film reviews – Page 3

Boxing Day Movies

December 21, 2021by CJLeave a Comment

All of the following release Boxing Day in Australia except Bergman Island which has been postponed until March 2022.

Anders Danielsen Lie is having a moment. The Norwegian actor shows up in two films generating big buzz on the international Festival circuit, The Worst Person In The World and Bergman Island. Appearing in two such films is something. Giving almost the same performance in both is something else. Lie is undeniably charismatic, but, perhaps through no fault of his own, he is routinely cast in very similar roles, offering very little range. One Lie performance bleeds into the next.

In both films, he’s surrounded by far more interesting characters and bolder performances. The Worst Person In The World is about a young Oslo woman named Julie, played in an international career-making performance by Renate Reinsve. It’s a character study touching on familiar themes of career and ambition, love and relationships, family and ‘the kid question’ faced by twentysomethings from Oslo to Orkney, bathed in pretty Norwegian light and too much touchy-feely music, but driven energetically by Reinsve’s superb performance. She’s so good that she saves the film from its own very misconceived and tonally jarring third act, in which, admittedly, Lie offers some pretty solid, albeit unsurprising, acting. * * * 1/2

Bergman Island is about a young filmmaker, Chris (Vicki Krieps), who finds inspiration for her next movie while staying on Fårö Island, home to Ingmar Bergman, with her partner Tony (Tim Roth), also a filmmaker. They’re there to work and soak in the Bergman vibes while he appears at a tiny festival screening of one of his films. Lie appears in the film-within-the-film that Chris is conceiving, along with Mia Wasikowska; unfortunately, those scenes are far less interesting than the ‘real’ storyline, yet take up what feels like about half the running time. The scenes with Krieps and Roth, though, are terrific, and deeply chucklesome for cinephiles. * * * 1/2

Not generating buzz on the Festival circuit, but sure to create huge and hearty word-of-mouth among the general audience, is the impossible-to-dislike crowd-pleaser Délicieux (Delicious), ostensibly about the creation of France’s first proper restaurant in 1789. Like any bistro tartiflette, Délicieux is made strictly to the recipe (in this case, of foodie period romantic movies), changing none of the accepted ingredients (and embracing cheese and ham), displaying little to no technical innovation, but guaranteed to leave one satisfied, smiling and a little guilty. You’ll know what you’re getting and you’ll like it! * * * 1/2

I’m no expert on the original West Side Story, but I can say that Steven Spielberg’s remake, with an updated screenplay by Tony Kushner, is technically dazzling and musically delightful, if emotionally rather unengaging. The two most exciting characters and performances are those that are based on Mercutio and Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet, and if you know what happens to them, you’ll know that the third act is inevitably less exciting than the first two. * * * *

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Licorice Pizza

December 13, 2021by CJLeave a Comment

* * * * 1/2

Opening 26 December in Australia. Now open in the US.

Paul Thomas Anderson has been making music videos for Haim, a family musical group based in Los Angeles. Now he’s built his latest film, Licorice Pizza, around Alana Haim, and, in her first acting role, she becomes a movie star in front of our eyes, as does her co-star Cooper Hoffman, in his.

It is astonishing to see such a major film by such a major filmmaker carried on the shoulders of two people with literally no other acting credits (although Haim has been in many music videos, Hoffman’s IMDB credit list literally says ‘Acting: 1 Credit’, and it’s this film). It’s astonishing as a risk (or, put another way, it’s astonishingly brave) and it’s astonishing how good they are. Licorice Pizza is the story of two young people’s friendship, and although the cast is large, it is very much centred on these two, and they are both superb.

Haim’s character, also named Alana (Anderson wrote the film for her) is the protagonist, a twenty-five year old Jewish girl living with her parents and sisters (all played by her real family members) in the San Fernando Valley near Los Angeles in 1973, who befriends and develops an intense relationship with a fifteen-year-old small-time actor and big-time dreamer, Gary, played by Hoffman (who is Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s son). Over what feels like about a year, they follow Gary’s dreams – of selling waterbeds, mainly – while finding out who they are and how they feel.

It’s a warm, warm movie, often very funny, thoroughly engaging and impeccably crafted (the cinematography being a highlight). While the subject matter may seem lighter than some of Anderson’s more sombre work (eg There Will Be Blood and The Master), it is no less thematically rich than any of his films. For what themes are greater than love and friendship (and this is a very good movie about love and friendship)? One of the films of the year.

