I was ten years old when I produced my first piece of propaganda. The homeroom of my school was named after ex-student and Victoria Cross recipient Robert Grieve. We were dutifully informed of the heroism Captain Grieve demonstrated in defence of our nation, bombing and killing two gun crews in the First World War and…
Tokyo Tribe practically demands hyperbolic metaphors, but the best way to describe Sion Sono’s maximalist rap musical is offered up by the extreme auteur himself in the film’s opening scene. Sono’s camera swoops and bucks through neon-streaked Tokyo streets in an impressive long shot, surveying scantily-clad ladies, raving doomsayers, overweening gangsters and a wizened old…
Writing about TV on the Radio’s Nine Types of Light in 2011 – after it topped my albums of the year poll, I wrote: “I loved Dear Science, which was like the last half of a great house party, funky and fun but kinda morose at the same time. Nine Types of Light feels like…
The last time I wrote about the Brisbane Asia Pacific Film Festival, my attitude was one of scepticism. And, I’ll concede, a modicum of bitterness. You see, the birth of BAPFF meant the death of BIFF (the Brisbane International Film Festival), the latter cut down in its prime (at twenty-one years old!) to pave…
Let me introduce you to Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal). Who is Lou Bloom? Well, in his own words, he’s a hard worker. He sets high goals and he’s been told that he’s persistent. He’s looking for a job, and now he’s thinking that television news might be something that he could love as well as…
The funeral is a fertile ground for familial drama in the cinema. It’s easy to see why, what with the reunion of family members long separated by distance and/or estrangement born of malignant buried secrets unearthing those secrets in the heightened emotionality necessarily produced by grief and nostalgia. There are countless films in the ‘genre’…
The Troubles (the violent Northern Ireland conflict between Catholics and Protestants) are defined by a moral and political complexity that’s difficult to successfully convey on film. Many of the movies that have succeeded in portraying the era – In the Name of the Father, The Outsider, Good Vibrations – avoid the problems of presenting either…
Biopics are a much maligned category of film … with good reason. Despite the preponderance of such films – only, ultimately, connected by being about ‘someone dead and famous’ – there are surprisingly few great biographical films. There are a lot of ‘entirely fine’ ones, but I can only think of handful that could be…
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…
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…
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