Film Shapes

The Guardian recently ran an article on the ten best World War II films, as voted by respondents to a Deltapoll for The War Movie Theatre podcast (see their list and link at the end of this piece). As this year is 80 years since the end of hostilities, I thought it might be interesting to run down my top twenty World War II films. Here we go: 20.  Empire of the Sun   (Steven Spielberg - 1987)  This China-set drama of expats during the war in the Pacific theatre was Christian Bale's first big role at the age of 13. He's pretty bloody good too, as are most of the cast, including John Malkovich and Nigel Havers. Spielberg saw this J.G. Ballard story as a chance to make a comparatively 'darker' film about the loss of innocence and it turned out to be one of his very best. 19.  The English Patient   (Anthony Minghella - 1996)  All the press for this film was the love story angle between dreamy Ralph Fiennes (pre-Voldemort, of course) and elegantly icy Kristin Sc...

My final tilt at the 2025 German Film Festival turned out to be a Swiss/Belgian/Italian co-production, directed by Silvio Soldini. It's based on a book by Rosella Postorino called At the Wolf's Table , about a year or so in the life of Margot Wölk. This luckless woman was one of 15 official food tasters for Hitler when he was staying at the Wolf's Lair in East Prussia (current day Poland). Rosa Sauer (Elisa Schlott) arrives at her parents-in-law's house in the town of Parcz to await the return of her husband from the Eastern Front. Not long after, she is co-opted into a perverse gig at the military compound just outside the town - Rosa and several other young, healthy women must taste the Fuhrer's food before he eats it, in case it's poisoned. The dynamic between the women is well played. Some are suspicious of Rosa, due to the fact that she's from Berlin; one is young and naive; one is blindly loyal to the Reich; one is staunchly discreet. All are bricking ...

Artist biopics are few and far between these days. Mr. Turner in 2014 and Daaaaaali! in 2023 come to mind as relatively recent examples, and Van Gogh and Picasso are always popular subjects. This German production, directed by TV stalwart Marcus O. Rosenmüller, looks at the life of Expressionist maestro, Wassily Kandinsky, but crucially, via the perspective of his lover and ex-student, Gabriele Münter. The film starts and ends with her and Vanessa Loibl gives the character a vivid intensity. We see Münter's dissatisfaction with the lot of women in turn of the century Munich. She wants to study and practice her art and so is chuffed when she hears of a studio called the Phalanx, where women are allowed to attend. This is where she meets the intense Kandinsky, a lecturer at the college. After some visible romantic tension, a painting excursion to picturesque Kochel brings them together. Post coitus, Kandinsky tells Münter that he wants her to leave the trip early as his wife is com...

This eighth entry in the Mission: Impossible franchise feels like a good place to end things. The series is rapidly ripening and it's possible that any more and we might be getting into the fruit fly stage. It's not going out on a limb to say they will probably continue until Tom Cruise is in traction but, by the looks of this warlock, he'll outlast us all. The Final Reckoning is many things to many people. On the one hand, it's great fun, packed with tension and brilliantly edited to within an inch of its celluloid life (kudos to the editor with a name like a British snooker player, Eddie Hamilton). On the other hand, it reeks with honking dialogue and convoluted exposition that wastes an awful lot of its lengthy run-time (170 mins, no thanks Mr. Bladder). One character actually says, "It's the end of the world as we know it." At this stage, I didn't feel fine. And for your bingo card, make a cross in the square for 'characters saying the name o...

This is the sixth and final film in phase five of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and by my reckoning, it's the second best of the phase (after the third Guardians film). It's certainly an improvement on the flaccid Captain America: Brave New World from a few months back. Kevin Feige has done a good bit of business getting the right team together here, not unlike the film itself. The reasonably unknown crew includes director Jacob Schreier, writers Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo, and cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo. Schreier hasn't actually directed a feature for ten years (he's been involved in TV) but they all have some interesting credits to their names. The film picks up the story of Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), adopted sister of Black Widow. She's taking jobs for Valentina de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), mostly illegal cleanup gigs with high body counts, but is becoming disenchanted with all the drudgery. She's in a murderous malaise. A fatality funk...

Hats off to Ryan Coogler for turning out this vibrantly bloody cracker with only his fifth feature. It's also quite a hand brake turn after two Black Panther films and one Rocky spin-off to deliver a singular story like this (I'm presuming there'll be no Sinners Cinematic Universe but I could be wrong). I say singular but actually, this owes a lot to Tarantino, and many other genre directors. I'm dancing around the issue here as the best way to watch this is to be completely unaware of what you're going to get. What I can say is that this is great fun. It really zips along, there's hardly a scene without forward momentum. Even the wonderfully ambitious musical numbers (relax, it's not a musical) add background to the story. Coogler's script crackles, especially in the mouths of the excellent cast - more on them later. One of the best things about this is that it disguises itself really well, you're not sure where it's going until it arrives the...