Film Shapes

With The Square in 2017, and now Triangle of Sadness , Ruben Östlund has joined a select group of directors who've won the Palme D'Or with consecutive films (Billie August and Michael Haneke being the others, though nine directors have won twice). Rarified air. Add 2014's Force Majeure and that makes up a critically lauded hat trick. With only Force and Triangle to go on (I've been meaning to see Square but, shit, I've been meaning to do loads of stuff), Östlund seems to be furrowing a mildly provocative, fluffy bête-noire niche for himself, not fully blown Von Trier, but it's early doors. The title refers to the space between your eyes and the top of your nose, and has something to do with modelling pouts, as far as I could tell. The leads, Harris Dickinson (Carl) and Charlbi Dean (Yaya) are gorgeous, young fashion models - Yaya is also an 'influencer', which is the reason they find themselves on a luxury super boat, fraternising with other disgust...

Criminally, this is only Martin McDonagh's FOURTH feature, but it's vying with In Bruges as his best yet. In fact, were it not for the uneven mess of Seven Psychopaths , he'd be on a brilliant run, including Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri . The Banshees of Inisherin reunites Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell in a story of two mates, Colm and Pádraic, on an Irish island in the 1920s, trying to deal with some friendship issues. In a nutshell, Colm decides one day that he's had enough of his mate and his attempts to keep Pádraic at arm's length become increasingly.....inventive. Farrell and Gleeson are brilliant; Pádraic's outburst in J.J.Devine's public house is a super scene, and I reckon this film might be the highpoint of his gathering storm as a genuine talent. His esoteric choice of films going back a few years are indicative of this - probably since 2015's The Lobster , and running through The Killing of a Sacred Deer , The Beguiled and...

Return to Seoul is a quietly moving drama, written and directed by Davy Chou, a Cambodian/French filmmaker. It runs through a few years in the life of Freddie, played by 'plastic artist', Park Ji-Min. She's Korean by birth but was adopted out to a French family as a baby and at the start of the film, finds herself back in Seoul. On the face of it, she's there simply because a flight to Tokyo was cancelled, but we get an inkling that the desire to reconnect with her biological parents is working its way to primacy. Freddie can't speak Korean when she first arrives so she latches onto a young woman who works in the guest house she's staying at, Tena (Guka Han). The relationship is a curious one - polite, caring Tena seems to find chaotic Freddie fun....until she doesn't. At one point, during a spiteful night out, Tena tells her something like, "You're the saddest person I've ever met" and this 'slash and burn' style threatens to dera...

First up - great title, Violent Night . Combine these words on the poster with a bedraggled, blood-encrusted Santa Claus, chewing a candy cane like Eastwood chewed his cigar, and you've done half the job of selling the film. It also helps that it's a riot of inappropriateness - vomit, piss and (reindeer) shit all occur within the first few minutes, with the blood and gore soon to follow. Season's greetings to all! David Harbour plays Santa, disenchanted and ready to hang up the sack, when he drunkenly stumbles into a criminal heist situation at a luxurious mansion. The unimportant upshot is the family matriarch, Gertrude Lightstone (Beverly D'Angelo), has illegally ferreted away a stash of millions in her vault, which boss wrong'un, Scrooge (John Leguizamo) has sniffed out (how? again, not important). The heart, and the cheese, of the film rests with Gertrude's granddaughter, Trudy (Leah Brady) and, to a lesser extent, her separated parents, Jason and Linda (Ale...

Kompromat (shorthand for Compromising Material) is a serviceable near-thriller, based on book about the true story of Yoann Barbereau, a French national who spent more than a year on the run, trying to escape the Russian authorities. It opens with a cliched forest chase, then a '5 months earlier' title card, leading into the 'how did we get here' backstory. The film has its ups and downs until the climax, where it reaches its nadir, thanks to some overwrought symbolism and mawkish emotion, not helped much by the swelling score. Gilles Lellouche plays Mathieu Roussel, the Irkutsk director of the Alliance Francaise organisation. He lives in this Siberian outpost with his not-best-pleased wife and young daughter until one day when he's arrested for a trumped up charge of publishing child pornography. The reason for this fit-up isn't quite explained - is it suspicions of spying or petty revenge? Maybe something else entirely? Perhaps we're meant to be as cluele...

