Philmology

In this article for Senses of Cinema, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and I explore Laurie McInnes’ 1993 film, Broken Highway. In addition to tracing the film’s production history and the initial critical response, we examine various key themes and motifs present throughout the work. Into the Light: Hope, Despair and Haunted Doubles in Laurie McInnes’s Broken Highway […]

In this piece written for Overland, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and I examine issues of racial politics, cinematic representation and their relationship to the horror genre in writer-director Jordan Peele’s debut feature Get Out. Get Out and the Horror of Representation (link to article)

“The word remake is anachronistic to the degree to which our awareness of the preexistence of other versions (previous films of the novel as well as the novel itself) is now a constitutive and essential part of the film’s structure: we are now, in other words, in “intertextuality” as a deliberate, built-in feature of the […]

In an industry where marginalised social classes are routinely depicted as loveable larrikins, comical bogans or dangerous criminals and sexual predators, Amiel Courtin-Wilson’s Hail signals something of a breakthrough in Australian cinema. Based on the life and stories of Daniel P. Jones (who also performs the lead role, Danny), the film broadly depicts one man’s […]

More than half a century after it was first published and three decades since Francis Ford Coppola acquired the rights to the material, Jack Kerouac’s Beat Generation novel On the Road (d. Walter Salles) has been adapted for the screen. Of the many challenges in reproducing Kerouac’s celebrated work (e.g. contending with the sprawling structure […]

You’re not just stripping. You are fulfilling every woman’s wildest fantasies. You are the husband that they never had. You are that dreamboat guy that never came along. You are the one-night stand: that free fling of a fuck that they get to have tonight, with you on stage, and still go home to their […]

At what point does representation become exploitation? Classifying the inherent ethical value of art is a perilous pursuit. As the response to Bill Henson’s photography or the calls to ban Adrian Lyne’s Lolita, Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin and Srđan Spasojević’s A Serbian Film reveal, this is particularly so when the work involves children. Recently released […]

As far as blockbusters go, the recently released Men in Black 3 (dir. Barry Sonnenfeld) might seem to be a fairly unremarkable film. However, the narrative, which continues the story of extraterrestrial law enforcers Agent J (Will Smith) and Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones), is noteworthy for other reasons. With its emphasis on the rescue […]

In her gender analysis of Aliens (1986) Barbara Creed notes how the “dark and slimy” interior spaces of the Alien Queen’s egg chamber “offer a nightmarish vision of what [Julia] Kristeva describes as ‘the fascinating and abject inside of the maternal body’” (1993:51). The mise-en-scène of Aliens (where this viscous-coated lair is contrasted with the […]

For mine, the defining moment of Henry Hathaway’s True Grit (1969) occurs towards the beginning of the film. Given the slip by the two men charged with hunting down her father’s killer, Mattie Ross (Kim Darby) takes chase only to be refused passage on the river barge that the pair have boarded. Not to be […]