Author: James Curnow
Review: Live your childhood again with ‘Miss Kiet’s Children’
With their new film Miss Kiet’s Children, filmmaking couple Petra Lataster-Czisch and Peter Lataster have achieved something truly extraordinary. Over the course of two mesmerising hours, they’ve found a way to have viewers abandon their mundane adult perspectives, transporting them back to a time in which stolen crayons and memorising times-tables were great emotional challenges.…
Why I just couldn’t like ‘Rogue One: A Star Wars Story’
SPOILER ALERT: IF YOU’VE NOT SEEN ROGUE ONE, OR HAVE ANY INTEREST IN SEEING IT, DO NOT READ ON. I was little late to see Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and if I’m to be totally honest I wasn’t in any rush. Last year I wrote a very positive review of Star Wars: The…
Dangal: The perfect Bollywood film for the uninitiated
There is a general resistance to Bollywood cinema in Western countries. This isn’t so much because of any strong objection to them, as it is because their structure is so fundamentally different from the output of Hollywood. They are frequently quite long, invest heavily in a sense of the melodramatic, and perhaps most significantly, the…
Trevor Graham’s Monsieur Mayonnaise: Getting Mora out of History
It will come as no surprise to regular readers that over the last year I’ve become increasingly interested in the films of Australian director Philippe Mora, most particularly his films focused on the representation of history. From Swastika (1974) to Snide and Prejudice (1997), each of Mora’s historically centered works is part of a life-long…
Aaron Biebert discusses A Billion Lives
Ahead of its Australian premiere at the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival, I recently had the opportunity to see A Billion Lives, the documentary feature film debut of director, Aaron Biebert. The subject matter is likely to be controversial, and I must confess to having started writing this article on numerous occasions, looking for the best…