fresh movie reviews for a socially distanced world

dir: JT Mollner

2024

This flick thinks it’s ever so fucking clever.

I beg to disagree.

It starts with a pseudo-voice-over meant to sound like what it’s saying is true. I don’t know if it’s cribbing from the most famous of the fake intros ever done, which is probably the infamous one John Larroquette recorded for Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but it’s another reminder of how artificial this all is.

It’s not based on a true story, but it does clue us in to a detail about these shenanigans being something to do with some killing spree from some serial killer.

A-HA! It must be the first guy we see on the screen, helpfully titled The Demon. He does have a moustache after all. We also hear a voice ask him if he’s a serial killer, and then he’s shown doing something murdery!

But then… we’re told that this is a story that will be told in six parts. And then the film ‘jumps’ to part 3.

Hmm, this is gonna be one of dem dere non-chronological storytellings, huh?

And to what purpose will that non-chronological telling be? Is it to delightfully obscure what is happening and why, or is it to deepen our understanding of the rich tapestry of life that we call the human experience?

Yeah Nah. It’s just to delay our understanding of what’s really going on.

dir: Zoë Kravitz

2024

It’s not enough that her parents are Lisa Bonet and Lenny Kravitz who are, if nothing else, two of the most supernaturally attractive people on the planet. It’s not enough that her parents are incredibly talented and successful as well in their respective fields. It’s not enough that Ms Kravitz is immensely talented and successful herself, and that she’s been great in most of the performances I’ve ever seen her give, in films as different as The Batman and, a film I actually liked, being Kimi or that remake series of High Fidelity.

Now she wants to successfully direct movies as well. Goddamn talented nepo babies: a leg up and a foot through the door, and so much more.

Also, as if to emphasise what a nepo baby experience this all is, a child of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman is in this, but no, it’s not Maya – it’s their son Levon, who plays a complete nothing of a character. He is there just to remind us what the untalented nepo babies are up to.

Plus, Ms Kravitz also hires her fiancé, who’s clearly hurting for work, being Channing Tatum, to play one of the main roles here: that of a tech billionaire who’s always vaping.

If only that was the worst of his crimes. This is one of those movies where someone accidentally or unintentionally gets trapped in a place where they might get hunted or murdered or worse. You know, like those films where rich people hunt poor people for their selfish amusement.

The twist in the tail here is that the rich tech bros led by Slater King, which is a name so terrible it could only be the name of a vile tech bro who rubs shoulders with the likes of Elmo Husk or Peter Thiel, have it all figured out. He and his other monsters are monstrous predators, but they are comfortable ones.

The thing is, right from the start, we know something odd is going on, and that’s a good place to start from.

dir: Tilman Singer

2024

Cuckoos, as represented in movies, are the worst birds in the world. I don’t mean how they’re physically represented, I mean the process by which they get by in this crazy, turvy topsy world.

By now absolutely everyone, even the people that don’t watch exactly all the films that I watch knows that the reason why cuckoos are so hated is because the mummy cuckoo lays her eggs in the nest of a different species of bird, without even asking. The cuckoo hatches, mum is long gone, never to return, and then proceeds to push out the other eggs or hatchlings, leaving it the sole recipient of its adoptive parent’s hunting and gathering. This can go on an absurd length of time, such that the cuckoo has grown larger than its nest and carers.

Then, I dunno, it eats them or something.

It’s not only the fact that it murders the other babies. It’s not just that their evolutionary strategy is called “brood parasitism”, which sounds inherently evil. It’s not only the fact that it robs these parents of their efforts, tricking them into devoting all their time and energies into furthering the survival of a creature they’re not even genetically related to, it’s that it just seems so nasty.

dir: Rupert Sanders

2024

Thirty years have passed since the original film came out. Inexplicably it became and remains something of a cult classic amongst sad, chubby people my age, you know, people just like me.

I went and saw the movie in the theatre with my girlfriend at the time. The relationship did not last long past the end of the film, I don’t think. She did not enjoy the experience, at all.

