Piercing (2018)

Sanctuary, a film about the power balance in a BDSM arrangement, stars Christopher Abbott and Margaret Qualley, in a hotel-set two-hander with dark psycho-sexual themes. It almost felt like Abbott had made this movie before, or was making a habit of using his deep black eyes and dramatic intensity to be in a ruinous pairing […]

I Do Not Care If We Go Down In History As Barbarians (2018)

I was a fan of Romanian director Radu Jude’s Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, and was reading recent interviews with him about his next film doing the festival rounds. This compelled me to track down some of his earlier films, and the only one available on SBS On Demand is I Do Not Care […]

Grass (2018)

“I believe that my films are not made to express a story, but to feature some fragments” – Hong Sang-soo. A couple catch up in a cafe. Classical music plays on the stereo; apparently the cafe owner loves classical music. At times, the music swells and almost drowns out the conversation. Then again, what seems […]

Strange Colours (2017)

I watched director Alena Lodkina’s Strange Colours (2017) on SBS On Demand, a few days after I saw Ivan Sen’s Limbo in cinemas. While Limbo works in another recurring genre in Australian film – the crime genre – and there are clear differences in where they are shot, what they are looking at, particularly indigenous […]

Transit (2018)

Transit (2018) is the third film I’ve watched of German director Christian Petzold and at this point, I have to say that I’m a fan. There is something very direct about Petzold’s filmmaking style, it is not too showy or over-the-top; there’s a degree of elegance, though for some it might also be close to […]