Female Film Critics 24/375
Burning is an immersive, awful, essential watch, and the urgency with which filmmaker Eve Orner seeks to alert us of just how close we are to the edge of global disaster is intoxicating; climate change and its nightmarish effects are no longer a matter for debate, Orner argues. That reality is here already.
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Beautifully filmed yet brutal to watch, Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale is a revenge drama that will resonate with any woman who’s been assaulted — or, for that matter, dismissed by society. Set in 1825 Tasmania, it follows the plight of Clare, an Irish convict who’s suffered years of abuse at the hands of a British officer and is driven by his brutality to seek brutal revenge. The Nightingale is difficult to watch, but it is most certainly a must see.
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Dark Place saves the best of its anthology of five horror shorts till last and excels with Kodie Bedford’s unforgettable, electrifying Scout. If every horror anthology contains one short you wish was a feature, this is it; despite being a newcomer to directing, Bedford directs action like an old-hand, and the way she combines familiar genre thrills with inescapable and at times explicit political agenda about the exploitation and abuse of Indigenous Australian women by white men is nothing less than masterful.
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In a rare treat for Australian audiences, Thurston Moore – co-founder, guitarist and sometime-vocalist of legendary US rock band Sonic Youth – will be a guest of the 2019 Melbourne International FIlm Festival where, on 2 August, he will perform live his scores to four Maya Deren’s films, the haunting Meshes of the Afternoon, At Land (1944), Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946) and a new score for her famously unfinished short The Witch’s Cradle.
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Women horror filmmakers in Australia – as in many other countries – are a tight knit community, and an accomplishment for one is seen as an accomplishment for all. Australian filmmaker, artist, and academic Donna McRae’s sophomore feature film Lost Gully Road speaks both to that particular professional network and represents the increasing success of women in the field in Australia over recent years.
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The Australian state of Queensland in the country’s north-east in many ways typifies all the national clichés so readily identifiable in the international imagination, its iconography saturated with bikini-clad women engaging in myriad ways with sun, sand, and surf. Unlike the larger and supposedly more urban cities of Melbourne and Sydney, however, Queensland’s capital city Brisbane boasts one of the most unique treasures in the country’s yearly film calendar. The Queensland Film Festival is an annual event that has run for the last four years which showcases some of the most innovative and daring programming in the country.
Read moreBaz Luhrman’s sweeping romantic adventure is packed to the gills with something for everyone. And, like that wise old adage,
Read moreIn one of the most ambitious, exciting filmmaking feats of the year, Baz Luhrmann has created a compelling, romantic frontier
Read moreDirector/producer/co-writer Baz Luhrmann’s long-awaited film “Australia” plays a bit like an Aussie version of “Gone With the Wind”: lushly beautiful,
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