By Jake Wilson and Karl Quinn
F1
★★★
(M), 155 minutes, in cinemas from June 26
“Thrilling” and “lulling” can be oddly close together, and that’s how it feels watching the cars speed round and round the track in the skilfully made if somewhat monotonous F1, which is the victory lap for its director Joseph Kosinski following his box-office triumph with Top Gun: Maverick three years ago.
After his career was cut short, Sonny (Brad Pitt) supported himself as a cab driver and gambler.
Both films involve a seated hero moving at high speed in a confined space, although where Top Gun: Maverick verged on being a war movie, F1 is strictly a sports movie, which lowers the stakes even if Formula One driving is riskier than, say, tennis.
Tom Cruise, the star of Top Gun, has also been swapped out for Brad Pitt, which probably makes just as much difference. Both are movie stars in the full sense, unabashedly there to be looked at, and both have retained a boyish mystique into late middle age.
But Cruise has never once in his whole career played a character who could be called relaxed, whereas cultivated laziness is what Pitt is all about. As Sonny Hayes, the hero of F1, he does a lot of sleepy-eyed smirking, though we’re meant to understand that his mind is going a mile a minute under the surface.
Sonny is the Rip Van Winkle of the Formula One world, induced to make a comeback as a driver long after his promising career was cut short, as if he’d just woken up from a 30-year nap.
In fact, he’s been up to a range of things in the meantime, including supporting himself as a New York cab driver and as a professional gambler, besides having several failed marriages under his belt.
A gambler is what he remains, the kind who’s studied the odds and believes he knows how to beat the house. On the track, he has a range of tricky strategies that test the limits of the rules, which the commentators outline for us in voiceover. These typically involve starting from behind and using this to his advantage, roughly his approach to life in general.
Damson Idris plays Joshua Pearce, a young driver with big ambitions, opposite Brad Pitt as veteran Sonny Hayes.Credit: AP
The races themselves occupy much of the extended runtime of F1, which follows Sonny over the course of his comeback season. Kosinski shoots them in the manner of the outer space battles in Star Wars, cutting between Sonny at the wheel, a range of tense observers, and wider shots of the track.
Rather than immersing us in any single perspective, the goal is to give us a total overview of the event – illustrating the high level of precision and focus the sport demands from everyone involved, not just the drivers.
Still, there’s no question that Pitt is the number one attraction of F1, even though there’s a second hero, Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris) – a rookie driver anxious to make it to the top, who fears his chances have been compromised when Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem), the manager of his struggling Grand Prix team, insists on bringing Sonny on board.
Sonny and Ruben go back a long way, which doesn’t mean they’re always in agreement, and Sonny also has a love interest, the team’s technical director Kate (Kerry Condon), whom he coaxes into designing a new car that suits his needs.
But it doesn’t much matter who Sonny is sparring or flirting with: the central relationship in the film is between Pitt and the camera. He, too, is an old hand who knows all the angles of the game he’s been playing since he was in his early 20s – which means whenever he turns his head, he knows just how the light will strike his face.
Reviewed by Jake Wilson
28 Years Later
★★★★
MA 15+, 115 mins, now showing
It is 23 years since writer Alex Garland, director Danny Boyle and producer Andrew Macdonald unleashed the Rage virus upon the world and redefined the zombie genre in 28 Days Later (despite insisting their film wasn’t a zombie flick at all). And in the first of a projected new trilogy, they prove there’s plenty of life in them old bones yet.
The filmmakers claim no prior knowledge of the franchise is necessary (Garland and Boyle were only executive producers on the 2007 sequel 28 Weeks Later) in order to enter the latest incarnation of the hellscape of England after the outbreak. And while it undoubtedly adds a little something to have seen the earlier films, they are largely right in that. As The Walking Dead made perfectly clear, you don’t need an origin story when the world you’ve created is as fully fleshed out as this. Even if the flesh is in a horrible state of decay.
