July, 2011

The storyline of Top Floor, Left Wing (film #31) — a tight and peppy black comedy/hostage drama from French writer/director Angelo Cianci — is propelled by a misunderstanding. Police and a bailiff arrive at the flat of Mohand (Mohamed Felagg) to serve an eviction notice but his son Salem (Aymen Saïdi) assumes they’re there because [...]

The problem with yesterday’s screening of German/Polish drama Winter’s Daughter (review below) was not that it was half full of squawking high school students but that their curriculum, which this film is presumably a part of, did not include education about cinema etiquette. To be fair, the crowd was fairly well behaved, particularly given their [...]

Watching a plethora of bold films every day from the minds of interesting artists from various spots on the globe is, to a point — when, say, your eyes roll back into your head and your body develops deep vein thrombosis as a way of saying f-you, pal — nourishing for the mind but not [...]

Less than a week into the Melbourne International Film Festival, after yours truly had sat through over 20 feature film screenings in less than five days and absorbed everything from Czechoslovakian psychoanalytic comedy to fattened French period epics, a reel bolt out of the blue arrived: proof that a David Williamson play can still provide [...]

The bright light city sure did set Elvis’ soul on fire, and it was a delight to watch George Sidney’s 1964 gem Viva Las Vegas on the big screen, my third film in MIFF’s 2011 retrospective program. However it was a modest new Australian drama with a tiny budget and a big heart that provided [...]

In this strange game of eye-hurting attrition and film reviewing stamina known as MIFF’s 2011 blog-a-thon challenge, I am now past the quarter way mark in my quest to watch and review 60 films in 17 days. With day four done and dusted, I’ve notched up 18 feature film screenings, with my previous three days [...]

There are worse ways to kick off a Sunday morning than watching a self-professed “psychoanalytical comedy” from an extremely unorthodox Czechoslovakian filmmaker with a fascination for mingling stop motion animation with live action footage and exploring all manner of Waking Life-esque dream scapes, but admittedly there are better ways too — like staring into a [...]

Hollywood: that magical land where bright young hopefuls with elastic smiles and moony eyes get transformed into international sensations, names emblazoned in twinkling floodlight-lit letters on the skyline of popular culture. A place where lives become legends and dreams reality. Yeah, that’s laying it on a little thick, but there are still plenty of poor [...]

For the next two and a half weeks, until August 7, this blog will be entirely devoted to reporting on the 2011 Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF). This year marks the festival’s 60th anniversary, and as part of the birthday celebrations myself and five other film bloggers have agreed to participate in the MIFF 2011 [...]

Cameron Diaz slips into super bitch mode in this daft but refreshingly amoral comedy from director Jake Kasdan (Orange Country, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story) that takes the premise of Terry Zwigoff’s Bad Santa (2003), dilutes it and switches the setting from a shopping mall to a classroom. Elizabeth Halsey (Cameron Diaz) is the [...]

There is a compelling sense of desperation in Mel Gibson’s baggy-eyed performance as a mentally ill businessman who finds a second life via a musty puppet beaver in this left of field, and long delayed, Jodie Foster-directed drama that arrives in cinemas burdened by the baggage of Gibson’s chequered reputation. The life/art parallels between Gibson [...]

I tend to resist drawing together guides for festivals I’m yet to attend for the simple reason that compiling a list of ‘recommendations’ for films you haven’t seen is pretty poor form. But given the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF), which kicks off this Thursday, so warms the cockles of my cinema-going heart, I’m making [...]

British funnymen Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon coast between hotels, restaurants and quaint countryside locations in director Michael Winterbottom’s Sideways-esque love letter to good food, wine and conversation. The Trip is essentially a stream of conversation fitted to the personable personalities of it’s two banter addicted Brits, who are never strapped for a word or [...]