Film Shapes

Roly and I went to Morley's Event cinema a week or so back to check out Jordan Peele's  Us , his follow-up to  Get Out . Now  Get Out  was a pretty fine flick but I reckon Peele goes one better here.  Us  is, at different times, a home invasion thriller, a Cronenbergian body-horror, a black comedy, a pseudo-zombie film, a social commentary/political satire on class structures and even at a pinch, a sci-fi/fantasy. So it really gives you a chance to choose how you want to view it. The film starts out showing us a moment from 1986 where a young girl and her parents are at a fair in Santa Cruz, California. Girl gets lost in a house of mirrors on the beach and has a bit of a freak-out. Flip forward to present day and a family of four visit the same beach. Things start getting creepy right about here. And throughout this set-up, Peele layers in little clues that foreshadow events to come. I won't give away much more - have a listen to the pod below for the ...

I saw The Sisters Brothers a couple of weeks back at the Paradiso as part of the French Film Festival . This is the first English language film by Jacques Audiard and only his eighth film as director. Cards on the table time - this geezer is one of my favourite active directors (along with Denis Villeneuve). A Prophet , The Beat That My Heart Skipped and Rust and Bone are among the best films made in the past 20 years. So by these measuring sticks, The Sisters Brothers comes up short, but not by too much. The film charts a typical Western cinema journey. Character A has something or has done something and Character B has to hunt him down. The Quest type of plot as outlined by Christopher Booker and repeated ad nauseam throughout film (and story) history. Here though, it coalesces quite nicely with another of Bookers plots, the Voyage and Return. Character A, in this case, is Riz Ahmed's chemist Hermann Warm (and later, Jake Gyllenhaal's John Morris). Character B here ...

The 21st film of the MCU and the first to cast a female lead, Captain Marvel also acts as a primer for the big event to come, Avengers Endgame (as seen in the mid-credits sting). I quite liked the film as a stand-alone prequel to most of the wider universe and the introduction of the Skrull-Kree war scenario opened things up a bit. I reckon I prefer the space MCU to the more Earth bound fare. Much has been made of Captain Marvel's feminist angle but rather than dive into gender politics, I, maybe naively, saw this as a well made superhero film first and a kick in the bollocks to the neanderthals second. Win-win. Behind the camera, there's been a concerted effort to have women in important roles - Anna Boden as co-writer and director with Ryan Fleck, all of the other credited writers, music by Pinar Toprak, Debbie Berman as co-editor, and so on. In front of the camera, Brie Larson rips it up as tough, smart-arse fighter pilot Carol Danvers. Her best mate is another pilot,...

Once more to the Luna in Leederville to see The Guilty , a Danish real-time thriller set in a police  emergency dispatch office. It's directed by first-timer, Gustav Moller and stars Jacob Cedergren and.....well, he's pretty much it, aside from a handful of voices over the phone. This may sound a bit boxed-in, a bit restricted, but that's the point of the film. It plays on the audience's helplessness by NOT showing us anything except Cedergren's character, Asger's creeping sense of futility. Sensibly, there's more at play than just an emergency and the problems of Asger himself run somewhat parallel to the abduction that pivots the film. Slices of information are fed to the viewer at intervals regarding what has happened (and what is about to happen) to Asger and this leaves us to build the flanking narratives as they occur. Setting this film in a couple of rooms makes it tricky to show the 'action' but Moller has dealt with this by regular ...

Cold War , directed and co-written by Pawel Pawlikowski, has been the darling of the festival circuit and it's reviews have ranged from very good to glowing. But I'm afraid to say that it didn't quite do all that for me. It's clearly a masterful piece of work - nicely acted, beautiful to look at in its monochrome and 4:3 ratio and adeptly directed with a real restraint. It's loosely based on the lives of Pawlikowski's parents, who went through similar turbulence in cold war Europe. The film follows around 15 years in the lives of musicians, Witkor, played by Tomasz Kot, and Zula, played luminously by Joanna Kulig, who fall in love and spend the rest of their lives trying to be together. Black and white? Academy aspect ratio? Europe in the post-war years? Bleak as all hell? Why didn't I like this more? It's a puzzler. I think part of the reason lies in the protagonists. I couldn't warm to them, as good as the performances were. I guess it's ...

M. Night Shyamalan's latest is the third part of a trilogy that was supposedly dreamt up around 20 years ago. If you liked  Split  and don't remember  Unbreakable , this is the film for you. The neat trick in  Glass  is bringing together the three heavy hitters of the previous films - James McAvoy's multiple personality 'Horde', Bruce Willis's unbreakable David Dunn and Samuel L. Jackson's fragile Elijah Price (or Mr. Glass) - and placing them in a slightly creepy, understaffed asylum. The majority of the film does its business here and that's where it feels most comfortable. In fact, I'd suggest that, due to the nonsense that is perpetrated in the final third, Shyamalan has problems finishing his movies. Not the most controversial statement, I know. The mooted showdown at the tallest building in Philadelphia was nicely shelved, though. It probably would've been too  Die Hard  meets  King Kong,  but it's a herring, none redder. Presum...

The Favourite  is a film set in the reign of Queen Anne of Great Britain sometime around the start of the 18th Century. It's directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, the Greek director of  Dogtooth  and  The Lobster , among others, and stars Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz, Emma Stone and Nicholas Hoult. All of these talented bastards hit the back of the net but the writers - Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara - and the cinematographer - Robbie Ryan - are the unsung water-carriers here. The script is crackling, especially the dialogue between Stone's Abigail and Hoult's Harley, a prime example of which below: Favour is a breeze that shifts direction all the time. Then in a instant you're back sleeping with a bunch of scabrous whores wondering whose finger's in your arse. But it's not only the dialogue that scores. The pacing of the scenes, unlike many period dramas, snaps along and the action travels nicely around the mansion, making the location a character in itself (Ab...

So Merv and I caught  Vice  at the Luna last week and I was chuffed to hear it was showing in the 'new' screens just up Oxford street. (Bonus review - mostly fine, smallish theatre but the seats didn't allow for any spreading, very narrow at the knee area). So, the film. Right after it I think I was riding on a wave of anti-neo-con sentiment, happy to sneer at all the U.S. Republican shithousery. But isolating the film itself took a bit longer and I realised that, aside from its politics and its prosthetics, it's not very good. It's timeline seemed scattershot rather than inventively fractured. The comedic side dishes mostly fell flat. The central idea that Cheney was the real, insidious power behind a raft of evil deeds is not really news and adding in the Unitary Executive Theory angle was perhaps a stretch, considering Nixon had probably tried fiddling this years before. Christian Bale as Cheney is immense, helped in no small part by the amazing prosthet...