Roberta Torre’s spasmodic Lost Kisses is a missed opportunity. This lackadaisical film about a 13 year old girl in the town of Librino revered for a vision and subsequently treated by the local community as a saint, fails to capitalise on its best ideas. Manuela (Carla Marchese) is a quiet girl, overshadowed by her extroverted […]
Using clichés as crutches, writer-director Massimiliano Bruno has taken a very safe route with his latest film, Escort in Love (Nessuno mi può giudicare) (2011). No shipping into unchartered waters for Bruno who, with co-writer Edoardo Falcone, contrives a scenario in which as 33 year old woman used to opulence and bossing her caricaturised migrant
Writer-director Alice Rohrwacher’s Corpo celeste is a welcome dosage of social realism from Italy. Taking her cue from the visual aesthetic perenially employed by the Dardennes brothers, Rohrwacher has crafted a poignant tale of religious awakening in a girl, Marta (Yle Vianello), who has returned to Calabria after ten years in Switzerland with her mother
After a rapid ascension to the acting sub A-list in films like The Departed (2006) and Up in the Air (2009) (for which she received an Oscar nomination), Vera Farmiga has thrown her weight behind a more intimate, personal story for her directorial debut. Based on a non-fiction book by Carolyn S. Briggs and adapted
Writer-director Ti West very neatly blended lavish servings of comedy to the mix when writing his most recent chiller, The Innkeepers. Recently, at the Melbourne International Film Festival, he claimed a shift in pace was required after the relentless darkness of his previous film, the 80’s set shocker, The House of the Devil (2009). The
For newcomers to the craze of pursuing deadly weather events conjured by Mother Nature, Sean Casey’s Imax short Tornado Alley will be a tasty bite-size introduction to the nutty passion that drives certain motivated scientists and the meteorologically inclined through the central southern states of America for a few months each year. However, anyone familiar
Andrew Niccol has run out of great ideas. From the Philip K. Dick assisted The Truman Show (1998) to his own projects as director, including the clinical Gattaca (1997) and the underrated S1m0ne (2002) in which he glimpsed a future Hollywood where the real stars are hologramic projections, Niccol’s mind has been fertile ground for
An eighty year old man pierces the New York throng on his pushbike, only pausing to take snaps of the latest in fashion: what is this, Portrait of a Fetishist in his declining years? An oddball begging for loose change in exchange for a fleeting photographic memory? Neither, it turns out this is Bill Cunningham,
An early figure from the career of Nick Cave and his seminal band, The Birthday Party, guitarist Rowland S. Howard would later leave his own mark on the local music scene. Beginning in the wild days of Melbourne pub rock of the 1970’s with Cave and their earliest collaborators, Autoluminescent delves into the promising beginnings,
For the love of things that go bump in the night, a trifecta of spooky home videos has now been assembled with the arrival of a third Paranormal Activity instalment. A former teenager in love with films like Poltergeist (1982) and The Entity (1982), I’m now predisposed, it seems, to looking favourably upon films about
