The 2016 AICE Israeli Film Festival is currently in full swing in Sydney and Melbourne ( at the Ritz and Nova cinemas respectively). The event aims to present a diverse range of films from Israel in a variety of genres – including romantic comedies, a Holocaust mystery, a Bedouin family drama, a Polish/Israeli horror film…
Winner of five Goya Awards (the Spanish equivalent of the Oscars), Truman is a bittersweet comedy/drama, which screened during the recent Spanish Film Festival earlier in the year. It was one of the more popular films in the festival and now it gets a cinema release. This amusing and deeply affecting film deals with universal…
France’s nomination for Best Foreign Language Film at this year’s Oscars, Mustang is, not surprisingly, a riveting drama about five beautiful Turkish girls whose lives are turned to hell by age-old practices. It is the start of the summer. In a remote village in the north of Turkey, Lale and her four older sisters come…
If there is a slower moving film than The Wait, you would be hard-pressed to find it. In this lyrical, poetic work concerning a grieving mother and her son’s girlfriend, very little is said. Instead, it features languorous shots of Sicily. Anna (Juliette Binoche) refuses to accept that her son Giuseppe is dead and will…
From loathing to liking … I can’t recall too many movies I have seen where my predilection has swung so appreciably. But that was the case with Victoria, slow burn material shot in point of view style (think extensive use of hand held camera) from the perspective of the lead character. So, patience is ultimately…
Slow moving but compelling, Felix and Meira is a Canadian drama concerns a young, unhappy Hasidic wife and mother, Meira (Hadas Yaron), who wants more out of life than the cards she has been dealt. She finds the strictures of her ultraorthodox upbringing are choking her vitality. Meira likes lively popular music – much to…
With more than a touch of Slumdog Millionaire about it, this is a funny, touching and unlikely tale of two mischievous brothers who live with their mother and grandmother in a Chennai slum. Their father is in jail, and although there are a couple of scenes in the movie between he and his wife, we…
Set in the aftermath of WWII, Phoenix is a slow burn noir-like psychological thriller about identity, survival, obsesion and betrayal. It bears some similarity to the Hitchcock classic Vertigo as well as Brian De Palma’s Obsession. Disfigured Jewish concentration camp survivor Nelly Lanz (Nina Hoss, recently seen in A Most Wanted Man) has undergone plastic…
The winner of six Ophir Awards (the Israeli equivalent of the Oscars), this is a quirky armed services comedy with a difference. It focuses more on the inept army portrayed in television’s F Troop (from the mid ‘60s) than the finely tuned force usually associated with the Israeli army, but so be it. At a…
From acclaimed Estonian filmmaker Zaza Urushadze (Three Houses) comes this Oscar nominated anti-war drama, set in the disputed territory of Abhazia during the war between Georgia and Chechen rebels in the early 1990s. Tangerines is a strong and provocative but very human look at the horrors of war, but it also looks at the futility…
