Film
Kokuhō (★★1/2), Sunset Sunrise (★★), Chime (★★★★1/2)
The phenomenal box office success of Lee Sang-il’s Kokuhō – a sprawling epic about the friendship and rivalry between two kabuki actors – has been regarded as something of a miracle in Japan. The surprise stems from the status of kabuki: despite being a centuries-old art form of immense cultural significance, it remains neither broadly understood nor widely appreciated.
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In recent years, much fuss has been made about our foremost filmmakers’ apparent reluctance to set their films in the present day. Instead, they have flocked to the comforts of nostalgia, just as audiences have.
... (read more)Frankenstein (★★) and Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere (★★★1/2)
The first filmed version of Mary Shelley’s gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) was the silent short Frankenstein (1910). Since then, more than four hundred versions of Shelley’s sutured-together golem have bestridden both the large and small screen. The most well known remains Universal Pictures’ Frankenstein (1931) and its sequel, Bride of Frankenstein (1935), pre-Code gothic horrors which implanted Boris Karloff’s pitiable Monster in the collective imagination forever after.
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What Is Wrong with Men by Jessa Crispin & The Male Complaint by Simon James Copland
The Mountain Bride – Vermiglio (★★★★1/2), The Boy with Pink Trousers (★★★1/2), and La Grazia (★★★★★)
Maura Delpero’s The Mountain Bride – Vermiglio was the winner of the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize at the 2024 Venice Film Festival. It is a film of austere beauty, as fragile as it is forceful. Set in the Trentino village of Vermiglio in 1944, it conjures a community perched on the edge – geographically at the border of Switzerland and Austria, historically at the close of World War II, and spiritually at the uneasy threshold between tradition and change.
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Agnes (Eva Victor) is a high achiever. Barely out of her twenties, she is already a faculty member of the English department at a north-eastern US college. The red brick college sits with certainty in the landscape; so should Agnes, but something is off. The cottage where she lives – narrow and tall, just like she is – feels isolated. At night she hears the wind in the trees and checks the door, waiting for something. A reckoning never materialises.
... (read more)Australia at the Movies: The ultimate guide to modern Australian cinema 1990-2020 by David Stratton
Right now on the website for A24 – the reigning enfant terrible of indie American film distribution – you can buy a ‘Babygirl Milk Tee’ for $40, a T-shirt prominently featuring an image of a tall glass of milk. This is an allusion to one of the more memorable moments in Halina Reijn’s Babygirl, when upstart intern Samuel (Harris Dickinson) surreptitiously purchases a glass of milk for his much-older boss, Romy (Nicole Kidman), at a work function, then watches her drink it in a single gulp; a semi-public display of psychosexual domination.