Film

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.

There is a scene in Maria Schrader’s film She Said where two New York Times journalists debate the merits of pursuing an investigation into Harvey Weinstein’s sexual abuse, given, as one of them says, that actresses already have a voice. ‘Are there other women to be looking at?’, she asks.

After the uneven space operatics of Ad Astra (2019), American writer–director James Gray returns to Earth – specifically to Queens, New York, 1980 – with Armageddon Time, a burnished, contemplative, and astutely observed autobiographical coming-of-age tale. This is a rapidly escalating micro-trend in cinema; it seems that every auteur with enough critical clout will soon be expected to churn out their very own childhood memoir movie, from Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018) and Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast (2021) to the upcoming self-told Steven Spielberg origin story, The Fabelmans.

For the casual moviegoer unconcerned by matters of auteurship, it can still come as something of a shock to learn that the person behind the original Mad Max trilogy (1979–85), as well as its decade-defining follow-up, Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), also brought us the madcap animal antics of Babe: Pig in the City (1998) and the all-singing, all-dancing penguin colony of Happy Feet (2006) and Happy Feet 2 (2011). George Miller has one of the most eclectic oeuvres in modern cinema, but all his films are defined by a rich, seemingly limitless vein of imagination, as well as by the technical and aesthetic mastery necessary to mine it. Whether dabbling in live-action or 3D animation – whether wrangling penguins, pigs, or eighteen-wheeler ‘War Rigs’ – Miller is a storyteller first and foremost. It stands to reason that his latest film is a story about stories themselves: where they come from, what they mean to us, and what their place is (if any) in the modern world.

In the documentary film Navalny, Christo Grosev, chief investigator with the Bellingcat group of independent journalists, details how he followed the data trail to identify the FSB (Russian secret service) kill team who shadowed Alexei Navalny (leader of the opposition movement) to Siberia in August 2020 and poisoned him with the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok. The attack left Navalny in a coma, teetering between life and death in a Russian hospital, the doctors apparently complicit in the attempts to cover up the source of his illness.