jason de rosso movie reviews

• Festival Reports
• Book Reviews
• Great Directors
• Great Actors
• Special Dossiers
• Past Issues
• Support us on Patreon

Subscribe to Senses of Cinema to receive news of our latest cinema journal. Enter your email address below:

• Thank you to our Patrons
• Style Guide
• Advertisers
• Call for Contributions

Author Jason Di Rosso

Jason di rosso.

Jason Di Rosso is a film critic at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and host of the weekly radio show The Final Cut . He is currently completing a Doctorate of Creative Arts in the School of Communication, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences at the University of Technology, Sydney.

The Chamber Films of Matías Piñeiro: Complexity and Intertextuality in Micro-Budget Filmmaking

Letterboxd — Your life in film

Forgotten username or password ?

• Start a new list…
• Add all films to a list…
• Add all films to watchlist

Add to your films…

Press Tab to complete, Enter to create

A moderator has locked this field.

Add to lists

Where to watch

The hidden spring.

2023 Directed by Jason Di Rosso

Divided by 4000 kilometres, a son and his dying father connect in this profoundly intimate documentary debut.

Director Director

Jason Di Rosso

Producer Producer

Writer writer, editor editor, cinematography cinematography.

Documentary

Releases by Date

08 aug 2023, releases by country.

• Premiere Melbourne International Film Festival

51 mins   More at TMDb Report this page

Popular reviews

Review by Felix Hubble ★★★★

Based Chad Di Rosso delivers a cinematic knock out!!

(fr... extremely solid, interesting and intimate film - fantastic in a cinema, and love Dimitri Zaunder's grade; v excellent to see someone local grapple with global essay cinema, but especially the work of two of our GOATs, Jeni Thornley and Margot Nash (name dropped by Di Rosso in his intro tonight and also screening very accomplished new works at MIFF - had a couple of flashbacks to The Silences hanging out watching this, with some very excellent and worthwhile digressions), making something that's also very much his own thing, that I found particularly strong when grappling with the loss of aspects of cultural identity. Unironically a banger and very funny that the sole musical work featured in the film - to great effect at its top and tail - is just something found online that worked.)

Review by Shea

Di Rosso conjures up so much from so little - evocations of distance and absence thru what the camera rests on and what it doesn’t. A film that feels as though it is searching for itself, slowly piecing together a bigger picture one chance moment at a time. The notion of architecture as memory is fascinating and I found the suggestion that a house is like a camera (a quote from whom I can't recall) to be deeply resonant with what Di Rosso attempts here in the humble domestic set-ups. Also a surprising focus on planes, trains and automobiles and the landscapes they traverse.

Honestly it's a privilege just to see something this intimate in a theatre. Nothing but good and generous thoughts from Jason Di Rosso after the screening, made all the more special by his various musings to me on Adelaide later throughout the day.

Review by Daniel

Always going to be up for this kind of handmade semi-experimental work but even accounting for that pre-existing predilection I think this is something really special. Di Rosso strikes a perfect balance between formal looseness and rigour, allowing conscious connections and unconscious feeling to flow through the film with equal weight. Geography as emotion (and vice versa) is one of my favourite motifs in art and The Hidden Spring is as potent an example I've seen recently. The distances - Sydney and Perth, word and image, thought and expression, father and son - are so much larger than the things they connect and disconnect that they almost start to mean more than the things themselves. Finding peace in those empty spaces is probably impossible, life itself.

Review by Ashlea💧🦎🐜 ★★★★

Hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have

With my father over in WA, this film was bound to stir emotions in me, and it did. I liked Jason Di Rosso's stylistic choices; I hope he can trust his artistic sensibility moving forward (he was hopeful his choice of music resonated in the Q & A). The score was particularly well suited to the subject. It's an odd feeling when your father is complicated and hard to break through yet still adored by you. Yes, you could feel the distance between the two, but also the underlying, unspoken bond of love. Jason narrated the film and briefly touched on fear when it comes to sick loved ones;…

Review by Flynn Boffo ★★★★

I really connected to this one, in ways I never thought I would.

