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

Nosferatu

The best looking film of the year, this has a gorgeous array of visuals that elicited a number of quiet 'wows' and intakes of breath from yours truly. Big praise to cinematographer Jarin Blaschke, production designer Craig Lathrop, art director Robert Cowper, set decorator Beatrice Brentnerova, and of course, director Robert Eggers for getting this crew together - he seems to use a lot of the same folk for his films, and fair enough, when this is the final product. Eggers has adapted the script from Henrik Galeen's original for F. W. Murnau's 1922 film, itself none too subtly ripped off from Bram Stoker's novel, Dracula . This is Eggers' fourth feature after The Witch , The Lighthouse , and The Northman and while I haven't yet seen the first two, I didn't care much for The Northman , typically wondrous images aside. He flirts with the pomposity that affected his previous film but here it matches the gothic tones and source text, that is until Aaron Tayl...

The Quiet Girl

This is a great film, especially in the way that it manages to create something interesting out of a reasonably mundane synopsis. A young girl is sent away to a relative's house for the summer where she is treated better than at home. Sounds like it could have a bit of Rohmer-style youthful awakenings? Or maybe some gritty Loach-ian societal comment? Even perhaps a revenge tinged 'fear the youth' theme? Well, it's none of the above, and more power to its style. The Quiet Girl herself (Cáit) is a newcomer, Catherine Clinch, and she was apparently found via an Irish language school call out. She's incredible - meek, direct, no airs nor graces whatsoever, with a clear-eyed awkwardness. She's almost like a little female Bowie in The Quiet Girl Who Fell to Earth (no, not a film but I thought I'd italicise anyway). There are orbiting performances that complement her perfectly. Carrie Crowley and Andrew Bennet play Eibhlín and Seán Cinnsealach, the couple who tak...

The Good Boy

This English/Polish co-production is not to be confused with Good Boy , a dog-based horror film, even though in most regions the definite article is removed - it seems only Australia and the UK have it as The Good Boy . To muddy the waters more, in some areas, including the US, Brazil and the Netherlands, it's called Heel , something you might say to a dog. Anyway, I'll call it THE Good Boy because that's how it's being sold here. It's directed by a Polish guy called Jan Komasa, who's done some features in Poland, and written by first time writer Bartek Bartosik, alongside slightly more established Naqqash Khalid. They've concocted a genre pic that flirts with horror, winks at black comedy and straight up propositions psychological dependency drama. At the beginning of the film, young scally Tommy (Anson Boon) is a hateable twat, acting 'the big I am' on a night out, drug-fucked and aggro with everyone, until he sets off on his own for more action. ...

The Captive

Screening at the Spanish and Latin American Film Festival , Alejandro Amenabar's first film since 2019 is a mildly controversial take on the 5-year captivity of legendary Spanish author, Miguel de Cervantes. We begin the film as Cervantes is led into a dusty courtyard in Algiers, along with many other kidnappees. Before he can be sold as a slave, or sliced up for insubordination, he presents a letter from the Spanish court, signalling that perhaps it's better he be kept as a hostage for ransom. The film takes a bit of time to get rolling from here but when it does it settles into a clever mix of melodrama and weighty ideas. Cervantes, with his weak left arm acting like an acting crutch, slowly becomes the cheerleader of the prisoners, writing his stories in the air, only stopping when he temporarily runs light on material. The story takes a hurdle when the Bey, a high-ranking provincial governor (Alessandro Borghi) overhears the stories told in the courtyard and summons Cerv...

Supergirl

This new superhero flick from the DCU is an incel's nightmare. Following on from James Gunn's Superman of last year, Craig Gillespie takes the director's reins for this spin-off, Supergirl . Quick deviation - partway through, there's a clever aside about how Kara gets the 'girl' label, while her cousin Kal-El can use 'man'. Starting as it means to go on. Before we actually see the lead, we open with the motivating event of a family slaughter by the face-studded Krem of the Yellow Hills (Matthias Schoenaerts), sending young Ruthye (Eve Ridley) off on a revenge quest, which eventually drags in Kara Kor-El (Milly Alcock). Kara is on a week-long birthday bender, making sure to stay in red sun systems so that her powers don't work and the booze does. This is significant for the showstopping transformation yet to come on an interplanetary bus. Look, the film itself is fine, nothing new in the storyline structure (Andrew from The Curb notes that 'the ...

