May, 2009

The films that Michael Moore really wrote, inspired by The Age.

Some of us invariably grumble from time to time about picture quality when we go out to watch a movie – blurry focus and off-kilter framing are two of the more common irks – but a small band of cinemagoers grouse about the inadequacies of the cinema experience in a very different context. It is [...]

It should be noted that in Lesbian Vampire Killers director Phil Claydon delivers on a basic level: there are lesbians in it, and these lesbians are also vampires, and these lesbian vampires also happen to kill people. With that essential criteria crossed off everything else appears to have been deemed irrelevant, from the two irritable [...]

In her feature film debut Look Both Ways director Sarah Watt gave cancer to her husband, actor William McInnes, thrusting his character into the centre of a romantic drama speckled with small bursts of aesthetic innovation – a splash of animation here, a zippy editing transition there. In her follow-up feature, My Year Without Sex, [...]

Update: some great entries so far people, keep ‘em coming. However, nobody has correctly identified the yellow furry puppet on my desk. If anybody can do so (if you know me personally you’re out of the running, you dirty cheat) the first correct submission will be rewarded with a Cinetology gift pack consisting of three [...]

Capping off this year’s program at Cannes, one in which no clear favourite emerged and plenty of commentators have regarded as a particularly diverse crop of films, the awards have been dished out and the top gong – the prestigious Palme d’or – went to director Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, a drama about mysterious [...]

Last month Adam Elliot’s feature film debut Mary and Max became the first Australian-made stopmotion feature to be theatrically released in the country.  But the first completed Australian stopmotion feature was director Tatia Rosenthal’s $9.99, an Australian/Israeli co-production that was shot in Sydney in 2007 and transferred to Tel Aviv in Israel for post in [...]

State of Play is an investigatory drama about reporters doing the sorts of things cinematic journalism inevitably entails – unravelling high profile sex scandals, busting shady politicians, banging together apocalyptic headlines, following leads into dark underground car parks etcetera etcetera – and it’s set in those oxygen-draining, paper-producing days at the beginning of the end [...]

Fans of Seth Rogen are likely to be both confounded and morbidly intrigued by his bitterly amusing performance in Observe and Report, which in one fell swoop moves the cuddly actor’s oeuvre from inoffensive stoner shtick to jet-black bad-ass comedy, lugging with it a feeling that things will never be quite the same again. Writer/director [...]

Update: the trailer for Sherlock Holmes is now online and you can watch it here. It’s breathless, star-studded, action packed – not exactly Sir Arthur Conan Doyle material – and it looks kind of, well, crap, as if Ritchie has substituted all of Doyle’s precise plotting for fight scenes, explosions, sex scenes, leaps out of [...]

Apparently all you have to do to legally download new movies – not just with the government’s blessing but with their assistance in copying, reformatting and uploading requested titles – is leave the planet. Last Friday, according to New York Times blogger Rebecca Cathcart, three astronauts – from America, Russia and Japan – watched J.J. [...]

During the opening ceremony at Cannes earlier this week a long show reel of festival films provided tantalising glimpses of yet-to-be released features, including a clip from Heath Ledger’s final performance in Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. The video, which can be found here, is almost half an hour long but footage of [...]

Legendary Australian film and TV actor Charles ‘Bud’ Tingwell died this morning at a Melbourne hospital, aged 86. He was a much loved and highly regarded screen veteran with a CV of performances as long as your arm, and then some. You can read my Crikey news story on Tingwell here.

Another Robert Langdon movie, another bad hair day for Tom Hanks and another round of pseudo intellectual beat-the-clock brain mulching from director Ron Howard, whose adaptations of Dan Brown’s books are beginning to feel a lot like National Treasure Goes to the Vatican. In Angels and Demons, a sequel to The Da Vinci Code, Langdon [...]

Fans of Ol’ Blue Eyes may have cause for cheer, with news that Martin Scorsese will helm Sinatra – a biopic of the late superstar singer which will be made with the rare blessing of the Sinatra Estate. Precious little is known at this stage other than Scorsese’s involvement and the involvement of Oscar-nominated screenwriter [...]

It’s A Christmas Carol crossed with The Wedding Crashers crossed with lobotomised generic rom-com in Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, director Mark Waters’s slushy love anthem that mingles Dickens’s famous morality fable with the ever-wooden Matthew Mahogany. Mahog, er, McConaughey stars as a promiscuous a-hole who Hates Love and woos ladies by reciting humdingers like “every [...]

Few first-time feature filmmakers are greeted with the kind of accolades bestowed upon Australian director Warwick Thornton, whose triumphant Cannes-selected indigenous drama Samson & Delilah has prompted a gushing response from critics the country over. The film tells an at times heart wrenching story following the two titular characters, who live in an impoverished rural [...]