“Truth is like poetry. And most people fucking hate poetry.” The above quote appears roughly midway through The Big Short, Adam McKay’s star-studded, irreverent take on 2008’s global financial crisis. It’s an effective encapsulation of a film that operates as the rare piece of ‘edutainment’ that’s both legitimately educational and entertaining while providing a self-reflexive…
By any ‘objective’ measure, People Places Things has a terrible screenplay. It’s a romantic comedy almost completely bereft of comedy. It centres its entire first act on the challenges of being a single father – with cartoonist/teacher Will (Jemaine Clement) frantically dashing his twin daughters between work and home and school – before jettisoning any…
Experimenter has a fascinating premise, but loses its way by focusing on the wrong subject. It opens on Stanley Milgram’s now-famous obedience experiments, wherein an unknowing subject provides near-fatal electrocutions to an innocent man who they believe to be failing a multiple-choice questionnaire – or at least, they’re led to believe that’s what they’re doing.…
Eden feels kinda pointless. Maybe that’s the point. Following an aspiring garage DJ, Paul (Félix de Givry), a slender surrogate for director Mia Hansen-Løve’s brother and co-writer Sven, the film’s first half largely eschews the typical party aesthetics – the neon-streaked dancefloor, the incandescent beaches – for overcast streets and rumpled apartments, like something out…
If Iranian cinema has a home, it’s the automobile. Like Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry and Ten, Jafar Panahi’s Tehran Taxi, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s Tales, Ali Ahmadzade’s Atomic Heart is a road movie without any particular destination in mind, drifting idly through Tehran’s twilight streets, through conversations about atomic mothers and dormant dictators. But where those…
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…
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…
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,…
This is a flashback on history that for me was unfamiliar and enlightening. In 1986 the riots between the Protestant and Catholic Church were becoming a regular backdrop to everyday life. Simultaneously, Northern Ireland qualified for the World Cup for the third time, travelling to Mexico to compete against the best in the world. Shooting…
Results is a conscious step towards the mainstream for director Andrew Bujalski, who cut his teeth on indie “mumblecore” features like Funny Ha Ha before wowing critics [who are not me] with 2013’s eccentric, experimental Computer Chess. This is decidedly more conventional fare – with recognisable actors (Guy Pearce, Cobie Smulders, Kevin Corrigan) in a…
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