Selina Robertson

Bitch Slap

(18) 110min (Momentum) Writer/director and Corman protégé Rick Jacobson certainly earned his B movie/fantasy-action spurs working on cult US television series Xena /Hercules. With cameos by Lucy Xena Lawless and Michael Hercules Hurst and…

Profile: RJ Cutler

All you need to know about the director of The September Issue.

Name RJ Cutler Born 1962, USA Background Cutler graduated from Harvard in 1983. He has a producing credit on The War Room (1993), a landmark documentary that follows Clinton’s 1992 US presidential campaign through his notorious spin doctors James…

(500) Days of Summer

Back to front story romantic comedy

(500) Days of Summer promises more than it delivers, regrettably. This factory made YouTube generation rom-com kicks off at breakneck speed delivering a drole reconstruction of young man Tom’s (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) unruly love affair with young girl…

Title sequence - Sin Nombre

Studio backing and awards at Sundance have seen Mexican immigrant-tale Sin Nombre become one of the most talked about upcoming films. Selina Robertson meets the director.

Before Stonewall

(87min) Forty years ago a small bar called the Stonewall Inn in a corner pocket of New York’s West Village sparked the legendary Stonewall riots that spearheaded the global gay liberation movement. In 1984, seasoned documentarian Greta Schiller shot…

Wendy and Lucy

DRAMA Twentysomething Wendy (Michelle Williams) and her golden retriever dog Lucy embark on a cross-country road trip from Indiana to find temporary work in a fishing cannery in Ketchikan, Alaska. Their problems begin in Oregon when Wendy’s old Honda…

Berlin Film Festival 2009 - selected highlights

List Film contributor and programmer Selina Robertson's selects 10 films making waves at the Berlin Film Festival 2009 The Exploding Girl US indie rising star writer-director Bradley Rust Grey’s delivers a low-key character study of a young girl’s…

Unrelated

DRAMA British TV director Joanna Hogg’s debut feature, shot during a hot summer in the Tuscan hills, has none of the trappings of Merchants Ivory’s A Room with a View, that other British heritage film made in the same location. Forty-something…

Esther B Robinson - A Walk Into the Sea

In July 1966, Esther B Robinson’s uncle Danny Williams drove home to Massachusetts, with a shaving kit full of drugs, and took his own life. Thirty-four years later, Esther’s grandmother Nadia came to visit her granddaughter’s workplace at the Warhol…

EXODUS

One of Britain’s best-known maverick filmmakers, Penny Woolcock (Mischief Night, The Principles of Lust), teams up with Artangel (an organisation that commissions and produces projects by contemporary artists), Antony Gormley and the city of Margate to…

Away From Her

DRAMA Canadian short and TV filmmaker Sarah Polley’s leap into feature film directing is a moving adaptation of Alice Munro’s short story The Bear Came Over the Mountain. Set in present day Ontario, middle class Fiona (Julie Christie) and Grant…

10 Great Films

From the Berlin Film Festival 2007

Away From Her (pictured) Atom Egoyan’s favourite actress Sarah Polley’s debut feature delivers a powerhouse drama concerning the effects of Alzheimer’s on a 50-year-old marriage. Julie Christie stars; no doubt she’ll be up for an Oscar nomination come…

Echo Park LA

Tony Richardson/Shelagh Delaney’s 1961 drama A Taste of Honey is the direct inspiration for this beautifully composed teenage drama. Young Latina Magdalena (Emily Rios) is blissfully preparing for her Quinceañera (15th birthday celebration) dreaming of…