Duelling duo: Bridge Stuart and Nikki McKenzie in ‘A Fantastic Relationship’.

A FANTASTIC RELATIONSHIP **** (85 minutes)
If only studio romcoms were as vigourously directed and splendidly performed as this excellent, very funny, well-rounded tale of collapsing coupledom.

That’s the key thought that starts coursing through your head about 20 minutes into A Fantastic Relationship.

Actually, describing such a thoughtful, wit-laden jaunt as a romantic comedy is somewhat misleading.

It’s a comedy about romance, sure, yet it successfully pushes against the formulaic tide, sweeping aside cliches to offer something fresh and honest about modern love and the messy aftermath of a sudden break-up.

In the middle of what seems like the normal morning of a contented young couple, Katie (Nikki McKenzie) and Brian (writer/director Bridge Stuart) begin bickering over a relatively trivial matter, the sure-fire sign of deeper discord in their relationship. So they impulsively decide to end things.

As movie timing would have it, Katie gets a call from her super-successful sister inviting them to a dinner party that evening. Stupidly – or perhaps tellingly – she accepts, now having to convince Brian to pretend they’re still together.

The reasons for the ruse unfold slowly amidst a flurry of doubts, preparation and advice from friends, some of whom have a greater grasp of reality than others.

With complications piling up with every scene, Stuart maintains a high degree of comic energy, drawing a superb central performance from McKenzie as a professional young businesswoman – a millennial yuppie? – who dearly wishes she had it more together than she does.

The swirl is blessed with some truly wonderful second tier characters, most notably a lay therapist with a deeply entrenched conspiratorial mindset and a social media-obsessed woman who has had it with dating well-mannered new-recipe men. Some of the stuff they spout is pure gold. And funny as heck.

Proficiently directed with an impressive sureness of touch that breathes through tight camerawork and smooth editing, Stuart mounts what could be dubiously called a post-romcom that is as polished and accomplished as it is unassuming and inviting.

For more about the movie go here. Screening details at Laemmle NoHo (North Hollywood).

Check out some of Bridge Stuart’s very funny short films here.

FINDING NICOLE *** (90 minutes)
A raft of fine performances and a strong, fact-based story more than make up for the obviously low-budget of Finding Nicole, a fine, well-directed drama about a woman whose happy marriage dissolves into a cycle of domestic violence.

Drawn from the best-selling same-named book, Nicole Beverly (Kaiti Wallen) is prompted by the increasingly unstable behaviour of her husband Warren (Ari G), a hard-working man whose frustrations about the sacrifices he has made for his marriage metastasize into a need for control over his wife and children.

Careful not to stray into issue-driven melodrama, director Harley Wallen (Final Recovery) keeps focus on the grey details that send conflicting signals about Warren, his articulate manner and rationale facade bristling against his baser impulses and growing hatred for his wife.

Though the production values are mostly adequate and the dialogue is occasionally tinny, the quality of the acting sustains the film admirably, with Kaiti Wallen (a production partner with her husband director) convincing in her portrayal of a woman who, despite her ordeal and swirls of emotional confusion, refuses to remain passive.

The film is certainly timely given the broad rise in domestic violence, the closing captions being as distressing as they are accurate with the revelation that the crisis claims the lives of four women a day in the US.

Here, from 2021–22 to 2022–23 the death count of women at the hands of their partners jumped by some 28%, up-ending the downward trend of the previous 30 years.

On Prime (US only)

Those experiencing abuse or know of someone who is can seek from the 24/7 counselling line on 1800 737 732.

HACKING AT LEAVES ***1/2 (108 minutes)
Having recently emerged from viewing his appendage-obsessed opus Solvent without much joy or enlightenment, how gratifying it is to report that Hacking at Leaves, the latest delivery from noted Austrian artist and not-quite-conventional raconteur Johannes Grenzfurthner, is at once entertaining, informative and inventively assembled.

For the love of Mike, it’s even coherent, giving the film the added quality of shock value.

Dressed in a protective yellow suit to shield him from any sudden exposure to radioactivity, Grenzfurthner guides us through a highly unusual and captivating documentary about America, colonization, exploitation of its First Nations people, nuclear mining, Covid-19 and hacker culture, all of which are interconnected and illuminated by a string of colourful interviews with a range of equally colourful characters.

With an obvious love for analog technology, Grenzfurthner dresses the frame with VHS cassettes, old video recorders and cathode ray TV sets through which he often presents his subjects. Owners of ancient Sony Trinitron monitors be warned: your eyes might mist over.

So stylish is the presentation – it puts one in mind of Werner Herzog’s work – one can easily forgive the film’s occasional lapses in focus and even its dig at US President Donald Trump, an apparently mandatory requirement for anything left-of-centre these days.

Also pleasing is the range of pop-cultural references Grenzfurthner deploys, a highlight being the snippet from the 1981 Sean Connery sci-fi film Outland, one of the most underrated movies of that decade. Hopefully, this will warrant a mention in Grenzfurthner’s elegy.

TIM TRAVERS AND THE TIME TRAVELLER’S PARADOX ***1/2 (95 minutes)
A clever and decidedly loopy take on the all-but-exhausted time travel movie cliche, Tim Travers and the Time Traveler’s Paradox nobly tackles the tired trope with party-sized doses of humour and some ripper visuals that add up yo a fun, zesty contemplation of things impossible.

Eager to challenge the laws of the universe and the contradictory concept of time travel, dashing young scientist Tim Travers (Samuel Dunning) uses his impressively designed self-made time machine to test the age-old conundrum about disrupting your own timeline by erasing yourself.

The standard scenario we’ve been taught by countless movies and Carl Sagan is that time travel back into your past is impossible because if you go back and kill your parents you’d cease to exist, which logically can’t hold.

The premise here playfully pushes the notion by having Travers travel back a minute or so and killing himself to suss out the alleged impossibility of the event. What he discovers he didn’t expect.

No amount of Back to the Future revisits can properly brace you for the mind-twisting, resolutely fun, gloriously nonsensical shenanigans writer/director Stimson Snead unleashes here.

Most admirable, on top of A-grade visual effects that sees Travers interacting with different versions of himself, is how Snead pushes the ingenious idea to the point where it actually, kind of, well, makes some sort of sense.

It’s very well-done, and all the more meritorious for taking such an over-used sci-fi concept we’d all become mightily fatigued by and making it intriguing again.