Another recent effort by a prolific film maker, this time Michael Winterbottom. He brings us a strange little number, starting out as a kidnap drama, which goes somewhat wrong and ends up as a rather strange love story (not exactly Stockholm syndrome) cum escape movie in slow motion.
Met with faint praise by critics and I think rightly so, it has a few good points to its name. One is Dev Patel who holds the centre very well and shows he can do quiet action characters well.
Co-star Radhika Apte is also reasonable in another underwritten part.
Photography by Giles Nuttgens of India and Pakistan gives a very real impression of being there and it is probably this travelogue side of the movie that saves it from greater ignominy.
But a very weak ending definitely leaves it as the sort of film hard to remember in a few months.
I watched this because it is Soderbergh and because it is one of the first movies from a major director filmed on an i-phone and screened only on Netflix. The story is typical Soderbergh, about people trying to wreak change in difficult circumstances. Here we move into the professional basketball world in the US.
Bill Duke as Spence and André Holland as Ray Burke in High Flying Bird, directed by Steven Soderbergh.
Photo by Peter Andrews
There is a lockdown and the players are being thwarted from playing by the owners of the NBA and the agents. One rookie agent Ray Burke (André Holland)
wants to break this stalemate and get his own new signing out on the court.
There is an intelligent script by Tarell Alvin McCraney of Moonlight fame but you have to have some inkling about how professional sport works in the US and I found it frankly rather boring. Apart from the effective Holland, the supporting cast is good, especially Sonja Sohn as an agent, Zazie Beetz,
who plays Holland’s ex-assistant and Kyle MacLachlan.
The images and look of the film, much of which is filmed around the World Trade Centre is also attractive.
But…did I care about these characters and this story? About as much as for Meryl Streep and her colleagues in The Laundromat, another Soderbergh production last year. There is a sense that they are all cyphers and despite the many good elements the overall product simply fails to inspire.
This small Icelandic debut by Isold Uggadottir is a fairly straightforward movie in terms of its structure and direction but as a piece of social commentary it is devastating.
The film traces the connection between two women from very different cultures who end up meeting and sharing some time together before parting. Lara is a solo mother in Iceland who is trying to do the best by her young son Eldar but is struggling to survive against eviction from her flat, is unlucky in love and has some secrets in her past. She lives in the Icelandic equivalent of monoblocks, austere uninviting buildings near the airport
and has no more money. The new class of employed urban poor.
The only positive aspect in her life is that she is training to be a passport control officer at the airport. It is here that she detects a false passport being used by a woman from Guinea-Bissau who is trying to fly to Canada. Adja is arrested and sent to prison and then to a sort of holding centre for immigrants while the authorities decide if she is going to be deported.
It is here that she and Lara cross paths. Lara has been kicked out of her flat and is sleeping with Eldar in her car. One day the boy goes missing near the airport and it is Adja who is out walking who finds him. A relationship slowly gtows between them and Adja offers them her bed in the centre.
She looks after the boy during the day or takes him to school and he is even present when she is given bad news about her asylum application.
Some of the film features the plight of these refugees who seek any means to leave the country like sneaking into a container. Iceleand may be quite decent in its treatment of refugees compared to other countries but it is still so very hard for them as they never seem to have enough proof or papers and are at the mercy of the sharks who try to smuggle them out.
Kristin Pora Haraldsdottir and Babetida Sadjo make a great team as the two women and director Uggadottir manages to create an atmosphere of tense dread through much of the film.
We want to believe that things will improve for the women but mostly we fear the worse. It is for the women to unthaw and show some simple human kindness which is generally lacking in the rest of society. A film and topic to dwell on in these times.
Was pleasantly surprised by this one. Andrew Ahn presents his second film which is a small, slow and totally charming story of the friendship between an old man, a former Korea war veteran and an 8 year-old boy who is staying next door while his mother cleans out her dead sister’s house.
Kathy (Hong Chau) is a single mother from Michigan, aspiring to be a nurse, with a backstory we only get glimpses of.
