Film Shapes

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...