For Conrad Valmont (Jason Bateman) this was apparently the longest and most painful week. For me this was the longest and most painful movie experience. Anyway I have a strong dislike for a voice-over that begins with “This is …” followed by the name of the main character. This is usually already a bad omen….
Dread is palpable throughout Arthur Miller’s drama A View from the Bridge. The Melbourne Theatre Company’s version features seven actors and one old wooden chair but held me transfixed for two hours. The time is the 1950s; and the place an Italian-American neighbourhood near the Brooklyn Bridge in New York. The narrator is Alfieri (Marco…
I don’t read about a play or musical or film before seeing it. The reason: I want the art form to speak for itself. But taking that approach to Laundry Shoot! is problematic because the narrative is far from straight forward. This is what I could make out after seeing the 70-minute play before reading the program….
The patience of Job would be a great asset when setting out to watch this slow moving martial arts film with a young female protagonist. Set in 9th century China (towards the end of the Tang Dynasty), Nie Yinniang (Shu Qi), a general’s daughter, is abducted by a nun who initiates her into the art…
Colossal is one bizarre film, and this low budget effort serves us a weird mash-up of sci-fi, Korean kaiju style monster movie, romantic comedy and domestic drama. Gloria (played by Anne Hathaway) is an insecure and self-destructive alcoholic on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Following her breakup with her increasingly frustrated career-obsessed boyfriend Tim…
Sleeper agents hold a weird fascination. When one is uncovered, the media seem intrigued. But of course the reality of someone playing a “long game” of espionage is often far more prosaic than sensational headlines would suggest. That reality fuels Trevor Nunn’s stagy drama, Red Joan. Lindsay Shapero wrote the original screenplay, basing it loosely…
After a three-year break, David Fincher is back with a very un-Fincher-like film with The Killer. This finely crafted film sees the director subverting just about every convention of the hitman sub-genre in a way I found both inventive and a little perplexing at the same time. Fincher is of course known for the directorial…
Based on a true story, this is a tale of one man’s obsession to build a monument to his beloved daughter. Set in France, the film begins in 1979 and pans some three decades. Joseph Cheval (played by Jacques Gamblin) is a quiet, withdrawn and solitary postman who has just buried his first wife and…
We are in Poland in 1870. Yentl (Amy Hack) is driven by her desire to study … to learn and understand. Her father teaches at the local Yeshiva (a traditional Jewish educational institution focused on the study of Rabbinic literature). Being a girl, she is not allowed to attend the Yeshiva, nor to study the Torah (the…
In 1962 French filmmaker and auteur Francois Truffaut flew to Hollywood and sat down with legendary director Alfred Hitchcock, the “master of suspense”, for a series of extensive interviews. A former film critic for the influential French journal Cahiers du Cinema, Truffaut had just begun to make his mark as a director himself with his…