She is relatively poor and seems somewhat embittered with life but is putting on a brave face for her son Cody (Lucas Jaye).
He is a shy, intelligent kid who prefers the company of books or older people and together they are new to Poughkeepsie in NY State. Kathy’s older sister April has passed on after being estranged from her family and left a house full of junk which they now have to pack up and sell.
After failing to hit it off with the grandsons of another neighbour, Cody ends up befriending Del, the Vet who lives a quiet life next door since his wife died and mainly gets out to see his mates at bingo.
Brian Dennehy is excellent in one of his last roles and provides the foundation for great acting from the other two.
The slightly non-linear but very natural script in which important information is revealed in part or hinted at and the organic way in which the relationships develop is a fine feature of this film which is largely about the transitions we face in life: death, moving house, losing and making friends and growing up. All told, quite a lovely film.
This debut work by Argentine Lucio Castro has been well regarded on the festival scene and while I don’t consider it is quite as good as many reviewers it definitely has plenty of plus factors.
The film is in the ilk of Before Sunrise and features the meeting up of two men in Barcelona ostensibly for sex.
However it turns out that they met each other 20 years previously when one was visiting a friend, Sonia (Mia Maestro)
and in a relationship with a woman and the other was Sonia’s boyfriend. The original meeting was not innocent either but one of those one night stands that is a treasured but buried recollection.
20 years have passed and Ocho (Juan Berberini) is a writer based in New York visiting Barcelona seeking a break from a long relationship.
Javi (Ramon Pujol), is living in Germany and he and his German boyfriend are parents to a young girl. He is back in Spain visiting family.
Part of the movie is recollections and catching up, discussions over the paths they have taken and how different things become priority at different stages. To recall the first meeting, Castro takes us right back with the same actors at that age, almost as if the physical appearance doesn’t matter so much as the essence of the person. Then there is a coda at the end in which a sort of leap into a potential but unreal immediate future occurs.
The acting by the three leads is fine aided by Bernat Mestres excellent photography. This is very much a feeling film, often there is little or no dialogue but we look and sense as we watch the characters move around Barcelona.
Certainly, a little different and a very accomplished first feature-length film.
One of the new line of Scandinavian detective series made with considerable care and detail and proving to be a competent work of suspense and drama.
In this series, we visit a small town in the north of Iceland, far from Reykjavik. It is a port and a ferry visits once a week from Denmark and the Faroe Islands. On this voyage it contains victims of human trafficking and perhaps the return of a young man who has a bad reputation in town.
7 years previously a fish factory burned down killing a young woman inside and now the secrets behind that event are bubbling under. A headless limbless body is found in the fjord and this sets off a whole series of new events with cover-ups, red herrings and a storm and avalanches thrown in.
We watch all this through the eyes of the 3 police officers in town: Andri, the local chief of police, Hinrika, his deputy
and Asgeir, the sergeant. We also get to know a wide range of locals, some straightforward and easy to decipher and others who have hidden motives.
Baltasar Kormakur shows a safe hand in revealing clues and pacing the story well right through to the end and is accompanied by the excellent photography of Bergsteinn Bjorgulfsson and the haunting music of Hildur Gudnadottir, Rutger Hoedemaekers and Johann Johansson. Olafur Darri Olafsson
and Ilmur Kristjansdottir shine as the two unglamorous unlikely leads, police professionals with the case of their lives and left to do the major part of it alone as the town is cut off by the bad February weather.
French comedy about two unsuccessful businessmen who come up with the idea of a travel agency organizing stag night trips to Budapest which include wacky activities like using old Eastern European weapons and tanks
and a trip to a fantasy nightclub that has something for all tastes.
Chaos ensues because of the clients and their drunken states but also because the protagonists find their own lives melting down in their inefficiency. The romantic subplot involves their relationship with their wives who become part of the adventure.
This updated version of the Bachelor Party films coupled with The Hangover is pretty uninspiring and predictable but it does have its moments.
Leads Manu Payet (surprisingly subtle) and Jonathan Cohen shoulder the burden well, Xavier Gens keeps the pace going in direction and Gilles Portes brings clear photography. There are some amusing if somewhat stereotypic minor characters.
