Film

Writer and director Sarah Polley’s new film, Women Talking , based on Miriam Toews’ book, is a devastating exploration of abuse and sexual violence, trauma and women’s oppression — and resistance. In an isolated religious community, a group of men have been drugging and raping the women and girls for years. Women have long been excluded from education, silenced, and kept disempowered, some domestically abused. Women Talking ’s opening declaration, “What follows is an act of female imagination”, alludes to the response of the village elders to the attacks. The attacks were dismissed as either...

I have now seen the ‘“remake” of All Quiet on the Western Front by German director Edward Berger. Unsurprisingly, it differs considerably from Lewis Milestone’s 1930 classic. The bare outline — of both Erich Maria Remarque’s book and the 1930 film — is followed, but that’s about it. A key scene where the central character, German soldier, Paul Bäumer, returns home on leave is omitted, thus denuding the film of much of its personal impact. It’s another powerful anti-war statement with brutal combat scenes; but these men are human beings with emotions, feelings, families and loved ones, and this...

Georgia Oakley’s riveting and impressive debut, Blue Jean , is both moving and apposite. Jean, excellently performed by Rosy McEwen, struggles to navigate a double life. In her new job as a PE teacher in 1988 Newcastle, Jean is a newly-divorced and reserved individual, always making excuses to not socialise with her co-workers. She’s fretfully anxious to keep work life apart from her other life with her new girlfriend Viv, and other boisterous, more openly lesbian friends. But in 1988, set against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis, a moral panic against homosexuality is being whipped up as the...

Long overdue in Kino Eye: a film from Australia. Gillian Armstrong’s My Brilliant Career (1979) was adapted from Miles Franklin’s novel of the same name, written in 1901 when Franklin was only 16 years old, and published in Britain by Virago in 1980. It tells the story of Sybylla Melvyn (Judy Davis), who lives on an isolated farm and dreams of becoming a writer. Her parents are not exactly overjoyed at this prospect and pack her off to board with their maternal grandparents, who they hope will make her see sense. She becomes close to Harry Beecham (Sam Neill), and he proposes, but Sybylla...

Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka (1939), starring Greta Garbo, was billed as a “romantic comedy”, but the comedy dished up is a rather thin gruel. Garbo plays Ninotchtka, a po-faced Soviet bureaucrat who is sent by her Commissar (Béla Lugossi, looking like Count Dracula in a uniform) to Paris on a mission to sort out three wayward colleagues, who have succumbed to the delights of the City of Light. As indeed does Ninotchka, eventually falling for the charms of the White émigré Count Léon d’Algoult. The film does make, as might be expected, some valid criticisms of the Soviet Union, but those tend to...

Eugene Debs (1855-1926) was the main public figure of the US Socialist Party in the era when it won over 900,000 votes in the presidential elections of 1912 and 1920. Later socialists, learning from the Bolsheviks and the Russian Revolution as well as rising black struggles, were critical of Debs's limitations, and of course the language he used was the language of his time; but Debs spoke out eloquently against racism. The Birth of a Nation (1915) has been called "the most influential film in history". The merits of the spectacular drama The Birth of a Nation excite bitter comment whenever it...

I haven't seen the new film Tár (with Cate Blanchett) yet. However, there are many films which feature conductors, this being rich territory for the dramatization of massive egos and conflicts, artistic and otherwise. Amadeus (Miloš Forman, 1984) is a good example. My choice is Taking Sides (2001), an international co-production with István Szabó directing and focusing on the famous German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler (Stellan Skarsgård) and allegations of his collaboration with the Nazis while Musical Director of the renowned Berlin Philharmonic. He is interrogated by Major Steve Arnold of...

After two back-to-back Academy Awards in which women won Best Director — Nomadland ’s Chloé Zhao in 2021 and T he Power of the Dog ’s Jane Campion in 2022 — this year only men are shortlisted: Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert for Everything Everywhere All at Once ; Todd Field for Tár ; Martin McDonagh for The Banshees of Inisherin ; Ruben Östlund for Triangle of Sadness ; and Steven Spielberg for The Fabelmans . In 2022, women comprised 24% of directors, writers, producers, editors and cinematographers working on the top 250 grossing films, down 1% from 2021. The last Oscar time nominations...

Friday 27 January was International Holocaust Remembrance Day. My chosen film, unfortunately, is not easily accessible and is not that well-known. Omer Bartov in his otherwise excellent book The “Jew” in Cinema doesn’t even mention it, although it is one of the most interesting, if perplexing because of a peculiar twist, of the films depicting those terrible events. There was a publishing sensation in post-war Hungary when the diary of Holocaust victim Éva Heyman, a 13 year-old girl from the Transylvanian town of Nagyvárad (now Oradea in Romania), was found by her mother. Éva perished in...

Twas down in Mississippi not so long ago When a young boy from Chicago stepped through a southern door This boy’s dreadful tragedy I can still remember well The colour of his skin was black and his name was Emmett Till - Death of Emmett Till , by Bob Dylan Till , a film now showing at local cinemas, tells the story of a lynching in the Southern USA which did not go almost unnoticed outside its area as many other such lynchings did. Instead it became a cause célèbre and gave a major impetus to the Civil Rights Movement. The USA presents itself as a great “melting pot” — a country where diverse...