The Menu is a great satire on the haves and the have-nots, set in an exclusive island restaurant called Hawthorne. Ralph Fiennes is the chef, Slowik, who at first, seems like a snobby, arrogant kitchen-maestro, but has deeper...issues. He's, as always, excellent, giving us more to chew on than pure sociopathy. Nicholas Hoult plays Tyler, a foodie twat, seemingly oblivious to the creeping danse macabre taking place. But it's ultimately Anya Taylor-Joy's film. She's Margot, Tyler's date for this once in a lifetime culinary event, though she appears to have her reservations (I promise that's the first and last food or restaurant pun in this write-up. My apologies.) Margot is the audience conduit and Taylor-Joy brings the gusto and a feisty 'no-shit-taken' attitude. John Leguizamo is spot-on casting as the actor to whom Fiennes says something like, "Your face has irritated me for a long time" regarding a terrible film he was in. It's the perfe...

A new Marvel film isn't quite the drawcard it once was. Aside from the Doctor Strange multiverse film, Phase 4 of the MCU hasn't really delivered anything of much quality. There were moments in Black Widow and Shang-Chi , even Eternals at a stretch, but the crackers from Phase 3 seem a long way back. Now, SPOILERS AHOY, but presumably Kev Feige and his acolytes hadn't expected Chadwick Boseman to pass away at the age of 43, causing the need for massive rewrites (or a reimagining at any rate). Incidentally, they probably chose the best way to deal with an actor's unexpected death. It was nicely handled, a fitting tribute to Boseman. The beginning was a deviation from the usual action splash, in order to make way for the sombre, but zesty funeral scene. It was an authentic tear-jerker too, if the young German & French international students in the cinema were anything to go by. So, here's a film choc-full of grief and loss, which is only amplified by the mirror...

Brian and Charles is the 'Brian-child' of David Earl and Chris Hayward, who also play the leads - the former, a shabby loner, the latter, his bodgy android creation. The film is set in the glorious North Wales countryside, and have a run at some of these place names - Llyn Gwynant, Ysbyty Ifan, Trefriw, Cwm Penmachno, Betws y Coed, Llangernyw. Rough on the tongue, gorgeous on the eye. Earl plays his Brian Gittens character as a sweeter, less disgusting version of the lonely loser from Ricky Gervais's After Life and Derek . He's a single, middle aged depressive, who loves tinkering and inventing (objectively useless) things. The scene of the aftermath of a flying cuckoo clock test run is an early highlight, underlining the 'mockumentary' style of the piece. The 'useless inventions' theory is scotched when Brian surprises himself by actually making a robot, albeit a very shonky looking one. As Charles says, "My tummy is a washing machine." Th...

It's been a few years between drinks for madly inconsistent David O. Russell. His last film before this was Joy  in 2015, and he has the pretty great Silver Linings Playbook under his belt. Now, as Thom Yorke once sang, ambition makes you look pretty ugly, and this lyric applies to Amsterdam . This is not to say it's a terrible film - it has a few very good moments - but Russell has bitten off more than he can chew with this one. And there's a lot to chew. The film is based loosely on The Business Plot of 1933 in the US, a failed attempt to overthrow the Franklin Roosevelt government and install a fascist dictator, in line with Italy and Germany. The ambition is manifest in the breadth of the story and the amount of characters involved. Russell has at least 15 'names' to his disposal but many of them (Timothy Olyphant, Ed Begley Jr., Chris Rock, Taylor Swift, etc) get very little to do. I'll try to unpick some of the threads - it begins with a suspicious death;...

