Film Shapes

This is a film heavy with 'premise buzz'; it hangs its hopes, almost singularly, on the simple combination of a bear and shitloads of cocaine. By the amount of reviews I've seen rolling through my social timelines in the last few days, I'd say it's doing the job. The poster is great, and there's one word on it that's used extremely loosely - 'INSPIRED by true events'. These true events involved drug dealers dumping around 40 containers of cocaine into the Tennessee wilderness, and a black bear eating a lot of it. The real story is way too prosaic, so a gory action comedy was scaffolded around those bare bones.  An odd, anti-drug TV spot featuring Pee-wee Herman and Nancy Reagan lets us know what tone to expect and it doesn't take its foot off the slightly tacky, weirdly endearing pedal. It has a great 80s music synthy pop soundtrack and the cast is one of the most esoteric I've seen in a long time. Keri Russell is probably the lead, along wit...

This striking documentary is from the stable of heavy-hitter, Laura Poitras, who has made films about the Iraq War, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. In this Venice Golden Lion winner, she covers the life of photographer/artist Nan Goldin, and zooms in on her fight against the opioid crisis in the US. Poitras handles the structuring really well, there are no jarring transfers between 'stories'; at least, I didn't feel any. Taking roughly equal screentime, Goldin's life story runs chronologically, with the shorter timeline of her current activism interspersed.  It begins (and ends) with Goldin's sister, Barbara, and how she affected the course of her life, and soon turns the focus to the Sackler family, a disgustingly rich cabal of 'big pharma' knobs who have made a proper killing off the sale of addictive opioids since the mid-90s. Goldin, an ex-addict herself, founded P.A.I.N (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), which rails against the Sackler family...

Aftersun is a fitting title for this top-notch drama set in a coastal resort in Turkey in the late 90s. Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio play father and daughter, Calum and Sophie - it later becomes evident that Calum is separated from Sophie's mother. The title suits because this holiday is potentially the last moment to be cherished between Sophie and Calum, the sun that all following events are compared to. It may also be giving a nod to all the evening scenes, the film certainly eschews the bright and shiny cliches of holiday resorts. There's a fantastic chemistry between Mescal and Corio. Mescal's portrayal of a seemingly stable bloke dealing with mental health issues is wonderfully understated. There's really only one openly emotional burst, the rest he conveys with stares, downcast eyes and Tai Chi. Corio, on debut, is superb as Sophie, a girl calmly grappling with the onset of puberty. Her interactions with older kids at the resort feel spot on and writer/director...

Hlynur Pálmason's third feature follows his fine A White, White Day from 2019, and this one is also heavy on the white stuff, yes, snow and ice. It charts the physical, and increasingly mental, journey of young Danish priest, Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove) as he sets off from one side of Iceland to the other to build a church in the late 19th Century. His travelling party includes a translator (Hilmar Guðjónsson) and a few hired hands, led by the recalcitrant Ragnar (Ingvar Sigurdsson). The first act of the film is comprised of this journey - think Aguirre, Wrath of God but with tundra instead of jungle. When they finally arrive, after no little calamity, they proceed to to get stuck into construction. The cinematography by Maria von Hausswolff is fantastic, from the unearthly landscape vistas to the incredible shots of lava spewing down the side of a volcano. The aspect ratio of 4:3 with rounded edges is a nice touch too. The scenery is important for thematic reasons, it almost to...