Review by C L ★★

Crafting an artsy documentary that delves into the life of a seemingly distant and now deceased father, while omitting any tangible interactions with the said father, carries distinct consequences. The resultant documentary assumes the form of a unilateral narrative, founded predominantly on the director's abundant verbal commentary and meticulously selected visual elements. While proponents might contend that the documentary serves as an intimate portrayal of the director's personal perspective regarding his departed father, I am inclined to perceive the documentary's structural approach as one that inadvertently marginalizes the father's presence. Throughout the documentary, the father remains an elusive entity, his portrayal invariably shaped by the director's subjective narrations that mirror his own emotions and sentiments toward his progenitor. The conspicuous…

Select your preferred poster

Film in Revolt

A platform for youth to explore film

Interview with Jason Di Rosso / The Hidden Spring

by Flynn Boffo

Radio National’s ‘The Screen Show’ and its host, Jason Di Rosso was my introduction to film criticism. With his weekly show, my eyes were opened to the wider world of international cinema. Consequently, Jason played an important role in the path that has led me to this moment where you are reading my writing. Upon discovering that he was releasing a film of his own this year, I felt compelled to reach out.

The Hidden Spring is an essay film, exploring both the physical and spiritual distance between a terminally ill father and his son. It is the distance itself that Di Rosso candidly frames, reflecting on his father in Perth as he observes life changes around him in Sydney.

One thing that struck me about The Hidden Spring was its sense of reflection, filmed mostly within Jason’s inner west home. The familiar sounds of planes and trains are never far away, this motif of transport and the tracks connecting destinations are deeply embedded into Jason’s immigrant background.

Flynn Boffo: I am interested in learning more about the moment when you felt motivated to actually pick up a camera and start filming this.

Jason Di Rosso: It was just so intuitive, I was experiencing this initial shock and feeling of grief, anticipating my father’s decline. I was also doing a research doctorate at UTS, part of which was going to be some kind of film, and I had to in some way trust intuition and see what was going to emerge.

So that’s how the film really emerged. I started to get a sense that there’s a potential language here that will work for a film dealing with these themes, like the motif of looking out the window, but also like the diaristic kind of shots of the dinner table. It just sort of emerged in that way, but it was very ad hoc.

FB: I really connected with the idea of making art in a reaction, to grief, in reaction to something happening in your life that’s out of your control. I found a lot of comfort in the idea that your world might be changing rapidly, but the camera’s in your hands and you’re framing it right now.

I found that really interesting, as a film critic and a filmmaker, how you’ve used cinema to make sense of your world during this time.

JDR: Yes, there’s a therapeutic aspect to making this film and also picking up a camera, shooting images, and recording sound. In the digital age, where cameras come with microphones, you can’t help but think of images in connection with sound. There’s such a drama to the sound of living on a railway. And that’s both the trains going past, but also the extraordinary sounds of the maintenance crews at night, that stuff sounds crazy. It’s almost science fiction. The sounds are made with metal under tension.

JDR: That’s true too. I think there’s a sense of transience in the film, a sense of people in motion. There’s a tension within the film for people to reflect on, deep in the film, a sense of uprootedness within my family history that in some way I’m still part of because I’ve left Perth.

There’s been no sort of arriving at the destination for me in a sense. The film was at least trying to suggest that there’s still that momentum from almost three generations ago that began with my great-grandparents, which I don’t mention in the film.

These are things that emerge almost after you’ve made the film, there’s this theme of work and labor, and I think there’s a tension there between the labor of maintaining things and upkeep, which goes into the idea of dwelling that people like Heidegger talk about, where to dwell in a place is to meaningfully engage with it, cultivate it, and maintain it in some way.

So the labor outside of the workers on the railway is that kind of labor.  I was drawn to that, apart from the fact that visually I thought it was interesting, they also seem to come from another realm.

During COVID, all the hidden labor was suddenly noticeable and I thought that sort of labor of maintenance was a really important theme in my film. And, it’s in a dialogue with another kind of labor which isn’t about maintaining. It’s about breaking ground and building the first thing somewhere. And it’s a disruptive, penetrating sort of labor.

FB: I was quite surprised that you didn’t start it during the lockdown. Watching the film even from the first shots, you beautifully photographed the space and it was cool seeing you take this moment to really reflect on your environment as many of us were later forced to during the lockdown.

JDR: Yeah. It’s funny because the lockdown ended up being a period of collective grieving. When COVID happened, we left the world behind and we weren’t really sure if we were going to get back to that world at all.

All of that was happening, so there is a double grief in the film in that sense. It just so happened that the expression of the grief that I was sort of feeling with my dad being ill was already evoking that reflection and it was evoking a kind of visual language that was locked down but it was very inspired by a film, I mean there are a few films that based their visual language around the motif of looking out windows.

