Had a day free on Saturday, so I went to Leeds Film Festival and tried to hoover up as many films as I could...

Animalia

"Do you think there's any meaning in all this?"
"We must find one in any case."

That exchange takes place about 2/3 of the way through Animalia, and it's both a warning to the audience and a summation of what the film is about.

Animalia is that rare thing - a film that feels genuinely original. It has a lot of DNA in common with others of course -  superficially it fits the template of a very specific kind of genre movie - but it takes it in unexpected directions, and frames it from a very different perspective.

Itto has married into a very rich Moroccan family and is heavily pregnant. Tried of the disapproving comments of her in-laws she engineers a way to have a day to herself in their mansion only for, well, something to happen.  Phonelines drop, roads are blocked off and the world, seemingly, is sinking into chaos, but no-one seems to quite know what's going on.  A neighbour is sent to retrieve her and bring her back to the rest of the family, only for things to go awry, setting her on a journey to be reunited with them.

That journey is as eventful as it is confusing. What's with the dogs?  What are these strange meteorological phenomena? Is everything really going to be alright?

Some questions get answered, some pointedly aren't.  This is a film more concerned with spirituality and the way in which everything is connected, than it is with science in the traditional SciFi mood. It swaps out the old Emmerich or Spielberg template and tries a bit of Malick instead.

It is frequently utterly beautiful, brilliantly shot, and often lyrical in both writing and direction.

It does, however, fail to give you an ending in the conventional form. I felt it worked better for me in thinking afterwards, than at the time - it tells Itto's story, but leaves the viewer very much left to piece everything else together on their own.  Which, I suspect, will piss off as many viewers as it pleases.

Still, very glad I watched it, and a film I can see myself picking up again once it starts streaming.

8/10


The Becomers

Pretty much the antithesis of Animalia.  There is nothing remotely subtle about this film.  In this low budget SciFi Horror Comedy, a body snatching alien comes to Earth looking for its lover, leaving a trail of corpses in its wake, and taking over a few bodies it rather wishes it had left alone.

In my 20s I think I would have loved this.  Now though, it felt a little bit too familiar.  It's a fun 90 minutes however, propelled by the genuinely intriguing question of where on Earth they're going to take it next.  It suffers from the that school of acting that seems beloved of so many low budget movies (though you can mostly chalk this up to them being aliens), and the direction is functional rather than dazzling.  But if you get swept up into its silliness, I doubt you'll care.  (I wasn't, quite.)

6/10

Poor Things

Brilliant. Lanthimos is rapidly becoming my favourite director, and this feels like a pulling together of many strands in his work over the years - albeit with a bigger budget and a more overtly fantastical setting.

Poor Things is essentially "what if Frankenstein's monster made himself a daughter"?  I've seen various reviews describe Emma Stone's performance in this as "brave", which I've learnt over the years is reviewer code for "the actress spends a lot of the film naked" - and whilst that's certainly the case here too, in reality the performance is brave in the truest sense as well.  Stone commits to the act of lumbering naive monster in a way I suspect few actors would.  Allowing herself to go "full retard" (to use the Tropic Thunder categorisation) in order to gradually dial it back as the film progresses. She plays a vast range over the course of the film, whilst maintaining a singular sense of Bella's soul from the outset.

The film trades almost exclusively in caricatures, but the fantasy setting makes that forgivable - rendering the whole thing faintly Swiftian.  Mark Ruffalo is particularly over the top, adopting an accent that never quite settles, and which may or may not be a deliberate manifestation of his rakishness.

What you get is a glorious exploration of the many ways in which society attempts to own and control women, all via the lens of a woman who doesn't recognise any of them. (Albeit written and directed by men, something I'm sure some Guardian columnist will make great hay from at some stage.)

An easy recommendation, unless you're a misogynist or a prude.

9/10

Poor Things sounds fascinating. I went straight off to watch a trailer and it looks just as rich visually too. Thanks Tin.

Crash (1996) What a load of boring old soft porn bollocks. Fell asleep at around the 30min mark.

I doubt it's worth going back to.

Open to persuasion - maybe it comes to life eventually?

the newer crash (2004) is very good

I really enjoyed the book (Crash) but the film was rubbish yeah, iirc. I'd give it a rewatch though probably - at the time there was hysteria in the Daily Mail about it.

Both Crash films are garbage for different reasons.

Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One
Overlong generic dumb spy stuff. Longer than the title. Tom Cruise did some running. Why does every action film at the moment have to have a car chase/crash scene on the steps in Rome?

Oof, that sounds 'good'.

The 355
A solid cast (led by Jessica Chastain) doing a girl gang spy flick action thriller thing. By the numbers, but still quite entertaining.

Why does every modern spy film have to be about magic boxes and algorithms that can hack into anything in the world ever? It’s starting to feel really samey.

She really is quite marvellous.

63. Infinity Pool
Alexander Skarsgård ponders what to write in his Trip Advisor review of his holiday to the (fictional) country of Li Tolqa, a brutal oppressive regime that does a nice line in luxury resorts for rich white westerners. You should never leave the confines of the resort though, because Li Tolqa has laws that, if broken, have some pretty final consequences. Playing out as a mixture of a satire on the way that entitled rich people interact with and treat the foreign cultures that they 'experience' on holiday and a frenzied descent into the kinds of depravity that would make you question your very identity - this is a disturbing, brutal and hallucinatory film anchored by two superb turns by Skarsgård and Mia Goth. It's not as good as Possessor and it didn't take some of its key ideas as far as I would have liked, but it's the kind of experimental film that doesn't get made enough and which I really like. 7

The Butterfly Effect is another film I missed due to early parenting. I remember it being talked about at the time. It seems to get a great deal of criticism but I enjoyed it. It's a nice idea and the two leads are very good. I have a soft spot for a bit of time travel antics.

It plays out like an extended Twilight Zone episode. It simplifies things - making changes only seem to affect things related to the lead for example - it's done well. I enjoyed the refreshing caper like feel to it.

Infinity Pool. Not as good as Possessor but worth watching and similarly freaky/bonkers. Slightly disturbing how much Mia Goth's character sounds like my friend's other half in this, but I doubt that'll be a problem for everyone.

That's the bit.