“In a film like Killer of Sheep, and reportedly in [Charles Burnett’s] other films too, it is possible to see the influence of filmmakers like Jean Renoir, and his line “everybody has their reasons.” “It was one of the films that he did, The Southerner, that really affected me a lot. It was about two itinerant farmers, a black family and a white family, and it was first time both of them were treated humanely and equally. If it was made by an American, it would have been focused on the white family and told through their eyes. The film was criticised for that [approach]. But in later years I realised that it was because he didn’t fit the mould, he didn’t perpetuate the racist mould that you find in a lot of directors of that time.” BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM’s interview with Charles Burnett continues....[Read More]

More dailies from JOE SHEPPARD in Wellington: on Homegrown: Works on Film (“For all the films, the post-production was beautiful and sophisticated, but it did jar a little with the idealised view of provincial New Zealand on offer. I know there’s still plenty of VHS tapes and kitsch wallpaper out there, but haven’t we moved on from milkmen and glass bottles?”) Manufactured Landscapes (“Burtynsky divines deep beauty even among the dusty Yangtze cities, dismantled brick-by-brick to make way for the Great Dam of China: urgent questions of enormous social and economic change have never been posed so prettily”) and The Bothersome Man (“The script is as sharp as a switchblade, the humour brutally deadpan, and the scores from Ginge and Grieg achingly beautiful”).

DAVID LEVINSON on TV Junkie: “What ultimately saves [Rick] Kirkham’s story from the glossy endzone of a million other wreck stories like it, is his chronic self-chronicling, having captured on home video the before, during and after of years’ worth of highs; totalling 3000 hours worth of footage, filmmakers Michael Cain and Matt Radecki, in an endurance test of editing, have streamlined this mountain of avowal down into the hellish-but-laboured 90 minutes.” And DARREN BEVAN on a vampire epic: “Given how Night Watch ended with the central character losing his son after he allied himself with the forces of darkness, I had half expected to sit through a sequel in the vein of a supernatural Kramer vs Kramer – but I needn’t have worried. Day Watch is by turns brilliant and completely bonkers.”