Revelation Film Festival 2025

Revelation Film Festival 2025 - Wrap Up

That's it for Rev this year and I can't help feeling I've missed something... Eight films isn't a bad effort but there were a few that I hope I can catch somewhere later. Anyway, here are the films I saw this year, in calendar order of viewing. First up was:

U are the Universe ★★★½

Ambitious Ukrainian film by Pavel Ostrikov about the last person in the universe after an earth-destroying disaster. Andriy (Volodymyr Kravchuk) is running nuclear waste to Callico, a moon of Jupiter, when he gets the news. His fastidious on-board robot Maxim is his only companion until he gets a message from near Saturn.

There are some lovely moments - 2001 music reveals a replacement office chair floating through space, the Open Me message, the sinister link to 2001 (set up earlier by the music), the tenderness of the burgeoning audio relationship - all leading to a sweet but realistically depressing conclusion. Wonderful pared down, yet grand filmmaking.

Of Caravan and the Dogs ★★★★

The title comes from the saying that 'the dogs bark, the caravan moves on.' This can be taken two ways - either the dogs are insignificant to the behemoth, or they actually provide the impetus for the continual movement. The dogs here refer to the Russian journalists and editors, TV hosts and radio DJs that are trying to keep the bastards honest. Like pushing shit up a hill.

The film is reminiscent of Navalny, 20 Days in Mariupol and Collective and it has a great lead in the boss of the newspaper. It's a sad watch but with surprising hopefulness. As one poet agitator guy says, 'All dodgy empires end with a war' or words to that effect. It's written by Askold Kurov and directed by him and Anonymous. This particular credit permeates the roll at the end of the film, with good reason. An excellent documentary.

Eight Postcards from Utopia ★★★

This is a found footage compendium of Romanian TV commercials from the 80s to the 2010s, I think, with some wild shit going on. The film starts with Adrian Mutu in Roman dress and is broken into 8 categories, such as History, Technology, Money, Masculine and Feminine, Magic, etc.

TV advertising can explain a lot about a country - the Romanians apparently look to Germany with envy, and there's some crazy ads that look to have influenced The Fast Show. Pepsi seems to be the winner of the cola wars in Romania, Dracula Park looks fun, and one ad even had a contest to find the preeminent 'Tits Expert' in the country. The privatisation public service announcements were an interesting document of the times, post cold war. Could have been shorter but worth a watch.

The American Friend ★★½

Wim Wenders adapts a Patricia Highsmith Ripley novel (Ripley's Game). Dennis Hopper plays the lead, though I'd suggest Bruno Ganz is the star of the film. Nothing really felt legitimate about it, I couldn't buy any of these characters, especially not Hopper as Ripley. Maybe a controversial take, but I don't think he's a very good actor - he plays a fine nutter but if he needs to seem 'real', he struggles.

The plot wasn't too bad structurally, especially at the start, but again, I didn't believe the likelihood of the characters' actions within the context of their story. This picture framer family man quite happily becomes a killer? The French geezer simply trusts that he'll do the job? Ripley drops him in the shit, simply because he didn't shake his hand once? Well, perhaps that's the Ripley sociopathy showing out there, so fair dues. But overall, not a satisfying film for me, sadly. I don't have a great track record with Wenders.

Chain Reactions ★★★★

This is a fantastic documentary, right up my alley. Unfortunately, it might have spoiled my enjoyment of the film that followed, as I'd never seen The Texas Chainsaw Saw Massacre before the double bill. This is your basic talking head format where five artists talk about their memories of (or reactions to) the above film. What sets this apart is that the subjects are fascinating and passionate about Chain Saw.

Patton Oswalt, Takashi Miike, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Stephen King and Karyn Kusama are the people interviewed and they all give great insight into how this film has affected and influenced them since their first viewing. Highlights are Heller-Nicholas talking about Picnic at Hanging Rock and the similarities between Texas and the Aussie bush, and Miike remembering that Chaplin's City Lights retrospective screening in Osaka was sold out so he happened upon Chain Saw. Sliding doors and all that.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre ★★★

As mentioned above, this was my first viewing and the forensic analysis laid out in Chain Reactions didn't allow me any surprises in the main event. Maybe it would have been better shown first on the bill but I'm guessing most people had seen it before this screening. I think 50 years is probably long enough for spoilers:) So looking at it like I had seen it before, it seems very dated and not really very scary either. It is iconic, though, and quite well made for a 'slasher' pic, perhaps the benchmark for those to follow.

As some of the subjects in the previous film said, it's not a stretch to feel some kind of sympathy or justification for Leatherface, as these hippy kids are veritable home invaders, and he is clearly disturbed. Not a great film for me but I'm glad to finally see it.

