Film Shapes

Right, hands up, my views on the following film may be clouded by the fact that I rank Jacques Audiard as the greatest living director. Somebody (maybe Mel Brooks?) once said - and I'm paraphrasing here - they'd forgive their best friend vomiting all over the dinner table, but be appalled if their enemy had their cutlery in the wrong place. That's kind of how I feel about Audiard - I know he can tend towards melodrama, and this might irk me in anyone else's hands, but with him, I let it fly.  Paris, 13th District (or Les Olympiades ) is only his ninth feature, and for me it sits roughly mid-table of the seven I've seen. It's about the 13th arrondissement, south-east of central Paris, which is home to Europe's largest Chinatown. I say it's about the area because the people involved in the story are secondary to the place. The story itself even takes a back seat to the way the 13th is displayed, lovingly shot in black and white by cinematographer, Paul Gu...

Now here's a pickle of mine own doing. I saw this film at a preview screening in December last year but it's only due for release now, in March. Precious few notes taken mean I'm vaguing a bit on the finer details, hence a somewhat truncated write-up. I ordinarily like to stew over a film for a day or two before deciding on how I feel about it, but 3 months? Hmmm. Yet, here goes. Bergman Island is a semi-autobiographical film about film-making and film-makers, directed by Mia Hansen-Løve and starring Vicky Krieps and Tim Roth. Both are pretty bloody fine here, and it's a pleasure to see Roth again on the big screen. Sadly, he hasn't made the best choices in his career, but he's a brilliant, naturalistic performer. The film takes place on the Swedish island of Fårö, where legendary director, Ingmar Bergman made his home. Married couple Chris (Krieps) and Tony (Roth) are booked in to stay for a time while they work on their latest screenplays - Roth seemingly the...

Coming at this film from a non-gamer perspective, I was (and am) only superficially aware of the base IP that spawned it. Probably, this freed me from any quibbles others might have about casting or characterisation or dialogue or anything else that particular subculture could get exercised about. But, that's a double edged sword, in that I had to google some stuff like; who that dude on the beach was; what Pilou Asbæk's doing at the end; and is that character supposed to be Aussie or Kiwi or Pom, or some kind of Commonwealth amalgam? Answers on the back of a postcard. As a palate cleanser of sheer dumb-arsed frippery, Uncharted ticks all the boxes. It's reasonably short for this kind of blockbuster (at a touch under 2 hours), the leads, Tom Holland and Marky Mark Wahlberg, seem to be having a right old giggle, there are some passable parkour snatches (making use of Holland's Spidery fleet-footedness), and the final helicopter/ship transport sequence is pretty mint. An...

The (important definite article attached) Batman has cleared up all the mess of previous DC Batman films and given us a grungy, gothic, dystopian film that has more in common with a Fincher thriller than a comic book. And it's trite to say all they needed to do was add a 'the' but it worked for The Suicide Squad , comes up roses again here. Director Matt Reeves actually sets this up as a detective yarn with a cryptic serial killer as the villain, happily eschewing any kind of Wayne backstory. The plot gets a touch strandy as we follow Batman, played with righteous jaw-work by Robert Pattinson and Lieutenant James Gordon (Jeffrey Wright) as they winkle out the clues set by the Riddler, an incredible Paul Dano. The film opens with someone watching an obviously rich, probably powerful guy through binoculars. This turns out to be the Riddler staking out Gotham City's mayor, before making him victim number one. The reflection of this scene happens shortly after when Batte...

I caught this Perth Festival preview screening at the Backlot last week and it's an ambitious film that also feels quite low-key, almost like the filmmaker, Jonas Poher Rasmussen wanted to downplay the fortitude of those involved. This works in its favour, as the hardships and menace that the 'characters' go through are accentuated all the more by the lack of histrionics. Flee is about a man, Amin (not his real name), who escaped Afghanistan and the Mujahideen in the 1990s and is now, on the verge of settling down to marriage with his husband, ready to tell the tale to his old school friend.  It has an interesting structure - it's mostly animation created to match documented audio interviews, voice actors doing 'recreations' of events, with archived footage of news events of the 90s (human trafficking, Afghan bloodshed, Russian supermarkets during the fall of communism, etc). Rasmussen says: “I wanted to add this footage to the movie so that every time you see ...