Film Shapes

Here's a gripping, rage-inducing film about a UN translator during the Bosnian War in 1995. It starts with Aida (played by Jasna Djuricic) sitting on a couch, looking at three men. Nothing is said, and we don't find out who they are until they're shown evacuating their home in Srebrenica. Before this, the die is cast with a great scene of the mayor of the city (Ermin Bravo) pleading with the UN representative, Colonel Karremans (Johan Heldenbergh) to protect his citizens. Aida translates the Colonel as he promises air strikes on Bosnian-Serb posts if they continue their attacks.  The resulting horror-farce has been well documented historically but this film puts a human face to the Srebrenica massacre. The director, Jasmila Zbanic, is from Sarajevo and grew up amidst the Balkan splintering, post-Tito. She keeps a very steady hand on the rudder, where it might be forgiven were she to go all revenge-berko. The docu-drama style keeps the tension levels peaking, and the frustra...

Ridley Scott, who was 84 in November this year, will give absolutely zero shits if I didn't think much of a film of his. He has over 50 feature directing credits to his name, with a couple of the best films ever made under his belt. He is a dead set master. But, in saying all that, he has the odd average delivery in his arsenal. There are wicket taking balls, definitely. and there are some half-trackers to be put away over the mid on fence. But House of Gucci is simply a dot ball. It doesn't excite but it also isn't awful. The film is a biopic of the Gucci fashion house, centring on Partizia Reggiani, the wife of the head of the company, Maurizio Gucci. They're played by Lady Gaga and Adam Driver, and this relationship is the focus of the movie. Many folk will know what happened to the main players in reality, so I'll leave all that alone. I feel the film is let down by bog standard plotting, there's nothing imaginative going on. Maybe the writers - Becky Johns...

Almost 20 years after the Matrix sequels - Reloaded and Revolutions - were released, comes the fourth film of the franchise, The Matrix Resurrections. Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss return as Neo and Trinity, but Laurence Fishburne and Hugo Weaving are noticeably absent (apparently scheduling issues for Agent Smith and no contact for Morpheus). Joining the cast in place of these guys are Yahya Abdul-Mateen 11 and Jonathan Groff, and despite the size of the shoes, they fill them well. Another casting success is Jessica Henwick as Bugs, best of the bunch here for my money. As a nerdy sidetrack, I wonder how many other actors have been in Game of Thrones , Star Wars , Marvel and now Matrix franchises.  So, I've been stalling, as you may be able to tell. This is mainly because I can't quite remember what the hell happened in the previous films, especially the aforementioned sequels. Even a quick Wikipedia plot summary didn't help much. This middle-aged amnesia shouldn...

There's nothing new in Garth Jennings' Sing 2 but that's not really the goal here. It's all about small bums on seats, and if the crowd for this preview screening is any indicator, that's what they'll get. The kink of 'peopling' the film entirely with cartoon animals, in the vein of Zootopia or Kung Fu Panda , gives the animators and writers a lot to play with. Realism is not an issue here, and fair enough. If you have someone use an apple as a false eye, narrative rigour is the least of your concerns. This film sees koala impresario, Buster Moon (Matthew McConaughey) still running his theatre show from the first Sing , but aiming higher. After a snooty talent scout leaves a showing of Alice in Wonderland, Moon gathers the cast (Scarlett Johansson, Reece Witherspoon, Taron Egerton, etc.) and heads to Redshore City to try out for media guru, Jimmy Crystal (Bobby Cannavale). Drawbacks (obviously) appear throughout but eventually, they're tasked with p...

Denis Villeneuve's long-awaited  Dune  finally arrives in Australian cinemas and it's a technical marvel.  To start with, there's the amazing production design by Patrice Vermette. A lot of the sets and machinery have been physically created, to add weight to the visual effects. A highlight is the appearance of the 'ornithopter', a clunky, dragonfly of metal, that flaps its wings to fly. The scale of the buildings and cities is mammoth, many of them made on a studio lot in Budapest (see this  Architectural Digest article  for more). The cinematography, by Melburnian, Greig Fraser, is suitably magic, in keeping with Villeneuve's stylistic requirements, For example, desert scenes have a tendency to go all wind-whipped and blurry, but even when a dragonfly enters a storm, acuity is admirably maintained.  The visuals are just a part of Villeneuve's signature language - the almost ethereal long shots across vast rooms and landscapes; the measured, even slow paci...

