Author: Jenni Kauppi

Melbourne International Film Festival Review: The Diary of a Teenage Girl (USA, 2015)

We open in San Francisco in 1976. Minnie Goetz (Bel Powley) has just had sex for the first time. With Monroe (Alexander Skarsgård), her mother’s (Kistin Wiig) boyfriend. Based on Goets’ graphic novel memoir of the same name, The Diary of a Teenage Girl charts a dark and disturbing journey of a young woman, going…

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Melbourne International Film Festival Review: 7 Chinese Brothers (USA, 2015)

Larry (Jason Schwartzman) is on the road to nowhere in notoriously chillaxed Austin. He’s just lost his job for a string of misdemeanours, and his only friends appear to be his very beloved French Bulldog Arrow (Schwatrzman’s pet in real life), a prescription medication dealer and aged carer, Norwood, and his grandmother (Olimpia Dukakis), a…

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We get a taste of the new 8K Radius series coming to Hawthorn’s Lido Cinemas

Following the success of the Classic Cinema’s first 8K Radius series, Hawthorn’s newly minted Lido Cinema will be getting its own 8-part series of these five-minute film portraits of Hawthorn locals who live and work within an eight kilometre radius of the cinema. Directed by Clayton Jacobson (Kenny), the films are a rich and varied…

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Melbourne International Film Festival Review: The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: ‘Him’ and ‘Her’ (USA, 2014)

The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby is the ambitious vision of writer/director Ned Benson to capture a relationship in breakdown. Shot over three films ‘Her’, ‘Him’ and ‘Them’, (the first two screened back to back at this year’s MIFF, the second released later this year), Benson covers all angles of the crisis. In ‘Her’, Eleanor (Jessica…

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Melbourne International Film Festival Review: 10,000km (Spain/USA, 2014)

Alex (Natalia Tena) and Sergi (David Verdaguer) are very much in love, living in a poky apartment in Barcelona and planning to have a baby when Alex is offered an un-missable career opportunity. In Los Angeles. Living 10,000 kilometres apart, they make the best use of modern technology to stay in touch – Skype features…

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Sydney Film Festival Review: Appropriate Behaviour (USA, 2014)

Played with deadpan composure by writer and feature debut director Desiree Akhavan, we meet Shirin in the last stage of her breakup with long-term girlfriend, Maxine (Rebecca Henderson). In the opening scene she is collecting her remaining belongings, exchanging final barbs and discussing the future custody of a shared strap-on dildo. The scene closes on…

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Film Review: Palo Alto (MA15+) (USA, 2013)

In the privileged valleys of north-west California, the next generation are figuring their shit out. Based on James Franco’s linked short story collection of the same name, Palo Alto is the directorial debut of Gia Coppola. The premise will be familiar to anyone versed in the disaffected-slacker-coming-of-age genre: boys do stupid things, with pyrotechnics, alcohol and/or…

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AICE Israeli Film Festival Review: Israel: A Home Movie (Israel, 2013)

A collection of home movies that tell the story of Israel from 1930 to the 1970s, and screening at the 2013 AICE Israeli Film Festival, Israel: A Home Movie is an intricate and kaleidoscopic retelling of history via as-it-happened style footage, reframing the historical through the personal. The footage itself is dazzling. An archival treasure…

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AICE Israeli Film Festival Review: Ballad of a Weeping Spring (Israel, 2012)

In an unspecific time in an unspecified part of Israel, Amram Mufradi (David Tassa) is on a mission. It is his dying father’s last wish to hear ‘The Ballad of a Weeping Spring’, a song written by his band, the Turquoise Ensemble, 20 years before, but as yet unperformed due to a tragedy that has echoed through…

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Melbourne International Film Festival Review: Coming Forth By Day (2012 Egypt, UAE – CTC)

Set in current day Cairo over the course of one day, Coming Forth By Day is a slow moving and bleak meditation on the life of Suad (Donia Maher) an unmarried 30-something who lives with her parents, and together with her mother (Salma Al-Najjar), looks after her ailing father (Ahmed Lutfi) . As the film…

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Melbourne International Film Festival Review: It Felt Like Love (2013 USA – CTC)

A quietly devastating meditation on female adolescence, It Felt Like Love is the feature debut of director Eliza Pittman made on a tiny budget, and shot over 18 days in August 2012. The film opens with an awkward teenaged Lila (Gina Piersanti), childishly smeared in sunscreen at the beach. It’s this yardstick from which Lila’s character arc moves over the…

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Album Review: Bob Evans – Familiar Stranger (2013 LP)

Leaving the suburbs behind, Bob Evans’ Familiar Stranger hits a lush, layered note. Cannily on-trend, in touch with all the latest tropes of nostalgic pop, it’s a departure from the acoustic guitar-driven sounds of his so-called suburban trilogy. Like any album, it’s marked by derivation, with many a nod to alumni like The Beatles (as…

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Live Review: Green Stone Garden + Analechi – The Darwin Railway Sports and Social Club (16.02.13)

