I was not all that impressed when this film was first released in Australia as it seemed out of whack with Francis Ford Coppola’s earlier filmography.  My film journal notes recorded that the characters seemed to sink under the weight of the storytelling and that Coppola’s decision to separate himself from earlier film versions left him stranded in a weird no man’s land - neither literary adaptation nor horror movie (not even psychological horror).

Rewatching it all these years later,…

I need to declare up front that I find it impossible to maintain any kind of critical distance from this documentary, directed by Serge Ou (with a segment director credit for Andy Neil) for Wildbear Entertainment, the ABC and Film Queensland.  This is the footage and the soundtrack of my 20s and it was a joy to spend a little over an hour seeing dozens of people I knew well 40  to 50 years ago, bands that were part of…

This documentary short film (9 minutes) from director Tristan Anthony Ortiz tells the story of a young African-American man CJ Bellamy. Cinematographer Gage Eggleton begins with a close-up of CJ working out in the gym on a weight machine, then climbing a rope before zooming out to show him coming down the rope and into a wheelchair.

As a high schooler, CJ played baseball and American football before choosing basketball as his sport of choice, and he seemed headed for…

This documentary, directed by Jérôme Revon, is a live recording of the grand reopening concert held at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris on 7 December last year, following immediately after the formal rededication ceremony which is not included here.  The cathedral itself looks spectacular, taken back as far as possible to how it looked when it was completed in 1345, 182 years after work had commenced on the site.

While this is essentially a concert film, we never get to see…

There was a point about a third of the way through writer/director Elia Suleiman's absurdist comedy where I realised that hidden just under the surface of the very funny screenplay was a diamond-hard political edge.

Suleiman, playing himself, opens his film in Palestine then travels to Paris and New York trying to get producers to put up the money for his latest film. He runs into Western stereotypes of what a Palestinian is and what a Palestinian film must be.…

Thanks to a sensible approach by Australia’s Classification Board which rated the film R18+ (restricted to 18 and over), we are now able to see Sandra Wollner’s film which was pulled from the Melbourne International Film Festival virtual program after two forensic psychologists ed by Karl Quinn, the film critic at The Age, condemned the film as “a source of arousal for men interested in child abuse material” in one case and constituting “child abuse material” in the other.  The…