July movies: What’s worth watching
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The Wizard of the Kremlin ★★★
(MA15+), 144 minutes
The Wizard of the Kremlin tells a terrific story. It’s a Machiavellian saga about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rise to power seen from the point of view of one of his closest and canniest aides.
It’s not wholly true. The plot is based on a novel by Giuliano da Empoli, an Italian intellectual who also spent time as a political insider – he was adviser to a former Italian prime minister – but it was certainly informed by truth. The model for its leading character, Vadim Baranov, was Vladislav Surkov, who came from the disparate worlds of avant-garde theatre and public relations to become “Putin’s eminence grise”. A fan of rap music and abstract art, he wrote lyrics for a rock band and is recognised as a pioneer in the dubious craft of fake news.
In his book, da Empoli makes only a few changes to this CV. Baranov’s background is in theatre and reality TV.
Colours of Time ★★★½
(M), 126 minutes
Cédric Klapisch, director of The Spanish Apartment trilogy and one of French cinema’s greatest crowd pleasers, calls on a gallery of famous names to fill the supporting roles in Colours of Time.
The script takes us back to Paris in 1895 and deposits us in bohemia, where Claude Monet, the photographer Félix Nadar, Victor Hugo and Sarah Bernhardt all join the passing parade.
It begins in the present. The distantly related members of a large family are brought together to be told that they have collectively inherited a long-abandoned but fully furnished farmhouse in Normandy. Not quite sure what to do about this, they delegate four of their cousins to take the train there and see what’s what.
Penny Lane Is Dead ★★★
(MA15+), 90 minutes
The Australian writer-director Mia’Kate Russell started out working in make-up and special effects, so it’s natural that horror is a genre in which she feels at home. But the youthful main characters in Penny Lane Is Dead, her feature debut, could hold our attention even if they weren’t destined to wind up covered in blood.
To start with, there’s Penny herself (Bailey Spalding), a golden girl bound for law school and secretly head-over-heels in love with her tough best friend Toni (Tahlee Faraday).
Toni is no less smitten, but so far they’ve told no one of their relationship, not even the open-hearted Amy (Alexandra Jensen), an innocent who acts younger than her years. And certainly not Kat (Sophia Wright-Mendelsohn), Penny’s unhinged cousin, who shows up unannounced at the beach house where the others have gathered to celebrate the end of high school.
Tenor: My Name Is Pati ★★½
(PG), 104 minutes
Nobody in Tenor: My Name Is Pati has a bad word to say about the Samoan-born New Zealand opera singer Pene Pati – which might raise the question of whether we’re getting the full story from this documentary portrait by classical music specialist Rebecca Tansley (Crossing Rachmaninov).
But Pati, now in his late thirties, does seem like a lovely guy: built like a wrestler but unassuming, dedicated equally to his art and to his family, and despite his stoicism so unmistakably full of emotion you might wonder how he’d get by if he couldn’t let it all out in song.
Pati grew up singing every Sunday in the church choir, but knew nothing of opera until his late teens, when he went on a whim to hear La bohème. Even if he didn’t entirely follow the story, by the final act he was in tears – and vowing inwardly that one day he’d be able to sing this music, too.
The Odyssey ★★★★
(M) 172 minutes
Christopher Nolan has a way with a time paradox. Not content with constructing narratives that run backwards – or whatever was meant to be happening in 2020 sci-fi thriller Tenet – his big-budget adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey gambles that he can take one of the oldest stories in Western culture and make it feel new.
Drums pound, eager listeners lean forward in torchlight, and a bard (Travis Scott) summons up the figure of a man trying to get home, the long way round. That man is Odysseus (Matt Damon), Greece’s craftiest warrior, on his way back from the Trojan War, while his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) waits patiently and his son Telemachus (Tom Holland) seeks him in turn.
Head here for the full review.
First Light ★★½
(M) 118 minutes
Anyone who goes to film festivals will recognise the idiom of First Light – the debut feature by the Australian-Filipino photographer turned filmmaker James J. Robinson, centred on a convent in the mountains north of Manila.
