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 ...

Prolific writer/director, Alice Rohrwacher brings us this 1980s-set tale of a gang of Tombaroli, petty crims who steal artefacts from Etruscan tombs to sell on the black market. Their nominal leader, Arthur, returns to his shack, barnacled onto the side of an imposing castle city somewhere Tuscany. He has been 'away' and clearly has the major hump, if his reactions to his old crew have any bearing. The one person he wants to see is Flora, the mother of his absent girlfriend. It's in this run-down mansion that we meet, Italia, a slightly hesitant, slightly careless music student of Flora. So far, so good, but after this promising start, the films sadly peters out a bit. Josh O'Connor plays Arthur, an Englishman with a talent for dowsing archaeological sites, and he's asked to pull miserable for most of the journey. There's not much else to him and this lack of range doesn't help the film as a whole, unfortunately. Isabella Rossellini, on the other hand is fan...