On my part I probably apologised hundreds of times for dragging her to such a terrible flick, but it was to no avail. Some relationships cannot be saved, some loves cannot be redeemed, even with the powers of supernatural crows or the support of tangential characters.

In case my language has been indelicate or ambiguous – the original Crow is a terrible movie. I don’t care what anyone says, what generous curve someone invents to grade against; by any metric of what makes a movie half decent, it fails on every level imaginable.

And yet – there was that soundtrack that people really, really liked. Some people even bought it (on tape) and listened to it thousands of times. There was the emotional frisson of sacrifice that came from the knowledge that the very talented lead Brandon Lee, son of Bruce Lee, died during the making of the film.

Some particularly pathetic people had posters of the talented Brandon Lee in full gothic gear and clown makeup on the walls of the flats and hovels they lived in for the rest of the 90s…

And by talented, I mean he was a talented martial artist, who was good in one other film he made (Rapid Fire), but put in a ludicrously arch and blundering performance as the “hero” of the title here. I mean, the dialogue is fucking wretched in this flick, and his performance and delivery is cringeworthy throughout. He says and does such dumb things throughout this whole goddamn flick.

And yet… They decided to make a new Crow. And it’s not even as bad as the original. It finds new, modern ways to be mediocre.

Its main, major sin is that it’s a dumb premise, and it’s a property that just really didn’t need to be resurrected.

dir: Jeremy Saulnier

2024

If you know what to expect from Jeremy Saulnier as a director, then nothing you see in this film should come as a complete shock to you (even when shocking things occur).

I can’t imagine it’s a group containing legions of people, but his second and third films at least are loved by a certain type of film nerd. Blue Ruin and Green Room are rightly prized as keen examples of a meticulous approach to directing and storytelling, and to the escalation of tension in the delivery of a rollicking ride for the attentive viewer.

I have no idea what Hold the Dark is like, but if it’s anything like everything else he’s done, it should proceed with all the fussiness and precision of a Swiss watch.

Just like this does. Rebel Ridge contains not a single wasted second of screen time or a single wasted word of dialogue. Everything is in the absolute service of delivering the story in the most precise fashion possible. It’s what he does.

And yes, despite the seeming familiarity of the subject matter: An outsider being treated like shit by the cops in a country town, only to turn the tables on them for sweet, sweet revenge, the real villain is civil asset forfeiture.

You read that right: in a country where everyone has guns, no-one takes responsibility for anything, and where no-one wants to pay any taxes, the idea is that cop shops will fund themselves through confiscating funds from criminal activities.

That sounds like a great idea. I am sure that cops, who are known for their honesty and forthrightness, would never find ways to abuse such a system.

(Bên trong vỏ kén vang)

dir: Phạm Thiên Ân

2023

Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell is a perfect example of so-called “slow cinema”, in that it goes for over three hours(!), and unfurls itself at what one would call an unhurried pace. Since it’s so long, and because so much of the screen time has nothing to do with what the plot seems to be about, it aspires to be about way more than its constituent parts. Perhaps. I don’t know anything for sure.

A young man called Thiện (Lê Phong Vũ), wanders around for three hours, pretty confused about what to do with his life. Amidst the wanderings, certain things happen, but the film isn’t about those things: his sister-in-law dies, so he has to take care of her funeral arrangements, look after his 5-year-old nephew Đạo (Nguyễn Thịnh), and possibly track down his own brother Tam, who abandoned his family a number of years ago.

So it involves actual things happening, but I doubt it’s about those “things”.

I say this with a modicum of confidence, mostly because I’ve watched the film the whole way through, and because I went back and watched the beginning again just to make sure.

dir: Shawn Levy

2024

Shame…shame…shame. I feel like I’ve been paraded through the streets of King’s Landing, much to my eternal regret for my shameful crimes, after watching this amalgam of references loosely aspiring to be a ‘movie’.

