Carl Nilsson-Polias

On her last day in the office before taking a well-deserved overseas jaunt, I caught up with Kristy Edmunds, Artistic Director of the Melbourne International Arts Festival (MIAF), to talk about this year’s program from her perspective.
There is something wonderfully seasonal about Melbourne’s festival circuit. The winter solstice comes and goes and, even though the […]

A disclaimer: from all appearances, Werner Herzog lives a highly creative, highly prolific, highly nomadic existence of which I am insanely envious. I feel a pang of excitement whenever there’s an opportunity to see a new Herzog film as much because I want to vicariously inhabit his world as I want to see the movie. […]

Alexander Sokurov is known for making films that walk the knife-edge of indulgent minimalism. To some, his films are devoid of plots, deliberately obscure and fundamentally boring. Then there are some of us who think his films are pretty damn good. Then there are the ardent Sokurists who bow down before his Slavic certainty like […]

“Auschwitz” and “tongue-in-cheek comedy” aren’t often phrases that share the same sentence, but this documentary from Italy covers both. Primo Levi the chemist, novelist and Holocaust survivor immortalised his recollections of his internment in If This Is A Man. He followed this up with The Truce, which journalled the ten months it took him and […]

History is written by the victors, they say. History is also written by the colonisers. Despite the justifiability of Western Europe’s indignation at the neo-con imperialism of Bush, Cheney et alia, there is something undeniably hypocritical in their stand when considered from the perspective of their own colonial pasts. Take two of the producing countries […]

Julie Christie returns to the big screen and, her beauty as crystalline and mesmerising as ever, she remains a luminous presence. We are introduced to an apparently blissful retired family life. The lighting is warm, the location bucolic, the cross-country skis are new, the hair silver but lush, the couture that catalogue-perfect ensemble of earth-coloured, […]

Kim Ki-duk’s Breath is set in the freezing air of a South Korean winter. The glacial atmosphere extends inside the unromantic modernist achitecture that is home to Yeon, a sculptress in a gratingly unfulfilling marriage. Also searching for some warmth are the shivering prisoners who inhabit a bare-wall cell of Hang Sung prison. There’s a […]

Alan Rickman and Sigourney Weaver are two actors not generally associated with odd-couple comedy but some of the finest moments in Snowcake come out of their on-screen disparity. Rickman has that dry, acerbic voice that marks him as a natural villain, not because he looks nasty (though he can) but because there’s clearly something he’s […]

The Front Page by Billy Wilder
Madman Entertainment
In a recent talk with Milos Forman on American radio, the interviewer asked the director how it was that a Czech émigré could create films thought of as quintessentially American—One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in this case. Forman responded without irony or guile, “that was a Czech film”. […]

Fellow travellers, vicarious eavesdroppers and others foolhardy enough to give me their email address, here comes another prolix postcard to warm the cockles and stroke your id. Once more, the winter that blights Melbourne has sent me scurrying for warmer climes and the chance to tiptoe through the excrement of other backpackers.
Why Borneo? Well, it’s […]