A personal journal of film and documentary reviews, and reviews of anything else that intrigues me.
Australian and New Zealand Films
Steven McGregor, “Servant or Slave” (2017) Few Australians have very little appreciation of the apartheid-style society that exploited Aboriginal people, Torres Strait Islanders and even Melanesians…
Kaneto Shindo, “Kuroneko” (1968) A companion piece to his earlier classic “Onibaba”, Shindo’s “Kuroneko” explores vengeance and human desires for love in the setting of a…
“The Tsar and Empress: Secret Letters” (2017) A lavish two-part series revolving around the letters that Tsar Nicholas II, the last Emperor of Russia, and his…
German and German-language Films
F W Murnau, “Faust” (1926) Visually powerful and stunning, with an incredible opening scene of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse riding high in the sky,…
Harvey Cashore, “Brainwashed: The Secret CIA Experiments in Canada” (The Fifth Estate, December 2017) As The Fifth Estate’s website post on this documentary says, the scenario…
Ronna Syed, “A Tale of Two Traitors” (Fifth Estate, March 2018) In the wake of the recent incident in the UK concerning a suspected poisoning of…
British Films, French and French-language Films
Armando Iannucci, “The Death of Stalin” (2017) A British-made comedy satire about the death of Joseph Stalin and the struggle among his senior officials in the…
“Why is China Investing in the Balkans?” (VisualPolitik EN, 26 March 2018) VisualPolitik EN is a Youtube channel that posts short video clips on geopolitical and…
Russian Foreign Ministry Meeting with Foreign Ambassadors on Skripal poisoning case (21 March 2018) For nearly all of March 2018, the world was gripped by a…
William Oldroyd, “Lady Macbeth” (2016) Adapted from Nikolai Leskov’s 1865 novel “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District”, this character study investigates how an apparently demure young…