You gotta run, run, run, run, run: Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Alfie Williams in 28 Years Later.Credit: AP
We start here on the island of Lindisfarne, off the coast of north-east England. That gives our leads – Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Jamie, Jodie Comer as Isla, and Alfie Williams as their son, Spike – the chance to do some cracking Geordie accents, something we just do not hear enough of on screen, if you ask me.
Isla is bed-bound, racked by a mystery illness that at first glance could be mistaken for early-onset Rage. Jamie is a hunter, a leader of the gated and so-far secure island community that seems to have clung to a version of civilisation fashioned some time between 1830 and 1940.
He’s taking Spike across the causeway – accessible only at low tide – that connects the island to the mainland, to hunt for slow-moving infected, and to dodge the fast-moving variety. It’s a coming-of-age ritual, with a rather higher degree of risk than a bar mitzvah or a blue-light disco. Of course, things unravel pretty quickly, as they encounter a horde led by an oversized, more intelligent leader, known as an Alpha.
Boyle is masterful at creating an almost unbearable sense of tension in these scenes. His use of jump-cuts, of varied focal lengths and exposures, and above all his use of music and sound design (think Trainspotting, times 10) all combine to create and sustain a state of high anxiety in the audience.
The mission is a turning point for Spike, but not quite in the way his old man had anticipated. His experiences, and the aftermath of them, open his eyes to the way myth is used to reinforce a particular version of the world. It causes a rift between father and son, and sets in train the second part of the film, in which Spike leads his mother back to the mainland in search of a doctor who is rumoured to be there, and who might provide a diagnosis and a cure.
At its core, then, 28 Years Later is a story about a fractured family, and the quest to reunite it, or replace it. It’s about the painful act of severance necessary to growth. It’s about betrayal and faith, and the need to believe in a better future even when it seems impossible.
If, like me, you are a fan of the genre you will see echoes of other examples here – of The Walking Dead and The Last of Us especially. But I see a big debt, too, to Russell Hoban’s magnificent and slender post-apocalyptic novel, Riddley Walker, in which a teenage boy wanders the Fens of East Anglia, and where language and stories have fractured and decayed but still hold sway. In all of these, there’s a fascinating kind of regressive medievalism at play, with hilltop forts, primitive weaponry, folk religion and a desperate bid to carve a life of normality in a time of perpetual siege.
There’s not a lot of room for humour in all this, though I couldn’t help but chuckle at how much the infected remind me of ravers at Confest, especially in scenes where they’re bathing naked in a river.
There’s also a hilarious scene involving a Swedish marine and the picture of his girlfriend on a barely functioning phone. It’s a throwaway moment (in all senses), but it says something about the things that are ephemeral and the ones that really matter.
And, ultimately, isn’t that precisely what the best zombie stories always do.
Reviewed by Karl Quinn
ELIO
★★★½
PG, 98 minutes, now showing
Child meets alien: it’s a tale as old as time, or at least a formula that goes back to E.T. Still, given that Disney and Pixar are two branches of the same company, there’s something disconcerting about Pixar releasing Elio just a few weeks after Disney brought us the live-action version of Lilo & Stitch.
Elio and his alien friend Glordon.Credit: PIXAR
Both films centre on a rambunctious young orphan who has trouble making human friends, but does better when extra-terrestrials are involved – and both incorporate the expected heart-tugging moments and moral lessons, along with parodies of science-fiction cliches.
So which one should you or your children see? It’s a matter of individual preference, but personally I’d have to give Elio the edge.
Lilo & Stitch is mostly old-fashioned slapstick, though not lacking in charm. Elio is more ambitious, and also a whole lot weirder – which is a plus, though questions might be raised about the advisability of showing a child lying on a beach next to a message scrawled in the sand that reads “ABDUCT ME,” granting he’s spelled out he wants to be abducted by aliens, not just anyone.
At any rate, it isn’t long before young Elio (Yonas Kibreab) gets his wish. Light years away from planet Earth, he seems to have found his chosen family in a non-violent, technologically advanced collective of aliens known as the Communiverse, who accept and appreciate him as his well-meaning aunt back home (Zoe Saldana) never could.
