I only managed seven films last month, nearly all DVDs of recent or last-year releases. I’m not convinced November will prove much better, but here’s what I’m aiming for, a potpourri of intriguing movies: Mao’s Last Dancer – the trailers fill me with dread but the book was so evocative, I have no choice Cold Souls [...]
The older get, the less I like kids’ animation, especially the ones not-so-subtly tagged as ‘for children but there’s plenty here for adults.’ Yes, I liked Toy Story when my offspring were at the age to revel in it, but hey, aren’t the franchise sequels just the pits? Sorry to rant but the point of [...]
The trailer for Doubt, directed by John Patrick Shanley(who also wrote the screenplay and the original play, winner of a Pulitzer Prize), does the film an injustice, splicing out strangely incongruent bits that make the two protagonists, Father Flynn and Sister Aloysius Beauvier, to be overwrought, overacted. Overacted this certainly isn’t. Merryl Streep restores herself in [...]
Some beguiling releases, accorded good reviews by Salon and The New Yorker: The Invention of Lying with Ricky Gervais I’m hooked on Steven Soderbergh, even if he sometimes overreaches, so I’ll put up with Matt Damon in The Informant As for the Coen brothers, I find them hit and miss, but Burn After Reading was [...]
After the glories of the Melbourne International Film Festival, cinematic bleakness arrives in Melbourne. Only the first three are movies in the cinemas, the others are DVDs, mostly films that stayed in Melbourne cinemas for too short a time. Mao’s Last Dancer – much hoopla but the book was so good that the movie is [...]
I’m amazed by how many people deride the documentary, equating it with countless dull television features. Yet the modern documentary – I use that label because this feels like a relatively recent development – can be as gripping and revelatory as the best ‘regular’ film. Such documentaries use all the structural, narrative and characterization arts [...]
Salon not only offers the wonderful Beyond the Multiplex but regular movie critic Stephanie Zacharek offers excellent reviews as well. Two recent (well, not so recent at all) reviews have plonked these movies onto my list: Cold Souls (it will reach Melbourne in November) and Extract (we may never see it on our shores).
In the Loop is a glorious satire on the British decision to join America in invading Iraq. Director Armando Iannucci’ssavage take is that the big step was nothing more than the outcome of ferocious jockeying between politicians and bureaucrats on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The film’s standout performance is by Peter Capaldi, playing [...]
Also posted in Vietnam Redux |
Fearless Russian journalist Anna Politskovskaya was murdered just outside her apartment in October 2006 (we see footage of the hooded killer), one of a number of Putin era critics and investigators (she sneaked into Chechnya a number of times to pursue damning stories) to have been killed. I knew quite a bit about her before [...]
Also posted in Genocide |
I dreaded seeing The Hurt Locker, a movie about an American bomb disposal squad in post-invasion Iraq, simply because the subject of Iraq stirs up in me tremendous anger and guilt. And my dread is mostly justified. This is a dark, dark film, offering little in the way of redemption. Following a month in the [...]
Also posted in Vietnam Redux |