Image via miff.com.au
Climax is a drug-infused, sweaty and self-indulgent nightmare. It immerses you in a single night with a bunch of unlikable dancers as bad things happen to them. Continue reading
Climax (2018)
StandardTag Archives: 3 stars
Mary Shelley (2017)
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Image via http://www.irishtimes.com
This serviceable dramatisation of the life of author Mary Shelley (Elle Fanning) satisfies as much as it disappoints. Feeling a bit like a made-for-TV movie, director Haifaa al-Mansour (Wadjda) paints by numbers, giving us a long succession of plot points with a good dose of high emotion but little drama. Continue reading
Jirga (2018)
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Image via miff.com.au
This unusual and well-meaning Australian film by Ben Gilmour follows an ex-soldier as he attempts to contact the widow and children of a civilian he killed in Kandahar, Afghanistan, whilst on deployment. Continue reading
VR: On the Road (Short) (2018)
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Image via miff.com.au
This short South Korean virtual reality film mixes static and moving imagery to evoke words sent from a man to a woman as he revisit the places they went to together. Like a poem, we sense the emptiness of the spaces without her, the monochrome of lost punctuated by the saturated colour of memory. Continue reading
VR: Parragirls Past, Present: Unlocking Memories of Institutional ‘Care’ (Short) (2017)
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Image via miff.com.au
Virtual Reality at its best immerses you in a human experience in a way that cinema can’t. Parragirls Past, Present floats you slowly through a mostly ghost-like recreation of the Parramatta Girls’ Home while former inmates – survivors – recount their stories. Continue reading
Museum (Museo) (2018)
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Image via miff.com.au
Usually, you going to a heist movie expecting tension, action and a black-and-white resolution – capture or escape. Don’t expect this from Alonso Ruizpalacios’s Museum, loosely based on the real life theft of Mayan antiquities from the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City in the 1980s. Continue reading
[Censored] (2018)
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Image via miff.com.au
Sari Braithwaite’s hour long introspective documentary built from clips cut out of films by the Australian Censor Board goes some way to exploring the notion of censorship. Continue reading
Mug (Twarz) (2018)
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Image via miff.com.au
Not as blackly comedic as I was expecting, more bleakly tragic, Malgorzata Szumowska’s Mug doesn’t hide its overt criticism of the hypocrisy of religious complacency, as shown by the narrowmindedness of the people of a rural Polish town. Continue reading
Upgrade
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Image via deluxevideoonline.org
Upgrade is a slick and serviceable sci-fi that retreads the oft-used Frankenstein trope in a near future, with Melbourne convincingly masquerading as a futuristic USA. Continue reading
Lost in Paris (Paris Pieds Nus) (2016)
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Image via http://www.mfah.org
Jacques Tati lives on in this featherlight slapstick farce from duo Fiona Gordon and Dominic Abel. Continue reading
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