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The French Dispatch

December 9, 2021by CJLeave a Comment

* * * *

Wes Anderson’s tribute to The New Yorker (dedicated to a swathe of its golden-era writers in the end credits) is a gloriously cheerful celebration of that magazine, France, erudition, intellectualism and writing. It’s as Wes Anderson-y as it gets, tripling down on the production design, cinematography, performance and sonic aesthetic that is often imitated but is his and his alone.

If you like his vibe, The New Yorker and France, you’ll almost certainly love this. It’s astonishingly crafted, full of exquisite detail, and very, very funny. Within his oeuvre I’d place it alongside The Grand Budapest Hotel, as an example of him working full-tilt within his own style, with clearly hefty resources.

There are so many sets, so many jokes, and so many movie stars, both American and French; a fun running gag is that some of the French ones play American and vice-versa. Narratively it’s a trifle, being composed of three stories enveloped in, essentially, a framing device (the founding editor of an English-language magazine based in France passes away); but who has ever come to Anderson for the story? You come for the style, and that’s never been better – or more pronounced – than it is here.

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Dune

December 3, 2021December 3, 2021by CJLeave a Comment

* * * *

Denis Villeneuve’s Dune Part 1 (aka Dune) instantly joins the ranks of the great, big-budget, mass-market sci-fi extravaganzas, including 2001, Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Blade Runner, all of which it either references, pays homage to, or is clearly influenced by. In the case of Star Wars, the references become quite heady, because Star Wars is so clearly influenced by Dune, the novel, that Villeneuve’s imagery re-builds upon imagery influenced by his source material. Is this a sandcrawler that I see before me?

What Villeneuve does so well here is make all this familiar stuff feel so fresh, and a huge part of it involves Hans Zimmer’s score, which is ominous, threatening, suitably alien, and omnipresent. It really sets the tone, and it’s really unique. I’m no musician, but I reckon its singular arresting sonic motif combines (or is inspired by) the bagpipe and an Islamic prayer call. This ain’t Also sprach Zarathustra, nor – very definitely – is it John Williams.

No, this is darker all around; Zimmer’s intense, at times frightening score is clear about that. It’s dark and it’s serious: there is one clear joke, delivered by the one character who seems allowed to make jokes. Everywhere else, all is somber. In a way, it feels like Star Wars for grown-ups.

What took me by surprise was how much action there was. The first act is world-building but acts two and three are both pretty much relentless action set-pieces. It may be ‘hard’ sci-fi, but it’s totally accessible.

It’s also really fun, gorgeous to look at, vibrant, stimulating, and huge. It’s extremely gratifying to see this kind of massive entertainment being made with such inventiveness and intelligence (the adaptation of a notoriously challenging text is superb and deserves an Oscar nomination for Adapted Screenplay). It’s Villeneuve’s best film, and I greatly look forward to Part Two.

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Get Back

December 1, 2021by CJLeave a Comment

* * * * *

I’m not going to be shy, coy or restrained, because there’s no reason to be: Peter Jackson’s Get Back is monumental, the Mona Lisa of rock documentaries, a staggering, towering technical and artistic achievement. Over eight hours and three episodes, drawing from sixty hours of footage and a hundred and twenty of audio, Jackson recreates the Beatles’ creation of Let It Be (and parts of Abbey Road) and in doing so, gives us not only the most intimate, revealing, comprehensive look at the Beatles ever, but one of the most incisive portraits of musical creation as well.

It’s all summed up in a jaw-dropping, spellbinding, you-wouldn’t-believe-it-if-you-weren’t-seeing-it moment when we watch, in real time, with no cuts, as Paul McCartney comes up with the main structure of the song Get Back. As he’s doing so, Ringo and George (John isn’t there yet) pick up on the vibe, then pick up their instruments. It’s not merely goosebump-inducing; your hair may stand on end, and you could very likely cry with the sheer magic of the moment.

Get Back is full of such incidents; we see and hear individual songs from their moment of birth and follow them as they’re refined and ultimately recorded. We see George play I Me Mine to the others for the very first time. We see John coming up with the ‘Everybody had a hard year’ riff for I’ve Got A Feeling – as it happens. Indeed, the greatest magic of all, among eight hours of pure magic, comes whenever Paul and John get into a groove with each other and create the songs we know and love.

