ALLIANCE OF WOMEN FILM JOURNALISTS

Female Film Critics 24/375

Melbourne IFF 2024

Festivals Reviews 

THE BALCONETTES (Melbourne IFF 2024) – Review by Nadine Whitney

Nadine Whitney , , , , , ,

Noémie Merlant’s The Balconettes is a deliciously outré response to the tacit complicity of the French film and cultural institutions in enabling misogyny and gendered violence. With a script co-authored by Céline Sciamma, The Balconettes succeeds in depicting the double standards still applied to women and the ownership of their image and bodies. Women young, old, fat, and thin, walk the streets and dance in freedom away from the weight of men in one stunning scene. Noémie Merlant and Céline Sciamma imagine a world in The Balconettes where France shouts Liberté, égalité, sororité and while the film isn’t an incendiary revolutionary document on its own, it’s adding to the voices growing louder all the time.

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Festivals Reviews 

CHRISTMAS EVE IN MILLER’S POINT (Melbourne IFF 2024) – Review by Nadine Whitney

Nadine Whitney , , , , , , , ,

Tyler Taormina is developing as the new auteur of surreal, suburban Americana. Long Island through his lens becomes a space filled with odd rituals conducted in diners, parking lots, or empty streets at night. After his oneiric night song and dialogue free Happer’s Comet, the aural assault of Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point suggests a very different kind of Long Island experience – cluttered and chaotic. Taormina’s tribute to the strangeness of the everyday extends into the ritual of a large extended family Christmas.

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Festivals Reviews 

THE DAMNED (Melbourne IFF 2024) – Review by Nadine Whitney

Nadine Whitney , , , ,

Roberto Minervini’s Civil War drama is an extended purgatory wherein the soldiers are already ghosts in not only history, but ghosts walking into Minervini’s otherworldly shot narrative. It’s 1862 and a group of Union volunteers have been sent to the West to scout and hold the territory without back up. Winter sets in and the men (and boys) find themselves exposed not only to the elements but the entropic nature of war.

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Festivals Reviews 

THE GIRL WITH THE NEEDLE (Melbourne IFF 2024) – Review by Nadine Whitney

Nadine Whitney , , , , ,

Magnus von Horn’s The Girl with the Needle is based on a notorious true crime case in Denmark. von Horn and co-screenwriter Line Langebek use the horrors of the murders to reveal the greater social horrors that lead the disenfranchised to believe that they can give their unwanted (or unable to be cared for) babies a better life in a city already filled with widows, broken men, women, and children. Karoline, Peter, and even Dagmar are representative of those who keep sliding further and further as grist in a system where innocence and guilt are only moral absolutes when viewed from the outside.

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Festivals Reviews 

GOOD ONE (Melbourne IFF 2024) – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas , , , , ,

Sam (Lily Collias) is an ordinary, sensible seventeen-year-old planning a camping trip with her father, his best friend, and his best friend’s son who is around her same age. A last minute argument sees the latter pull out from the trip, so Sam finds herself alone with the two middle-aged men as they embark on a wilderness adventure in upstate New York. A grounded, down-to-earth young woman on the cusp of adulthood, she patiently accepts what is the predominantly good-natured needling from the older men until, slowly, the dynamics visibly change and the reality of who these men are comes increasingly to the surface.

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Festivals Reviews 

GREEN BORDER (Melbourne IFF 2024) – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas , , , , , , ,

This is an unambiguously upsetting, distressing viewing experience, and it should be. Yet Agnieszka Holland is never exploitative, but also never softens or shirks from what is a genuinely harrowing story. Green Border is not an easy watch, but it is an indescribably important one, and one of Holland’s most humane and compassionate works yet.

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Festivals Reviews 

HE AIN’T HEAVY (Melbourne IFF 2024) – Review by Nadine Whitney

Nadine Whitney , , , , , , ,

David Vincent Smith’s debut film He Ain’t Heavy is an astonishing piece of art. A story of one family dealing with the fallout of mental illness and addiction; and the limits of being able to care for the person inside the disease. Max becomes a violent almost demonic presence in his sister Jade’s life. Trying to protect herself and her mother Bev from Max’s outbursts has made her put her life on hold. In an act of desperation, she kidnaps Max to get him through detox – as all the programs he went into previously have failed. The rawness and honesty of David Vincent Smith’s film is disarming. A blazing debut from an Australian talent tackling difficult subject matter with nuance and grace.

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Festivals Reviews 

JANET PLANET (Melbourne IFF 2024) – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas , , , ,

Janet Planet is an intimate snapshot of an intense mother-daughter relationship as each of the two characters attempts to move through the world. On the cusp of adolescence, Lacy clings to Janet, her mother, the latter of whom is trying in her own way to forge an identity beyond ‘single mother’. Nostalgic but never naff, Janet Planet fills the screen with warmth and compassion for its charming, flawed and very human characters.

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Festivals Reviews 

MATT AND MARA (Melbourne IFF 2024) – Review by Nadine Whitney

Nadine Whitney , , , ,

A finely drawn character study with charming humour and some not-so-subtle barbs about the Toronto literary and artistic scene, Matt and Mara dissects fragile egos, adult ennui, and the parameters of success with the sensibility built around the shifting maturity of the protagonists. Director Kazik Radwanski presents a dramatic comedy hiding its profundity in constructed slightness. Two imperfect and indulgent people who open and close doors in their relationship as they hold each other to account simply by existing. Matt and Mara emerges as tender depiction of a bittersweet, deep and complicated connection.

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Festivals Reviews 

ON BECOMING A GUINEA FOWL (Melbourne IFF 2024) – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas , , , , , ,

Zambian-Welsh filmmaker Rungano Nyoni’s stunning debut feature I Am Not a Witch (2017) followed the story of am orphan girl called Shula who is sent to a witch camp, leading to her exploitation by a corrupt government official. In Nyoni’s sophomore feature On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, we meet – again – a central character called Shula. That both these characters have the same name might suggest an informal connection, but the life of Shula in On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is marked very much by the overbearing presence of both her immediate and extended family. Through her signature introduction of the fantastic into their brutal worlds, the presence of hope elevates Nyoni’s films to something bordering on the spiritually divine. No one makes films like her – right now, they don’t even come close.

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