This art world doco, by Dane Andreas Koefoed, is a nicely constructed look at the most expensive painting in the world, Salvator Mundi , by Leonardo Da Vinci - or is it? By Da Vinci, I mean. The film begins with a preamble about how a group of fellas bought this painting at an auction in New Orleans in 2005 for $1175 USD, and the film then sets up the chapters by starting with The Art Game. This section talks about the 're-discovery', the level of overpainting that took place and questions on its provenance. Following is The Money Game, which shows how the original (2005) guys ended up selling the painting to a Swiss businessman called Yves Bouvier for $83 million, who then sold it on to a Russian oligarch for $127.5 million. Nice little earner. This part is probably the most interesting, as it also explores Bouvier's interests in freeports (the thing a plane was driven into in Tenet ), where he houses millions of dollars worth of goods that rich knobs don't want to pay...

Winner of the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, this film by prolific Romanian writer/director Radu Jude is a mixed bag of satire, realism and surrealism, and porn. Let's get that out of the way - as one character says, "It's not porn because there's no transaction taking place", but he's IN the film, we're watching, having paid the ticket price. Confused? The first few minutes of the film are taken up with a shakily-filmed, clearly amateur sex-tape - and it's extremely graphic - 'featuring' a Romanian school teacher and her husband. Said tape (or video file) somehow finds its way onto the internet and pretty soon, outrage occurs. The film is broken into three distinct chapters. The first is basically Romanian New Wave, with a meandering camera following Katia Pascariu's Emilia around Bucharest while she attempts damage control. As she makes her way to the apartment of her school Headmistress (Claudia Ieremia), she fields calls from ...

Here's this year's Palme d'Or winner and it certainly underlines Cannes' predilection for 'envelope-pushing' films. Broadly, it's a sweet story of two people who are searching for love, it's just that it's dressed up in body horror and violent killings. Don't let that put you off (unless you find long, bone hairpins in orifices beyond the pale), because this film has some pretty fine things going for it.  Director, Julia Ducournau, in only her second feature, shows a steady, confident hand. Oddly, for a film that's so provocative, she lets the audience assume details and, maybe reluctantly, accept certain events. Alexia, played by newcomer Agathe Rouselle, is involved in a car accident in her childhood, and is patched up with a titanium plate in her head. Fast forward 10 years or so and she's an exotic dancer at underground car shows (least, that's what it looks like). After one such show, a sleazy dude tries it on her, much to his de...

Edgar Wright's newest film is something of a return to his early days, but without the comic elements. Last Night in Soho , starring Thomasin McKenzie and Anya Taylor-Joy, is an astral projection murder mystery set in London, now AND in the 1960s. McKenzie's Eloise gets a bursary to study at the London College of Fashion and leaves her country town for the big smoke. She quickly gets fed up with her student digs and takes a room in a house in Goodge Place owned by Ms. Collins - Diana Rigg in her final film. The first night she dreams (travels?) herself as hopeful music star, Sandie, with Taylor-Joy's image reflecting back at her through the mirrors in the Café de Paris. So far, this is all exciting stuff, but things start to go pear-shaped for Sandie/Eloise when Matt Smith's Jack shows his true, nasty colours. Now, unlike some folk, I went along with this film. It's very clever, plot points are set up to pay off later, the story by Wright wears it's influences o...