Naturally, there are complications. It’s not that the members of the Communiverse are hiding anything sinister, but they’ve jumped to the false conclusion that Elio is Earth’s leader.
Rather than confess the humiliating truth, he volunteers for a dangerous diplomatic mission involving the monstrous Lord Grigon (Brad Garrett) – whose young son Glorgan (Remy Edgerly) proves to be even more of a misfit than Elio, with no true desire to move on from his larval form or join the family business of galactic conquest.
Credited to three directors, Madeline Sharafian, Domee Shi, and Adrian Molina, Elio feels more like a corporate product gone slightly haywire than the vision of any particular individual. But it’s inventively animated and neatly plotted in a way that used to be a Pixar hallmark: the surprises are many, both in one-off sight gags and larger twists.
Elio is an especially intriguing cultural object for adults who have followed the reports of behind-the-scenes disputes over the representation of gender in Disney and Pixar movies, as with the fleeting same-sex kiss apparently cut from the 2022 Lightyear then reinstated.
For anyone familiar with this history, it’s hard to avoid viewing Glorgon’s whole subplot as a metaphor for gender non-conformity. For his species, growing up means entering into a “carapace,” a hard outer shell masking inconveniently squishy feelings.
Elsewhere in the film, the theme is echoed in ways that feel sometimes conscious and sometimes less so – including the revelations about what alien bodies are capable of, as well as Elio’s sense of his own difference. But there’s no reason any of this should trouble kids.
Reviewed by Jake Wilson
The Unholy Trinity
★★★
MA (15+), 93 minutes, in select cinemas from June 29
A Western starring Pierce Brosnan and Samuel L. Jackson promises to be a decent enough time, at the very least. And that is exactly what this revenge tale, with a significant (though far from obvious) Australian component, delivers – a decent enough time.
Absolutely nothing in The Unholy Trinity comes as a surprise. Almost everything feels like something you’ve seen or heard before (“they kilt ma brother”, says one chap-wearing villain seconds after the saloon has fallen silent upon the entry of his posse).
Pierce Brosnan as Sheriff Gabriel Dove in The Unholy Trinity.Credit: Rialto
Even the name echoes the Terence Hill-Bud Spencer Trinity films from the 1970s. But while there are some flashes of wry humour dotted throughout – can a movie with Jackson ever not have at least a little twinkle in its eye? – this is mostly a straight-shooting exercise in genre.
Not that it doesn’t try to surprise with its convoluted revenge plot sprinkled with dollops of Civil War, slavery, indigenous land rights and religion.
Henry Broadway (Brandon Lessard) arrives at the gallows just in time to hear his father proclaim he is innocent of the crime for which he’s about to swing. The true villain, he insists, is the sheriff of a town called Trinity.
Samuel L Jackson plays a former slave on the trail of some ill-gotten gold. Credit: Rialto
Duly entrusted with a mission of vengeance, Henry rides to Trinity and pulls a gun on the lawman in church. Trouble is, it’s the wrong sheriff; the man who killed his Pa is dead. In his place is Gabriel Dove (Brosnan), whose message is one of peace (nominal determinism, much?). That said, he’s not averse to using a rifle to enforce it.
There’s a faction in the town convinced that the old sheriff was murdered by a Blackfoot woman (Q’orianka Kilcher) who lives out in the wilds, and they want to hunt her down. Dove is convinced she’s innocent, and does all he can to protect her.
Meanwhile, in a plot that’s not so much parallel as perpendicular, Jackson’s former slave, who goes by the name St Christopher, comes to town looking for a pile of gold that’s linked to both the old sheriff and Henry’s late father.
If you can predict how this is all going to turn out you should probably set up a tent and start reading fortunes for illiterate gold miners … let’s just say the plot lines converge, and it ain’t purty.
But how, you may wonder, is any of this remotely Australian. I’m glad you asked.
The director, Richard Gray, is from Melbourne, was runner-up on Project Greenlight Australia in 2005, made his debut with Summer Coda in 2010, and has gone on to make nine feature films since.
