In among their early run of successful movies they also wrote this neat little police thriller, which Alan Mak co-directed with Andrew Lau (Infernal Affairs). Confession of Pain (its Chinese title translates literally as Forlorn City) is a gripping melodrama with a rare spin.

It is, in essence, a murder mystery. The difference is that we know the identity of the killer within 20 minutes. The remaining 90 are spent finding out why the murder occurred, and whether or not the killer is going to get away with it. Coming home after a sting operation, police officer Bong (the always appealing Kaneshiro Takeshi) finds his pregnant girlfriend dead from suicide. Three years later, Bong is now an alcoholic private investigator. He is dragged back into the life of his ex-partner Hei (the always excellent Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) when the father of Hei’s wife Susan (Xu Jinglei) is murdered. While the police investigation is ongoing, Susan asks Bong to conduct his own investigation.

While not scaling the dramatic heights of Infernal Affairs or Overheard, Confession of Pain remains a gripping and effective thriller. It is certainly a heightened and emotional film, and those with an aversion to drama from the blunter end of the spectrum might consider giving it a miss. Many elements – such as Bong’s drunkenness – are rather over the top.

There is also a tendency in Hong Kong cinema to use female characters in a specific way; one that is very much in effect here. Hollywood has an awful habit of using female characters as damsels in distress, or sex objects, or as a prize for the male protagonist to win over in one fashion or another. Hong Kong cinema is somewhat different I think: all too often the female characters exist not as a reward but to provoke an emotional response in the males. Bong’s personal arc can only be kicked into gear by the death of his girlfriend – her only purpose is to provoke the story. It’s a phenomenon well known to American comic book readers – they call it ‘women in refrigerators’ after a particular incident in a 1990s Green Lantern comic. The effect often creates quite weak female characters, and I think the female characters are visibly like that here. Both Xu Jinglei and Shu Qi (as Bong’s new girlfriend) give strong, likeable performances – and are both exceptional actors – but there is only so much an actor can do on their own.

Despite these flaws, Confession of Pain remains another effective, gripping entry in Mak and Chong’s canon of crime films. If only there was a little more in the characters, and this good film could have been great.

Without exaggeration I think Season 5 of Doctor Who was one of the best that the series ever had. It adopted a new visual aesthetic, a markedly different take on the Doctor’s character, and a far more ambitious approach to storytelling – both short-term and long. Not only was it met with popular success, it was by-and-large critically praised as well. No surprise, then, that for the second time around for writer/producer Stephen Moffat attempted something even more ambitious. If Season 5 was Doctor Who firing on all cylinders, Season 6 was a bold attempt to exceed that success. It takes even greater narrative risks. Whereas Season 5 presented an exciting sequential mystery, slowly building on each story element towards its finale, Season 6 opens a complicated puzzle box from the outset. Season premiere “The Impossible Astronaut”, written by Moffat and directed by Toby Haynes, throws several mysteries at the audience at once – and it does so with a confidence bordering on cocky.

The mysteries are set up here, but of course they are largely not resolved for another 12 episodes. It is really only possible to appreciate the set-up since “The Impossible Astronaut” – and its second part “Day of the Moon” – intentionally lack a proper resolution. It would be unfair to judge the episodes on anything other than their own terms.

The season begins big and outlandish, with a deliberately ‘noisy’ Doctor leaving evidence of his travels everywhere he goes. It even has a roaring Restoration aristocrat demanding to know the Doctor’s name, with the most obvious pun ever: ‘Doctor who?’ It seems silly and over-the-top, maybe it is over-the-top, but both elements of the prologue become a lot more relevant in retrospect.

