Sydney Film Festival

Based on a memoir by American writer James Lord and adapted for the screen by actor Stanley Tucci, Final Portrait is a concise passion project with committed performances and evident production care that sadly doesn’t overcome its bland setting. Anchored by a wonderful turn from Geoffrey Rush as eccentric painter Giacometti, this dramedy of sorts…

Acclaimed Indigenous  Australian director, writer and performer Leah Purcell has been awarded the 2017 Sydney-UNESCO City of Film Award at last night’s closing of the Sydney Film Festival. The award follows a huge year for Leah, from adapting and starring in the theatre adaptation of acclaimed Australian novel The Drover’s Wife, with which she won the…

The Sydney Film Festival has come to a close for another year – and with it come all the great memories of the films that surprised us, inspired us and left us wishing the event would never end. Alas, it has – but here are five films we’re taking away with us as the best…

Last night’s Closing Gala for the 2017 Sydney Film Festival saw an array of diverse Australia films and talent receive distinctions, as well as the Australian premiere of highly-anticipated Netflix Original Film Okja as the 64th Festival came to a close. The prestigious Sydney Film Prize was awarded to Ildikó Enyedi‘s intriguing love story On Body and Soul, while…

A song is as song except when it’s a Terrence Malick film. The famous director’s latest experimental offering is an absolute waste in that it is all show and no substance. It weaves together cameos from famous A-list creatives and a cast of Hollywood’s finest actors and then it does nothing. Absolutely nothing. For 129…

Okja is a film involving a giant mutated pig. What more do you want? But seriously, in order to understand the hype of the film, you have to know the filmmaker Bong Joon-Ho. Bong Joon-Ho is an acclaimed Korean filmmaker who has made some incredible films. And the reason he is so acclaimed is his…

The story of The Go-Betweens had previously been largely untold save for Robert Forster’s autobiography, Grant & I. But the film, The Go-Betweens: Right Here is set to change that. It’s a wonderful music documentary that plays out like a love letter to a seminal, Australian band. It also dives head-first into the melodrama, adventure,…

Fans of off-kilter comedy should find something of value in Jeff Baena’s quirky spoof The Little Hours, a play on the 14th-century Giovanni Boccaccio novella The Decameron. With hefty doses of witchcraft, torture, and pan-sexuality peppered throughout the script, it’s not hard to see some viewers being confounded by Baena’s film just as much as those…

Thoroughly engaging, immensely poignant, and remarkably evocative, Call Me By Your Name functions as both a coming-of-age tale and a love story, likely to surprise viewers as to where it travels on both accounts. Based on the novel by Andre Aciman, and co-penned for the screen by director Luca Guadagnino (A Bigger Splash), James Ivory…

It would have been too easy for a film like Una to result in something unreservedly perfunctory. The fable of the abuse victim confronting her perpetrator has been depicted more than one would wish to count, and the argument can be made that a fair share wishes to portray the subject matter no more than…

Having proven his worth as a screenwriter with both Hell or High Water and Sicario, Wind River serves as scribe Taylor Sheridan’s directorial debut.  Arguably arriving with high expectations, Sheridan’s tight, often brutal thriller proves his workings with such professionals as David Mackenzie and Denis Villeneuve has paid off, showcasing an ease behind the lens…

Making his directorial debut, penning the script and holding the starring role, Austrian actor Josef Hader has impressed festivals around the world with the dark comedy Wild Mouse – which has had its Australian premiere this week as part of the Sydney Film Festival. The film stars Hader as Georg, a classical music critic who…

Audacious is definitely the right word to start with when it comes to describing the Mathieu Denis and Simon Lavoie-directed Those Who Make Revolution Halfway Only Dig Their Own Graves. At 180 minutes, it’s a leviathan of a film that often comes across as equal parts provocative and indecipherable. The central narrative here centers on…

I don’t want to make a Star Trek joke – it’d be too obvious and you would only resent me for it – but as much as it pains me, I do need to say that space really is the final frontier. It’s always right there, just outside our atmosphere, and for decades we humans…

Agnieszka Holland creates a character to love and to loath in Spoor, the Polish thriller-comedy that follows one woman’s passion for animal justice in a town that doesn’t share the same sentiments. Spoor, meaning the tracks left by an animal, is a film that rarely falls from the trail, coming together as a poignant comedy…

