Film Shapes

The 21st film of the MCU and the first to cast a female lead, Captain Marvel also acts as a primer for the big event to come, Avengers Endgame (as seen in the mid-credits sting). I quite liked the film as a stand-alone prequel to most of the wider universe and the introduction of the Skrull-Kree war scenario opened things up a bit. I reckon I prefer the space MCU to the more Earth bound fare. Much has been made of Captain Marvel's feminist angle but rather than dive into gender politics, I, maybe naively, saw this as a well made superhero film first and a kick in the bollocks to the neanderthals second. Win-win. Behind the camera, there's been a concerted effort to have women in important roles - Anna Boden as co-writer and director with Ryan Fleck, all of the other credited writers, music by Pinar Toprak, Debbie Berman as co-editor, and so on. In front of the camera, Brie Larson rips it up as tough, smart-arse fighter pilot Carol Danvers. Her best mate is another pilot,...

Once more to the Luna in Leederville to see The Guilty , a Danish real-time thriller set in a police  emergency dispatch office. It's directed by first-timer, Gustav Moller and stars Jacob Cedergren and.....well, he's pretty much it, aside from a handful of voices over the phone. This may sound a bit boxed-in, a bit restricted, but that's the point of the film. It plays on the audience's helplessness by NOT showing us anything except Cedergren's character, Asger's creeping sense of futility. Sensibly, there's more at play than just an emergency and the problems of Asger himself run somewhat parallel to the abduction that pivots the film. Slices of information are fed to the viewer at intervals regarding what has happened (and what is about to happen) to Asger and this leaves us to build the flanking narratives as they occur. Setting this film in a couple of rooms makes it tricky to show the 'action' but Moller has dealt with this by regular ...