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Who makes the best action hero, Lara Croft (Angelina Jolie) in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) or Alice (Mila Jovovich) in Resident Evil (2002)? Made a year apart and both based on female protagonists in popular video games, this week we watched both for some vicarious bad-ass women thrills. Continue reading
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I wasn’t expecting much from this live action musical remake of the 1991 animation and, at 2.5 hours long, I was thinking I might get a bit of shut eye. Surprisingly I stayed awake for the whole thing and I didn’t hate it. Continue reading
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The delightful, tiny film Once thrust musicians Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová into the spotlight when they won an Academy Award for Best Original Song in 2008 for Falling Slowly. The Swell Season is the name of the band they formed and toured around the world as well as this quiet and genuine B&W documentary that follows the ups and downs of their personal and professional relationship in the aftermath of their success. Continue reading
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This Melbourne Queer Film Festival screening was my third attempt to see this film; booked at MIFF but sacrificed for tiredness, waiting for half an hour at Cinema Nova yesterday before it was cancelled due to a technical hitch and then rescheduled today. I’m glad I hung in there; it was a beautiful film that pulled me into a world both foreign and familiar. Continue reading
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This is a warm and sensitive adaptation by director Rachel Perkins of Craig Silvey’s excellent Australian novel of the same name. The film aims squarely at a mainstream and younger audience than the book, pulling its punches to just touch on the themes of racism and abuse that are central to the story of Charlie Bucktin’s awakening from childhood innocence in the rural town of Corrigan in the 1960s. Continue reading
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For those born after 1980, Trainspotting was a genre-changing, career-making, 1996 film that made us fall in love all over again with 80s punk music and feel empathy for a group of low-life heroin addicts. The sequel, the rather cutely named T2 Trainspotting, unapologetically replicates the original’s style and shows us what becomes of 20-year-old smack heads as they approach middle age. Continue reading
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It takes a while for this slow and quiet study of a man to hit its stride and to show its colours. We meet Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck) as he goes about his job as a Boston janitor, at the beck and call of people in four apartment buildings. Lee seems shy and awkward but a few scenes show us it is perhaps a simmering anger that keeps him quiet. Interspersed with the monotony of his life, we see scenes of him on a boat with his brother and nephew and it is only gradually that we become aware these are flashbacks. A phone call brings him home to Manchester. His brother has died, leaving him the responsibility of his 16-year-old nephew Patrick. Continue reading
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This is an unexpectedly beautiful and thought-provoking film based on the true story of five-year-old Indian boy, Saroo, who becomes separated from his family. He is lost amongst the millions, one of 80,000 Indian children who go missing every year, and it is a 25 year journey before he has the chance to reconnect with his home. Continue reading
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Lex talionis; this is a judicial term I will not quickly forget. In the Iranian justice system it is the right of a victim to retaliation, to demand that the punishment inflicted correspond in degree and kind to the offence. This was touched on in Sound and Fury, where a victim’s family had the power to forgive or to ask for the death penalty. In Lantouri, retribution and forgiveness are at the core of the story and we get to see it from many viewpoints. Continue reading
