FILM REVIEW: AGES OF LOVE

Palace Films

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Billed as an Italian Love, Actually, Ages of Love (or Manual of Love 3 as it is also known) even has its poster art recalling that 2003 Brit film of interconnecting stories of love won and lost. But despite its interlocking story structure, Giovanni Veronesi's film is a much more straight forward affair, making the Richard Curtis' rom-com seem positively labyrinthine by comparison.

The 'ages of love' depicted here are youth (20s), middle age and post-middle age, and are told from the male perspective as a young lawyer (Riccardio Scamarcio), a television news anchorman (Carlo Verdone), and a retired American scholar (Robert De Niro) learn first hand that love - or more appropriately, lust - makes fools of us all. And even more so when you think with your penis.

Roberto (Scamarcio) is seconded to a village to persuade the residents of a farm to sell their home. While he awaits their decision he becomes the source of much amusement for the locals, a rag tag group of harmless men, and one not-so-harmless woman who succeeds in seducing Roberto, despite his having a fiance back in Rome.

Fabio (Verdone) is a news anchorman who, despite 25 seemingly happy years of marriage, succumbs to the advances of an admirer only to discover the woman is a stalker but not so much in the Glenn Close-Fatal Attraction kind of way. No bunnies are hurt in Ages of Love but Fabio's ego, and his toupe, sure take a beating.

And then there's Adrian (De Niro), the retired and divorced American scholar who has come to Rome to live. And it's suddenly la dolce vita when the daughter of his best friend, Augusto (Michele Placido), comes to stay. That's Viola, played by Monica Bellucci, so you can almost forgive Adrian's sudden change in attire - lycra running shorts - or lack thereof (one scene has De Niro perform an awkward striptease for Bellucci).

All of these stories, tenuously linked by a taxi driving cupid, are mildly amusing and harmless enough, but none of them reveal anything insightful about the nature of love other than the man's inability to function properly when presented with the attentions of a new female.

Still, Ages of Love was a huge hit at the recent Lavazza Film Festival. I can't say if that was the audience's desire to see a rom-com done in a way other than the tried (i.e. tired) and true way of Hollywood or to simply see De Niro in his first Italian-speaking role since Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900 (1976), and his least embarrassing performance (striptease aside) in quite some time.

FILM REVIEW: THE IDES OF MARCH

Roadshow Films

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While a perfectly fine political drama, The Ides of March suffers under the misconception that its premise – that politics is a dirty game and ideals are the first thing to die in the pursuit of power – is revelatory. Anyone who ran for student council in high school can tell you it's not. Yet when this truth is revealed to young campaigner Stephen Meyers (Ryan Gosling), his world is thrown off its axis.

Working the campaign for Governor Mike Morris (George Clooney), a Democrat hoping to secure that Party's nomination to run for President of the United States, Stephen is a hot shot going places. The rival Democrats want him to come work for them, but he rebuffs the advances of that campaign's manager, Tom Duffy (Paul Giamatti at his weasel-like best): Stephen is big on loyalty – to both the Governor and the man who hired him, Paul Zara (Philip Seymour Hoffman) – and his own ideals.

But those ideals don't prevent him from fraternising with Molly Stearns (Evan Rachel Wood), a spunky young intern and 10 years his junior. Gosling and Wood have great chemistry together but I'm guessing it's not hard to feign desire for Gosling (some may say the same of Wood). It's during their midnight assignations that Steven unearths a grenade which threatens not only to rock the Governor's campaign but Stephen's whole belief system.

Clooney's Governor Morris would seem to be an amalgam of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, two of the US Democrats' most promising stars in recent years whose lustre, for reasons of their own doing (Clinton's sexual indiscretions; Obama's mishandling of the GFC, giving Wall Street a free pass), was lost.

A Democrat himself, Clooney, directing his fourth film, doesn't let the Party off easy: there are no Republicans in The Ides of March for the Democrats do a perfectly good job of destroying themselves. Yet none of this in-fighting, backstabbing or abandonment of ideals is as revelatory or earth-shattering as Clooney and his co-writers – Grant Heslov and Beau Willimon, from whose play, Farragut North, Ides is adapted – would have us believe.

Even if ironically, or fittingly, like so many political candidates (and movies, for that matter), the film delivers less than what it promises, The Ides of March succeeds as an engaging political drama. Gosling, on a roll in 2011, Clooney, graciously playing a supporting role, and Giamatti and Hoffman (whom I could have used more of) are all in fine form and worthy of your vote.

