Every year since 1997 I have posted on this website my thoughts about the films I have seen – as I see them – at each Sydney Film Festival.  Apparently I was blogging. Every year it seems to get harder to get these reviews up quickly, but I won't give up!

Sometimes I post the raw notes I made at the time I saw each film - my contemporaneous thinking, informed by discussions with people in and around row D in the stalls, and in the aisles and foyer.  Thanks to all of you! It is a bit shorthand, and often poorly typed. But I'll try to work through it and edit it as soon as I can...

Oh, and these reviews are copyright. You must not use any part of them without my permission.

In Bruges, 107 mins, rated TBA, opening in cinemas on 4 September 2008.

By MICHELE ASPREY, Lawyer

Martin McDonagh, the writer and director of In Bruges, is better known as a playwright. His plays include The Beauty Queen of Leenane, The Cripple of Inishmaan, The Lieutenant of Inishmore and, most recently, The Pillowman.  All of these plays have had productions over the past few years in Sydney.

McDonagh is a theatre prodigy: he’s the only writer to have had four plays running in London's West End at the same time. He was nominated for Tony awards for Best Play for Leenane (1998), Lonesome West (1999), Pillowman (2005) and Inishmore (2006). Pillowman won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play in 2004. Now he has turned to film directing. 

He started modestly in 2004 with a short film he wrote and directed, called Six Shooter. It won the 2006 Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film, and starred the wonderful Irish actor Brendan Gleeson (Gangs of New York, 2002, and The General, 1998). McDonagh’s first feature, In Bruges, also stars Brendan Gleeson, along with Colin Farrell (The New World, 2005, Alexander, 2004) and Ralph Fiennes (Spider, 2002, Schindler’s List, 1993). What a threesome of Anglo-Celtic actors!

McDonagh’s plays give you an inkling of what to expect: dark comedy, hilarious dialogue, and moments of sudden and shocking violence. McDonagh is often described as combining elements of JM Synge with Harold Pinter or even David Mamet. He was born in London, but of Irish parents, and his plays are either set in Ireland, or feature Irish characters, or both. He’s widely admired, but he also divides audiences. Is he a brilliant interpreter of contemporary Ireland, or peddler of arrant caricature?

In Bruges is set, not surprisingly, in Bruges (as the tag line says, “it’s in Belgium”). Farrell and Gleeson are two Irish hit men, hiding out in that beautiful medieval town on the orders of their boss, after a botched hit. We soon find out that the hit was on a Catholic priest (an uncredited Ciaran Hinds) – in a confessional! This is so typical of McDonagh: what’s the most outrageous hit you can think of? Let’s have that.

The banter between Farrell (Ray) and Gleeson (Ken) is reminiscent of Quentin Tarantino, too, but it seems more authentic, perhaps because of its thorough Irishness. Ray hates Bruges. He hates history too: “It’s all about stuff that’s already happened.” But Ken really warms to Bruges, and tries to take Ray sightseeing. Ray’s not interested, until he notices a film set, and an unusually short actor.  “They’re filming something! They’re filming midgets!” he cries, delightedly.

There are many amusing diversions and non-sequiturs like that before we learn the real reason that Ray and Ken are in Bruges. In the meantime we become tourists with them, and I’m sure that many of us will fall in love with the town, as Ken does – and as their boss Harry (Ralph Fiennes) has already done. Harry is a truly loathsome character, not unlike Ben Kingsley’s frightening “Don Logan” from Sexy Beast (2000), and it’s hard to believe he admires the chocolate-box good looks of a town like Bruges. But he’s adamant: Bruges is beautiful, and Ray and Ken should go sightseeing.

In Bruges succeeds for many reasons. It’s not just the quirky characters, the funny dialogue or the unexpected directions of the plotline. McDonagh has an uncanny sense of character and plot, but we expect that from an award-winning playwright. What I didn’t expect was his assured visual ability: In Bruges looks, in turn, wonderful, menacing, fairytale, dangerous, mysterious and fun.   In several scenes we actually seem to enter a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. This is particularly wonderful because Ray and Ken have earlier been to a museum to see Bosch’s Judgment Day, and Ken has tried to explain it to Ray, who gives us this priceless explanation of Purgatory: “Purgatory's kind of like the in-betweeny one. You weren't really shit, but you weren't all that great either. Like Tottenham.”

