16 Results

And here it is. After two and a bit weeks, innumerable hours sitting in the dark and an accumulation of mental and physical defects, we finally arrive at the big number: 60. Turns out I didn’t need the full 17 days to watch and review 60 films. I did it in 16 days and one [...]

Just when I thought my Melbourne International Film Festival experience couldn’t get any weirder…it got weirder. I wrote a detailed post late last night about what happened to me yesterday after a screening of UK director Ben Wheatley’s assassin thriller Kill List. Let’s just say it involves Colonel Sanders and the long flabby arm of [...]

You’ll be pleased to know, dear reader, that I recovered from my bout of food poisoning quite quickly (touch wood) and caught three sessions yesterday at MIFF: the anti-disaster disaster movie Innocent Saturday, the Ridley and Tony Scott produced Life in a Day and the first two episodes of ABC’s adaption of The Slap. Write-ups [...]

They say in space, nobody can hear you scream. Well here’s a new one: in the cinema, nobody (to a point) can see what you’re wearing. If you’re spending up to 10 hours a day inside darkened auditoriums watching films from around the globe, as I have been doing now for nearly the last two [...]

See below for write-ups of yesterday’s cinematic diet: three documentaries (Boxing Gym, Buck and Khodorkovsky) and a racy French police drama. But please also read this post, an experiment of sorts in which I change the focus of the film review onto me, the reviewer, and hopefully share something valuable in the process. Onwards we [...]

Having now watched and reviewed 40 films in 10 days, I am now deep within the belly of the MIFF beast, and evidence that this extreme exercise in movie-watching may be having physical and psychological effects is mounting. Fellow MIFF blog-a-thoner Thomas Caldwell has confirmed a rumour bandied about town that, attacked by reality at [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Cinetology generated a huge response to the story broken on this blog last Friday about a row that erupted between organisers of the Melbourne International Film Festival and the makers of the Iraq-set drama Son of Babylon, who unsuccessfully demanded their film be removed from the festival program as a protest against its financial ties [...]

This morning the makers of the acclaimed feature Son of Babylon alerted Crikey to the news that they sent numerous requests to the Melbourne International Film Festival asking for the film be removed from the festival program. The filmmakers strongly object to MIFF’s links with the State of Israel, which is one of the festival’s [...]

Some good news on the Melbourne International Film Festival front: today MIFF confirmed that its 2009 program will include some of the biggest drawcards from this year’s Cannes Film Festival. These include Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, Park Chan-wook’s Thirst and Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist. Says festival director Richard Moore via press release: “Love it or [...]