Film
Matt Wolf
Women everywhere may start cutting loose in their kitchens after seeing Goddess, a sweet if slight Australian film that suggests a hybrid of Mamma Mia! and Shirley Valentine. Adapted (and greatly expanded) from a solo play written and performed by co-screenwriter Joanna Weinberg, the film's terrain is sure to hit many distaff moviegoers where they live, whether or not they find themselves displaced to Tasmania with a former boyband star (in this case, Ronan Keating) as their often-absent husband. At times too peppy for its own good, the film's abiding virtue is the first leading role onscreen Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Much has been said before about these two Leos Carax greats, but the beauty of these surrealist French films is that you can enjoy them again and again, each time finding something new to appreciate. It's been a while since Boy Meets Girl and Mauvais Sang (The Night Is Young) were first released, but that only makes them that little bit more iconic.Like blowing the dust off an old painting, we are re-introduced to the blanched faces and melancholic characters that remind us of a love that burns fast but lasts forever. With Carax, everyone is either in love, Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
It’s not unusual for Jon Favreau to go small, despite his reputation for the big hits such as Iron Man, Iron Man 2 and Elf. There was the much-touted squib Cowboys & Aliens alongside the nifty minnows of Made and Very Bad Things. Favreau loves acting and making movies so much that he’s a realist when things go wrong. Or right, in the case of his latest Chef, which one reviewer strangely called "shallow", a word that would only apply if you expected something Bergmanesque from a juicy romp through the world of a professional chef trying to get back his magic meal-making mojo.Favreau stars Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Two brothers who are at polar opposites, one an indie rock star, the other a heavy-metal loving, B-movie making slacker who still lives at home with his parents and is longing to find his place in the world, are at the centre of this gleeful, touching and manic rockumentary about The National. The band consists of two pairs of brothers, Aaron and Bryce Dessner, Bryan and Scott Devendorf and lone front man Mat Berninger who in a bid to support his younger brother invites him on tour to work as part of the crew. What ensues is a surprisingly poignant portrait of brotherly love, self-loathing Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You can almost feel the dust on your skin in Spanish director Diego Quemada-Diez’s debut feature The Golden Dream. It’s the dust of the precarious journey from Central America towards the US, undertaken by four teenage Guatemalan kids intent on finding a better life north of the final border. And of the gritty immigrant experience of jumping train after train, and struggles with the authorities, where each new stage presents new challenges, and more acts of betrayal than of kindness are to be found along the way.We are introduced to the protagonists only gradually. Juan (Brandon Lopez) looks Read more ...
Katie Colombus
For a long time, Kathleen Hanna was ensconced in a world where she cared more about the noise she made onstage than off. Despite being in a band that couldn't really play their instruments, her political message was what mattered.
The Bikini Kill front-woman and outspoken feminist punk idol’s life is explored in this biographical documentary, hinged on the mystery of why she suddenly stopped performing in 2005.
Directed by Sini Anderson in a fanzine style, the film pays homage to a singer that rocked the riot grrrl movement, sparking a sub-culture of female empowerment and launching third Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Director Jim Mickle and writing partner Nick Damici made a big splash on the horror scene back in 2007 with fierce debut Mulberry St. Since then they have impressed with low-key apocalyptic vampire flick, Stake Land, and a reimagining of the well-regarded Mexican cannibal horror, We Are What We Are, which they turned into a story of female empowerment and a slight on organised religion. Cold in July may not be what their ever increasing fan base expected them to do next but that’s exactly what makes it so satisfying. Mickle and Damici’s daring attitude, passion and knowledge of genre, and Read more ...
Katie Colombus
A pervading sense of melancholia runs through this film, and yet it is neither chilling, nor disaffecting. Akin to one of the key characters, watching it is a bit like having an out-of-body experience. The Past hovers somewhere between fight and flight, with characters in myriad sliding door moments. They dissect the past and analyse the future, but are stuck in an impossible limbo between the two. It is a labyrinthine tangle of what might have been - accidentally leaving your child on the metro as you head out of the station; a complete and happy marriage; an extra-marital affair; a Read more ...
Ian Knight
I can remember the exact moment that Zulu grabbed me. I was seven at the time and watched the film at some now-defunct widescreen cinema in Brighton early in 1964, probably just a few weeks after it was released.I had been intrigued by the posters spread on hoardings around my nearby hometown. They depicted small figures locked in battle at the foot of the gigantic letters making up the title, which stood, Ozymandias-like, in the African veldt. The movie promised to be right up my street, a classic Boys’ Own adventure – although I can’t remember now if I badgered my parents to take me to see Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Given that Jersey Boys is about a singer, Frankie Valli, whose voice - or so we are told within the first five minutes - constitutes "a gift from god", it's a shame Clint Eastwood's film of the stage musical smash hit doesn't feel more heaven-sent. There are thrills to be had across the two hour-plus running time and enough Italian-Americanisms to make audiences feel as if they may have wandered into Goodfellas-lite. But the film stints on precisely that aspect of the show that sends theatre audiences to their feet every night - namely, the music, which largely gets sacrificed on the altar of Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Camille Claudel was not only Rodin’s student, mistress and muse, but a talented sculptor in her own right. Some years after the two parted, her mental health started to decline. In 1913 her family committed her first to a psychiatric hospital, then an asylum; but their actions appear to have been needless and cruel, the family persistently ignoring doctors’ recommendations that Camille be released. She would remain locked up until her death, some 30 years later. Bruno Dumont’s outstanding film charts three days near the start of Claudel’s incarceration in the asylum, during which time Read more ...
Matt Wolf
For a film that begins with the remark "this is the truth, sorry", The Fault in Our Stars could up its honesty quotient. Slickly made and very nicely acted within the confines allowed by the script, Josh Boone's adaptation of John Green's young-adult blockbuster novel nonetheless can't help but sell candour (not to mention plausibility) down a tear-laden river in its tale of young love cut short by cancer. I was more or less going along with a narrative that sells its lack of sentimentality like a badge of honour - until a scene set at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam of such startling Read more ...