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  • Through a Glass Brightly: Andrea Arnold’s 'Fish Tank' and Tom Ford’s 'A Single Man' The Online Monthly - subscriber only access
    Luke Davies | Film | March 2010 | Society & Culture

    “Life’s a bitch ’n’ then you die,” sings the rapper Nas on the soundtrack of Fish Tank (released nationally on 11 March), Andrea Arnold’s gritty and engaging British drama about a young girl growing up without anchor or compass on a drab Essex council estate. “That’s...

  • Lost Boys: Jacques Audiard's 'A Prophet' and John Hillcoat's 'The Road'
    Luke Davies | Arts & Letters | Film | February 2010 | Society & Culture

    In A Prophet, a dazzling new film about innocence and power from Jacques Audiard (director of The Beat My Heart Skipped, 2005), 19-year-old Malik (Tahar Rahim) is about to embark on a six-year prison sentence for assaulting a cop. Polite and...

  • Nowhere Near Hollywood (preview): Australian Film
    Louis Nowra | Film

    Read the full 4500-word essay

  • Nowhere Near Hollywood: Australian Film
    Louis Nowra | The Monthly Essays | Film | Dec 2009 - Jan 2010

    I set out to watch most of the Australian films released this year because I wanted to grasp the condition of our industry. On a practical level, it was often hard to find these films; they seldom stayed in the cinema long enough. I became used to tracking them to small...

  • Bright Stars: John Keats and Fanny Brawne Revisited
    Sophie Gee | Film | Dec 2009 - Jan 2010 | Society & Culture

    John Keats’s last letter is just about his most powerful piece of writing. He was in Rome, dying of tuberculosis. He’d gone there in a final attempt to stave off the death he knew by then was inevitable. He was separated from his beloved fiancée and her family, who had cared...

  • Tooth and Claw: Lars Von Trier's 'Antichrist'
    Luke Davies | Arts & Letters | Film | November 2009 | Society & Culture

    The opening five minutes of Antichrist (released nationally on 26 November) are a compelling symphony of exquisite film-making. In hyper-stylised black-and-white ecstasy – in super-slow-motion – the characters played by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg make love...

  • Tasmanian Devils: Jonathan auf der Heide's "Van Diemen's Land"
    Luke Davies | Film | October 2009 | Society & Culture

    “There’s nothing to a piece of man,” intones the mellifluous voice-over (in Gaelic, with subtitles) late in Jonathan auf der Heide’s strange – and strangely compelling – Van Diemen’s Land. The voice-over runs sporadically yet hauntingly through the film and is at...

  • Amoral Tale: Steven Soderbergh's 'The Girlfriend Experience'
    Luke Davies | Film | September 2009 | Society & Culture

    In what passes for context-setting in a porn clip I found on the internet as research for this review, an off-screen cameraman asks porn star Sasha Grey to tell a little about herself. “When I’m not fucking,” she smiles, “I like seeing a good movie, or writing, or fooling...

  • Cover Story: Robert Connolly's 'Balibo'
    Luke Davies | Film | August 2009 | Society & Culture

    In the book Dispatches, Michael Herr’s virtuoso memoir of the Vietnam War, Sean Flynn – Errol’s son – an actor and photojournalist who went missing in action in Cambodia in 1970, is portrayed as a kind of philosopher-adventurer, bounding like a fearless young pup...

  • Dirty Work: Luke Davies on Christine Jeffs’ ‘Sunshine Cleaning’
    Luke Davies | July 2009 | Arts & Letters | Film | Society & Culture

    Television’s police-procedural dramas have suffered for some time now from a disease for which there is as yet no apparent cure. It hasn’t been adequately studied or named, but might best be thought of as Forensic Overkill Syndrome. It multiplies by the day,...