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This is a somewhat standard biker flick, concentrating on a Western Australian bikie gang, the Copperheads. Their president, Knuck, is just getting out of prison. His vice president, Paddo, is trying to make a deal with rival gangs to save the life of his damaged drug addicted brother. And behind both their wives and girlfriends are positioning themselves for control. But Knuck’s time in prison has changed him and made him paranoid, and soon the tension between the two men will boil over.

Alas, this suffers from a bit of fatal miscasting, as Ryan Corr, playing Paddo, never really convinces as a hard-core criminal type (even the dialogue eventually agrees, with Knuck calling him “a male model in leathers”). He’s not particularly compelling as a centre for the film – everyone around him seems far more interesting and far better motivated – not just reacting to circumstances but driving them, for good or ill. Matt Nable who wrote the script has given himself the prime role of Knuck and he relishes everything the role offers – a truly toxic figure whose own internally suppressed divisions play out across the whole gang – and the script is aware of the latent homoeroticism of this mostly male environment and uses it to interesting effect. And while the setup is a bit ropey, the payoffs when they come still work pretty strongly (although the final twist seems awfully arbitrary). This isn’t perfect pulp but it has its moments of success.

Venom

Yes, there are probably too many superhero films. There used to be too many westerns, and too many teen apocalypse films, and so on. But this is Hollywood and they follow trends until the trend has been bled dry, and there certainly still seems to be a fair bit of blood in this particular stone. “Venom” combines a lot of fairly generic plot elements (Evil Scientist! Bland-quasi-love-interest! Overuse of CGI in the finale so you can’t tell what’s going on!) with a few bits of oddity in bringing a standalone film for one of Marvel’s more villainous characters, the symbiotic creature with big nasty teeth known as Venom, who in this case is domesticated a bit by having him largely kill bad people and fight against worse versions of his own kind. 

In all honesty, this is a bit of a mess when it’s not mindbogglingly predictable, and the action scenes vary between generic and incoherent, but it’s remarkably good at making Venom the standout character in the entire film, despite being either CGI or voiceover for the entire film. Tom Hardy’s Eddie Brock, the human host of Venom, is your standard dickhead slob protagonist whose apparent crusading activism never really seems to involve having any other allies around him (does he have too much integrity, or is it more that he’s an inconsiderate dickhead? I know they probably want me to think the first, but it’s more likely to be the second), but his Venom voice has a delightful Cookie Monster quality, pure simple enthusiastic hunger, which feeds a very odd mismatched-couple action movie (one’s a knobhead reporter! One’s an intergalactic scavenger! Together they fight crime). Michelle Williams has almost nothing to do in the most generic of crappy girlfriend roles, although there is about thirty seconds when they suggest ways in which she could have been more interesting. 

I did kinda enjoy this despite the very flawed nature of the whole exercise, and the threat that we may be in line for a sequel that probably won’t use the promising elements of this film nearly as much as it will just be a more stupidly bloated version of the worst elements.

First Man

This is simultaneously the story of the process leading up to the moon landings and a very personal portrait of a man who’s extremely cut off from his own emotions. Neil Armstrong was never the most demonstrative or funloving of astronauts (although, fun fact that is dropped in this movie, he apparently wrote a musical! They don’t let us hear any of the songs, though), and this is reflected in Ryan Gosling’s super-detached, stoic performance - through multiple years and multiple missions filled with setbacks and life-threatening danger. 

While this is a story that has been told a few times, it’s not been told from quite this personal a viewpoint before. This has its pluses and its minuses – this is very much not the “rah rah USA” approach to the space program that we’ve frequently seen before, with the result that it never quite has the same pleasures people come to expect from these kinda movies. There’s a lot of tension every time anybody goes into space in this film – despite us knowing that Neil Armstrong lives through this, the feeling of the peril of spacetravel is palpable. It’s a distinctly non-joyful and non-triumphal film, which is, I suspect, not entirely what people are looking for in a film about the space program – but for all that, it achieves what it sets out to do remarkably well.

