Film Shapes

John Michael McDonagh and his younger brother, Martin, have carved out a prominent place in British/Irish film in the past 20 years or so. With very few features to their name, they've managed to become the type of filmmakers who get eyebrows raised and hands rubbing together whenever a new project is announced. Anyway, that's what happened to me when I heard McDonagh the elder was the director of The Forgiven . It's a morality tale set in Morocco at a posh party on the edge of the Sahara. Ralph Fiennes and Jessica Chastain play David and Jo Henninger, an upper class couple who don't really seem to be getting on - he's a wanker and she's got the complete shits with him. After landing by ferry, they drive through the night to the party, but hit and kill a young guy on the way. Meanwhile, hosts Richard (Matt Smith) and Dally (Caleb Landry Jones) welcome their guests to a weekend of vulgar debauchery, causing some amount of cultural discord with the local staff. Th...

Time to run down the 13 films I saw at this year's Revelation Film Festival. It was a great edition for the 25th anniversary, with some excellent films on show. Here are my thoughts, in ascending order of quality. After Blue   ★ This was quite hard going. It reminded me of struggling through Aleksei German's impenetrably muddy Hard to Be a God (2013). After Blue shares much of that film's aesthetic, with amateur looking sets, foggy darkness and animalistic performances. Director Bertrand Mandico is one of the creators of the Incoherence Manifesto and it certainly shows in this film, which follows a young woman and her mother on the hunt for wanted killer, Kate Bush (not that one). It's set on a planet peopled only by women (the men have died off after growing hair internally) and the story, if you can call it that, sends the mother and daughter to a mountain lair and back again. There are worthy feminist and environmental messages here but I didn't have the stamina...

What a little oddity this is. Coming in at a tic under 1 hour, it's an electronic fever dream of a film. The premise is that some time in the future humanity is forced to retreat to reinforced bunkers at dawn due to the sun's extreme heat (something like thousands of degrees, if I remember rightly). The opening shows us a group of people racing back to the shelter, heeding the broadcast to get a wriggle on. On the way back, one of the characters knifes another guy in the stomach and we see the blood drift upwards from the wound, as though in very low gravity. It starts as it means to go on. Once back inside the rudimentary safe room, we meet others in the group via some very French musings. There's a young woman who is attempting to shag everyone else and a Japanese bloke in wooden geta. There's an old fella who seems the sensible anchor, a techy guy who is on the way to discovering the eponymous planet, a theatrical woman who kind of acts as a circuit breaker to events...

When I read the blurb about  Freaks Out in the Revelation Film Festival programme I earmarked it as the one to watch for this year. Usually, this kind of anticipation results in disappointment but it wasn't to be here. This is a blast. You might think a film with a bunch of circus freaks and Nazis (both with super-powers), as well as a gang of amputee partisans might be a bit ironic, with a nudge and a wink to the audience. But Freaks Out plays it very straight, very sincere, almost in the vein of a neo-realist war film. The gist is that four Italian circus performers, seemingly left in the lurch by their ringleader, decide to join the Zircus Berlin, which is headlined by the erratically psychotic Franz, (Franz Rogowski). Our special quad are Fulvio (Claudio Santamaria), a grumpy, super-strong Chewbacca who can bend metal; Cencio (Pietro Castellitto), a weedy insect overlord; Mario (Giancarlo Martini), a magnetic, masturbating dwarf; and the heart of the film, Matilde (Aurora Gio...

It's Rev time again and this year's programme is stuffed full of goodies. The majority of films will be screened at Luna Leederville , with one or two a day in Freo at Luna on SX. The Backlot Perth has a few events, as does PICA and the WA Museum. The festival runs from Thu July 7th to Sun July 17th and there are 25 features, 15 documentaries and dozens of short films to check out, along with guest speakers doing Q&As, panel talks and other events. See the  Rev site  for details.  Festival director and founder, Richard Sowada, talked to us about the very first Rev in 1997 and how this year's programme showcases personal themes, small gestures and intimate relationships, while also allowing space for some suitable oddness. He also picked out a few highlights to check out. Listen below. Films that caught my eye were: Freaks Out , an Italian/Belgian co-production about super-powered circus performers in Nazi Germany; 18½ , about the missing minutes of Nixon's Watergate...