Film Shapes

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...

This preview for the Nordic Film Festival is a proper drama for grown-ups, directed and co-written by Maria Sødahl, that poses some curly questions. It's about a middle class Danish couple on holiday with their young daughters in the Canary Islands. Interestingly, the Danish title is Paradis , which carries a bit more irony than its English title. Mikkel (Esben Smed) and Louise (Danica Curcic) are a typically 'normal' couple from northern Europe, enjoying their island holiday when they run down a bloke while driving at night. He turns out to be Ahmed (Aziz Çapkurt), a refugee from Afghanistan, and his leg is pretty munted. Trying to do the right thing, they take him to hospital and leave him with some cash, and crucially, their resort room and phone numbers. This minor act of kindness, and no little guilt, sets in motion a slow building series of events that fucks with the couple's holiday, and relationship in a wider sense. The resurfacing of Ahmed is clearly signpost...

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...

Here's a police procedural drama from the Alliance Francais French Film Festival with a minor key change. Case 137 is based on true events from 2018 during the Gilets jaunes (Yellow Vest) protests in Paris. The case (or dossier in the version originale) involves a young lad who was shot in the head with an LBD riot gun (basically rubber bullets) and then left on the street. He survived, but with life changing injuries. The IGPN internal affairs department are brought in to investigate. Léa Drucker takes the lead as Stéphanie, a single mum dealing with resentment from her ex-husband, his new girlfriend, and most other members of the force, who believe the cops should look after their own and not 'police the police'. Her teenage son is also concerned that everyone he talks to hates 'les flics'. There's a slight hitch in the case when it's discovered that the injured guy and his family come from Saint-Dizier, also Stéphanie's home town. Director, Dominik M...

This final film at the Lotterywest Film Season for the Perth Festival is a surprising gem. It combines a great musical opening scene with a fine entrance from Matthew McConaughey. Writer/director Andrew Patterson knows who he's got on his hands here. McConaughey has fun with this role of Amziah King, his first real starring part since The Gentleman in 2019, and in fairness, the film probably wouldn't have been made without him. The story goes thus: a honey maker (or beekeeper, apiarist, professor of bees, call him what you will) is coopted into helping the police identify a stolen batch of honey barrels. After a frankly incredible (in the good sense of the word) honey heating procedure that goes off the rails, Amziah finds himself at cafe, where he bumps into Kateri, a young woman who used to foster with him when she was a kid. A star is unearthed here in Angelina LookingGlass (what a name!), in her debut film role, and the rest of the cast is fittingly grubby and grungy. Kur...

I went along to Luna Outdoor last Friday to see a preview of local lad, Zac Hilditch's Albany shot, Tassie set zombie drama, We Bury the Dead . The premise goes that the US government has accidentally detonated an experimental pulse weapon close to the east coast of Tasmania, killing more than 500,000 people. A side note to this disaster is that some of the dead are rebooting. Daisy Ridley plays Ava, an American physical therapist looking for her husband, who was in Tassie on a work retreat. She volunteers to be part of a body retrieval unit but is told she must not leave Hobart. She meets Clay (Brenton Thwaites) and they manage to cadge a motorbike and hit the road south. On the way, among the rebooted, they run into soldier Riley (Mark Coles Smith), who has his own reasons for being out of the capital. In a Q&A after the film with The Curb's Andrew F. Peirce, Hilditch mentioned that the film started out as a pure grief drama, and zombies were added to the script later. Th...

Hamnet sounds like something you might take pig fishing but it's actually a fine new film from Chloé Zhao. It looks at how a seismic event in the life of William Shakespeare and, crucially, his wife Agnes, may have contributed to the creation of one of the Bard's most famous plays. The film is based on the novel of the same name by Maggie O'Farrell, and begins with the introduction of Agnes (A.K.A. Anne) Hathaway, played by Jessie Buckley. She's a strong-willed, earthy falconer and more than a match for besotted Will (Paul Mescal), who spies her returning from the woods one day. Will is employed to tutor Agnes's younger brothers and initially takes her for a servant girl, such is her lack of guile and conceit. They eventually get together and are forced into a shotgun wedding, thanks to the beast with two backs. Agnes is a great support for her husband (who, incidentally, is rarely referred to in the film as Shakespeare) and makes a lot of sacrifices to enable him ...

Before this film, Paul Thomas Anderson had at least one certifiable classic on his CV in There Will Be Blood . Now, make that two. In saying this, most of his films range from good to brilliant. This is his second adaptation of a Thomas Pynchon novel (after the uneven but interesting Inherent Vice ) and it looks at the lives of modern American revolutionaries, notably members of French 75. The group are apparently named after a WWI weapon, and then a cocktail, both of which have something of a kick.  Leonardo DiCaprio plays Bob, The Rocket Man, who makes the ordnance for the group and is in a relationship with fellow revolutionary, Perfidia (Teyana Taylor). A combination of a run-in with Sean Penn's Colonel Steven Lockjaw, and a rash killing of a security guard triggers more interest in the group, and so a roundup begins. Perfidia is caught, then forced to name names before doing a runner. But not before she has a daughter with Bob, whom he is left to raise on the run. After this f...

I had a bit of time to spare while the car was getting a service so I decided to visit the Greater Union Morley cinemas one last time (it closed a few days after I saw this). I think this was the first cinema I went to when I came back from Japan in 2016 and sadly, it hadn't had a touch up since then, possibly not for a long time before either. Fingers crossed for a brand spanking new cinema complex one day.  Anyway, the film I saw was The Long Walk , and it's a bit of an oddity. It's based on a Stephen King (writing as Richard Bachman) book from 1979. King seems to have a thing for these dystopian 'last one standing' stories (see also The Running Man , an Arnie adaptation was made in 1987, and Edgar Wright has a new version up his sleeve, opening soon). Director Francis Lawrence returns to the theme of his Hunger Games films, riffing on Battle Royale , but also, many of these types of films where characters get picked off one by one, from Alien to Monty Python an...

Tim Key adds value to every film or TV show he appears in but here he has found his perfect role. Of course, it helps if you write the thing yourself (with help from co-star, Tom Basden). Key plays Charles, a slightly buffoonish, slightly clever 'lord of the manor' type who has invited Basden's Herb to his lightly-populated island to play a gig. Herb was part of a reasonably successful folk duo in years past but is now solo, and experimenting with genres (As another character queries, "Is 'commercial' a genre?"). Charles has the means to pay handsomely for this intimate concert but Herb isn't aware just how intimate it promises to be. Nor is he aware that Charles has also invited the other half of McGwyer/Mortimer, Nell, to the island, in order to reunite after nearly 10 years. Nell is played by Carey Mulligan, another casting triumph. She's always great but is really natural and confident here, with a fine singing voice (also heard in Inside Llewy...

The Guardian recently ran an article on the ten best World War II films, as voted by respondents to a Deltapoll for The War Movie Theatre podcast (see their list and link at the end of this piece). As this year is 80 years since the end of hostilities, I thought it might be interesting to run down my top twenty World War II films. Here we go: 20.  Empire of the Sun   (Steven Spielberg - 1987)  This China-set drama of expats during the war in the Pacific theatre was Christian Bale's first big role at the age of 13. He's pretty bloody good too, as are most of the cast, including John Malkovich and Nigel Havers. Spielberg saw this J.G. Ballard story as a chance to make a comparatively 'darker' film about the loss of innocence and it turned out to be one of his very best. 19.  The English Patient   (Anthony Minghella - 1996)  All the press for this film was the love story angle between dreamy Ralph Fiennes (pre-Voldemort, of course) and elegantly icy Kristin Sc...