A series of anonymous invitations unite the Doctor (Matt Smith) and friends Amy (Karen Gillen), Rory (Arthur Darvill), and River (Alex Kingston) to Utah. Shortly after their reunion, while sharing a picnic by a lake, the Doctor is visited and then murdered by an anonymous astronaut that emerges from the water. His shocked companions are immediately interrupted by an old man, introducing himself as Canton Everett Delaware III (W. Morgan Sheppard), who helps them burn the Doctor’s body. At a local diner, Amy, Rory, and River unexpectedly encounter the Doctor again – only this time he is centuries younger, unaware of his future demise, and in receipt of an invitation of his own.

It is a hell of a lot of activity with which to begin the season. On the one hand, it is rich with exceptional visual imagery: the astronaut in the lake is superbly weird, and the TARDIS-blue invitations are a hugely evocative element. At the same time it feels critically flawed, because at no point does the audience believe the Doctor’s future death is inevitable. Had Moffat sculpted his story arc around any other cast member in the series, the tension would have been superb. Instead the tension dissipates as soon as the arc begins, and becomes a hunt for an explanation rather than a race to change history. It all looks great, but feels hollow.

From here the episode tracks back to 1969 Washington DC, clearly aligned to the moon landings that July. It’s a historical event that the series has not previously utilised directly, but viewers expecting a “Doctor meets Neil Armstrong” episode may be surprised at its partial focus on US President Richard Nixon (played by Stuart Milligan) instead. It is an odd element on which to focus, since both this and the following episode exploit his real-life criminal behaviour for humour rather than actually portray him as a terrible person. In many ways it reflects Season 5’s use of Winston Churchill, since he too was bowdlerized for narrative purposes.

In a casting stroke of genius, the 1969 version of Canton Delaware is played by Mark Sheppard, W. Morgan Sheppard’s son. Both actors have cult television credentials to attract the fans: the younger via Firefly and Supernatural, and the elder via Max Headroom and Babylon 5, among other things. Mark Sheppard is excellent here. It is a small shame his character has never been used again.

This is an episode packed with iconic potential, whether it is the recurring scenes of a young girl somehow directly telephoning the President for help, or the introduction of new alien menace the Silents. They seem based on a particularly Moffat-esque premise: a monster that you forgot about whenever you’re not directly looking at it. It is a smart variation on Moffat’s popular Weeping Angels, and is worked for maximum effect here. They even look superb, with a design akin to the traditional UFO sighting “greys” mixed with the mythical “men in black” of American conspiracy theories.

Skip this paragraph if you’ve not seen the episode before, but for the rest of us: “The Impossible Astronaut” arguably captures Steven Moffat at his most narratively perverse. Since his first episode as writer he has been growing more and more confident in wrapping his stories around time travel concepts. Here the storyline is wrapped into so many knots that it features – at one moment or not – two versions of the Doctor, two Cantons, and four Rivers (adult River, astronaut River, little girl River, and foetus River).

“The Impossible Astronaut” is a big, ambitious opening episode that makes its audience a lot of promises – only some of which will be satisfactorily kept.

Franco’s film begins provocatively with a locked truck of screaming South and Central American immigrants, and when it is finally opened by American immigration one of the passengers somehow just jumps out, quietly evades the authorities, and goes hitch-hiking up to San Francisco. This is Fernando (Isaac Hernández), a Mexican ballet dancer who has spontaneously made his way across the border for a tryst with rich benefactor Jennifer (Jessica Chastain). It is a hell of a risk to take for a hook-up, not to mention a strange reason to flirt with America’s heated immigration debate.

Franco works in a stripped-down, functional fashion. Dreams comes without a non-diegetic score – the only music you hear comes from inside the movie, via a character’s radio or some such – and Yves Cape’s cinematography is deliberately simple and uncomplicated. This socially realist approach can work wonders in the right film: here it simply highlights each character’s poor or illogical behaviour.

