Gore Vidal, who died in 2012, was an acclaimed and highly provocative playwright, novelist, essayist occasional political candidate and famed social and political commentator. The documentary Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia traces Vidal’s life from privileged boyhood as a US Senator’s son, to his emergence as a prominent student intellectual, his military service during the Second World War,
Read moreBest known in this country for the vivid animated fantasy films Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away, Japanese writer-director Hayao Miyazaki brings us what is arguably his most mature, moving and contemplative film, The Wind Rises. This is reportedly Miyazaki’s last film and with its artistically inspired and introspective protagonist and typical Miyazaki themes such as pacifism, environmental devastation, the role
Read moreTracks, starring Mia Wasikowska, dramatises Robyn Davidson’s best-selling book which chronicled her epic 1,700 kilometre journey from Alice Springs to Uluru and the Indian Ocean in 1977. Davidson trekked on foot with four camels carrying supplies and her dog Diggity as company. Reluctantly, she allowed awkward American National Geographic photographer Rick Smolan (Adam Driver) to meet up with her every
Read moreThe first Wolf Creek film was a landmark in Australian horror cinema, taking what could have been a mindless slasher or torture porn scenario and turning it into a tense, well-acted, superbly-shot, genuinely menacing slow-burn thriller; it did for slasher movies what Alien did for sci-fi horror. Based loosely on both the Ivan Milat and Bradley Murdoch cases, Wolf Creek
Read moreNebraska is exactly the sort of film that generates instant Oscar buzz, a quirky yet solemn tale of crumbling dreams and redemption steeped in Americana and anchored by an idiosyncratic Becket-esque performance. Bruce Dern plays irascible scraggly-haired old drunk Woodrow Grant who, sadly, floats in a state between retirement and encroaching dementia. Mistakenly believing that a sweepstakes letter guarantees him
Read moreThere’s little doubt that writer/ director Scott Cooper is a fan of The Deer Hunter as he sets his latest film, Out Of The Furnace, in a Pennsylvania steel town, has major characters returning from a contentious war and has in Christian bale, a lead character who, like Robert De Niro in The Deer Hunter, is taciturn, resourceful, goatee-bearded and
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