But, one of the most influential on me was Ackermann’s Là-bas ( Down There ), a film she made when she was teaching at university in Tel Aviv. Almost exclusively of shots looking out the window of the rental apartment she had in Tel Aviv at her neighbor’s with a room and a voiceover.

FB: It’s interesting you mention that, because for me it feels very evocative of the films of Agnes Varda, particularly L’opéra-mouffe ( Diary of a Pregnant Woman ) which she made when she was pregnant and is told from her perspective looking down at the markets from her window.

JDR: I was very interested in this notion of just looking out at the world. You’re never really sure until you make the film, what you’ve got. But I thought out the window I had a few layers that were going to be aesthetically interesting enough to photograph and to use as a motif again and again, a photographic motif.

FB: To see all of these symbols that you were surrounded with,  you did a really great job at finding the connections to your father. You’ve got the train tracks, you’ve got the fact that your house is being renovated during this time. It was interesting, almost like you were taking off the shell of your house. You find yourself in this grief and your kitchen is being torn down.

JDR: There is this notion of the layers of history that I was reflecting on with my father and then my family more generally, and then these literal layers that are being ripped off the wall, you know, walls in my house. And I also thought there’s something, given that it’s a film about someone who you don’t really see and a situation that’s central but you don’t really see, which is an illness and its treatments and all of that.

I was just trying to find some kind of language that on a symbolic level, or even just the subconscious emotional level, could, speak to that and articulate those feelings and that situation.

JDR: The film does have quite a reticence about it though. There aren’t these full frontal shots of me or my family or close-ups. People are often shot in shadows and so forth.That renders everything less, it takes things out of realism a bit and elevates them to a kind of archetypal level.

But also with this film, if I put too much detail in, it would almost become a little bit more banal. I wanted things to be sometimes just reduced to figures, like my mother for example.

FB: I see that in the scene where she is directing you.

JDR: Yes. Off camera.

There’s a sort of filmmaker that’s very much about full disclosure and throwing the audience into a kind of self-interrogation. In this film, I was always conscious of playing with the tension between that approach and something that kept a distance.

FB: Interesting that you say it like that, you’ve mentioned that Ackerman film where a lot of it is looking out windows, and for me the impression I got is that it felt like it was made from the first person looking out at their environment.

JDR: The subjectivity was really important as well and in that because it is an essay film. The essay was a form of self-expression, which was more about documenting your attempt to describe the world and your relationship to it, rather than definitively writing about how the world is.

That idea was attractive to me because of the fragmentary nature of the shooting of the film, and also because of the limitations on doing something realistic. I wasn’t in Perth, I wasn’t going to do a fly-on-the-wall thing about my dad being sick, and neither would I really, because it’s not my sensibility, it’s too far away.

The essay form freed me up to express myself in fragments cinematically and to take detours into different registers, registers that were dreamlike and even to be a little meta and talk about the making of the film itself and films I perhaps thought of making but didn’t make.

The film was always going to be in motion and never settled in what it was and that resonated really well with the themes of migration, uprootedness, identity, and being Australian that I wanted to explore in the film.

FB: I felt a strong sense of place in this film, it’s cool to see another entry into that small canon of Inner West-based cinema.

JDR: Often I feel like there’s not a love of place in Australian films, oddly. There’s this sort of disconnect from place, which people will say has its root in non-Indigenous filmmakers not feeling comfortable here. That’s one way of describing it, and it’s an important critique, but whatever the case, I don’t believe that’s the only way to look at it.

I love the places I live in, and there are things I really love about them, and that’s kind of what I wanted to imbue my film with.

FB: Do you think Australian cinema is scared to embrace place as part of the film? It’s almost like they make a film in spite of the place.

JDR: Australian cinema, growing up, wasn’t something I associated with a love of place. Not like American cinema, which is filled with the love of everything from tenement blocks, in New York, to great ancient forests, to the Mojave Desert.

The place is so central in American cinema, and there’s a love of it, just in the way It’s photographed even if there are criticisms of who was there before and the power dynamics in the place. That’s still there, but there’s also just a love for the physicality of being in America.

That’s what I wanted my film to be like. I wanted to make this film that had an aesthetic beauty to it that just sort of luxuriated in a certain hour of the day as the light fades, the way that trains pass by my house, the desert out of the airplane window, and, just the spaces in the film, the architectural spaces.