Some people subscribe to the theory that you’ve got to suffer for your art. Two such individuals include the Godfather of Punk, Iggy Pop and the best-selling French novelist, Michel Houellebecq. In To Stay Alive – A Method the pair share a meeting of minds in a film that is artistic, experimental and semi-autobiographical and…

You may want to walk away from Better Watch Out during its first half. For the first 30 minutes Chris Peckover gives us a Christmas-themed home invasion thriller that is sorely lacking in originality and only manages a few mild chuckles, upheld by teenage actors who are clearly struggling with the seemingly insipid material script….

It seems that American Indians have been erased from the history books, including the chapters relating to contemporary music. Until now. The documentary, Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked The World looks set to change all of that by celebrating the contributions of these individuals and finally giving credit where it’s due. The film is directed…

Michael Haneke is a bit of a misanthrope, isn’t he? Granted, I haven’t seen all of his films, but the few that I have seen seem to have a very critical view on society and human nature. And compared to mainstream fare, he makes films with plenty of space for the audience to contemplate and…

The ghosts of never-ending war and destruction haunt Rusudan Glurjidze’s

Akihiko Shiota’s Wet Woman in the Wind is a feature-length manhunt, set into motion by Shiori (Yuki Mamiya) riding her bike into the sea. She emerges as she entered, focused and unwavering, locking on to Kosuke (Tasuku Nagaoka), a playwright in pursuit of celibacy. Shiota’s film develops into a playful take on a Japanese sub-genre…

At first glance, I’m tempted to drum up some connection or parallel between You Have No Idea How Much I Love You and last year’s Europe, She Loves. Both are European documentaries that engross themselves utterly in their subjects and return with captivating insights into modern humanity. However, aside from the size of its ambitions,…

Out of all the cinematic genres, horror is, in my opinion, the best outlet for creative storytelling. Whether in a metaphorical sense, a symbolic sense, or just nuts-and-bolts mainstream filmmaking, horror can engage, thrill, scare and surprise, regardless of what it looks like on the outside. Case in point, David Cronenberg‘s The Fly. With a…

Fundamentally there is much about Sami Blood that cinema has seen many times over, though for her debut feature writer-director Amanda Kernell has delivered a uniquely complex and painfully relevant coming-of-age while also shedding light on the largely unknown indigenous population of Swedish Lappland. A film of cultural identity and great pain, the prodigiously talented…

At first glance, the logline for Ingrid Goes West can sound a bit twee, tacky or hyperbolic. In the wrong hands, this feels like a film that could easily have come off the wrong way. However, it’s to the credit of director Matt Splicer that it feels less like a lecture from your parents more…

This is not a love song- it’s a review of Public Image Limited’s (PiL) documentary. The film, The Public Image Is Rotten is one that focuses on John Lydon AKA Johnny Rotten AKA the band’s one mainstay (just like The Cure’s Robert Smith). It shows an outspoken and spiky man who has tempered through age…

Adapting her own novel for the big screen, German author-director Helen Hegemann makes a polished feature debut with Axolotl Overkill. Pulse firmly on the rapid strobe-lit streets of Berlin, the film is very much a muse on teenage excess and independence, as self-destructive as in can be, with an assured sense of style and impressive…

A Modern Man is a documentary about a handsome, contemporary classical violinist named Charlie Siem. But who is Messer Siem? Unfortunately that question is not really answered in this film because this British-Norwegian musician puts up a wall that is largely impenetrable. This film is directed by Eva Mulvad (The Good Life). It begins with…

When you consider the name Winnie Mandela do you think of the mother of a nation or a terrorist? The documentary, Winnie tends to sit in the former camp by telling this woman’s history and story from her own point-of-view. It’s fascinating to hear her out and this documentary is a long overdue one, but…

The Untamed, Amat Escalante’s oddball genre film built with space monsters and sexual tension, could have worked just as well as a dysfunctional family drama. The eccentric Mexican director has packed a lot into his fourth feature, an instantly memorable and incredibly unique piece that understands its best possible tension comes from contrasting a heady…