The Emperor’s New Clothes is currently showing at the Sydney Film Festival, and you can grab your tickets here. What is it about these anti-capitalitst films that calls forth our ugliest bourgeoise judgements that result in a desperate search for tiny criticisms that somehow act as a stabilizer for the ‘extreme’ rhetoric exhibited? Russell Brand […]
Category Archives: Film Reviews
June
08
A Pigeon Sat on a Branch reflecting on Existence – Sydney Film Festival Review
posted by lisathatcher
A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence is currently showing at the Sydney Film Festival. You can grab your tickets here. It is usually the simplest of themes in which we see the darkest of ourselves, but no where is this more available and more ignored than in cinema, that great art form […]
June
05
My love don’t Cross that River – Sydney Film Festival review
posted by lisathatcher
My love Don’t Cross that River is now showing at the Sydney Film festival. You can grab your tickets here. My love don’t Cross that River is a South Korean film made by Jin Mo-young in 2014. It’s the story of a seventy-six year-long love affair between a husband and wife filmed over the last fifteen months […]
June
04
The Hunting Ground (SFF Film Review)
posted by lisathatcher
The Hunting Ground is currently showing at the Sydney Film Festival. You can purchase your tickets here. Sexual assault experiences the same amount of false claims as every other crime (that includes robbery, car jacking and murder) and yet it is the only crime where a false claim is the immediate assumption, and the presumed […]
June
03
Dearest – Sydney Film Festival review
posted by lisathatcher
At several points during the first half of Peter Ho-Sun Chan’s emotional child abduction story Dearest, the camera hovers (seemingly unnecessarily) on smaller details of the mish-mash of life in Shenzhen, a major city in the south China province of Guangdong. Details such as a tangled collection of electrical wires each impossible to distinguish from […]
June
01
Articles at The Essential – My take on “The Rock” at San Andreas. (Film Review)
posted by lisathatcher
Over at the awsome magazine The Essential, my latest offering, a review of San Andreas is prepped and primed for viewing. Warning… (that will come as no suprise) I didn’t love this film. Check my review out here. The cynicism that overwhelms San Andreas is so maddening that its Americana puff-piece bullshit appears laughable, until […]
May
27
Song One – The music of our united isolation. (film review)
posted by lisathatcher
Like many films unfairly derided, if you skim the surface of Song One, and point-blank refuse to be seduced by its depths, there is plenty at which to poke a pointy critical stick. A small estranged family, already burdened by grief, are united over one member laying in a coma in hospital, by using music […]
May
16
Mad Max Fury Road – George Miller and the feminist touch. (Film Review)
posted by lisathatcher
Warning: This review contains spoilers. One of the strengths of the Mad Max franchise is its undisclosed historical time frame. This is never truer than in the first Mad Max film, when an opening sequence informs us of the near future setting, but remains poignantly ambiguous, as if to declare the exasperation of existing problems. A favourite […]
May
11
Clouds of Sils Maria – Olivier Assayas includes and subverts the male gaze. (Theatre Review)
posted by lisathatcher
“We are made to need other people, we have no choice, yet we don’t know how to be with them. Not safely.” (From The bitter tears of Petra Von Kant, Play by Fassbinder) To imagine Clouds Of Sils Maria is a film about aging and the way an older actress might see herself reflected in […]
May
03
Jupiter Ascending – Sci-Fi as it should be or One for the true believers. (Film Review)
posted by lisathatcher
I’ve left my review of this film till the hype wore down, considering I have a monumental personal problem with film reviewing this year that is either born of a certain number of years immersing myself in the critical community, or film reviews getting dramatically worse each year – I suspect my problem is a […]
Lisa Thatcher 