But overall, there is not much point to the film and it could have been a lot funnier.
Aussie romantic comedy that is a sort of Not your big fat Greek-Lebanese wedding set in Sydney. Teacher Alex is from a Greek family and Lawyer Eve is Lebanese.
Neither has been successful finding a future spouse among their own ethnic and religious community and when they meet they have great chemistry and start seeing each other.
The families go apeshit because the worse thing their children could do is marry someone from another religion and race, especially when the combination is Greek and Lebanese.
Well, the film is a fairly predictable and exaggerated compendium of the racial stereotypes you might expect. What saves it is the freshness and enthusiasm of the cast, the fact that however clichéd the concepts are, there are still many examples of these us and them divides in a country like Australia and a slick pace.
Some scenes are really quite amusing as the families argue over the merits of baklava or who has the only gods.
Richard Brancantisano and Andrea Demetriades are attractive leads.
The films probably worked better as a play but is sufficiently well-worked to survive on screen and pretty much achieves what it set out to do.
James Gray-directed film starring Brad Pitt who plays the role of a middle-aged astronaut (Roy Mc Bride) who is commissioned to go and find his father, who is possibly alive somewhere near Neptune 16 years after going off the radar.
There is plenty for the space buff here in beautiful visuals by Hoyte van Hoytema, in a look at the moon as a sort of glorified shopping mall and Mars as Earth’s last outpost.
We also get the off excitement en route with an ambush on the moon and some nasty things happening onboard the spaceships.
But the real centre of this story is more along the line of 2001 space Odyssey or even Apocalypse Now. Roy has real qualms about meeting up with his father who basically abandoned the family and was obsessed with his job.
Now, they think he may be sabotaging the space programme. Roy starts to wonder how much of his old man is in him and as the film progresses we see him very coolly start to unpack layers of emotions that he has buried for years including those in his marriage (Liv Tyler, cameo). As Dad, Clifford, it is great to have an actor of the ilk of Tommy Lee Jones and he doesn’t disappoint. Ravaged by solitude and misunderstandings he is a tragic figure.
We also have good performances by Donald Sutherland
and Ruth Negga. A space film focused on psychology, on connection, with clear messages for our planet today is clearly not everyone’s idea of fun and reviewers were more charitable to this than the box office. Nevertheless, Pitt is doing some of the best acting of his career and there is plenty to like and admire in this film even if it falls short of being excellent.
This Romanian film was a big art-house hit 8 years ago when it was released and I have only just managed to catch up with it. Directed by Cristian Mungiu, famed director of other socially aware films, this one is set in a convent in the hills above a small town. Although we see aspects of modern life in the nearby town, the monastery itself is poor and spartan.
Voichita (Cosmina Stratan) is an orphan who has found her place in the convent and she is visited by her friend from the orphanage, Alina (Cristina Flutur) who has been working in Germany. It appears that she and Voichita had a thing in the past and Alina has returned to convince her to go to Germany with her.
But Voichita doesn’t want to leave. Alina starts to act up and at one point goes to hospital where they say she is stressed and discharge her back to the convent.
Things continue to worsen until the priest and the mother superior decide that Alina is possessed and needs to be exorcised, a decision which brings dramatic results.
The film is slow moving for quite a long time but gradually becomes increasingly absorbing. Two scenes are especially telling: one in which Alina is read a list of 464 sins and has to note down which ones she has committed and a second one in which Alina starts to behave badly and the nuns start running around hysterically trying to deal with it.
The (artificial) simplicity of the convent world, the strict beliefs they hold come under Mungiu’s regard here and are being judged but without a judgmental attitude.
The actors are all convincing in their parts
and we can see how such a situation as the conducting of an exorcism can take place in this day and age. Some critics also see the film as an allegory for the country, the church being the Romanian state which even since 1991 has run the country in an austere and restricted way.
Mostly, Mungiu knows how to tell a story fluidly and how to make his points even if the viewer needs patience.
passionfilm 