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C’est La Vie! is a wry and heartwarming French comedy about love, napkin twirling and the frustrations you feel when nothing goes quite as planned. Continue reading
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Margot Robbie does a smashing job (no pun intended) at portraying the much maligned US Olympic figure skater Tonya Harding in this quirky, openly contradictory telling of her story. Continue reading
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Amelie meets Dark City in this darkly whimsical fairy tale by Guillermo del Toro. Fairy tales are often equal parts sentimentality and tragedy and The Shape of Water weaves a long dance around these two elements. Continue reading
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There’s lots to love about this film from Martin McDonagh, primarily the remarkable performance of Frances McDormand as Mildred Hayes. Mildred’s daughter was murdered ten months before and, frustrated at the police’s inability to find the perpetrator, she uses three billboards on a quiet road to stir up action. Continue reading
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Based on the graphic novel ‘The Coldest City’, this Cold War action thriller is engaging and entertaining and only occasionally lacks pace and plausibility. Charlize Theron is Lorraine Broughton, the atomic blonde of the title with a shock of white hair and the epitome of sangfroid. She’s an MI6 agent and is sent to Berlin to investigate the assassination of fellow agent and former lover James Gascoigne (Sam Hargrave). Continue reading
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Like Hotel Coolgardie, this is a documentary that positions us as silent viewers, watching everyday life unfold around us. In School Life, there is no context nor narration, we are dropped straight into a day at Headfort School, a boarding school for primary kids in Kells, Ireland. Continue reading
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I was completely charmed by this family comedy at the Japanese Film Festival. Yukio (Riku Ohnishi) must write an essay for a school contest about an adult in his family. His parents are too unexceptional so he chooses his infantile loafer of an uncle (Ryûhei Matsuda). Continue reading
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A slow burn of a film, A Double Life at first seems to be about the vagaries of a young girl, trying to find meaning in her life. Inspired by the work of French artist Sophie Calle, True Stories, it becomes instead a thoughtful and moving exploration of privacy, connection and compromise. Continue reading
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My first Japanese Film Festival outing for this year, I stepped in to a multi-coloured tangled web of a tale about disaffected youth in rural Japan. Ai (a radiant Sairi Itô) is rejected by her mother and shipped off to a religious commune. Finding a sense of belonging there as Ananda, her peaceful world is upended when cult leader Levi (Matthew Chozick) is arrested. Continue reading
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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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