At first glance, Sebastián Silva’s Nasty Baby appears to slot neatly into the Noah Baumbach/Lena Dunham school of New York indie. You know the type. Loose, naturalistic dramas about trendy people in a trendy city, leavened with a hint of comedy before drifting towards Serious Issues that aren’t taken all that seriously. For most of…
Unlike most critics, I take no joy in composing scathing reviews. I love films – even the shitty ones – so it pains me to cut one down to size. Even if it deserves it. (This might explain why I’ve yet to see Aloha.) I feel especially bad about writing a negative review of this…
Unlocking the Truth are a metal band composed of African-American teenagers – and I’m talking, like, their-voices-haven’t-broken-yet-teenagers – from Brooklyn. After a YouTube video of the group busking at Times Square went viral, they scored a $1.8 million record deal and performed at Coachella. In most documentaries, that would be the story. Check out these…
I walked into Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead not knowing much about National Lampoon beyond seeing their name displayed above films like Animal Farm, Vacation and, uh, Loaded Weapon 1. I left the documentary with newfound respect and admiration for a seminal comedy institution: a magazine (and, eventually, radio shows, movies et al) that’s the clear…
Maybe I’m not the audience for Entourage. I’ve seen very little of the show – snippets here and there of the later seasons that my wife forced herself to sit through, presumably out of completist compulsion. So I had no sense of good will towards movie star Vince (Adrian Grenier), his agent Ari Gold (Jeremy…
The word ‘naturalistic’ has very particular connotations when used to describe cinema. Handheld camera, loose compositions, deliberately-muddled foley; that sort of thing. However May in the Summer’s naturalism bears none of these characteristics. When May (Cherien Dabas, writer and director besides) returns to her home country of Jordan shortly before her wedding, the conversations she…
As the second instalment in my series of “cheat sheets” on films taught in secondary schools for SBS Movies, I took a look at Rabbit-Proof Fence, a powerful film centring on the plight of Australia’s stolen generations. It’s also paired with a free stream of the feature film (for now, anyway) for Australian audiences, while…
The community at the centre of Ariel Kleiman’s Partisan is introduced with rare restraint and precision. After a short prologue, we are deposited into a secluded society, buried within sheltering slabs of through which thin rays of sunlight shine. The society (described in most reviews as a ‘cult’, though I’d argue that’s an overly simplistic…
I must confess I know essentially nothing about Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. What I do know is gleaned pretty much entirely from this film, in which elderly baker Martin (Fabrice Luchini) becomes convinced that his new neighbour, Gemma (Gemma Arterton), is reliving Madame Bovary’s tragic character arc (specifically: sleeping with some dudes and then committing…
Two and a half months ago, Terry Pratchett passed away. I didn’t say, or write much about it at the time. It felt wrong to expound upon my feelings about the man. Despite the fact that he’s my favourite author. Despite the fact that my bookshelves are still laden with his books (and associated Discworld…
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