FB: Entirely, I can really see that and it was really cool to be able to identify that spot in Newtown, that road along the train line.

JDR: I like that too. I love watching films and going, oh, okay, I know where that is, or I’ve been there and to see it presented through a lens, and a filmmaker’s eye just sort of does something different to it.

It’s like seeing a painting of a street, and you revisit the street. And you go, wow. It’s kind of not immortalized, but it’s kind of immortalized, for want of a better word, in the art.

I really like that loving connection because you usually don’t put a lens on something you hate. Usually, there’s something in it. Even if you don’t think it’s beautiful, what you like is maybe the beauty of the tension you see within it. I just wanted the film to be a bit of an embrace.

The Hidden Spring is playing at the Adelaide Film Festival this weekend.

Tickets are available here: https://adelaidefilmfestival.org/event/the-hidden-spring/

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Trouble logging in?

By continuing, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes.

Email not verified

Let's keep in touch.

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

• Upcoming Movies and TV shows
• Trivia & Rotten Tomatoes Podcast
• Media News + More

By clicking "Sign Me Up," you are agreeing to receive occasional emails and communications from Fandango Media (Fandango, Vudu, and Rotten Tomatoes) and consenting to Fandango's Privacy Policy and Terms and Policies . Please allow 10 business days for your account to reflect your preferences.

OK, got it!

Movies / TV

No results found.

• What's the Tomatometer®?
• Login/signup

Movies in theaters

• Opening this week
• Top box office
• Coming soon to theaters
• Certified fresh movies

Movies at home

• Netflix streaming
• Prime Video
• Most popular streaming movies
• What to Watch New

Certified fresh picks

• Love Lies Bleeding Link to Love Lies Bleeding
• Problemista Link to Problemista
• Late Night with the Devil Link to Late Night with the Devil

New TV Tonight

• Mary & George: Season 1
• Star Trek: Discovery: Season 5
• Sugar: Season 1
• American Horror Story: Season 12
• Parish: Season 1
• Ripley: Season 1
• Loot: Season 2
• Lopez vs Lopez: Season 2
• The Magic Prank Show With Justin Willman: Season 1

Most Popular TV on RT

• 3 Body Problem: Season 1
• A Gentleman in Moscow: Season 1
• Shōgun: Season 1
• We Were the Lucky Ones: Season 1
• The Gentlemen: Season 1
• Palm Royale: Season 1
• Manhunt: Season 1
• X-Men '97: Season 1
• Best TV Shows
• Most Popular TV
• TV & Streaming News

Certified fresh pick

• We Were the Lucky Ones Link to We Were the Lucky Ones
• All-Time Lists
• Binge Guide
• Comics on TV
• Five Favorite Films
• Video Interviews
• Weekend Box Office
• Weekly Ketchup
• What to Watch

Pedro Pascal Movies and Series Ranked by Tomatometer

Dwayne Johnson Movies Ranked by Tomatometer

What to Watch: In Theaters and On Streaming

Awards Tour

TV Premiere Dates 2024

Renewed and Cancelled TV Shows 2024

• Trending on RT
• Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire
• Play Movie Trivia

Jason Di Rosso

Highest Rated: Not Available

Lowest Rated: Not Available

Birthday: Not Available

Birthplace: Not Available

Filmography

Jason Di Rosso

Jason Di Rosso is ABC RN’s film critic, host of the weekly film show The Final Cut and a reviewer across a range of RN programs.

Before becoming RN’s chief film specialist, Jason spent six years as associate producer and reviewer on Movietime , a weekly show hosted by Julie Rigg. Outside the ABC, his writing on film and popular culture has appeared in GQ magazine and the  Australian .

Jason’s background in film goes back to the 1990s, when he completed a degree in communications at Perth’s Curtin University. His first job was behind the camera as a production runner, driving actors in a mini-van for a short-lived TV series called  Sweat . It sank without a trace, though it helped launch the career of a young WA actor called Heath Ledger.

The next few years saw Jason slowly drift from the film to radio, and he made features for RN’s Social History Unit,  360 documentaries  and  The Comfort Zone . Since returning to film by way of radio, he has interviewed some of cinema’s most important talents, from Isabelle Huppert to Mike Leigh.