Watching and laughing as much as I did while watching this flick only filled me with deep shame, after the laughs wore off. I would almost argue that it was involuntary, as in, against my will and my supposedly rational mind, but that’s pretty much the same every time we laugh. It bypasses rationality and hits us in the centre of our lizard brain, that same part that laughs and then immediately recoils when you giggle at someone walking into something or getting hit in the groin.

I did not expect to ‘enjoy’ this flick, but then I discovered that either they programmed me years ago to enjoy things like this like the Pavlovian dog that I am, or, based on some kind of horrifying download directly from my brain, they figured out how to make something entirely for the very nerdiest parts of my entire being.

I mean, the only way they could have made it more for me is if they actually had references to me, like Deadpool himself saying “yeah, drew, you’re really going to like this next reference, who’s a clever boy?”

The thing is, part of me knows how wrong it is to find Ryan Reynolds and his smarmy antics so funny. It makes me feel soiled, contaminated in so many ways. I tell myself I am old enough not to fall for his bullshit, not to be amused by such lowbrow Freudian anally and orally fixated idiocy, and yet there I am, laughing until tears course down my haggard features.

dir: M. Night Shyamalan

2024

We can’t, at this stage, pretend we don’t know what we’re in for by voluntarily choosing to watch a film by M. Night Shyamalan. He’s not the problem anymore – we are. People like me – people who hatewatch his films just to have something to complain about. Inadvertently, we create the thing we loathe by still making it look like he is a profitable director.

It’s a sickness, an addiction, if you will. So please understand that this review genuinely comes from a place of bad faith.

A dad called Cooper (Josh Hartnett) takes along his daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to a concert at a stadium. The pop star putting on the concert? Lady Raven (Saleka Night Shyamalan). Is she the Beyoncé / Taylor Swift of this world, which is always Philadelphia if it’s a Shyamalan movie, even though it was shot in Canada? Eh. She’s more a sub-tier Camila Cabello / Olivia Rodrigo, but without any songs anywhere near as catchy. For once in his life Shyamalan has done something more realistic, in that believing his daughter could play an international popstar would be unbelievable even for him.

The dad makes dad jokes, alternates between riling his daughter up and saying how great this will all be, and also trying to reassure her that her recent problems with school friends won’t matter in the scheme of things. And he also tries to get her snacks and merch and such, which is fine. You even sense that she would probably have preferred to have gone to the concert with those friends she’s on the outs with, but it’s still nice of her dad to have bought the tickets and come along with her.

A lot of dads would probably not want to subject themselves to something like this, or they’d be busy with something else, or they’d be too self-conscious to be seen at such a place with their teenage daughter. Not our hero here, Cooper. No, he lives to make his precious little princess happy.

dir: Annie Baker

2024

The hint, to me, was how loud the sounds of nature are, at all times, around the Janet of the film’s title and her daughter, throughout the film. No matter where they are, the sounds of insects and birds, and other creatures, permeate every scene.

There is some music in the flick, but it’s all diegetic (as in, playing within the movie, not as a soundtrack that the characters aren’t hearing).

It’s one long summer, an endless summer, in someone’s life. That someone is not the someone referred to in the title of the film, but maybe it is?

Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) calls her mother from summer camp, telling her she’s going to kill herself if she’s not picked up.

She’s about eleven years old, I think. By the time the mother comes to collect her, Lacy has changed her mind and wants to stay, but tis too late.

And thus ensues the depiction of their enmeshed, co-dependent relationship over the course of that summer. I don’t think it’s unintended, or a lot of a stretch, or too unfair to say that Lacy seems really fucking annoying.

I’m sure deep down she’s a good kid, who maybe grew up to be less of a pill. But at that age, she was a clingy pill who made her mother’s life hell, based on this flick. And maybe I’m assuming too much, but I get the feeling the character is probably an extreme, extrapolated version of herself that the writer / director remembers or imagines about herself. Maybe. In which case what she remembers, or artistically renders about her mother also has meaning for her, and hopefully us.

dir: Damian McCarthy

2024

Oddity is one of the stronger horror flicks to come out this year thus far. It’s still pretty slow, though, and deliberately unsatisfying in its resolution, so take my endorsement with a large grain of slow-cooked salt.

