Category: Reviews
One Film Critic’s Week in Review: From Beasts of No Nation to The Last Witch Hunter
For film fans, the time period from late October through New Years is like one extended Christmas morning. All the big movies that you have been hearing about for the past year have their releases clustered together so that they can maximise their award-season potential. But for a film reviewer, you feel more like an…
Hollywood Parking in The Intern: A Sweet Tune Undermined by False Notes
There’s a cliché in American movies and television known as “Hollywood parking.” You know the drill. Middle of New York City. Hero drives up to some swanky spot and parallel parks in front of the door. It’s the kind of thing that never actually happens if you are not in a movie. It’s the kind…
Dolares de arena: Small Pleasures, Deep Hearts and Dreams to Explore
The story goes that when financiers of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s silent film classic The Passion of Joan of Arc screened his initial cut, they were appalled. They had invested quite a bit of money so that Dreyer could recreate the court in Rouen where French clerics would ultimately find Joan guilty of heresy. Yet Dreyer’s…
Jake Wilson on Mad Dog Morgan: Histories, Myths, Legends and Motivations
It was in 1976 that Philippe Mora released his underappreciated classic, Mad Dog Morgan, starring Dennis Hopper as the once notorious bushranger Daniel Morgan. In many ways, Jake Wilson’s excellent new monograph of the same name, the latest entry into the Australian Screen Classics series from Currency Press, positions Mad Dog Morgan as a fusion of…
Why Shyamalan’s The Visit is less than the sum of its parts
You want to know the problem with writing? Everything gets written down. In ink. Posted to websites where it will never go away. And so, occasionally something like this happens. A few weeks ago, I posted a review of the new Jesse Eisenberg movie American Ultra. It was a very positive review for a movie…