Starring: Afre Woodard, Delroy Lindo, Zelda Harris Director: Spike Lee Rated: M Distributor: Universal Spike Lee’s semi-autobiographical trip back to Brooklyn circa 1975 is laced with some of the greatest soul hits of the era. Set consciously to them, the story of an only girl in an all boy family of five spins out like …

Starring: Buster Keaton, Annie Cornwall, Snitz Edwards Director: James W. Horne Rated: G Distributor: Madman It’s the perennial high school dilemma: to be a popular athlete or a studious nerd. Some lucky people have it all but for the rest, it’s mostly one or the other. And it seems it was ever thus. Even back …

Starring: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Rex Harrison Director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz Rated: M (15+) Distributor: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment Did the Queen of the Nile really wear such provocative gowns as Elizabeth Taylor parades so majestically in the title role of the four-hour long epic that is Cleopatra? As her cleavage plunges ever deeper …

Starring: Philippe Noiret, Salvatore Cascio, Marco Leonardi Director: Giuseppe Tornatore Rated: M Distributor: Umbrella World Cinema DVD For twenty odd years, movie-goers in the small Sicilian village of Giancaldo have been deprived of witnessing even so much as a kiss up on the screen of their local Cinema Paradiso. The town’s priest has taken it …

Starring: Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Huston Director: Roman Polanski Rated: M Distributor: Paramount Golden Classics Extras: Retrospective interviews with Polanski, producer Robert Evans and writer Robert Towne. In book after book on the craft of screen writing Robert Towne’s Chinatown is cited as a near perfect example of a film script. The complex plot …

Starring: Alan Arkin, Arthur Garfunkel, Anthony Perkins, John Voight, Martin Sheen, Orson Welles Director: Mike Nichols Rated: M (15+) Distributor: Paramount Golden Classics Extras: Commentary by Mike Nichols and Steven Soderburgh I wonder if, in the wake of last week’s devastating defeat, Mark Latham is taking comfort in his favourite book, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, a …

Starring: Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman Director: Michael Curtiz Rated: PG Distributor: Warner Brothers I have a huge black and white photograph of what looks suspiciously like Madonna and Warren Beatty in period costume locked in a passionate kiss at a dark, rain splattered airport. It’s an image that could have been lifted straight out of …

Starring: Gordon McRae, Shirley Jones, Claramae Turner Director: Henry King Rated: G Distributor: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment “Is it possible for someone to hit you real hard and it not to hurt?” asks the baby-doll-faced Louise (Susan Luckey) of her mother Julie Jordon (Shirley Jones). Julie has experienced domestic blisters at the hands of …

Starring: Wendy Hughes, Robin Nevin, Nicholas Gledhill, John Hargreaves Director: Carl Schultz Rated: PG Distributor: Umbrella Aussie DVD It’s leading lady calls it “a forgotten classic”. If so, then this wonderful screen adaptation of Sumner Locke Elliott’s autobiographical novel needs to be refreshed in peoples’ minds as a matter of urgency. Apart from a few …

Starring: Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Katharine Ross Director: George Roy Hill Rated: PG Distributor: Twentieth Century Fox It’s the very last shot in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid that stays cemented in the mind. It’s a close-up on a freeze frame of Butch (Paul Newman) and the Kid (Robert Redford) belting out of their …

Starring: Graham Faulkner, Judi Bowker, Alec Guinnes Director: Franco Zeffirelli Rated: PG Distributor: Paramount Some historical films tell you more about the era in which they were made than ones actually set in that period. Franco Zeffirelli’s Brother Sun, Sister Moon is a case in point. A dramatic recreation of the life of Francis of …

Starring: Audrey Hepburn, George Peppard Director: Blake Edwards Rated: PG Distributor: Paramount “There once was a very lovely, very frightened girl. She lived alone except for a nameless cat.” So begins the story by Paul Varjak (George Peppard) about his singularly eccentric neighbour, Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn). Holly is a party girl par excellence who …

Starring: Emily Watson, Stellan Skarsgard Director: Lars von Trier Rated: R Distributor: Umbrella World Cinema DVD Do we have the power to influence the events surrounding our lives? Or are we merely victims of our own destinies? These are the question posed by Danish director Lars von Trier in his devastatingly moving film Breaking the …

