Film Shapes

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...

Brazilian writer/director Kleber Mendonça Filho delivers one of the films of the year with this political thriller that hoovered up awards at Cannes. It stars Wagner Moura as Armando, an ex-academic who lands in Recife during Carnival time in 1977. Once there, he's welcomed into a kind of apartment block commune, filled with other 'refugees' from some tyranny or other. The opening of the film teases the situation, slowly unpicking the threads as we cruise through the northern Brazilian setting. It's extremely confident of keeping details held back, no need to rush the exposition. We're introduced to quite a few characters, on both sides of humanity - helpful matriarchs, corrupt cops, selfless in-laws, scuzzy hitmen, crusading journos, and one Jewish German Holocaust survivor. Yep, there's a lot going on here. Around the end of the first act, we flash-forward to the present to find a couple of researchers going through old cassette tapes of interviews between Arm...

So I was driving back from down south and we decided to fiddle with the radio. A generic FM station appeared and my Gen X ears knew most of the tracks, some ok, some dire. But the thing that prompted me to start this post was that a couple of the songs were clearly linked to films from the 1980s. I began thinking that, as much as it doesn't really happen now (or even much after the end of that decade, with some notable exceptions), this 'movie/song tie-in' was a huge pop culture phenomenon back then. As a massive time-wasting technique, I decided to do a bit of research and try to find the film and song pairing that was the most popular of the era. Box Office Mojo helped with the film's takings, but how to discern a song's popularity? I've had a look at the US Billboard charts and the UK top 40, so we'll see if this goes some way to covering it.  Ultimately, the song that YOU heard on the radio all the time, or watched on MTV (often with the film's actor...

I caught this at the Luna back in November as part of the Akira Kurosawa retrospective and was happily gobsmacked to find screen one nearly full. It was the biggest crowd I've seen at the cinema for a long while. Kurosawa still packing them in! It's actually the first non-samurai film of his I've seen but it has his stamp of lingering, physically moving mid-shots and busy action within the frame of the wider shots.  The setting is Yokohama, Japan in the early 1960s (the film was made in 1963). A shoe company executive, Gondo (Toshiro Mifune) is planning a share takeover when his son's friend, mistaken for the son, is kidnapped. The kidnapper demands roughly the same amount of money required to finalise the financial coup, putting Gondo in quite the tsukemono! Mifune is commanding in the lead (odd seeing him in a suit) but detective 'Bos'n' Taguchi (Kenjiro Ishiyama) is the standout. He looks like so many of the oji-sans hanging out at the horse tracks of Jap...

Here's a French police procedural that doesn't promise closure, in fact it pretty much tells us that this is based on one of France's many unsolved murders. Soon enough, that lack of climactic suspense proves to be a boon for The Night of the 12th . The audience (me anyway) can leave the 'whodunit' nature to one side and just focus on the relationships, the characterisation and the actual procedure, as well as the effects of these types of crimes. Director, Dominik Moll (also co-writer with Gilles Marchand), takes the book by Pauline Guéna and builds the story around detective Yohan Vivès (a great Bastien Bouillon), a newly promoted captain in the Grenoble police department. On his first morning in the new job, his team are called to a town at the foot of the Alps where a young woman has been burnt to death by an unknown assailant. The usual steps are taken - ascertain victim's identity, canvass potential witnesses, inform parents, begin interviewing possible c...