Film Shapes

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 ...

This English/Polish co-production is not to be confused with Good Boy , a dog-based horror film, even though in most regions the definite article is removed - it seems only Australia and the UK have it as The Good Boy . To muddy the waters more, in some areas, including the US, Brazil and the Netherlands, it's called Heel , something you might say to a dog. Anyway, I'll call it THE Good Boy because that's how it's being sold here. It's directed by a Polish guy called Jan Komasa, who's done some features in Poland, and written by first time writer Bartek Bartosik, alongside slightly more established Naqqash Khalid. They've concocted a genre pic that flirts with horror, winks at black comedy and straight up propositions psychological dependency drama. At the beginning of the film, young scally Tommy (Anson Boon) is a hateable twat, acting 'the big I am' on a night out, drug-fucked and aggro with everyone, until he sets off on his own for more action. ...

I'm really getting into the 28UoTLCU (28 'Unit of Time' Later Cinematic Universe). This edition is directed by Nia DaCosta, and she picks up the reins from Danny Boyle and slots right into the landscape. The biggest takeaway from The Bone Temple is that Father Figure transference is rife, throughout both of these '28 Years' films, actually. If we choose the obvious link, Spike (Alfie Williams) is passed from parents, Isla (Jodie Comer) and Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) in the first film, onto two polar opposites, Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) and Jimmy Crystal (Jack O'Connell) in this one, and presumably to a certain returnee in the third installment.  But there are also other relationships in the film(s) that explore the nature of dependency, and we have to assume writer Alex Garland, DaCosta, and godfather Boyle, have other, real-world settings in mind, not purely in the zombie genre. This manifests in the rapprochement of Dr. Kelson towards the 'infected', s...

What's this then? Modern horror, I guess. Or just another addition to the relatively recent spate of animal-titled films: The Lobster , The Crow , The Whale , Pig , Lamb , First Cow , Black Dog , Red Dog ,  Dog Man ,  Monkey Man ,  Wolf Man , Cuckoo , Cocaine Bear , and Hundreds of Beavers . Whatever the reason for its existence, this Stephen King adaptation is a curious beast. Osgood Perkins (son of old Norman Bates himself, Anthony Perkins) writes and directs here. He also has a pretty funny cameo. The story starts with a bloke in a pilot's uniform (Adam Scott) trying to sell a windup drumming monkey toy (DON'T CALL IT A TOY!!). A bloody event occurs, not for the last time in the movie. Cut to 1999 where we meet Hal Shelburn and his twin, Bill (both played by Christian Convery), who live with their mother, Lois (an in-form Tatiana Maslany). The pilot of the opening scene is the dad/hubby who has done a runner, leaving the cursed monkey for the lads to find (though, to b...

Ho ho, yo yos. Here's my rundown of films in 2024. By my best count I saw 124 films last year, 115 of them new watches (though not necessarily made or released in 2024), and 61 of them at the cinema. Of those cinema trips, 28 were at Luna Leederville , 14 at Palace Raine Square and 10 at the Backlot Perth , with 6 other cinemas making up the numbers. So here are my 10 favourite films from 2024, with a top 5 pod down the bottom... [Click on the titles for links to full reviews] 10. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) George Miller's follow-up to Fury Road tells us the story of how Furiosa got to where that film started. I reckon this was the best blockbuster of the year, certainly the most entertaining, with one epic action sequence and a couple of fine performances from Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth. Great fun. 9. The Taste of Things (2023) Don't go in hungry! This is a foodie's shan-grill-ah, the high culinary masterwork of the last decade or more. Juliette Binoch...

The best looking film of the year, this has a gorgeous array of visuals that elicited a number of quiet 'wows' and intakes of breath from yours truly. Big praise to cinematographer Jarin Blaschke, production designer Craig Lathrop, art director Robert Cowper, set decorator Beatrice Brentnerova, and of course, director Robert Eggers for getting this crew together - he seems to use a lot of the same folk for his films, and fair enough, when this is the final product. Eggers has adapted the script from Henrik Galeen's original for F. W. Murnau's 1922 film, itself none too subtly ripped off from Bram Stoker's novel, Dracula . This is Eggers' fourth feature after The Witch , The Lighthouse , and The Northman and while I haven't yet seen the first two, I didn't care much for The Northman , typically wondrous images aside. He flirts with the pomposity that affected his previous film but here it matches the gothic tones and source text, that is until Aaron Tayl...

The old Cygnet cinema in Como reopened, initially for the Strange Festival in July, but is now running films from a very wide range of genres and eras (as well as quality levels).  An exhaustive scan through the calendar turned up the seminal kids'  fantasy-comedy,  Gremlins  from 1984. Seeing an opportunity to show the kids some 80s style, we ventured south of the river for the fi r st time in ages. Now I hadn't seen this since about, hmmm, maybe 1986 (I'm pretty sure I was too young to see it at the cinema on release, so it must have been a TV screening). It's an oddity, in that it borders on horror, flirts with comedy and yet is, at its centre, a soppy heart-warmer from Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment, written by Chris Columbus. Apparently though, this film (as well as  Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom ) forced the MPAA to bring in the PG-13 rating, due to complaints about violent scenes. It starts with a slightly misplaced voice-over from an inventor/sa...

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...

Abigail follows in the tradition of using a woman's name for the film title: Carrie , Christine , Coraline , Mandy , M3gan , Pearl (with MaXXXine on her way), and these are only from the horror genre. Titling is not the only thing lifted from elsewhere. The story sees a gang of crims carrying out a kidnapping only to find the tables turned when they realise the victim is not so....fragile. It's very difficult to speak about this film without giving the game away, and that's possibly one of the reasons why it didn't grab me. It really would have been enhanced had the marketing not laid out the 'twist' but these are the times we live in. By plugging this as a vampire ballerina film, the gang's surprise is not shared by the audience. Once that realisation is out of the way, it settles into a pretty tread-worn rhythm. Expendable members are dispatched, relationships are made and betrayed, blood and viscera are spilled. The film goes through the motions until ...

First up - great title, Violent Night . Combine these words on the poster with a bedraggled, blood-encrusted Santa Claus, chewing a candy cane like Eastwood chewed his cigar, and you've done half the job of selling the film. It also helps that it's a riot of inappropriateness - vomit, piss and (reindeer) shit all occur within the first few minutes, with the blood and gore soon to follow. Season's greetings to all! David Harbour plays Santa, disenchanted and ready to hang up the sack, when he drunkenly stumbles into a criminal heist situation at a luxurious mansion. The unimportant upshot is the family matriarch, Gertrude Lightstone (Beverly D'Angelo), has illegally ferreted away a stash of millions in her vault, which boss wrong'un, Scrooge (John Leguizamo) has sniffed out (how? again, not important). The heart, and the cheese, of the film rests with Gertrude's granddaughter, Trudy (Leah Brady) and, to a lesser extent, her separated parents, Jason and Linda (Ale...