Film Shapes

Roly and I went to Morley's Event cinema a week or so back to check out Jordan Peele's  Us , his follow-up to  Get Out . Now  Get Out  was a pretty fine flick but I reckon Peele goes one better here.  Us  is, at different times, a home invasion thriller, a Cronenbergian body-horror, a black comedy, a pseudo-zombie film, a social commentary/political satire on class structures and even at a pinch, a sci-fi/fantasy. So it really gives you a chance to choose how you want to view it. The film starts out showing us a moment from 1986 where a young girl and her parents are at a fair in Santa Cruz, California. Girl gets lost in a house of mirrors on the beach and has a bit of a freak-out. Flip forward to present day and a family of four visit the same beach. Things start getting creepy right about here. And throughout this set-up, Peele layers in little clues that foreshadow events to come. I won't give away much more - have a listen to the pod below for the ...

I saw The Sisters Brothers a couple of weeks back at the Paradiso as part of the French Film Festival . This is the first English language film by Jacques Audiard and only his eighth film as director. Cards on the table time - this geezer is one of my favourite active directors (along with Denis Villeneuve). A Prophet , The Beat That My Heart Skipped and Rust and Bone are among the best films made in the past 20 years. So by these measuring sticks, The Sisters Brothers comes up short, but not by too much. The film charts a typical Western cinema journey. Character A has something or has done something and Character B has to hunt him down. The Quest type of plot as outlined by Christopher Booker and repeated ad nauseam throughout film (and story) history. Here though, it coalesces quite nicely with another of Bookers plots, the Voyage and Return. Character A, in this case, is Riz Ahmed's chemist Hermann Warm (and later, Jake Gyllenhaal's John Morris). Character B here ...