Cinemas re-opened in July — but for who knows how long, if the second wave of COVID-19 community transmission continues.
Perhaps the best news for cinephiles is that the Melbourne International Film Festival (August 6-23) has managed to pull off a fully digital festival with new film releases, including Kelly Reichardt's anticipated First Cow, Pedro Costa's award-winner Vitalina Varela and Pablo Larrain's dance-drama Ema.
In the meantime, we're spoilt for choice of streaming services: from Netflix, Stan, Foxtel Now and streaming package Binge, to Amazon Prime Australia, Apple TV+ and Disney+, arthouse specialists MUBI, and free services like ABC iview (where you can currently watch 37 Australian films — from classics to blockbusters and indie gems), SBS On Demand and Tubi.
We've asked our regular film reviewers to comb through all these services and share recommendations, with a mix of subscriber-based and free. Expect new independent and arthouse, festival favourites, classics, and underrated films from the vault.
Koko: A Talking Gorilla (1978)
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Koko the Gorilla was just becoming a household name in the late 70s when the eclectic Swiss director Barbet Schroeder (Single White Female) flew to California to shoot this mind-boggling, heart-busting documentary, which gets up close and personal with the charismatic ape.
Koko captivated the world by learning to understand human speech and sign hundreds of words. (Later, she'd become an internet celebrity after adopting several kittens.)
"It's like watching Marlon Brando or Greta Garbo," enthused Schroeder in one interview, and indeed it's hard to tear your eyes away from Koko as she operates a ViewMaster or asks to be tickled by her lifelong trainer Dr. Penny Patterson — an interspecies bond to rival Elliott and E.T.
More overtly troubling are scenes in which Koko expresses complex emotions like sadness, as the film cracks open several cans of worms, raising questions — about animal rights, language and what it means to be human — that still baffle us today. ABB
Watch on MUBI from August 15.
The Bling Ring (2013)
As was the case with her lavish, pastel-hued Marie Antoinette, Sofia Coppola's dramatisation of the high-profile burglaries carried out by the so-called 'Bling Ring' in 2009 was criticised for replicating the superficiality of its characters — a take that ignores both her canny, satirical touch and her affinity for disaffected youths.
Helmed by Emma Watson (in unusually fine, stuck-up form), the ensemble cast embark on a series of illicit shopping sprees in the homes of their celeb idols — Lindsay Lohan; Audrina Patridge; Paris Hilton — running riot through rooms stuffed with glittering 00s frippery.
(Parts of Marie Antoinette were shot on location at Versailles; for The Bling Ring, hotel heiress Hilton let Coppola make use of her fabulously tasteless mansion.)
If the film's preening, hard-partying Calabasas teens are less sympathetic than the typical Coppola protagonist, she's at least always gesturing towards the ways in which they've been shaped by their environment: "We're going to make vision boards about people who demonstrate good character," one mother (played by Leslie Mann) says perkily, holding up a poster of Angelina Jolie. KY
Watch on Stan.
Space Jam (1996)
It's risky to revisit a cherished childhood movie; to discover that it isn't quite the great work of art you once believed can be a truly disenchanting experience. Maybe the opposite is true of Space Jam, a key text in the '90s kid' canon. Watching this film all grown up reveals how brazen and totally bizarre an exercise in corporate synergy it is — and makes for an exhilaratingly warped nostalgia trip, if you're into that sort of thing.
It's a tale as old as time: a malevolent proprietor of a theme park in outer space, voiced by Danny DeVito, decides that he wants to "enslave" the Looney Tunes gang. Only by winning a basketball game against the aliens can Bugs Bunny and co. maintain their liberty — cue the abduction of Michael Jordan. Also embroiled in the quick-cut, Dutch-angled hijinks are Bill Murray, Wayne Knight (aka Seinfeld's Newman), and a bunch of NBA players.
For a movie inspired by an ad for Nikes, there's a lot going on. That it makes so little sense is half the fun. KY
Watch on Netflix from August 15.
The Paperboy (2012)
"If anyone's gonna piss on him, it's gonna be me!" Nicole Kidman may have worked with Kubrick and won an Oscar, but she'll never have a moment quite like urinating on jellyfish-stung co-star Zac Efron in The Paperboy, their bleached blonde hair and blue eyes dissolving into director Lee Daniels's dreamy, double-exposed fantasy.
A slice of Southern sleaze as sweaty as the Florida swamps on its fringes, this 1969-set potboiler pivots on an incarcerated murder suspect (a truly filthy John Cusack), a trashy Alabama bombshell (Kidman) and two visiting investigative journalists (Matthew McConaughey and David Oyelowo), with the sexually frustrated — and heroically objectified — Efron as the paperboy caught in the crossfire.
