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...