Shadow

Zhang Yimou has been having a rough couple of years. Not necessarily financially (he’s still producing big scale Chinese epics with a strong design sense, and he got to do the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics) but certainly script-wise “The Great Wall”, for example, suffered from over-enthusiastic catering to the Western market (no, it wasn’t a “white saviour” narrative, but it was a “white people shoehorned into a central role when they’re essentially irrelevant” movie, or more specifically a “why is this guy the protagonist when this woman is a whole heap more interesting” movie), and he hasn’t really had a breakout hit since “Curse of the Golden Flower” over a decade ago.

Due to the vagaries of distribution, this may not break the pattern (it’s only showing twice a day at Hoyts Belconnen at the moment) but it certainly deserves a bit more attention than it might be getting. The setup is familiar – two rival kings fight over a city, and the injured warlord of the city currently-out-of-power finds an impersonator to cover for him and fight his battle for him. And the setup takes a while – there’s a lot of training and backroom politicking to get through for the first 50 minutes or so, and while Yimou’s design sense still shines (in this case, using settings and costumes largely on a black-white-grey palette), there’s a deliberate pacing that can feel a little sluggish. But it all pays off in a slightly bonkers final third when battle breaks out in a frenzy of extraordinary moments that simply have to be seen to be believed. Recommended for anybody who’s been missing the grand Chinese epic battle film.

Bad Times at the El Royale

This is a gorgeously pulpy story of four strangers all spending the night at the El Royale, a hotel right on the border between California and Nevada, a former getaway for gangsters and celebrities alike that has fallen on poorer times as the 1960s draw to a close. Everybody has their secrets, including the hotel, and over the course of one night all of them will spill out in ways most dangerous and bloody.

There’s a whole lot of entertainment here, with a collection of great performances – Cynthia Errivo as a nightclub singer gets to also deliver a great range of soul classics in a voice that shows why she’s won Tony awards, and Jeff Bridges relishes the opportunities in the best role he’s had in years, but there’s not a weak link anywhere else. The narrative twists and turns as the stakes escalate, and how I wish I could tell you of the highlights, which include something with a bottle and something with a number. Writer-Director Drew Goddard shows a sure hand for mood and style in this thrilling little film that hit my delight buttons repeatedly.

American Animals

This is in some ways a fairly familiar heist story, with a couple of interesting details. First of all, the two lead actors, Barry Keoghan and Evan Peters, are distinctly unusual young actors who pair interestingly - KEoghan's slightly nerdy attitude and Peters' youthful fearlessness play well against each other in the early stages. Also there's a clever framing device as this based-on-a-true-story brings in interviews with the real participants, including ones that indicate that the participants don't always agree on the details (which then gets introduced into the re-enactments, as, for example, a disagreement about the location of a conversation means that the re-enactment swaps location from shot-to-shot). But these embelishments tend to drip away as the film continues (yes, we still get the interviews, but they stop interacting with how the main story goes, and KEoghan in particular tends to get sidelined when the heist actually takes place). And the payoff just isn't quite worth the setup - it's ultimately a very conventional heist in most respects, and while there's notes of concern for the victims, it's not enough to elevate this beyond the middling.

Custody

This french film is a tight look at a divorce, as the unreconciled father and mother share custody arrangements with the son of the marriage (the daughter is already old enough to make her own decisions, and has decided she wants nothing to do with dad). The tension underlying the meetings between father and son builds with the small and bigger lies that generate between them as the boy, too young to really be doing this, tries to keep peace between his parents. And there's an enthralling last 15 minutes as everything boils over in a sequence that had me utterly engrossed. It's done in a way that feels unembelished (no background music beyond where music has a source within the scene, no flashy camera work), and draws us into a story that proves as stark as it is intriguing. Definitely something to catch.