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…
The Salvation reminded me of Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns. Not, I should hasten to add, because it approaches the mastery of Leone’s films, but rather in the way a foreign filmmaker (director Kristian Levring is Danish) approaches an acutely American genre from a unique perspective. There are some Leone similarities in how Levring’s screenplay (co-written…
Mad Max: Fury Road isn’t going to change your life. It’s probably not necessary to clarify that, but I thought it was worth noting in the wake of the torrent of #MadMadFuryRoad hype and hyperbole that has consumed Twitter regarding George Miller’s long-(long)-awaited follow-up to his original Mad Max trilogy. Believe the hype, but don’t…
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