Category: Reviews
-
Gerwig’s Barbie, girls, and a Barbie world
A Barbie movie on face value, in the age of Hollywood intellectual property mining, would be easy to deride as a glorified toy commercial. She ticks off the boxes after all: cross-generational appeal, an iconic figure and hot-pink image, a cultural reference point that’s evolved to mean very different things to all ends of the…
-
SFF 2023: Kennedy — the indulgence of noir-crime, tragedy and psychopathy
This review is part of Tharunka’s continued coverage of the 70th Sydney Film Festival. Read the rest of the reviews here. Reality tends to be a deafeningly dull echo of our imagination, often restricted in creativity and complicated with details. At this year’s 70th Sydney Film Festival, director Anurag Kashyap introduces the film as his…
-
SFF 2023: ‘Past Lives’ — absence, connection and a different kind of love story
Past Lives opens with a slow zoom approaching a trio in a New York bar, as unseen strangers discuss among themselves: what relationships exist between these people? Who are they to each other? Are they friends or tourists? Which pairing of them are lovers, if at all? We don’t know the answer yet — and…
-
SFF 2023: Change, Trauma and Cinema — ‘I Like Movies’ delivers a seminal teen text
When Lawrence Kweller (Isaiah Letterman) proclaims “Movies are my life. I need to watch them like I need to breathe, and if I don’t watch a movie a day, I feel like part of me is dying,” the film’s title stands almost ironically in comparison to his undying, and no doubt toxic, love for cinema.
-
SFF 2023: Hirokazu Kore-eda finds humanity in Monster’s misconstrued world of perspectives
This review is part of Tharunka’s continued coverage of the 70th Sydney Film Festival. Read the rest of the reviews here. Hirokazu Kore-eda has built his works on a repeated message: there is inherent goodness in all people that makes them human. Morality has been communicated through unlikely family dynamics in Shoplifters (2018) and Broker…
-
Actually Autistic: All About Women
Chloé Hayden is an actor, influencer, published author and disability advocate, best known for portraying the beloved autistic character Quinni in the 2022 Heartbreak High reboot, while Grace Tame won Australian of the Year in 2021 and is an advocate for survivors on sexual assault and Dr. Jac Den Houting is a research psychologist who…