Film

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‘The Hunt’ and ‘Spring Breakers’ film review

By Luke Davies

Danish director Thomas Vinterberg made Festen (1998), a family reunion drama so dazzling and disturbing it was hard to look away and yet excruciating to continue looking. In The Hunt (in national release 2 May), Vinterberg continues honing his skills in the cinema of anxiety. Mads Mikkelsen is Lucas, a recently divorced, affable kindergarten teacher at a small school in a tight-knit Danish

Call a somnambulance

‘Sleepwalk with Me’ film review

By Luke Davies

“I think to be a comedian you have to be a little bit delusional. Particularly starting out, there’s just so much failure. And amidst that failure you have to tell yourself, ‘It’s going quite nicely.’ Because if you didn’t, you’d just never get on stage again. You’d be like, ‘I guess human beings don’t like me.’” Mike

Michael Haneke’s ‘Amour’

Love in the Time of Ruin

By Luke Davies

Michael Haneke’s films tend towards the bone-chilling. They are sedately, or at least evenly, paced. They have an intoxicating, heady strangeness and are rarely less than gripping. When they are masterful it is because of, not despite, their formalism and austerity. In Funny Games (1997) Haneke achieved the remarkable feat of making a brilliantly compelling yet deeply disturbing horror film that is also a savage deconstruction and ton

Kathryn Bigelow’s ‘Zero Dark Thirty’

Day of the jackpot

By Luke Davies

The wrong film invariably wins the Oscar for Best Picture, which is in fact the award for the marketing campaign that most successfully targets the ageing and conservative 6000 eligible voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Kathryn Bigelow’s overrated The Hurt Locker, which won in 2010, a year that included the brilliant South

Jacques Audiard’s ‘Rust and Bone’

As it Comes

By Luke Davies

Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts), a hulking, blank-faced man, with his five-year-old son Sam in tow, first hitchhikes, then takes the train from the dark, grimy north to the sunny expanses of the French Mediterranean coast, where he and Sam are to crash for a while

‘Dead Europe’ by Tony Krawitz (director)

By Catherine Ford

When Greek-Australian photographer Isaac Raftis, the protagonist in Tony Krawitz’s adaptation of Christos Tsiolkas’ novel, announces a trip to Europe to train a lens on his family’s long-abandoned homeland, he’s submitted to hostile tes

Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘The Master’

Volatile Spirits

By Luke Davies

“You’re aberrated,” says the marvellously named, honey-voiced Lancaster Dodd, to Freddie Quell, a drifter with alcoholic tendencies, in Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master (in national release 8 November). When Freddie says he doesn’t know what that means, Dodd

Andrew Dominik's 'Killing Them Softly'

The games of men

By Luke Davies

Andrew Dominik, whose melancholic epic The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is surely one of the great Westerns, has followed up with a film that, while smaller than its predecessor, is still, at moments and for entirely different reasons

Benh Zeitlin’s 'Beasts of the Southern Wild'

After the Flood

By Luke Davies

A rapturous and stunning new film, the improbable product of a modest budget and an unstructured shooting schedule, first-time director Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild (in national release 13 September) is set in a fictional, dirt-poor bayou community known

Aki Kaurismäki’s 'Le Havre'

A Port for the Soul

By Helen Garner

A watchman strolling late one night on the wharves of the French port of Le Havre raps his stick on the side of a container, and hears the faint cry of a baby. An official arrives with a clipboard: the container is in transit from Gabon to London, but due to a

Daniel Nettheim’s The Hunter and Anh Hung Tran’s Norwegian Wood

Taking to the Woods

By John Collee

Shot in some of Tasmania’s most breathtaking wilderness, The Hunter (in national release) tells the story of an American mercenary (Willem Dafoe) and his search for the last Tasmanian tiger. The last thylacine died in captivity in 1936 but surviving black-an

Fred Schepisi’s 'The Eye of the Storm'

Shakespeare in Australia

By Peter Conrad

It’s fortunate that Australia’s new capital was called Canberra not Shakespeare, as a few Empire loyalists proposed at the time of Federation. The bourgeois bard of Avon hardly qualified as a founding father; even so, Shakespeare has haunted Australian culture, dari

Helen Garner on Justin Kurzel’s Snowtown and Brendan Fletcher’s Mad Bastards

Broken Communities

By Helen Garner

In 1999, in the small South Australian township of Snowtown, police entered the vault of a disused bank and found a serial killer’s stash: dismembered corpses stored in barrels of acid. Director Justin Kurzel, in his first feature film Snowtown (to be released on 19 May, and a Cannes Critics’ Week selection), fronts up gamely to the story behind this gru

Susanne Bier’s 'In a Better World' and Denis Villeneuve’s 'Incendies'

Triumph of the Kill

By Luke Davies

In Susanne Bier’s In a Better World (in national release on 21 April) – this year’s Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film – there’s a character called Big Man, a warlord terrorising local villagers near a Sudanese refugee camp. Big Man amuses himself making bets with his underlings as to the impending gender of the unborn children of local women. Impatient to collect, he has been s

Peter Weir’s 'The Way Back' and Leon Ford’s 'Griff the Invisible'

Economies of Scale

By Helen Garner

Epic is one word people resort to when confronted by a tale like the one Peter Weir tackles in his new movie, The Way Back. Seven prisoners escape from a Siberian labour camp in the winter of 1940. They trudge to the Mongolian border, then across a stony deser

Olivier Assayas’ 'Carlos' and Terrorists in Film

Paths of Glory

By Kate Jennings

Every road leads to a reckoning. In Olivier Assayas’ movie Carlos, the Venezuelan terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez – AKA Carlos the Jackal – meets his reckoning not when he is finally kidnapped in Khartoum in 1994 and taken back to France to be imprison

Tom Hooper’s 'The King’s Speech' and Derek Cianfrance’s 'Blue Valentine'

Failure to Communicate

By Luke Davies

“Do you know any jokes?” asks a speech pathologist of his newest patient, a stammerer. “Timing is not my strong suit,” the uptight patient replies. It’s the early 1930s and the Australian pathologist Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), known for his unorthodox techn

Tools of the Trade

By Luke Davies

“Every time an illegal dances across our border,” says Senator John McLaughlin (Robert de Niro) at a rally, “it is an act of aggression against this sovereign state.” This Texan politician, the “Independent from Cocksucker County”, is running for re-election. A supporter at the rally carries a sign riffing on the World War I recruitment poster, with Uncle Sam proclaiming, “I want YOU