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.

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Coyote vs. Acme

While there have been loads of Looney Tunes feature films, this is the fourth to mix live action with the animated favourites. There are two Space Jam films, but if you can remember 2003's Looney Tunes: Back in Action , you're doing better than me. This new hybrid, directed by Dave Green, stars Will Forte and John Cena as opposing lawyers in a case brought against Acme by Wile E. Coyote. Oddly, this film is actually based on an article for the New Yorker magazine, written by Ian Frazier, about the downtrodden desert dog and his annoyance with Acme Corporation and their faulty products. I realise that some younger crew will have no idea of the content of the Looney Tunes Road Runner cartoons, so to sum it up: "Road Runner, the Coyote's after you. Road Runner, if he catches you, you're through." Yep, it's a classic, constant chase, and as this film posits, maybe the chase is the point. Logically, and in nature, the coyote would probably eat the bird, if i...

Life is Life

Here's another serving from the Italian Film Festival , this one set mostly in the fictional town of Bellesammama in Southern Sardinia, the beautiful Spiaggia di Tuerredda standing in for the beach paradise. The recognisable story goes that a rich company wants to buy up the land on the beach to build a resort, promising to create jobs and bring untold wealth to the struggling area. Everyone is confident things will be done and dusted in no time until the real estate company runs up against an immovable object, old farmer Efisio (Giuseppe Loi). Offered ever increasing sums of Lira, then as time goes on, Euros, he rejects all. This is his home, he doesn't need anything else. The townsfolk cajole Efisio and chivvy his daughter Francesca (Virginia Raffaele), hoping they'll see reason. The head of the Milanese real estate firm, Giacomo (Diego Abatantuono), sends a foreman, Mariano (Aldo Baglio) to sort things out, and even enlists the local mayor and police. No dice. Althoug...

Dune

Denis Villeneuve's long-awaited Dune finally arrives in Australian cinemas and it's a technical marvel. To start with, there's the amazing production design by Patrice Vermette. A lot of the sets and machinery have been physically created, to add weight to the visual effects. A highlight is the appearance of the 'ornithopter', a clunky, dragonfly of metal, that flaps its wings to fly. The scale of the buildings and cities is mammoth, many of them made on a studio lot in Budapest (see this Architectural Digest article for more). The cinematography, by Melburnian, Greig Fraser, is suitably magic, in keeping with Villeneuve's stylistic requirements, For example, desert scenes have a tendency to go all wind-whipped and blurry, but even when a dragonfly enters a storm, acuity is admirably maintained. The visuals are just a part of Villeneuve's signature language - the almost ethereal long shots across vast rooms and landscapes; the measured, even slow paci...

Classmates

This solid, if not super original, slice of high school life in gritty Euro-environs looks to be a change of tack for director Umberto Riccioni Carteni. Much of his back catalogue appears to be on the frothy end of the spectrum, and oddly, Classmates is listed as a 'Drama, Comedy' in the festival programme. It's not all that heavy but it's a stretch to call it a comedy. It starts with English teacher, credited as Professoressa (Anna Ferzetti) arriving at her new school in a rough-ish area of north-east Rome called Rebibbia. The final year students of this class are generally downheartened nihilists, all carrying problems related to poverty, drugs or family. A more difficult start might have been expected for the Prof but most of her students respond well to her, due to a policy of treating them like humans, not the garbage they (and other teachers) believe they are. A familiar trope of students shouting at each other, insulting and threatening, soon shows itself to be...

Spider-Man: Brand New Day

Well, well, well. This thing has done some business. It's currently SIXTH in all time worldwide receipts, with Titanic in its sights. But, of course, it's problematic to rely on public opinion as a judge of quality. Or maybe that's just me. Because I found this new Spider-Man film to be just slightly above average. They are quite a few positives to take from it. Tom Holland has a winning presence, the omnipotent Zendaya is his equal (they have some nice moments together), and the cameos are fun - Mark Ruffalo's Hulk, Florence Pugh's Yelena Belova, and John Bernthal's Punisher big screen debut. Aside from the performances, the city of New York is almost another character, and it's portrayed lovingly here. The jumpy, swingy scenes feel more realistic than previous films, and there's a dark edge to the story as well, to do with change and maturity. The first grown-up Spider-Man? On that note, I read his situation as a late arrival at puberty. Bear with me...

