Tag: cinema
Interview: Nick Barkla on Inside Fighter
Inside Fighter is the kind of uncontrived and intimate cinematic portrait – free of pretence or judgement – that acts as a reminder of the possibilities of the documentary form. For each and every second of the film’s relatively brief 51-minute running time, it is clear that first-time director Nick Barkla has entered into the…
Ben Wheatley directs J. G. Ballard’s “High-Rise”: Why movies should move
This is a very simple rule, and, as with most simple rules, we must allow for a great many exceptions. But the rule still has merit. Movies are better when they move. That’s why Joon-ho Bong’s Snowpiercer is better than Ben Wheatley’s new movie High-Rise. Well, one reason, anyway. One very simple reason. The stories…
Interviewing Philippe Mora: History and Hitler Deconstructed
At some point in the early 2000s, as a young cinephile burrowing into the nooks and crannies of Australian film culture, I came across the name Philippe Mora. At the time, like many others, I understood Philippe Mora to be a director of camp horror classics like The Beast Within (1982), The Marsupials: The Howling…
Hollywood in the 1970s: 10 Films History Forgot
I became a film fan in the 1970s. It was a good decade, one of the best if we’re ranking Hollywood in such a fashion. It had a number of iconic movies. There were the blockbusters – Jaws and Star Wars – which would rewrite the rules for how Hollywood manufactured its product. There were…
Loving Jake Gyllenhaal: From City Slickers to Nightcrawler
I’ll admit it. I was not always the biggest Jake Gyllenhaal fan. But, as Richard Cohen quoted Nora Ephron at the latter’s funeral, “This is going to be like the movies. We start as enemies and end as friends.” Who better to apply a “like the movies” quote to? The son of a director/screenwriter marriage,…