/Australian drama Early Winter, through Simon Stone’s The Daughter and concluding with a retrospective screening of Mikio Naruse’s classic Floating Clouds, my weekend was dominated by the infidelities and dark secrets that define the much-maligned genre of…
Argentinian film The Secret in Their Eyes has been idling sloshing around my watchlist for a couple years now, buoyed by strong word of mouth and an Oscar win for Best Foreign Language Film. But I decided to hold off after hearing of the impending American remake starring the likes of Julia Roberts, Chiwetel Ejiofor…
Successful speculative fiction is essentially sociology. It’s grounded not in the details of the alternate reality it concocts, but in investigating how societies and individuals would react to different structures and opportunities. The best speculative fiction isn’t inspired by spaceships or wizardry; rather, it’s impelled by an overriding interest in human nature – a considered,…
We often see the dehumanising effects of war observed in film; the loss of one’s innocence through unimaginable and uncharacteristic actions or events. However, in such settings, rarely is this gaze cast upon the most intrinsic form of innocence – childhood. Beasts of No Nation follows the transformation – or corruption, rather – of young Agu…
As a portrait of David Foster Wallace, The End of the Tour is mostly a failure. Along with Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg), we follow Wallace’s 1996 promotion tour for Infinite Jest, but we learn less about him from the film than we could divine from reading his justly-celebrated novels and essays. Jason…
Mistress America is Noah Baumbach’s second feature for 2015, and by far the strongest. His first effort, While We’re Young, parlayed an unconvincing generational-gap comedy into a weirdly-shoehorned meditation on authenticity in documentaries; Mistress America, thankfully, proves to be both a funnier comedy and a more insightful analysis of the blurred line between artificiality and…
In 1962, Bronx lawyer and ex-Navy officer James B. Donovan negotiated a tense prisoner transfer between the United States of America, the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic. The negotiation required Donovan to enter East Germany at the behest of his country, but without any official recognition from America. Rather, Donovan was operating on…
I’ve never been much for antiques. By and large, that’s a reflection of budgetary issues – the furniture I own is nearly all cheap-as-chips or hand-me-downs – but I’ve just never really been invested in the aestheticisation of aging and decay that seems to drive aficionados of antiques. Guillermo del Toro, though, seems like a…
Last week saw the Australian release of Justin Kurzel’s Macbeth adaptation, which Jonathan awarded 4 stars in his review. As part of my series of “cheat sheets” on films taught in secondary schools, unpacking their themes and detailing related texts, I examined Kurzel’s film for SBS Movies. Check it out via the link below! Read Macbeth: Cheat Sheet at SBSMovies.
It’s pretty hard to go about making a film about Whitey Bulger, because how do you make it not like every other sub-Scorsese, heated-up-bullshit gangster movie? All the basic elements of the Whitey Bulger story – corrupt feds, brother on the other side of the law, paranoiac crime lord – are well-worn clichés in the…
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