Jennifer is the middle-aged daughter of the very wealthy donor Michael McCarthy (Marshall Bell), and she and her brother Jake (Rupert Friend) essentially donate money to the arts as a vocation. As with that striking opening scene, it seems as if Franco has settled on a provocative contemporary issue to address. The relationship between a society’s wealthy elite and its art is one that has been going on around the world literally for as long as people have engaged with art. Recent years have seen government-supported art retreat in favour of a rich patron model; here in Dreams Jennifer has invested in a Mexican ballet academy and then picked up its principal dancer for her own sexual purposes. It is blunt, but has potential. Once again, that potential is never properly resolved or addressed. (It is interesting to see Chastain play the role, given she is herself the beneficiary of wealthy patronage: a rare working class actor in Hollywood, her scholarship to Julliard was paid for by Robin Williams.)

It is difficult to justify each character’s behaviour, since they so regularly make inexplicable and unwarranted decisions. The cast generally rise above the material. Chastain is a genuine world-class talent. Hernández, a professional ballet dancer making his acting debut, acquits himself admirably.

A third-act twist seems to come out of left field, and forces the film to abandon its main direction in favour of crude melodrama. The conclusion leaves an ugly taste in the mouth: why that change in direction? What was the ultimate point of this film?

Dreams is screening at the 2025 Melbourne International Film Festival. Click here for more information.

With All I Had Was Nothingness, photographer and director Guillaume Ribot has sifted through the extraordinary mass of footage to turn the camera back on Claude Lanzmann and explore how he went about making such an enormous, unwieldy film. Like Lanzmann’s own film, it is structured less as a documentary and more like a record. Lanzmann’s own journals provide the script for the film’s narration. It reveals the man in full, both good aspects and bad, including his dogged pursuit of the full story what happened in Poland as well as his penchant for manipulation of his interview subjects. Despite its overwhelming cultural and moral value, Shoah was not without its critics in 1985. The Polish government condemned the manner in which Lanzmann apparently indicted their lack of resistance to the Nazi invaders while neglecting to include those non-Jewish Poles who did fight to save as many Jews as they could. No less a critical authority than Pauline Kael – herself the child of Polish Jews – controversially described Shoah as ‘a form of self-punishment’.

I think it is worth keeping in mind that Shoah is not like other films, and only suffers from being compared to them. It is enormously valuable, and I deeply believe it is worth anybody tracking it down and experiencing the whole nine hour work, but it is understandable as challenging a watch as it is an important one.

There is, however, a question of the full worth of Ribot’s tribute to Lanzmann here. The truth is that Lanzmann shot so much footage for his original film that in succeeding years he found enough material to release five additional works of at least feature length. One of them, Four Sisters (2018), was four-and-a-half hours long by itself. I suppose All I Had Was Nothingness marks a sixth additional film – the new work is produced by Lanzmann’s widow and exclusively features material shot for Shoah.

By working with such sober, worthy source material, Ribot arguably makes his film critic-proof; surely criticising this documentary risks coming across as being dismissive of the Shoah itself? Surely though, there must be a point at which Lanzmann’s footage becomes whittled down to its least effective parts. What is presented here has some curiosity value, but feels more the domain of a supporting feature for a blu-ray than a work in its own right. Ribot’s film is only a sprightly 90 minutes, but it feels very dry and overly long – and why watch this when one can watch the original, profoundly effective film itself?

If there is value to Ribot’s film, it is that it reminds audiences of Lanzmann’s great achievement and the messages it contains. On its own merits, this honestly feels like a footnote to a vastly more important text.

All I Had Was Nothingness is screening at the 2025 Melbourne International Film Festival. Click here for more information.

Of course the reason that the film scores so many laughs is that it makes so many attempts. This is a tightly wound 85-minute barrage of gags and jokes. Should one fail to hit, another will come up directly behind it. By the time to credits roll, we are all more likely to remember the one great joke that landed over the four that did not. It is the sort of ‘everything but the kitchen sink’ approach that typified the Zucker-Abrams-Zucker comedies of the 1980s including Airplane!, Top Secret, and – indeed – the original Naked Gun of 1988. To an extent, Schaffer’s The Naked Gun is an effective replacement, and star Liam Neeson a similarly deadpan presence to original star Leslie Neilson.