FILM REVIEW: WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN

Hopscotch Films

Now Showing

There has been some discussion in the media of late as to whether or not women who choose not to have children (for whatever reason) are selfish. While a silly debate to begin with, a strong argument for the negative is Lynne Ramsay's new feature We Need To Talk About Kevin: anyone, not just women, will abandon the idea of parenthood after seeing this film.

Based on the award-winning bestselling book by Lionel Shriver, Ramsay's film unfolds as a prism of memories belonging to Eva (Tilda Swinton), who is struggling to come to terms with the horrific crime her adolescent son, Kevin (Ezra Miller), has committed. But was it Eva's lack of maternal instinct that lead to Kevin's actions, or, as Eva's memories suggest, was Kevin born the bad seed? Nurture versus nature?

The young Kevin wilfully ignores, taunts and defies his mother which leaves her exasperated and exhausted. Husband and father Franklin (John C. Reilly, underused and arguably miscast), who escapes to the office every day, doesn't see Kevin as Eva does; when daddy walks in the door, it's all smiles.

The behaviour of Kevin in his various stages, may be one of the film's less convincing elements, bordering on caricature, but as I said, these are the memories of a grieving mother and wife, they are not objective flashbacks. Memory is not a reliable tool, and Eva is possibly looking for a way to explain what happened or punishing herself for missing signs that were there all along.

Tilda Swinton is, of course, amazing in the film which she also executive produced. She doesn't do vanity - Swinton appears gaunt and haggard throughout - nor does she make Eva the hero of the piece. We get the sense that Eva never really envisioned herself as a mother and nurturing doesn't come naturally to her; Kevin is a riddle she simply can't decipher. And with the arrival of a daughter, it would seem Eva's easy relationship with her confirms her suspicions about Kevin: it's not me, it's him.

Of course nothing in We Need To Talk About Kevin is meant to be that simplistic. Never having read Shriver's book, I can only go by what Ramsay - making just her third feature, and her first in nine years - has presented. As a film it's an impressionistic piece about memory and guilt, the fractured narrative of which serves to heighten your discomfort as you wait for the truth of what Kevin did to be fully revealed.

And when it's revealed to be something other than a gun which is involved, it's all the more chilling. Kevin, played as an adolescent by Ezra Miller with insouciant menace, may have been born an arsehole but for mine, he chose to be a monster. And make no mistake: if you choose to see We Need To Talk About Kevin, like Eva, you'll be haunted.

FILM REVIEW: THE TALL MAN

Hopscotch Films

Now Showing

Palm Island, off the east coast of Queensland, is a beautiful location and a tropical idyll. But looks can be deceiving, and when one of the indigenous locals died in police custody in 2004, all kinds of ugly were revealed, extending across to the mainland and the heart of the Queensland Police Force, and back to the island's aboriginal penal colony past.

Cameron Doomadgee was arrested for swearing at police officer, Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley, and a mere 45 minutes later died in a cell at the Palm Island Police Station. Despite suffering injuries consistent with those sustained in a car crash - including four broken ribs and a liver almost cleaved in half - Hurley maintained that Doomadgee was never beaten and that his injuries were sustained in a fall whilst being taken from the paddy wagon to the cell where he died.

But from the moment Doomadgee was found dead, the police investigation was compromised, and standard procedure ignored. A miscarriage of justice which began with the arrest of Cameron Doomadgee (for swearing at a police officer; offensive but not really an arrest-worthy offense), reverberated long after his death: Doomadgee's son, and the man who shared that fatal cell with the deceased, both committed suicide not long after.

A Coronial Inquiry into Doomadgee's death ruled Hurley responsible but the Queensland Department of Police Prosecutions not only reversed that decision but ruled the death an accident. When, at the behest of the Queensland government in 2007, that decision by the DPP was to be reinvestigated, the Queensland Police Department came out in force in support of Hurley with strike action a constant threat.

Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, no one from QLD Police would agree to appear in The Tall Man, Tony Krawitz's doco based on Chloe Hooper's non-fiction book, which recounts all of these events with clarity. Hurley's defense is left to video footage of the investigation, court recordings of Hurley's testimony, and character references from (white) locals from his previous postings.

Interviews with family, friends and the partner of Doomagdee paint a portrait of an imperfect but no less loved man while also capturing the anger and, as much as film can, their grief. And make no mistake, The Tall Man will anger and sadden you in equal measure. Whether Doomadagee's death was racially motivated or not, you can't help but feel ashamed of the ongoing tensions between black and white Australia, as well as those between Aboriginals and police.

Naively, I believed that aboriginal deaths in custody had come to a head in Australia in the early 1990s. The Tall Man acts as a sobering reminder that even in the 2000s, Australia still has a long way to go.