ALINE
Cinemas Now
* * *
Valérie Lemercier’s wackadoodle ‘unauthorised’ biopic of Céline Dion stars the 57-year old auteur as a version of the Canadian superstar singer at about five years old, twelve, as a teenager, in her twenties and so forth. Bizarre in conception and often bonkers in execution, it’s also truly compelling, partly as train wreck and partly as an honest-to-goodness offbeat oddity.
FLEE
Cinemas Now
* * * *
Nominated, unprecedented, for Best Animated Feature Film, Best International Film and Best Documentary Feature at the upcoming Academy Awards, Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s astonishingly creative telling of his friend’s refugee story – coming from Afghanistan to Copenhagen via Moscow and elsewhere – is beautiful, heartbreaking and eye-opening. This is the nuts and bolts of European human trafficking, finding the universal in the personal, and reminding you how lucky you have it.
KIMI
Now on Foxtel
* * *
Steven Soderbergh’s latest thriller is clean, efficient, timely and resonant until it becomes something… less. The prolific auteur is in full neo-Roger Corman mode here, riffing on our fears but delivering, in this instance, an elevated B-Movie, clearly intended, and enjoyable, as such.
SEVERANCE
Series on Apple+
Ben Stiller’s creepy, darkly funny workplace satire is artfully framed, spookily scored, and acted with deadpan wit by, among others, Adam Scott, Britt Lower, John Turturro, Patricia Arquette, Zach Cherry and Christopher Walken. The central conceit – that at a large tech corporation, certain employees working on sensitive material have a procedure ‘severing’ their work memories from those of their out-of-work lives – is intriguing and well thought-through, but it’s only the jumping-off point for an honestly compelling series of mysteries and corporate-conspiracy shenanigans. The production design is terrific.