Month: August 2019
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DVD Round-up: Aug 2019 edition
August’s releases run the gamut from horror, urban thrillers, social justice and tender drama. While themes of modernity, paranoia and urban life prominently feature in this month’s lineup, headed by the likes of Kiss Me Deadly, The Incident, and Do The Right Thing, so too does nature and its relationship to human society – such as in Australian classic The…
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Venice 2019: An Officer and a Spy review
★★★☆☆ The Dreyfus Affair is chronicled as a turn of the century espionage thriller worthy of le Carré in Roman Polanski’s An Officer and a Spy. There was a good chance that his film could have been withdrawn after the jury head Lucrecia Martel shared her dissatisfaction at the film being included in the competition.
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Film Review: Ad Astra
★★☆☆☆ It’s the near future: a time of “conflict and hope”, according to the first title cards of James Gray’s latest offering, the space drama Ad Astra. Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) is an unflappable astronaut with ice in his veins, and whose pulse doesn’t redline even as he falls to Earth from the upper reaches of…
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Film Review: Marriage Story
★★★★★ The Squid and the Whale director Noah Baumbach returns with his latest Netflix collaboration, Marriage Story, which sublimely manages to find humour and humanity in the mutually assured destruction of a messy divorce. Adam Driver plays New York theatre director Charlie, while Scarlett Johansson plays Nicole, an actress who gave up her Hollywood career to be…
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Venice 2019: Jokers, Kings and everyone in-between
As the 76th edition of Venice commenced this week, the oldest film festival in the world has entered some choppy waters. First of all, there was a Hollywood Reporter article that slammed Venice as the “Fuck you” festival, essentially ignoring the #MeToo movement and the calls for gender representation which even Cannes has been slowly…
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The perennial popularity of horror
For years the film industry has been releasing films for audiences that shock and scare. While horror films might be best released during the Halloween season, plenty of these films are now being released all year round. From classic films like Psycho to recent releases like Midsommar, there has been a wide variety of horror films…
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Film Review: The Souvenir
★★★★★ Joanna Hogg’s semi-autobiographical feature The Souvenir introduces Honor Swinton Byrne in a tour de force performance. It’s a stunning evocation of a young woman’s rite of passage in 1980s London, and a poignant exploration of an artist’s early foray into film. When Julie (Swinton Byrne), an earnest film student, falls for raffish, upper-crust Anthony (Tom…
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Film Review: Bait
★★★★★ Contemporary British cinema has continued to surprise and amaze in recent years with the vast array of stunning directorial debuts. From the likes of Lady Macbeth to The Levelling, such first features have introduced adept directors and actors alike to the world. Emerging from the shadows into the limelight, as these films equally did…