Resident Evil

This latest Resident Evil is a slight zombie viscera flick that doesn't really say much but is a bit of fun anyway. Director Zach Cregger impressed with Weapons , and folk have good things to say about his film before that, Barbarian , too (I'm yet to watch). His latest is a reboot, retool, reimagining, however you'd like to put it, of the film series spawned from the game in 2002, that eventually mutated to six entries, all gamely starring Milla Jovovich. Now before this new iteration, I'd only seen that first one, but quite possibly one or two more (like the creatures in the film, I'm guessing they all meld together). My gaming credentials are even more paltry - I seem to remember playing a version once years ago, but it could have been any zombie shooting game. So drawing a long bow, I'm going to say this one aims more for the shits and giggles than the others, borrowing from Cregger's previous life as a comedy actor/writer/director. Austin Abrams plays ...

The Odyssey

Christopher Nolan is one of the few active directors who can entice punters to the cinema (along with Denis Villeneuve), and they've come out in droves for his latest, a retelling of Homer's The Odyssey . Matt Damon stars as Odysseus, the king of Ithaca who is co-opted to join his overlord, Agamemnon, in his attack on Troy. After near 10 years of siege, culminating in the Trojan Horse event, the silly bastard then decides to take the scenic route home, and gets plumb lost. What follows is a technically brilliant rendering of mythical nonsense made to feel real. Odysseus's mini-fleet of three ships and maybe 100 (?) men run into several hardships, notably the Cyclops; a small army of huge men called the Laestrygonians; the sorceress, Circe; and some salacious sea nymphs. These set pieces are fantastic, especially the Cyclops (played by TARS voice from Interstellar , Bill Irwin), and Circe's cottage, where she has a way with greedy menfolk. Samantha Morton is almost best...

Prometheus

It has taken me a few days to start this entry as I needed to ponder a number of issues. Without thinking too much about it, I really enjoyed Prometheus . It looked great (2D), the cast was pretty solid, Fassbender excellent, but I'll return to him later and the story was satisfying in its connection to, and, at the same time, its distancing from Alien . Let me explain that last messy clause. I think you can watch this without any knowledge of the Alien series but as most of us over 20 know about the other films, its quite good fun to recognise the hints and echoes throughout. The only slight issues I have are regarding the details in the story. Here's where it may get a little/very SPOILERY, so please look away if you haven't seen the film. Firstly, the religious angle irritated me a bit but I guess if you're investigating the origin of humanity, you might at least pay lip service to "the great magic". And of course, Christianity is at the heart of the ...

Migration (Me) (Kids)

A whole family trip to the cinema for this animated duck movie, written by Mike White (of The White Lotus fame) and directed and co-written by Benjamin Renner. It's a fairly simple storyline - mum and ducklings fancy a trip to Jamaica, risk-averse dad is reluctant. Of course, for the sake of the plot, dad comes around. The journey is physical as well as offering a chance to experience personal (duckal?) growth - the spirit of adventure is enhanced, and the kids, mainly the older lad, transition from childhood to adulthood. There are numerous POV flying scenes - through clouds, between buildings in New York, in a nightmarish kitchen, down water slides, through a jungle - seriously, it's enough to make an adult dizzy. Admittedly though, it feels kind of reductive to even talk about all this as a grown up human. The colours, sounds, Looney Tunes style sight gags, are all mechanically tooled for little grommets to lap up, let's face it, this type of film isn't for the lik...

Queen: Budapest

Pure class. A Hungarian director, János Zsombolyai, and his crew filmed Queen's concert at Népstadion in Budapest in 1986 with a fair number of 35mm cameras. It's recently been finessed for IMAX and the result is a bloody ripping concert film. There's a short preview promo featuring sit-down interviews with Brian May and Roger Taylor and then the concert begins. The band played this unprecedented gig at the end of July, just a couple of weeks after their Wembley sets, and as part of the Magic Tour. It was one of the first stadium concerts played behind the Iron Curtain by a 'Western' band, and apparently around 80,000 punters turned up, with more than half that number listening from outside the stadium. The band run through a typical set list of favourites, starting with One Vision , Tie Your Mother Down , and (my favourite from the gig) Seven Seas of Rhye . Other belting highlights include Under Pressure , Now I'm Here , Hammer to Fall , and Radio Ga Ga . Watch...

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