Not that you’re waiting for my blessing as to whether you’ll see this or not.

This is a complex and unsettling slow burner that nonetheless is happy enough to indulge in jump scares when it wants to punctuate something, and punctuate it does. Ye gods. I never pretended to be immune to jump scares, but the mark of a quality one is that even when you know it’s coming, it still scares the shit out of you.

This film also is an indictment of the insidiousness of how Grand Designs has permeated everything.

I have nothing against Kevin McCloud, in fact I quite like the man, as a presenter and as a designer, but there’s no doubt his terrible and terribly addictive show has done more to stoke the fires of property renovation - aspiration than any other show produced by Great Britain ever in its history. It is a horrible show where couples who claim they can’t afford any of what they’re doing somehow find the extra five hundred thousand pounds from somewhere in order to eventually complete their dream home five years later than they thought they would. It is dismal and irritating how well they manage to suck the audience in and get them invested in the works being completed without losing everything (which never happens, because the show is aspirational, after all).

Sometimes the couple’s survive, sometimes they don’t. A lot of them look like they’ve never really appreciated what the ‘sunk cost’ fallacy actually means, or, because they are so goddamn wealthy it doesn’t ultimately matter that much to them. It’s more than just a collection of stones and wood, because, in the man’s own words, “the notion of home is not simply a concept, it’s a place of psychological dependency.”

Rarely does it lead to murder, like it ultimately does here.

dir: Yorgos Lanthimos

2024

If Poor Things seemed like an attempt from a mercurial director to make something somehow crowd-pleasing and popular, Kinds of Kindness is a reminder that what this director really enjoys doing is making audiences feel very uncomfortable.

He has a knack for it. Kinds of Kindness is a long arse movie, mostly because it’s three movies standing on each other’s shoulders under a coat pretending to be one movie. The three stories have all the same actors, mostly, playing completely different roles, but they’re only loosely connected.

What are they connected by? It’s not kindness, I can tell you that much for free.

They’re also not connected by R.M.F. Each story has ‘R.M.F.’ in its title, but R.M.F. himself doesn’t even get any dialogue.

“The Death of R.M.F.”, “R.M.F. is Flying” and “R.M.F. eats a sandwich” are each part of this triptych. Those titles are not illuminating, in that they explain neither their point nor their linkage. But they could be evidence that Lanthimos, part of the so-called Greek Weird Wave of cinema, primarily likes fucking with his audience’s heads / expectations.

Who is R.M.F in the first story? He is a guy wearing a monogrammed shirt, who is paid with an envelope of cash, who is meant to be run into by a car (while driving a separate car). In the second he is the helicopter pilot who brings back a marine biologist who was lost at sea. And in the third story, he is a dead person brought back to life, who eats a sandwich, and gets a lot of it on his shirt.

Very messy eater, that R.M.F. Maybe R.M.F stands for Repulsive Mother Fucker?

What’s of absolute greatest importance is that it does not fucking matter, not one bit.

dIr: Kelsey Mann

2024

You don’t have to tell me, I already agree with you. You’re right: Inside Out didn’t need a sequel. It was perfect as it was, a pristine thing of beauty, something to hold up as evidence that late-stage Pixar could still put out decent flicks long after its heyday.

And yet they made this, it was a massive success, it raked in all the moneys, and Disney execs get to rub even more cold hard cash all over their bodies, and we’re the chumps left crying in our seats or in the gutter.

Fully admitting that, I still enjoyed the flick, and I don’t think it’s a drop in quality at all. Even if it feels a bit unnecessary at the end, it’s okay. The metaphor still holds up.

