Acting Under Orders
Does John Key know the conditions facing Kiwi workers within US film and TV productions here?
Movies
Punishment Park
Five attractive teenagers, a remote cabin in the woods … What could possibly go wrong?
Dark Knight of the Soul
The Batman finale, plus Alyx Duncan and Dan Salmon
Milestone Movies: Out of the Past (1947) and Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011)
The past may be a far country, but we still live in it
Old Blighty Goes Down For The Count
Patrick Keiller’s films about his faux intellectual, Robinson. Also : Aki Kaurismaki’s Le Havre
Hello Madness, My Old Friend
The films Mental Notes, A Dangerous Method and Spider tackle mental illness in very different ways
Webs of Maya
Underground film-maker Maya Deren still casts a spell
What Would Katniss Do?
The Hunger Games heroine is a sign that women are adapting better to today’s economic realities….
Pedro Does Vertigo
Pedro Almodovar’s fresh take on the Hitchcock classic about sex, obsession and second chances
Nature’s Boy
The films of Terrence Malick, from Badlands to Tree of Life
Life As A Death Sentence
The understated horror of Never Let Me Go
Touching the Void
In Melancholia Lars von Trier hives off serenely into the cosmos
Milestone Movies : Cave of Forgotten Dreams ( 2010)
This time, Werner Herzog’s process of turning obsession into art begins with art
Why The Long Face ?
Bela Tarr’s The Turin Horse, and the controversy about slow cinema
Taxi Driver at 35
In the 1970s, New York (and Martin Scorsese) were a lot sleazier and scarier…
Milestone Movies : Nanook of the North (1922)
The birth of documentaries as real life fictions…
Milestone Movies : The Silent House (2010)
Horror, in one 79 minute long take
Milestone Movies : The Killer Inside Me (2010) and Coup de Torchon (1981)
Film violence against women, via the ‘dimestore’ novelist Jim Thompson
Milestone Movies : Black Swan (2010)
In giving your life to art, the dying is the easy part
Treasury Enters, Stage Right
Treasury, not trade unions, poses the biggest threat to film industry jobs
Milestone Movies : The Searchers (1956)
John Wayne, antihero
Milestone Movies : The Best of 2010
Art – and reality are always a construct
Milestone Movies : Daisies (1966)
Freedom’s just another word for making fun of everything
Milestone Movies : Deep Throat (1972)
From Linda Lovelace to Julia Roberts – its not such a long way, baby
Milestone Movies : A City of Sadness (1989) A Brighter Summer Day ( 1991)
A colonised Taiwan finds a sense of national identity through its own great film-makers
Milestone Movies : Do The Right Thing (1989)
Spike Lee’s critics fade to black
I Saw Saw
One intrepid writer watches the six Saw movies one after the other, so that you won’t have to
Milestone Movies: Birth of a Nation (1915)
Should the racism in Birth of a Nation disqualify it from being considered as great art?
Milestone Movies : Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
Sergio Leone’s great operatic Western about death, revenge and endurance
Milestone Movies : The House is Black (1962)
Iran’s cinema of hope, amid states of repressio