Film
Not much appears to happen in Aftersun, the first feature film of young Scottish director Charlotte Wells – unless you count the snooker games, scuba diving, mud baths, and other holiday activities. But don’t be fooled. Like the water polo players in one of the many watery scenes, all the grunt work takes place below the surface. All you have to do, as spectator, is sit back and look for the clues.
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In February 2019, artist Nan Goldin and the activist group she founded staged a ‘die-in’ at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The group demanded that the Museum refuse further funding from the super-wealthy art-patron Sackler family, whose pharmaceutical arm, Purdue, produced and aggressively marketed the highly addictive prescription painkiller OxyContin. ... (read more)
Given the success of the film adaptation of his previous play, The Father (2020), with an Academy Award-winning lead performance from Anthony Hopkins and a slew of nominations for himself, it seems only natural that writer–director Florian Zeller should turn to another in his trilogy of plays, The Son, for his next film project. (Zeller’s play, Le Fils, had its première in Paris in 2018.) Co-written by famed English playwright Christopher Hampton and shot by cinematographer Ben Smithard, who both worked on the earlier film, The Son represents, in many ways, a consolidation of Zeller’s talents, even if it doesn’t quite reach the harrowing intensity of The Father. ... (read more)
The Empress Elisabeth is trapped, cinched by the titular garment as tightly as she is stuck in her very public role and a loveless marriage. The audience, too, is held captive, mesmerised by the bold and dynamic performance of Vicky Krieps. ... (read more)
He may shock, horrify, polarise, and disgust but one thing Darren Aronofsky will never do is bore an audience. This is true of the director’s latest feature film, The Whale (2022), which has all the intensity of Black Swan (2010) and fascination of the controversial mother! (2017). Happy to say there’s no gore at all in this surprisingly sympathetic study of man who is morbidly obese, striving to right a wrong he committed in the past. ... (read more)
I worked front-of-house at the Melbourne Recital Centre for the better part of my twenties, sitting in on hundreds of classical music performances during that time. The highlight for me was a performance by the Australian Chamber Orchestra of Wojciech Kilar’s Orawa. I was to accompany a number of VIPs who would be seated onstage for the duration of the performance, just behind the orchestra, facing out – inverting the perspective I had grown so accustomed to. Now, with the musicians’ backs to me, and the audience in darkness, there was only one person for me to focus on: the conductor.
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'The devil’s throat’, ‘the devil’s lair’, ‘the devil’s cauldron’: if volcanoes are the hearth of the devil, there is no question that Satan has an irresistible allure. To watch the earth split asunder and spew up its entrails in a roiling inferno is to encounter the elemental turbulence that festers underneath the stable ground we tread. It shakes all certainty to its core. It brings us face to face with all our cultural imaginings of the rage of apocalypse, and we cannot take our eyes off it. ... (read more)
People’s taste in satire can be as acquired and specific as their taste in art overall; some favour scalpel-like precision (the television of Armando Iannucci), while others prefer more of a sledgehammer approach (the films of Adam McKay). Your appreciation for Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness will vary depending on your tolerance for sweeping observational class satire (and the on-screen depiction of bodily fluids) ... (read more)
When did nice become an insult, and simple such a burden? Pádraic Súilleabháin (Colin Farrell) is a nice man, leading a simple life on the fictional island of Inisherin, just off the coast of Ireland. The year is 1923. Even as a civil war rages across the water, for Pádraic all is well in the world so long as he gets to meet his lifelong friend, Colm Doherty (Brendan Gleeson), at the pub at 2 pm every day for a pint. ... (read more)
Timothée Chalamet, sharp of jaw and dark of eyebrow, found fame due to his starring role in Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name (2017), a languorous evocation of semi-closeted first love set in the sun-drenched Italian countryside, with a tender and judicious screenplay by that veteran filmmaker of suppressed emotion, James Ivory, of Merchant Ivory. Being all of twenty when that film was shot, Chalamet produced the kind of lightning-in-a-bottle performance that only a young and very green actor can: unaffected and genuinely heart-rending. Half a decade on, his gracile person causes red-carpet mayhem worldwide; he’s Timmy now, the internet’s boyfriend and Vogue magazine cover star. Watching his stilted, wary performance as a cannibal – yes, really – in Bones and All, which reunites him with director Guadagnino, I could only conclude that the real wrongdoer is fame, which eats young talent and is never satisfied. ... (read more)