October, 2009

If you’re looking for even handed and maturely nuanced debate, if you’re looking for objectivity, multifaceted perspectives and intelligent arguments unencumbered by sentiments and emotions, then stay the hell away from the films of veteran rabble-rouser Michael Moore, whose penchant for fire and brimstone documentary journalism burns ever-undulled in Capitalism: A Love Story. But if [...]

Last week The Daily Telegraph broke the news that George Miller’s classic Mad Max franchise will spawn a belated sequel, Mad Max: Fury Road. In a major coup for the NSW film industry – following the sobering recent announcement that Green Hornet will not (as originally planned) be shot in Sydney – Premier Nathan Rees [...]

Phil Grabsky’s widely acclaimed doco In Search of Mozart (2006) was broadcast in over 25 countries, screened theatrically at cinemas around the world, and, in Australia and New Zealand, made it into the top 50 list of all-time highest grossing documentaries (excluding IMAX). The veteran UK filmmaker’s latest feature, In Search of Beethoven, may well [...]

Many of the issues surrounding the ever-beleaguered state of the Australian film industry are encapsulated in Into the Shadows, a dense, compelling and cheaply produced documentary from debut writer/ director Anthony Scarano. Essentially a compilation of talking heads, Scarano collaborates an impressive cross-section of viewpoints from exhibitors, distributors, actors, writers, directors and other industry folk [...]

Watch the trailer for The Box and you’ll swear it’s gonna play like a by-the-numbers thriller dressed up with a careful-what-you-wish-for premise reminiscent of W.W. Jacobs’ classic short story The Monkey’s Paw. But brace yourself for something entirely different: an experience simultaneously compelling, befuddling, audacious and frustratingly disjointed. The director is Richard Kelly, whose brilliantly [...]

Last week I blogged aboout the next project from legendary cult director Lars von Trier – a US$7 million “psychological drama-cum-disaster movie” titled Melancholia. I noted that nothing is known about the story other than it “takes its name from ‘Planet Melancholia,’ an enormous planet that supposedly lingers precariously close to earth” and “it won’t [...]

All too well conditioned by cinema’s dispiriting habit of transforming old school animated TV shows into retch-a-rific buckets of movie lard enjoyed only by the thoroughly forgiving, the morbidly curious and the criminally tasteless, I must admit to not having very high hopes – along with everybody else in the sane world – for Astro [...]

Jackie Earle Haley (aka Rorschach from Watchmen) will fill some very big shoes and a very iconic red and green jumper in music vid-cum-feature director Samuel Bayer’s upcoming remake of Wes Craven’s one-two-you-know-who’s-coming-for-you horror classic A Nightmare on Elm Street. Haley will be the first actor to play gnarly dream invader Freddy Krueger other than [...]

Any film explicitly about or involving food or cooking inevitably challenges critics to sharpen their analytical knives in the hope of carving up a culinary themed zinger or two: one might say, for example, that No Reservations was “a light snack not a three course meal”; What’s Cooking “a flavourless fable as hard to swallow [...]

The box office receipts for Mao’s Last Dancer, director Bruce Beresford’s tribute to the life and career of Chinese ballet prodigy Li Cunxin, have vastly surpassed even the most optimistic predictions and it’s now clear – only a week into its theatrical release – that the film will be Australian cinema’s smash hit of 2009. [...]

Like most a-star-is-born biopics Bruce Beresford’s Mao’s Last Dancer affectionately charters the protagonist’s journey from an undiscovered hopeful to a celebrated artist – in this case from Chinese ballet prodigy Li Cunxin’s upbringing in rural China to his acclaimed dance career in America.  And like most films about dancers it accentuates – consciously or not [...]