As elegant and stylish as a 1960’s advertisement for exclusive menswear, A Single Man is more of a showpiece for style than an emotional journey, with fashion-designer turned film director Tom Ford overwhelming Colin Firth’s performance of a bereft man with scene after scene of impeccably beautiful but detached imagery.
What a treat to see and feel an independent American movie that sifts gently across the Western landscape with a heartfelt touch – albeit dusted over with a hazy drift of nostalgia. Based on the novel by Thomas Cobb, actor-turned director Scott Cooper shows a deft hand at focusing on the intimate nature of alcoholic […]
A visceral, gripping and totally absorbing film that follows one man’s life on the front line of bomb disposal, The Hurt Locker will surely take out an Academy Award nomination for Best Director next February. Director Kathryn Bigalow puts you right in the adrenaline rush zone along with the remarkable Jeremy Ranner playing the man […]
You can almost feel Martin Scorsese straining to create some magic in his latest feature Shutter Island, with its pounding music, ominous cinematography, jaw-clenching close-up performances and overblown gothic flashbacks. Sadly the screenplay – a tale of a man losing (or finding?) his mind in a mental asylum - is fatally flawed and the film […]
Despite the hairy production process, Universal Pictures has managed to rescue a half decent chiller in this remake of the 1941 classic B-grade Wolfman that starred Lon Chaney as the man turned beast. With a delayed release caused by producer-director battles over budgets, a sacked director (Mark Romanek), weeks of re-shoots and re-editing, there was […]
Jason Reitman, the young director who previously brought us the caustic Thank you for smoking and the critical and commercial darling Juno, proves himself again adept at intelligent comedy with Up in the Air. In it, George Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a man who has perfected the art of distance. A seasoned corporate traveller, he […]
There have been more than twenty film versions of Lewis Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland, but none starring a local Canberra girl in the title role. In 1903 May Clark played the first screen Alice, the longest film ever made in Britain at the time. At a whopping 12 minutes, it was considered far too long […]
The producers and distributors of Precious faced an Everest-sized obstacle in making such miserable subject matter palatable. The story of an obese, illiterate and unloved girl growing up in conditions of horrible abuse in Harlem, Precious is a hard sell for audiences. The character of Precious, pregnant at 16 with the second child to her […]
Unquestionably the best film I saw at the Cannes Film Festival last year, and winner of the Grand Prize of the Jury (better known as coming second), A Prophet is an extraordinary prison-based crime drama that is destined to be one of the finest works of the decade. In a year with little top-class French […]
Like the country music that runs through its blood, actor-turned-first-time-director Scott Cooper’s Crazy Heart is awash with clichés. Every day is a new town and another show for country music legend Bad Blake (Jeff Bridges). He never met a glass of whisky he didn’t like, and with every glass, that faded San Antonio Rose sitting […]
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