Author Archive

The Tree (M)

Directed by Julie Bertucelli

Australian films have often delved into the co-existence of nature and culture and French director Julie Bertucelli uses rural Australia to set her adaptation of Judy Pascoe’s novel ‘Our Father Who Art in the Tree’. The opening scene is a house being transported on the back of a truck down a dusty road and central to the drama is an enormous Moreton Bay Fig tree whose branches reach towards the sky and roots stretch over the ground. Dawn (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and Peter O’Neill (Aden Young) live with their four children next to the tree which is larger than the house. When Peter crashes his car into the tree and dies, the tree offers an unusual form of solace to Dawn and her eight year old daughter Simone (Morgana Davies). (more…)

Matching Jack (M)

Directed by Nadia Tass

While Jack (Tom Russell) and his friends are watching a magician at his birthday party, his father David (Richard Roxburgh) does a disappearing act. A little later, when Jack finds himself in Melbourne Children’s Hospital, his mother Marissa (Jacinda Barrett) is unable to locate her architect husband who is meant to be interstate at a conference. In actual fact, David is with his current mistress Veronica (Yvonne Strahovski), his phone is switched off and he is planning to leave Marissa. So, just when Marissa finds out that her only child has leukaemia, she also finds out that her husband is a serial philanderer. (more…)

Boy (M)

Directed by Taika Waititi

Boy (James Rolleston) lives on the east coast of New Zealand, in a small impoverished town where one person seems to have all the available jobs. It is 1984 and the eleven year old Maori boy is obsessed with Michael Jackson and his latest dance moves. Boy and his younger brother Rocky (Te Aho Eketone-Whitu) are both highly imaginative and their antics are hilarious even though there is an underlying seriousness. Rocky thinks that he has special powers and Boy has built his father up to be all sorts of heroic figures including a war veteran, a Samurai warrior, a deep-sea diver and a rugby captain. (more…)

Kandahar

Directed by Andrei Kavun

In 1995, a Russian plane with a crew of seven was forced to land in the Afghani province of Kandahar and, although there are only five pilots in the film, this is the story of what happened to them when they were imprisoned for over a year. Even though their documents were in order and they weren’t violating any international rules, the captain had to land his Ilyushin-76 freight aircraft on the dusty landing strip when a fighter jet threatened to shoot it out of the sky. While the Russians in their crisp white uniforms demand to see someone from the consul, it soon becomes clear that the Taliban rebels are playing by a very different rule book. (more…)

Inception (PG)

Directed by Christopher Nolan

Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) specialises in stealing people’s secrets while they are asleep by inserting himself in their dreams. That is the premise of the latest film from the director of Momento, Insomnia, The Prestige and The Dark Knight who delves into the realms of memory manipulation. Christopher Nolan asks his audience to take a leap of faith and indulge in his multi-layered, existentialist film that has been described as ‘James Bond on acid’. This is a demanding and rewarding film because when you work out the rules of the dream world the characters inhabit, they change. (more…)

Runaways (MA)

Directed by Floria Sigismondi

Joan Jett was only 16 when she started the all-girl band The Runaways. This was in the 1970s, just after she had been informed by a music teacher that girls didn’t play electric guitars and she should stick to strumming ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’. Kristen Stewart, who is 4 years older than that, puts on a sneer and plenty of tough-chick attitude as she teams up with three other girls and in-you-face record producer Kim Fowley (Michael Shannon). According to Fowley, it was time when men wanted to see women in the kitchen or on their knees, and breaking into the machismo world of rock was not about women’s lib – but women’s libido. (more…)

South Solitary (M)

Directed by Shirley Barrett

Meredith Appleton (Miranda Otto) vows to remain cheerful as the small boat approaches her new home – a baron, bleak island in the middle of nowhere. She is accompanying her uncle, George Wadsworth (Barry Otto) who is replacing the previous head lighthouse keeper who committed suicide. It is 1927 and communication is by semaphore to passing ships or via carrier pigeons that, more often than not, won’t leave the island. Clutching her pet lamb, Meredith struggles up the steep, rocky edge of the island from the boat, and it is obvious that she will need a lot more than white stockings and a smile to remain upbeat. (more…)

The Waiting City (M)

Directed by Claire McCarthy

Claire McCarthy first went to Calcutta in 2002 and did some volunteer work at an orphanage where she met many middle-class Western couples wanting to adopt children. She realised that the waiting period to receive a child was often quite emotionally draining for the couples involved and she also reflected on what it would mean to take a child away from their culture. This Australian writer/director filmed The Waiting City entirely in India, setting an intimate, complex love story of transformation against a breath-takingly beautiful backdrop of Calcutta. (more…)

Howl (M)

Directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Freidman

In 1955, Allen Ginsberg, a previously unpublished 29 year-old beat generation poet, revealed his vision of the world in his poem Howl. It was a cry of pain and protest from someone who felt that his homosexuality set him apart, and he actually spent eight months in a mental institution being given electro-shock treatment before he promised the doctors that he would become heterosexual in order to gain his release. Solomon, a fellow patient and friend, was not so lucky and ended up being given a lobotomy. We know this because Solomon made his way into Ginsberg’s iconic poem Howl. (more…)

Creation (PG)

Directed by Jon Amiel

One hundred and fifty years ago, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of the Species By Means of Natural Selection. The book still creates controversy today because he pitted science against religion and proposed that instead of God creating all creatures in one week, brute survival over thousands of years was responsible for our evolution. The film is based on Darwin’s great-great-grandson’s book Annies Box, which is about Darwin’s (Paul Bettany) last years of writing his monumental work. It was a time where he was at odds with his deeply religious wife Emma (Bettany’s real life partner Jennifer Connolly) as well as trying to come to terms with his eldest daughter’s death. (more…)