Hostages as we are to our hormones and our emotions, we continue the story of teenager Riley as seen through the portholes that are her eyes by the emotions that animate her entire being through a control console of buttons, levers and, I dunno, flanges maybe. All the ‘old’ emotions are back, especially Sadness (Phyllis Smith), my absolute favourite, but a growing Riley, who has just hit puberty, finds herself at the mercy of a whole new set of emotions / feelings.

dir: Osgood Perkins

2024

I… did not like this. I had been assured that it was the scariest film of the year, but that’s not even where it falls down. Scary, like everything else, is in the eye of the beholder. Some jaded eyes aren’t going to recoil in terror at the same things as others, they’re just going to roll in contempt or irritation.

I think I just expected too much of this director. I really loved one of his previous films, being I Am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House, which doesn’t operate as a conventional horror film at all, but still really worked for me. I couldn’t even tell you why that flick works and this one doesn’t, other than to point out the difference in expectations, in that I had none the first time I saw that flick, and had plenty when I saw this flick.

Nicolas Cage, and this is something I don’t usually get to type, is not the problem with the film. His performance as the so-called Longlegs of the title neither improves the flick nor sinks it. It’s strange, unhinged, unsettling and unpleasant, but that’s what you want in a flick, probably.

Nor is the actual lead performance in the flick, being played by Maika Monroe, the problem. The performance isn’t great, and is pointlessly distracting, but the way she carries herself as the main detective trying to figure out how someone is murdering entire families and yet leaving no physical evidence at the crime is fine for the film’s purposes.

(九龍城寨之圍城
九龙城寨之围城
Jiǔ Lóng Chéng Zhài·Wéi Chéng)

dir: Soi Cheang

2024

It brought me a strange joy to watch this movie.

I am not, despite my abject mawkishness and the fact that the slightest thing can bring me to tears, whether it’s a tv commercial or any pet rescue video online, an overly sentimental person. I don’t revel in nostalgia. That doesn’t mean I don’t think of the past, all the time. I am as much a prisoner of the past as the rest of us are.

But I never indulge along the lines of “Things were so much better back *insert unspecified time when you were younger*. The movies were better, the music was better, sex and drugs were better, everything back then was better. If only we could return to…”

With little variation, plenty of things were terrible for plenty of people back whenever you choose to pick. If the music back then was great, I can listen to it at will now. If there were great films back whenever, in a lot of cases I can just stream them at will too. At every time that there was great stuff coming out, there was plenty of absolute crap.

For every great Hong Kong film I ever watched, there were a hundred mediocre pieces of shit that came out as well. I don’t want to return to the late 80s early 90s at all. I certainly don’t want the world to go forty years backwards. Think of how terrible the internet was back then. You want to go back to dial-up modems? Well, do ya?

But even I can’t help feeling a deep nostalgia while watching this flick, which I’m going to truncate to Walled In for the purposes of this review.

The place this flick pretends to be about no longer exists. Unlike the great cities of yore that are nothing but dust now, or infamous places where feet dread to step, the Walled so-called City in Kowloon existed within living memory, for weird reasons, and its destruction is also not that long ago, happening several years before Britain handed back Hong Kong to China in 1997.

It should never have controlled Hong Kong, because, in case you haven’t noticed, colonialism brings misery and wealth-extraction wherever it goes, and is bad. Britain’s control of Hong Kong is especially awful, since its occupation started with the Opium Wars.

You know, those wars where the Chinese said “please, we don’t want that crap, it’s killing us”, and the British Empire said “you will take our opium and you will love it, bitches”, enforced of course through many cannons making many Chinese people be unalived. The remnants of the Qing Dynasty ceded control of that island referred to as Hong Kong, but as a “fuck you” designated an area for there to be a fort and an official residence for an official to sit in his office and glare at them through the window.

dir: Paul Feig

2024

I thought I was watching the sequel to Idiocracy, but instead of critiquing what decades of neo-liberalism, curdled libertarianism and the dogma of ‘rugged individualism’ has wrought in the States, this cowardly film ends up celebrating it.

Imagine California years from now. Tent cities everywhere, human life is worth even less than today, streets awash in sewerage. Successive Trump governments have bankrupted the country, and the only way the government has to raise money is in an increasingly elevated lottery. No, it’s not a nod to Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery; it’s something much dumber and far more shallow.

