Albert Camus’s L’Étranger (1942), is the kind of novel every bookish teenager once felt compelled to read. Less than 70 pages, it’s not much of a commitment, but it leaves an indelible impression. I read the book at high school and have returned a couple of times since. Unlike much of the literature consumed in one’s teens, Camus’s novel feels just as striking when read at a mature age.

Often known as The Outsider in English, following Stuart Gilbert’s translation, (no longer considered the standard), it’s as disturbing today as it must have been to readers in the 1940s. Part of its impact comes from Camus’s bare, unembellished prose, inspired by Hemingway, but it’s also a philosophical novel, viewed as one of the key works of existentialist literature.

Existentialism, a leading intellectual current in the years following World War Two, is not much spoken about nowadays, perhaps because we’ve internalised its insights so successfully. To say that humanity is alone in a Godless universe, and if God does exist, he doesn’t care, probably describes the beliefs of most people in the western world, who go through their lives with scarcely a thought for the hereafter. We may tolerate all forms of religious belief and feel religion is vaguely a good thing, but for most people God no longer plays a central role in their day-to-day existence.

Those who practice some form of faith would reject existentialism, and always have, but it’s no longer a matter of urgent debate. Most of us today are existentialists without even knowing it, which is why many viewers will find that François Ozon’s film of Camus’s novel touches parts of the psyche which have lain dormant for years.

Read more

At a time when Donald Trump is threatening to destroy “a whole civilisation” in the Middle East, The President’s Cake, puts us on the ground during those days of the early 1990s, when the United States was applying the squeeze to Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, following his attack on Kuwait. Hasan Hadi’s directorial debut reveals the price paid by ordinary people when a superpower imposes crippling sanctions and military strikes on a nation already suffering under a corrupt, brutal regime.

What’s most wonderful about this movie is the way Hadi frames his narrative through the experiences of a nine-year-old girl named Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef), who draws the short straw at school and is given the onerous task of baking a cake for Saddam’s birthday. It’s as if we are watching a bizarre quest, with this stubborn schoolgirl going in search of ingredients in the big city, overcoming one obstacle after another.

For us, baking a cake might not sound like an earth-shattering responsibility, but when the teacher tells you that failure to produce the goods may result in the torture and victimisation of your family, it takes on a sense of urgency. What makes it even worse, was that in Iraq at the time, sanctions had made it difficult to obtain the bare necessities of life. Eggs, flour, sugar and baking powder were in short supply and selling for high prices.

Read more

“Grace” is a concept that has inspired volumes of theological literature, so it’s a brave director that takes it up as the theme of a movie. Paolo Sorrentino, one of the most accomplished filmmakers at work today, doesn’t lack the courage or artistry to weave a story around an abstraction, taking it into the most unlikely of settings: the Palazzo del Quirinale in Rome, the official residence of the President of the Republic.

Politics is familiar territory for Sorrentino, but most of his protagonists have been thoroughly disreputable, from Giulio Andreotti in Il Divo (2008) to Silvio Berlusconi in Loro (2018). Both those scheming powerbrokers were played by Toni Servillo, a great actor, who has starred in most of Sorrentino’s films. In La Grazia, Servillo finally gets to play a political figure with a scrupulous regard for the law. It may say something about Italian politics that he’s a completely imaginary character.

Servillo’s Mariano di Santo is the President of Italy. Like the hero in Italo Svevo’s novel, Confessions of Zeno, he spends the entire story having one last cigarette, savouring this small act of rebellion against the tyranny of a health program that obliges him to eat quantities of quinoa.

A respected jurist who takes his time considering the pros and cons of any case, Mariano has exerted a steadying influence on the chaos of Italian democracy, having negotiated no fewer than six crises. He’s disturbed to learn that his nickname is “reinforced concrete”, but it’s a tribute to his integrity. Coming towards the end of his term of office, Mariano is hesitating to sign a controversial bill on euthanasia into law and pondering two appeals for pardons. The Italian word for an official pardon is “grazia”.