Past Events

New News by the Centre for Advancing Journalism

Cultural Cringe: The Role of the Arts Critic in Australia

Anders Furze, Rebecca Harkins-Cross, Jonathan Green, Ramona Koval, Jason Di Rosso

The Wheeler Centre acknowledges the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation as the Traditional Owners of the land on which the Centre stands. We acknowledge and pay our respects to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and their Elders, past and present, as the custodians of the world’s oldest continuous living culture.

Stay up to date with our upcoming events and special announcements by subscribing to The Wheeler Centre's mailing list.

Join or Sign In

Sign in to customize your TV listings

By joining TV Guide, you agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy .

• TV Listings

Jason Di Rosso

‘Riceboy Sleeps’ Review: A Graceful, Moving Immigrant Drama Lit by a Mother’s Love

Writer-director Anthony Shim's delicate, precise approach makes a familiar story of immigrant exile glimmer with insight and feeling.

By Jessica Kiang

Jessica Kiang

• ‘All the Long Nights’ Review: Two Chipped Souls Fall in Like with Each Other in a Tender Story of Redemptive Connection 1 month ago
• ‘Through the Graves the Wind is Blowing’ Review: Travis Wilkerson’s Playful, Political Essay Set in Split, Croatia 1 month ago
• ‘All Shall Be Well’ Review: A Found Family is Lost in a Tender But Tentative, Queer-Themed Grief Drama 1 month ago

There’s a drifting, dreamed quality to Shim’s movie, which has been quietly collecting plaudits since its premiere in Toronto (where it won the Platform Prize). It’s a mood established right from the storybook beginning, when, over hazy sea- and mountain-scapes, a Korean voiceover tells of an orphan, abandoned as a baby at a temple, who grew into a strong young woman, who fell in love with a rice-farmer’s son. They had a few happy years before his mental health declined and he committed suicide. Alone, unmarried with a newborn, the woman left the judgments and regrets of the past in Korea, and moved to suburban Canada, a milieu introduced to us in a low, thrilling, gliding shot of her son, Dong-hyun (Dohyun Noel Hwang), as a little boy, running across a green field, a satchel on his back. It is 1990, and it is Dong-hyun’s first day of school.

It’s only the first of the many unforced, imperfect echoes that happen across the film’s expansive runtime, as though Shim is finding, from this far-off perspective, synchronicities that the characters themselves cannot be aware of. These resonances live, like so much of the film’s artfulness, in the graceful movement and constant, subtle reframing of Christopher Lew’s exemplary photography, which avoids overt manipulation and excessive cutting and instead allows conversations to play out in single, wide frames, and finds close-ups on the fly, as though the camera, too, were rootless. 

After a clever ellipsis that happens between Dong-hyun as a kid futzing with his big owl-eye glasses and Dong-hyun (now Ethan Hwang) as a surly bleach-blond teenager putting in his blue contacts, the mother/son echoes become all the more poignant for the distance that has sprung up between them. While So-young, having just received the worst of all possible news, sways drunkenly in the embrace of her new Canadian-Korean beau (played by Shim himself), Dong-hyun staggers home bleeding after a fight at a party, but the way they are framed makes it all one mood. Time and again, this is how Shim gets around the dramatic difficulty of communicating the connection between such inherently undemonstrative, reserved characters. The camera, and Andrew Yong Hoon Lee’s minimal but gradually swelling score, express the emotions that mother and son hold so deliberately in check. 

The beats of the immigrant drama — the new friendships and small triumphs of assimilation, as well as the humiliations and miscommunication of cultural otherness — are all here. So-young builds a sturdy life for herself and her son, that has all they could need, except perhaps an acknowledgement of where they came from. So when, in the final third, the vista changes as So-young and Dong-hyun go on a visit to Korea, it’s a resolve that is hardly unexpected but satisfies nonetheless, as though the film were finally taking a deep, freeing breath. “Riceboy Sleeps” is sedate and respectful and hardly reinvents the immigrant drama wheel. But in its soulful, expertly crafted simplicity it does ring with the sincerest and most moving of sentiments that a grown-up child could express to a beloved parent: I remember it all, and thank you.

Reviewed online, Paris. May 4, 2023. In Toronto Film Festival. Running time: 117 MIN. 

