Storytelling and escapism in the age of lockdowns
If escape is a departure, as Tolkien claims, the direction we take to imaginatively shape new worlds and new futures is important. As we collectively escape the physical and symbolic barriers of the...
View Article‘Flung out of space’: displacement in contemporary queer cinema
Displacing the queer is not a new phenomenon. What has changed in recent years is the kind of displacement at work. Where once queerness existed on the fringes of society, under the cover of darkness,...
View ArticleIf he can’t have it, no-one can: Christopher Nolan’s billionaire world destroyer
Throughout Tenet a verbal code, ‘we live in a twilight world’, is refrained. Narratively it propels the plot forward. Thematically it operates as Nolan’s driving idea: that the late-stage capitalism...
View ArticleIndigenous voices to the centre: the making of In My Blood it Runs
What could a real collaborative process look like in a landscape where colonial injustices never ended, and just continued under different names? How could a non-indigenous filmmaking team walk into...
View ArticleSidelining the elderly: the resonance of Dick Johnson Is Dead
Dick Johnson is Dead was always going to be reviewed well because, yeah, it's great. Death, well-handled, is a powerful subject. But the film is made more poignant by the state of the world, and more...
View ArticleDestroying myths: 50 years since The Sorrow and the Pity
It’s been 50 years since The Sorrow and the Pity first screened in a tiny cinema in Paris. Soon after its American release, film critic Roger Ebert described it as ‘one of the greatest documentaries...
View ArticleHobbit laws and the race to the bottom in the global film market
Ultimately, governments offering Hollywood subsidies are usually bidding for ‘place branding’, effectively a form of product placement. The economic and artistic health of the local screen industry and...
View ArticleWhat life on Earth is for: animated films and the pandemic
In most countries, new film releases have played out over the past year or so within the four walls of living rooms, on the small screens of television sets, laptop screens, or tablets. But how do we...
View Article‘You could do a lot with this place’: film therapy during a housing crisis
Indulging in cinematic spaces like these – loft apartments occupied by single artist types – is a salve amidst the current housing crisis in Australia. These viewing habits, the enthusiastic study of...
View ArticleDisrupting the Capitalist Real: Kevin Lewis’ Willy’s Wonderland
In WILLY'S WONDERLAND, we are confronted with two nightmares: being trapped in a children’s entertainment venue inhabited by haunted animatronic characters; and the torment of living as hostages, held...
View ArticleSurviving the world unseen
What unites The Conversation and Leave No Trace is the shared desire of their protagonists to evade particular forms of capture. This desire to live off-the-grid is, inherently, a rejection of the...
View ArticleCarfucker: mechanophilia and accelerationism in Julia Ducournau’s Titane
While it may be sensible in our climate-threatened world to regard cars as unrestrainable pests choking and exhausting the planet, cars are routinely celebrated in popular cinema as portals for...
View ArticleThe revolution will not be quirky
The French Dispatch is Wes Anderson’s most overtly ‘historical’ film to date. It is also his most Wes Anderson. His longstanding tendency toward narrative detours and aesthetic pastiche finds here its...
View ArticleThe triumph of intellectual property over storytelling
Sony’s pickle is that Spider-Man doesn't have the sidekick roster of a Batman or rotating teammates of the X-Men: so in order to keep producing content, the studio must dive into the rogues gallery and...
View ArticleJane Campion’s religion of love and disgust
In these films Jane Campion’s creed seems to be one of love, too, but a love that—distinct from the Romantic ideal—unfurls within the mucky ecstasy of the venal and the sublime. Her characters come...
View ArticleThe politics of the multiverse: simultaneity and trauma in Everything...
The multiverse can have deeper implications when the interests in self-conscious play and knotty conception are probed for a more consequential social commentary. While neither a flawless execution of...
View ArticleThere is nothing whatsoever wrong with Lightyear
If, as Andrew Todd has written, Sony’s recent Morbius was the triumph of intellectual property over storytelling, Disney’s Lightyear is intellectual property as storytelling. It is the story of a toy,...
View ArticleBarbaric struts and cosmic indigestion in Jordan Peele’s Nope
In that moment the audience and Emerald are each abolitionists, and in that moment at the Blacktown drive-in where I witnessed Nope, everyone in that carpark, however briefly, behind their tinted car...
View ArticleDoes your mother know? The maternal on-screen
Purity and sacrifice—the religious tenets of good motherhood—still course through representations of the maternal on-screen, just as they continue to weave their way through the dynamics of motherhood...
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