Long takes are favoured, with the characters typically framed in fixed wide shot. Conversations proceed without obvious dramatic heightening, music is used sparingly, light sources are visible more often than not. The story is in no rush to arrive anywhere, giving us time to listen to birdsong or watch clouds drift through the sky.
This brand of minimalist lyricism often arises in part from the restrictions imposed by a limited budget. But it can also imply an entire philosophy, not just about cinema but about how to exist in the world – and a master like Thailand’s Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Cemetery of Splendour) can make it look deceptively simple, as if all he had to do was pick up a camera and shoot.
Animal Farm ★★★
(M) 96 minutes
Andy Serkis’s Animal Farm – the third screen adaptation of George Orwell’s 1945 novella – is much cuter and more sentimental than either of its predecessors and it’s been soundly punished for it by critics and audiences alike.
But I enjoyed some of its attempts to bring Orwell’s fable into the Trump era. They’re far from subtle but there’s a certain satisfaction to be found in their aptness. Orwell’s dictatorial pig, Napoleon, may have been a satire on Stalin but it’s not such a stretch to see him as a Trump caricature. First up, there’s his habit of changing the rules to suit his evolving demands. This is the kind of behaviour we’ve come to know as “pure Trump” as we watch the President set about re-designing Washington to fulfil his every desire.
Orwell’s basic storyline is here. The animals stage a rebellion and take over the farm after Farmer Jones, a hopeless alcoholic, stops feeding them and lets the place go to ruin. After he’s driven off, all is going well under the guidance of Napoleon’s rival, Snowball, who has undergone a change of gender in this version and is voiced by Laverne Cox. To keep the freedom – a new concept to most of the animals – she sets some rules aimed at promoting the belief that all animals are equal and that they should resist any temptation to emulate humans. In other words, none should wear clothes, sleep in a bed and drink alcohol, or “naughty juice” as the script would have it.
Moana ★★
PG (115 minutes)
At the start of the second act of Moana, the trickster demigod Maui (Dwayne Johnson) is forced to join the plucky young heroine (Australian newcomer Catherine Laga’aia) on her quest to return a magical gem to its rightful owner.
To escape his responsibilities, he repeatedly tries knocking Moana overboard. But the sea has her back: each time, a wave scoops up and deposits her back on the raft alongside Maui. When he tries jumping overboard himself, he in turn finds himself back where he started, forcing him to accept that he and Moana are destined to be comrades no matter what.
The power of the ocean, in this scenario, stands in for the power of the Walt Disney Company: this is a film where everything appears to happen automatically, in accordance with Disney formula.
The Invite ★★★½
MA (107 minutes)
Look at the three features directed so far by Olivia Wilde and you might conclude they aren’t the work of the same person – and in no case is she credited with the script. Still, they could all be described as feminist satires, which already makes her an unusual figure in mainstream US cinema.
There’s also something psychoanalytic about her approach: she’s interested in the question of what a woman wants, without presuming this amounts to the same thing in every case. Each film turns on the contrast between the drudgery of the everyday and a fantasy of escape – a theme handled most straightforwardly in the somewhat overrated teen comedy Booksmart, in which the earnest young heroines finally cut loose.
Her underrated paranoid fantasy Don’t Worry Darling was more equivocal but also more interesting, positing that a nostalgic dream of squeaky-clean 1950s patriarchy might have its attractions for women as well as men.
Saccharine ★★★
MA (112 minutes)
Saccharine is the latest in the run of low-budget horror movies helping to bring teens and twenty-somethings back to the cinema.
It’s from Melbourne-based director Natalie Erika James who got off to a fast start in the genre with Relic and the Rosemary’s Baby prequel Apartment 7A, and it’s particularly fashionable in delivering a strong dose of stomach-churning body horror charged with a topical message.
Its central character, Hana (Midori Francis), is a medical student with an eating disorder. Her efforts to lose weight with energetic sessions at the gym are continually undermined by binge eating.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
