Film Shapes

This will be a quickie review as there's a pod to follow that gets into it more. But I'll say right now, I loved this doco. It's an excellent cold war history lesson pieced together from fascinating archive footage, much like Asif Kapadia's films, Senna and Diego Maradona (I guess his other feature docs Amy and Federer are a similar style, but I've not seen them).  This film, directed by Belgian, Johan Grimonprez and edited by Rik Chaubet, is about the murky removal and subsequent assassination of Patrice Lumumba, first Prime Minister of the (Democratic) Republic of Congo. It's a panoply of found footage, mostly newsreels and old interviews, interspersed with a jazz soundtrack and band visuals that really fit the era. Honestly, this sifting and compiling must have taken a fecking age, so big props to Chaubet and Gimonprez (who has some experience with this form of doc - Dial H.I.S.T.O.R.Y. , for example). The 'stars' include the likes of Nikita Khrus...

Matteo Garrone directs this migrant drama about two lads trying to make their way from Senegal to Europe. Considering the bleak shit they go through on the trek, their life in Dakar doesn't seem as grim as might be expected. Garrone and co-writers Massimo Ceccherini, Massimo Gaudioso and Andrea Tagliaferri (along with a whole swag of collaborating writers) are posing a less stereotyped position here - what if a couple of young guys simply want to follow their dream and work in Europe? Do they necessarily have to be escaping a life of hardship and/or persecution? This premise shines a light on the broken system that forces people, for many reasons, to risk their lives in pursuit of a better option. Not being sure of legal standpoints here, I did a bit of reading on Amnesty International's website. The following explains the distinction between migrants, like the guys in this film, and refugees or asylum seekers: It is important to understand that, just because migrants do not fl...

Here's an enjoyable, tense genre pic that doesn't pretend to be anything more than you'd expect. Beast stars Idris Elba as a doctor trying to reconnect with his daughters on a trip to the African savannah. Potted backstory: he had split with his wife, then she got ill and died, now the kids carry some animosity towards Big Dris. The ever-so-subtle tagline, 'Fight For Family', makes it plain where we're headed. Sure, his kids are ratty with him but a LION WANTS TO KILL THEM ALL. The titular animal is rendered fairly realistically, in fact it's sometimes more believable than the humans. Here is the main issue with the film, but to be fair, it's not a huge problem. I understand we are asked, as an audience, to suspend disbelief in many films, and I'm generally in accord. Occasionally though, the decisions made by characters make an eyebrow raise, even a snort escape, and this happened a few times in Beast . It was just enough to take me out of the film...