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Keywords: Film Reviews

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Education system is for kids, not teachers

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 24 March 2011
    5 Comments

    Teachers unions are painted as self-interested clubs whose safeguards for hard-working, quality teachers also extend to the lazy and incompetent, at students' expense.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Teen sexuality at the apocalypse

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 17 March 2011

    New Queer Cinema is a genre marked by its robust portrayal of gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender protagonists, usually as outsiders or renegades from conventional society. Alienation and otherness drive the characters into each other's orbits with the force of a familial bond.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Private school education in purgatory

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 09 March 2011
    3 Comments

    Parents and teachers have absconded. A violent altercation is documented by students with camera phones. During a drug-and-booze-addled party, a girl is assulted and left for dead. A pricey education is no substitute for an ethical framework.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Reincarnated goats and the sacrament of change

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 02 March 2011
    2 Comments

    A hollow booming is the only result of the sickly goatherd's urgent knocking on the church door on the night before his death. The image makes a sad irony of the man's simple faith in the healing power of the ash he earlier swept off the church floor.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Testing marriage

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 16 February 2011
    1 Comment

    Becca is appalled by the insufficiency of religious platitudes. Howie's emotions are unbridled and barely tempered, emerging as a lunging stallion roar. Separated by the obelisk of grief for their dead son, they seek solace individually.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Exploiting natural disasters

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 10 February 2011
    2 Comments

    The Tsunami is recreated in spectacular fashion, but robbed of significance, except as a catalyst for one white-skinned European tourist, who survives despite the deaths of hundreds of thousands of brown-skinned Indonesian villagers. This is exploitative in the extreme.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Father Brennan's jailbreak

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 02 February 2011

    A mess of maps and photos pinned to his wall reflects his obsession. A series of close calls and violent altercations reveal his rising desperation. His love of his family bolsters his conviction while allowing him to retain his humanity.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Inside and outside the Facebook fishtank

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 27 January 2011
    3 Comments

    A lot of people say they committed Facebook suicide – deleting their profile – after seeing the new American documentary Catfish. 'Even I've scaled back,' says co-director Ariel Schulman. 'If a "virtual relationship" affects you emotionally, then it's not virtual at all.'

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Unmarried misery

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 19 January 2011
    1 Comment

    Although Mary is an infuriating ninny, we get to know her well enough to appreciate that gasping for breath beneath her wine-swilling garrulousness are deeply felt insecurities and a desperate desire to be loved.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Best of 2010: Stoning death by male ego

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 06 January 2011
    7 Comments

    The trial and execution of Soraya M are portrayed in agonising, visceral detail. The stoning of 'adulterous' women under the auspices of Shariah law is shown to be less about violence inherent to Islam than the egos of brutal and bullying men.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    U2's way to God

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 09 December 2010
    8 Comments

    A ridiculously wealthy humanitarian, Bono is an object of scorn among grassroots human rights advocates. But a U2 show may be as close to church as a rock concert gets. Nowhere outside a church would you find so many voices declaring in unison: 'I believe in the kingdom come.'

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Drug dealer's life after death

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 02 December 2010
    2 Comments

    This theatre of cruelty reflects the preoccupations of a protagonist unrestrained by physical revulsion, and evokes a nightmare world defined by sex and violence, where there is not much difference between the two.

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