Daniels successfully splashes camp affectation across a legitimately troubling milieu of racism and repressed sexual orientation, while his winning eye for the grotesque — be it spilled alligator intestines or hot pink lipstick smeared over leathery tans — makes for some consistently lurid images. LG
Watch on Stan from August 27.
Trigonometry (season one)
The arthouse oddities of filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari (Chevalier, currently on Stan) are roused by the joyful absurdity of life, and fans can trace a line from the exuberant sexual awakening of her "Greek Weird Wave" triumph Attenberg (2010) to her latest directorial effort, the polyamorous BBC series Trigonometry — an authentically messy portrait of desire that plays out as a light and cheery screwball romp.
Reuniting with her Attenberg star, the Greek-French actor Ariane Labed, Tsangari helms a deliciously millennial take on the ancient rule that all good things come in threes, as the 30-year-old ex-Olympian-in-crisis Ray (Labed, a former dancer, who also played a gymnast in Yorgos Lanthimos's Alps) moves into a London couple's squishy apartment, and sparks instantly fly in all directions.
Hospital visits, clumsy parents, and plenty of will-they-won't-they lusty confrontations keep the drama motoring along, as Trigonometry sticks to the snappy beats of comfort TV while staying refreshingly alert to the complexities of humans and the possibilities for wonder that lie beyond the everyday — epitomised by Labed, the thruple's magical unicorn. ABB
Watch on SBS Viceland and SBS On Demand from August 21.
Heaven (1987)
Diane Keaton: beloved American actress, enduring fashion plate... avant garde auteur? Perhaps moved by the paradoxes of Belinda Carlisle's Heaven is a Place on Earth, for which she directed the music video, Keaton's super obscure feature directing debut sets out to tackle the big questions — What is Heaven? Are You Afraid To Die? — via an eccentric series of talking heads intercut with straight-up experimental montages of classic Hollywood films depicting death and the afterlife.
Keaton's pastel-surreal sets exist somewhere between heavenly antechamber and afternoon game show (if you ever wondered how she came to direct for Twin Peaks, look no further), while her witty juxtaposition of Hollywood fantasy is often eerily prescient — there's an entire sequence that might as well be an excerpt from Christian Marclay's The Clock.
The oddball playfulness, combined with Keaton's sense of curiosity and wonder (think True Stories-era David Byrne), also reveals a surprisingly touching tribute to humanity and its delusions, however grand or ridiculous they may be. LG
Watch on Tubi.
Matthias & Maxime (2019)
After a couple of less-than-well-received (and, in the case of The Death & Life of John F. Donovan, barely released) films, one time French-Canadian wunderkind Xavier Dolan makes something of a return to form with his latest, a modest but tender drama that finds both writer-director and his millennial characters at a crossroads.
Lifelong best friends Matthias (Gabriel D'Almeida Freitas) and Maxime (Dolan) are on the cusp of 30 and headed toward very different adulthoods — one very straight and climbing the corporate ladder, the other bisexual, bartending and en route to Australia — when an on-screen kiss they share for a short film slowly opens up a vault of long-unexplored feelings.
While it doesn't swing for the big, messy fences of Dolan's best, Laurence Anyways (2012) and Mommy (2014), the filmmaker's knack for capturing sexual fluidity, and skill with actors — especially his Almodovarian feel for women — remains intact, as does his often inventive camerawork and loud, blustery soundtrack. LG
Watch on MUBI from August 28.
Police Story (1985) and Police Story 2 (1988)
The most imaginative crime thrillers coming out of Hong Kong today are surely the videos of ingenious protesters foiling cops. But back in the 80s — arguably the golden decade of the Hong Kong film industry — director and star fighter Jackie Chan modernised the kung-fu movie by unleashing this game-changing pair of heroic police action slapstick comedies, catapulting himself — and the fabulous Maggie Cheung — to international fame.
The breathtaking films wring maximum entertainment from any scene, as the renegade police inspector Ka Kui (Chan) tirelessly battles thugs and lawyers while trying to please his girlfriend May (Cheung), necessitating goofball jokes and a feast of death-taunting stunts — like sailing down a multi-storey chandelier, or dangling off a moving double-decker bus from the clawed handle of an umbrella.
