FWENDS** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Preview

FWENDS is the debut feature from writer-director Sophie Somerville, and stars Emmanuelle Mattana and Melissa Gan as Em and Jessie, two friends reuniting in Melbourne and just wondering around the city discussing everything about their lives. It's a lovely naturalistic concept and wonderful to see female friendship highlighted on screen.  But the film feels like a 60 minute short expanded to a length that it's writing can't justify.  As day turns to night the girlfriends take drugs, get locked out of their apartment, and once again derp around the streets of Melbourne. It feels really repetitive and I didn't feel like I was getting character or narrative development to keep me interested. I also feel like your capacity to enjoy this film will be radically impacted by the generational cohort you belong to.  I have a lot of empathy with Millenials and Gan Z moaning about high rent and misogyny in the workplace.  But their general fecklessness is also deeply irritating. This is no BEFORE SUNRISE.

FWENDS has a running time of 92 minutes. It played Berlin where Sophie Somerville won the Calgari Film Award. It also played Sydney and Melbourne. It will play the BFI London Film Festival but all three screenings are sold out. 

MEMOIR OF A SNAIL****

I finished the film year strong with a double-bill of films about miserable life experiences tempered by kindly grandma figures who like the TV comedy show The Two Ronnies. In the first, by Adam Elliot (MARY & MAX) we are in a stop-motion depiction of childhood in 1970s Melbourne, Australia.  Grace (Succession's Sarah Snook) is a sweet but nerdy girl obsessed with snails, and beloved by her brother Gilbert. The first in a series of awful events results in her being split from that brother and fostered by a couple of swingers. Meanwhile, Gilbert is fostered by a couple of religious fundamentalists who want to suppress his incipient homosexuality.  As an adult, Grace is alone but for her kindly old grandma-substitute friend Pinky (Jacki Weaver). Even her fiancé isn't all he's cracked up to be  As with BETTER MAN the film does end with Grace creating a safe and happy space for herself, and letting go of some of her childhood trauma. But the overall feel of the film is - as with Elliot's prior works - miserabalist. If anything shitty can go wrong for Grace it will. As ever, the animation is beautifully rendered. There's something so unique and expressive in Elliot's style that you want to pause frames to pick up on the detail. But I found this inverse WALLACE & GROMIT just a bit too unrelenting in its sadness.

MEMOIR OF A SNAIL has a running time of 95 minutes and is rated R. It played the BFI London Film Festival 2024 and will be released in the UK on February 14th 2025. It was released in the USA in October.

NITRAM***** - BFI London Film Festival 2021 - Day 7

NITRAM is a stunning and disturbing film from Aussie writer-director Justin Kurzel that covers a deeply traumatic and controversial mass shooting in mid-1990s Tasmania. The perpetrator was a man called Martin, who was teased with the nickname Nitram because he was mentally "backward".  Indeed, it's a open question what's wrong with Martin. He seems childlike - his mother describes behaviour that seems psychopathic - he's being prescribed drugs for depression - he has an unhealthy obsession with fireworks and guns. What's clear is that his parents love him but also enable him - particularly his dad - and at various points of the film I became angry that he wasn't in a residential care facility rather than out and about in the general community. 

The truth is stranger than fiction.  This misfit somehow meets an incredibly wealthy eccentric older woman (Essie Davis) and she essentially bankrolls him and takes him in, even though even she draws the line at buying him a gun.  As the film develops we see that this newfound freedom and money does not satisfy Martin. He remains severely lonely, unhappy and disturbed. And so we move to the inevitable final act, which is handled delicately and largely off-screen. We are left with harsh questions.  Could his parents have prevented this? His doctors?  The people he freaked out but who didn't report anything? And would anything have happened if he hadn't had the (mis)fortune of access to wealth, and thanks to Australia's then lax gun laws, a cache of arms?

Caleb Landry Jones won the acting award at Cannes for his performance in NITRAM and it's well deserved. It's incredibly moving and nuanced - at once terrifying and heart-breaking. I was physically wincing in fear, but also believed Martin genuinely loved his mum and particularly his dad. Judy Davis is typically brilliant as Martin's mum and Anthony LaPaglia is heartbreaking as his dad. 

I also loved the choice to use a limited claustrophobic aspect ratio that makes us feel trapped by Martin in the hazy summer heat of dusty abandoned rooms. This is arguably Kurzel's most assured and impressive film to date. Kudos to all involved. 