Read more

If Academy Award nominations were a guarantee of quality, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, with a record sixteen, would be the greatest film of all time. The reality is that it’s arguably not as good as some of the features that never made this year’s shortlist for Best Picture. Sinners doesn’t have the depth or drama of Nuremberg or The Testament of Ann Lee, neither of which found favour with the Academy. The obvious reason for its success is that it’s a remarkable exercise in box-ticking, providing all the political and pop cultural triggers that appeal to the kind of sensibility flourishing in Hollywood today.

The film had a brief cinematic release in April last year, before reverting to home viewing platforms where it can be watched at any time. It may yet get another run on the big screen, although that’s for Warner Bros. to decide. In Australia, Sinners was a sleeper at first release, but its later success represents a triumph of global marketing as it has made inroads with an initially indifferent audience.

The aspects of the movie that appeal to reviewers who have given it a 97% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, are precisely what I saw as weaknesses. Coogler has been praised for the way he has stitched together film genres that seem completely incompatible, making Sinners a blend of musical, horror, drama and social history. As unlikely as the platypus, it’s one hell of a high wire act for any writer-director. To my mind, he doesn’t come close to pulling it off.

Read more

For Ann Lee, the visionary leader of the Shakers, fornication was the express lane to hell. So fiercely were these beliefs enforced, her congregation had to adopt children rather than create their own. For their Church to prosper, the Shakers needed keep making converts among the ranks of sinners. Small wonder the sect has struggled to maintain its numbers. In the mid-19^th century, there were more than 4,000 believers spread across 18 communities, today there are only two professed Shakers, residing in a village in Maine.

This may not sound like a promising subject, but Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet, who gave us The Brutalist (2024), have created a movie unlike anything you will have ever seen before. This time it’s Fastvold in the director’s chair, but as with the previous effort it’s a husband-and-wife collaboration. The Testament of Ann Lee is a bio pic of a remarkable woman, an historical epic, a study of faith and fanaticism, and – believe it or not – a musical.

The story is rigidly structured, proceeding by chapters that show how the Shakers find their origins in Manchester in the mid-1700s, cross the ocean to America, and make a new home in the wilderness of up-state New York. Throughout this journey, both physical and spiritual, the true believers grow progressively more devoted to their religious mission while seeking to avoid persecutions stirred up by their manner of worship.

Read more

Searching for redeeming features in Emerald Fennell’s ‘Wuthering Heights’, I could only feel grateful the film gave me an excuse to read Emily Brontë’s book for the fourth time. Wuthering Heights, devoid of the coy inverted commas is, without doubt, one of the greatest novels in the English language. Written by a 27-year-old virgin who would die at the age of 30, it’s a book in which sex and death inhabit every chapter. Although the author spent all but a small part of her life in a lonely parsonage on the Yorkshire moors, she left us a tale that is just as strange and powerful today as it was on first publication in 1847.

One of the definitions of a classic is that one may return to it again and again, always finding something new. Wuthering Heights is that kind of book. At the other end of the scale, Fennell’s sexed-up, celebrity vehicle for Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi is the definition of trash.

At the risk of sounding too portentous, I’d go even further. This film is not simply a travesty it’s an act of desecration. It takes what has always been for me, and I’m sure for countless others, a sacred book and turns it into a soulless extended video clip in which everything that Emily Brontë created is systematically vandalised.

Read more

Chloé Zhao must be a remarkable person to achieve what she’s achieved. Ten years ago, it would have been inconceivable for a Chinese woman to take out Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director, for a film in which hardly anything happens. That film was Nomadland (2020), in which Frances McDormand played a woman who had given up a permanent home and made her life in a camper van. It was a vision of freedom snatched from the staggering poverty and inequality that has consumed America’s working classes.

Nomadland came along at the right time to appeal to a politicised Academy still reeling from the depredations of the first Trump Presidency. It had a singularity of purpose that made the other nominations seem frivolous.

