Tag: Romance
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Modern Film: Dead Again (1991)
★★★ Filmmaking is a constantly evolving conversation in technical and aesthetics. While few films are truly avant-garde, they tend to align with the prevailing winds of the era. No-one says that you can’t make a film that feels like a 1940s film noir, directors don’t. If one looks at Hitchcock, directors like Brian De Palma…
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World Film: Amphibian Man (1962)
★★★ With Australia being part of the Anglophone world, Hollywood (and to a lesser extent Britain) dominates the film landscape. While this was a bigger problem in earlier generations when the Australian content became virtually non-existent (see: Not Quite Hollywood), the idea of having a local industry is in some way a capturing of the…
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World Film: Decision to Leave (2022)
★★★★ Directors, no matter how visionary, are products of their times working for contemporary audiences. It’s easy to contemplate what it would be like if those directors could work in cinema as it stands today, not least because modern filmmakers echo their forebears. Contemporary films are inevitably compared to those of the greats and (often…
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World Film: Fallen Leaves (2023)
★★★★ One of the hard parts of getting older is realising that we become our habits. Whether it’s nature or nurture, we learn to live a fixed way and that gets harder to break as we get older. This isn’t the negative it sounds, because it’s a reflection that we’ve worked out how to live.…
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Modern Film: Lost in Translation (2003)
★★★★ Nepotism feels like it should have no place in a meritocracy. The derogatory use of “nepo baby” applies to anyone who is able to use their parents’ position to get themselves into a prestige job. Seeing the number of children of actors follow their parents into the profession reeks of taking away chances from…
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Nonnas (2025)
★★★ Based on a true story, Nonnas is about a metro-worker Joe (Vince Vaughn) who uses the money left to him by his dead mother to buy a restaurant to honour her. His vision is a restaurant that serves the kind of food he grew up eating in his Italian heritage home, with the unique…
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Marmalade (2024)
★★★★ Marmalade is a mystery heist film told in the heist’s aftermath. Here, the recently incarcerated “dumb as a bag of rocks” Baron (Joe Keery) tells his cellmate (Aldis Hodge) his story of romance with the impulsive drifter Marmalade (Camila Morrone) that leads to a bank robbery in a nearby town. Only things aren’t as…
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Hit Man (2024)
★★★★ Inspired by a real life fake hitman, Hit Man is a completely fictional crime caper movie that plays something between a screwball comedy and a neo noir thriller. Glen Powell plays Gary Johnson – a mild mannered philosophy professor who moonlights as a sound recordist for the New Orleans police department. When the undercover…
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Priscilla (2023)
★★★★ Priscilla is the story of the romance between the most famous singer in the world and a teenage girl, told from Priscilla Beaulieu’s perspective. As a bored teenager on a military base in Germany, she is saved from the isolation of that life with an invitation to the home of Elvis Presley. He takes…
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World Film: The Handmaiden (2016)
★★★★★ This blog is now old enough that it’s time we had the sex talk, by which I mean talking about the role of sex in film. While prudishness and moral panic over sex has dominated censorship, and thus setting the standard of what can be shown on screen, there’s already a documentary that covers…
A Random Walk Through Film History 