Film Shapes

Wake Up Dead Man (without a comma to be seen) is the third Benoit Blanc mystery, written and directed by Rian Johnson. Daniel Craig stars again as the Foghorn Leghorn-twanging detective but he's a touch overshadowed here by the 'supporting' cast, namely Josh O'Connor as young priest, Jud (Judas anyone?) Duplenticy, Josh Brolin as Monsignor Wicks and Glenn Close as church dogsbody Martha. Though it seems O'Connor is the new big thing, especially in indie films, I find him about as engaging as the weekly supermarket trip. In saying that, he's a pretty good foil for the rest of the characters, who have charisma by the bucketload. Blanc only appears around the start of act two, after all the set-up has been dealt with, in a very similar fashion to the previous films, Knives Out and Glass Onion . We gather that somebody has been killed on Good Friday, and the format for this exposition is a letter that Blanc asks Jud to write to him. This works well enough, (Keigo ...

Here's the seventh installment in the Alien franchise, if we can disregard the two Alien vs Predator efforts, and it fits in the timeline about 20 years after the original film (see graphic below). It kicks off with a hat tip to Ripley and co with a mission to recover some unmentionable. The film then jumps to a grimy mining colony called Jackson's Star, where we're introduced to Cailee Spaeny's Rain and David Jonsson's Andy. She's rebuffed by the authorities in her attempts to get off-planet, and so agrees to a hare-brained scheme to escape the working drudgery and likely death in the mines. Her accomplices, a similarly aged group of chancers, need Andy to get into an abandoned (hmmm) Weyland-Yutani spaceship that they've located floating above them. They need Andy because he's actually a company synthetic and should be compatible with the mystery ship's systems. Set-up over, time for the viscosity. This is director Fede Alvarez's fourth featu...

This is Alex Garland's fourth film as director. He first wrote some novels, including The Beach , then moved onto writing films (often for Danny Boyle, though strangely, not  The Beach ), and then moved onto directing his own scripts. His debut as a writer/director was the excellent Ex Machina . Sadly, this looks more and more like a false dawn. His follow-up, Annihilation , had some promise but lacked something, maybe humour, maybe humility, maybe just an experienced head. His next film, Men , again began with an interesting premise, but rapidly disappeared up its own arse.  So, now to Civil War . First off, it's an improvement on his previous effort. It's set in the near future where the unnamed U.S. President (Nick Offerman) is scrabbling to save his bacon from the approaching Western Forces of California and Texas. It would appear that the 'United States' are much less united in this alternate reality. But here's Garland's proposal - this might actually ...