• Production: (Canada) A Screen Media, Redbox Entertainment, Sphere Films presentation of a Lonesome Heroes production, in association with Kind Stranger Production and A Lasting Dose Productions. Producers: Anthony Shim, Rebecca Steele, Bryan Demore. Co-producer: Andrea Agur. Executive Producers: Matt Kerr, Charlie Kerr, Giuliana Bertuzzi. 
• Crew: Director, writer: Anthony Shim. Camera:Christopher Lew. Editor: Anthony Shim. Music: Andrew Yong Hoon Lee.
• With: Choi Seung-yoon, Ethan Hwang, Dohyun Noel Hwang, Anthony Shim, Hunter Dillon, Jerina Son, Kang in Sung, Choi Jongryul, Lee Yong-nyeo, Emily Le. (English, Korean dialogue.)

More From Our Brands

Filmmaker john ridley, abc, and disney named as defendants in discrimination lawsuit, george lucas is the world’s richest celebrity billionaire: report, voters reject sales tax extension for chiefs and royals stadiums, the best loofahs and body scrubbers, according to dermatologists, ratings: the rookie and will trent tick up, fbi tops tuesday, verify it's you, please log in.

Advertisement

Supported by

‘Riceboy Sleeps’ Review: Motherhood and Boyhood in a New Home

This intimate drama gives a moving, if imperfect, look at a Korean immigrant mother’s struggle to raise her son in 1990s Canada.

• Share full article

By Brandon Yu

A few minutes into “Riceboy Sleeps,” an imperfect but ultimately moving drama written and directed by Anthony Shim, the film falls into that dreaded trope of immigrant stories: the smelly lunchbox moment. The experience comes for young Dong-hyun (Dohyun Noel Hwang) when he opens the Korean meal his mom packed him and is taunted by elementary school classmates.

Later, he asks his single mother, So-young (Choi Seung-yoon), who emigrated from Korea to Canada with Dong-hyun after the father died by suicide, to pack him a less conspicuous lunch. It’s one of a few ways that Shim’s film, which eventually flashes forward to track So-young’s struggle to raise and connect with her son during his teenage years (when he is played by Ethan Hwang), emphasizes in an almost perfunctory way the racism and hardship the pair faces in a new country in the ‘90s.

Even while it’s hampered by these rough edges, the movie is terrifically scored and beautifully shot. (Though the cinematographer Christopher Lew’s astute camerawork is too often left to do heavy emotional lifting that the writing can’t.) Most of all, the film is elevated by Choi, who naturally communicates the strength, tenderness and pain of So-young’s life.

It’s not until the spectacular third act of the film, when mother and son travel to Korea, that everything clicks more fully into place, as Shim lets the landscape and his actors take over. The camera finally sits still, capturing small moments of connection that further contour unspeakable wounds — giving a window into a past life that So-young could never fully escape.

Riceboy Sleeps Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. Rent or buy on most major platforms.

Explore More in TV and Movies

Not sure what to watch next we can help..

“X-Men ’97,” a revival on Disney+ that picks up where the ’90s animated series left off, has faced questions after the firing of its showrunner  ahead of the premiere.

“3 Body Problem,” a science fiction epic from the creators of “Game of Thrones,” has arrived on Netflix. We spoke with them about their latest project .

For the past two decades, female presidential candidates on TV have been made in Hillary Clinton’s image. With “The Girls on the Bus,” that’s beginning to change .

“Freaknik,” a new Hulu documentary, delves into the rowdy ’80s and ’90s-era spring festival  that drew hundreds of thousands of Black college students to Atlanta.

If you are overwhelmed by the endless options, don’t despair — we put together the best offerings   on Netflix , Max , Disney+ , Amazon Prime  and Hulu  to make choosing your next binge a little easier.

Sign up for our Watching newsletter  to get recommendations on the best films and TV shows to stream and watch, delivered to your inbox.

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

EO review – an innocent donkey leads the way in surreal Bresson-inspired ride

Life is seen through the eyes of a put-upon beast of burden in this beautifully photographed homage to Au Hasard Balthazar by the veteran Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski

J erzy Skolimowski is the celebrated veteran director who first came to Cannes in 1972 with King, Queen, Knave starring Gina Lollobrigida and David Niven; now he has returned with a winter’s tale of a film, inspired by Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar from 1966. I’m not sure this is my favourite Skolimowski film, but it is engaging in many ways: beautifully photographed, sentimental and surreal in equal measure; and also stubborn – as stubborn as its hero – in its symbolism and stark pessimism.

