It’s the closing weekend for MIFF2017 – the Melbourne International Film Festival! Last chance to catch some of the best films of the year. Some of our highlights for the weekend:
Wonderstruck (trailer above) Review via Variety:
“Wonderstruck” is a supple and flowing experience by comparison. Haynes, working from a script by Selznick, guides and serves the material with supreme craftsmanship. For a while, he casts a spell. Yet one of the film’s noteworthy qualities is that it creates a nearly dizzying sense of anticipation, and the payoff, regrettably, doesn’t live up to it. “Wonderstruck,” with its tale of two lost and impaired children finding each other across time, will certainly be an awards contender, and it may gently push the buttons of more than a few moviegoers, but it’s an ambitious doohickey impersonating a work of art.
Jungle (Review via Hollywood Reporter):
More than a decade after premiering Wolf Creek in Melbourne, director Greg McLean has returned to the festival that made his name with Jungle. Based on the memoir by Yossi Ghinsberg, an Israeli man who got himself lost in the Bolivian jungle in 1981, the new film apes the structure of McLean’s horror breakout almost exactly, with three backpackers whose hedonism is rudely interrupted — this time by red ants and rapids instead of an Outback serial killer.
I Am Not Your Negro (Review via the New York Times):
A few weeks ago, in reaction to something we had written about blackness and whiteness in recent movies, my colleague Manohla Dargis and I received a note from a reader. “Since when is everything about race?” he wanted to know. Perhaps it was a rhetorical question.
A flippant — though by no means inaccurate — answer would have been 1619. But a more constructive response might have been to recommend Raoul Peck’s life-altering new documentary, “I Am Not Your Negro.” Let me do so now, for that reader (if he’s still interested) and for everybody else, too. Whatever you think about the past and future of what used to be called “race relations” — white supremacy and the resistance to it, in plainer English — this movie will make you think again, and may even change your mind. Though its principal figure, the novelist, playwright and essayist James Baldwin, is a man who has been dead for nearly 30 years, you would be hard-pressed to find a movie that speaks to the present moment with greater clarity and force, insisting on uncomfortable truths and drawing stark lessons from the shadows of history.