NITRAM played Cannes 2021 where Caleb Landry Jones won Best Actor. It was released earlier this year in Australia. The film has a running time of 112 minutes.

SWEET COUNTRY - Day 9 - BFI London Film Festival 2017

SWEET COUNTRY is a film of power and beauty that knocked me for six and took a while to digest. It stands as one of the best films of this year's LFF, and certainly one of the most important.  It contains a unique directorial vision, a unique true story, and provocative questions for all of us at this time of heightened fear of the Other.

The film is set in post-World War One Central Australia, on a series of small cattle farms. The hero is an aboriginal cattle farmer called Sam Kelly (Hamilton Morris), a decent man who works for another decent man, station owner Fred Smith (Sam Neill). Unfortunately, their oasis of mutual respect goes against the prevailing tide of racism and injustice in this wild frontier.  A newly returned solider (Ewen Leslie) manipulates Fred into lending him Sam, his wife and niece, to work for him for a few days.  This good turn sets in motion a series of events that culminate in Sam shooting the white man in self-defense and going on the run.  Act Two sees Sam and his wife being chased down by the local lawman (Bryan Brown) and Act Three sees him face whatever justice a black man can get in 1920s Australia.  To say more would be to ruin the plot.

There's so much to admire in this film that it's hard to know where to begin. To state the obvious, the director Warwick Thornton (SAMSON & DELILAH) has a unique interest in bringing Australia's alternative history to the screen - in showing the violence and exploitation that doesn't show up in textbooks. Instead of Aussie folk hero Ned Kelly he wants to give us  a true indigenous hero - Sam Kelly - and he wants to ask us if he'd fair any better in the justice system today.

But the great and wonderful thing is that Warwick Thornton's projects are so much more than just pedagogical. He has a really unique directorial vision. For a start, filming this story as a western allows him to tell us something about the wild frontier (in)justice at this time.  Second, he makes bold choices, all of which seem to pay off.   I loved his use of quick flash-backs and flash-fowards to add nuance to his characters and build suspense for the audience.  For instance, the ostensible bad guy in the movie is basically a racist bully, but he's also a very traumatised war veteran who's self-medicating with a lot of alcohol. I also loved the equally bold choice to have no musical score in this film, but to really ramp up the tension by focusing on the sound of every footstep, locked shackle and cocked rifle.  But most of all, I just love the visual vastness and harsh beauty of the landscapes as a context for this very small-scale human tale - with these people quite simply dwarfed by greater forces - whether nature or institutional injustice.  There's a deep humanity to the tale - and Hamilton Morris' performance in particular.  And I can't think of anything more chilling than Sam Neill's final line in the film.

SWEET COUNTRY has a running time of 110 minutes. It played Venice, Toronto, Adelaide and London 2017. The film is rated 15 for strong violence, injury detail, violence and racism as a theme. 

ADRIANA'S PACT - Day 2 - BFI London Film Festival 2017

Chilean director Lissette Orozco's ADRIANA'S PACT is a psychologically fascinating documentary about the true story of her favourite aunt Adriana being arrested for committing torture under General Pinochet's brutal Chilean dictatorship in the 1980s.  Suddenly this beautiful and glamorous aunt is a defensive, demonstrative wreck, bemoaning the bad press in Chile and denying that she had any part in such crimes. After much pressure and many skype conversations, the mask starts to slip a little. Ok so she admits she WAS a member of the secret police, but only because she was glamorous and new how to receive foreign delegations. Ok so maybe she did realise that people were being tortured, but she wasn't personally involved, and by then she couldn't have protested or her own family would've been at risk. And well, you know, maybe sometimes you have to torture communists, because they are stubborn, and the US tortures people too, but you know I didn't do it. 

The documentary is painful to watch because you're seeing a real-time example of a child having a glamorous relation demystified and a firm belief in innocence turned to a tentative belief in guilt.  But it's fascinating because you're getting a glimpse into the psychology of someone who fell into wickedness and now has to live with it by somehow compartmentalising it or dissociating herself from it. Although not entirely analogous it reminded me of BLIND SPOT - the documentary about Hitler's secretary insofar as there was something a little off in the protestations of naivety. It's also interesting to see how Australia deals with the problem of Adriana hiding out there - many Chilean Australians have family killed during the Pinochet regime after all - and to my knowledge she still hasn't been extradited to face charges in Chile. 

ADRIANA'S PACT has a running time of 94 minutes. The film played Berlin and London 2017.

