Clip is a Serbian film that I found more disturbing than A Serbian Film. The latter picture gained notoriety last year for its graphic depictions of rape, incest, paedophilia and necrophilia, and was the result of additional controversy in Australia after it was refused classification – banned – by the Australian classification review board. Personally however, I found the content of director Srđan Spasojević movie to be so ludicrous – [...]
In 2004, Australian filmmaker Stephan Elliott fell from a cliff whilst skiing, breaking his back, pelvis and legs. He was given 20 minutes to live, but given that this is not a posthumous interview, live is what he did. The road to recovery was long, but this near-death experience renewed Elliott’s vigour to make movies, much of which he’d lost after a decade of disappointing followups to his breakout hit The [...]
Boy meets horse. Boy looses horse. Boy gets horse. It’s the classic formula for a Hollywood love story – albeit with a slightly equestrian twist –and also the plot of War Horse, the latest film from director Steven Spielberg (Tintin), based on the novel by Michael Morpurgo and the award-winning stage production by Nick Stafford. The story follows a horse, named Joey, in a war, named The Great War, [...]
Released back in 2003 when twilight was still a time of day, the original Underworld was a mildly entertaining B-movie that did the whole vampire vs. werewolf thing before, you know, doing the whole vampire vs. werewolf thing was considered uncool. The film was made on a comparatively small budget of $22 million, lending it a certain underdog appeal as it went up against box-office goliath Pirates of the Caribbean: [...]
The sophomore effort of writer/director Jeff Nichols (Shotgun Stories), Take Shelter calls to mind the story of Noah, only to repaint the biblical hero as a paranoid schizophrenic. It begins when a Middle American family man named Curtis LaForche, played with ground-shaking intensity by Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road), becomes convinced that an apocalyptic storm is just beyond the horizon and is compelled to take drastic action in order to [...]
From Abrams (Super 8) aping Spielberg, Allen (Midnight in Paris) namedropping Bunuel and Scorsese (Hugo) paying homage to one of cinema’s earliest icons, lately we’ve seen filmmakers increasingly looking back. It’s a trend born, one suspects, of a desire to return to what many perceive as a simpler, more innocent time; a time when artists, not accountants, decided when and how a movie was to be made. Call [...]
I don’t know much about Rotterdam. Wikipedia tells me – now that it’s back in action following that rather terrifying twenty-four hour blackout – that it’s the second largest city in The Netherlands, as well as one of the busiest ports in the world. The Rotterdam tourism board website tells me that it’s “a trendy, dynamic city” that you really need “to experience for yourself”. And a Google search tells [...]
A group of American youths are besieged by invisible attackers in the Russian capital of Moscow in The Darkest Hour, an alien invasion movie so woefully written, directed and acted that it makes Cowboys & Aliens, Battle: Los Angeles and Skyline all look positively award worthy by comparison. That this movie exists makes me sad. That I’m writing about it makes me sadder. But is does. And [...]