The last three of those have been made at Yellowstone Movie Ranch in Montana, where he and his family live. This and the last (Murder at Yellowstone City) are Westerns; the other, Robert the Bruce, is a historical epic set in Scotland. Alec Baldwin’s cursed Western Rust was also partially shot there (Gray served as an executive producer on it).
The screenplay to this one is by Lee Zachariah, also Australian (he’s worked on The Hamster Wheel, The Checkout and Shaun Micallef’s Mad as Hell). The producers include US-born, Queensland-based Steve Jaggi and Melburnian Lee Matthews. Some of the post-production was done in Queensland.
Does any of that make it great? No, not really. But it doesn’t make it bad either. And as another stone in the fascinating path that Gray’s career has taken, it’s certainly worth noting.
Reviewed by Karl Quinn
Jane Austen Wrecked My Life
★★1/2
M, 98 minutes, now showing
From a 21st-century vantage point, it’s all too easy to pigeonhole the novels of Jane Austen as the ultimate in prim and proper Englishness – although their plots still hold up, as Clueless in the 1990s showed brilliantly.
Imagine how the French must see her. Or rather, you don’t have to imagine it, because you can get an idea from Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, a first feature from the French writer-director Laura Piani.
Pablo Pauly, left, and Camille Rutherford star in Jane Austen Wrecked My Life.Credit: AP
The bilingual Camille Rutherford stars as the heroine Agathe, a constant reader whose taste for Austen is portrayed as highly unusual by Parisian standards, even among admirers of the classics.
Agathe is a misfit in other ways, the kind who laments she was born in the wrong century. Long-limbed and charmingly awkward, she works at the famous English-language bookstore Shakespeare & Company (as Piani did too), writes unpublished romances in her spare time, and derides dating apps as “Uber sex”.
Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is a first feature from the French writer-director Laura Piani.Credit: AP
If she’s holding out for her own version of Mr Darcy from Pride and Prejudice, she could be waiting a while, nor is there much sign of her literary career getting off the ground. So her friend and co worker Felix (Pablo Pauly) decides to give her a hand, signing her up for the Jane Austen Residency, a writer’s retreat held at an English country house (the locations were all in France, not that it matters).
Here she meets Oliver (Charlie Anson) a buttoned-up literature professor who also happens to be a distant connection of the Austen clan. While he’s no great admirer of his ancestor’s work, there’s something oddly familiar about his standoffish manner, which puts him at odds with Agathe from the moment they meet.
Could it be that she’s met her match at last? Or has she been led astray by over-exposure to 19th century novels, with her real chance at happiness lying closer to home?
Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is a deliberately lightweight confection, but this is far from the easiest kind of film to bring off. There are some genuinely charming and surprising elements, including a cameo by the great US documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, who has lived partly in Paris for many years and shows up perhaps simply because he happened to be available.
But there’s also a heavy reliance on what I can only call snob appeal, whether Agathe is showing off her skill at the piano, poking around in an antique shop or dressing up for a costume ball.
Accompanying this is an oddly insistent hostility to anything intellectual. In the worst scene, an obnoxious feminist academic holds forth about the political purpose of literature, prompting Agathe to insist that the real purpose of a novel is simply to tell a good story.
If the exchange had been conceived in satirical terms it might have worked, but it plays out with hardly a hint of humour, as if Piani were working off a grudge against her lecturers at university.
Indeed, while Jane Austen Wrecked My Life could be described as a romantic comedy, it’s never especially funny, for all the stumbling and bumbling in the manner of Richard Curtis movies like Love Actually (Anson doesn’t go the full Hugh Grant, but does emulate the rapid blinking).
Certainly, there’s no effort to emulate the crisp, unsentimental tone of Austen’s writing: Agathe’s favourite of the books is Sense and Sensibility, but she and Piani both appear to be more on the side of sensibility than sense.
As a modernised homage, this ranks some way below Jerusha Hess’ cheerfully crass yet underrated 2013 Austenland, co-starring Jennifer Coolidge – and it certainly isn’t a patch on Clueless.
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