This film by Swedish writer/director, Ronnie Sandahl is based on the book In the Shadow of San Siro, Martin Bengtsson's autobiography. Bengtsson was a footballing prodigy in the early 2000s and this is the story of how he tried to deal with going to a professional club at an early age. The club in question is Inter Milan, but it could probably have been any big club in Europe. A disclaimer of sorts in the end credits says how these clubs are improving their handling of mental health issues, and I guess we take their word for it. The film is neatly blocked into seasons, starting with his impending arrival in Italy in spring and finishing in winter. Along the way, he encounters hardships; such as envy, bullying (though not as much as I'd expected), alienation and loneliness. He also seems to be getting some things right: friendship with an American keeper in his team, and crucially, a love interest in the form of a Swedish model, Vibeke (a fantastic Frida Gustavsson). Bengtsson h...

This latest Marvel edition is on a slightly different tack, in that this crew predate the MCU by a few thousand years (leaving aside all the wunderbar time travel malarkey). A Celestial called Arishem sends the Eternals to Earth around 5000 BC to protect humanity from a breed of monsters called Deviants. The Eternals are slightly in thrall to a semblance of the Star Trek 'Prime Directive', meaning they can't interfere in disputes (or even genocides) but can, and must, stop the Deviants killing people. After wiping out these buggers around 1500 years ago, our space Highlanders are kicking their heels, waiting to be told what to do, when some shit starts to go down again.  The urge to do things differently in this phase of Marvel output is clear, perhaps due to the director Chloe Zhao, fresh off an Oscar for Nomadland . She brings a sense of balance to proceedings, and even manages to be slightly more serious, albeit with some comedic touches. She has A LOT of characters to...

The best Bond films have always been more than what we associate with 007 - the theme, the women, the gadgets, the villains, the song, etc. Which is why No Time to Die may go down as one of the best of the franchise. It stands alongside Casino Royale , On Her Majesty's Secret Service  (keep an eye out for echoes of this film) and From Russia With Love as a high water mark, mainly due to what's going on behind the veneer of glitz and cool. This fifth film of Daniel Craig's tenure wraps up a lot of the threads that began with Casino Royale and continued on and off through the subsequent films. It acts as a pretty perfect bookend to that first film. Running over the plot seems irrelevant. On paper, it's as you were with 007 films - uber-villain has nefarious plans for world domination or, at least, some sort of large-scale crime; Bond is called in to stop him; there are great action set-pieces; Bond cheeks it up with M, Moneypenny and Q; the CIA get involved; and of cour...

The preview for this year's British Film Festival was a warm, inclusive relationship drama in the Mike Leigh vein called Ali & Ava. This is directed by Clio Barnard and stars Adeel Akhtar and Claire Rushbrook as our titled pair. It's probably the simplest plot to explain - guy slowly separating from his wife, meets a woman from another circle. They get along, but will respective influences allow them to be together? That's pretty much it, but it's the kind of film that doesn't require plottage - a functionally viewed genre pic. If we can assume the likes of Barnard, Shane Meadows, Leigh, Ken Loach, and going further back to Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, etc, all worked on and off in the Kitchen Sink Realism genre, then these lines from Warren Buckland (in Teach Yourself Film Studies) seems apt: "The genre film sets up hopes and promises and brings pleasure if these hope and promises are fulfilled. In studying genre films, we first need to...

As per the film's title, this is all about the last legally sanctioned duel in France. In 1386! Wikipedia gives a more recent 1547 and Ridley Scott himself directed a film (his first) in 1977 called The Duellists , set around the early 1800s, though I take it the duels in this film were not judicial. Anyway, The Last Duel is a pretty fine film. It's neatly structured into three parts, though crucially, not three acts. Each part is named 'The Truth According to....', covering the main characters, played by Matt Damon, Adam Driver and Jodie Comer. These are Jean de Carrouges, Jacques Le Gris and Marguerite de Carrouges respectively. Add Ben Affleck's delicious portrayal (replete with quality swears) of Count Pierre d'Alençon, and you have some excellent turns; just the right side of smallgoods. The 'three truths' structuring will, of course, conjure thoughts of Rashomon (and the many examples of  films or TV shows using the Rashomon Effect), but the icing...

