Amazing Grace

As I watched Anthony Minghella’s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley, I kept asking myself why this movie was being made. The decrepitude of its subject matter is obvious from its very first scenes when we see the eponymous Mr Ripley (Matt Damon) accompanying a lieder singer at a private recital for…

Love Serenade, an Australian film by Shirley Barrett stars George Shevtsov as Ken Sherry, a recently divorced (for the third time) disc jockey from Brisbane who comes to work in the little Australian town of Sunray on the Murray River. Next door to him live two young sisters, Vicki Ann (Rebecca Frith) and Dimity (Miranda…

Like the Iliad, Biker Boyz — directed by Reggie Rock Bythewood from a screenplay he co-wrote with Craig Fernandez and based on an article by Michael Gougis in New Times magazine — presents us with the theatre of raw masculinity. Also like the Iliad it depicts a series of stylized taunts and scenes of individual…

Robert Duvall and his fetching companion, Luciana Pedraza, are fun to watch on the dance floor, but the movie he has built round those scenes is a pretty feeble one.

The fantastical superhero makes the transition from childish wish-fulfilment to adult castration nightmare. Is this progress?

In Les Misérables, directed by Bille August, it is the film itself which turns out to be misérable: thin and poor and wretched and in need of feeding up. The one thing you don’t want to skimp on when you are filming an epic is the epic proportions. August, a fine director of intense and…