Author Joanna Di Mattia

Basil Dearden’s 1961 film, Victim, represents a significant moment in British film history. Released into a world where sex between adult men in the United Kingdom was a heavily policed crime, it is the first B...

Do secret agents have hearts that break? In its final minutes, Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011), delivers an affirmative answer with a pop song – a musical moment discordant with the film’s mo...

The Long Day Closes (1992), like each of Terence Davies’ nine films, lives and breathes within interior spaces. When Bud (Leigh McCormack), the film’s 12-year-old protagonist, is pictured outdoors, it is an exp...

Originally published in Senses of Cinema issue 84, September 2017. “Only Through Time Time is Conquered” Early in Of Time and the City (2008), Terence Davies’ documentary collage that brings the postwar Live...

The Flavour of Green Tea over Rice (1952) appears early in the most lauded period of Yasujirō Ozu’s 35-year career. Inevitably overshadowed by the film that followed it, Tokyo Story (1953), The Flavour of Green...

“Harry Graham …” the adoption agent, Mr Jordan (Edmund Gwenn), contemplates, once the man in question (Edmond O’Brien) and his wife, Eve (Joan Fontaine), have left his office. Harry and Eve have decided to adop...

An adult tries to comfort the four-year-old girl whose grief and confusion at her mother’s sudden death provides Jacques Doillon’s Ponette (1996) with its narrative and emotional contours. She tells Ponette (Vi...

* The last time I saw France, I caught a train alone from Paris to Lyon. I ate a ham and cheese baguette, drank a bottle of Orangina, and flicked absently between magazines, writing in my journal, and reading ...

Desire is a wish; a risk; a hunger. Desire starts with an arousal that then becomes a yearning. It alters our perception and changes our molecules. To follow where desire leads can make life better or messier, ...

George Stevens helmed a U.S. Army film unit for much of the Second World War. He recorded the D-Day landings, the liberation of Paris and, most importantly, the liberation of Dachau concentration camp and Duben...

‘Will I ever get into the beautiful garden?’ Charlotte Henry’s Alice cries in frustration after she takes a drink from a bottle (‘Not poison’) that she hopes will let her fit through a very small door. Her deci...

“We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces.” This statement, from Billy Wilder’s Hollywood noir, Sunset Boulevard (1950), returned to me time and time again during the 2017 Melbourne International Film Festival. A ...

Touch creates its own language. In The Piano (1993), Jane Campion’s gorgeous, Gothic romance, it speaks multiple dialects. Campion gives us access to mute Ada McGrath’s (Holly Hunter) voice when her fingers tou...

10 November 1945, Liverpool, UK “Only Through Time Time is Conquered” Early in Of Time and the City (2008), Terence Davies’ documentary collage that brings the postwar Liverpool of his youth and dreams to vi...

Sidney Poitier’s Dignified Touch in Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night We hear Detective Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier) speak very few words in the early scenes of In the Heat of the Night. Tibbs is a st...

Captain Wade Hunnicutt (Robert Mitchum) is introduced to us as a man of action. Out hunting, he crouches in the reeds waiting to take aim at the ducks flying overhead. But before he has a chance to shoot, a way...

Pietro Germi’s satire of Sicilian machismo, Divorce Italian Style, unfolds within the stifling walls of a decaying palace in Agramonte, a town of “slow progress”. For the film’s protagonist, the impoverished ar...

“I am eternally, devastatingly romantic, and I thought people would see it because ‘romantic’ doesn’t mean ‘sugary.’ It’s dark and tormented – the furor of passion, the despair of an idealism that you can’t att...

Oppressive heat shrouds an Algerian beach. A Frenchman, Arthur Meursault (Marcello Mastroianni), pauses at the foot of the stairs of the house at which he’s a guest. He’s too exhausted to climb, overcome by the...

Emergency Kisses begins with a couple quarrelling about something most couples don’t usually quarrel about – who should play one of them in a film the other is making based on their lives. The man, Mathieu, is ...

“You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing.” - He (Eiji Okada) in Hiroshima mon amour (1959) The importance of bearing witness preoccupied Alain Resnais (1922-2014) in the years prior to directing his first featu...