So I rocked up to the Palace cinema last week, intent on seeing Amsterdam only to hear that the session had to be cancelled for some projection reason. No harm done, I'd just finished work anyway so was thereabouts. Ah, but what's this? There's another film showing in that time slot, says the cinema staff. It's apparently in a similar vein - mysterious, rompy, witty, etc. Why not, I say, pretending to be spontaneous, though in actual fact, I'd been thinking of seeing this anyway. Oh, I forgot to mention that a seagull had shat on my shoulder on the way to the cinema, though it looked more like gozz than shite. Supposed to be good luck, so you might think that See How They Run turned out to be a brilliantly happy accident. No? No. It's not much good at all. I've been wondering how this was greenlit. Who is this even for? The film 'ever-so-cleverly' weaves a murder around the London stage production of Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap , with some ...

Here's a French police procedural that doesn't promise closure, in fact it pretty much tells us that this is based on one of France's many unsolved murders. Soon enough, that lack of climactic suspense proves to be a boon for The Night of the 12th . The audience (me anyway) can leave the 'whodunit' nature to one side and just focus on the relationships, the characterisation and the actual procedure, as well as the effects of these types of crimes. Director, Dominik Moll (also co-writer with Gilles Marchand), takes the book by Pauline Guéna and builds the story around detective Yohan Vivès (a great Bastien Bouillon), a newly promoted captain in the Grenoble police department. On his first morning in the new job, his team are called to a town at the foot of the Alps where a young woman has been burnt to death by an unknown assailant. The usual steps are taken - ascertain victim's identity, canvass potential witnesses, inform parents, begin interviewing possible c...

George Miller holds a special place in Aussie cinema, thanks largely to the Mad Max films (soon to be supplemented with Furiosa ), so it might surprise folk that Three Thousand Years of Longing is only his tenth stand-alone feature - not including the excellent segment from Twilight Zone: The Movie , Nightmare at 20,000 Feet , with John Lithgow. The legendary New Yorker Magazine critic, Pauline Kael said this about Miller, in relation to the aforementioned film, "Miller's images rush at you; they're fast and energising." Well, not much has changed in the nearly 40 years since she wrote this, if anything, he's picked it up a notch with Fury Road and, to a lesser extent, his latest film. This is based on a short story by A.S. Byatt called The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye , and it stars two shining lights in Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba.  Swinton plays Alithea, a narratologist, a collector of stories, who uncovers an odd looking bottle in Istanbul's Gra...

Here's a film that's had more said about the bullshit around it than the film itself. Therefore, I'll try to keep it relevant. This is Olivia Wilde's second feature and she's a bit of a dab hand at this directing lark. I haven't seen her debut, Booksmart , but have heard good things. In a nutshell, Don't Worry Darling (errant comma notwithstanding) is a stylish, speculative drama, with a patina of utopia-cum-dystopia that masks something far more commonplace and unsettling. Florence Pugh is the dutiful 1950s hausfrau of Harry Styles, who live in a postcard perfect sunny, desert community, presumably near the West coast of the US. Styles' Jack works for Chris Pine's pseudo-cult leader, Frank, in a mysterious compound just out of the town of Victory. Pugh's Alice spends her days with other wives, shopping, practicing ballet or getting pissed up. All's going swimmingly until one of Alice's friends, Margaret (Kiki Layne), begins to ask quest...

Can an idea be killed? Can you erase or transform folkloric mythology? Star Wars and organised religion would hope not but it seems Goran Stolevski might think otherwise. You Won't Be Alone is the debut feature of this Macedonian/Aussie filmmaker (he's also got Of an Age doing the festival circuits at the moment - it took out the top prize at WA's own Cinefest Oz recently). The film is set in Macedonia in the 19th century and, as you might expect, it's pretty bleak, especially for women. It starts with a mother and baby getting an unexpected visit from Old Maid Maria, a scarred witch who is after blood. The mother cuts a deal which gives the child 16 years grace before she is to be taken so, in the words of the mother, "you won't be alone." In an attempt to trick the witch, the child is hidden in a cave until the inevitable day when she is claimed. Henceforth, the child grown, Nevena (Sara Klimoska) becomes a kind of trainee witch to Maria (Anamaria Mar...