DAVID STRATTON: A LIFE IN FILM - BFI London Film Festival 2017 Preview

Director Sally Aitken's DAVID STRATTON: A LIFE IN CINEMA is one of those films that makes you fall in love with cinema all over again.  It's a must for cinephiles and especially for lovers of Australian cinema.  I must confess, however, that I sat down to watch it never having heard of the titular film reviewer. But it turns out that he's actually something of an icon - the Aussie Roger Ebert, say.  He started out living in England, before moving to Australia, and discovering his adopted country through its cinema. Obsessed with movies, he realised he could watch films for free if he volunteered as an usher at the Sydney Film Festival. He then worked his way up the be the festival's director for many years, before working as a critic for Variety, and then hosting a hugely popular and influential TV review show in Australia. Even now his passion for cinema is undimmed, and he teaches a seemingly never-ending class on world history at Sydney university.

The still-English accented Stratton takes us through his life and the development of Aussie cinema by highlighting movies that he thinks are exceptional but also personally important to him.  So we get Aussie classics like PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK and recent films like MURIEL'S WEDDING by way of fan favourites like STRICTLY BALLROOM.  But he also subtly teaches us about the first time we saw an Aussie female director, or Aborigines take lead roles, or when Geoffrey Rush was the first Aussie to win an acting Oscar for SHINE.  He takes us through the Ozploitation trend and into the birth of arthouse cinema. And we even learn that the first ever feature film in the WORLD was an Aussie film about the Kelly gang. 

What I loved about this film was seeing actors and directors from Peter Weir to Nicole Kidman to Russell Crowe to David Michod discussing their films with Stratton - the insights and the debates. The most controversial of these is over the white supremacist film ROMPER STOMPER, starring Crowe, that Stratton thought was well made but actively dangerous.  The director hasn't gotten over the slight but Crowe is surprisingly gracious.  We also see Stratton change his mind over the Aussie classic THE CASTLE. 

Having watched this film, I desperately want to buy a compilation of Stratton's written reviews, to sit alongside those from Sarris, Kael and Ebert. He seems like such an insightful, historically literate critic.  This documentary has also given me a list of Aussie films recommended by Stratton that I can't wait to watch. To that end, it's a great doc insofar as it has deepened my understanding of old favourites and provoked a hunger to get to know more about Australian cinema.

DAVID STRATTON: A CINEMATIC LIFE has a running time of 97 minutes. It played Cannes 2017 and opened earlier this year in Australia. There are still tickets available for both screenings at the BFI London Film Festival. 

LION - BFI LFF 2016 - Day 9

LION is an emotionally intense human interest story that comes complete with lovely cinematography.  However, a straightforward structure, slack pacing and ho-hum soundtrack prevent it from being truly great, as opposed to a well-made tear-jerker.

The film is based on the memoirs of Saroo Brierley. He was born in a small north Indian town in the early 80s, but through a twist of fate was separated from his family and ended up on a train to Calcutta, 1600km away.  Unable to speak Bengali, or even knowing the name of his hometown, the boy becomes one of many homeless children, and only narrowly escapes a predator to end up in an equally brutal state orphanage. But a kindly social worker intervenes and arranges for him to adopted by a white Tasmanian family, where it appears that he lived a very happy childhood.  However, when Saroo goes to university he finally meets people from India, and this triggers a wave of memories and a desire both to find his birth family, but not to hurt his adoptive parents.  And so begins a needle in the haystack search for a faint memory of a train station with a water tank, without even knowing if he'll find his family at the end of it. 

BFI LFF 2016 Preview - DOWN UNDER

DOWN UNDER is a sometimes predictable, often very funny and continually highly disturbing film tackling heightened racial tensions between a self-described native population against immigrants.  In this case, rather than contemporary America or Europe we're in Australia in the mid 2000s.  Apparently, back in 2006 a bunch of Aussie racists set upon a bunch of Lebanese immigrants on Christmas day, prompting the inevitable backlash from the targeted community.  