Neeson plays Los Angeles police detective Frank Drebin, son of Neilson’s Frank Drebin Sr. While investigating an apparent suicide, he soon runs into femme fatale Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson) as well as technology billionare Richard Cane (Danny Huston). The former is the sister of the apparent suicide, while the latter clearly had a hand in the death, and – ah really who cares, it is all a basic framework for gags anyway.

It is still a weaker picture than David Zucker’s 1988 version, but then again that was in itself a weaker iteration than Zucker’s earlier TV series Police Squad. That series deftly parodied the old TV police procedurals of the 1960s, whereas Schaffer is essentially parodying The Naked Gun itself. It is ultimately a photocopy of a photocopy, and while I may have laughed at the jokes I remember laughing harder in the 1980s.

It is worth singling out co-star Pamela Anderson for praise. She seems to be in a middle of mid-career resurgence at the moment, and she delivers some pitch-perfect work here. Likewise Danny Huston provides a strong presence as the film’s central villain – even if, perhaps even because, he resembles a classic era James Bond antagonist.

These sorts of films are often described as ‘critic-proof’, which makes a certain kind of sense. Quality is really a secondary consideration if one is simply looking for a film to make them laugh. You can laugh at The Naked Gun. You may laugh more than I did. It is reasonable enough disposable entertainment, but it doesn’t deserve a 500-word review. Really all it warrants is a shrug. It’s fine. Go watch it when it opens in Australian cinemas. You might laugh. Maybe a lot, or maybe hardly at all – but probably a bit, and then within a few days you will have forgotten all about it.

A catastrophic military accident has killed the entire population of Australia’s island state Tasmania. Ava (Ridley), an American immigrant, has joined a body retrieval team in the hope of discovering her late husband. With the help of fellow volunteer Clay (Thwaites), Ava breaks containment lines and heads south for the town where her husband was when the disaster occurred. It soon becomes clear, however, that not all of the victims are as dead as the authorities first believed.

We Bury the Dead is another great film from Hilditch, a Western Australian director who has successfully transitioned from his early ultra-low budget features to Hollywood. His 2017 feature 1922, based on a Stephen King novella, was a superb – and superbly bleak – thriller, and here he largely works in similarly grim territory.

It seems almost de rigueur to note that the zombie movie is a particularly crowded genre of horror film. Since the modern zombie was invented by director George Romero, they have been used as metaphors for all kinds of thing, they have been slow and fast, haunting and visceral, and pretty much every variation imaginable. Here Hilditch carves out a personal niche of his own. It has clear influences – Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later being the most obvious one – but in decent fashion they are used to push the genre into some fresh territory.

There is also no doubting this is an Australian horror film either: we have a particular penchant for the choice potty-mouthed exclamation, and here Brenton Thwaites gets the best one since Nathan Phillips’ despairing ‘aw, get fucked‘ in Justin Dix’s Blood Vessel (2019).

It is a great role for Daisy Ridley, who plays Ava with a great sense of subtlety and woe. This is, more than being scary, a remarkably melancholic film, and the enormous sense of loss expressed throughout is palpable. Ridley works as an anchor throughout: the situation that she leads us through is enormous in scale without ever feeling over-the-top, but by focusing closely on Ava’s situation the film consistently feels intimate. For his part, Brenton Thwaites is great – both dramatically effective and funny – and sheds a lot of the preconceptions that come from his earlier, more Hollywood-scale, roles.

There are imperfections. The film’s mid-section suffers from an overly familiar subplot involving a local military officer (Kym Jackson). It feels slightly derivative and unpleasant, although its ultimate payoff is worthwhile. The film also resists moving too far away from expected genre conventions, although whether that is a flaw or a feature will come down to viewer expectations.

Steve Annis shoots the film very well, adding yet another hot, yellowed landscape to the Australian screen tradition. The score by British electronic musician Clark is effective, and in places rather innovative.

