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Keywords: Film Review

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Nightmares and daydreams about women and power

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 10 April 2014
    1 Comment

    Sex addicted woman Joe's story is marked by innumerable sexual encounters with random men. Often it is explicit, and thoroughly unpleasant. It culminates in a pointed statement about societal double standards regarding gender and sex. By contrast, Carol's story about trying to get ahead in a man's world is affirming and uplifting at every turn. Both stories are about women and power, but ultimately Carol's is the more empowering.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Flawed humanity of a police shooting martyr

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 01 August 2013
    3 Comments

    On 1 January 2009, police in Oakland, California shot dead an unarmed African-American man, 22-year-old Oscar Grant. The event sparked riots, and renewed tensions around race and debates about police procedure. Underlying this politicised context is the story of a young father and former drug dealer who was trying, with mixed success, to turn his life around.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Baz Luhrmann versus the god of capitalism

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 06 June 2013
    5 Comments

    In the 1920s New York society of Gatsby, money is literally God: benevolent to some; laying waste to the lives of others. It's a tough call whether Luhrmann has deliberately dumbed down Fitzgerald's text in order to appeal more readily to a mass market. If cinema was a medium to excite the eyes and ears while relaxing the brain, he'd be a master.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Oscar-winning racism in Hollywood's mixed bag

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 28 February 2013

    After cataloguing the ways in which the film belittles and marginalises the experiences of black slaves, Williams laments the fact that such marginalisation continues to exist seemingly unnoticed in mainstream popular culture. The Oscar awarded to Django Unchained is the epitome of popular culture 'not noticing'.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Stories about people who want to do better

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 20 December 2012
    3 Comments

    One man suffers the shame of sex addiction. For another, a quadriplegic, sex is a matter of dignity. Two couples meet for a civilised discussion about their children's behaviour, but civility collapses. An antihero embraces violence as a solution to exploitative American media. Eureka Street counts down its essential films of 2012.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The media and the vulnerable in 2012

    • Michael Mullins
    • 17 December 2012
    3 Comments

    Browsing the highlights and lowlights of the year, media treatment of vulnerable people has been a constant. The regrettable circumstances surrounding the suicide of nurse Jacintha Saldanha come to mind, but there are surprising moments when journalists have distinguished themselves with investigative reporting for the common good.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Children breathe the air of protest

    • Various
    • 04 September 2012

    Children need to walk together, arm in arm with strangers, wear badges of hope and T-shirts with lifelines, sing words of wisdom and history, chant choric responses of camaraderie in a mass movement of human voices. Understand the justice of causes and the constant need for change.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The epiphanies of our lives

    • B.N. Oakman
    • 10 July 2012
    4 Comments

    I want  you to list the epiphanies in your lives, says the lecturer. We'll build poems around them...  I ponder, but cannot manage to think of one. Does he really believe people have several? My extra years are like binoculars peered through from the wrong end, shrinking past significance to present inconsequence.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Teen girl's post-traumatic guilt trip

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 21 June 2012
    2 Comments

    A self-absorbed teenager contributes to the road death of a pedestrian, then seeks to assuage her guilt without actually accepting responsibility. One teacher attemps to mentor the girl in her dilemma but is too accepting of her flirtatious advances to be considered a disinterested advisor.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Love with an open hand

    • Various
    • 13 March 2012

    When I'm with you, I take off my rings, unlatch my watch and untie my hair. And it's so quiet, so so quiet, like a film without a soundtrack.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Humanising Hoover and Thatcher

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 02 February 2012
    4 Comments

    The problems do not begin and end with badly applied fake jowls. J. Edgar introduces its subject in his later years, reflecting back on his life. This manipulative tactic errs on the side of sentimentality, when Hoover, like Margaret Thatcher, is not a figure to whom sentimentality can be easily attached.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Exposing UN sex and violence

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 14 September 2011
    2 Comments

    UN peacekeeper Kathryn Bolkovac uncovers evidence that some of her colleagues have been involved with sex slavery and human trafficking. Her interactions with one victim reinforce her determination to achieve justice, while highlighting the limits of her ability to do so.

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