The Thinking Game ★★½

Here's a doco about Demis Hassabis, co-founder of DeepMind, and his desire to 'solve' AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). Hassabis was a bit of a prodigy from childhood, junior chess champion, games developer before entering Cambridge. His interest in AGI and its potential uses is covered in this film. What's not really covered is the danger of letting these fuckers THINK for themselves. I mean, Hassabis and his crew seem to have the best intentions - notably, releasing the code for AlphaFold to the world in 2021. This has almost 'solved' the issue of protein folding, which troubled molecular biologists for years.

All well and good but the ethics angle was only briefly mentioned near the end, and the sale to Google has made this altruism quite murky indeed. I read one local review on Letterboxd that absolutely excoriated the film. It's sits unevenly between a puff piece and an interesting view of where this tech might be going. Polarising, if enough people see it.

Zodiac Killer Project ★★★★½

A brilliant documentary, this one. Charlie Shackleton, a young Brit, optioned the rights to a police officer's book about his hunt for the infamous Zodiac Killer. Just as he was prepping the film, the family of the author/cop (deceased) pulled the rights. So Shackleton made an empty film, along the lines of "If we had made it, we would have started with a car parked here....". He narrates his past intentions to images of semi-deserted streets, empty diners, stand in buildings ("We were going to use this police station. Actually, this is a library, it's much easier to shoot at a library").

About halfway through, Shackelton appears on screen, in a recording booth but before this, there's nobody to associate with at all. This works to the films credit as it's presented as a kind of 'non-film'. Throughout proceedings, he dissects True Crime films and TV, specifically those newish Netflix titillators, by mentioning the tropes used - evocative B-rolls, 3D-ifying crime scene stills, dark country music over the opening credits, etc. He's done his research. In fact, it's probably a boon that he didn't get the rights to the book - I can't imagine a generic doco on this topic would have been anywhere near as good as this.

Comments

The Long Walk

I had a bit of time to spare while the car was getting a service so I decided to visit the Greater Union Morley cinemas one last time (it closed a few days after I saw this). I think this was the first cinema I went to when I came back from Japan in 2016 and sadly, it hadn't had a touch up since then, possibly not for a long time before either. Fingers crossed for a brand spanking new cinema complex one day. Anyway, the film I saw was The Long Walk , and it's a bit of an oddity. It's based on a Stephen King (writing as Richard Bachman) book from 1979. King seems to have a thing for these dystopian 'last one standing' stories (see also The Running Man , an Arnie adaptation was made in 1987, and Edgar Wright has a new version up his sleeve, opening soon). Director Francis Lawrence returns to the theme of his Hunger Games films, riffing on Battle Royale , but also, many of these types of films where characters get picked off one by one, from Alien to Monty Python an...

The Ballad of Wallis Island

Tim Key adds value to every film or TV show he appears in but here he has found his perfect role. Of course, it helps if you write the thing yourself (with help from co-star, Tom Basden). Key plays Charles, a slightly buffoonish, slightly clever 'lord of the manor' type who has invited Basden's Herb to his lightly-populated island to play a gig. Herb was part of a reasonably successful folk duo in years past but is now solo, and experimenting with genres (As another character queries, "Is 'commercial' a genre?"). Charles has the means to pay handsomely for this intimate concert but Herb isn't aware just how intimate it promises to be. Nor is he aware that Charles has also invited the other half of McGwyer/Mortimer, Nell, to the island, in order to reunite after nearly 10 years. Nell is played by Carey Mulligan, another casting triumph. She's always great but is really natural and confident here, with a fine singing voice (also heard in Inside Llewy...

Caught Stealing

Darren Aronofsky seems to have been more prolific but this is just his 9th feature since his debut, Pi , in 1998, which is, coincidentally, when this new film is set. And it's a film that wears its love for New York City on its sleeve. There are shots of the Twin Towers, streets full of rubbish, dingy apartments, and even a brief pass by of the iconic Kim's Video store (now immortalised in a documentary of the same name). Austin Butler stars as Hank, a former wunderkind baseball player whose careless driving ruined his pro sports future, but also crucially took the life of a friend, a passenger in the car. Some wag on Letterboxd said this film was a great advert for seatbelts, it's a recurring Public Service Announcement. Hank is getting by in NY, thinking of getting serious with his girlfriend, Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz), and generally wallowing in his lost opportunities. Events turn when neighbour Russ (Matt Smith), an obnoxious punk geezer, pops back to Laaaahhnd'n for a ...

