By Carolyn Lake. Fred Schepisi’s latest film, The Eye of the Storm, opened this month in select theatres around Australia and enjoyed a warm reception for its international debut at the Toronto International Film Festival. The film is an adaptation of the 1973 novel by Nobel prizing-winning Australian author, Patrick […]
Attack the Block (2011)
By Janine Gericke. “This is too much madness to explain in one text,” one of five hoodlums turned heroes screams in Joe Cornish’s already-cult sci-fi film Attack the Block. The film won raves at South by Southwest, winning the Audience award, and was quickly picked up by Screen Gems for U.S. […]
Drive (2011)
By Bryan Nixon. “What do you do?” Irene asked. He carefully calculated his response and replied, “I drive.” The protagonist of Drive is a passive aggressive unnamed entity who consistently acts with precision in any given situation. He rarely speaks, and when he does it is usually when he has […]
Beginners (2010)
By Janine Gericke. I have to say that I adore this film. Beginners is Mike Mills’s second feature film, following 2005’s Thumbsucker, which intrigued me through its vulnerable perspective. In Beginners, Mills creates a delicate story based on his own experiences. It’s packed with a spread of incredibly sweet and absolutely heartbreaking moments. At […]
Apollo 18 (2011)
By Steven Harrison Gibbs. The poster for this latest cash grab in the ever-lucrative wave of ‘found footage’ horror cinema intrigued me when I saw it in passing at a local theater earlier this year, its tagline stating ‘There’s a reason we’ve never gone back to the moon,’ and underneath […]
Contagion (2011)
By Bryan Nixon. It always starts with a cough. Naivety hints at the common cold. Or maybe it’s something worse, such as the flu. Maybe it’s a symptom of a deadly virus that threatens all life on Earth. The latter is the case with Steven Soderbergh’s latest slick and sophisticated […]
FID-Marseille: Festival International du Cinema, 6 July–11 July, 2011
By Philip Cartelli. Near the end of Philippe Grandrieux’s hyperbolic It May Be That Beauty Has Reinforced Our Resolve – Masao Adachi (Il se peut que la beauté ait renforcé notre resolution – Masao Adachi, 2011), screened in the international competition at this year’s FID, director Masao Adachi looks into […]
Cowboys & Aliens (2011)
By Bryan Nixon. Hollywood takes itself too seriously, especially when it should be anything but serious. Common sense dictates that a citizen who is going to the theater to see a film titled Cowboys & Aliens would expect a witty action comedy, in the vein of Men in Black (1997), […]
Handsworth Songs Revisited
By Celluloid Liberation Front. “If the young are not initiated into the village, they will burn it down just to feel its warmth.” African proverb The recent urban unrest that shook the already shaky scaffoldings of English society – sugar-coated with viral advertising yet hardly reassuring – recurs at a […]
16th Annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival, July 14-17, 2011
By Janine Gericke. My fondness for silent film grows more every year because of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. It is exciting to see these pieces of history projected onto a giant screen, especially one as storied and decadent as the Castro Theatre. This festival is populated by a […]