This loyal coverage of the Bowie legend begins with the voice of the man himself over a whack of white text on black, musing on the apparent 'death of God'. It's a fairly ambitious way to kick off but director Brett Morgen isn't have a bob each way here. It must have been a thankless task deciding on the format and style for this doco (ok, maybe not style, as that kind of speaks for itself with Bowie). There are amazing concert snatches peppered through the film and the opening number - All the Young Dudes - from an early gig is stupendous. Sound and Vision, from his Berlin sojourn, was brilliantly cut to painterly dobs, like a Kandinsky composition, and Heroes was spine tinglingly fine. But...returning to the format, I think this is where it dips out. The film is a long 2 and a quarter hours, by long, I mean it felt like a lot longer. Morgen attempts to use as much Bowie narration and gig footage as possible and neglects any other viewpoint or angle that may have opene...

This is a great film, especially in the way that it manages to create something interesting out of a reasonably mundane synopsis. A young girl is sent away to a relative's house for the summer where she is treated better than at home. Sounds like it could have a bit of Rohmer-style youthful awakenings? Or maybe some gritty Loach-ian societal comment? Even perhaps a revenge tinged 'fear the youth' theme? Well, it's none of the above, and more power to its style. The Quiet Girl herself (Cáit) is a newcomer, Catherine Clinch, and she was apparently found via an Irish language school call out. She's incredible - meek, direct, no airs nor graces whatsoever, with a clear-eyed awkwardness. She's almost like a little female Bowie in The Quiet Girl Who Fell to Earth (no, not a film but I thought I'd italicise anyway). There are orbiting performances that complement her perfectly. Carrie Crowley and Andrew Bennet play Eibhlín and Seán Cinnsealach, the couple who tak...

Here's an enjoyable, tense genre pic that doesn't pretend to be anything more than you'd expect. Beast stars Idris Elba as a doctor trying to reconnect with his daughters on a trip to the African savannah. Potted backstory: he had split with his wife, then she got ill and died, now the kids carry some animosity towards Big Dris. The ever-so-subtle tagline, 'Fight For Family', makes it plain where we're headed. Sure, his kids are ratty with him but a LION WANTS TO KILL THEM ALL. The titular animal is rendered fairly realistically, in fact it's sometimes more believable than the humans. Here is the main issue with the film, but to be fair, it's not a huge problem. I understand we are asked, as an audience, to suspend disbelief in many films, and I'm generally in accord. Occasionally though, the decisions made by characters make an eyebrow raise, even a snort escape, and this happened a few times in Beast . It was just enough to take me out of the film...

Jordan Peele really doesn't flinch from a stoush. His first film, Get Out , took an excoriating swipe at racism and white privilege in the US. His second film, Us , delved into class divides and human rights. His latest film, Nope , takes aim at man's subjugation of nature, primarily for profit. The marketing of this film suggests a creepy, sci-fi alien invasion film, and while this is all accurate, there's more going on here too. Daniel Kaluuya, returning for a second Peele film (after Get Out ), plays OJ Haywood, a trainer of horses that appear in films or TV. His father, Otis senior (Keith David), is killed early doors in a freak accident....or is it? Well, no obviously, it isn't, but life moves on for 6 months before more manure flies. OJ is joined by his sister, Emerald (Keke Palmer), as the Haywood Hollywood Horses business, bereft of the old man's guidance and experience perhaps, begins to flounder. OJ has been selling some of the horses to Steven Yuen's ...

I think this may be a first - here are some words about a 30 minute, made for TV documentary, which I was lucky enough to see (pre-broadcast) at The Backlot cinema. It's called Walking Man and and it's a film about the eponymous bloke who used to walk along Stirling Highway here in Perth for years. I think I'd seen him in the past, definitely many people I knew had, and if you're of a certain vintage, and from Perth, you'd know about him. He was quite the urban (living) legend. But I had no idea that he was actually a bloody good artist and he spent much of his life making art. The film is seen through the lens of the Walking Man, Ross Seaton's relationship with professor Ted Snell, who chanced upon him working one day and asked if he'd be keen on an exhibition. Ultimately agreeing but, sadly, passing away before things could be sorted, the film continues as a sort of jigsaw puzzle, with pieces provided by relatives and members of the public alike. Seaton...