Writer-director Abe Forsythe opens his film with shocking documentary footage of the riots  - shocking at least to those who, like me, had no idea they had occurred. At this point, I wasn't sure if I was sitting down for a hard-hitting political documentary. But the mood quickly shifts into dark comedy, and a satire on both sides of the racial fracas.  The irony is that, to the viewer, the warring factions have a lot in common: ignorance, racial and sexual prejudice, and ineptitude.  Moreover, each side has four men of differing but symmetric profile - the gung-ho violent leader; the nice guy who turns nasty; the quirky comic relief guy; and the true societal outsider who turns out to be the wisest of the lot. (In the case of the white Aussies, that's the down syndrome cousin, and in the case of the Lebanese immigrants, it's their visiting uncle - the only practicing Muslim in the group.)  Along the way, the movie also pokes fun at the Aussie obsession with Gallipoli and Ned Kelly, bogan bad  parenting, the idea that the white Aussies crave Turkish food, and the fact that the second generation immigrants are so assimilated as to be as feckless as the white population.

The resulting film is pretty predictable but really very funny and rightly disturbing. Even though you know where it's going, I was still tense wondering exactly how the director would get there. The film also looks good, with a really imaginative use of framing and panning to reveal a character we didn't realise was part of the scene, not to mention some of the best incidental pop music since the car-ride scenes in Wayne's World.  It's just the right mix of stupidly funny and politically provocative, and if some of the social commentary is a little too on the nose, the timing of its release couldn't be better.

DOWN UNDER played the Sydney and Melbourne film festivals earlier this year.  There are tickets left for all three screenings at the BFI London Film Festival 2016. It does not yet have a commercial release date.  The movie has a running time of 90 minutes.

THE DAUGHTER - BFI London Film Festival 2015 - Day Four

The strange thing about my reaction to THE DAUGHTER is that while I can see that it's superbly acted and well directed I just couldn't stand it.  I spent the whole film thinking it was derivative and predictable and obvious and I absolutely despised the final scene.

But let's wind back to the beginning.  The film is the directorial debut of theatre director Simon Stone and is essentially a modern day adaptation of Ibsen's The Wild Duck, set in contemporary Australia.  Geoffrey Rush plays a rich industrialist who's just laid off all his workers in a small lumber town, putting its very existence at risk. At the same time he's celebrating his marriage to a woman half his age.  His son Christian (Paul Schneider) turns up for the wedding and is evidently resentful not just at his father's happiness but also his childhood best friend Oliver (Ewen Leslie). Oliver may be poor and unemployed but he seemingly has a loving wife (Miranda Otto) and charming clever daughter Hedvig (Odessa Young).  By contrast, Christian is an alcoholic who's wife is in the process of leaving him.

RUBEN GUTHRIE - BFI London Film Festival 2015 - Preview

Aussie writer-director-actor Brendan Cowell (SAVE YOUR LEGS!) returns to the BFI London Festival with his black comedy-drama RUBEN GUTHRIE about an ad exec battling with alcoholism in the face of workplace peer pressure and an unsupportive family.  As the movie opens, he gets tanked and falls into a swimming pool, breaking his arm, and losing his fiance unless he can get sober for a year. This prompts panic in those around him. His best friend thinks he'll be no fun. His boss thinks he'll lose his ad-skills and dangles a younger social media hipster as competitive pressure.  His dad thinks he should just man up.  And in a typically pithy exchange, when Ruben tells his mum that he's taking it one day at a time, she responds "that doesn't seem very ambitious".   Despite all the surrounding nastiness, Ruben remains a spiky and not totally likeable character, and I love that Patrick Brammall plays him as half charming and half repellent. He evidently shacked up with his fiancee when she was underage and sleeps with his vulnerable AA sponsor almost as a distraction.  That said, apparently those who know say the original stage play, also written by Cowell, was far darker and nastier, with Guthrie far less sympathetic.  

MAD MAX: FURY ROAD

You can listen to a podcast review of this film here or subscribe to Bina007 Movie Reviews in iTunes.

In a post-apocalyptic future, petrol and water are scarce. Daddy controls the water in Citadel and so controls the people. The young woman are Breeders to be used at will, the old women provide mother's milk, the men are turned into fanatical warriors bewitched by a cultish vision of glorious death and Valhalla.  Into this world steps a hero. Not Mad Max but Imperatur Furiosa - Charlize Theron as a kind of Ripley - riding the War Rig to Gastown across the Badlands until she hangs a right and goes off-road to the Green Place, carrying Daddy's Breeders.  So begins a two hour car-chase of epic and gonzo proportions. The war-rig, guarded by its henchman, gone rogue.  Daddy following with all the martial glory of the Citadel - chopped up bikes and cars teeming with war-boys & a fire-breathing guitar not to mention all the gangsters roaming the sand-dunes.  But Furiosa is better than them all, and this is her story, her journey and her redemption.  Max? Well, Max is just a blood-bag, strapped to the front axle of a war-buggy with a blood transfusion feeding a war-boy called Nux.  He's not peripheral. But he's not central either.

