The Duke We recently had the fascinating SBS documentary Framed which recalled the infamous 1986 theft of Picasso’s Weeping Woman from the National Gallery of Victoria. Less known to us here in Australia is that 25 years earlier there’d been a similar incident in England when 61-year-old Kempton Bunton apparently took a painting of the Duke of Wellington by Francisco
Read moreThere’s an important scene early in The Leisure Seeker in which retired English teacher John (Donald Sutherland) regales a perplexed fast food waitress about the simple poetic beauty of Ernest Hemmingway’s prose. The idea is that poetry can be found in the apparent banality of everyday events. While this middling meditation on ageing doesn’t fully capitalise on the potential of
Read moreDue to both its inherent artistic genius and that fact that it has been reproduced in every marketable form including fridge magnets, Gustav Klimt’s 1907 portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer aka Woman in Gold, is one of the most recognisable paintings in history. The film Woman in Gold, which stars Helen Mirren and Ryan Reynolds, tells the remarkable true story behind
Read moreThe novelty of Red was that the gun-totin’, fist-fightin’ action stars, Bruce Willis, John Malcovich and Helen Mirren were all well past 50. This casting lent some senior-citizen empowerment, sophistication and philosophical reflection to the testosterone-fuelled world of the action movie. Red was still pretty silly and implausible but it was clever enough to stand out from the usual action
Read moreMonsters University is a prequel to the highly successful 2001 film Monsters Inc. which was a clever and very endearing parody of both the corporate world and monster movies. In that film monsters entered the human world to frighten kiddies in their beds and in a fine example of renewable energy, used the children’s screams to power the monster world.
Read moreHitchcock, is a prosaic but still engrossing biopic of the legendary director Alfred Hitchcock (played here by Anthony Hopkins). Based on the critically acclaimed Stephen Rebello book “Alfred Hitchcock and the making of Psycho”, the film doesn’t provide an overview of Hitchcock’s life but instead focuses on a pivotal segment of it, in this case the making of what is
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