Hot on the heels of my watching Dead Man, I saw Coup de Torchon. Where Jarmusch depicts a savage landscape shaping and creating its previously half dead inhabitants, Bertrand Tavernier gives us a very dark show of law men plonked in French occupied Senegal just before the outbreak of world war two. These films have […]
Category Archives: Film Reviews
March
01
Coup de torchon (Clean Slate) – Bertrand Tavernier and the dark comic side of French Colonialism. (film review)
posted by lisathatcher
February
28
Dead Man – Jim Jarmusch, William Blake and the death of America. (film review)
posted by lisathatcher
Some are born to sweet delight, some are borne to endless night. William Blake In 1793, William Blake wrote America a Prophesy which amounts to a kind of formula for revolution. One of the subplots of the work is oppression of the mind – what we might call ‘unconsciousness’ in pop terminology today. Blake had […]
February
27
Side Effects – Steven Soderbergh and the twisting plot combined with the old chestnut. (film review)
posted by lisathatcher
Steven Soderbergh started his career with Sex Lies and Videotape and for that one film alone, he has a lot of credibility with me, no matter how high is “Ocean’s” count goes. He’s an interesting director, the way he can move rather seamlessly between big budget, low substance, Hollywood blockbusters and high-grade art house films. […]
February
26
Adelheid – František Vláčil places all his hope in what goes on between two people. (film review)
posted by lisathatcher
František Vláčil is surely one of the greatest directors to have ever lived. For what it’s worth, he is certainly one of my favorites. I’m not alone in thinking highly of him, his film Marketa Lazarová was voted to be the greatest Czech film ever made (high praise indeed) and he was honored with a […]
February
25
The Saddest music in the World – Guy Maddin makes morbid arty self-consciousness fun. (film review)
posted by lisathatcher
“I just try and put things into forms that will be fun, and if anything, it feels just too good to blurt out the truth.” Guy Maddin I saw my first Guy Maddin film, Keyhole, at the Sydney underground film festival last year. I liked it immediately, feeling right at home with all his film […]
February
24
Stranger than Paradise – Jim Jarmusch and the deadpan comedy of the absurd. (film review)
posted by lisathatcher
The film world on the internet is buzzing with Oscar chat at the moment, and seeing as so many of American offerings in the best film category this year are a poor affair at best, I thought it was a good idea to remember there have been some truly great American films made – even […]
February
23
Cloud Atlas – The Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer make the most expensive independant film of all time. (film review)
posted by lisathatcher
Lana and Andy Wachowski have definitely got a “real is not really what you think real is” thing going. With the enormous success of their Matrix trilogy and then the follow-up successes with films such as V for Vendetta, they have established themselves as a powerful force in that world between worlds narrative. Tom Tykwer […]
February
20
Beautiful Creatures – Richard LaGravenese and the love of a good script. (film reviews)
posted by lisathatcher
Richard LaGravenese seems to be an odd choice as the director for the first of the series post-Twilight fantasy series Beautiful Creatures, mostly because he’s a screen writer and not a director. Yet, in a way this odd twist has worked out well for the film because it has a fantastic script based on the […]
February
18
Anna Karenina – Joe Wright and Tom Stoppard squeeze Tolstoy down to theatre size (film review)
posted by lisathatcher
I was rather shocked to find, as I was researching this film, that the story of Anna Karenina has been made into a film twenty-five times. It was considered by Dostoyevsky – a favorite writer of mine – to be the greatest novel ever written, and Dostoyevsky is not alone in that opinion. Having seen […]
February
16
Hiroshima Mon Amour – Resnais and Duras and the tragedy of memory. (Film review)
posted by lisathatcher
How does one speak about a project that both Marguerite Duras and Alain Resnais called ‘impossible’? I’ve been thinking for days how to talk about Hiroshima Mon Amour and I still can’t think about what to say. It was intended originally as another documentary like Night and Fog, only this time about the horrors of […]
Lisa Thatcher 