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By Anders Furze
In volume 2 of his Melbourne International Film Festival diary, critic Anders Furze takes in films including the hot ticket of the festival: French period drama Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and a restoration of 1990’s Return Home, starring a young Ben Mendelsohn. * Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire is an
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By Anders Furze
My experience of the Melbourne International Film Festival veers wildly from year to year. One year I’ll focus on retrospectives, the next I’ll see 30 films. The next, two. At a festival this large, it’s impossible to craft a comprehensive survey, at least for somebody who can’t spend two-and-a-half weeks watching four films a day.
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By Anders Furze
It’s a brave new world at this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival, the first for new artistic director Al Cossar after the departure of Michelle Carey. Long-time screening venue the Australian Centre for the Moving Image is out of action due to renovations, and the festival’s footprint has expanded to some 20 venues, including Carlton’s
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Monrovia, Indiana Frederick Wiseman returns to MIFF with this portrait of one small town deep inside America. A festival stalwart, Wiseman is keenly aware of the power of editing to create meaning. His observational documentaries gradually but powerfully nudge us to find meaning in juxtaposition, to extremely compelling effect. Words and Silk: the Imaginary and Real
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It’s been just over 20 years to the day since the much-loved teen movie 10 Things I Hate About You, featuring Heath Ledger’s star-making turn as a charismatic, roguish heartthrob, first hit cinemas. Based on The Taming of the Shrew, the 1999 film was one of a slew of Shakespeare adaptations of that era, such
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By Anders Furze
With The Good, The Bad and The Elderly, 2019 Moosehead Award-winning comedian Tanya Losanno explores life in the ‘sandwich generation’ – thirty and fortysomething-year-olds responsible for taking care of ageing parents and their own children. The show begins with Losanno describing her love for the music of Italian composer Ennio Morricone. Morricone is well known for scoring
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It’s rare for a superhero blockbuster to inspire a near-spiritual experience, but that’s what Patty Jenkins’ 2017 film Wonder Woman did for author and comedian Joanne Brookfield. In the opening chapter of her new book No Apologies (Echo Publishing, $29.99) she describes, awe radiating off the page, how it felt to watch “a woman saving the world”: “Imagine if that
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You know it’s going to be a big-budget, blockbuster show when, squished into the Tower Room at the Malthouse, a glow of moody red lighting spills through from offstage OP; and then the sounds of thundering hooves – destriers charging, the clashing of swords, the cries of men – and it’s so close, so life-like,
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Many Australians would recognise Michelle Wolf as the comedian who skewered Donald Trump’s press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2018, when Wolf told Sanders to her face that she burns facts and uses the ash to create a “perfect smokey eye”. Though the set sparked outcry – mainly from
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By Anders Furze
Some film stars play variations of themselves; others disappear into their roles. Somehow Juliette Binoche manages to do both: you’re never entirely unaware that you’re watching the French arthouse stalwart, and yet she manages to embody a spectrum of human emotions unreachable to lesser actors prone to overcompensation and overacting. Between a recent retrospective of
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