Nomadland was Zhao’s third film, her two previous efforts having barely left a trace at the box office. She followed up with The Eternals (2021), a big budget Marvel Comics Universe production that I haven’t seen, and can barely imagine. By the usual MCU standards it failed with the fans, earning a mere US$402 million.

Hamnet, Zhao’s fifth feature, finds her back in the limelight. It was judged Best Motion Picture – Drama, at this year’s Golden Globes, and is in the running for another Oscar or two. Set in the Elizabethan era, it’s a tale of William Shakespeare and his family, told with an unusual degree of intimacy. True to form, it’s also a slow-moving exercise that builds to a shuddering intensity, although the journey takes almost two hours.

Read more

It’s taken me an unusually long time to see Nuremberg, but having finally managed this feat it’d be a dereliction of duty if the film slipped by without a review. Writer-director, James Vanderbilt, has created the kind of solid, old-fashioned movie we rarely see any more. The dialogue is excellent, the characters convincing, and the moral of the story too big to miss. It deals with a heavily loaded moment in history in a way that doesn’t simply devolve into a fable of good versus evil.

This is quite an achievement because for the past 80 years, the Nazis have been Hollywood’s most reliable moral miscreants. What’s more surprising is that Nazism today is undergoing a resurgence, which seems to denote a sickness in our society. At the very least it reveals an alarming lack of historical consciousness in those who act as if the war itself was only a movie.

Vanderbilt noticed this when he found that for his own daughter the events of World War Two had no sense of reality. As the veterans of the conflict and the survivors of the concentration camps disappear, that human connection with history is lost. The most terrible events begin to seem like fiction.

Read more

Park Chan-wook, South Korea’s answer to Alfred Hitchcock, has taken an old American crime novel and turned it into an allegory for our times. When Donald E. Westlake published The Ax in 1997, he was responding to the growing practice of U.S. manufacturers relocating overseas, to places where materials and labour costs are significantly cheaper. This meant bigger profits for the company and its shareholders, but unemployment for local workers. It spelled the death-knell of the ‘good corporate man’ who might have spent his entire life in one industry, working for a single company. Costa-Gavras made an adaptation of The Ax in 2005 that dealt with this dilemma. The new corporate threat that Park explores is the rise of AI, which promises even greater carnage in the workplace.

In No Other Choice, we follow the fortunes of Yoo Man-su (Lee Byung-hun), a middle-aged manager at a paper factory, who is living the bourgeois dream, with a wife, two kids, and a big house in the suburbs. We realise at once this kind of satisfaction is too good to last, and it’s not long before Manu-su is given his marching orders, following the purchase of his company by an American firm.

What follows is a painful series of humiliations, as Man-su attends workshops in which sacked workers sit around and chant, “It’s not my fault I was retrenched”, or words to that effect. The growth of automation has made the jobs pool contract so rapidly there is nothing on offer, even for the most qualified workers. Having reached the end of his tether, Manu-su arrives at a high-risk strategy to get back in the game.

Read more

By the end of last year, Sang-il Lee’s Kokuho had grossed ¥18.47 billion (A$177 million) at the Japanese box office - an all-time record for a local drama. To put this into perspective, our highest grossing local feature is Crocodile Dundee, at A$47.7 million. OK, the population of Japan may be more than four times that of Australia, but it’s clear we’ve never made anything so wildly popular.

It’s no coincidence that this incredibly popular film deals with Kabuki - a traditional artform unique to Japan. Aussie audiences turning up to see what all the fuss is about are leaving with mixed reactions. For every viewer enraptured by this movie, there are plenty who feel it spends too long showing the actors going through their elaborate routines on stage.

What may have felt boring or confusing to those new to Kabuki, was the main attraction for Japanese audiences, who feel a deep bond with this form of theatre - although one shouldn’t undervalue the quality of the directing, acting and cinematography.

Read more

If proof were required that the most successful and popular films are not necessarily the best, look no further than James Cameron’s Avatar series. The three biggest earning movies of all time are Avatar (2009) (US $2.92 billion) Avengers: Endgame (2019) (US $2.8 billion) and Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) (US $2.34 billion). With two of the top three highest grossing films (three out of four, if we add Titanic (1997) US $2.26 billion!), Cameron can do no wrong in the eyes of studio executives.

