Featuring: Lance Armstrong, Reed Albergotti, Betsy Andreu, Frankie Andreu, Michele Ferrari
Director: Alex Gibney
Writer/narrator: Alex Gibney
Movie website: sonyclassics.com/thearmstronglie/

2013-14 Lotterywest Perth Film Festival season dates:
Joondalup Pines: 11–16 March, 7.30pm

Reviewer: rolanstein
Verdict: Cycling fans and aficionados will relish this expansive treatment of the Armstrong scandal and its background, but casual viewers might struggle with the detail and somewhat chaotic presentation.

Review:
When Lance Armstrong announced a comeback to the Tour de France in 1989, four years after retirement, documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney covered the bid. Armstrong’s purpose was to convince the world that he raced clean and affirm his legendary status. Submitting to stringent drug testing throughout the race, he appeared to have achieved his objective, finishing a laudable third. However, with Armstrong’s former team-mates confessing to doping and providing compelling details about his involvement during the seven consecutive years he had won the event, the documentary was shelved. Following Armstrong’s eventual public admission of guilt on Oprah in 2013, Gibney revived the project, and The Armstrong Lie is the result. Continue reading The Armstrong Lie Movie Review →

Featuring: Emmanuelle Devos, Sandrine Kiberlain, Catherine Hiegel, Olivier Gourmet, Olivier Py, Jacques Bonnaffé
Director: Martin Provost
Writer: Martin Provost

2013-14 Lotterywest Perth Film Festival season dates:
Somerville: 3–9 March, 7.30pm

Reviewer: rolanstein
Verdict: The intensity and length could be demanding for some, but the superb crafting and performances are more than ample reward.

Story:
Traces the personal and creative development of provocative French feminist writer Violette Leduc (Emmanuelle Devos), whose influences included Simone de Beauvoir (Sandrine Kiberlain) and Jean Genet (Jacques Bonnaffé).

Review:
Biopics about writers can be problematic as cinema. Shots of an author hunched over a typewriter while a well-known excerpt from a novel is read in voiceover, for instance, are clunky and worn, and do not make for exciting viewing. Such clichés are kept to a minimum in Voilette. Chapters are used as a narrative structural divider, each allotted to a figure significant in stages of Leduc’s literary and personal life, but other typically literary devices are avoided. The focus here is Leduc as character, and appropriately so, since she writes in blood, sweat and tears. That is, her work, while in novelistic form, was strongly autobiographical; her life fed her art and probably vice versa. Continue reading Violette Movie Review →

Featuring: Tom Schilling, Katharina Schüttler, Marc Hosemann, Justus von Dohnányi
Director: Jan Ole Gerster
Writer: Jan Ole Gerster

2013-14 Lotterywest Perth Film Festival season dates:
Somerville: 17–23 Feb, 8pm
Joondalup Pines: 24 Feb–2 March, 8pm

Reviewer: rolanstein
Verdict: Promises more than it delivers, but engaging nevertheless.

Story:
Berlin-based law school dropout Nico’s (Tom Schilling) day has started badly, with his girlfriend dumping him, necessitating him leasing a new apartment. Any hope of his new residence providing a comfortable haven is dashed when a troubled tenant knocks on the door with a welcome-to-the-neighbourhood offering of home-made meatballs that turn out to be inedible, then proceeds to break down in a blubbering mess. Retreating to the streets and cafes, Nico fails even to find a decent coffee, which he can barely afford anyway after an ATM swallows his credit card and his father stops his allowance. A chance encounter with a girl he has not seem since school promises a change of fortune, but the day goes from bad to worse, culminating in a jolting event that renders the earlier frustrations trivial.

Review:
Filmed in black and white in Berlin and set against a jazzy soundscape, this directorial debut from Jan Ole Gerster is big on mood, but like lead character Nico, unfocused and meandering, and somewhat unsure of its raison d’être.

It is engaging nevertheless, due mostly to the performance of Tom Schilling, who invests Nico with an ennui and rudderlessness with which disaffected and marginalised youth (past and present) will readily identify. Nico is not an angry young man, or a rebel with or without a cause; he just doesn’t feel a sense of belonging or purpose, and refuses – or perhaps is unable – to play the fitting-in game. Continue reading Oh Boy Movie Review →