Film
Aman steers a fishing vessel through grey-blue seas off the coast of wintry Massachusetts, while another man chats with a young boy in a life jacket. The camera keeps its distance, the three figures aboard the boat framed by a wide horizon, but we soon perceive that the boy is son to the man at ...
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There is a striking scene early on in Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight that sums up the whole film. It is dusk and the sun is about to set on a Miami Beach. A young African American boy and his mentor sit by the sea and watch the ebb and flow of the ocean in the dwindling light. Having just run away ...
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For the first third of this film, you would be forgiven for thinking you were back under the influence of the Italian neorealists: largely non-professional actors in a realistic milieu; themes of poverty and deprivation; a child at the centre of the action. That it takes place in India only heightens the ...
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In London, 1947, a young white English woman named Ruth Williams (Rosamund Pike), of modest background, meets an ordinary-seeming young black man named Seretse Khama (David Oyelowo) at a dance. They go on a few dates, swap jazz records, and then, in short order, the young ...
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If you’ve just read a novel prior to seeing the film derived from it, you tend to know what to expect in the way of major plot manoeuvres. Attention is then apt to focus on how the filmmaker has responded to the original, and the ‘what’ can then often be seriously challenged. As one who believes ...
... (read more)La Belle et la Bête, The Triplets of Belleville, and David Bowie: Nothing has changed (Melbourne Festival)
In the notes accompanying this year’s Melbourne Festival, artistic director Jonathan Holloway stated that his diverse program was designed to ‘puncture the creative borders between artforms’. The concept of artistic cross-fertilisation is hardly new, nor does it always result in something worth ...
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Early in Helen Garner’s Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004) there is a striking description of Anu Singh, the Canberra law student arrested in 1997 for drugging her boyfriend Joe Cinque with a cocktail of heroin and Rohypnol. In court one morning, Singh uses the interval before the judge’s arrival ...
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It is possible that the remainder of 2016 may produce a more memorable film than Sunset Song, but I doubt it. None so far has moved and enthralled me as Terence Davies' latest has. How I wish he didn't keep us waiting so long between films. It was the semi-autobiographical Distant Voices ...
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The ending of the BBC 'mockumentary' sitcom, The Office (2001–03) was suitably cathartic. Its supporting protagonists, Tim Canterbury (Martin Freeman) and Dawn Tinsley (Lucy Davis), walked off into the sunset hand in hand to Yazoo's synth love-ballad 'Only You', and its central character ...
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High-Rise has been a long time coming to the cinema screen. J.G. Ballard's novel of the same name has been slated for adaptation almost since it was published in 1975: director Nicolas Roeg (Walkabout, The Man Who Fell to Earth) was provisionally attached to the project in the late 1970s ...
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