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Can Taika Waititi please direct every Marvel/DC film? Then I might be tempted to watch them. Not my favourite genre, New Zealand director Waititi (Hunt for the Wilderpeople, What We Do in the Shadows, Boy) for the most part refuses to take his job too seriously and peppers the script with largely improvised and genuinely funny dialogue. Continue reading
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The way to make a sequel, and big budget movie, is to give the directing job to a non-American it seems. French-Canadian, Denis Villeneuve, who directed the superb Arrival and Incendies, takes a fair stab at this one and manages to equal the original in mood, visual impact, leisurely pace and partially clothed women. Continue reading
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A fitting film to review during White Ribbon Week, Hotel Coolgardie is a low budget but beautifully realised documentary about the brutal and misogynistic culture that proudly exists in outback Australian mining towns. Continue reading
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Wow! Where has this film been hiding? Thanks goodness for ACMI that keeps showing these unlooked for and unheralded gems. The advertising for this Mexican horror/drama almost put me off; “Sexual desire, social realism and the uncanny converge in this provocative genre splice.” It could’ve been a Neon Demon – and you can click on the link to see how much I loved that ‘genre-splicing, misogyny-satirising’ movie. Happily The Untamed is nothing like it and I loved its deadpan and excoriating look at heteronormative oppression, wound through with a profoundly meaningful and metaphorical motif of horror. Continue reading
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There’s something lovely about this dark comedy, although it’s almost unbearable sometimes to watch the sad and dangerous trajectory of hapless Ingrid Thorburn (Aubrey Plaza). Continue reading
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This tense and dirty crime drama by the Safdie brothers hooked me in with its relentless pace, fluoro grubbiness and the first frame of an unrecognisable and mesmerising Robert Pattinson. Continue reading
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This slightly oddball, feel good film is formulaic in many ways but with idiosyncratic styling that lends it an off-kilter, other-worldliness. Beginning with a fairy tale realism, we see Bella Brown (Jessica Brown Findlay) abandoned as a baby in a park. Watched over by ducks until she is found, she grows up without a family and with a fear and loathing of nature. Continue reading
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The second feature from Iranian director Ida Panahandeh, Israfil is a quiet exploration of the repercussions of the cultural oppression dealt with much more histrionically in Leila. Unlike Leila, where the thoughts of the protagonists were spelt out to us, Panahandeh lets us watch and feel and imagine. Continue reading
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Cultural oppression is a battering ram that destroys everything in its path. There are those who help wield it and those who throw their hands up in protest but do nothing. So it is with the lives of Leila (Leila Hatami) and Reza (Ali Mosaffa). Married because of family expectation but finding love and companionship, their problems begin when Leila finds she can’t have children. Continue reading
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Introduced by the director of the Iranian Film Festival Australia (IFFA) as a rare example of an Iranian action film, I expected a touch of Hollywood and a breakneck pace but Negar was much more. Better described as a subdued psychological thriller, Negar weaves a fragmented but compelling story as the eponymous heroine struggles to understand her father’s apparent suicide. Continue reading
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