But outside of the music, we see and hear the most private conversations (one of them recorded secretly, between John and Paul, by a microphone hidden in a vase of flowers) and get to know these guys as individuals like never before. It’s uncanny. The sound and vision has been elaborately restored: everything is audible, everything is vivid. You simply cannot believe (a) that all this material exists and (b) that we’ve never seen it before.

I don’t know how non-Beatles fans would go – eight hours of conversation and noodling is a lot – but this isn’t for them. This is for the fans; indeed, it is surely the greatest item of fan service ever made. Too much? Wait ‘till you see it.

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The Power of the Dog / Bad Luck Banging

November 18, 2021November 19, 2021by CJLeave a Comment

The Power of the Dog

Now playing in Australian cinemas.

* * * 1/2

During the end credits of Jane Campion’s new feature The Power of the Dog, she thanks a colleague who gave her the novel on which it is based. Her friend thought she’d like it; it’s easy to see why. I haven’t read the book but Campion’s screenplay and filmed version of it echoes repeatedly in all manner of ways with her acknowledged masterpiece, The Piano (1993).

That film, set in the mid-1800s in isolated New Zealand, placed a newly-married woman and her daughter into a psychosexual pressure-cooker involving two men, one rough as guts and one highly refined. This film, set in 1925 in isolated Montana, places a newly-married woman and her son into a psychosexual pressure-cooker involving two men, one rough as guts and one highly refined. There’s even, not only a piano for the woman to play, but a scene of rough-as-guts workers carrying it across rugged landscape into a refined house for her: a case of a director paying almost risibly direct homage to herself.

The film pans out differently, but thematically it’s of a piece with The Piano, and shares with that film plenty of top-tier craft, including a suite of excellent performances and an outstanding original score (this time by Jonny Greenwood). But the film hums frustratingly along on that single frequency of psychosexual tension without a huge amount of actual dramatic energy. The Piano swept you along: it was ecstatic cinema. The Power of the Dog is restrained for its entire two hours and six minutes, and we, the audience, unfortunately may feel as bound and suffocated by its reserve as the woman, Rose (Kirsten Dunst) does by her observed, isolated new life.

By all means see the film, and preferably on the big screen; it’s sure to feature heavily in awards – including Oscar – conversations, and it does have an eerie, enigmatic quality (and some great acting). But be prepared to settle calmly in your seat, as this film settles into its one very consistent tone.

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn

Opens 25/11 in Australian cinemas.

* * *

Much has been made at various festivals, including the recent Sydney Film Festival, of the explicit opening of Radu Jude’s Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn. And it is indeed full of genitalia and explicit sexual acts – for about three minutes. After that the film settles into a story of how those acts, as featured in a sex tape privately filmed by a school teacher, gets her into hot water when they appear online. The film is a colourful, unsubtle attack on hypocrisy and conservatism, in Romania and beyond, in the time of Covid: there are masks, and attitudes to wearing them, all over the film. Jude is shrewd: his film won’t make Marvel Box Office, but it’s precisely engineered for maximum festival marketability. Hopefully if you come for the porn, you’ll stay for the social critique.

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Titane

November 9, 2021by CJLeave a Comment

* * * *

Seemingly inspired by Boys Don’t Cry (1999), feature documentary The Imposter (2012) and David Cronenberg’s 1996 adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s Crash, Julia Ducournau’s Palme D’Or-winning follow-up to Raw (2016) – my favourite film of the past five years – is tender and raw, ferocious and funny, and, despite wearing its influences on its diesel-stained sleeve, a true original. While not as brilliant as Raw (and I should not spend Ducournau’s career seeking something that is; Welles never topped Kane, right?), Titane is a major work by a major filmmaker, and echoes in the mind long after its loud credits roll.

Ready for a bonkers one-line synopsis? A young female exotic dancer serial killer goes into hiding with a grief-stricken fireman after having sex with a car. Yep. And that’s kind of spoiler-free. There’s a lot more.

The fireman is played by Vincent Lindon and it’s in his performance, and the relationship he builds with the murderous dancer Alexia (Agathe Rousselle, making an astonishing feature debut), that tenderness resides. At its heart, outside of the crowd-freaking acts of violence and depravity (no greater, by the way, than any in Raw), this is that old chestnut: a tale of two lost, deeply damaged souls finding each other. The film becomes increasingly – yes, tender – as it goes on, culminating in an ending as perfect, and perfectly moving, as it is inevitable.