Like Bresson, Skolimowski makes his lead a donkey, the beast that carried the Virgin Mary to Bethlehem and Jesus into Jerusalem. Skolimowski calls his animal “EO” – after its braying “eee-ohhh” sound. The place is present-day Poland, but the setting could almost be Europe at any time in the last few centuries. EO is being worked in a circus act but has to be let go because of legislation about using animals in this way. He winds up in a donkey sanctuary from which he is freed, then captured in the streets by a council worker for whose football team EO becomes a mascot. But then he is beaten by hooligans supporting the opposing team, captured by a gang trading in illicit horse- and donkey-meat, and finally rescued by a troubled young aristocrat whose haughty and devout mama (a tasty cameo for Isabelle Huppert) disapproves of her son’s louche gambling ways.

And all the time, EO observes and witnesses, his innate humility and dignity rising above crass human vanity and greed. Or, is that what is happening? The film invites us to ask if it is meaningful to attribute these characteristics to EO. He does not participate in any side of our moralising human comedy. The donkey maintains his innocence, but what choice does he have in that matter? How would a donkey without innocence behave? He is, after all, simply a beast of burden. His point of view and his consciousness are mysteries. But perhaps an alien life form, as far above humans as we are above donkeys, would regard us in the same way. And EO’s simple presence on screen is uncanny – this animal is not acting; it is being itself. But, then, perhaps we humans are deluding ourselves when we think that we can transform ourselves by the art of acting, or any other art.

Skolimowski asks us to think about all this: and for all that there is something a little sugary in the movie, it is poignant and distinctive.

• World cinema
• Drama films
• Cannes 2022
• Cannes film festival

Most viewed

• Cast & crew
• User reviews

Wicked Little Letters

When people in Littlehampton--including conservative local Edith--begin to receive letters full of hilarious profanities, rowdy Irish migrant Rose is charged with the crime. Suspecting that ... Read all When people in Littlehampton--including conservative local Edith--begin to receive letters full of hilarious profanities, rowdy Irish migrant Rose is charged with the crime. Suspecting that something is amiss, the town's women investigate. When people in Littlehampton--including conservative local Edith--begin to receive letters full of hilarious profanities, rowdy Irish migrant Rose is charged with the crime. Suspecting that something is amiss, the town's women investigate.

• Thea Sharrock
• Jonny Sweet
• Olivia Colman
• Jessie Buckley
• Timothy Spall
• 68 User reviews
• 68 Critic reviews
• 54 Metascore

• Rose Gooding

• Edward Swan

• Mr. Treading

• Nancy Gooding

• Constable Papperwick

• Victoria Swan

• Police Officer Gladys Moss

• Father Ambrose

• Chief Constable Spedding

• Jury Foreman
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

More like this

Did you know

• Trivia Although the actual events occurred in Littlehampton, the filming did not take place there. Instead nearby Arundel and Worthing were used. Arundel was used for town and street events. All the seaside filming was carried out in Worthing.
• Goofs There are references to Rose's daughter been taken off her by the CPS; a modern organisation that begun in the 1980s.

[to her daughter, looking at the words Die Slut on her door]

Rose Gooding : It's German.

• Connections Referenced in Amanda the Jedi Show: I ALMOST Walked Out | The Best and Worst of TIFF 2023 (2023)

User reviews 68

• Maverick1962
• Feb 29, 2024
• How long is Wicked Little Letters? Powered by Alexa
• April 5, 2024 (United States)
• United Kingdom
• Pequeñas cartas indiscretas
• Arundel, West Sussex, England, UK
• Blueprint Pictures
• People Person Pictures
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• Mar 31, 2024
• $12,824,275

Technical specs

• Runtime 1 hour 40 minutes
• Dolby Digital

Related news

Contribute to this page.

• See more gaps
• Learn more about contributing

More to explore

Recently viewed

Program: RN Breakfast

'One Fine Morning', 'The Plains' and 'The New Boy' - Film with Jason Di Rosso

• X (formerly Twitter)

Life gets very complicated in a new French drama out this week called One Fine Morning, plus   acclaimed Australian film The Plains  that did the festival circuit has now popped up online.

And Warwick Thornton's new film  The New Boy  starring Cate Blanchett, Deborah Mailman and newcomer Aswan Reid premieres at the Sydney Film Festival.

Guest:  Jason Di Rosso, host of RN's The Screen Show

RN Breakfast, 8th June 2023

In this episode

You Am I performs The Who's concept album 'Tommy'

CEDA: dynamism key to productivity, profits and satisfaction

Join the conversation

Download the ABC listen app to text and call your favourite live radio