Tag: 4 StarsPage 11 of 14

Spotlight

    Review © Jane Freebury Just before 9/11, the Boston Globe was about to publish revelations of long-term and systematic child sexual abuse by rogue priests in…

Suffragette

Review by Jane Freebury As arguments for human rights go, this is in its quiet way a powerful one. All the more for the way it draws us…

The Dressmaker

  Review © by Jane Freebury Once upon a time in the Wimmera, a stranger comes to town. The twang of guitar and low-angle framing suggest that this…

Macbeth

Review by © Jane Freebury The last time I saw Macbeth on screen it was set in the ganglands of Melbourne. Geoffrey Wright’s film was not the first…

The Gift

Review © Jane Freebury Gifts are not always welcome, nor freely given. The well known subtext to giving and receiving gets a thoroughly sinister workout in this accomplished…

Amy

REVIEW BY JANE FREEBURY Everyone knew what had happened to her, Amy Winehouse, but many of us may have forgotten how good she was when she started out….

Wild Tales

Review © Jane Freebury Lions, cheetahs, wildebeest and birds-of-prey grace the opening credits of this giddily extravagant Argentinean anthology of tales of revenge. By film’s close, well may…

Mad Max: Fury Road

Review © Jane Freebury Finding a space on screens crowded with cataclysm and ultra-violent action, in an industry that waits for no one, the new Mad Max has…

Clouds of Sils Maria

Review © Jane Freebury Fading stars facing tough new realities is a subject that has been worked to brilliant effect on screen. It received definitive, hysterical treatment in…

Wild

Review by © Jane Freebury Wild opens at the top of a rocky outcrop in stunning mountain wilderness. If the lone hiker who has earned herself the view…

Mr Turner

Review by Jane Freebury Of all the times in an artist’s life to choose from, director Mike Leigh has chosen to portray the great English landscape painter J.M.W….

The Drop

Review by Jane Freebury A smoothly crafted tale of minor redemption that gives James Gandolfini his final bow, has a British and a Swedish actor in the lead…

Pride

Review by Jane Freebury This big-hearted sprawling movie shuttles between a grungy gay and lesbian bookshop in inner London and a mining village nestled in the rolling green…

Begin Again

Review by Jane Freebury The hauteur that goes with Keira Knightley’s cheekbones in some signature roles has vanished in this fresh and engaging human drama set in the…

A Most Wanted Man

Review by Jane Freebury It’s a tough ask, separating our response to the Philip Seymour Hoffman character in A Most Wanted Man from the knowledge that this classy…

Venus in Fur

Review by Jane Freebury To begin with, there’s a taste of Paris as we track down a boulevard, between rows of wintry trees. We turn off at a…

Jersey Boys

Review by Jane Freebury Movie evergreen Clint Eastwood has recently been showing us other sides to himself besides the swaggering cowboy in buckskins that made him famous. The…

Frank

Review by Jane Freebury It’s such a short, no-nonsense name for a complete eccentric and it belies the weirdness and whimsy of his story, but what other shorthand…

Ida

Review by Jane Freebury This solemn, spare and beautiful personal journey begins in a house of silence, a convent, where a young woman is preparing herself for the…

Belle

Review by Jane Freebury A portrait of the woman who inspired this film, the daughter of an English sea captain and a black woman held in slavery, was…