Showing all posts about film
Kimi, a Rear Window inspired thriller by Steven Soderbergh
7 June 2022
Still from Kimi, courtesy of Warner Brothers.
Angela (Zoe Kravitz) is a housebound voice stream interpreter who spends her days correcting errors a virtual assistant named Kimi makes. Typically Angela is required to familiarise Kimi with slang terms and clarify user instructions the virtual assistant doesn’t understand.
But when Angela hears what sounds like a violent assault on a recording that’s been flagged for review, she urges her managers to inform the authorities. But the would-be crime is an inconvenience CEO Bradley Hasling (Derek DelGaudio) has no time for.
The company is about to float on the sharemarket, and Hasling is more focussed on the payout due to him. He wants Angela to drop the matter, insisting the recording is some sort of glitch. When Angela refuses to relent, she finds herself pursued by people who will stop at nothing to protect their interests.
Kimi, trailer, directed by American filmmaker Steven Soderbergh, is choke full of references to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 classic Rear Window. Soderbergh still delivers us the neighbours peering into each other’s windows, but adds COVID, face masks, and smartphones to the mix. The storyline may be on the straightforward side, but the brisk runtime means there’s seldom a dull moment.
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Derek DelGaudio, film, Steven Soderbergh, Zoe Kravitz
A trailer for Juniper, a film by Matthew J. Saville
7 June 2022
Still from Juniper, courtesy of Transmission Films.
Juniper, trailer, is the debut feature of South African born New Zealand filmmaker Matthew J. Saville. Set in rural New Zealand, the story brings together two headstrong characters, Ruth (Charlotte Rampling), an alcoholic, and Sam (George Ferrier), her troubled grandson, who find themselves forced into each other’s company.
Sam (17) has been on a self-destructive spiral that could lead to his death. He returns home from boarding school to find his wheelchair-bound English grandmother, Ruth has moved in. Ruth is an ex-war photographer with a lust for life and a love of the bottle. Sam soon finds himself profoundly confronted by her alcoholic wit and chutzpah. Their first meeting is awkward; their second violent. Things get worse when Sam finds himself stranded alone with her and her nurse Sarah for the school holidays. Both strong-willed characters, a battle of supremacy ensues, enabling Sam to embrace life again and for Ruth to face her mortality.
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Charlotte Rampling, film, George Ferrier, Matthew J. Saville, trailer
PRIDE on SCREEN, LGBTIQ+ films, Cinema Nova, Melbourne, June 2022
6 June 2022
PRIDE on SCREEN is a celebration of Pride Month, taking place at Melbourne’s Cinema Nova, from Friday 10 June 2022, until Wednesday 15 June.
Cinema Nova celebrates Pride Month with a curated selection of premiere screenings, new releases and big-screen classics exploring stories from across the LGBTIQ+ experience, screening from Friday June 10.
After Blue, trailer, a science-fiction feature made by French director Bertrand Mandico in 2021, is one of the films showing at the festival. Set on a planet where only women can survive, After Blue tells the story of a hairdresser and her daughter, as they hunt for a notorious killer, named — curiously — Kate Bush.
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Bertrand Mandico, events, film, trailer
What If the Future Never Happened? The Daniel Johns story
1 June 2022
To accompany his latest album, Never Future, Australian musician Daniel Johns, formerly of Silverchair, will be releasing a short film (trailer), set in 1994, based on his experiences as a fifteen year old fronting Silverchair, which will feature orchestral reinterpretations of the band’s hits.
In a press release, Johns described What If The Future Never Happened? as “a grunge, sci-fi short adventure inspired by the pop culture I was immersed in before a curious case of child stardom”. It follows a hypothetical timeline wherein Johns’ trajectory was interrupted by “a mysterious figure from the future”, presumably stopping him from making the leap to stardom.
Johns, who will be portrayed by Australian actor Rasmus King, in addition to making a cameo appearance himself, describes the film as “at once the most honest and most fantastical thing I’ve ever done”.
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Daniel Johns, film, music, science fiction, trailer
Ray Liotta pitches a surprise in Field of Dreams
31 May 2022
I know nothing about baseball, let alone who the legends of the game are, or were, but after seeing Field of Dreams, I learned of one, Shoeless Joe Jackson, an American Major League Baseball (MLB) player one hundred years ago.
