2013
Plastic Paradise shines a spotlight on the problems that our society has created and its impact on the world in which we live.
On Belle’s original release, I was intrigued by the film but felt no real urge to watch it. It almost seemed to sell itself on the back of its unusual story: a biracial woman born to aristocracy during the time of the slave trade.
Aleksei German once said “I am not interested in anything but the possibility of building a world, an entire civilization from scratch.” While “worldbuilding” has turned into a sort of buzz term, it’s fair to say that he did succeed in creating a meticulously detailed world that is as equally claustrophobic and terrifying as it is expansive and daunting. Aleksei German’s final film Hard to Be a God, an adaptation of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s novel of the same name, turned into a subject of curiosity given the thirteen-year production, dense source material and the death of the director before the film’s release.
Watch Our Lad here. Our Lad, brought lovingly to life by director Rachna Suri, is a compelling insight into a British Muslim community and the conflict between two brothers. The short film stars Shazad Latif (The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel) as a young Muslim soldier returning from Afghanistan to an antagonistic brother and community.
A young Montana boy named T.S. Spivet leaves his rustic home and heads to Washington D.
“A Cajun devil hunter goes to the crossroads and meets the devil’s attorney”. The compelling summary of Chasseur had me hooked before I even started watching, let alone the mesmerising central performance from the film’s writer and director, Christopher Soren Kelly. An unconventional structure, perhaps, but a successful one.
The Tale of the Princess Kaguya tells the folklore of a Japanese princess born from a bamboo stalk in the heavens and raised as the child of an elderly agrarian couple. She lives and grows up rapidly right before our eyes, just like the bamboo from which she was bred. She was meant to live a more “normal” life, though, and is soon thrust into a lifestyle that contradicts her humble upbringings.
Anna, a young woman on the verge of nunhood raised from the confines of a lonely convent discovers that her only living relative, Wanda, is a judge who abides by an irresponsible lifestyle of hedonism. These two very different personalities clash in Poland’s submission to the foreign film category of the Oscars, Ida. Anna and Wanda embark through the vestiges of Poland to locate the remains of Anna’s parents in order to give them a proper burial, a journey which becomes a heartfelt saunter that causes the pair to question their beliefs.
Tom Hardy is one of the most versatile and talented actors in film today. His resume is proof. From his first performance as Twombly in Black Hawk Down, to his most recent one as Bob in The Drop, he has delivered a dazzling array of characters on screen.
According to my personal checklist, the extent to which a film can affect a viewer is a mark of its quality. Pioneer must have done something right, because it absolutely wrecked my sense of calm. A full 24 hours after watching director Erik Skjoldbjærg’s thriller for the first time, I still find myself feeling strangely uneasy – stealing glances over my shoulder, eyeing my friends and family with icy distrust…I even threw out a plate of unattended food on the off chance it had been poisoned by the shady agents of a deep-sea drilling conglomerate.
Last year, Denis Villeneuve directed one of the most pleasant surprises of the year with Prisoners, an unrelentingly tense film about child abduction that presented intriguing moral questions while also providing satisfying twists and turns throughout. That filmed starred Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal. Gyllenhaal has teamed up with Villeneuve again in Enemy, a much smaller and much, much more mind-bending film than Prisoners.
This movie is part of the Spanish Film Festival, which takes place during May. As one of the many films chosen to play at the Spanish Film Festival in 2014, Three Many Weddings (original title Tres Bodas De Mas) is a wild Spanish-language romantic comedy following a month in the life of Ruth (Inma Cuesta), the puppy-eyed lab scientist longing for love. When Ruth wakes up one morning from a drunken night of random love-making, she is faced with three wedding invitations – all from ex-boyfriends.
This movie is screened during the Spanish Film Festival in Australia, taking place all May. In Ariel Winograd’s To Fool A Thief, we’re often reminded to think upon the kind of screwball comedies that made romance the immaterial ideal that critics so often found unbearable for its overtly fictitious realities – It Happened One Night, My Man Godfrey, The Great Ziegfeld and on and on the list goes. It’s not surprising during the course that Winograd’s film should reprise these classical thematic structures, but it’s presented in a fashion which is ultimately a distraction from the main action.
When I saw the first preview of this film, it appealed to me as a sci-fi thriller fan. I had every intention of going to the theaters to see it, but alas, I waited too long. Meanwhile, Gravity won several Academy Awards including Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best Visual Effects, and Best Original Score.
Last weekend I attended a screening of Jim Jarmusch’s latest production, Only Lovers Left Alive, at the Luna Leederville Cinema here in Perth (which, by the way, is a beautiful original 20’s art deco cinema). While I’ve only seen two of Jim Jarmusch’s movies (Coffee and Cigarettes and Dead Man), Only Lovers Left Alive has Jarmusch’s distinctly recognizable style: it’s dark, pretty, it’s gritty, and very witty (how’s that for rhyming?