Film Shapes

Shayda is Noora Niasari's first feature and almost certainly won't be her last. It tells the frustrating story of an Iranian mother struggling for custody of her daughter in Melbourne, in the face of abuse and ostracism. Zar Amir Ebrahim plays Shayda with such intensity and warmth that it's near impossible to take your eyes off her. She recently won the best actress award at Cannes for Holy Spider and it's not hard to see why. Her chemistry with Selina Zahednia, who plays her daughter, Mona, is fantastic - I even had to check they weren't actually related. The semi-autobiographical story is presented methodically and with no little style. Niasari eschews the wides, focussing on the interiors, mostly of the women's shelter run by Joyce (Leah Purcell) that Shayda and Mona find themselves in. The harrowing elements are balanced by the sense of community and support that comes from the shelter and the people therein.  Shayda's husband, Hossein (Osamah Sami) pr...

Here's a taut Roman police thriller from director, Lyda Patitucci, her feature debut. Isabella Ragonese stars as Vera, a damaged undercover cop embedded within a Serbian gang. We're introduced to her as she drives her 'colleagues' to a meeting where a nasty piece of business occurs, followed later that night by a confrontation with an ex-lover and a drunken tryst with a barman. Frantic, destructive events like these seem to be about par for Vera. Her stint with the gang comes under threat when a couple of extra bodies join for an armoured car job and one of them turns out to be her younger brother, Bruno (Andrea Arcangeli). Cue a confrontation at their objectionable father's place and a plan of sorts is arranged to keep them both safe. Unfortunately, Bruno has struggles of his own in that his angelic young daughter, Marta (Carolina Michelangeli) needs extracting from her dangerously alcoholic mother, so cash is required to ferry her away.  This is quite a brutal fil...

This debut feature from Charlotte Regan is a low-key, yet ambitious drama about a 12-year-old girl, Georgie (played by Lola Campbell) raising herself on a London housing estate. It becomes clear that she has lost her mother recently but is making a fair fist of it by half-inching bikes with her mate, Ali (Alin Uzun) and selling them to a local fence (apologies for the geezer language, but the film has that effect). Soon enough, the kids spot a wide boy jumping over the back fence who turns out to be Jason, Georgie's absent-until-now father (Harris Dickinson, last seen as the twatty model in Triangle of Sadness ). The central relationship is the focus of the film, along with Georgie's method of working through her grief, and this is all sweetly done. It has slight hints of another father/daughter film from this year, the superior  Aftersun. I've been attempting to work out why I didn't really gel with Scrapper since seeing it a few days ago and I think it may be the ton...