In 1976, the year of the American bicentenary, Steven Spurrier (Alan Rickman), a British entrepreneur in the French wine business in Paris, staged a blind wine-tasting in France where he squared off the best wines of the French industry with the relatively new produce of California’s Napa Valley. This based-on-a-true-story takes us on Spurrier’s journey, […]
In 2003 director Ji-woon Kim took the South Korean box-office by storm with his creepy supernatural thriller The Tale of Two Sisters – loosely based on a traditional Korean folktale about ghosts, stepmothers and sisters coping with their mother’s death. The Univited is a remake of the film by English brothers Thomas and Charles Guard, […]
Hot on the tail of The Combination comes another Australian film about boxing and family. Two Fists One Heart wraps a fairly clichéd story of one man’s struggles in and out of the ring in some impressionistic hand-held packaging, to produce a rather middle-weight film with little emotional punch.
Perth boxer Rai Fazio decided to write […]
Although it’s the shiny red 1974 Ford Falcon coupe that occupies the screen time, it’s Eric Bana who engages in this very personal look at the boy from suburban Melbourne who might have been a racing car driver. Written and directed by Bana himself, the film poses the question why anyone would – after 25 […]
This personal and poetic meditation on England’s portside city of Liverpool will appeal to documentary fans and anyone with a connection to post-war Britain. It’s a nostalgic journey through archival footage of the 1950’s ‘60’s and ‘70’s accompanied by an eclectic collection of lyrical ramblings by writer/director Terence Davies.
A complex and unusually structured film that spans three time periods, The Reader is an intriguing journey – love story without love, war story without war, and ultimately a meditation upon our inability to normalise an understanding of what life would have been like for those living in Nazi Germany. The love story is a […]
We hear much about the challenges of teaching on the front-line of inner city government schools – trying to engage the hearts and minds of the Millennials (those children born in the ten years before the year 2000), and their special way of skimming across life and navigating the disintegrated multi-cultural social spaces we have […]
Much stands out in Dean Spanley – a delightful period piece about reincarnation and friendship. Firstly the strange name - hardly an easy sell – which doesn’t hint at much. Then there’s the careful and elegant pacing - a rarity these days - leaving many a viewer wondering, for the first half hour at least, […]
That Australian filmmakers haven’t followed the model established by Belgium’s Dardenne brothers is a mystery – simple stories, complex characters, naturalistic and straightforward production values, all combining to produce compelling, low budget filmmaking with an emphasis on character and performance. Since winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1999 with Rosetta, every film they have […]
There’s something deeply admirable about the intention of The Combination, tackling identity and ethnic tension in contemporary urban Australia, and although it is full of passion and an uncompromising sense of its own direction – it suffers from a lack of subtlety – particularly in the writing and the central performance of the piece, both […]
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