Since Antonio Zeccola founded it in 2000, Melbourne’s Lavazza Italian Film Festival 2017 has grown to become the biggest celebration of Italian cinema outside of its home country. Every year, the festival brings the nation’s freshest talent and most exciting…
A trailer for our planet – if it were filmed by aliens. Say what you will about Terrence Malick – that his dialogue is insufferable; that, since The Tree Of Life (which was iffy at best) the quality of his…
Animated Iranian film draws starkly realist depiction of modern-day Tehran. Director Ali Soozandeh has made a film that he knows won’t be shown on television or in cinemas in his home country, where the film is set. For a film…
Swedish film The Square is making its Australian debut at Melbourne’s most wonderful film festival, MIFF. After taking out the 2017 Cannes Palm d’Or, my fellow movie-watching crew and I had high hopes for filmmaker Ruben Östlund’s unusual and inventive…
A triumph of American independent filmmaking. Sometimes at a film festival, your biggest takeaway from a screening is, ‘I need to see that again.’ This was mine after seeing Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s The Endless, a film the duo…
The Wound is the directorial debut from filmmaker John Trengove that has been receiving some hot debate about its controversial look at the clash of tradition and modernity in South Africa. On a chilly Melbourne evening we made our way…
Homoerotic, kinky bondage, and Catholic parables do not usually fit within the same sentence, that’s why we were so intrigued to see one of this year’s most unconventional films at MIFF – The Ornithologist. This Portuguese film from 2016 stars…
An essential documentary that rewrites history to show the truth. For many Australian audiences (myself included), the name ‘James Baldwin’ won’t have the same ring to it that Martin Luther King’s does, or Malcolm X’s But hopefully, after seeing Raoul…
The Indian Film Festival will once again be held in Melbourne from 10 August to 22 August. As a country with one of the biggest film industries in the world, churning out over 1500 movies annually, the cinematic experience is…
There’s very little music in God’s Own Country. There’s hardly even any talking. Francis Lee’s debut feature is one defined by incidental sounds: the sound of rain lashing against the walls of a flimsy caravan, of goats bleating as they’re…