Film Shapes

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...