Reviewed by Lee Hill In his 1946 essay, Politics and the English Language, George Orwell said: “…if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better.” Clear thinking, common sense, open debate and reason face new threats from the grip that marketing, branding, spin, “fake news” and other forms of intellectual cheerleading now…
Read MoreFilm Review: A Fantastic Woman
Reviewed by Linda Marric A few films have managed to garner the kind of good will directed at Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Lelio’s brilliantly well observed feature A Fantastic Woman. Nominated for a foreign language Oscar at this weekend’s Academy Awards, the film offers a wonderfully complex, engaging and thoroughly affecting account of a young trans woman’s battle against preconceived ideas about gender and sexuality in a traditional latin society. Staring…
Read MoreReport: I, Tonya Press Conference
Report by Amon Warmann I, Tonya has been a big player in this year’s awards season, and for good reason. Margot Robbie delivers a career-best performance as Tonya Harding – an ex figure skating champion with a shocking story to tell – and she’s ably supported by an eye-catching turn from Allison Janney, Harding’s overbearing mother.
Read MoreFilm Review: The Shape of Water
Reviewed by Rachael Kaines With The Shape of Water Guillermo del Toro has finally returned to form. A charming and beautiful romance as well as a tale (tail) of underdogs (fish) of all shapes and sizes. del Toro manages to represent many marginalised aspects of society in the setting of America during the cold war (even a group we never knew were marginalised — fish men).
Read MoreFilm Review: Loveless
Reviewed by Lee Hill For international audiences, Andrey Zvyagintsev is THE Russian director in the way that Andrei Tarkovsky was in the 80s. Since his astonishing debut in 2003, The Return, he has found a way to combine portraits of individuals in crisis with wider examinations of Russia’s inability to move away from totalitarianism. In his last two films, Elena (2011) and Leviathan (2014), relationships between men and women are…
Read MoreFilm Review: Phantom Thread
Reviewed by Rachael Kaines Not quite the harrowing experience some might be expecting, Phantom Thread is closer to a perverse romantic comedy than a serious or dark drama. If the idea of watching people throw beautiful barbs at each other over a breakfast table sounds appealing, then Phantom Thread is your film.
Read MoreFilm Review: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri
Reviewed by Freda Cooper It was only a matter of time. One of the brothers McDonagh had to hit the jackpot. Big brother John Michael had made The Guard, Calvary and, more latterly, War On Everyone. Martin had In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths under his belt. And now he brings Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri to the screen – the most cumbersome of titles for a film which is the…
Read MoreFilm Review: All The Money In The World
Reviewed by Freda Cooper Only two months ago, a large question mark hung over the fate of Ridley Scott’s All The Money In The World. We all know why and we all know what happened next. Rather than have his film shelved, the director reverted to his original choice of Christopher Plummer to play billionaire J Paul Getty and re-shot his scenes in just six weeks.
Read MoreFilm Review: The Disaster Artist
Reviewed by Rachael Kaines James Franco, (much like Tommy Wiseau the man he plays), directs, produces, and stars in The Disaster Artist, easily his finest film to date. Based on a book by Greg Sestero about the nightmare experience of making a horrendous movie called The Room, and the extremely strange experience of being friends with the writer, director, producer, and star, Tommy Wiseau.
Read MoreFilm Review: Mudbound
The opening scene of Dees Rees’s Mudbound shows two brothers digging a hole in the dreary half-light of an approaching storm, surrounded by mud. This scene bookends the film as we spend the rest of the film finding out how the characters got there, and evokes Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying — a stormy and unforgiving Mississippi, full of mud, washed out bridges, and the need to bury dead relatives.
Read More