Starring: Mel Gibson, Sophie Marceau, Patrick McGoohan Director: Mel Gibson Distributor: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment Rated: MA (15+) Extras: Mel Gibson’s ‘Braveheart’ – A Filmmaker’s Passion On the grounds of Edinburgh Castle stands a gigantic stone statue of one William Wallace, a man many Scots folk regard as their greatest hero. When screenwriter Randall …

Starring: Barry Otto, Helen Jones, Lynette Curran Director: Ray Lawrence Rated: MA (15+) Extras: Director’s Cut with commentary by Lawrence and producer Anthony Buckley Distributor: Roadshow Entertainment Some people think that working in advertising is a bit like selling your soul to the devil, especially when you have to sex up carcinogenic products and make …

Starring: Breno Mello, Marpessa Dawn Director: Marcel Camus Rated: PG Distributor: Umbrella Entertainment Anyone familiar with ancient Greek mythology will know the tragic tale of Orpheus and Eurydice. In a nutshell: the son of Apollo falls hard for an aristocratic beauty, she dies, he goes down into the underworld to find her, everything ends badly. …

Starring: Dolly Read, John Lazar, Cynthia Myers, Marcia McBroom Director: Russ Meyer Rated: R Distributor: Fox Watching the saccharine, faux moralistic epilogue of this absolutely out-of-control film, you can’t help but wonder how on earth it ever got made? It’s so outrageously twisted, it’s nothing short of a miracle that it slipped under the radar …

Starring: Jean Marais, Josette Day Director: Jean Cocteau Rated: PG Distributor: Madman Director’s Suite From the opening credits it’s clear that this is a film sprung from the mind of a supremely creative individual; the key names are written in chalk on a blackboard, a clapper loader calls the shot, from somewhere off screen we …

Starring: Barry Crocker, Barry Humphries Rated: M (15+) Distributor: Umbrella Entertainment DVD Extras: Audio commentary by Barry Crocker, Behind the scenes footage, ’74 Documentary ‘Barry McKenzie: Ogre or Ocker’ (and more) Proudly announcing itself as ‘The first English language film with English language sub-titles’ Barry McKenzie Holds His Own (’74) is the sequel to the …

Starring: Nicholas Hope, Claire Benito, Ralph Cotterill Director: Rolf de Heer Rated: R (18+) Distributor: Umbrella Adelaide based director Rolf de Heer premieres his latest film in his hometown today. Titled 10 Canoes it’s being hailed as Australia’s first indigenous language feature and it represents another major milestone in this fiercely independent-minded filmmakers’ career. Working …

Starring: Bill Hunter, Gary Foley, Zac Martin, Terry Camilleri, Essie Coffey Director: Phillip Noyce Rated: M 15+ Distributor: Madman Cinema, The AV Channel, Smart Street Films Phillip Noyce calls his first feature a cross between a B-grade blaxploitation film and a polemical tract. Inspired by Wim Wenders homage to the U.S. roadmovie Kings of the …

Starring: Natar Ungalaaq, Sylvia Ivalu, Peter-Henry Arnatsiaq, Lucy Tulugarjuk Director: Zacharias Kunuk Rated: MA Distributor: Madman/AV Channel Wearing fur is a controversial issue these days but it was absolutely mandatory if you were an Inuit living in the age before synthetic parkas. Atanarjuat is set at the dawn of the first millennium and every single …

Starring: Willeke van Ammelrooy, Els Dottersmns Director: Marleen Gorris Rated: MA Distributor: Madman Antonia has long been marked out as a black sheep but when she returns to her Dutch hometown after the end of World War 2 she does so with a mission to stake her claim as self-appointed matriarch. As she marches down …

Starring: Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, George Sanders, Celeste Holm Director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz Rated: PG Distributor: Fox What more could a film buff want than this true treasure in their DVD collection? It stands as a monument to the power of cinema with performances by an ensemble of actors virtually on fire, each one delivering …

Starring: Klaus Kinski Director: Werner Herzog Rated: PG Distributor: Umbrella World Cinema DVD If you view the colonisation of native countries like the intrusion of a foreign virus into a pristine body then Aguirre is one of the most virulent kinds. German auteur Werner Herzog created the character from historical facts surrounding the Spanish invasion …