You could probably make an argument that Fear and Desire, Stanley Kubrick’s debut feature film (later described by the man himself as “amateurish”), is some kind of lost masterpiece. The argument would likely involve cherry-picking the film’s rudimentary anti-war themes and include a lot of stills. Unfortunately, when you actually watch the damn thing –…
Margin Call seems like the perfect post-Wolf of Wall Street palate cleanser. Scorsese’s film wielded kinetic entertainment as provocation, presenting the unlimited excess of the American dream before turning the camera on the audience and insisting on their culpability. Margin Call isn’t on the same level, trading absurd hedonism for dry didacticism on the verge…
When you turn up to your local multiplex and fork out for a bucket of popcorn and a couple of tickets to Hercules, you’re not going in expecting a cinematic masterpiece. This is, after all, a film about Greek demi-god Hercules with The Rock – sorry, he goes by Dwayne Johnson now – in the…
Once My Mother isn’t necessarily an exemplar of expert filmmaking. Chronicling the life of director Sophia Turkiewicz’s mother, Helen, who travelled the perilous journey from war-torn Poland through a Siberian gulag and Zimbabwean refugee camp before arriving in Australia, some formal failings are understandable: Turkiewicz filmed the bulk of the documentary with no funding, meaning…
Xavier Dolan’s first two features seem like they needed to be made by a young director. I Killed My Mother and Heartbeats each feature Dolan as lead actor; the former examining his character’s tense relationship with his mother, the latter instead positioning him at the vertex of a similarly tense love triangle. I doubt an…
Princess Mononoke’s recent release on Blu-Ray provided me an opportunity to truly appreciate the gorgeous animation of Miyazaki’s seventh feature-length film. My previous viewings of the film had been low-quality (pirated) versions – in fact, I can distinctly recall watching the film at a friend’s place on a burnt DVD when, halfway through, the disc…
A great “video nasty” breaches the boundaries of good taste, finding something uncomfortably real behind them. Many video nasties lose their impact over time as censorship slackens, but that’s not the case with Maniac. This is thanks to Joe Spinell’s sweaty anti-charisma as the titular maniac, Frank Zito, combined with Tom Savini’s legendary makeup work (he’s…
Within Charlie’s (David Gulpilil’s) sorrowful gaze is an encapsulation of a people denied the land and culture that is theirs. The discourse around this denial and its ramifications is generally driven by white people under the assumption that Indigenous Australians are a problem to be solved. The draconian “intervention” is the largest example of this ideology…
It’s pretty easy to disparage Sex Tape, the second film in a year to feature product placement from Apple and YouPorn (the first? Don Jon). Its entire premise – a married couple (Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel) find themselves frantically hunting down stray iPads after their sex tape is inadvertently shared with friends and family…
Paris is Burning is a document of the New York drag ball subculture of the eighties, providing a precise record of the intricate minutiae that came to define these LGBTIQ gatherings: the language, the fashion, the behaviour –in such fascinating detail that it remains a cultural touchstone. Sub-cultures create meaning through specificity. You say this…
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