Splitsville

This is the second film I've seen in a row where two blokes wrote the film and also starred in it ( see previous review ). This time round the two blokes are Michael Angelo Covino (also directing) and Kyle Marvin. The coup was signing Dakota Johnson and Adria Arjona to play the wives, Julie and Ashley. On the face of it, it's hard to believe that these women would be with these two spuds, but the script allows for a suspension of disbelief. Marvin plays Carey, just over a year into marriage with Ashley (Arjona). On the way to a waterfront weekend with Paul and Julie (Covino and Johnson), Ashley explains that she wants a divorce. The trigger may have had something to do with them being part of a road accident death, a darkly amusing opening scene. Carey leaves the car in a panic and eventually finds his way to the beach house. Distraught, he decides to wallow with his friends until a discretion threatens to blow apart the relationship. To be clear, Julie and Paul's open rela...

Sicilian Letters

This Italian Film Festival offering is a post-mafia story from writer/director pair, Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza. Ex-school principal and local politician, Catello (Toni Servillo) is released from prison in the early 2000s, only to be co-opted by the Italian Secret Service to help apprehend the last Cosa Nostra boss still at large, Matteo Messina Denaro (Elio Germano). Catello is the perfect patsy. He was a good friend of Denaro's father, Don Gaetano, who made Catello the Godfather to young Matteo. I should mention this is based loosely on the life of Denaro, though it's at pains to acknowledge that much of this story is fabricated (a title card reads "Loosely inspired by real events, though the film's characters are the fruits of the authors' imagination.") In this chunk of Denaro's life on the run, Catello is tasked with writing letters to the fugitive, via a bespoke butcher-based post office. Initially, Denaro is moved by Catello's prose a...

The Naked Gun

This uncalled for remake of 1988's The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! is not a patch on the original, nor the TV show, Police Squad! that spawned them both. Director Akiva Schaffer has plenty of pedigree with stupid comedy, having directed oodles of Saturday Night Live episodes, as well as films like Hot Rod and The Watch . I haven't seen these films but I'm not about to now. The new Naked Gun has a fairly rapid rate of jokes - many successful - in the first 30 minutes or so, but once the film had to start servicing the plot, the laughs dried up. Throughout the film, the sight gags didn't work as well as the straight-faced wordplay, à la the 'awfully big mustache' classic from The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear . This might be due to the casting. Liam Neeson is fun and tries hard, but he doesn't get anywhere near Leslie Nielsen, though I thought Pamela Anderson was an improvement on Priscilla Presley (I guess being an actual actor helps). Ab...

One Battle After Another

Before this film, Paul Thomas Anderson had at least one certifiable classic on his CV in There Will Be Blood . Now, make that two. In saying this, most of his films range from good to brilliant. This is his second adaptation of a Thomas Pynchon novel (after the uneven but interesting Inherent Vice ) and it looks at the lives of modern American revolutionaries, notably members of French 75. The group are apparently named after a WWI weapon, and then a cocktail, both of which have something of a kick. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Bob, The Rocket Man, who makes the ordnance for the group and is in a relationship with fellow revolutionary, Perfidia (Teyana Taylor). A combination of a run-in with Sean Penn's Colonel Steven Lockjaw, and a rash killing of a security guard triggers more interest in the group, and so a roundup begins. Perfidia is caught, then forced to name names before doing a runner. But not before she has a daughter with Bob, whom he is left to raise on the run. After this f...

The Fantastic Four: First Steps

A few years ago, we hit the S.S.P. (Superhero Saturation Point). And the best way for studios to arrest, or even maybe reverse, the law of diminishing returns is to JUST GIVE IT A FUCKING REST. There's enough residual goodwill in the fan base to guarantee profits....for now. But, as Malcolm Gladwell said, there must be a tipping point. So into this cinematic avalanche slips The Fantastic Four: First Steps , the first film of Phase Six and the thirty seventh overall! It's quite dull for the first 30 minutes, setting up the characters, ensuring the audience understands we're on a slightly different Earth (828), and a different time as well. It only gets going when the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) appears and promises everyone death by devouring. She's not going to eat them, she works for a massive space turd called Galactus, played by Finchy himself, Ralph Ineson. He'll do the devouring. Here's the thing - this film is a perfectly serviceable entry, not brilliant,...

Friendship

Amazingly, this is a first feature from writer/director Andrew DeYoung, though he's had heaps of experience in TV and shorts. The pace is pretty tight, albeit it's a bit longer than the 'ideal' of 90 minutes for a comedy. This is a bittersweet story about stupid masculinity, loneliness, and performative societal posturing, but it certainly doesn't scrimp on the laughs. Friendship focusses on Craig (pronounced in that annoyingly American way to rhyme with Greg) (Tim Robinson), who sits right in the middle of the Larry David / David Brent / Alan Partridge Venn diagram. He's a totally oblivious tosser, but not in a mean way, he just doesn't know where the line is. Ultimately, he's lonely. He has succeeded in alienating his wife, who has recently beaten cancer, his son appears to tolerate him, but not in an eye-rolling way, and his work colleagues think he's a bit of a dick. Doesn't matter that they are also knobheads. His life takes a turn when a n...

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