I am, all things considered, a huge enthusiast for genre filmmaking. It has been so satisfying to see Australian filmmakers continue to build on our long legacy of strong speculative fiction – particularly horror. We Bury the Dead will hopefully get recognised as one of the best of the current wave.

We Bury the Dead is screening at the 2025 Melbourne International Film Festival. Click here for more information.

Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was an improbable smash hit when released in 1974, and has spent the past 50 years building its influence and reputation to a significant degree. While its original run was met with split opinions – and no small amount of controversy – it is now regarded as one of the most influential horror movies ever made. It is also now considered a genuine classic: last year the USA’s National Film Registry selected for preservation.

Hooper died in 2017, and these days much of his film’s cast and crew are also sadly departed. To study the making and impact of the movie, documentary filmmaker Alexandre O. Philippe has taken an inventive step. His feature-length documentary Chain Reactions pares down its appreciation of Chainsaw Massacre to five individual people: comic and performer Patton Oswalt, directors Takashi Miike and Karyn Kusama, author Stephen King, and critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. Each of them in turn discuss the film’s appeal to them, its influence on their careers, and why they think it remains such a potent, vital work today.

There is always a risk with this sort of ‘talking heads’, clip-dominated documentary of resembling any number of DVD supplementary feature of the last 25 years, and it is a risk that Chain Reactions only partially avoids. Philippe to his credit does a marvellous job of interweaving interviews with film clips, not only from Hooper’s films but a whole range of obvious and less-obvious derivative or inspirational works. He also divides each commentator’s interview into their own chapters, which adds a somewhat formal but elegant structure to the film.

The key problem is that the film is simply too long: knowing the structure, one can find their attention wavering by the time Karyn Kusama appears to talk very intelligently about the film’s representations of masculinity – and honestly it does her something of a disservice. Re-arranging the order of the guests might have helped to an extent.

It also difficult to entirely justify Patton Oswalt’s presence in the film. One can easily understand the other four – the world’s most popular horror author, two talented directors, and a critic who has literally written the book on horror several times over – but when you’re seeking something to cut for length, Oswalt seems an obvious choice. He is a popular entertainer, and he is certainly entertaining here, but he palpably has less to say than his co-stars.

One element that does really work is the personal nature of it all. Miike and Heller-Nicholas in particular talk less about what Texas Chainsaw Massacre means to the world and genre, and more about what it means to them. As an Australian film critic myself – albeit nowhere near as accomplished – much of what Heller-Nicholas said resonated vividly with me.

It goes without saying that Chain Reactions is a very entertaining watch for fans of Hooper’s film, or for those interested in film genre and culture. At 103 minutes of monologues, however, it really does get a little tiring. It is a little too much of a good thing.

Chain Reactions is screening at the 2025 Melbourne International Film Festival from 9 August. Click here for more information.

One of the advantages of the physical media and streaming eras of cinema is that films made 20 or more years ago, which in previous generations would have drifted into obscurity, remain in the popular entertainment conversation far longer than they ever used to. To an extend they keep their value with audiences, and Hollywood’s studios can bring back valuable intellectual property and take advantage of audience nostalgia at the same time. Within 2025 alone we are being offered revivals of 28 Years Later, Tron, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and Final Destination. Why not Freaky Friday as well?

Freaky Friday was, in itself, a remake of the original 1976 Disney comedy that starring Jodie Foster and Barbara Harris. Produced in 2003, the second version starred Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan as mother and daughter magically trapped in each other’s bodies. It was reasonably funny stuff, and a bona fide hit with its target market. Weirdly, while it was Lohan who was the popular draw in 2003, it is Curtis – now an Oscar winner – who seems to have been the driving impetus behind the sequel.

