Film
Simple Passion review – a case of female amour fouSaturday, 06 February 2021
Pushing 40, Simple Passion’s Hélène (Laetitia Dosch) lectures Paris college students on poetry and is single mother to pre-adolescent Paul (Lou Teymour-Thion). Blessed with a bountiful Deneuve-ian mane, she’s a pale but unfallen bloom in her late... Read more... |
Rams review – softhearted bush-loving dramaSaturday, 06 February 2021
Kiwi and Aussie screen legends Sam Neill and Michael Caton have teamed up in this heartfelt and humorous remake of Grímur Hákonarson’s 2015 Icelandic original. The template of Hákonarson’s story has been transplanted but all the details and fillings... Read more... |
Bliss review - simulation or real life?Friday, 05 February 2021
Bliss gets off to a powerful start. Stressed-out Greg Wittle (an endearing Owen Wilson) is in his office, trying to do several things at once: draw his dream seaside home in great detail; talk to his daughter; renew his painkiller prescription by... Read more... |
Malcolm & Marie review - actorly grandstanding in beautiful black and whiteFriday, 05 February 2021
Do you want to spend 105 minutes trapped in a house with two people arguing, or do you already feel that your life under lockdown is quite quarrelsome and claustrophobic enough? If your answer is the former, then Malcolm & Marie is the... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: The Masque of the Red DeathTuesday, 02 February 2021
One hundred and seventy four years ago today, on Tuesday, 2 February 1847, the body of Virginia (“Sissy”) Poe, Edgar Allan Poe's 24-year-old wife, was interred in a vault in a graveyard near the couple's rented cottage in Fordham, in the Bronx; she... Read more... |
Assassins review - unravelling the bizarre death of Kim Jong-namSaturday, 30 January 2021
The 2017 killing of Kim Jong-nam, older half-brother of North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un, was a chilling expression of merciless Pyongyang realpolitik. Labyrinthine planning by a team of North Korean undercover agents went into the attack, carried... Read more... |
The Capote Tapes review - lush portrait of the louche writerSaturday, 30 January 2021
"A candied tarantula" is one of the many great descriptions of Truman Capote that light up this conventionally made but enjoyable profile of the American author most famous for Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood. Written and... Read more... |
Penguin Bloom, Netflix review - stirringly acted if sentimentalFriday, 29 January 2021
Two genuinely lovely performances elevate an often-simplistic tale in Penguin Bloom, based on a 2016 memoir of the same name. Telling of the rehabilitation of an Australian athlete, Sam Bloom, who – true to her surname – learns to blossom... Read more... |
The Dig, Netflix review - a haunting exploration of time and timelessnessThursday, 28 January 2021
The Sutton Hoo burial site in Suffolk has proved to be one of the most valuable archaeological finds ever made in Britain, shedding priceless light on the Anglo-Saxon period of the 6th and 7th Centuries. Simon Stone’s drama (adapted from John... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: RelicTuesday, 26 January 2021
Relic's deliberate drabness hits home first; set in Victoria, Natalie Erika James’s modern horror shows us a grey contemporary Australia, a place bleached of all colour. We first see Kay and her daughter Sam (Emily Mortimer and Bella Heathcote,... Read more... |
Persian Lessons review - confusing Holocaust dramaSaturday, 23 January 2021
This is an odd film, made even odder by a caption near the beginning, which claims it is "inspired by true events" but doesn’t elaborate. Produced in Belarus, it’s a Holocaust drama based on a novella by the veteran East German screenwriter/director... Read more... |
Quo Vadis, Aida review - a Bosnian woman confronts genocideFriday, 22 January 2021
Jasmila Žbanić’s latest film, once again about the people of her native Bosnia and Herzegovina, is hardly an easy watch. Focusing on Aida, a passionate and highly capable interpreter for the UN forces in former Yugoslavia, she unflinchingly... Read more... |
