A personal journal of film and documentary reviews, and reviews of anything else that intrigues me.
French and French-language Films
Walerian Borowczyk, Chris Marker, “Les Astronautes” (1959) An entertaining little film short, “Les Astronautes” is a stop-motion animation collage of photographs copied, cut and pasted onto…
Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica, “The House / Dom” (1958) Rather odd film in which a woman (Ligia Branice), seemingly trapped and bored in an apartment…
Jan Lenica, “The Labyrinth / Labirynt” (1963) Superficially this looks like a Terry Gilliam / Monty Python animated cartoon and it is indeed very funny and…
Andrew S Allen, “The Thomas Beale Cipher” (2010) Unusual collage-type animated film that’s based on the legend about the three cypher-texts that supposedly reveal the location…
French and French-language Films
Philippe Grammaticopoulos, “The Bellies / Les Ventres” (2009) Delightful short film inspired in part by Rene Laloux’s animated work, “The Bellies” features a simple story about…
Piotr Dumala, “Franz Kafka” (1992) A 15-minute film of various episodes in the life of early 20th century Czech writer Franz Kafka, this is remarkable mainly…
Jan Svankmajer, “A Quiet Week in the House / Tichy tyden v dome” (1969) A strange little film even by my standards of strangeness, this combines live…
Jan Svankmajer, “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1981), “The Pit, the Pendulum and Hope” (1983) Both these live action / stop-motion animation films by…
Australian and New Zealand Films, Multi-media Presentations
Ms&Mr, “Xerox Missive 1977 / 2011”, multi-channel video installation (2011) Technically not a film but a multi-channel video art installation using old archived video recordings among other…
Hiromasa Yonebayashi, “Arrietty / Karu-gurashi no Arrietti” (2010) A charming offering from Studio Ghibli, based loosely on Mary Norton’s novel “The Borrowers”, this film is beautiful…