Reel Encounters

It’s anyone’s guess what the film industry, local and international, will look like whenever the world comes out on the other side of the current pandemic.

What does it mean for art to become political? The question occurred to me this past week watching the way protests against anti-blackness spilled out from the USA to the rest of the world after police killed yet another black life.

A young woman is picked up before sunrise by a driver and travels from her home to her office.

There’s a tenderness to Lucio Castro’s debut film, “End of the Century,” that feels too fragile to be sustained.

Nothing in the deliriously trippy “Ema” is accidental. Instead, Pablo Larraín’s nervy drama deepens in complexity when you try to dissect any individual moment.

2002: Long Island, New York. Frank Tassone, a high-school superintendent, impeccably dressed in a fancy suit, preps for an evening assembly meeting with parents of Roslyn High School.

It makes sense that Australian director Justin Kurzel would get around to making a film about Ned Kelly, Australia’s most infamous outlaw.

Can one come of age in their thirties? In many ways, “Endings, Beginnings”, the new feature from director Drake Doremus, is best considered as a kind of delayed coming-of-age story of a woman coming to terms with her life.

Last week, amidst the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, two French doctors appeared on television discussing the possibility of testing experimental treatments against the virus in Africa.

Todd Haynes’ legal thriller “Dark Waters” is a dramatisation of a lawyer’s battle to uncover how the chemical manufacturing corporation DuPont contaminated a town, and a country, with its unregulated chemicals.

As the movie industry slows to a halt, now is as good a time as any to turn to the digitised media that’s available.

Whether you’re practicing social distancing, in self-quarantine or going about your business as normal, it’s hard to ignore that the current times are a bit fraught.

The positive reviews for “Onward” have seemed to damn it with faint praise; it’s good but not excellent, they say, or not quite up the level of the best of Pixar.

It’s, perhaps, a lucky sleight of hand that the majority of films now playing in local cinemas offer great opportunities of counterprogramming for the more serious national and regional issues that we’re facing.

No matter how I try to approach it, “Birds of Prey (and the fantabulous Emancipa-tion of One Harley Quinn)” seems to exist in relation to some other film that came before.

I wandered into the newly released Jane Austen adaptation “Emma” more out of mild curiosity than genuine expectation or interest.

Later tonight the Academy Awards will act as the official closer on the 2019 year in film when the statues for outstanding achievements are handed out to winners – some deserving, some not so much.

Bad movies are nothing new or unusual. Considering the number of films put into production and released each year, they are an unavoidable part of the film industry.

It’s bad form to critique an ad-campaign instead of the film, but the central liability of Taika Waititi’s “Jojo Rabbit” is its own inability to recognise itself.

Common knowledge suggests that January cinema is typically mediocre, it’s where bad movies go to die.