As is the trend with sequels, Freakier Friday attempts to go bigger and more outlandish: instead of a mother-daughter swap there is a four-person swap between grandmother (Curtis), mother (Lohan), daughter (Julia Butters), and step-daughter (Sophia Hammons). It is arguably more than the screenplay can bear, but thanks to some solid performances by the four leads it just about manages to hold together.

There are elements that work remarkably well, as well as jokes that fall terribly flat. Altogether it is a better film than it has any real right to be, in large part to those four key performances. A lot of actors from the original film make superficial appearances, essentially knowing waves to the audience, and for the franchise faithful they will be well received. It is nice to see The Good Place star Manny Jacinto appearing as Lohan’s new husband-to-be, and both Vanessa Bayer and X Mayo contribute some great humorous moments.

It is particularly pleasant to see Lindsay Lohan make a high-profile return to mainstream cinema. 20 years ago she all-but ruled teen Hollywood through films like The Parent Trap (1998), Freaky Friday, and Mean Girls (2004). She later struggled to maintain her popularity in more mature fare. Whether Freakier Friday heralds a return to fame or not is to be seen, but it is a nice revival for now.

There is an overall earnest quality to the film that lets it stand out from the crowd. There would be an easy temptation to mock the body-swap format, or its fairly straight-laced premise and narrative. Instead director Nisha Ganatra plays things with a simple, uncomplicated edge. It is beginning to feel like the sensibility of choice for 2025 American cinema: eschewing the real-life horrors of contemporary politics, Hollywood is going to brightly-lit optimism. To be honest, given world events these days it is a refreshing choice.

With the straightforward nature of the film comes an ease in recommending it. If you loved the 2003 version, this will be a nostalgic delight. If you are seeking a family-friendly, somewhat silly comedy, it fits the bill. If the idea of Curtis and Lohan reteamed fails to interest you, and the prospect of a Disney live-action comedy makes you squirm, you can rest assure that this confident, broadly effective confection is not for you.

A friend of mine once remarked that the weirder the subject matter of a museum, the more likely it would be that the museum was worth visiting. The argument goes that if the museum is dedicated to something really specific – possibly even bespoke – then it can only have continued to draw a crowd because it was genuinely entertaining. I think the same is true of documentaries. Generally speaking they can take a very long time to develop, produce, edit together, and sell – and there is hardly any money to be earned from them, so unless they are about sharks or Nazis they are fiendishly difficult to show a profit. See a documentary, particularly one screening at a festival, and you are as good as guaranteed to be watching a labour of love.

It is obvious from the outset that The Golden Spurtle, from Australian writer-director Constantine Costi, is one such labour. Like many great documentaries, the subject matter is an excuse: what it really represents is a profile of community, culture, and human behaviour. It is a warm, enormously charming excuse to spend about 75 minutes with some funny, wonderful, and occasionally eccentric people.

The contest involves proper Scottish porridge as well: there is no milk or sugar or fancy condiments to be found in this showdown – just water, oats, and salt. The entire film is infused with such an intensely expressed Scottishness that it feels akin to taking a trip to the Highlands themselves. I am Australian born to Scottish immigrants, and I grew up in that migrant community as well as visiting the ‘old country’ a few times, and more than once a sharp flash of recognition struck deeply. It is not just in the accents, but in the cadence. It soaks through via the attitudes, the humour, and the appalling weather. Even the locals’ insistence that the torrential rain on the day of the contest is uncharacteristic, and it is usually much brighter, is such a Scottish thing to say that it’s practically a cliché. (Nervous non-Scot viewers mustn’t fear: much of the dialogue is subtitled.)

What pushes The Golden Spurtle from an entertaining film to a masterful one is the exceptional way that it has been produced. The photography, by Dimitri Zaunders, follows a tight sense of geometry like a Wes Anderson feature. It gives everything a very stylised, slightly mannered effect, but because the documentary’s subjects are cheerfully self-aware it never feels artificial or condescending. Simon Bruckard’s musical score is similarly pitch-perfect, reflecting the small town vibe and the Caledonian culture without ever feeling stereotypical or trite.

