Welcome to Eureka Street

back to site
Forgot your password?
Subscribe

Keywords: Film Reviews

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Toppling the idyls of youth

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 02 September 2010
    1 Comment

    A barroom brawl is transformed in Boy's head into a version of Michael Jackson's 'Beat It' music video. It's 1984 and Jackson is at his artistic and popular peak: pre-surgery, pre-child abuse allegations. Boy's worship is pure, but as an audience watching in 2010 we know the purity is transient.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Ratings hog Seven kills Cousins doco

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 26 August 2010
    7 Comments

    Ben Cousins is no angel, but neither is he a demon; just a man with a problem that he's fought to contain. His story has mirrors in the lives of many people who have battled addiction. Seven's treatment of it borders on exploitative.  

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The morality of violent films

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 19 August 2010
    7 Comments

    'Anyone watching this saying it in some way supports or encourages violence is watching the film in a very perverse way.' UK filmmaker Michael Winterbottom has a point, but one must wonder what scenes of brutal violence against women contribute to the betterment of the public imagination.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The gay Jewish butcher and other tales of Israeli conflict

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 12 August 2010
    1 Comment

    Aaron initially rationalises his sexuality as a test from God, a test that priveleges him, as it gives him an opportunity to prove his resilience. Ultimately his affair with a younger man is rather more serious than simply a rebellion against an oppressive ultra-orthodox society.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Putting border protection into perspective

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 05 August 2010
    6 Comments

    Mother Fish recreates the journey by sea of a group of Vietnamese refugees. During an election campaign where both major parties are trying to win votes with prejudicial rhetoric about 'border protection', a bit of truth and humanity is just what's needed.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Asylum seeker's island hell

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 29 July 2010
    2 Comments

    As Meredith approaches, two boys appear on the cliff and call for the boat to turn back. This allegory for the asylum seeker experience is not entirely out of place: Meredith seeks asylum from personal horrors that lie in her wake. But the curdled milk of human unkindness flows readily.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Sympathy for the man who killed God

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 22 July 2010
    1 Comment

    The idea of 'killing God' causes Darwin great anguish. In one scene, after a night spent scribbling his manuscript, he is shown frantically scrubbing at the ink stains on his fingers — Lady Macbeth trying to remove mythical blood.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Charity tourists find god in India

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 15 July 2010
    3 Comments

    Sydney filmmaker Claire McCarthy spent two months working among Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta. Like many Westerners with egalitarian pretensions, the characters in her film The Waiting City arrive in India bearing a tourist's naivety.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Repressed matriarch's unsafe sex

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 01 July 2010

    Risk is titillation for the buttoned-down Emma. Close-ups of stinging insects are juxtaposed with microcosms of human carnality; fingers and mouths traversing yards of stretch-marked, pocked and freckled skin.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Permutations of motherhood

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 17 June 2010

    Adoption is shown to be a tumultuous process, as joyful and painful in its own way as pregnancy and birth. Lucy is unable to conceive, but suspects that the motherly bond is about much more than biology. Her husband Joseph, by contrast, values biology greatly.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Criminals and other animals

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 10 June 2010
    4 Comments

    Nicky is curled up asleep on the couch. She is an innocent, and we feel affection for her. But as the camera pans around, we realise we have been sharing Andrew's leering perspective. The scene foreshadows Animal Kingdom's most appalling atrocity.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Tasmanian Church's reverse missionaries solution

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 03 June 2010
    23 Comments

    The Nigerian priests are disturbed that many Australian Catholic parents send their children to Catholic school but not to Mass. The structured religious lives of children in Nigeria mean that one seminary has had to restrict its intake numbers to 90 per year.

    READ MORE