Inevitably, there is a Judgment Day coming for Ray and Ken. And, like most of Bosch, it will not be pretty. But it will be moving.

And When Did You Last See Your Father?, 92 mins, rated M, opening in cinemas on 31 July 2008.

By MICHELE ASPREY, Lawyer

This film is an adaptation of the 1993 best-selling and influential memoir by Blake Morrison, a novelist, critic, and past literary editor of British newspaper The Observer. The book is an exploration of memory, reconciliation, and the author’s attempt to come to an understanding of his complex relationship with an exasperating father.

The title comes from a famous British painting by WK Yeames, a Victorian painter of many historical pictures, often dealing with the English Civil War. This particular painting shows an imaginary scene in a Royalist house. Parliamentarian soldiers are questioning a little boy (about 5 years old) about his Royalist father.

The question Yeames poses in his painting is: will the boy tell the truth and thus betray his father? This is quite a conundrum, especially for the Victorians, who believed in children as paragons of honesty and virtue. The painting adds another layer to the memoir and the film: what is the role of honesty and truthfulness in the father/ son relationship?

The Morrison memoir has been sensitively adapted for the screen by David Nicholls. The screenplay takes the point of view of Blake Morrison (Colin Firth), aged about 40. He has returned to the family home to see his father, Arthur, a country doctor who’s dying of cancer. This triggers memories of Blake’s childhood and adolescence. The film cleverly cuts between the present, and two stages of the past: when Blake is a boy of 8 (Bradley Johnson) and when he is an adolescent of 14 (strikingly played by newcomer Matthew Beard).

The director often uses mirrors and glass to show duplicate images, or reflections of people who may or may not be in the frame, to suggest different points of view, and different personas, as well as the idea of reflection itself. The mood is gentle and slow moving, and some filmgoers may feel restless as we cut back and forward in time, returning again and again to the dying Arthur.

But there are several moments of great humour, and a few squirm-worthy scenes where Arthur manages yet again to embarrass Blake. Jim Broadbent plays Arthur, in a towering portrayal of a difficult man. Arthur’s a rogue, not above using his status as a doctor to push ahead in a queue waiting to get in to the car races. This is how the film opens, and we immediately see the fraught relationship Arthur has with his fellow GP wife (the superb Juliet Stephenson), his son Blake, and daughter Gillian (Claire Skinner). They watch in appalled admiration as Arthur triumphantly lies his way into the private members’ carpark and special seats.

Arthur repeats this sort of behaviour throughout his life. And most people seem to love him for it. But he embarrasses Blake, often in front of girls. He refers to Blake as “Fathead,” and he never seems to acknowledge his son’s successes, even when Blake wins an important award for poetry. Worse, Blake suspects Arthur has had an affair with Aunty Beaty.

Arthur never seems to show any emotion with Blake. He’s not the type. Blake, too, is stitched-up and closed-in, having been discouraged and belittled at every turn by his father. So when, towards the end of the film, Blake finds a form of release and begins to cry, it is a genuinely shocking moment. But there is no Hollywood style reconciliation in this film. Colin Firth’s Blake is an internal being, and it is a beautifully restrained performance. Matthew Beard’s portrayal of the teen-aged Blake is intelligent, restrained and quite striking. Juliet Stephenson, as Arthur’s wife, plays way above her age with ease and grace.

Director Anand Tucker’s two previous feature films were Hilary and Jackie (1998) and Shopgirl (2005), both sensitive films. But here he delivers a really beautiful meditation on how we see our parents and what they mean to us. The final scenes of the film ask the question of the title: when did you last see your father? When was he last the way you want to remember him, before he was too ill, before he lost that spark of mischievousness that you loved and hated at the same time? The answer is both unbearably sad and amazingly consoling.