From trashing a mall in the hit first film to wholesale blowing one up in the smash sequel, the movies follow a delirious thrill-seeker's logic of escalating destruction, building to a final fight scene so explosive it literally takes place in a warehouse filled with fireworks. ABB
Watch on SBS On Demand from August 20
Hyenas (1992)
"The world has made me a whore, and I'll turn the world into a whorehouse." So states Linguere Ramatou (Ami Diakhate) upon her return to Colobane, in Senegal, the home from which she fled after falling pregnant out of wedlock, disgraced. Decades on, she's become "richer than the World Bank", and the impoverished townsfolk greet her with gleeful expectancy.
The stony older woman is not interested in charity, however — she will share her fortune only on the condition that the man who betrayed her, all those years ago, be murdered: she wishes to buy his body as others bought hers.
Brutal and playful in equal measure, Hyenas is the spiritual sequel to director Djibril Diop Mambety's celebrated debut, Touki Bouki (1973); for his second and final full-length feature, released almost twenty years later, Mambety would rework Fredrich Dürrenmatt's play The Visit as a sun-bleached anti-neocolonial allegory, set in his own hometown.
A vibrant new restoration will be available to stream for free, nationwide, as part of Melbourne International Film Festival's digital edition — so you needn't be richer than the World Bank to partake. KY
Watch via MIFF from August 6 - 23.
The Shout (1978)
Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski has made a singular career out of unusual art films, from the off-kilter coming-of-age classic Deep End (1970) to his late-period existential trip Essential Killing (2011), and this unnerving psychosexual nightmare — one of the rare films, in a medium obsessed with manufacturing magic, to actually conjure something genuinely transformative — just might be his masterpiece.
The Shout opens during a game of cricket — already disturbing enough — when a melee prompts an extended flashback to the seemingly tranquil English countryside, where a young couple (knob-twiddling electronic composer John Hurt and wife Susannah York) invite a mysterious traveller (a never darker Alan Bates) into their homestead and soon-to-be frayed minds.
If the sexual corrosion weren't uneasy enough, then the film's frightening titular moment — a soul-shaking wail that the traveller claims to have learned by communing with an Indigenous shaman — possesses a psychic power that's impossible to unhear. LG
Watch on SBS on Demand.
Glen or Glenda (1953)
Lovingly portrayed by Johnny Depp in Tim Burton's 1994 biopic, the low-budget filmmaker Ed Wood only achieved some measure of the fame he sought posthumously, and for the wrong reason: his cult following blossomed after he was branded the worst director of all time.
The title is a cruel one, and undeserved — who cares about continuity errors when Wood's films (the horror/sci-fi mash-up Plan 9 From Outer Space best known amongst them) are so spirited, and so surprising? Go ahead and laugh at all the stock footage, wooden performances, and cardboard props, but don't deny their charm or kooky creativity.
Based in part on the story of Christine Jorgensen, a pioneering transgender woman whose transition made headlines in 1952, Glen or Glenda is a docudrama with a surrealist bent, and Wood's most personal film. He plays the titular Glen, a man who just wants to wear silk underwear and angora sweaters without judgment — as did the director himself.
It's an idiosyncratic plea for acceptance, inexplicably framed, it should be noted, by spooky incantations from Wood's pal Bela Lugosi. KY
Watch on Tubi.
Looky Looky Here Comes Cooky (2020)
The high-energy poet-performer Steven Oliver (Faboriginal) hosts this hour-long conversation-starting documentary, which reconsiders the story of Captain Cook's arrival in what we now call Australia — and 250 years of dodgy history lessons — from a First Nations perspective.
After working together on the hit sketch show Black Comedy, Oliver and director Steven McGregor team up again, weaponising humour and empathy — as well as music, with moving contributions from artists (including Alice Skye, Mo'Ju, Trials and Birdz) in a chorus of powerful Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices.
"We're creating a modern-day songline," says Oliver.
Coming to NITV and SBS after its MIFF world premiere, Looky Looky Here Comes Cooky avoids pat answers as it ever-so gently opens up discussions about who Cook was, who we are as a country, and what should be done with all these awful colonial statues. Perhaps Kev Carmody sums it up best: "Captain cook, he's a bloody dirty chook!" ABB
Watch on NITV and SBS On Demand from August 20.
https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMia2h0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvbmV3cy8yMDIwLTA3LTMxL2Jlc3QtZmlsbXMtdHYtc3RyZWFtaW5nLXdoYXRzLW9uLW5ldGZsaXgtc3Rhbi1zYnMtdHViaS1tdWJpLzEyNDk5NTgy0gEnaHR0cHM6Ly9hbXAuYWJjLm5ldC5hdS9hcnRpY2xlLzEyNDk5NTgy?oc=5
2020-07-30 17:51:00Z
CAIiEM7QOs_ZyWmEJJb9G6EoKOoqFggEKg4IACoGCAow3vI9MPeaCDDciw4
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