
#LFF2016: Down Under, Indivisible, Wild
Quick takes from the 60th London Film Festival, with public screenings from October 5th-16th, 2016.
film criticism by maryann johanson | since 1997
Quick takes from the 60th London Film Festival, with public screenings from October 5th-16th, 2016.
It’s supposed to be intense, but it’s just silly. Unless it’s secretly about one woman ridding the world of notorious arms dealers through sly manipulation.
Hooray for movies about sex and love that aren’t about teenagers trying to get laid but adults still trying to figure it all out.
Appealing performances, a few tweaks to genre clichés, and a sincere desire to counter outrageous racism go a long way toward making this worth a look.
Since Sydney is the seventh most represented city among my readership, I figure this is worth mentioning even though it’s only available to those living in or near there…
Christmastime is typically associated with snow, but it isn’t always in the forecast in many places that celebrate the holiday…
*Finding Nemo* is stunningly exquisite, an extraordinary leap forward in artistry for Pixar, and for computer animation in general, bringing a strange and alien world to life, so real you could almost reach out and touch it, knowing that it would be wet if you did. Truly, *Nemo* is an immersive experience. But only visually. Because the moment all the gorgeously rendered inhabitants of this beautiful undersea realm open their mouths, they sound surprisingly, and rather depressingly, human.
Can it be a coincidence that both of the big new flicks this Memorial Day weekend — the kickoff for Hollywood’s first summer movie season of the twenty-first century — are basically Hong Kong action movies? The people who think about these kinds of things — current-events journalists, mainly — have already predicted that if the 1900s were the American century, the 2000s may well be the Asian century… but they were speaking economically and politically. I guess it’s probably inevitable that Asia would start to hold some cultural sway in the West, too.