THE MULE - LFF14 - Day Five

THE MULE is yet another movie programmed under the Laugh strand at the London Film Festival that could arguably be better classified as a thriller or straight drama. Which isn't to say that it doesn't contain absolutely hilarious moments and lines, but the overall tone, for me, was one of a classic cross and double-cross story of crime and corruption.

The story is set in early 80s Australia with underdog Ray (co-director Angus Sampson) persuaded by his so-called best mate into smuggling condoms filled with heroine back into Aus after a footie tour to Thailand.  The feckless Ray obviously messes this up through nerves and ends up in police detention in an airport hotel as they wait for him to shit and he attempts to hold out.  The film then descends into a three-way play off - between the cops who are clearly brutal but just how brutal? - the Aussie mobsters who want the drugs or to shut Ray up or both - and Ray himself - a man of few talents but I guess that desperate times bring out the best or worst in people.

The resulting film is very funny and very dark and disturbing. It contains genuinely good twists and had me captivated to the end. Am I going to remember it in a month's time? Maybe not.  But it's superb entertainment nonetheless.

THE MULE has a running time of 105 minutes.  The movie played SXSW and London 2014. It does not yet have a commercial release date.

THE INBETWEENERS 2

THE INBETWEENERS was that rare thing - a hugely commercially and critically successful TV adaptation.  And with its commercial success comes the inevitable sequel.  But against all odds, THE INBETWEENERS 2 is as funny, if not funnier, than the original! And as usual, there's a lot of wry social commentary amid the poo jokes.

As the movie opens, our four protagonists have left high school and have finished their first year at college, or working. The motor-mouth ultimate Lad, Jay (James Buckley) has gone to Australia to chase after his ex, although of course, in one of the funniest movie openings ever, he plays it like he doesn't care about her at all and is having an amazing time shagging lots of girls. Nice guy Will (Simon Bird) decides to go visit him to escape his massively annoying but scary girlfriend who he ends up accidentally getting engaged to her over Skype. Will is joined by the nice but dim Neil (Blake Harrison) and neurotic Will (Simon Bird) who ditches his mates for the posh Gap year students he meets Down Under.

The plot sees the boys travel around Oz, dealing with the usual bullies, popular kids and manipulative girls. The writers, Damon Beesley and Iain Morris, poke a lot of fun at the absurdity of identikit posh kids travelling around Asia-Pac to supposedly find themselves on exactly the same route as everyone else. We also get some nice gags at the expense of Aussie cliches, like the ultra macho men. But what I really love is that this seemingly random holiday does have a purpose, and as usual it's to allow the boys to grow and learn. And although there is always an emotional pay-off it's never incredible. So, to avoid spoiling the ending, let's just say the writers don't let a need for Hollywood style schmaltz ruin a darkly, bitingly funny movie.

I don't know what else to say but that you should see this movie. It's hilarious. Both physically funny, scatalogically funny, and with biting social satire. I hope they make a third.

THE INBETWEENERS 2 has a running time of 96 minutes and is rated 15 for very strong nudity, sex references, and very strong language. The movie is on release in the UK and Ireland. It goes on release in Malta on August 20th, in Australia on August 21st, in New Zealand on August 28th, in Germany and Austria on October 30th, in Estonia on November 14th and in Russia on December 4th.

MYSTERY ROAD - LFF 2013 - Day Eleven

For those of you who have seen the critically acclaimed Sundance Channel murder mystery set in New Zealand, Top of the Lake, MYSTERY ROAD is going to seem rather familiar.  A small Antipodean town is riven with drugs, teenage prostitution, racism and a police cover up.  The problem is that while Top of the Lake was taught, tense, genuinely sinister and anchored on a devastatingly affecting central performance, MYSTERY ROAD is overlong, overdrawn, with a paint by numbers plot and a final shoot-out so overblown that the audience was laughing at it. 

