The first act set-up of a biopic is almost always laborious. Grandiose voiceover and lines of dialogue are laden with the knowing weight of history; various conflicting images of the subject and their ‘truth’ are forced, often boringly, into narrative harmony. Lee, the feature début from respected cinematographer Ellen Kuras (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, [2004]) and long-time passio ... (read more)
Tiia Kelly
Tiia Kelly is a critic and essayist based in Naarm. Her writing on film and culture can be found in Meanjin Quarterly, The Guardian, Kill Your Darlings, Overland, Senses of Cinema, The Big Issue, and elsewhere. She has been a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellow and regularly reviews films for ABC Radio Melbourne.
Something illusory lurks in the films of Ryûsuke Hamaguchi. Characters encounter each other under false and mistaken pretences; layers of performance mount and interact; memory intrudes and falters. In the Japanese director’s latest, an environmental fable that won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2023 Venice Film Festival, the ecosystem of a small village is threatened by a Tokyo business’s plan ... (read more)
Since her first feature, French writer-director Justine Triet has probed the fraught boundary between fact and fiction. Age of Panic (2013) melded documentary footage of France’s presidential 2012 election with a chaotic domestic drama about visitation rights. In In Bed with Victoria (2016) and Sibyl (2019), she featured various artistic types crafting stories about themselves and others in dece ... (read more)