The recent death of Polish director Andrzej Żuławski might at first appear a lesser addition to 2016’s already dramatic body count of influential artists: Lemmy, Bowie, Rivette, Eco, and Harper Lee, to name but a high-profile few. But in the film world, Żuławski’s passing seemed to come from out of nowhere.

Like most online phenomena about gender, the Bechdel test has its critics. A panel at New York's women-focused Athena Film Festival last year was dedicated to discussing precisely why it was important to move beyond the Bechdel test, seeking to expand the debate around gender and film. They underscored that the Bechdel is hardly a best-case scenario.

Both films, The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, explore the suffering, violence and personal and social rupture caused by the 1965-66 genocide in Indonesia.

It is, by turns, a love letter to seventies science fiction; a study of the clash between Hollywood filmmaking culture and the mores of the European avant garde; and a celebration of unrestrained creativity and artistic determination. I don’t mean to sound trite, but it is a film every creative, whatever they do, should see.

Potentially this year’s most brilliant and unnerving documentary film, The Gatekeepers, directed by Dror Moreh, restages and retells the Israel–Palestine conflict, systematically constructing and destabilising his own narrative complexity like a well-played game of Jenga.

The Hurt Locker was, in essence, a feelgood film. Audiences could leave the cinema thinking they had seen the reality of the Iraq War, when in fact they had seen no such thing. The Hurt Locker was a film of reassurance. The viewer had their sensibilities very lightly traumatised – occasional bits of sadism serving that purpose well – just enough to feel as though they had witnessed something emotionally meaningful.

The first ever Italian film had an exceptional premiere: on a giant screen outside of Rome’s Aurealian Walls, on 20 September of 1905, that is to say on the thirty-fifth anniversary of the capture of the city by the army of King Vittorio Emanuele II that completed the decades-long process of liberation and unification of the country. The subject of the film was that epic event: La Presa di Roma, the capture of Rome.

1. The Kid With a Bike (Le Gamin au vélo) Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Belgium-France-Italy 2011 may be the year that 3D came into its own with auteurs from Spielberg and Scorsese to Wenders and Herzog making admirable contributions to the medium. However, this year belongs to a modestly analogue film about an eleven-year-old boy […]

Here’s another small straw in the wind. This is the trailer for The Hunger Games movie. Even from that, you should get the gist. A country where the poor are tremendously poor and the rich are enormously rich, and where every so often young people are induced to fight and die in meaningless conflicts used […]

Toomelah Director: Ivan Sen ★★★ Ivan Sen’s debut feature film was 2002’s Beneath Clouds: a road movie about two Indigenous Australian teenagers trying to escape the depressing realities of their lives by fleeing to Sydney. It’s a solid film and I was thoroughly looking forward to Sen’s third feature, Toomelah. Especially as it was the […]

Cave of Forgotten Dreams Dir: Werner Herzog ★★★★ In 1994 three French speleologists discovered a cave hidden behind an old rockslide in southern France. Inside they found a particularly beautiful cave with rock paintings eventually dated to 32 000 years before the present. They are the oldest known cave paintings, preserved so well because of […]

Surviving Life Director: Jan Švankmajer ★★★ Czech director Jan Švankmajer’s Surviving Life is a whole movie in the style of Terry Gilliam’s animations. Or, more accurately, Gilliam’s animations are in the style of Švankmajer, who was a major influence on the Monty Python member. In an amusing introduction Švankmajer explains the film is a ‘psychoanalytic […]

Armadillo Director: Janus Metz ★★★★ Janus Metz’s Armadillo takes its name from a forward operating base in Helmand province. The documentary focuses on a platoon of Danish soldiers and their deployment from February to August 2009. The impression given of the Afghanistan War during their tour is a war by inches. The Taliban are less […]

On 26 February 2009, novelist and journalist Nick McDowell began his embed with the United States Army’s 1st Cavalry Division in Mosul, northern Iraq. He was to spend two weeks researching a report for Time magazine and his book The End of Major Combat Operations. Most of that time was spent accompanying the units he […]

So anyway, as I was passing through Brisbane last week at the end of a long journey, I caught up with a friend of mine who reads my blogs. Brisbane always seems to me to be a city where a great catastrophe has at some time taken place, a catastrophe that no one wants to […]

The Meanland essay in Overland 199 is written by author, SPUNC President and Wet Ink fiction editor, Emmett Stinson. ‘The pirate code’ delves into the underbelly of copyright during the digital revolution – and comes to some surprising conclusions: Right now publishers are abuzz with discussions of ‘book futures’ and the digital revolution, but there […]