The plot, such as it is, sees Aaron Pederson as a smalltown cop where a young Aborigine girl is found murdered.  He begins his investigation in the teeth of opposition from town's white cops, and stumbles on a subculture of drugs and teen prostitution.  Tragically, he finds himself similarly alienated from his own indigenous community, as a man sent to investigate his own. Worse still, his daughter, living with her alcoholic abused mum, is right in the target demographic of the victims.  The movie unravels at a deeply slow pace to reveal police collusion and ends in a somewhat bizarre stand-off. On the way, we get some interesting insights about contemporary race relations in Australia - some stunning cinematography from director Ivan Sen - and the evocation of Australia as a kind of lawless, corrupt Wild West.  But ultimately this movie needed a better script, a better editor, and a less ludicrous ending. 

MYSTERY ROAD has a running time of 122 minutes.

MYSTERY ROAD played Sydney, Toronto and London 2013. It opened earlier this year in Australia and the USA. 

TRACKS - LFF 2013 - Day Eight

TRACKS is a rather lovely, beautifully shot movie depicting the true life journey of an Australian woman called Robyn Davidson who walked 2000 miles from Alice Springs to the western Australian coast.  She did this with three camels that she'd wrangled and trained, her pet dog, and occasionally the company of an aboriginal elder and a National Geographic photographer.  One might ask why and there are lots of hints at explanations on this film.  Maybe it was something to do with her own father's safari in Africa, or her innate loneliness, or of her bored dissatisfaction with life in the 70s.  Either way, I like that director John Curran doesn't feel the need to make everything obvious and easy, but allows us to see some of her charisma and mystery.

The film is beautifully made, and it serves as a hymn to he harsh beauty of the Aussie outback.  That said, any nature lovers should be cautioned that this isn't a movie that shies away from the harsh reality of nature, and animal lovers probably should give this film a wide berth.  In front of the camera, Mia Wasikowska carries the film as Robyn, and does a good job in making quite a prickly character interesting and sympathetic. Adam Driver, who seems to be popping up everywhere at the moment, is also highly enjoyable as Robyn's photographer cum suitor - the guy who has to reconcile, as we do, Robyn's need for solitude and her intense loneliness.  Ultimately, though, this isn't any actor's film.  It belongs to the cinematographer Mandy Walker who captures the stunning landscapes and people of the outback.  

TRACKS has a running time of 110 minutes. 

TRACKS played Venice, Toronto and London 2013 and does not yet have a commercial release date. 

London Film Fest 2012 - Day 5 - THE SAPPHIRES

So I went to what I thought was going to the press screening of the Sundance acclaimed John Hawkes starrer, THE SESSIONS, but it turned out I was actually at the press screening for THE SAPPHIRES.  My bad, but ins way good, because it meant I came to the film without a clue, with no preconceptions, and totally open to it. And what a ride it was!  Because while dressed up in the narrative structure of a romantic comedy, this movies just unique:  telling the true story of a 1960s Aussie aborigine girl band and their feckless Irish manager performing soul music for the US troops in Vietnam.

The result is a genuinely funny, feel good movie that's full of great tunes, but that doesn't gloss over the grim politics of the time: he racism towards Aborigines, and African Americans, and the horrors of Vietnam.  It even touches on perhaps the most shameless chapter in Aussie history, when fairer skinned Aborigines were forcibly separated from their parents and "civilised". 

Kudos to Aussie director Wayne Blair and to writers  Tony Briggs (real life son of one of the Sapphires) and  Keith Thompson for finding that perfect balance between joyful energy and political awareness.  I also thought the production design of wartime was impressive, particularly given the film's low budget. In front of the camera, Chris  is utterly charming as the Irish manager - seriously, is he the most charming man in cinema today?  And as the four girls, Deborah Mailman, Jessica Mauboy,  Shari Sebbens and Miranda Tapsell all do a fine job.

Of course there are gripes.  The girls often resolve arguments by singing, even in the much flagged unescorted drive to a gig, the sense of peril is never that high, and more often that not it's painfully obvious that the girls are lip synching.  Still, it's testament to the film's energy and joy that one of that bothered me too much.

THE SAPPHIRES played Cannes, Toronto, Telluride and London 2012. It was released earlier this year in Australia and France and is currently on release in New Zealand. It opens in the UK and Ireland on November 7th, in Germany on February 7th and in the Netherlands on 21 February 2013.

London Film Fest 2012 Day 3 - SAVE YOUR LEGS!

I love cricket. I love cinema. I'm almost pre-programmed to love this film.  And love this film I did!  I laughed out loud all the way through, I loved the characters, and I willed them to win.  For me, SAVE YOUR LEGS! was basically the perfect comedy.  But what I hope I'll do in the rest of this review is convince you that even if you neither know nor care about cricket, you'll have a good time watching the film.

