Film Shapes

Masquerade begins with a quote from Somerset Maugham: "The French Riviera is a sunny place for shady people." We later find out the house of Isabelle Adjani's truculent Martha was once owned by the author. Immediate snap to Murray Head's One Night in Bangkok : "Tea, girls, warm, sweet. Some are set up in the Somerset Maugham suite." Great lyrics, but let's move on. Writer/director Nicolas Bedos sets this tale of scammers and dupes (or pigeons) in the stunning south of France, the Riviera that Maugham was so taken with, and to be fair, the scenery competes for star billing.  Those human stars are suitably glimmering, though, as you've got Adjani alongside François Cluzet and Emmanuel Devos, on the aging side, with Marine Vacth and Pierre Niney representing the youth. All are brilliant, except Niney as the nominal lead, Adrien - he's lacking a bit of grit or charm or something. He's ok, just not quite up to the level of the others. Vacth, as M...

Ténor is a rudimentary 'fish out of water', 'clash of cultures' drama, with French rap and opera representing the opposing lifestyles. I guess its claim to fame is the fact that the lead is Mohammed Belkhir (a.k.a. MB14), a rapper who appeared on the French version of irritating 'talent' show,  The Voice.  This is his first film but he looks like he's been doing this for yonks, and if it's really him singing, he certainly got some pipes on him. His co-star is the classy Michèle Laroque - she plays Madame Loyseau, the opera tutor who discovers Antione (MB14).  There's nothing ground-breaking here but Claude Zidi Jr. is only on his third film and he doesn't do too much wrong in the handling of it. The story creaks a bit, especially when Antoine is off-screen, and some of the characters are a bit cliched, in the shape of the tough and thick, yet loving brother, Didier (Guillaume Duhesme) and comic mate sidekick, Elio (Samir Decazza). Antoine is spoi...

Around 15 minutes into this French remake of a Japanese zombie comedy I found myself wondering if this might be the worst film of the year, and even a bit guilty for suggesting Merv see it with me. Imagine my surprise, dear Viz readers, to be happily proven wrong. This is a great lark. The original, One Cut of the Dead , from 2017, seems to be a virtual template, aside from a few clever story angles that connect the two. In a gory nutshell, it concerns a film crew attempting to make a low-budget zombie film in an abandoned events hall, when a bunch of real zombies begin to queer the pitch. Directed (and adapted) by Michel Hazanavicius, of The Artist fame, this opened the Cannes Film Festival in May 2022. It stars one of my favourite actors, Roman Duris as Remi, the director, and Bérénice Bejo as Nadia, who has a fantastic reason for giving up acting. Their daughter, Romy, is played by the actual director's daughter, Simone Hazanavicius (also step-daughter of Bejo, it's all get...

Quiet dignity radiates from this moving remake of Kurosawa's  Ikiru  and it has the recognisable stamp of Kazuo Ishiguro all over it. This acclaimed (Nobel Prize-winning, even) novelist has previous with Merchant/Ivory fare - he wrote the screenplay for  The White Countess  and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala adapted his great novel,  The Remains of the Day  - and  Living  isn't too far removed from the style of these Brit heavyweights. The focus is on stuffy Mr. Williams, played with fierce introspection by Bill Nighy. As much as we all want him to crack out some semi-drunken wittery, he holds himself in check, and it's probably his most mannered, yet natural performance. He's tip-top in this. Set in early 1950s London, Ishiguro and director, Oliver Hermanus show Williams as a buttoned-up, broadsheet reading, Fortnum & Mason frequenting gentleman - in fact, he confesses that a gentleman was all he ever aspired to be. His confidante takes the form of a y...

Here's a delicately turned out drama about love and repression in a Moroccan medina. Director and co-writer, Maryam Touzani keeps a steady pace, not slow, but nothing's going to waste here. Every scene, every glance, every sigh, every mandarin seems utterly crucial to the story.  For all its outward sobriety, this is quite a seditious film. It concerns a married couple trying to maintain the relevance of their caftan store in the face of 'modern' advances in technology, like....sewing machines. Halim is a traditional maalem (master), attempting to keep the caftan stitching art of his father alive. Mina is the face and brain of the business, it's her idea to bring in an apprentice for Halim. Youssef is a much younger, attractive bloke, whose inexperience is balanced by his eagerness.  The wrinkle in the tale is that Halim is (likely always has been) gay, and the secrecy is clearly weighing on him. He also, very obviously loves his wife, who is doing her best to hold ...

Empire of Light, Sam Mendes's follow-up to   the excellent 1917,  is a low-key, very British attempt at covering a whole range of weighty themes and not quite nailing any of them. This isn't to say it's a bad film, despite the critical shoeing it's copped since release. It just seems slightly misguided. For instance, there are two main characters - Olivia Colman's Hilary, and Micheal Ward's Stephen (three if you count the gorgeous cinema itself) - but the film doesn't quite know when or where to shine its beam of light. The Hilary section lands with a climactic flourish, but this happens about halfway through. Stephen's strand picks up from there and threatens to jumpstart with some character building (ex-girlfriend, mother) but then Hilary re-appears, soon followed by a National Front mob to add some tension and violence. The film juggles three main themes; mental health, racism and the power of cinema, and, unsurprisingly, only one of these is played f...

This is a film heavy with 'premise buzz'; it hangs its hopes, almost singularly, on the simple combination of a bear and shitloads of cocaine. By the amount of reviews I've seen rolling through my social timelines in the last few days, I'd say it's doing the job. The poster is great, and there's one word on it that's used extremely loosely - 'INSPIRED by true events'. These true events involved drug dealers dumping around 40 containers of cocaine into the Tennessee wilderness, and a black bear eating a lot of it. The real story is way too prosaic, so a gory action comedy was scaffolded around those bare bones.  An odd, anti-drug TV spot featuring Pee-wee Herman and Nancy Reagan lets us know what tone to expect and it doesn't take its foot off the slightly tacky, weirdly endearing pedal. It has a great 80s music synthy pop soundtrack and the cast is one of the most esoteric I've seen in a long time. Keri Russell is probably the lead, along wit...

This striking documentary is from the stable of heavy-hitter, Laura Poitras, who has made films about the Iraq War, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. In this Venice Golden Lion winner, she covers the life of photographer/artist Nan Goldin, and zooms in on her fight against the opioid crisis in the US. Poitras handles the structuring really well, there are no jarring transfers between 'stories'; at least, I didn't feel any. Taking roughly equal screentime, Goldin's life story runs chronologically, with the shorter timeline of her current activism interspersed.  It begins (and ends) with Goldin's sister, Barbara, and how she affected the course of her life, and soon turns the focus to the Sackler family, a disgustingly rich cabal of 'big pharma' knobs who have made a proper killing off the sale of addictive opioids since the mid-90s. Goldin, an ex-addict herself, founded P.A.I.N (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), which rails against the Sackler family...