Instead of taking its cues from something intelligent or sensible, this flick turns The Purge concept into a comedy, but instead of one night a year being a free-for-all, for the day when the winner is announced, everyone can legally kill the winner and claim the billion dollar prize pool. In the unlikeliest twist on the premise, the murderers aren’t allowed to use guns, though.

Pfft. How un-American, but then California is different from the rest of the States.

This has been going on for a while, so, like when any new awful thing comes along, people adapt. People change according to what is perceived as being the new normal. They just accept that it’s fine.

dir: Lee Isaac Chung

2024

Genius. Whoever was working in the marketing department for this film, whose decision it was to call it Twisters, you, sir or madam, or non-binary equivalent, are a platinum-plated, stone-cold genius. First movie was called Twister. Do you even reckon they bothered with brainstorming titles? “Uh, Twister 2?”

What about…Twis2er? Twister II, more old school perhaps, or maybe 2 Twist 2 Furious?

Nup. Nope. Twisters. And then when they make the sequel to this, they have the next, absolutely perfect title: Twisti3s. I smell marketing opportunities galore!

Bold, lots of bold choices going into this film. Especially since there’s practically nothing connecting the two films, other than they’re about idiots chasing tornadoes and then getting scared and having to hide from the same tornadoes.

It never occurred to me before, but the perplexity I face watching these special kinds of disaster flicks was somewhat alleviated when I realised, during the ‘intense’ moments in the film, that they’re really not that different from monster / kaiju movies, in that tornadoes are gigantic mindless forces of nature that destroy everything in their path. And when done right, the little people running around admit they have no power over anything, and are at the mercy of a cruel yet somehow indifferent universe. In the bad versions of these stories, the pathetic humans think they are the ones in control, and they can do things to make the bad giant monsters / tornadoes go away.

dir: Daina Oniunas-Pusiċ

2023

A film about a dying teenager… It’s not a guaranteed barrel of laughs. I guess there’s this weird sub-genre of YA books adapted to movies about dying teenagers finding love (just before the end), but in general you’d think studios worry the subject matter is too confronting to get bums on seats in theatres.

What about… Julia Louis-Dreyfus, the great Julia Louis-Dreyfus? If I told you she was in it, would that entice you back into the cinema? She has a solid number of post-Seinfeld performances such that you would think a decent person wouldn’t have to mention what she’s most famous for. She’s been great in those Nicole Holofcener movies like Enough Said and You Hurt My Feewings, and there’s her amazing run on Veep.

Her performance is much neater and much more straight-forward here (even as the story becomes more fantastical). She plays the mother of a dying teenager, and she’s pretty much in denial about it despite the constant and unavoidable daily struggle to keep things together. She knows her daughter is dying, but she can’t even talk to her daughter about it, and sort-of avoids her, palming her off onto the nurse who looks after her (Leah Harvey). She has a nurse to look after Tuesday (Lola Pettigrew) during the day, but she that time pawning things, hanging out in cafes and sleeping on a bench in a park.

Why? Well, why not?

These are not the characters we first meet in this flick, not really. There’s another character I haven’t mentioned yet who plays the most central role, other than Tuesday. I don’t know if it’s a he, or how they choose to style themselves, but today’s the day you find out that Death Himself or Death Itself is an orange macaw. A parrot. The Parrot of Death (Arinze Mokwe Kene). Born of the void, he has no friends, but he has one task, and that is to visit the dying, wave his mighty wing at them, and then see them ushered out of this world.

He grows large, he grows small as needs be, he is greeted with relief, or hate, or fear, or scorn, but the result is the same.

dir: Vera Drew

2024

That this exists… is something of a miracle. It feels like a production that, had Warner Brothers known about it, would have sued all the people involved out of existence.

Let me put this into a tiny bit in context. I had a Scottish friend from back in the day, and she worked in film production in the UK. She worked for a company run by a number of sisters, whose literal surname was Warner. Naturally, in a cheeky fashion, they called their production company The Warner Sisters.

