The Nobel Prize winning Diary of a Bad Year is a structurally unique piece of reflexivity, presented as three distinct texts combined on each page: the first, a piece of left-wing political commentary true to the Howard/Bush/Guantanamo Bay era; the second, the inner thoughts of the author of that commentary, “Señor C” (a barely-disguised analogue…
Denis Villeneuve’s collaboration with Jake Gyllenhaal has produced two films thus far: last year’s preposterously-plotted yet consistently engaging thriller, Prisoners, and now, Enemy. There aren’t a great many similarities between the two films; the former was literal and methodical while the latter is elliptical and abstract. Prisoners solidly held to genre conventions while Enemy takes…
Fritz Lang’s tale of a community torn apart and then united by the threat of a child murderer has a lot to say about power in civilisation. The contrast between the police investigation – driven by increasingly draconian measures – and the criminal underworld’s approach to these tragedies demonstrates powerfully how the polite notion of…
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes rejects the modern blockbuster’s inclination towards weightlessness; for a film about super-intelligent monkeys, this is a surprisingly heavy picture. While its predecessor, Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Rupert Wyatt, 2011), half-heartedly feinted at social resonance before shrugging and descending into frivolity, Dawn unapologetically bears the burden…
Is there anything more reliable in cinema than the crime drama? We have our middle-aged, grizzled police officer. He chain-smokes, drinks heavily, and seems to send his shirts to be custom-ruffled daily. He doesn’t get along with people – he’s taciturn, gruff, and so forth – but, dammit, he gets results. You will be shocked…
If you pitched Next Goal Wins as a fictional film, you’d be laughed out of the office. This soccer documentary reproduces every cliché of inspirational sports films like The Mighty Ducks or Cool Runnings. The lowest-ranked soccer team in the world, American Samoa, who infamously lost 31-0 to the Socceroos in 2001, fill out the…
The Lunchbox marketing promises a kind of Indian take on Sleepless in Seattle, where two strangers – through the vagaries of chance and India’s carefully-orchestrated, but not flawless, lunchbox distribution system – begin a correspondence and fall in love before they ever meet. You know, the kind of frothy, featherweight romantic comedy that makes the…
Someday World is the child of two parents: two musicians, Brian Eno and Karl Hyde, who would each likely appear in my own personal top ten favourite musicians. It’s pointless to try to summarise the breadth of Eno’s inimitable musical career within the confines of a mere music review; suffice to say he contributes his…
Austrian creature-feature The Station (titled Blood Glacier elsewhere, which, awesome) tries to emulate the classics of the genre. Its first half is John Carpenter’s The Thing with a dash of Alien, as scientists investigating a remote glacier discover a blood-like substance that infects and transforms anything it comes into contact with into a bloodthirsty mutant,…
It’s possibly unfair to complain about the predictability of Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Is it the filmmaker’s fault that the trailer prominently includes the climactic showdown between revolutionary, super-intelligent apes and police? Probably not. But when the predictability of the narrative is informed by a familiarity with Planet of the Apes or,…
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