Film Shapes

I realised a few weeks ago that I've been doing the Film Shapes blog since 2011. This got me thinking that it might be a doddle to put together an aggregation of the top tens of each year, a kind of 'best of the decade' list. Not such an easy task. I've had to stretch a mooted ten out to twenty and the order has been troubling me for some days. As it turns out, all these films were actually made between 2011 and 2020, otherwise titles like Inception may have snuck in. Anyway, I'll leave you with this for now and bugger the consequences. 20. Slow West (2015) An odd, melodic Western, directed by John Maclean (of The Beta Band), this has young Scot, Kodi Smitt-McPhee crossing the perilous US west, helped or hindered along the way by their excellencies Michael Fassbender and Ben Mendelsohn. As the title suggests, it's slow-paced but that's what sets it apart from other films of its ilk. Come to think of it, this is a pretty lonely ilk. 19. Bohemian Rhap sody ...

The Perth Festival is showing a bunch of interesting looking films at the Somerville Auditorium on the grounds of UWA. This one, The Mole Agent , runs Feb 1st to 7th. It's well worth a look. Documentary makers, like all film makers, are constantly on the lookout for ways to present their message. The styles available to documentary as a genre are seemingly limited, which is why Maite Alberdi’s The Mole Agent seems so fresh. She has chosen to couch her story in the figure of a genuinely sweet old widower named Sergio. His task is to go undercover in a nursing home in Chile and report back to a private detective regarding a client’s mother. And there is the simple genius in the telling of the story. Rather than staging this as a newsy expose, with lurid details and sensational confrontations, Sergio acts as a conduit for the very real, very lonely situations of the residents of the home. His conversations with them are basically interviews but these are portrayed with the empathy an...

So for all the shite that occurred in 2020, the films I saw weren't all that bad, just very bland or disappointing. The good certainly outweighed the bad. But here are the 10 worst films I had the displeasure of seeing last year. Don't be afraid but please do avoid. 10. The Gentlemen (2019) Guy Ritchie's body of work has really declined since, well, since the beginning. This is a pale echo of his best days, when geezerism was at its most endearing (if you swing that way). I have a kind of sad feeling that Ritchie's legs have gone, that the best days are well behind him. Even Hugh Grant playing nicely against type and Colin Farrell, hamming up the Oirish, can't salvage this. 9. The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) So it seems Bowie was human after all; fallible, imperfect. This film was a real disappointment, hovering around my radar for many years, I finally saw it last year and well, ponderous and dull probably sum it up for me. Let's call it a minor glitch in th...

Yes, it's been a pretty cruddy year. Many cinemas closed for a bit, and some still are at time of writing. We were luckier here in Perth. There was a gap of around three months between visits to the cinema but I still managed to get to 29 films in the remainder. With streaming sites and more free time than expected, it was possible to see around 140 films in total in 2020. Take out the repeat viewings and there were around 100 films to whittle down to the best 10. So here, in descending order, they are. Fill your sandals, human movie lovers. 10. Archive (2020) One of the films of the Revelation Festival, this is a cracking little futuristic tale of loss and grief in the AI age. First time director Gavin Rothery, working from his own script, serves up a belter. 9. Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan (2020) And here's another gem from Rev, this a doco on the life of the erstwhile Pogue's frontman. Director Julien Temple must have spent about a year in the edit s...