Even though this is a work of fiction (termed “an act of female imagination”), the starting point for Women Talking was a recent real-life event in Bolivia. Between 2005 and 2009, more than 100 girls and women in a remote Mennonite colony discovered they had been raped in their sleep. A group of men from…
If any setting was just made for Guillermo del Toro, it’s got to be the circus. Colour, spectacle, carnies, creepy clowns, “freaks” – it positively screams for treatment from the modern master of smart horror. But del Toro is mercurial. Just as he turned his hand to big-budget action in Pacific Rim, he pivots in…
Joaquin Phoenix is ideally suited to fill the role of an inveterate drinker who pays a horrendous price for his addiction, Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot. Phoenix frequently tackles more obtuse material and appears to revel in it. The last day slacker John Callahan (Phoenix), who lives in the US city of…
In the 1950s, Biblical films were extremely popular. Sweeping epics like the Oscar-winning Ben Hur and the spectacular The Ten Commandments scoring at the box office. These stories featured timeless themes of good versus evil. But in the 60s, their popularity seemed to wane. More modern takes on Bible stories have tended to be revisionist,…
– Mary Magdalene – Only in cinemas from 22 March 2018 We have 5 double in-season passes thanks to Transmission Films. *(Tickets valid in Australia only)* Watch the trailer HERE Set in the Holy Land in the first century C.E., a young woman leaves her small fishing village and traditional family behind to join a…
I loathed the past couple of films from revered auteur Terrence Malick, particularly his To the Wonder and Knight of Cups, with their frustratingly obtuse, indulgent and abstract experimental nature, existential meditations, impressionistic and unconventional approach to narrative, the mumbled and at times inaudible dialogue often delivered as internal monologues, the non-linear structure and fractured…
Terrence’s Malick’s The Tree of Life won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, but it drove me batty because I could not make head nor tail of it. So too David Lowery’s (Ain’t Them Bodies Saints) A Ghost Story, which I only understood in the most rudimentary way. It concerns an official ghost. You know the ones,…
A slow-moving, intense jigsaw puzzle, a mood of unease permeates nearly every scene in UNA. Based on David Harrower’s Olivier Award-winning one-act play Blackbird, the film follows a young woman’s journey to reclaim her past. Fifteen years ago, 13-year-old Una ran away with and had sex with an older man, Ray – a crime for which…
