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Philippa Hawker
Tomatometer-approved critic
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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Napoleon (2023) |
The Napoleon-Josephine relationship sits awkwardly alongside moments of spectacle, physicality, and dramatic scale. - Australian Book Review
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| Posted Dec 01, 2023
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Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) |
It is a story of murder, manipulation, and survival, an engrossing, deliberate work that also has expansive, unexpected moments and disconcerting juxtapositions. It is packed with vivid cameos and has three striking performances at its centre. - Australian Book Review
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| Posted Nov 04, 2023
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A Haunting in Venice (2023) |
In dispensing with Christie’s plot, Green and Branagh haven’t really brought anything strong or surprising to the narrative. It’s all ambiance and angle. If they are planning another Poirot, they need to rethink their approach. - Australian Book Review
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| Posted Sep 14, 2023
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One Fine Morning (2022) |
In French filmmaker Mia Hansen-Løve’s One Fine Morning (Un beau matin), books play a significant role: as physical objects, gifts, talismans, sources of connection, works in progress. Above all, books can represent a life. - Australian Book Review
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| Posted Jul 20, 2023
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Dalíland (2022) |
The central performances are strong. - Australian Book Review
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| Posted Jul 20, 2023
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The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (2005) |
There are some heavy-handed moments of affirmation in the film, but there is a likeable warmth to it, some strong performances and some grit and spark, particularly in the strand involving Ferrara. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted Mar 14, 2023
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The Lady Eve (1941) |
Funny, fast and graceful, an exuberant mixture of wit, physical comedy and inventive plotting, The Lady Eve sets a benchmark for romantic comedy. - The Age (Australia)
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| Posted Dec 28, 2022
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Gladiator (2000) |
The combat in the arena is exciting, fast but not overly gruesome -- blood is shed, tigers are unleashed, chariots career around the arena, but it's in a way that empties the gladiatorial spectacle of any sense of excess or extremes. - The Age (Australia)
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| Posted Nov 01, 2022
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Maleficent (2014) |
It's a splendid-looking film. The effects are striking throughout, whether they are dramatic battle confrontations between humans and the forces of the natural world, or small moments of delicate detail. - The Age (Australia)
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| Posted Dec 14, 2018
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Selma (2014) |
Ava DuVernay's Selma is a beautifully observed drama of public and private lives, of personal narratives and historic moments. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted Oct 04, 2018
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C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005) |
There's a warmth and detail to the way father, mother and son are depicted and explored. - The Age (Australia)
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| Posted Sep 17, 2018
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Mr. Six (2015) |
Mr Six is a comic, elegiac film that never settles into one particular genre or mood. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted Aug 14, 2018
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Measure of a Man (2018) |
The accumulating power of The Measure of a Man is in its small details and undemonstrative approach. - Australian Book Review
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| Posted Jul 09, 2018
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Trishna (2011) |
Alec d'Urberville, the wayward idler who seduces Tess, and Angel Clare, the compulsively virtuous youngman she loves, 'the earnestest man in Wessex', have been distilled [in this adaptation] into a single, somewhat problematic figure. - Australian Book Review
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| Posted Oct 14, 2017
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The Measure of a Man (2015) |
The accumulating power of The Measure of a Man is in its small details and undemonstrative approach. - Australian Book Review
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| Posted Oct 14, 2017
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Women He's Undressed (2015) |
Gillian Armstrong's lively, cleverly constructed documentary is a celebration of a life and an art. It's also a playful exploration of the creative achievements of an Australian who played an important role in the Golden Age of Hollywood. - The Age (Australia)
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| Posted Jul 25, 2016
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Courted (2015) |
Courted is an intriguing, carefully constrained work, although there's something a little disconcerting about the way the two stories are interwoven. - The Age (Australia)
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| Posted May 12, 2016
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The First Monday in May (2016) |
The documentary doesn't really tell us much about the items in the show either. But it gives us enough glimpses of the content to ensure that it is beautiful to look at. - The Age (Australia)
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| Posted May 12, 2016
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Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising (2016) |
Unfortunately, Bad Neighbours 2 hasn't found a way to recycle itself, even with a quasi-feminist comic cause. - Sydney Morning Herald
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| Posted May 11, 2016
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The Angry Birds Movie (2016) |
Whatever we might think of its broader implications, in the end, The Angry Birds Movie is basically a franchise extender that follows a predictable formula. - The Age (Australia)
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| Posted May 11, 2016
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My Mother (2015) |
The film is a warm depiction of familial bonds and the strength of relationships across generations. - The Age (Australia)
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| Posted May 04, 2016
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The Silences (2016) |
The Silences is a narrative of discovery, but it doesn't trade in startling revelations or reversals: it is judicious, thoughtful, resonant. - The Age (Australia)
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| Posted May 02, 2016
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The Huntsman: Winter's War (2016) |
A clumsily assembled patchwork of images, ideas, storylines and fabulous frocks that never comes together with any kind of consistency or flair. It's a mess, and a dour one at that. - The Age (Australia)
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| Posted Apr 14, 2016
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Ordet (1955) |
The film unfolds in a confined space but there is nothing constrained or contained in its searching, intense approach and nothing dogmatic about its approach to its subject. - The Age (Australia)
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| Posted Apr 10, 2016
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Moomins on the Riviera (2014) |
Freely adapting the work of Finnish writer and artist Tove Jansson, Moomins On The Riviera is a leisurely animated feature, a respectful tribute to her creations. - The Age (Australia)
