Review © Jane Freebury Rated M, 1 hr 54 mins Screening at Dendy and Palace Electric The cartoon that lends its caption to this Gus Van Sant film shows a sheriff’s posse staring at an empty wheelchair among cactus in the desert. The rough line drawing instantly conveys a…
Jirga, a new fiction feature from Benjamin Gilmour, is about a former Australian soldier who returns to Afghanistan to ask forgiveness of the family of a civilian he accidentally killed three years earlier. Writer-director Gilmour (Son of a Lion) filmed clandestinely on location. A Q&A with director Benjamin Gilmour will…
… in no particular order: Love and Friendship (dir. Whit Stillman) Hunt for the Wilderpeople (dir. Taika Waititi) Nocturnal Animals (dir. Tom Ford) The BFG (dir. Steven Spielberg) Goldstone (dir. Ivan Sen) The Nice Guys (dir. Shane Black) Joe Cinque’s Consolation (dir Sotiris Dounoukos) Elle (dir Paul Verhoeven) Mustang…
By Jane Freebury As I look around on the flight to Tehran, none of the other female passengers is wearing a headscarf. Not yet, anyhow, and not until we land. And Argo, the movie about US Embassy hostages escaping post-revolutionary Iran, seems a rather surprising in-flight entertainment option as we…
First published in the Canberra Times on 23 July 2016 © by Jane Freebury Two years ago, a bitter-sweet documentary about the backing singers behind stars like Jagger, Sting, Springsteen and Bowie won the Oscar for best documentary. Not only did the Morgan Neville doco, 20 Feet from Stardom, beat…
Published in the Canberra Times on 26 March 2016 at: http://www.canberratimes.com.au/act-news/canberra-life/canberra-filmmakers-the-tentmakers-of-cairo-shows-artisans-during-arab-spring-20160322-gnoebd.html © Jane Freebury Something tells me that the cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead would have enjoyed hearing that a documentary award in her name had gone to a film about men who sew. Mead became famous in the 1920s-30s for her…
Published in The Canberra Times on 27 February 2016, and in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald online. http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/french-film-festival-2016-vive-la-difference-20160223-gmycel.html © Jane Freebury A snippet of film that ran for under one minute was projected at a trendy cafe in Paris in 1895 and the rest is history. The…
