Cold War - Review

It might be a weird thing to say but with Cold War, Pawel Pawlikowski and his cinematographer Lukasz Zal have produced a black and white film that is bursting with colour.
The story of a love affair witnessed episodically over the years between a Polish songwriter and pianist and a young singer who become intrinsically linked through a love of music and then each other. An attraction that crosses and bridges barriers of age, politics, distance and borders.
Similarities could be drawn to the central pairing of Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg in Jean-Luc Godard's A Bout De Souffle. On paper the combination shouldn't really work but the chemistry between Tomasz Kot and Joanna Kulig is undeniable and the sparks that fly between the two of them are hot enough to burn through the cinema screen.
As Eldon Tyrell tells Roy Batty in Blade Runner, "the light that burns twice as bright burns half as long and you have burned so very, very brightly".
With a passion this intense, it is clear that the relationship is ultimately doomed but something keeps drawing them back together. Like a moth to a flame.
No stranger to doomed romances (My Summer of Love, The Woman in the Fifth), with Cold War Pawlikowski has created a film that feels like a blend of La La Land meets Casablanca that has been directed by Ingmar Bergman dabbling in a French New Wave style.
That sounds like a rather jazzy way of describing this mix of notes and style but it all blends together perfectly to produce on of the best films of 2018. One that, unlike the central couple Wiktor and Zula, will find an audience and will never let them go.

5 stars

You Were Never Really Here - review

You Were Never Really Here could refer to the protagonist's mental state, the film's runtime of 90 minutes or writer-director Lynne Ramsay's absence from the big screen.

Since debuting in 1999 with Ratcatcher, she has only produced adaptations of Morven Callar in 2002 and We Need To Talk About Kevin in 2011. That means she has made, on average, a film every 4.5 years. That is workrate that rivals Terrence Malick but thankfully, when she does return, it is not with a film full of wistful shots of pixie girls running through fields of wheat and dull, lifeless narration.

Instead Ramsay has returned with another adaptation of a pulp hard-boiled thriller, and similar to Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive, turned it into a tale of vengeance that is simultaneously one of the most brutal yet tender films of the year.

Phoenix goes full on Joaquin Wick as Joe, a man who it would be fair to say has seen some shit in his time, who works as a hired gun rescuing young girls from harm's way.

Taking the job of returning a Senator's young daughter from a brothel in New York's Midtown, Joe is forced to confront some demons of his own as he wages a one man war on the criminal underworld in this thriller that is stripped back to the bare (broken) bones.

The reasons why Joe is the way that he is have a huge influence on his current career choice but these are only glimpsed sparingly and Ramsay wisely leaves it up to the audience to fill in the blanks and determine the cause of Joe's grief and rage.

If anything casts a long shadow over the film, it is not the spectres from Joe's past but Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver. 

It would be difficult to ignore given the plot features a mentally disturbed man rescuing a young girl from the clutches of an abusive child abuser with links to a US senator. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the sequence where Joe initially rescues Nina from a brothel contained in a Manhattan Brownstone.

Careful to avoid direct comparisons, Ramsay orchestrates the rescue by seeing the action from the perspectives of the security cameras on stark black and white monitors. This further detaches the audience from the savage violence dispensed by Phoenix's character.

Whilst the film features flashes of severe barbarity, intensified by Jonny Greenwood's discordent score, from the ugliness of the violence emerges moments of incredible beauty and tenderness.

This is glimpsed early on with Joe's care for his mother, a theme that runs through the film with his care and protection for vulnerable women, but is replicated later on when he shows surprising compassion to a dying man who is frightened of death and lies next to him and sings "I've Never Been To Me" while holding his hand. It is completely unexpected but one of the most moving scenes of the year.

It is just one of many visually arresting images that Ramsay paints with cinematographer Thomas Townend (whose only previous DoP credit was Attack The Block), along with a stunning underwater sequence.

Joe is a tortured anti-hero, at times literally hammering the point home, and his relationship with Nina mirrors that of Travis and Iris, hinting that an escape and redemption might be possible for both of them. Yet like Bickle, it is left open to interpretation as to whether he is the rain that washes the scum of the streets or is ultimately another one of the animals that come out at night.

4 stars

Life Itself - review

Life Itself, the documentary of the life of Roger Ebert, does everything that a good movie should. It makes you laugh, cry, feel, emote and build a greater appreciation for cinema as a whole.

Steve James's powerful and moving doc involves interviews with Ebert in his final months as he is in and out of hospital relating to his cancer treatment. Seeing Ebert communicating through a computer after the cancer had taken his lower jaw and voice is upsetting to see and difficult to watch but what amazes is the high spirits that Roger seemed to be able to keep up.

Alongside the interviews, the film uses his memoir as the starting point for a look through the life of one of the world's all-time greatest film critics. It doesn't shy away from the darker side of history with Ebert's alcoholism, a frank look at his illness and his longtime friendship/rivalry with fellow Chicago critic Gene Siskel.

If there was one minor complaint, it would be that it didn't feature enough of his work and reviews (they did win him a Pulitzer Prize after all) but thankfully this can all be read and enjoyed on his website which catalogued his entire life's work because he was adamant that even though cancer had taken his vocal chords it wouldn't take his voice.

Just hearing a few excerpts from his reviews during the film makes you feel bad that you might never write anything as good but just the simple act of writing about film would put a smile on his face and I think Roger himself would have also given the film two thumbs up.

4 stars

Grace of Monaco - review

Grace Of Monaco lacks exactly that... grace.

It fails to deliver what one of the most beautiful stars that ever graced the silver screen had in abundance: Grace, beauty and elegance.

This film is so heavy-handed in its execution, it feels like it was made with boxing gloves.

Whether it is the overly-dramatic score that ramps up emotion or a sense of danger that simply isn't there, a camera that seems fixated on Kidman's eyes with many scenes consisting solely of Wayne's World-style "extreme close ups" and an unintentionally hilarious training montage where Derek Jacobi holds up cards with feelings written on them that Kidman has to express.

We get cards that read "Anger", "Trust", "Regret" yet the resulting expressions only reminded me of Derek Zoolander's various "range" of looks like Blue Steel, Ferrari and Le Tigre.

The final nail in the coffin has to be Grace Kelly's big moment at the end of the film where she finally delivers on her promise and duties after transferring from High Society to high society by giving a speech about how living in Monaco is like a fairy tale and please don't destroy our fairy tale by making us have to pay tax.

Given the current economic climate and the news stories about Amazon, Starbucks and Gary Barlow, I'm sure this will have the exact opposite effect that the movie had planned.

Somebody had better Dial M for Murder because Olivier Dahan has just killed the Princess of Monaco in a biopic that is as big a car crash as Diana that proves once and for all that Australia actresses shouldn't play royalty.

1 star