Looking back at what I wrote about the Avatar sequel of 2022, I could virtually reprint that review, changing only a few dates and details. Like its predecessor, Avatar: Fire and Ash is excessively long. At 197 minutes, it’s five minutes longer, but no better at justifying the time we spend sitting in the dark, wondering when it’s all going to end. I’m not reflexively opposed to long films, only boring, self-indulgent ones, and the latest Avatar, like all Cameron’s movies, is a vanity project. Weighed on the scales of overall satisfaction, the brief excitement of the action sequences doesn’t cancel out the deficiencies of plot and dialogue or compensate for the movie’s monstrous pretentions.

As with the previous film, the opening scenes create the disconcerting impression that we’ve arrived somewhere in the middle of the story. Cameron and his co-writers seem to believe the fans have immersed themselves so completely in his fantasy of the planet Pandora and the blue-skinned, two-metre-tall Na’vi, that no introduction is necessary. We don’t need to meet Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), the soldier from earth who has thrown in his lot with the Na’vi, or his wife, Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), or the kids, because it’s assumed we already know them. We’re supposed to be acquainted with Spider (Jack Champion), the earth boy who considers himself part of the family; or Jake’s arch-enemy, Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who has been brought back from the dead in the body of another towering, blue-skinned avatar.

Read more

If you’ve ever felt nostalgic about Woody Allen, thinking fondly of his early funny films before he became a social pariah, a 1967 interview with Twiggy may dispel any sentimental twinges. Having burst onto the London scene the year before, Twiggy had ascended to stardom more rapidly than any previous fashion model. Not bad for a teenager from working-class Neasden, who was still struggling to come to terms with the spotlight.

No sooner had she sat down than Allen asks: “Who’s your favourite philosopher?” She rolls her eyes, sticks out her tongue, and replies: “I haven’t got one. I don’t know any. Who’s yours?”

At this point, the tables unexpectedly turn. Allen says, “I like them all… all your basic philosophers.”

“Who?!” demands Twiggy.

“Just all of them,” says Allen.

“I don’t know their names though, do I?” she insists, in her cockney accent. Allen turns to face the camera, looking exasperated, his attempt to embarrass a teenage girl having blown up in his face.

It’s not that Allen didn’t know the names of a whole lot of philosophers, it’s just that he didn’t want to identify himself with any one of them. Or maybe he suddenly realised he was looking like a ghastly, pretentious dick, and wanted to escape. Either way, this was the end of the interview.

Read more

British director, Edgar Wright, says he read Stephen King’s 1982 novel, The Running Man, when he was a teenager. Decades later, he has fulfilled a dream of making it into a movie. It’s the second adaptation of the book, following a 1987 film by Paul Michael Glaser (better known as Starsky of Starsky & Hutch fame) with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the lead role. Although any film with Arnie has its own ineluctable charm, the 1987 version is pretty trashy. It also diverges so far from the novel that it’s largely a different story, which motivated Wright to attempt a more faithful reworking.

By all accounts this is exactly what he’s done, although I wasn’t prepared to read the novel to find out. Stephen King may have millions of dedicated fans, but I find his prose virtually unreadable – which is not to say that his books can’t be successfully adapted for the screen. Hitchcock made classic movies from pulp fiction, and King’s tales have served as the basis for acclaimed features such as Carrie (1976), The Shining (1980), and The Shankshaw Redemption (1994).

Given his proven track record with sharp, original entertainments such as Baby Driver (2017) or Last Night in Soho (2021), I was looking forward to Wright’s take on The Running Man. As is so often the case, a sense of anticipation proved treacherous. Wright has assembled all the desirable elements of a blockbuster sci-fi action film, but the results are strangely uninvolving. As usual there’s a soundtrack packed with classic pop songs, including (inevitably) ‘Keep on Running’ by the Spencer Davis Group. There’s some clever dialogue, no shortage of hair-raising escapes and pursuits, brilliant cinematography and CGI, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was watching a cartoon.

