Captive Radio screens on June 16 at the Sydney Film Festival. You can get tickets here. During four decades of civil conflict in Columbia, guerrillas, paramilitaries and criminal gangs have kidnapped more than 20,000 people. Most hostages are taken for ransom or political bargaining. Sometimes hostages are in captivity for many years. Remarkably, they are […]
Category Archives: Film Reviews
June
08
Captive Radio – Lauren Rosenfeld and the power of the human voice to reach accross the jungles of terror. (Sydney Film Festival short film review)
posted by lisathatcher
June
07
I am Divine – Jeffrey Schwarz gives us a “What’s-not-to-love” look at the most beautiful woman in the world. (Sydney Film Festival Film Review)
posted by lisathatcher
I am Divine is currently showing at the Sydney Film Festival. You can get your tickets here. “He took it to a different level. He took it to a level of anarchy.” John Waters As far as documentaries go – and I’ve seen some very well made documentaries at the Sydney Film Festival – I […]
June
06
Blackfish – Gabriela Cowperthwaite with a “just the facts” look at the dark side of SeaWolrd. (Sydney Film Festival Film Review)
posted by lisathatcher
Blackfish is currently showing at the Sydney Film Festival. You can get tickets here. Gabriela Cowperthwaite is not a film maker activist. She was driven to make Blackfish after the death in 2010 of highly skilled trainer Dawn Brancheau who was killed by the orca Tilikum after one of the shows at Sea World. What […]
June
05
Dragon Girls – Inigo Westmeier and the Kung Fu girls of the Shao Lin. (Sydney Film Festival Film Review)
posted by lisathatcher
Dragon Girls is showing at the Sydney Film Festival. You can get tickets here. Just as the shores of India have always seemed to offer a kind of promise of transcendental new-age enlightenment to those of us who live in countries of excess, so too we have held a fetish of fascination for the rigors […]
June
02
Algorithms – Ian McDonald reminds us, four moves in we are all blind. (Sydney Film Festival review)
posted by lisathatcher
Algorithms is currently screening at the Sydney Film Festival. You can grab your tickets here. Quite by accident, this is the second film I have watched about chess in the 2013 Film Festival. The first I saw, called Computer Chess, is a fictional film set up to look like a documentary on the 1980’s and […]
May
28
Computer Chess – Andrew Bujalski reminds us that Computers used to be exciting. (Sydney FF Film Review)
posted by lisathatcher
Computer Chess is currently playing at the Sydney Film Festival. You can grab your tickets here. Surely one of the most intensely disappointing aspects of the digital age is capitalism’s ability to domesticate it. It seems quaint now, but when we were first faced with the rapid expansion of computer technology and its mind-boggling abilities […]
May
26
Vicky Christina Barcelona – Woody Allen and the impossibility of our desires. (Film review)
posted by lisathatcher
In The Perverts guide to Ideology, a certain emphasis is placed on our desire and the impossibility of its fulfillment. This is a Lacanian idea (and one I think at this point in my intuitive travels makes a lot of sense) and it is double interesting to remember that Woody Allen has been through a […]
May
25
The Perverts Guide To Ideology – Slavoj Žižek says we are responsible for our dreams. (Sydney FF Film Review)
posted by lisathatcher
This is a review of The Perverts Guide to Ideology which is showing at the Sydney Film Festival. Grab your tickets here. I already am eating from the trash can all of the time. The name of this trash can is ideology. The material force of ideology makes me not see what I am effectively […]
May
24
Only God Forgives – Nicolas Winding Refn and the Oedipus reach. (Sydney Film Festival Film Review)
posted by lisathatcher
Only God Forgives is showing at the Sydney Film Festival in Competition. Grab tickets here. His destiny moves us only because it might have been ours — because the Oracle laid the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him. It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first […]
May
23
The Hangover 3 – What’s not to love? (film review)
posted by lisathatcher
I saw The Hangover part three earlier this week. I took a demographically appropriate eighteen year old white male along with me, and he laughed all the way through, as did all the people around me, and claimed the film to be an almighty success by the end. As for me, I laughed also and for […]
Lisa Thatcher 