Review: Lore

Lore

Dir. Cate Shortland

Country: Australia / Germany /UK

Aus Rating: MA15+

Running Time: 109mins

In the dying days of WWII, a mother to a seemingly affluent family with a husband whose supposedly still away at war fighting for the Third Reich, tells her five children that they must leave and seek refuge with their grandmother. As word of Hitler’s death filters across the European landscape, the mother departs her children to hand herself in to the new occupying forces and leaves the teenage Hannelore (Saskia Rosendahl in a fabulous debut performance) in charge. As they struggle to make their way across a divided nation that is crumbling around them, the children must join forces with a Jewish boy who makes Hannelore confront the prejudices that she and her siblings have been taught to adhere to for as long as they can possibly remember.

Read the rest at Onya Magazine

MIFF 2012 Review: Alois Nebel

Alois Nebel

Dir. Tomás Lunák

Country: Czech Republic

Aus Rating: N/A

Running Time: 84mins

A black and white, rotoscoped, drama from the Czech Republic. Well you certainly haven’t seen this before. This very sombre film from debut filmmaker Tomás Lunák recalls the dazzling visual style of Christian Volckman’s 2006 French action noir, Renaissance, but a plot that appears to move as slowly as molasses proved to be a bit too much to bear for my tired eyes so late in the festival. Knowing so little about Czech history is certainly a hindrance to enjoying this film beyond the purely visual, but Alois Nebel begins so promisingly with an intense border-crossing sequence that it’s hard not to be slightly disappointed that it didn’t live up to the early potential.

Read the rest at Trespass Magazine

Review: In Darkness

In Darkness

Dir. Agnieszka Holland

Country: Poland / Canada / Germany

Aus Rating: MA15+

Running Time: 145mins

The title says it all, really. In Darkness – the absence of light. This rather bleak, Oscar-nominated WWII drama (is there any other kind?) from Agnieszka Holland (Europa Europa) very literally presents a world that is so dark there are times where it appears we have no hope of ever seeing the rays of the sun again. Thankfully, despite an excessive runtime, over nearly two and a half hours, the way darkness is shown on the screen is at least captivating and mesmerising. The real star of this Polish/Canadian/German co-production is cinematographer Jolanta Dylewska, who performs a delicate dance of shadow and light within the claustrophobic confines of the Polish sewer system in the final year of German occupation. Even when the work of Holland screenwriter David F Shamoon – adapting In the Sewers of Lvov: A Heroic Story of Survival from the Holocaust by Robert Marshall – feels like it’s stretching itself too thin, In Darkness never loses its visual strength.

Read the rest at Trespass Magazine

Review: Iron Sky

Iron Sky

Year: 2012

Country: Finland/Australia/Germany

Aus Rating: M15+

Running Time: 93mins

Never again will you be able to say that nobody ever made a movie about Nazis living on the moon who then return to Earth and joined forces with a Sarah Palin-esque politician before waging intergalactic war. No you certainly cannot because Iron Sky is here and after years of development, crowd-sourced funding, and even filming just up north in Queensland, this comical sci-fi spoof is here on the big screen. How it conjured up a theatrical release I’m not too sure, but there it is in its entire goofy, oddball, space opera glory.

Read the rest at Trespass Magazine

Review: Sarah's Key

Sarah's Key
Dir. Gilles Paquet-Brenners
Year: 2010
Aus Rating: M
Running Time: 111mins

It must be easy to expect plaudits when one hears of a new film about World War II. No matter how often filmmakers takes audiences back there, no matter how many times those haunting images get projected onto the cinema screen, polite nodding and words like “respectful” and “the human spirit/soul/condition” tend to be the most common reactions. Sarah’s Key is no different, but like Stephen Daldry’s The Reader it uses the modern day to show how WWII still has repercussions to this very day and does so while putting a light on a part of the war that few may know about.

In modern day France an American immigrant, Kristen Scott Thomas’ Julia, and her husband renovate an apartment handed down to them by his parents. Her journalism skills combined with an escalating sense that something tragic happened there leads Julia to the story of Sarah, a 10-year-old Jewish girl, her younger brother and the key that – literally and metaphorically – unlocks everything. Scott Thomas gets to show off her considerable skills yet again as Julia navigates her own personal problems alongside those of Sarah, a girl she never knew and yet feels indebted to for reasons out of her control.

One of the aspects of Sarah’s Key that fascinated me most was the story of the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup, one of many grotesque and inhumane acts of cruelty committed during WWII, but one of the least reported. I had previously been unaware of this undertaking by the French police and was suitably appalled. Recreated in lengthy flashbacks with eye-catching costume and production design and spotted with performances by the likes of Niels Arestrup, the portions of the film dedicated to Sarah’s plight are handled with an appropriate lack of flash, but are still rousing or agonising and painful when necessary.


Not even an actor of her considerable talents can save Sarah’s Key from its own undoing towards the end. The introduction of Aidan Quinn all but grinds the film to a halt and does its best to undo all the good will that director Gilles Paquet-Brenner had built. Several moments feel guffaw-worthy in how spectacularly ridiculous they are, but as the credits rolled I found it easy to forgive. Paquet-Brenner and his co-writer Serge Joncour, adapting from Tatiana De Rosnay’s novel, have succeeded in crafting a sobering film that, while not scaling the heights of recent heights of The Pianist or The Reader, at least doesn’t read like a joke of a WWII film like recent Oscar winner The Counterfeiters. B