Reviewed by GREG KING Director: Maria Schrader Stars: Carey Mulligan, Zoe Kazan, Patricia Clarkson, Andre Braugher, Jennifer Ehle, Samantha Morton, Angela Yeoh, Anastasia Barzee, Sean Cullen, Peter Friedman, Zach Grenier, Mike Houston, Ashley Judd. In 2017 two investigative reporters for the New York Times wrote an article on sexual harassment in the workplace by men in positions of power. This led eager reporter Jodi Kantor (Zoe Kazan) and veteran journalist Megan Twohey (Carey Mulligan) to investigate rumours of the systemic sexual harassment and rape of female …
WILDLIFE
Reviewed by GREG KING Director: Paul Dano Stars: Carey Mulligan, Jake Gyllenhaal, Ed Oxenbould, Bill Camp. The opening night film for the Melbourne International Film Festival this year was Wildlife, a small coming of age drama which marks the directorial debut for Paul Dano, an actor better known for playing troubled and eccentric characters in films like Little Miss Sunshine and Prisoners, etc. Wildlife marks an auspicious directorial debut. Set in Montana in the 1960s this is a coming of age drama about the Brinson family and the disintegration of their …
MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2018 – reviews
ALL REVIEWS WRITTEN BY GREG KING LAST UPDATED AUGUST 17, 2018 THE MAN WHO KILLED DON QUIXOTE. The struggles faced by idiosyncratic and maverick filmmaker Terry Gilliam in trying to bring to the screen his long gestating passion project about Don Quixote have been well detailed in the fascinating 2002 documentary Lost In La Mancha. That film told of the storms that destroyed sets, the lack of financial support and the ill health of its star, all of which combined to halt production within a week of the project starting physical production. Now some twenty years …
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SUFFRAGETTE
Reviewed by GREG KING Director: Sarah Gavron Stars: Carey Mulligan, Anne-Marie Duff, Helena Bonham Carter, Ben Whishaw, Brendan Gleeson, Romola Garai, Finbar Lynch, Meryl Streep, Samuel West, Adrian Schiller, Natalie Press. Sisters are certainly doing it for themselves in this earnest drama about the early suffragette movement. Part earnest historical drama, part political drama and part character driven historical drama Suffragette looks at the struggle of British women to gain universal suffrage in the early part of the twentieth century. London in 1912 became the …
FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
Reviewed by GREG KING Director: Thomas Vinterberg Stars: Carey Mulligan, Matthias Schoenaerts, Michael Sheen, Tom Sturridge, Juno Temple, Jessica Barden. Thomas Hardy's lyrical pastoral romances set in his fictitious Wessex are often quite grim and bleak tales, and it is easy to see their continuing appeal to filmmakers. Hardy's Far From The Madding Crowd, written in 1874, tells the story of independent minded Bathsheba Everdene, who is wooed by three very different suitors before marrying one of them. It was sumptuously filmed in 1966 by John Schlesinger (Midnight …
INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS
Reviewed by GREG KING Directors: Joel and Ethan Coen Stars: Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, John Goodman, Justin Timberlake, Jeanine Serralles, Ethan Phillips, Robin Barrett. This bittersweet and blackly funny film follows a week in the life of a down and out folk singer struggling to make his mark in the early 60s when folk was slowly taking over from jazz in the Greenwich Village coffee houses frequented by the intellectuals and college students. The film is loosely based on The Mayor Of MacDougal Street, the memoir of Dave Van Ronk, who was one of the founding figures …
DRIVE
Reviewed by GREG KING Director: Nicholas Winding Refn Stars: Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Oscar Isaac, Bryan Cranston, Albert Brooks, Ron Perlman. Maverick Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn makes tough, unflinchingly brutal and uncompromising dramas like his Pusher trilogy and the physically bruising Bronson. For his first American film, Refn has made a dark and downbeat hard boiled noir-like thriller that has moments of quiet punctuated by sudden explosive bursts of graphic, bloody violence. Refn brings an outsider’s perspective to his depiction of LA, …
NEVER LET ME GO
Reviewed by GREG KING Director: Mark Romanek Stars: Keira Knightley, Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield, Isobel Meikle-Small, Charlie Rowe, Ella Purnell, Charlotte Rampling, Sally Hawkins. At first glance the rustic Hailsham seems like a typically privileged English boarding school, where orphaned students are raised by strict teachers and prepared for their future. But as we quickly learn, Hailsham has a far more sinister plan for its alumni. A few decades ago, scientists cured all diseases and developed a way to extend the human life span beyond 100 years. …