The Christophers

The title of the film refers to a series of paintings started by Julian Sklar in the 90s but left unfinished for reasons made clear later. Sklar, as played by Ian McKellen, is eccentric and irascible, and seems to be a blend of famous British painters, Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud. As Sklar is getting on in years, his grown children hatch a plan to have the paintings 'completed' for sale, with, or preferably without, their father's knowledge. For this undertaking they must enlist renowned art restorer (and dab hand forger), Lori Butler, an old acquaintance from art college. The premise is fine, but unfortunately, as created by Steven Soderbergh (director) and Ed Solomon (writer), it doesn't have any legs. Paradoxically, the best bits are probably also part of the reason it falters. McKellen is superb as the lovelorn painter, artistically blocked and emotionally bitter. His pithy, acerbic dialogue is great and he gives the performance full welly, but the actual storyli...

Head-On

I saw this confronting 2004 drama at the German Film Festival as part of a retrospective of Fatih Akin films. Unfortunately, there was only one screening in Perth, there might be extra shows in other cities. Akin's a great stylist, authentic and functional, and his films are informed by his cultural standing as a German-Turkish writer/director. In this film, a rough looking bloke called Cahit (Birol Ünel) smashes his car - head-on - into a wall after a heavy night on the turps. While getting treatment, he meets Sibel (Sibel Kekilli), a young woman who recognises his shared dual nationality status. She's looking for a 'Turkish' guy to marry, so her parents will get off her back. Initially sceptical and aggressively dismissive, Cahit realises Sibel is dangerously desperate, so he agrees to the sham marriage. There's an early bump in the road when Cahit kicks Sibel out on their wedding night for asking about his dead wife. Soon enough though, things settle into a room...

Franz: Becoming Kafka

In this fractured, somewhat unconventional biopic, various characters take on the role of narrator, breaking the fourth wall within the story. As curious as the method of delivery here is, the bones of the film itself still function to paint the picture of one of the 20th century's most lauded writers. We witness Kafka's less than perfect childhood with unloving father and powerless mother; his possible spectrum hovering; his near-crippling insecurities; his tricky relationships with women; and eventually the illness that brought on his early death. Director Agnieszka Holland is still firing at 77 years old, she's quite happy to lean towards experimentation and, along with her co-writer, Marek Epstein, she imbues the film with a surrealism similar to Kafka's work. Aside from the 'to camera' narration, the timeline jumps around, even bringing in elements of 21st century Kafka tourism with French, Japanese and American tour guides, who may or may not be on the lev...

Best Films of 2011 to 2020 - End of Decade Report

I realised a few weeks ago that I've been doing the Film Shapes blog since 2011. This got me thinking that it might be a doddle to put together an aggregation of the top tens of each year, a kind of 'best of the decade' list. Not such an easy task. I've had to stretch a mooted ten out to twenty and the order has been troubling me for some days. As it turns out, all these films were actually made between 2011 and 2020, otherwise titles like Inception may have snuck in. Anyway, I'll leave you with this for now and bugger the consequences. 20. Slow West (2015) An odd, melodic Western, directed by John Maclean (of The Beta Band), this has young Scot, Kodi Smitt-McPhee crossing the perilous US west, helped or hindered along the way by their excellencies Michael Fassbender and Ben Mendelsohn. As the title suggests, it's slow-paced but that's what sets it apart from other films of its ilk. Come to think of it, this is a pretty lonely ilk. 19. Bohemian Rhap sody ...

Nope

Jordan Peele really doesn't flinch from a stoush. His first film, Get Out , took an excoriating swipe at racism and white privilege in the US. His second film, Us , delved into class divides and human rights. His latest film, Nope , takes aim at man's subjugation of nature, primarily for profit. The marketing of this film suggests a creepy, sci-fi alien invasion film, and while this is all accurate, there's more going on here too. Daniel Kaluuya, returning for a second Peele film (after Get Out ), plays OJ Haywood, a trainer of horses that appear in films or TV. His father, Otis senior (Keith David), is killed early doors in a freak accident....or is it? Well, no obviously, it isn't, but life moves on for 6 months before more manure flies. OJ is joined by his sister, Emerald (Keke Palmer), as the Haywood Hollywood Horses business, bereft of the old man's guidance and experience perhaps, begins to flounder. OJ has been selling some of the horses to Steven Yuen's ...

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