Sleeping Beauty (Australia, 2011)

In the movie previous to this, Emily Browning played Babydoll in Sucker Punch (US-Can, 2011) and is maybe in danger of being typecast as a vacant, sexy being (I don’t know whether that was her character in the film but name suggests as much). Glancing at the current issue of Elle I noticed that the [...]

Oranges and Sunshine (UK-Aus, 2010)

What can you say about a film when you admire its message and dislike its way of telling? It’s both good and bad, I suppose. This terrific story about a social worker who discovers that 130000 children were deported illegally, with governments’ connivance, from Britain to Australia and attempts to reunite them with their… well, [...]

District 9 (US-New Zealand, 2009)

Genre films, particularly SF, are great for smuggling interesting messages into mainstream entertainment and premises don’t come much better than this where aliens arrive in a pathetic state and end up being corralled in a township in Johannesburg. The parallel with apartheid is clear, though it must be remembered that, for many cinemagoers, apartheid is [...]

The Piano (Aus-NZ-France, 1993)

The Piano was one of the most feted arthouse films of the 1990s and stands up well at the end of the noughties. Beautifully shot, fabulously performed, fantastic direction, gorgeous music, a feminist message plus much to debate about; there’s not much more you can want from a film. It portrays the plight of middle [...]