Playing to a (fairly adoring) home crowd, Darwin’s Green Stone Garden are back on stage for their first gig of the year, fresh from the studio and channeling a new sound. Most importantly, they come armed with some much anticipated new songs, including ‘The Island’, pegged to be the single when the EP North is…

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Live Review: Josh Pyke + Mark Gray – The Darwin Railway Sports and Social Club (15.11.12)

It’s a casual sit-down affair at The Rails on Thursday evening, candle-lit, except for those dastardly flashing fairy lights. Support act Mark Gray is local singer-songwriter, who comes armed to face a sold out crowd with a handful of really decent songs and solid guitar technique. But in the face of an increasingly loud room,…

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Live Review: Oh Mercy – Darwin Railway Club (27.10.12)

Tonight at the hot and sweaty Railway Club, tracks like ‘Deep Heat’, ‘Suffocated’ and ‘Fever’ all seem really appropriate. A layered, deep and funky house party album, Deep Heat is rife with glam-rock references, endearing rock star affectation plus a little bit of reggae. It’s a total and planned departure, Oh Mercy frontman Alex Gow…

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Live Review: Dappled Cities + Green Stone Garden – The Darwin Railway Sports and Social Club (28.09.12)

The balmy late-September air fills Darwin’s stalwart live music venue, the Railway Club, as it one again goes through an on-again, off-again relationship with its air conditioning. Instead, a small upright fan does what it can. It’s special night for live music. Dappled Cities launches their Lake Air tour, and the weekend also marks the…

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Film Review: Darwin International Film Festival Closing Night: Your Sister’s Sister (2012 USA)

Jack (Mark Duplass) is mourning the loss of his brother. After a mild implosion at a memorial ceremony, his best friend, also his brother’s ex, Iris (Emily Blunt) orders him to some alone time in her father’s cabin in the wintery woods on an Island off Washington State. But Iris’ sister, Hannah (Rosemarie Dewitt), has…

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Film Review: Darwin International Film Festival: On The Road (2012 USA)

Kerouac’s classic Beat-generation manifesto On The Road transforms to the big screen in all its pulsing, joyful free-wheeling madness, complete with crazy cats, hustlers, junkies, and poets. Brazilian director Walter Salles (Central Station) and screenwriter Jose Rivera (The Motorcycle Diaries) deliver a pitch-perfect manifestation of the cult classic, transporting the viewer to the time and…

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Darwin International Film Festival Review: Flowers of War (2011 China/USA – Australian Premiere)

The horror of war is painted with devastating clarity in Flowers of War, a historical fiction drama by director Zhang Yimou (Hero, House of Flying Daggers). Set during the 1937 Japanese massacre in Nanjing, under imminent occupation, the city is reduced to dusty rubble and the last remaining citizens are fleeing for their lives amid…

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Film Review: Darwin International Film Festival: Lore (2012 Australia/Germany – MA15+)

An Australian-German collaboration by director Cate Shortland (Somersault) and based on Rachel Seiffert’s 2001 Booker Prize short-listed novel ‘The Dark Room’, Lore follows the journey of Lore (Saskia Rosendahl), the daughter of an SS officer at the fall of the Third Reich, forced to flee her home with her four young brothers and sisters when…

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Darwin International Film Festival Review: I, Anna (UK/Germany/France, 2012)

A noir thriller set in grey, low-lit London and based on the Elsa Lewin’s 1990 novel of the same name, I, Anna is the directorial debut of Barnaby Southcomb. Beginning with a series of narrative threads woven together through a mosaic of flashbacks, the film draws on the classic murder mystery genre, with Anna (Charlotte…

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Darwin International Film Festival Review: Beauty (South Africa, 2011)

Set in South Africa, Beauty is a sombre meditation on masculinity and sexuality. François (Deon Lotz) is an Afrikaanner family man, who, at the film’s opening is celebrating his daughter’s wedding. He is affluent, ordinary, respected and liked. But, as suggested by the film’s opening shot – a long-angle zoom, ever so slowly drawing in…

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Film Review: Darwin International Film Festival: Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011 Turkey – CTC)

Winner of the Cannes Grand Prix, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia follows the overnight and early morning journey through the wind-swept Anatolian steppes of a group of forensic and law enforcement officers along with two murder suspects in search of a body they buried, but can’t remember where. It’s a long night, and as…

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Darwin International Film Festival Opening Night Review: Farewell My Queen (2012 France – CTC)

Set on the eve of the French Revolution (and based on the novel of the same name by Chantal Thomas, winner of French literary award the Prix Femina in 2002), Farewell My Queen, follows a fictional account of the early stages of the monarchy’s epic downfall through the eyes of the court’s peons – specifically…

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Live Review: Tim Rogers + Catherine Britt – The Darwin Railway Sports and Social Club (05.09.12)

The first time I speak to Tim Rogers on the phone, he’s delightful; the dream interviewee. Upbeat and charming, he calls me ma’am a lot and answers discursively; seguing smoothly from the book he’s reading about Russian poetry, to baseball and a conversation he recently had with his ex-wife about the Irish-Jewish tradition of mourning,…

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