GFF Reviews

Author: gffreviews

  • The Outfit

    A stylish noir locked room drama. Taking place entirely inside a tailor shop in 1950s Chicago, it follows Leonard, played by the excellent Mark Rylance, as he tries to survive the night.

    The Boyle Crew are at war with the La Fontaines, and are paranoid about a rat in their midst. Leonard and his receptionist and pseudo daughter, Mable, live a relatively quiet life plying their trade, despite more than a few of their customers being the city’s gangsters. But that boundary is crossed one night when the son of the head of the Boyle crime family bursts through the door with a gun shot wound. Aided by his lieutenant Francis, played to perfection by Johnny Flynn, the bleeding Richie demands to be sheltered and helped by Leonard. Added to the ticking clock of Richie’s wounds, is the valuable cassette in Francis’s suitcase, which will supposedly reveal the identity of the rat.

    The twists and turns of the night keeps Leonard on his toes. While the mobsters are tooled to the teeth, he must survive using nothing but his wits.

    I liked watching this, I liked its look and the tension in the scenes. I liked Rylance and Flynn’s performances as well as that of Simon Russell Beale as the Boyle mob boss. It’s a really enjoyable watch and it keeps you going through the 2 hours easy.

    But. It actually doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. The twists go back and forth long after it stops making sense. Like, if you were actually to sit down and say what happens, it just sounds like a series of highly unlikely coincidences and illogical decisions. Now that’s fine, coz it’s fun. But it takes a lot of cloth wholesale from Rope and Bound and others of that ilk. And unlike those films, where the villain essentially undoes themselves through their own character flaws, their arrogance, their pride, The Outfit’s villains don’t really have characters, they’re just tropes of the gangster genre. They’re undone by being outsmarted by Leonard, rather than their own faults, which I think gives Leonard too much power and downplays the peril.

    All in all, a really enjoyable and slick watch. Just don’t think about it too much.

  • Yeay! Opening Gala feels!

    So excited to be back in Cinema 1 for the Opening Gala of the film festival!

    Plus, a lovely new bag – this year’s colour is yellow.

    Scarfed the caramel wafer within.

    Nearly never got coz I woke up with a horrendous cold, but after 6 hours sleep and a negative Covid test, here I am!

  • This year’s wodge

    Plus also, this year I got a press pass, so if I look like I was in 2 places at once, that’ll be why.

  • Murina trailer

  • Carajita trailer

  • Heliopolis trailer

  • Olga trailer

  • Adult Adoption trailer

  • Love Is Just A Death Away

    A beautiful little animated short about a wee grub finding another like itself to love and grow.

    The film manages to be surprisingly beautiful despite being quite gross, and surprisingly tender despite being quite morbid. The grub inhabits the corpse of a decaying dog, like some kind of Pickle Rick. He lives in a garbage dump, and tries to make friends with the other animals there, a junkyard dog, an injured bird, a scavenging rat. Alas, they are either scared off or killed by his touch. Inhabiting a rotting corpse has its downsides.

    The wee grub gazes up at an eclipse of moths, dancing together against the pinks and blues of the beautiful sky. His loneliness and yearning is palpable.

    Things go from bad to worse, as the corpse deteriorates into a skeleton, leaving the grub vulnerable to the dangers of the garbage dump. Just when all hope looks lost, the injured bird returns, now dead but animated by a grub of its own. Together they make a connection, join, and grow into the magnificent moths they were destined to become.

    Really sweet.

  • Hungry Joe

    Hungry Joe is a short horror film about a mother whose son’s appetite knows no cessation.

    The film starts with Laura, happy with her husband in a new home with a new baby on the way, but that quickly changes once her son arrives. He screams constantly, needs fed nonstop, and has chewed her breasts until they are bruised and bloody. When Laura raises her difficulty with the health visitor, she is immediately shut down with shame, that she must put in the effort to breastfeed him, it’s the best for the baby so she is selfish if she wants to stop, and it is important for bonding, as though any complaint about the process must be some unnatural rejection of her motherhood entirely. The sense of failure and shame instilled in her as a new mother is all too recognisable.

    Then, as he grows, she is unable to keep up with his demand for food. Her husband has left her, and she struggles with the financial burden of feeding Joe. She has to turn to food banks to cope with his ravenous demand. When the school draws her in, it is to accuse her of neglect, as Joe always seems underfed and desperately hungry at school. To her disgust, she finds he has started to eat out the bins. The school say they have no option but to refer her to the social to be investigated as an unfit parent.

    When he has grown into adolescence, he no longer goes to school, but is almost entirely confined to the house. Neighbourhood cats are going missing, and Joe seems to be creeping out to catch and feast upon live animals at night. He has become a local legend, and children dare each other to post rotting food through his letter box. The kids sing, “Hungry Joe! Hungry Joe!”

    Laura too almost never leaves the house. They are pariahs. Having exhausted avenues for help with medical and social services, and met with nothing but condemnation, she faces the prospect of being chained to Joe for life. She dreams at night of throwing him into a fire as a baby, and while waking hopes he will one day choke. Finally at the end of her tether, she kills herself.

    And so Joe comes full circle. He consumed his mother’s body to build his own, fed from it insatiably through infancy, and upon her death, he devours her entirely.

    Cool idea, perhaps imperfectly executed. I feel it could have been shorter, tighter, with less repetition.

    One thing, if you have an eating disorder, this might not be the film for you. I mean, I know that’s obvious from the everything of the plot, but actually there is one particular aspect I found quite effecting. The foley is superb, and perfectly conveys the horror of eating. Like, every scene where Joe or anyone else was eating, I just wanted to close my eyes and cover my ears, coz the sound of it is just unbearably gross. Take it from me.