Faces Places
2017
Language: French
Language: French
Director: Agnes Varda
Starring: Agnes Varda, J R
With the winter setting in, and parts of Australia in lockdown, we can all do with some cheering up right now. There's only one thing for it: hitch a ride in the mobile photo-processing lab of French New Wave great Agnes Varda and her pal, artist J.R., as they embark on a magnificent inter-generational cross-country odyssey. Faces Places is delightful from start to finish, and the best buddy road movie I've seen in years. Agnes Varda was pushing 90 when she made this film, in collaboration with the muralist 60 years her junior. A vibrant memoir, Faces Places has them celebrate their joint passion for images (still and moving), as they journey into regional France to create large format installations to commemorate history and to celebrate the living. We've since lost Varda, of course, so this hybrid documentary - often funny, occasionally melancholy - is a wonderful testament to her memory.
Faces Places is now streaming at SBS On Demand
Mustang
2015
Language: Turkish
Director: Deniz Gamze Erguven
Starring: Günes Sensoy, Doga Zeynep Doguslu, Tugba Sunguroglu, Elit Iscan
This extraordinary film demonstrates the bonds between five orphaned sisters, as they endure being cooped up and married off by their conservative family. The girls are going to school and living with their grandmother, until nosy neighbours spy them laughing and splashing in the sea with boys and their innocent horseplay is misinterpreted as a threat to the entire family. Director Deniz Gamze Ergüven tells the story from the girls' perspective, as they try to find their own freedom as their worldview shrinks. Mustang was nominated for best foreign language film at the 2015 Oscars and won four César awards in France. Ergüven has gone on to direct TV, and found a thematic match with The Handmaid's Tale. For fellow obsessives, she was behind the iconic episode in which (*spoiler*) both Fred and Winslow copped it.
Mustang screens on SBS World Movies at 9.30pm on Tuesday 13 July and will be available to stream at SBS On Demand afterwards.
Goldstone
Australia, 2016
Genre: Thriller, Crime
Language: English
Director: Ivan Sen
Starring: Aaron Pedersen, David Wenham, Jacki Weaver, David Gulpilil, Alex Russell
falls in the first week of July, which makes an excellent reason to (re)discover films centred on Indigenous characters, and puts the emphasis where it ought to be - on our original storytellers. Both NITV and SBS World Movies will feature a week of powerful movies, including Rabbit-Proof Fence, Manganinnie, Tudawali, Sweet Country, Samson & Delilah, Ten Canoes, and Jasper Jones. The films will stream at SBS On Demand after broadcast, in a week that culminates in the cross-network premiere of Ivan Sen's Goldstone. Sen's standalone follow-up to Mystery Road sees Aaron Pedersen reprise his role as an alienated Blak cop on a bleak beat; he rides* into the sparse mining town of Goldstone (*metaphorically speaking - he's drunk at the wheel of his 4WD), and unearths a sweaty cesspit of racism, violence and corruption. Jackie Weaver drips contempt as the morally vacuous mayor, who oversees the rape of the both the land and an escalating number of the the town's migrant women.
Goldstone premieres across both NITV and SBS World Movies at 8.30pm on Friday 9 July, and will be available to stream at SBS On Demand for a limited time after the broadcast
[link title="Goldstone review: Shades of grey abound in outback noir" url="node/69364"]
[link title="Ivan Sen and Aaron Pedersen on filming outback noir 'Goldstone'" url="node/69424"]
Source: Image.net
Chevalier
Greece, 2015
Genre: Comedy, Drama
Language: Greek
Director: Athina Rachel Tsangari
Starring: Panos Koronis, Sakis Rouvas, Vangelis Mourikis, Yorgos Pirpassopoulos, Makis Papadimitriou
Athina Rachel Tsangari (Attenberg, ) sends up male vanity and puts us all at sea with a group six friends, family members and business associates, on a chartered yacht holiday that escalates into a contest of moronic machismo. A competitive streak underpins the itinerary, such that a spearfishing trip is an excuse to compare and contrast of the relative sizes of each other's catch. No, that's not a coy euphemism because in this film, and with these Alpha males on board, a literal penis-measuring contest isn't far off. Growing tired of the tame dinner party parlour games, the most cocksure of the bunch, proposes a new game: let's find out who is the best. Not the best at one specific thing, the best at all of the things. So begins a stupidly serious game of one-upmanship that involves competitive sleeping, stone skimming, and yes, member measuring. Tsangari shoots with a discreet camera so we are, at times, literally peeking through the window at a weird world, as things gets out of hand - because of course they do - but no one wants to be the buzzkill who calls 'time'. Read it as a searing critique of the pompous patriarchy, or just giggle at the hedonistic horseplay, either way it's a good time (so long as you're not on the boat).
