Philippa Hawker

Melbourne

Film and Arts Writer at Australian Book Review

Host at The ABR Podcast

Film and arts writer. Go Saints

Featured in: Favicon

sensesofcinema.com Favicon

smh.com.au Favicon

rottentomatoes.com Favicon

stuff.co.nz Favicon

theage.com.au Favicon

theaustralian.com.au Favicon

sbs.com.au Favicon

canberratimes.com.au Favicon

brisbanetimes.com.au Favicon

watoday.com.au + 4 more

Articles

Actor Abou Sangaré is the real deal

1 week ago | thesaturdaypaper.com.au | Philippa Hawker

At the Cannes Film Festival last year, Abou Sangaré should have been on top of the world. He had won a best actor award for his role in L’Histoire de Souleymane (The Story of Souleymane), the gripping tale of an asylum seeker, which had been selected for the Un Certain Regard section and also took out the jury and critics’ prizes. While he was there, however, he learnt that his application for a residency permit in France had been turned down.
Treaures unearthed for Cinema Reborn

2 months ago | thesaturdaypaper.com.au | Philippa Hawker

Film This year, Cinema Reborn brings treasures to the big screen that include a work by Tarkovsky, some vampire eroticism and the largest Australian contingent yet. By Philippa Hawker. SHARE Copy Link Bluesky Facebook X LinkedIn Every year, Cinema Reborn brings a brief yet densely packed festival of recently restored movie treasures to Sydney and Melbourne.
Small mercies • Philippa Hawker

2 months ago | insidestory.org.au | Philippa Hawker

Spare and haunting, Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These works in undemonstrative ways. The prose has an inexorable quality, a kind of flow; the accumulation of detail is graceful, precise and telling. There is an apparent simplicity in the events it describes that might suggest it would be easy to bring to the screen. But there are considerable challenges in its quiet, distilled narrative and in the nature of its central character, Bill Furlong, a restrained, elusive figure.
The Count of Monte Cristo

2 months ago | australianbookreview.com.au | Philippa Hawker

Umberto Eco said of Alexandre Dumas’s novel The Count of Monte Cristo (1846) that ‘it is one of the most exciting novels ever written and on the other hand, it is one of the most badly written novels of all time and in any literature’. It was the unnecessary length and the repetitions that appalled him most. Yet when he tried to produce a more elegant, distilled translation, he gave up: he began to wonder if the repetitions and redundancies were a necessary part of its structure.
Top Gere • Philippa Hawker

Mar 26, 2025 | insidestory.org.au | Philippa Hawker

Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada begins with the preparation of a room. There’s a practised efficiency as well as a ritual quality to the way three people unpack boxes, move furniture, shift a Christmas tree, set up cameras, monitors and lights, mark a spot on the floor with an x made out of gaffer tape. This is a rare straightforward moment in a film with an apparently simple premise: the recording of the recollections of a dying man.
Director Jessica Palud returns power to Last Tango in Paris actress Maria Schneider

Mar 4, 2025 | thesaturdaypaper.com.au | Philippa Hawker

In 1972, 19-year-old Maria Schneider was cast in her first lead role, opposite Marlon Brando. After the film’s premiere, one of America’s best-known critics proclaimed it a masterpiece for the ages. For Schneider, the trauma she experienced on the set of Last Tango in Paris was only the beginning. For French filmmaker Jessica Palud, Schneider’s story needed to be told, but not as it had been in the past. It was time for a different perspective.
The real thing • Philippa Hawker

Feb 19, 2025 | insidestory.org.au | Philippa Hawker

In his enveloping, tactile Grand Tour (currently in cinemas), Portuguese director Miguel Gomes takes us on a hectic yet leisurely adventure in storytelling that blurs boundaries between past and present, fiction and documentary, black-and-white and colour, absurdity and melancholy, and mixes languages and cinematic conventions. The film begins as a story of colonial anxiety borrowed from a travel piece by Somerset Maugham.
Baby steps • Inside Story

Jan 30, 2025 | insidestory.org.au | Philippa Hawker

Is Halina Reijn’s Babygirl a dark erotic thriller or a flipped #MeToo drama? Or a morality tale about the dangers of sexual desire? At various points in the movie you might be forgiven for wondering if it is going in any or all of these directions. But what is manifestly clear from the outset is that it is a perfect vehicle for the feverish, fearless talents of Nicole Kidman. She plays Romy, the founder and CEO of a highly successful warehouse automation company about to launch a new product.
Archivist Peter Steinberg’s 30 years of devotion to Sylvia Plath

Nov 29, 2024 | thesaturdaypaper.com.au | Philippa Hawker

Peter Steinberg was told that everyone goes through a Sylvia Plath phase. “Mine,” he says, “has lasted 30 years.” But after the publication on December 3 of The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath – the culmination of years of archival research and editing – he is finally moving on. Steinberg evolved from avid reader to Plath blogger to the author of two books about her to the co-editor of two volumes of her letters.
Border forces • Philippa Hawker

Nov 19, 2024 | insidestory.org.au | Philippa Hawker

In the documentary No Other Land, a handheld camera represents a way of recording and revealing, a form of witness and an affirmation of memory. “I started filming when we started to end,” says journalist Basel Adra, now twenty-eight, an activist from a family of activists, who comes from Masafer Yatta, a community of twenty small villages in the West Bank mountains. No Other Land, which opens on 21 November, won the Berlin Film Festival’s best documentary and audience awards this year.