Read more

Teddy is worried about the bees. Their survival is threatened, and he knows who’s responsible. It’s the Andromedans – the aliens who walk among us disguised as human beings. Their experiments are killing the bees and endangering human life, and unless someone acts quickly to stop them, the end is nigh.

This is the desperate scenario that Teddy (Jesse Plemons) explains to his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), a hulking naïf who, despite twinges of doubt, is incapable of arguing against this theory. If Teddy says the aliens are coming to get us, that’s the way it is. All his cousin’s intensive study on the Internet can’t have been for nothing.

Don has no choice but to go along with Teddy’s plan to kidnap a powerful Andromedan and force “it” to grant him an audience on their spaceship during the night of the forthcoming lunar eclipse. Once on board, Teddy intends to negotiate for the fate of the planet, convincing the aliens to abandon their experiments and leave us in peace.

The Andromedan they are targeting is Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), high-flying CEO of the big pharmaceutical company in which Teddy has a job packing boxes in the mail-order department. Although the operation doesn’t go exactly according to plan, they succeed in capturing Michelle. The immediate priority while she is unconscious is to shave her head and cover her with antihistamine cream to prevent her communicating telepathically with her fellow aliens.

Read more

Alan Bennett’s stories often threaten be ‘heart-warming’ and ‘feel-good’, but this impression is quickly dispelled. After a few minutes, our fears are banished by the quality of the writing, the naturalness and wit of the dialogue, and Bennett’s ability to instil the breath of life into his characters. It helps to have a skilful director and an excellent group of actors, and The Choral, which opened this year’s British Film Festival last week in Sydney, meets all these conditions.

Ralph Fiennes leads an impressive cast of old stagers and young up-and-comers in this tale of an amateur Choral Society in Yorkshire, staging a performance of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius, while the First World War looms in the background.

It’s 1916, the venue is Ramsden, a fictional Yorkshire town. The actual filming location was Saltaire, a model Victorian Mill Town built by an industrialist who believed his workers should be properly housed, with access to good health care and education. It’s the positive face of the industrial revolution that brought misery to so many British factory hands.

In this clean, prosperous community, the Mayor, Mr. Duxbury (Roger Allam) is the owner of the Mill and the chief supporter of the Choral Society. Passionate about music, he is also accustomed to singing the tenor solos. The other mainstays are photographer (Mark Addy), and the undertaker (Alun Armstrong). The rest of the chorus is recruited from citizens, old and young, who join up for a variety of reasons. For local lads, Ellis and Lofty (Taylor Uttley and Oliver Briscombe) it’s a chance to meet girls, before being called away to the trenches.

Read more

Nowadays, when I hear about “the new Jennifer Lawrence film”, I don’t feel hopeful. The bright young actress who charmed everybody in movies such as The Silver Linings Playbook (2012) and American Hustle (2013), has been a long time without a decent role. There have been appearances in franchise features such as X-Men, and The Hunger Games, and a bizarre outing in Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! (2017).

While Joy (2015), was slight but acceptable, that couldn’t be said about some of her other choices. Red Sparrow (2018) was an awful dud, and No Hard Feelings (2023) a deadset career killer. Both movies featured shamelessly exploitative sequences in which Lawrence had to bare all for the camera. I’m not exactly prudish, but it was hard to escape the feeling that these glimpses of celebrity flesh were intended to attract audiences that might otherwise not be interested.

Lawrence is getting her gear off again in Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love, although there is a more credible dramatic reason, as she is playing a young mother going crazy in the backblocks of Montana. It’s axiomatic that crazy people walk around naked, or spend hours creeping through the grass on all fours… isn’t it?

In this film, Lawrence spends so long slinking around on her hands and knees, bum in the air, it feels unsettling when she walks on her hind legs. Then again, almost everything she does in this film is unsettling, whether she’s fondling a big knife or pushing the baby in its pram down a lonely road.