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| Posted Apr 06, 2016
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Hockney (2014) |
[An] affectionate documentary portrait of the artist. - The Age (Australia)
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| Posted Apr 05, 2016
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Our Last Tango (2015) |
Our Last Tango is a complicated story of partnership and rupture, a film that foregrounds storytelling, dance, dramatised presentation and the construction of the world it evokes. - The Age (Australia)
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| Posted Mar 30, 2016
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Kung Fu Panda 3 (2016) |
There is plenty in Kung Fu Panda 3 that echoes the first film and the sequel, but it's not tired recycling. Instead, the movie deftly reinforces and extends what has gone before. - The Age (Australia)
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| Posted Mar 24, 2016
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The Daughter (2015) |
The Daughter has a sense of immediacy and an apparent embrace of naturalism, yet its carefully heightened use of space, place and emptiness has a strong impact. - The Age (Australia)
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| Posted Mar 16, 2016
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Zootopia (2016) |
The tale of a plucky rabbit and a sly fox, it's also a meditation on human nature, civil society and the politics of stereotyping. And it has great sloth jokes. - The Age (Australia)
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| Posted Mar 16, 2016
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From Vegas to Macau III (2016) |
This third instalment is a succession of CGI-driven sequences, comic routines and action set-pieces, played out with a distinct lack of energy. - The Age (Australia)
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| Posted Feb 18, 2016
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How to Be Single (2016) |
There are quite a few elements to appreciate in this mixed-up patchwork. - The Age (Australia)
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| Posted Feb 18, 2016
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Risen (2016) |
When it becomes the story of Clavius' gradual conversion from sceptic to believer, it seems to lose its nerve. It is earnest and surprisingly restrained. - The Age (Australia)
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| Posted Feb 18, 2016
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Room (2015) |
Room is a powerful imagining of an extraordinary situation, but it's also a poignant evocation of the ordinary, everyday intensity and complexity of the bond between mother and child. - The Age (Australia)
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| Posted Feb 03, 2016
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Goosebumps (2015) |
As the monsters are set free, and special effects mayhem starts to pile up, Goosebumps becomes an undifferentiated thrill ride, a slightly exhausting roll call that includes deadly garden gnomes, a teen werewolf, a giant mantis and a lot of slime. - The Age (Australia)
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| Posted Jan 22, 2016
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Cemetery of Splendor (2015) |
It is characteristically slow and measured, combining a profound sense of melancholy with a light touch, blurring the boundaries between waking and sleeping, dream and memory, past and present in the most relaxed, quotidian way. - The Age (Australia)
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| Posted Jan 22, 2016
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The 5th Wave (2016) |
There are some clunky or abruptly compressed revelations, and Evan's flashback story is dispatched far too quickly. Yet the situation that develops... is an intriguing one. - The Age (Australia)
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| Posted Jan 20, 2016
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Point Break (2015) |
Point Break soon becomes a mixture of spectacle and discomfort, with striking scenery, eye-catching stunts and awkward performances. - The Age (Australia)
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| Posted Jan 01, 2016
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Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip (2015) |
There are a few cameos... there's product placement galore, a few bearable gags, a few songs and not much else. It's exactly what an Alvin and the Chipmunks movie aims to deliver, in other words. - The Age (Australia)
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| Posted Dec 23, 2015
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Suffragette (2015) |
It's a graceful, serious-minded period piece that never quite comes to life, although it tells its story clearly and is at pains to place a sympathetic figure at its centre. - The Age (Australia)
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| Posted Dec 22, 2015
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Daddy's Home (2015) |
An oddly limited film. - The Age (Australia)
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| Posted Dec 22, 2015
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The End of the Tour (2015) |
Despite the depiction of rivalry and discomfort, its tone is not harsh; there's something restrained and carefully poignant about the film and the rueful reverence it displays for its central figure. - The Age (Australia)
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| Posted Dec 09, 2015
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Love the Coopers (2015) |
One Last Christmas. It's like One Last Job in a heist movie -- an enterprise embarked on with the best of intentions, but bound to go badly. - The Age (Australia)
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| Posted Dec 01, 2015
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Creed (2015) |
Creed moves the Rocky franchise into the present and gives it a future; Coogler makes the story his own, even as he pays respect to what has gone before. - The Age (Australia)
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| Posted Dec 01, 2015
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Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005) |
It soon becomes obvious that there is no avoiding the burden of predictability: there is nothing, essentially, in the film's story that we don't know already. - The Age (Australia)
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| Posted Nov 16, 2015
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Putuparri and the Rainmakers (2015) |
Nicole Ma's rich, engrossing and rewarding documentary gives us a sense of time that operates on many levels. - The Age (Australia)
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| Posted Nov 09, 2015
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5 to 7 (2014) |
The fairytale aura is nourished by outdated yet timeless notions of Frenchness and Americanness, grand romantic fantasies in themselves. - The Age (Australia)
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| Posted Nov 05, 2015
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Freeheld (2015) |
There is an important and moving story at its heart, and strong central performances from Moore, Page and Shannon, but they're undermined, in the final stages, by a strange kind of rote efficiency in the way it is told. - The Age (Australia)
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| Posted Nov 04, 2015
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Only the Dead (2015) |
There are occasions when more information or sustained introspection feels necessary, but there also times when images speak for themselves. - The Age (Australia)
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| Posted Oct 30, 2015
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A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (2014) |
[A] singular, engrossing collection of vignettes with a cumulative, disconcerting power. - The Age (Australia)
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| Posted Oct 29, 2015
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