Although, this is a love story, it’s not really a romantic film. As the characters are faced with trial after trial, what comes through is their loyal investment in each other and particularly Delilah’s determination to make things work with Samson despite his many flaws. In this sense it’s a love story but with the 1 Corinthians 13 definition of love, not the kind of love that is portrayed in your average Hollywood film. It’s also moving as a film about the plight of aboriginal peoples around the world and the daily struggles of those who fall through the gaps of society. I think it’ll stick with me for a while.

Winner of the “Best New British Feature Film” award at the Edinburgh film festival, none of the reviews/synopses I’ve read really do the film justice. The premise is that there’s these two guys who are like psychic cleaners who provide the service of airing the skeletons in your closet which gives some good comedy moments early on but that’s not really what the story is about. Most of the action revolves around a single job with a quirky family in an isolated country house and it’s here that the characters are developed and the story really happens. It’s not easily pigeon-holed – it’s kind of a comedy, but in a dark, British way, but it’s about loss and people finding themselves through each other. The film has resulted in writer/director Nick Whitfield being called a British Charlie Kaufman and there are definitely hints of the surreal worlds of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Being John Malkovich where disbelief is very much suspended.

Unfortunately, although the screening I saw was sold out, there aren’t many opportunities to see Skeletons at the cinema at the moment. Here’s a list. It’s a shame because it’s a quirky British film that deserves a wider audience than it’s getting.

Manic is set in the juvenile wing of the Northwood Mental Institution. The cast is made up mostly of unknowns, although JGL would have already done 3rd Rock by this time, and it was largely shot hand-held on a digital camcorder which is very effective as the tension builds between various characters and we get right in their faces.

What really makes the film stand out is its focus on the ebbs and flows of the relationships between these broken and hurting people and there are some really beautiful performances as these characters oscillate between vulnerability and their various defence mechanisms.

Deschanel’s quiet, troubled Tracy, Sara Rivas’s mouthy but insecure goth (also called Sara) and Michael Bacall’s nihilist Chad all make this a poetic ensemble piece that reminds us of our fragility and our need to find hope within ourselves and in each other.

Definitely worth the £2.99 it is on Amazon at the moment.

There is a certain nostalgia to watching a film from the 90s but, in this case, it was more a nostalgia for the 90s America I watched on TV while I was growing up than for the 90s Dorset I grew up in! There’s a great scene where the main character’s serious documentary footage of her friends, as they search for their identity and a place in the system they’re trying to reject, gets cut and spliced into garishly coloured, superficial, spoon-feeding 90s reality TV that was spot on the kind of rubbish I remember watching on Sunday morning Channel 4!

For those who like TV connections trivia, there’s John Mahoney who played Frasier’s dad in Frasier and Janeane Garofalo, whose stint in series 7 of 24 antagonising Chloe was one of the few good things about that series. There’s also a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it bit part for Renée Zellweger before she was famous.

Plus, the credits roll to Stay by Lisa Loeb which is up there with the best of the (many) one-hit wonders of the 90s.

8 candidates….1 job….1 question….1 answer….how far would you go….for your dream job?….EXAM.

If you’ve seen Cube or Cypher, this is a similar film but, unfortunately, if you’ve seen Cube or Cypher, you probably only need to watch the first 10 minutes to have a pretty good guess about everything else that happens thereafter.

This little exchange from The History Boys came to my mind after watching this film…

Timms: I don’t always understand poetry!
Hector: You don’t always understand it? Timms, I never understand it. But learn it now, know it now and you will understand it… whenever.

There are films and bits of films that you don’t really get when you first watch them. But then, at all sorts of random times, something sparks them back to your memory and you find that you not only understand the film better but also yourself or your situation. They become part of the apparatus, the vocabulary by which we understand ourselves and our lives. That’s been my experience, anyway.

I think All The Real Girls is meant to be watched as poetry. It’s an attempt at a realistic depiction of the rise and fall of a relationship between people and all their baggage. It’s a film about things between people. There’s not really a nice neat story arc – it’s more a series of vignettes of the different phases of the relationship. Some are more successful than others and there were bits that I just didn’t really get but there are some beautiful scenes that tackle the real highs and lows and complications and intricacies of two people trying to understand each other and themselves within and through a real (non-Hollywood) relationship.

Like poetry, this is a film that I can imagine watching in a years’ time and it resonating differently. It’s nice to watch a film and know that you haven’t heard everything it has to say first time round.

In summary, a grower!

Given that this is a film that has been made and remade over and over (mostly) by young, American and male film-makers, this version doesn’t really bring anything new or interesting in the way that some others do.

The two main characters, particularly “Happy”, don’t feel developed enough and so I ended up feeling they were quite inaccessible to me and therefore didn’t really engage with their fates. This, the jumpy plot that takes us from one quirky indie set-piece to the next with scarce continuity and the random guy who, for completely unexplained reasons, appears throughout the film to try to kill Paul Dano left me, by the end, with my own sense of queasiness and ennui to match those of the film’s main characters!