Shoeless Joe, depicted by late American actor Ray Liotta in the film, is the first player to appear in the baseball pitch Iowa farmer Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) cleared part of his cornfield to create. Following news of Liotta’s death last week, Costner posted a scene of Kinsella pitching to Shoeless Joe, which includes a moment that was not scripted, but ultimately included in the final cut.
Some of the best moments are unscripted.
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film, Kevin Costner, Ray Liotta
The 2022 Virtual Indigenous Film Festival
24 May 2022
Now in its fourth year, the 2022 Virtual Indigenous Film Festival is an event held exclusively online, showcasing Indigenous Australian film. This year’s event takes place from Thursday 26 May 2022, until Monday 30 May.
My Name is Gulpilil by Molly Reynolds, Off Country by John Harvey and Rhian Skirving, and Wash My Soul in the River’s Flow by Philippa Bateman (trailer featured above), are among titles being livestreamed during this year’s festival.
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Australian film, film, Indigenous film, trailer
Whina, a film by James Napier Robertson and Paula Whetu Jones
23 May 2022
Whina, trailer, directed by James Napier Robertson, and Paula Whetu Jones, is the story of Dame Whina Cooper, a twentieth century Māori activist and leader, who fought for Māori rights in New Zealand. Whina will screen at the 2022 Sydney Film Festival.
The daughter of a Māori chief, Josephine (‘Whina’ for short), was born in Hokianga in 1895. For nearly a century, Whina (Miriama McDowell, as younger Whina, and Rena Owen, Once Were Warriors) never stopped asserting the rights of her people and striving for unity between Māori and Pākehā. In 1975, Whina, frail but still determined, led a sacred hīkoi over 600kms, from the top of New Zealand to Parliament House in Wellington.
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film, James Napier Robertson, Paula Whetu Jones, trailer
The Impact, a film by 50 directors and 50 writers
21 May 2022
Made up of thirty-seven short films, The Impact, trailer, counts down the final two hours on Earth before a catastrophic meteor strike. Grim storyline aside, The Impact is a feat of filmmaking, with fifty directors and fifty writers collaborating to produce the feature. I’m not sure if we’ll see it on Australian film screens, but The Impact premieres in London on Tuesday 31 May 2022.
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Adèle Haenel exits reactionary racist patriarchal film industry
19 May 2022
French actor Adèle Haenel, who won best actress prizes in the César Awards and the European Film Awards, for her role as Héloïse, in Céline Sciamma’s 2019 film Portrait of a Lady on Fire, has walked away from film making, she said in a recent interview:
“I don’t make films anymore,” Haenel said. “Because of political reasons. Because the film industry is absolutely reactionary, racist, and patriarchal.”
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Before, Now & Then, by Kamila Andini, Sydney Film Prize contender
18 May 2022
Before, Now & Then, trailer, by Indonesian filmmaker Kamila Andini, is one of twelve films in competition for the Sydney Film Prize, at the 2022 Sydney Film Festival:
Kamila Andini tells a very personal story set against the backdrop of tumultuous political times in Indonesia in this beguiling period drama. Nana (a luminous Happy Salma) loses her family, including her husband, in the war in West Java. Years later, now in the 1960s, we meet her again. Her poverty now a thing of the past, she has remarried a significantly older man, Mr Darga, who is wealthy and a philanderer. Though her life is comfortable, Nana’s dreams are still occupied by the past.
A chance discovery of a carelessly forgotten item of clothing leads Nana to discover that Darga is having an affair with an even younger local woman, Ino. What follows is unexpected. Rather than a confrontation, Nana and Ino become friends, and take comfort in each other, jointly imagining a path to freedom. Meanwhile, through talk in the town of secret communists, and on radio broadcasts, the political tensions that will alter the future of Indonesia are made clear.
Before, Now & Then, also known as Nana, is competing against eleven other films for the Sydney Film Prize, the winner of which will be announced on Sunday 19 June 2022.
- Alcarràs by Carla Simón
- All The People I’ll Never Be by Davy Chou
- Blaze by Del Kathryn Barton
- The Box by Lorenzo Vigas
- Burning Days by Emin Alper
- Close by Lukas Dhont
- Fire of Love by Sara Dosa
- Godland by Hlynur Pálmason
- The Quiet Girl by Colm Bairéad
- Utama by Alejandro Loayza Grisi
- You Won’t Be Alone by Goran Stolevski
It looks like a tight contest to me.
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