The movie is based on the real life escapades on a bunch of Aussie park cricketers who went on a tour of India in 2001 to participate in a scratch tournament.  The lads had fun, got high, got Delhi Belly and played some cricket. The tour became the basis of a documentary, and now a feature film, both called SAVE YOUR LEGS!  The big theme of the movie is what happens to long-lived male friendship when blokes hit that mid-30s mark, get married, have kids, and have to take the wife to Ikea rather than play cricket on the weekend.  The hold-out in this crew is Teddy (Stephen Curry), the likeable and earnest club president who arranges the tour to try and keep the group together for one last hurrah before his best mate, opening batsman, and hard-drinking good-time boy Rick (Brendan Cowell) gets married. Along for the ride are the club's hilarious show-pony Stavros (Damon Gameau) and the sponsor's pretty daughter Anjali (Pallavi Sharda), to provide a love interest for Teddy.

To be sure, there's a layer of humour that comes from being a cricket fan - seeing a scoreboard in a limited overs match with a score in the high 300s makes you laugh because you know our beloved Aussie team is screwed.  And in a pivotal final scene, it helps if you know a bit about the mechanics of calling for a run to get what Stav is doing with the Boycottian Teddy.

But if all that means nothing to you never fear.  There are only small flashes of sport in the flick and they are pretty self-explanatory (I checked this by taking Dr. 007 along and he knows nothing about cricket having been tragically raised in a non-Commonwealth country).  The big themes of the movie are widely relatable - the challenges of keeping up male friendship in mid-life; the challenges of travelling in India; or the sad reality that eventually, a younger better kid is gonna make us look sadly old-hat - what I call LCD Soundsystem Syndrome.  All of that is just straightforward bromantic comedy of the type found in movies like THE HANGOVER, and what's more, it really works!

I loved the larger than life characters - the brash arrogance of Stav, the dishevelled loutishness of Ken, and seeing uptight Teddy loosen up.  I even loved the Bollywood ending and the brilliant use of 1970s Bollywood rock'n'roll classics all the way through the movie.  Mark Wareham's cinematography captures the beauty and craziness of India in equal measure.  So whether or not you're a fan of cricket, if you just want a good night out at the flicks, this is the movie for you.

SAVE YOUR LEGS! played London 2012 and will be released in Australia on Jan 24th 2013.

iPad Round-Up 7 - ORANGES AND SUNSHINE

ORANGES AND SUNSHINE is a turgid earnest historical drama more suited to be a TV afternoon movie than a feature release. The debut feature of TV director Jim (son of Ken) Loach, the movie tells the true story of a British social worker in the 1980s who stumbled upon a scandal, whereupon British kids of unwed mothers were shipped off to workcamps in Australia in the 1950s and 1960s, only to be abused and exploited. This powerful material should've made for a powerful film but this film is damp, dull, earnest, attempting to beat the audience into submission.  Emily Watson is becoming typecast in these suffering martyr roles - the only real revelation on the acting front is Hugo Weaving as  a suffering man, so far from his superhero roles, and David Wenham as a macho Aussie bloke coming to terms with his childhood abuse.  I suspect one would be better off reading the book upon which the movie was based. 

ORANGES AND SUNSHINE opened in summer 2011 in the UK, Ireland, Australia, Greece, New Zealand and Lebanon. It went on limited release in the US on October 28th. It is available to rent and own.

London Film Fest 2011 Day 7 - SNOWTOWN

SNOWTOWN is a searing, brutal movie about Australia's most notorious serial killer. An assured and powerful debut feature from Australian writer-director Justin Kerzel - it contains scenes of such explicit torture that in the screening I attended, a dozen people walked out at around the seventy minute mark.  But the unflinching depiction of torture should not distract us from the intelligent and nuanced depiction of psychological manipulation that brought to the point where one powerful psychopathic personality could commandeer a crew of three of four young men all complicit in murder.  To that end, SNOWTOWN is fascinating not just as an examination of this particular case, but of all those cases in which a charismatic personality creates heinous gang behaviour - the Manson Family, for example.

The movie opens with Kerzel deftly establishing the poverty and claustrophobia of smalltown life, centring on the extended family of Elizabeth Harvey - her brood of step-siblings. They badly need a father figure and in walks charismatic apparent family man, John Bunting.  He immediately asserts his personality, cooks meals, asserts discipline, and the mother almost looks happy. But behind his almost cherubic, bearded, cuddly image, we soon learn that he is capable of snap judgements about who is a menace to society - mostly gays and paedos, a seemingly interchangeable category for him, but then junkies, bullies...anyone in the wrong place at the wrong time.  

