Reel Rock 18
Each year, the Reel Rock event showcases short films, documentaries and features about rock-climbing. The annual travelling film festival is now into its 18th year.
Reel Rock 18 (rating to be confirmed, NC16 expected, 123 minutes) comprises four short films. It includes With My Heart, a documentary about Sachi Amma, a 34-year-old professional rock climber from Japan whose meditative, back-to-basics approach to the sport is summed up by the phrase “I climb with my heart”.
The film follows the two-time World Cup champion (2012 and 2013) as he makes a difficult ascent on Mount Mizugaki, located in a national park in central Japan.
All four short films will be screened in a single sitting with no intermission.
Where: Golden Village x The Projector at Cineleisure, 05-00, 8 Grange Road
MRT: Somerset
When: April 20, April 27 and May 5, various times
Admission: $16 for standard weekend tickets
Info: str.sg/mdLE
Late Night With The Devil (M18)
93 minutes, now showing
4 stars
Filming in Melbourne with a mostly Australian cast, Australian film-making brothers Colin and Cameron Cairnes have recreated, with loving attention, the look of American live television as it existed four decades ago.
In the 1970s battle of the late-night talk shows, Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian), host of Night Owls, is losing. To beat rival Johnny Carson, Jack decides to make his Halloween special the best yet. Pandering to an America obsessed with all things Satanic, he assembles guests with ties to the paranormal and demonic.
The laughs coming from the mildly sadistic interplay between Dastmalchian’s insecure host and his amiable co-host and whipping boy Gus McConnell (Rhys Auteri) will bring to mind The Larry Sanders Show (1992 to 1998), a satire centred on a similarly anxiety-ridden talk-show host played by Garry Shandling.
Despite being set in one room – a television studio during one night of taping – the film never feels monotonous because the setting, characters and dialogue keep the levels of interest high.
American actor Dastmalchian has, for years, been “that” guy – an in-demand supporting actor viewers will recognise from Dune: Part One (2021) and The Suicide Squad (2021).
As Jack the doomed television host, he moves through grief, egomania and terror in a vividly memorable way. He is an actor more than ready for a breakthrough.
La Chimera (PG13)
130 minutes, now showing exclusively at The Projector
4 stars
La Chimera is set around 1980 Tuscany, although place and time are a liminal space in the pastoral magic-realist fables of Italian auteur Alice Rohrwacher.
After a prison stint in Italy, English archaeologist Arthur (Josh O’Connor) returns to the countryside and falls back in with his merry band of tomb raiders.
Writer-director Rohrwacher, a Tuscan native, is revered in the cinephile circle for her autobiographical storytelling and unique cinematic language. All four of her narrative features – Heavenly Body (2011), The Wonders (2014), Happy As Lazzaro (2018) and La Chimera (2023) – were selected for competition at the Cannes Film Festival.
This film is like a folk ballad, at once playful and soulful. There are troubadours, and the singing, dancing gang of vagabond grave-robbers are carnivalesque carousers straight out of a movie by the director’s 1950s cinema forebear Federico Fellini.
Arthur is their reluctant leader because of his preternatural instinct for dowsing Etruscan burial sites. They dig up antiquities from the crypts and then fence the loot to a shady dealer (the film-maker’s sister, Alba Rohrwacher).
The rumpled expatriate is, however, seeking not riches underground but a legendary gate to the spirit world – to his lost love, Beniamina (Yile Yara Vianello). The desultory quest traverses the past and a spectral present, the living and the dead, history and myth, decaying villas and parched lands.
