Feed: Cinema Autopsy - AggScore: 77.3

Film review – The Grey (2012)

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Liam Neeson is John Ottway, a severely depressed man working in a remote part of Alaska with an oil drilling team. Ottway’s job is to kill the wolves that threaten the team and early in the film the symbiotic relationship he has with the wolves is established when one of the wolves distracts him from [...]

Glamour over grit at the AACTA Awards Ceremony

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I’ve recently become one of the regular film and television columnist for the Kill Your Darlings blog Killings. For my first piece I wrote about last week’s 2011 Samsung Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts (AACTA) award ceremony and Channel 9 broadcast: The AACTA awards are an attempt to rise above the negativity and celebrate [...]

Film review – Shame (2011)

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In The Lost Weekend (1945) Billy Wilder portrayed alcoholism as a serious affliction rather than a delightful and humorous eccentricity. In The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) Otto Preminger debunked the cliché of the drug-fiend to reveal that narcotic addiction afflicts even ‘respectable’ members of society. In Shame video artist and Hunger director Steve [...]

The Movie Man: Martin Scorsese

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There are few filmmakers who rival Martin Scorsese’s contribution to cinema. The 69-year-old New Yorker is part of the passionate and highly film-literate moviemakers (including Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg) that started their careers in the 1970s during the New Hollywood era. These directors created the modern blockbuster and [...]

Film review – The Artist (2011)

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One of the most significant developments in the history of cinema was the introduction of sound. Once the technology was ready and the public developed a taste for the talkies, cinema was transformed to an extent that had a much greater effect than the widespread use of colour or the advent of digital technologies. Sound [...]

Film review – Weekend (2011)

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A first glance an English film about a relationship between two young gay men, one of whom lives in a council estate apartment, invites comparisons to films such as My Beautiful Laundrette (Stephen Frears, 1985) and Beautiful Thing (Hettie Macdonald, 1996). The sexuality of the two men in Weekend and their developing relationship is the [...]

Film review – Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)

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Everything the audience needs to know about the tone of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is established in the opening scenes. It’s 1973 and the Cold War in England is not being played out in high-tech James Bond-style labs, but in dank and dusty rooms where the head of British Intelligence is a dishevelled and elderly [...]

Film review – Hugo (2011)

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Martin Scorsese’s passion for cinema has long been evident. His filmography is filled with titles that not only reference cinema of the past, especially Italian and classical Hollywood cinema, but push the development of contemporary cinema. Scorsese’s ability to look lovingly to the past and excitedly toward the future is further exemplified by his work [...]

Top Ten Films of 2011

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As 2011 comes to an end, I’ve once more looked back at my personal highlights of the cinematic year. For the first time I did a count of how many films I saw during the year to discover that while I watched over 300 films, only half of those were new films released in Australian [...]

Film review – Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011)

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Like the original film in the Mission: Impossible franchise, part four focuses more on the group dynamic of the Impossible Missions Force agents rather than solely on the Ethan Hunt character, played once more by Tom Cruise. Hunt is joined by fellow agents Jane Carte (Paula Patton) and Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), who previously appeared [...]

Film review – The Yellow Sea (2010)

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NOTE: This is a review of the 140-minute International Cut (aka Director’s Cut) version of the film. Gu-nam (Ha Jung-woo) is resilient. He may be hopelessly in debt, has been left by his wife, can’t take care of his daughter and has problems with gambling and controlling his temper, but he still persists. Fuelled by [...]

Film review – Puss in Boots (2011)

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There seems to be two approaches competing against each other in Puss in Boots. On the one hand, it is an extension of the Shrek universe, which the Puss character (voiced by Antonio Banderas) originally hailed from in part two of the franchise. Puss interacts with other nursery rhyme and fairy tale characters such as [...]

Film review – Restless (2011)

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Enoch (Henry Hopper) has lost his parents, hangs out with the ghost of a Japanese kamikaze pilot (Ryō Kase) and goes to funerals for people he doesn’t know. He meets Annabel (Mia Wasikowska), a young woman who also crashes funerals and who also has death playing a large part in her life. Despite knowing that [...]

Film review – Attack the Block (2011)

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Somewhere on a council estate in South London, hostile aliens have fallen from the sky. A local teenage gang take it upon themselves to fight off the unwanted visitors, but quickly discover they are outnumbered by the pitch-black, bear-like creatures with glowing, razor sharp teeth. Set to a distinctively British electronica soundtrack, courtesy of Basement [...]

Film review – Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

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Almost fifty years after it’s original 1964 release, Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy masterpiece is still as terrifying, insightful and hilarious as ever. In one regard, Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb functions as a time capsule in the way it so brilliantly encapsulates the very real Cold War [...]