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…
Intellectually and artistically, Tehran Taxi is intimidatingly dense. The third in a very loose trilogy from Jahar Panahi – following the Iranian director’s twenty-year ban from filmmaking in 2010 – we spend the entirety of the film in Panahi’s taxi, observing his passenger’s conversations about cinema, censorship and justice through a handful of digital cameras…
If you’re looking for an action-packed, entertaining blockbuster, you won’t find it in the final Hunger Games instalment. The atmosphere here is dour and soaked in dread; fitting, really, given we’re observing the final days of a bloody revolution. Constricted by the expectations of her role as an icon – much like the actress playing…
Ramin Bahrani might make fictional films, but his work draws so deeply from real life that they often feel like fact. That’s not an accident. Rather, it’s a reflection of the time and effort the Iranian-American director spends researching his projects. His 2005 breakout indie film Man Push Cart came from two years spent researching…
The Brisbane Asia Pacific Film Festival (BAPFF) hits Brisbane tomorrow night, and any self-respecting cinephile has plenty to look forward to at the sophomore appearance of Brisbane’s annual, Asia-Pacific-centric replacement for the dearly departed BIFF. We’ll be covering the festival over the next two weeks – and you can expect to see more coverage from…
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…
It’s easy, and not entirely inaccurate, to regard Knight of Cups as the apotheosis of “Malickian.” Terrence Malick’s latest film, centring on the idle thoughts and innumerable conquests of Christian Bale’s Hollywood A-lister (think Coppola’s Somewhere – Los Angeles as purgatory), has all the easily-parodied tropes that have come to define the director’s work. The…
If you’ve paid any attention at all to Daniel Craig’s press tour for the new James Bond film, Spectre, you’d be aware that Craig is pretty well disenchanted with 007. Maybe “really fucking over it” is a better description. He’s described Bond as a “misogynist”, noting that “a lot of women are drawn to him…
Two-time Palme d’Or winner Bille August’s latest, Silent Heart, addresses the controversial topic of euthanasia in this tale of a family coming together to farewell their grandmother, Esther (Ghita Nørby), planning to overdose on pills before she is rendered immobile by a degenerative disease. August seems strongly influenced by Fanny and Alexander – in particular,…
Thanks to Icon Film Distribution, ccpopculture has 5 double passes to give away to Absolutely Anything, releasing in Australian cinemas Thursday November 19th. “It’s comedy magic when Simon Pegg teams up with the voices of the Monty Python team to remind us to be careful what you wish for in Absolutely Anything. Unbeknownst to school teacher Neil Clarke…
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