Chevalier is now streaming at SBS On Demand
Rust and Bone
France, 2012
Genre: Drama
Language: French
Director: Jacques Audiard
Starring: Marion Cotillard, Matthias Schoenaerts, Corinne Masiero, Bouli Lanners, Céline Sallette
The title of Jacques Audiard's immensely romantic melodrama alludes to the sensation of being punched in the face: it's literally what you're supposed to taste as you take a hit to the jaw. I can't speak from experience about that, but the scrappy fighters in his film definitely can: one's a former trainer (Marion Cotillard) at a Sea World-like marine park, reluctantly rebuilding her life after losing her legs in a shocking workplace incident involving an Orca; the other is literally a bare-knuckle bruiser (Matthias Schoenaerts), finding himself face-to-face with a young son he hardly knows.
Rust And Bone is now streaming at SBS On Demand.
Source: SBS Movies
In Order of Disappearance
2014
Genre: Comedy, Action
Language: Norwegian, Swedish
Director: Hans Petter Moland
Starring: Bruno Ganz, Stellan Skarsgård, Peter Andersson
Revenge is ice cold and it drives a snow plough, in this black comedy with a monumental body count. Stellan Skarsgård is a grieving father who smells a rat when his only son dies of a "heroin overdose" despite never having taken drugs. Nils takes justice into his own hands and weeds out a cast of ne'er-do-wells (among them: a vegan gangster, and Bruno Ganz as a mafia boss!) and spills plenty of blood on the snow.
In Order of Disappearance starts streaming at SBS On Demand 16 July. 
Mother
MA15+
Korea, 2009
Genre: Drama, Crime, Mystery
Language: Korean
Director: Bong Joon-ho
Starring: Kim Hye-ja, Won Bin
A story of motherly devotion gets the Bong Joon-ho touch, with a very game Kim Hye-ja in the lead role as a mama out to clear her son of a wrongful murder charge. Disappointed at every turn by a useless lawyer and authorities who only want to close the case, not catch the culprit, she's a force to be reckoned with as she sets her morally ambiguous compass on setting things right. Director Bong has professed his love of all things Hitchcock, and Mother contains no shortage of nods back to the master of suspense (and of mother-son relationships).
Mother comes to SBS On Demand 23 July 
Source: SBS Movies
I Am Not Your Negro
United States of America, 2017
Genre: Documentary
Language: English
Director: Raoul Peck
Starring: Samuel L. Jackson, Harry Belafonte, Ray Charles, James Baldwin
After living abroad through the '50s and '60s, at arms' length from the chaos of the grassroots struggle for civil rights, author/poet/essayist James Baldwin felt compelled to return to the US, to be present for the reckoning that was underway. Oscar-nominated director Raoul Peck brings to life the text of Baldwin's incomplete final novel, Remember This House, in a meditation on what it means to be Black in America (then and now). It's impossible for a talking head to describe the way Baldwin's devastating intellect infuses his urgent prose, so Peck doesn't try, and simply has Samuel L. Jackson read aloud from the manuscript.
[link title="Documentary 'I Am Not Your Negro' proves writer James Baldwin's views on racism in America are as relevant as ever" url="node/155659"]
Source: SBS Movies
The Untamed
MA 15+
Mexico, 2016
Genre: Science Fiction, Drama, Thriller, Horror
Language: Spanish
Director: Amat Escalante
Starring: Kenny Johnston, Simone Bucio, Jesús Meza, Ruth Ramos, Eden Villavicencio
Mexican provocateur Amat Escalante has crafted a strange fable about lust. How best to personify the allure, the danger, the borderline obsession it can engender? Well, in a sci-fi horror story about an alien sex monster in the woods, of course! Truly bizarre but also entirely believable, The Untamed is both a suspenseful family drama, about a woman trapped in an abusive relationship, and her brother, who is unable to live as his authentic self. Into their lives comes the aforementioned tentacled space creature, whose um, 'people skills' lie in its ability to recognise and respond to a human's need for pleasure.
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