Film Shapes

So that's Rev for another year. I made it to eight films and it was far from a stellar collection, but I think I made the wrong choice to start with - Bulk , when I could have waited an hour and watched Rosebush Pruning , which looked better in hindsight. Anyhoo, live and learn, I guess. Here are the films I saw in viewing order: Bulk    ★ Boy, this was hard to get through. More pleased with itself than it had any right to be. Sam Riley and Alexandra Maria Lara are together again (after the vastly superior Control ) with Noah Taylor wafting around too. Writer/director Ben Wheatley has had a roller-coaster of a career so far, but this must be one of the nadirs. There are elements of Team America: World Police , Eraserhead and model work reminiscent of Ray Harryhausen, but the overripe dialogue, annoying performances, and sheer boredom all serve to give this a whiff of a pretentious student film (past experience verified). Avoid. Penny Lane is Dead    ★ ★ ★ There is ...

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 Revelation Perth International Film Festival 2025 is almost upon us and there are some promising looking films on offer again this year. Rev Program Director, Jack Sargeant picks 5 of the films he's excited about: Lesbian Space Princess [Australia/87min Directed by Emma Hough Hobbs, Leela Varghese] Pavements [United States/128min Directed by Alex Ross Perry] Alice in the Cities [Germany/113min Directed by Wim Wenders] Pater Noster and the Mission of Light [United States/96min Directed by Christopher Bickel] September Says [Ireland, UK, France, USA, Germany/100min Directed by Ariane Labed] Aside from these, I'm also looking forward to the following: Of Caravan and the Dogs [Germany/89min Directed by Anonymous, Askold Kurov] The Thinking Game  [United States/84min Directed by Greg Kohs] U are the Universe  [Ukraine/101min Directed by Pavlo Ostrikov] Eddington  [United States/148min Directed by Ari Aster] 1978  [Argentina/76min Directed by Luciano Onetti & Nicol...

Well, that brings an end to a fantastic edition of the Revelation Perth International Film Festival . I managed fewer films than I'd hoped due to a rough cold, but still got to see nine (plus one at the Programme Launch back in May). Spoilt for choice this year - I'll briefly run through my least to most liked: The Primevals   ★ ½ The story behind this film is more interesting than the film itself. Devised in the 70s, with principal photography done in Romania and Italy in 1994, it was finally released in 2023. A bonkers story about Yetis being genetically modified by lizard aliens (I think), this feels like a Ray Harryhausen stop-motion film from the 60s. It's really a vehicle for David Allen's puppet mastery, the bloke has some serious visual effects cred, but he doesn't cut it as a writer/director. I guess if it can produce a line like this -  "The eyes of a dying giraffe can change a man." - then it can't be all bad. Hundreds of Beavers   ★ ★ ½ Ver...

This film was shown at the Revelation Film Festival programme launch for 2024. It's a Turkish legal drama that leaves a lot unsaid, unexplained, with plenty of scope for interpretation. Tülin Özen plays Canan, a lawyer tasked with defending a guy on a murder charge, Musa (Ogulcan Arman Uslu). At the same time, she is dealing with the slow demise of her old mother, hospitalised in a coma.  The minutiae of life in this small Turkish town is fascinating. There's one simple, prosaic scene where Canan stops by a chemist to buy a razor so Musa can shave for the hearing. The shopkeeper asks what kind, she tells him she doesn't know, he selects for her, then explains that she can't use her debit card for that amount, so she buys some pretzel sticks. Completely normal, yet for some reason, I've remembered this scene weeks later. Maybe it's the unusualness of seeing a Turkish store on screen, but I think the on-point pacing of the film has a lot to do with it. Another odd...

It's Rev time again! The Revelation Perth International Film Festival - 27th edition - runs from July 3 to 14 at the Luna cinemas (Leederville and Fremantle), The Backlot cinema , WA Museum Boola Bardip and even Scitech . There are heaps of goodies to glue eyes to screens and bums to seats. Here are some that jumped out at me: Kim's Video - a doco about an iconic New York video store Tenement - a creepy looking Cambodian family drama The Primevals - Yetis, aliens, that's all I need to know The Man I Left Behind - a doco about Canadian photojournalist, Larry Towell Hesitation Wound - a Turkish legal drama (already seen, review to follow) Kid Snow - Kalgoorlie-shot boxing drama The Parallax View - 50 year anniversary of this political thriller There are also a bunch of music documentaries, a Rev specialty - Born Innocent: The Red Kross Story , Mogwai: If the Stars had a Sound , I Should Have Been Dead Years Ago , and see below... We had a chat with Suzanne Worner, G...

Time to run down the 13 films I saw at this year's Revelation Film Festival. It was a great edition for the 25th anniversary, with some excellent films on show. Here are my thoughts, in ascending order of quality. After Blue   ★ This was quite hard going. It reminded me of struggling through Aleksei German's impenetrably muddy Hard to Be a God (2013). After Blue shares much of that film's aesthetic, with amateur looking sets, foggy darkness and animalistic performances. Director Bertrand Mandico is one of the creators of the Incoherence Manifesto and it certainly shows in this film, which follows a young woman and her mother on the hunt for wanted killer, Kate Bush (not that one). It's set on a planet peopled only by women (the men have died off after growing hair internally) and the story, if you can call it that, sends the mother and daughter to a mountain lair and back again. There are worthy feminist and environmental messages here but I didn't have the stamina...

What a little oddity this is. Coming in at a tic under 1 hour, it's an electronic fever dream of a film. The premise is that some time in the future humanity is forced to retreat to reinforced bunkers at dawn due to the sun's extreme heat (something like thousands of degrees, if I remember rightly). The opening shows us a group of people racing back to the shelter, heeding the broadcast to get a wriggle on. On the way back, one of the characters knifes another guy in the stomach and we see the blood drift upwards from the wound, as though in very low gravity. It starts as it means to go on. Once back inside the rudimentary safe room, we meet others in the group via some very French musings. There's a young woman who is attempting to shag everyone else and a Japanese bloke in wooden geta. There's an old fella who seems the sensible anchor, a techy guy who is on the way to discovering the eponymous planet, a theatrical woman who kind of acts as a circuit breaker to events...