When Martin Scorcese’s Hugo came out at the end of 2011, we were all re-entranced with the Lumier brothers again, and the birth of cinema. The interest sparked a kind of revival of sorts, with the rocket in the eye of the moon motif suddenly being found all over the place. However Wim Wenders charming […]
Tag Archives: Film review
March
11
A trick of the Light – Wim Wenders reminds us the German’s did it first. (Film Review)
posted by lisathatcher
March
05
The Paperboy – Lee Daniels and the question of what went wrong with a butchered script. (film review)
posted by lisathatcher
I’ve said on this blog before that I don’t review works I don’t like, but The Paperboy is such a mess, that to review it feels like a necessary act of catharsis. It’s an enormous shame, because in the hands of a director with more experience I think it had the makings of a truly […]
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
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 […]
February
07
My American Uncle – Alain Resnais and the thing that drives us. (Film Review)
posted by lisathatcher
My American Uncle is a metaphor for the happiness we all hope comes out of no where for no reason that we as human creatures for some strange reason think we deserve. There is a wonderful moment in the film when Janine (Nicole Garcia) is speaking with Zambeaux (Pierre Arditi) and she describes an assumption […]
January
23
Damsels in Distress – Whit Stillman back after thirteen years. (Film Review)
posted by lisathatcher
I barely knew this was on at the cinema last November, it got such limited released here in Sydney. It seems to have been floating about for a while, and if Wikipedia is to be trusted (and why wouldn’t it be?) it has barely grossed a third of its budget at the box office. At […]
January
22
2 or 3 Things I know about her – Jean Luc Godard whispers meaningfully. (Film Review)
posted by lisathatcher
The above scene is easily one of the greatest in the history of cinema. It is Godard’s beautiful lament as his character stares into the cup of coffee that looks like the active universe that gives this scene its power. Godard whispers: “But since social relations are always ambiguous, since thought divides as much as […]
January
21
Hitchcock – A Wikipedia guide to Psycho from Sasha Gervasi. (Film Review)
posted by lisathatcher
What an odd film! I’m not sure which side of the fence to fall on after watching Hitchcock. For a film I thought would be terrible, I had a rather good time. I was compelled to go home directly and watch Psycho, currently shown for free all over the net – something I think is […]
Lisa Thatcher 