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No Time To Die

November 5, 2021November 5, 2021by CJLeave a Comment

* * * *

Daniel Craig’s final James Bond film is a dark, emotional epic. Deliberately and consistently harking back – musically, thematically, and tonally – to the purist’s secret favourite Bond film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, No Time To Die is a love story, and a successful one: the complicated chemistry between Daniel Craig and Léa Seydoux is supremely well played. Acting at this level was simply absent in the pre-Daniel Craig era, and this is probably the best acted entry in the entire series.

It’s also a team effort: Bond is rarely solo for this film’s two hours and forty-three minutes, and watching him and his crew – including Q and M, plus a new female agent and good ol’ Moneypenny – share the third act feels entirely appropriate. Earlier, Craig shares the film’s best action set-piece, in Havana, with Ana De Armas, who makes a spectacular impression with very little screen time. She is simply delightful, and her ability to make a fast strong impression is very much in keeping with the historical tradition of the First Act Bond Girl.

The film, directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, looks sublime, at times rivalling the cinematography of Skyfall. Most of the action is gripping, and the locations, particularly Norway, are moody and evocative.

The plot itself, featuring a biological weapon, is creepily Covid-prescient (of course unwittingly, as the film was finished by the advent of the pandemic and its release delayed for two years because of it). But plot is not story, and the story – the love story – is heartily and admirably committed to.

This is mature Bond for a mature audience, even if the (main) villain could have stepped out of the 60s Connerys. Played in a hard-to-hear weird dialect by Rami Malek, he’s a fun throwback, but no Silva (Javier Bardem in Skyfall), let alone a Goldfinger, a Scaramanga, or Terry Savalas’ Blofeld.

But this Bond is not about the villain. This Bond is about love, Léa Seydoux is very much the second lead, and she’s terrific. Dame Diana Rigg would approve.

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The Many Saints of Newark

October 29, 2021October 29, 2021by CJLeave a Comment

WARNING: Minor Spoilers.

The US reviews for The Many Saints of Newark, the big-screen Sopranos prequel, were lukewarm, and I was reticent in seeing it. But bada bing, I enjoyed it, quite a lot. It’s full of richly evocative late 1960s / early 1970s US urban period ambiance, it’s nicely shot (looking great on the huge screen I saw it on at Event Cinemas in the Sydney CBD) and the acting is a lot of fun. I also found the story compelling. But here’s the thing (and the reason, I think, mild disappointment surrounds the film): it’s not really Tony Soprano’s ‘origin’ story. It’s the story of his uncle Dickie, played very well by Alessandro Nivola. Young Tony is in it, as a child and a teenager, but he really doesn’t do much of anything at all. He’s an observer in Dickie’s movie. And I enjoyed Dickie’s movie.

The story revolves around the tension between the established Italian crime bosses in Newark and the rising opposition of Black gangsters. It’s exciting and the dialogue is witty. Vera Farmiga, as Livia, is the standout among those playing established characters from the series; the most exciting new character is a young Italian woman brought over to Newark and into the family, played passionately and cleverly by Michela De Rossi. Ray Liotta also has a couple of delicious roles.

It’s a fun, well crafted period mob story. Enjoy it as such; but if you’re hoping to see Tony’s blooding, you may well be very disappointed.

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The Last Duel

October 15, 2021by CJLeave a Comment

In Cinemas 21 October.

* * * 1/2

Sir Ridley Scott’s sprawling, very expensive-looking, old-school epic throwback The Last Duel is a strange beast. Featuring masterfully designed and executed art direction (it’s set in France in the 1300s, with castles, horses, gates, bridges, lances, swords, ladies in waiting, armour, medieval Paris, and about sixty never-not-roaring fireplaces), a superb central performance from Jodie Comer, and three fruity turns from Adam Driver, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, it succeeds in being engaging and entertaining throughout its two-and-a-half-hour runtime despite an icky story.

Scott uses Rashomon’s structure: an alleged sexual assault, told three times from three different perspectives, including that of the victim (Comer, of course, with Driver the accused). It’s rather shocking, seeing a big-budget rape drama (with an A-List actor playing the alleged rapist); to see rape portrayed at all demands sensitivity and kid gloves, and this movie’s gloves are all made of heavy metal.

Frankly, the themes are too grave for the flamboyant treatment, yet it’s the treatment that’s entertaining. Filled with astonishing visuals, and perhaps saved by Comer’s precise performance, the film succeeds despite itself, a ravishing relic.

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