This is a functional, yet tension-building film set in an internment camp in France during the Second World War. A Belgian Jew, Gilles, played by Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, trades a sandwich for an old Persian book, which turns out to save his life. Just prior to being shot, he proclaims to be Persian, not Jewish. Luckily, one of the local camp commandants is looking for a Persian to teach him lessons, and thus begins the high stakes bluff. Haupsturmführer Klaus Koch, played by Lars Eidinger, wants to open a restaurant in Tehran after the war and is eager to learn the language before he gets there. His excitement is moderated slightly by his suspicion that Gilles - or Reza, as he calls himself - is a fraud. The beats are all here. After some initial hesitancy, Koch accepts the likelihood that Reza is legit, but then a word (invented by Reza) is repeated and Koch loses his shit. Reza convinces Koch that some words can have two meanings, and things return to an uneasy balance. Until the nex...

The St. Ali Italian Film Festival opens this week and one of the offerings is this old-fashioned family comedy by co-writer/director, Rolando Ravello. I say old-fashioned because it seems to have come from a vault, at least in the case of the fathers. The daughters in question are 2020s women, trying to get on with things, but their dinosaur dads hatch plans to thwart their love lives. The wives are sisters who just happen to have married these three buffoons. I'd like to think the whole thing is taking a satirical angle on this type of Italian father, though the sentimental way they're ultimately treated doesn't fill me with too much hope. The fact that it's a remake of an equally farcical looking Spanish film called It's For Your Own Good , seems to indicate it's not solely an Italian affliction, though. Marco Giallini, Vincenzo Salemme and Giuseppe Battiston play the dads, and play them very broadly at that. The mums - played by Isabella Ferrari, Claudia Pan...

This was a film that I didn't get to during its initial run last year (2020) but we needed to choose a film as part of a quiz night win so we landed on Minari . As you can guess from my lack of enthusiasm, I didn't necessarily have high hopes for this but I was impressed on the whole. It's an engaging family drama set in the 1980s about a Korean family who immigrated to California some time before, but are now trying to take a stab at country life in Arkansas.  The dad, Jacob ( The Walking Dead's Steven Yuen), is the driver of this attempt to go bush, while mum, Monica (Yeri Han), is less impressed. Throughout, their relationship appears to be entering the final innings. The kids range from hating the move, to putting up with it, to enjoying it - in no particular order. Regarding the kids, there's a lot for Alan Kim to do as David, much less for Noel Cho as Anne. She basically plays the family crutch; looking after younger bro, helping mum and dad, tolerating crazy...

Lamb is a foggy creepshow about a farming couple in the Icelandic foothills who happen upon a 'gift' from nature in the form of a child, and....well, urm, let's continue. Noomi Rapace and Hilmir Snær Guðnason star as Maria and Ingvar, the childless couple, and their routine has them miserably plodding along with the farm chores in this oddly treeless and rocky land. As dull as this might sound, it's actually a quietly fascinating start to the film, which may be down to the oft-mentioned 'otherworldly' landscape. Icelandic folk must be well pissed off with everyone going on about their topography.  The opening is a slow tracking shot through a snow-swept exterior, via a herd of tiny horses. We end up in a barn full of frightened sheep (I guess they're always frightened) with the hint of something off screen - the eyes of the sheep are a clever way to suggest this. Later, as Maria and Ingvar are birthing lambs, an 'arrival' puts their gobs well into s...

This is a Danish film from Anders Thomas Jensen, and starring the guy who has been in every one of this director's films, Mads Mikkelsen. And that's basically all you need to know (though I'll waffle some more). The presence of Mads inserts just about any film into the 'worth a look' category. Mikkelsen is incredible in Riders of Justice , as a grieving husband who can't accept the fact that he probably needs help - he's all grey bearded intensity, and the slow unravelling of his machismo is fascinating to watch. There are loads of elements to this film. On the surface, it's a blackly comic, revenge drama, with aspects of farce and slapstick, but deeper in it develops - in no particular order - into a gangland thriller, a crime procedural and a meditation on bullying and abuse. It doesn't end there. There are nods to family troubles, parental responsibility, freedom to choose ways to deal with grief (including violence and religion), depictions of me...