Opening this year’s New Zealand International Film Festival and now making its way to Australia, The Dark Horse elevates its familiar storyline through specificity and authenticity. It tells the story of Genesis “Dark Horse” Potini (played by Kiwi character actor Cliff Curtis), an erstwhile speed chess player who now exhibits erratic behaviour fuelled by his…
The phrase “starred up” is British slang, referring to the transfer of a juvenile offender to adult incarceration. In David Mackenzie’s Starred Up the offender in question is Eric (Jack O’Connell). We enter the prison with Eric, watching him as he is strip-searched, as he constructs a makeshift shiv, as he unleashes savage violence on…
From a consumer point-of-view, I’m always a little sceptical of staggered releases of television/anime series, where one season is broken up into two (or more) physical releases; on the surface, it seems like straight-up profiteering. But just as the The Deathly Hallows and many of its cinematic antecdents turned their bifurcated releases into artistic strength,…
Let’s make a mainstream comedy with a pair of intensely unlikable characters with a pathological fixation on power; a failed footballer who tackles children (Jake Johnson) and a games designer who’s upset that he doesn’t run the place (Damon Wayans Jr). Let’s allow them to indulge their power trip by impersonating police officers, because that…
Describing Locke as a one-man show is misleading; yes, Tom Hardy as titular protagonist Ivan Locke is the only actor on screen throughout, but this is not some experimental, Manakamana-esque piece of cinéma vérité where we stare into Hardy’s handsome visage for ninety wordless minutes as he drives from point A to point B. Instead,…
I assume that the melodramatic machinations of Miss Julie played like gangbusters in 1890s Sweden, but a century later it all rings pretty false. Bergman acolyte Liv Ullmann sneaks in a reference to Cries and Whispers in the opening flashback and executes an excellent final shot, but otherwise can’t overcome the inherent staginess of the…
Biopics are a much maligned category of film … with good reason. Despite the preponderance of such films – only, ultimately, connected by being about ‘someone dead and famous’ – there are surprisingly few great biographical films. There are a lot of ‘entirely fine’ ones, but I can only think of handful that could be…
Lilting is a sensory experience. Describing a film in this way typically refers to the two expected senses: sight and sound. Hong Khaou’s debut feature film evokes scent; given all the references to smell, I don’t think it’s accidental. It has the delicate odour of clean skin, that sickly sweet smell of warm milk. The…
Where T.S. Eliot found fear in a handful of dust, Christopher Nolan finds it in huge clouds of the stuff. Dust storms are consuming America’s failing agrarian communities decades from now. Blight ravages the planet’s few remaining crops as that dust brings illness and despair. This is a pre-apocalyptic world, a wasteland upon which mankind…
The generations that lived through the ‘Great War’ are, by-and-large, no more, and the stories told about the war begin to become just that, blurring the line between fact and fiction as the war moves from lived experience to history. Testament of Youth is adapted from a testament itself: Vera Brittain’s memoirs of World War…
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