This is a wonderful, utterly joyful crowd-pleaser. It is also film that sneaks up on one’s emotions: first you are simply enjoying the amusing circumstances and situation, but by the end do not be surprised to find yourself rather touched as well. If you are wondering what on Earth a spurtle is, the answer can be found in this beautifully composed and produced film.

The Golden Spurtle is screening at the 2025 Melbourne International Film Festival. Click here for more information.

The benefit of making a new movie about Moses is that you know there’s a certain pre-built audience for the story, and that its various elements have already been proven to attract an appreciative mass audience. The drawback is that you’re working within a very crowded piece of creative real estate: what can you bring to the screen that other directors did not? How far can you stretch the story before you begin offending the people whose religious beliefs incorporate it?

Exodus: Gods and Kings, from director Ridley Scott, is the most recent attempt to tackle Moses for the big screen – although I’m sure it will not be the last. It benefits enormously from 21st century production standards and visual effects. It also suffers terribly from creative indecision: it knows it wants to be an adaptation of the Exodus story, but seems uncertain about its precise narrative approach.

Let us talk about positives first. Clearly, as a Ridley Scott production, it looks sensational. It has a visual aesthetic and an attention to detail that pops off the screen. It has a beautiful sense of scale, and despite its length running time never particularly drags or slows down. Alberto Iglesias’ musical score is beautiful to hear, and matches the visuals perfectly.

As Moses Christian Bale gives a relaxed and naturalistic performance. Playing Batman in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy appeared to sideline his talents for some years, so that in other films he would appear to duplicate Batman’s weird combinations of gravelly whispers and fierce shouting. Terminator: Salvation is a key example of that. Here he pulls everything back, and gives a remarkably humanistic and troubled portrayal. Likewise Joel Edgerton is remarkably strong as Rameses, the Egyptian Pharaoh whose subjugation of the Jews sets the story into motion. The film is packed with quality actors in supporting roles, including Ben Kingsley, John Turturro and Sigourney Weaver, but they are for the most part unexpectedly brief.

Race is a major problem: Scott deliberately goes for a more grounded and realistic telling than one might ordinarily see, yet the casting of Caucasian actors in Egyptian and Middle Eastern roles works directly counter to it. Time has moved on, as has the ethics of cross-racial casting. 30 years ago an almost entirely white cast would pass by unnoticed. Today the audience notices these things. I understand that certain commercial realities demand that a major star must headline a movie to warrant a large production budget, but did we need an Australian as the Pharaoh and an American as his mother? Did we need John Turturro as his father?

While racial controversy was certain the film’s biggest problem in the lead-up to release, it’s actually secondary to Scott’s problems with the story. Basically there are two clear routes to take with this story: either present it in keeping with the Biblical story, with all supernatural and earth-shattering plagues and torments intact, or present it as a realistic story based on the same basic set-up. For the bulk of the film Scott takes the braver path: Moses might be talking to God, but he also might be schizophrenic. The plagues might be divinely inspired punishments, or they might simply be an unfortunate chain of natural occurrences.

This all works perfectly well up to a point, and that point is the 10th plague. There’s no easy method to provide a rational explanation for every Egyptian first-born child to die on the same night, but every Hebrew child to be spared. As a result, Scott throws away all of the work made in keeping the film ambiguous to satisfy the needs of one scene. Once this scene is passed Gods and Kings is a significantly less interesting movie. There is the expected climax, with the parting of the Red Sea, but it feels too much like contemporary Hollywood: a visual effects extravaganza rich in eye candy but low in nuance or soul.

It’s all a deep shame. The film begins with so much promise, but by its closing titles – and despite some superb performances and visual storytelling – it feels nothing much beyond redundant. Hollywood has been here before. It will be here again, and whenever that is it’s likely audiences will barely remember Ridley Scott’s contribution at all.