I have no personal experience of sadomasochism, but if its pop-culture depictions are anything to go by, the one constant – aside from whips, chains and leather – is stilted role-play. For example, My Mistress – the debut feature of Brisbane director Stephen Lance – has us observe dominatrix Maggie (Emmanuelle Béart) leading an unnamed…
What defines the iconic horror villain? There are a few superficial commonalities to be found among the usual suspects: they’re almost invariably men, sometimes bald, always terrifying in their relentless opacity. If these are the criteria, then surely Terence Fletcher, as embodied by J.K. Simmons, qualifies. Fletcher is the conductor of the fictional Shaffer Music…
November last year introduced the inaugural British Film Festival, a breath of fresh air in an increasingly stale slate of nation-centric film festivals. It’s not that I don’t have a lot of respect for local festivals like the Italian, Israeli, French etc festivals – I only saw one of my favourite films of the year…
The New Pornographers are one of those bands that I’ve always felt vaguely guilty for not liking. The problem wasn’t that I had some deep-seated hatred for the group that I was unable to express, but rather that the group’s impressive reputation and pedigree never translated into great music for me. Sure, Twin Cinema is…
I remain impressed – and a little perplexed – by filmmakers who choose to title their productions with nothing more than a person’s name. It’s not like there isn’t a storied history of such films doing well – Ben Hur, anyone? – but it strikes me as requiring some serious self-belief to throw a film…
A dark rider atop a white horse, a figure of nobility, mounts the horizon over an endless expanse of rutted mud. The horse trots into a landscape of wreckage and the rider – a Nazi officer, we now see – is knocked from his steed by a hitherto unseen assailant. The officer’s fate is swift…
I’m a total sucker for films exploiting the amnesia trope, as hackneyed as it is (if it’s good enough for The Bold and the Beautiful, it’s good enough for me!). There’s something immediately engaging in the character and audience sharing the same predicament: not knowing the specifics of the events that preceded the film’s beginning,…
Shadow of the Vampire is a film of many genres. These include… …a historical revisionist re-telling of the filming of F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, with John Malkovich playing “Herr Doktor” Murnau; Eddie Izzard playing Gustav von Wangenheim who plays Thomas Hutter; and Willem Dafoe playing a vampire who takes on the role of Max Schreck…
A Long Way Down begins with a potentially promising premise before it falls, well, you know, <gestures vaguely towards title>. For a film that opens with a suicidal quartet meeting atop a London skyscraper on New Year’s Eve, it demonstrates little actual interest in examining suicide, despites its half-hearted feints at undergraduate psychology. Instead A…
Canadian director and co-writer of Siddharth, Richie Mehta, was inspired by his own encounter with a man on the streets of India looking for his lost son. His film poses the same questions Mehta must have had after this encounter. “What happened to the boy?” And, perhaps as importantly, “How could a father know so…
ccpopculture 