Top 10 films
The Age
Saturday July 4, 2009
WAKE IN FRIGHT (109 mins) MBACK on the big screen for the first time in decades, this 1971 gothic nightmare from the Canadian director Ted Kotcheff remains the definitive portrayal of outback Australia as a hell on earth. Selected cinemas. JWBASTARDY (83 mins) MASEVEN years in the making, Amiel Courtin-Wilson's documentary paints a nuanced and sympathetic picture of the actor and sometime burglar Jack Charles - whose face will be familiar to many Melburnians who have never heard his name.Selected cinemas. JWYEAR ONE (97 mins) MJACK Black and Michael Cera play hunter-gatherers who wander into the pages of the Old Testament in this period jape from Harold Ramis, which despite its philosophical ambitions works best as knockabout farce. General release. JWLAND OF THE LOST (101 mins) PGLOOSELY based on the 1970s TV show, this off-colour adventure comedy features Will Ferrell as a strangely dimwitted genius battling dinosaurs and lizard people on an alternate Earth. Plotless and puerile, but funny all the same. General release. JWTWO LOVERS (109 mins) MTHE best film yet from maverick director James Grey - an intense, eccentric drama about family ties, confined spaces and the weight of longing. Joaquin Phoenix is extraordinary as a lonely photographer trapped in extended adolescence.Cinema Nova. JWEVERY LITTLE STEP (96 mins) MENGAGING documentary about the famous Broadway musical A Chorus Line that combines an exploration of the show's beginnings in the 1970s with a look at the long-drawn-out process of casting the 2006 revival. It's a consistently enjoyable account, although there are times - with the focus on the angst and suspense of the auditions - when the shadow of reality TV looms a little large. Selected. PHDAISIES (74 mins) RIF EVERYTHING in the world is going bad, decide the rebellious, insouciant young women at the centre of the 1966 Czech film Daisies, directed by Vera Chytilova, we're going bad as well. A perpetually disruptive double act, they play with slapstick, Dada and whimsy, confound a succession of hapless men, and display insatiable appetites for food and chaos. A witty, visually beguiling film, initially banned, that offers more than the pleasure of its surfaces, Daisies is one of eight films from the '60s and '70s, directed by women, screening at ACMI this weekend and continuing until next Sunday. The films are all unclassified, therefore audience members must be over 18.ACMI, Saturday, 5pm. PHJEANNE DIELMAN (201 mins) RCHANTAL Akerman's 1975 depiction of three days in a woman's life is long - more than three hours - lucid and inexorable, and it's one of the key works in the development of contemporary cinema. Jeanne Dielman (Delphine Seyrig) combines housework with prostitution, and maintains domestic order with quietly obsessive intensity. The camera unblinkingly contemplates her routines of cooking, cleaning and washing up, to the point where every nuance of her rituals becomes apparent to the viewer, and it is clear that things are spiralling out of control. ACMI, Saturday, 7.15pm. PHWANDA (102 mins) RACTRESS Barbara Loden directed, wrote and starred in this downbeat, strikingly ambiguous 1970 portrait of a woman who takes to the road - with a kind of dedicated aimlessness - when she loses virtually all she has. She throws in her lot with a petty criminal, but Loden - who spoke of her film as "anti-Bonnie and Clyde" - carefully avoids romanticising. ACMI, Sunday, 3pm. PHSPARROWS CAN'T SING (94 mins) RBRITISH theatre director Joan Littlewood made her sole foray into cinema with an adaptation of a work originally staged by her Theatre Workshop group. A tale of changing lives and locations in the East End, it stars Carry On's Barbara Windsor and James Booth, a tough young actor who turned down the title role in Alfie, and whose career never reached the heights predicted for him. ACMI, Sunday, 5pm. PH
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