Film Shapes

This perfectly-tuned biopic of the father of the atomic bomb has the Nolan stamp of assuredness upon it. The opening gives us scenes of a young-ish Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) getting to know himself and quantum mechanics, intercut with a couple of hearings - a congressional one with Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr) attempting to become U.S. Secretary of Commerce, and a more secretive one to decide on Oppenheimer's security clearance. Sounds pretty dull, to be fair, but Nolan seems to realise the potential for yawns, so he keeps this whole first act zipping along, with constant, escalating music (by Ludwig Göransson) and tight editing (by Jennifer Lame). Oppenheimer breezes through this flurry and arrives at the central driver of the story - the recruitment of scientists to the Manhattan Project, run by Matt Damon's General Leslie Groves. It's around this time in the story that Oppenheimer starts to realise the potential for destruction that his work entails - he j...

An unexpected freebie turned up (thanks to Merv) for this little Swedish thriller at the Scandinavian Film Festival . It's from a first-time writer/director called Johan Storm, and it's probably just be a coincidence that a load of this film occurs during storms. Our protagonist, David (Johan L. Heinstedt), finds a box full of his dead dad's old documents at his mum's house and this prompts him to shoot off to an island in the Arctic Circle, where his old man was doing some meteorological research. Or was he? David sets up in the North lighthouse and soon encounters Sarah (Hanne Mathisen Haga) in the South lighthouse - first on shortwave, then later in person. Curious to find out what his dad was up to, David stumbles upon various things, from non-creepy mystery letters to a very-fucking-creepy dungeon inside a cave! Double your phobia pleasure right there. Oh, and they may not be the only living things on this murky, wind-swept island of fun. It's a pretty neat sce...