Film Shapes

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...

Who can take a mirror? Sprinkle it with goo? Cover it with viscera and an intestine or two? The Candy Man. Oh, the Candy Man can. That's where my mind strayed during this film - thinking of a variation on Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. In this version, Gene Wilder turns his hand to child-killing, and you don't have to stretch your 'pure' imagination too much to see that Wonka's not too far removed from that. So, I blame that song being played over the opening credits for my wandering thoughts. This film ( Candyman , not Wonka ) is a remake of/sequel to the 1992 original of the same name, where a crazed ghost (?) is summoned to kill anyone who's thick enough to say his name in the mirror five times. The new version, directed by Nia DaCosta and co-written and produced by Jordan Peele, attempts to update the story by making it about gentrification of the projects (incidentally, a word that means bugger all to non-Americans, I'd reckon) and seems to go s...

This Hungarian film is a slow-burning little gem. It balances itself somewhere between mysterious, psychological thriller and slyly satirical, deadpan comedy. And the amazing thing is you don't really notice what a number it has done on you until well after it's finished. Natasa Stork plays Márta, a successful neurosurgeon who decides to return home to Budapest to meet up with the man she met and fell in love with at a medical conference in the US. A planned rendezvous on a bridge doesn't eventuate and so Márta tracks down János, played by Viktor Bodó, to his hospital, whereupon he claims to have never met her in his life. Is he lying? Is she losing her mind? Could it be both? These questions are played with through the film and, though on the surface, they are answered, there's still lingering doubt about events just passed and crucially, preparations for the future. The final shot is an absurd flourish, reminiscent of a few Coen Brothers films, and close to a belly la...