Tastes range across all genres. Not a hater - but people who chat, text, eat loudly during a film push me very close.
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Bram Stoker's Dracula 1992
I was not all that impressed when this film was first released in Australia as it seemed out of whack with Francis Ford Coppola’s earlier filmography. My film journal notes recorded that the characters seemed to sink under the weight of the storytelling and that Coppola’s decision to separate himself from earlier film versions left him stranded in a weird no man’s land - neither literary adaptation nor horror movie (not even psychological horror).
Rewatching it all these years later,…
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Stranded 2015
I need to declare up front that I find it impossible to maintain any kind of critical distance from this documentary, directed by Serge Ou (with a segment director credit for Andy Neil) for Wildbear Entertainment, the ABC and Film Queensland. This is the footage and the soundtrack of my 20s and it was a joy to spend a little over an hour seeing dozens of people I knew well 40 to 50 years ago, bands that were part of…
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The Order of Time 2023
Writer/director Lilliana Cavani made one great movie, The Night Porter in 1974 and one very good movie, Ripley’s Game in 2002, so I will always be up for seeing a new Cavani film. She co-wrote the screenplay with Paolo Costella and theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, inspired by Rovelli’s 2017 book of the same name about quantum gravity research and time in physics.
In a seaside villa, a group of ten old friends gather for the annual birthday celebration for Elsa (Claudia Gerini),…
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Lonesome 2022
***Spoilers, flagged in the text, to discuss the film’s ending***
This week’s Friday Queer Movie, the latest film from writer/director Craig Boreham, is consistent with other films of his that I have seen: a talented cast of leads and supporting actors, good cinematography and editing (in this case by Dean Francis and Danielle Boesenberg) but an underwritten screenplay that leaves its gay characters floundering in places.The film begins with farm-boy Casey (Josh Lavery) hitchhiking out of his rural hometown…
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It Must Be Heaven 2019
There was a point about a third of the way through writer/director Elia Suleiman's absurdist comedy that I realised that hidden just under the surface of the very funny screenplay was a diamond-hard political edge.
Suleiman, playing himself, opens his film in Palestine then travels to Paris and New York trying to get producers to put up the money for his latest film. He runs into Western stereotypes of what a Palestinian is and what a Palestinian film must be.…
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The Trouble with Being Born 2020
Thanks to a sensible approach by Australia’s Classification Board which rated the film R18+ (restricted to 18 and over), we are now able to see Sandra Wollner’s film which was pulled from the Melbourne International Film Festival virtual program after two forensic psychologists contacted by Karl Quinn, the film critic at The Age, condemned the film as “a source of arousal for men interested in child abuse material” in one case and constituting “child abuse material” in the other. The…