For the first hour of the film, Kerzel exerts supreme self-discipline.  Bunting's power is shown in a couple of breath-taking set-piece scenes around the kitchen table. where he builds on the innate bigotry of his neighbours to whip up a lynch-mob frenzy.  We suspect he is already killing people but the only thing shown on screen is a still shot of a bathtub covered in bloody hand-prints from tortured victims - incredibly powerful. But then, in the second hour, Kerzel shows us exactly what has been happening starting with a scene where we see Bunting goad his girlfriend's teenage son James into participating in the torture of the boy who raped him.  That scene is necessary to show how a fragile boy could be psychologically broken, but the following scenes of torture did at times seem to verge on torture porn.

That's a small criticism, though, and shouldn't distract from the fact that this is a brilliantly crafted film (DP Adam Arkapaw - ANIMAL KINGDOM) that doesn't fall for the typical "police hunt serial killer" genre tropes. Rather it focuses on Bunting and his crew, what they did, and how they did it.  Daniel Henshall, despite his soft features and friendly face, is absolutely terrifying and magnetic as John Bunting. Late on, there's a scene where the camera looks at him head on sitting in a chair smiling. It's so sinister that we are petrified of what we will see when the camera pans round to show John's point of view.  That's the power of the performance. Young Lucas Pittaway as the James, the kid John manipulates, is also deeply sympathetic, although I was conscious throughout that the film, like the trial, was essentially based on his evidence. One wonders whether he really was such an unwilling and unwitting part of the gang.  At any rate, this is a must-see film, although be warned about the ultra-violence it contains.

SNOWTOWN played Cannes 2011 where it won the FIPRESCI Prize - Special Mention. It opened in Australia in May 2011 and opens in the UK on November 18th and in France on December 28th.

Overlooked DVD of the month - MARY AND MAX

MARY AND MAX is an amazing film, and all the more wonderful for being un-expectedly so. It's a darkly comic, emotionally raw clay-animated drama about the unlikely friendship between two very lonely people - a little girl called Mary, who lives in Australia, and an old man called Max, who lives in New York. Mary Daisy Dinkle is lonely because her mum is a mean drunk and her father is a withdrawn taxidermist. She hates how she looks, she's socially awkward and other kids tease her. Max is lonely because he finds the world strange and irrational and frustrating and retreats into a closed existence of comfort-eating and writing angry letters. They are each other's only and best friends. 

The movie takes us from the early heady days of their friendship - the first not to involve an imaginary friend for both of them - through Mary's adolescence and marriage. The friendship blossoms, then flounders on betrayal, and is finally redeemed. The journey is genuinely moving - I cried like a baby at the end of the film - and I was happy to have spent time with these intriguing people despite the harsh material I was forced to endure - drug abuse, sexual infidelity, self-loathing, suicide and chronic disease. 

If all this makes MARY AND MAX sound about as much fun as shock-therapy, then please believe me that despite the unbearable sadness as its heart, it's also a very funny, and ultimately uplifting film. The detail of the art design is wonderfully witty, with lots of clever details to repay a repeat viewing, and the verbal humour is at once pathetic and laugh-out-loud funny. I have always had nothing but praise for Philip Seymour Hoffman, but he really surpasses himself as Max, imbuing every sentence with common-sense, hurt, longing, fear and unintentional wit. Toni Colette is wonderfully misguided and sympathetic as Mary, and even Eric Bana gives a sweet cameo. So, if you love the kind of gentle, warm, heart-breaking humour found in the following quotations, please check MAX AND MARY out. As for me, I just can't wait to see what Australian writer-director Adam Eliot does next.

Max Jerry Horovitz: When I was young, I invented an invisible friend called Mr Ravioli. My psychiatrist says I don't need him anymore, so he just sits in the corner and reads. 

Max Jerry Horovitz: Butts are bad because they wash out to sea, and fish smoke them and become nicotine-dependent. 

MARY AND MAX played Sundance and Berlin 2009 and opened in Australia, the Czech Republic, New Zealand and Russia that year. It opened last year in Denmark, Belgium, Greece, Norway, Brazil, Sweden, Germany, Austria, Hungary and the UK. It is currently on release in Singapore and opens in Japan on April 23rd. It is available to rent and own.