Film Shapes

This filmic celebration of stunt performers throws a lot of ideas at the wall. Luckily, most of them stick. Renowned 'stuntie' David Leitch, who got his break as Brad Pitt's double on Fight Club , directs this script from Drew Pearce, the pen behind one of the best Marvel outings, Iron Man 3 . If you're older than, let's say 45, you might remember the well-watched TV series, The Fall Guy , created by TV ploymath, Glen A. Larson. I still recall a truism from Colt Seavers (Lee Majors) to his offsider about not driving down a hill on an angle, else you're liable to flip the car. Why I have retained this nugget is beyond me but the show certainly left a mark (I'm sure it hasn't aged well, though). Would the film version live up to 10-year-old me's expectations? My reservations were assuaged pretty much as soon as Ryan Gosling started his voice-over. The film opens in a classical 'good spot', where Colt (yes, they kept the name) is enjoying his jo...

Abigail follows in the tradition of using a woman's name for the film title: Carrie , Christine , Coraline , Mandy , M3gan , Pearl (with MaXXXine on her way), and these are only from the horror genre. Titling is not the only thing lifted from elsewhere. The story sees a gang of crims carrying out a kidnapping only to find the tables turned when they realise the victim is not so....fragile. It's very difficult to speak about this film without giving the game away, and that's possibly one of the reasons why it didn't grab me. It really would have been enhanced had the marketing not laid out the 'twist' but these are the times we live in. By plugging this as a vampire ballerina film, the gang's surprise is not shared by the audience. Once that realisation is out of the way, it settles into a pretty tread-worn rhythm. Expendable members are dispatched, relationships are made and betrayed, blood and viscera are spilled. The film goes through the motions until ...

The Teachers' Lounge was Germany's entrant for Best International (Foreign Language) film at the 2024 Oscars, beaten by the equally fine,  The Zone of Interest (the UK's nominee, though also in German). Leonie Benesch plays Carla Nowak, a young, slightly idealistic maths (and sports?) teacher at a primary school in Germany. There's been a spate of thefts at the school, in class as well as in the teachers' room. When a lad of Turkish origin is wrongly accused, Carla defends him and disagrees with the methods used by the school authorities. This doesn't endear her to some of her colleagues but when she finds evidence of a theft in the teachers' room, the scheiße really hits the fan.  Benesch, seen before in  The White Ribbon  and  Persian Lessons , is incredible. She really sells her sincerity and in the moments when the tension rises, her expressions are priceless. In one almost unbearable scene at a parent/teacher night, Carla is passive-aggressively confro...

Dev Patel introduced this preview himself (remotely - he's not pitching up in Cannington!) and he says he's been sitting on this story of the Monkey God, Hanuman fighting against the demon king for about a decade. He covers all the bases here - star, (debut) director, co-writer and co-producer under Jordan Peele's Monkeypaw Productions banner. It's a fairly rudimentary tale of revenge which plays out in Yatana, a pumping metropolis somewhere in India. I guess not naming the city (cough...Mumbai...) kept things a bit less problematic, considering 'yatana' means something like torture or serious pain in some languages. A rose-tinted tourist video this is not. The film opens in a scummy, crowded boxing arena where a dude in a monkey mask is taking a pounding from a snake fella, both part of Tiger's (Sharlto Copley) stable of fighters. Kipling-influenced characters, Shere Khan and Baloo are introduced in later scraps. Kid, (Patel, AKA Monkey Man) is taking these...