Read more

When 18-year-old Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein one stormy night on the shores of Lake Geneva, she could never have imagined she was penning a classic for the ages. First published in 1818, Shelley’s tale is into its third century and is just as compelling as ever. One reason for the story’s unbreakable grip on the cultural imagination is that it warns of the awful consequences of human beings trying to play God – of scientific breakthroughs that outstrip our ability to control and understand them.

Today as we stand on the brink of another earth-shattering scientific revolution with suitably apocalyptic implications, Guillermo del Toro must have felt it was an excellent time for new version of Frankenstein.

For this acclaimed Mexican director there was also the challenge of putting his own stamp on another famous work of fantasy. In recent years he’s drawn on Arthur Machen’s tales for Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) and made a new version of Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio (2022). Many of del Toro’s recent movies have owed as much to previous cinematic adaptations as they have to the original literature. His 2021 take on William Lindsay Gresham’s classic noir, Nightmare Alley, paid homage to Edmund Goulding’s film of 1947. The Shape of Water (2017), drew freely on The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), adding a powerful metaphor about social marginalisation.

Read more

After the Hunt is a film in which no character inspires much sympathy, which may be one reason why director, Luca Guadagnino’s latest effort has had such a mixed reception. With an all-star cast and a topical subject, it would seem to be a contender for higher honours in a quiet year at the cinema. But something, or several things, have gone wrong.

The plot is laden with deliberate obscurities, as characters keep secrets from each other and from the viewer. This is obviously meant to create a sense of mystery, although it often feels merely frustrating. We know there are things that need to be revealed, but those revelations take too long to arrive.

The story suffers from a lack of clarity, as it doubles back on itself, creating further confusion where we might expect resolution. For first-time scriptwriter, Nora Garrett, this may be a way of emphasising the complexity of the issues being raised. Justice is rarely a cut-and-dried affair, especially today, when many believe you can choose or discard facts to suit your opinion, but “complexity” or “ambiguity” are not concepts that will drive a narrative forward.

Read more

Irish cinema is having a moment reminiscent of Australian cinema in the 1970s, with an abundance of talent and self-belief, and a succession of new films making their way into international cinemas and festivals. In recent years the Irish have given us excellent movies such as The Quiet Girl and Small Things Like These, along with spiky, diverting productions such as Kneecap. It’s no surprise that the current Irish Film Festival is a genuinely festive affair, with a growing audience.

Although its screen time in Australian cities is relatively brief, the IFF has made itself the most accessible of all local film events, with a program that allows a range of options for on-line viewing. You can rent any film for $10, while $75 gets you the entire line-up of 19 films.

I’m looking at only two features, both of them superior products. Fran the Man is a mockumentary about the Assistant Manager of a amateur football team in Dublin, who gets caught up in a web of intrigue, trying to bust an international match-fixing scam. Christy is a slice of social realism set in a rundown suburb of Cork, about an estranged teenager struggling to reconnect with his half-brother, friends and family.

Read more

It’s been seven years since the once-prolific Bruce Beresford directed a feature. That movie, Ladies in Black (2018) took me by surprise. It was so up-tempo, so cheerful, yet full of keen observations about Australia in the 1950s. Memories of that sparkling effort made me eager to see what Beresford would give us in The Travellers, a film he has written and directed. I’m afraid I broke my own rule that it’s always best to go into the cinema with diminished expectations.

The Travellers is only 97 minutes, a small story that proceeds at a leisurely pace. We realise almost immediately that nothing especially dramatic is going to happen. Beresford has given us a study of character and family dynamics; of that typically Australian dilemma of being torn between one’s affection for this country, and the lure of the wider world. The narrative is patchy and episodic, with a tendency to set up promising scenarios that fizzle into thin air.

The lead character is Luke Bracey’s Stephen Seary, an Australian stage designer who has achieved great success in Europe and America at a relatively young age. We find him returning to his hometown of Yarrabiddy, an imaginary hamlet in the Western Australian countryside, to be with his dying mother.

Read more