Film Shapes

This is a documentary about the first Muslim Arab to win Israel's Masterchef TV cooking contest, Nof Atamna-Ismaeel. and her idea of running the A-Sham Arabic food festival. This brings chefs from all over Israel - some Arab, some Jewish, some Christian - and gives them a specific Levantine dish to make that has fallen out of favour or just been forgotten. Each chef is nominated to pair up with someone from a different background, town, religion even, and herein lies the interest (great looking food notwithstanding). We get to meet about 3 main pairs, as well as a few minor 'characters' through the course of the film. I'd say the spotlight is probably on Shlomi and Ali. Shlomi is an Israeli Jew, whose grandparents came from Eastern Europe, after surviving the Holocaust, and Ali is from Ghajar, an oddly placed town, half Israeli, half Lebanese. They are tasked with making a yoghurt based delicacy called Kishek, and the intricacies of the preparation are fairly extreme. T...

Leaving aside the honking great clanger of giving birth during an alien invasion, especially when those aliens are really, really good at hearing AND want to feck da human up (youth speak), I found the first A Quiet Place to be a compact little sphincter clencher. Pandemically disrupted cinemas forced the delay of A Quiet Place Part 2  - in fact, I remember earmarking this as the next film to see just as the doors closed. Well it's here now and it covers similar ground, exactly the same physical ground with respect to the setting, down to the sand trails and the local town from the first film.  The opening is almost the best thing about AQP2 , as we flash back to DAY 1 and get more beasty action than in the first one. During these scenes there's a neat trick of POV switching from John Krasinski's Lee to his daughter Regan, played by Millicent Simmonds. As Regan is deaf, the scenes from her viewpoint are completely silent, and when there are emaciated, murderous Skeksis ro...

Lapsis is the first feature of fiction from documentary-maker, Noah Hutton (son of Debra Winger and Timothy Hutton) and it's an odd'un. The budget was evidently quite small but Hutton has squeezed every cent out of it with some measure of success. The story involves a low-rent James Gandolfini, Ray (played by Dean Imperial) who is struggling to pay for his brother's Omnia (this reality's ME or Chronis Fatigue Syndrome) treatment. This leads Ray to take some dodgy, 'gig economy' job, cabling through the woods. Said cabling is all to do with Quantum computing and best if we don't try to analyse this too much.  The tension from here on is two-fold. One of those folds is that Ray is given a suspiciously-sourced 'medallion', the device you need to log in at work, kind of like a punch card of old. This medallion used to belong to a person with the trail name (pseudonym for work on the trail) of Lapsis Beeftech, someone who is not roundly admired among col...

A gall bladder removal (mine) prevented me from seeing this during the Alliance Francaise French Film Festival back in February, but happily, I got another chance last week. I say happily because The Godmother (or La daronne in France, Mama Weed in UK/USA) has bags of charm to go with its bags of hash. Isabelle Huppert is some sort of ageless wonder - she's 67, playing mid-50s, I'd reckon, and she sparkles in the role. C'est incroyable!  Huppert plays Patience Portefeux, a police translator, who is tasked with keeping tabs on a pending drug deal. Someone she knows inadvertently gets involved and she is suddenly given a choice - play it by the book and help the cops, one of whom she's going out with, or save the young trafficker. The decision is made quickly and this informs the rest of the film. The film, directed by Jean-Paul Salomé, handles her transformation from professional widowed mother of two adult daughters, to North African drug dealer, Mama Weed in a playf...

Let's start out with an admission. I haven't seen Swept Away , Guy Ritchie's 'love letter' film to his then partner, Madonna. Nor have I seen Aladdin , because, well, have a guess. But I have seen all Ritchie's other films and this one, Wrath of Man , may just be his third best. Of course, Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels will likely never be budged from spots one and two (that's my ordering, you may differ) but the rest of his catalogue is pretty dismal - and I'm including the Sherlock Holmes films here (though they had their moments). Wrath of Man is based on a French thriller from 2004 with Jean Dujardin and Albert Dupontel called Le Convoyeur. Jason Statham takes the lead as H, in his fourth film for Ritchie, and is joined by an assemblage of familiar faces, if not A-list names. Holt McCallany (him out of Mindhunter ), Josh Hartnett, Scott Eastwood (yep, son of...), Andy Garcia, Eddie Marsan, Niamh Algar, Rob Delaney, all add pretty...

Intemperie , the Spanish name for Out in the Open , means ‘outdoors’ or ‘the elements’ in English and these translations precisely describe the look of the film. Nearly the entire running time is spent in the hot, arid landscape of Andalucía, so rarely does the action venture indoors that it seems alien to even be ‘in’ a room. In fact, the occasional time spent away from the elements takes place mostly inside wells, caves or roofless huts. It’s as though the director, Benito Zambrano, is averse to conventional housing.  Nevertheless, the depiction of the Southern Spanish savanna is one of the many highlights of Out in the Open . The cinematography by Pau Esteve Birba is amazing, the sweeping pans and intimate close-ups equally affecting. Zambrano, with writers Pablo and Daniel Remón, won a Goya for best adapted screenplay (from the Jesús Carrasco novel) and the script is laden with themes of guilt and forgiveness, as seen through the lens of post-war, Francoist Spain. The first sho...

The machinations of the serial killer have long been fertile ground for filmmakers but the quality of the final product can vary greatly. For every Zodiac or Se7en there’s one like this. The Goya Murders (or El Asesino de los Caprichos ) starts with a reasonably sound premise – a killer is poisoning his (usually well off) victims and recreating scenes from Goya prints as deathly exhibits. Imagine the murders scenes in Se7en but with less gore and more artistry. Investigating these are Madrid detectives, Carmen Cobos and Eva González, played by Maribal Verdú and Aura Garrido, and though the actors are fine, they have the writing to overcome. Their characters are broadly painted, there’s not a lot of light and shade here. Carmen immediately takes against her younger partner for no apparent reason. Eva is a fun-loving, karaoke singing, happy mother-of-two, while Carmen drinks from a hip flask and drives erratically. At one point a fellow officer tells Carmen that her ‘bad cop’ routine ...