No-one with half a brain, or even most of the Americans that would vote for their bilious orange emperor, would confuse Warner Brothers with Warner Sisters. First of all, the words ‘Sisters’ and ‘Brothers’ are different words. As such, it is unlikely that anyone would confuse the Sisters with the movie production company started by Sam, Harry, Albert and the notorious Jack Warner in 1923.

But they sued them anyway. And the sisters, being a small film production company mostly doing corporate stuff and documentaries, couldn’t afford to compete legally with a billion dollar company, even one as incompetent and self-defeating as WB, so they capitulated and changed the name.

That’s how petty WB is. So when I watch a flick like this, where liberal usage of WB’s intellectual property occurs, in ways you know WB corporate or legal would never, ever agree to, I just feel like Vera Drew, in struggling so hard to make this flick, and eventually get it released in 2024, is like one of the bravest people in the world.

dir: Daniel Kokotajlo

2023

Brrr. Things are fucking grim up north. Yorkshire, to be specific. I can’t remember the last time I ever saw something set in Yorkshire that wasn’t dismal in almost every aspect of its being. Dales or moors, hills or glades, the entirety of the English canon of films make it seem to be a place more desolate than the moon’s surface.

And then there’s this flick. It takes what for many of us is the foreboding of knowing it’s depicting Yorkshire; a bucolic, idyllic looking place on the surface where dread permeates everything, and then adds misery, child death and the menace of the supernatural.

I actually like movies set in these kinds of areas, in that I enjoy footage of serene fields bordered by rock walls, of ancient trees, of heaths and earth. I don’t have negative or paranoid associations with them, and yet flicks like this work overtime to remind us that humans are not entirely welcome on certain bits of this green earth.

Juliette and Richard (Morfydd Clark and Matt Smith) have moved from the city back to Richard’s childhood home in Yorkshire in order to bring up their beloved son Owen (Arthur Shaw). Owen is unwell, and possibly deranged. Very early on he mentions that someone is whispering to him, and that’s before he stabs a pony in the eye for no discernible reason. We aren’t given enough time to wrestle with the implications and the logistics of trying to help a mentally unwell young child, because he is not long for this world.

dir: Ti West

2024

Maxxxine is the kind of flick you get when you promised a movie trilogy and ran out of ideas by the end of the second film. What to do in the third one…

I genuinely thought the first two movies rocked. I thought X was hilarious and ever so brutally violent, and passionate about its shlockiness. Pearl was a completely different film, and a fairly bonkers one at that. This one though…

I had watched many 80s slasher flicks, back in the day, well, mostly in the 90s, to be honest. I have seen, now, many parody flicks, homage flicks, satirical takes on 80s slasher flicks as well. Too many. I have now seen one more, one which perfectly apes the look and the feel of those days, which is as deliberately dated as anything you can remember from Stranger Things.

Remember Stranger Things? Seems like we all moved on a little quick from it. Anyway, so, Maxxxine. If nothing else this trilogy serves as a reminder of what a charismatic performer Mia Goth is, but the sad thing at least is that her performance isn’t as memorable as her earlier two (three, really), in the first two flicks. Hell, the character she played in Infinity Pool was far more memorable and terrifying than whatever this flick serves up here.

Maxine in this flick’s era, which is 1985, is famous in the porno world, but not as famous as she would like. She’s getting on in years (early thirties), and knows that her career options are going to diminish. She seeks roles in the ‘legitimate’ movie world, despite no-one thinking that she can get passed her past.

That’s not even the past she’s trying to move on from. The past she’s really trying to get away from is the events from the first flick, being X, where many murders transpired, however many were justifiable. There’s also a deeply creepy scene in the intro where a very young Maxine is pledging on camera both something something Jesus, but also that she’s going to be a bright fucking star one day.

dir: Michael Sarnoski

2024

Michael Sarnoski made probably the best film that I saw in 2021, even more inexplicably it starred Nicolas Cage. That film was called Pig, and even a staunch supporter of that film would still be both glad, on his behalf, and perplexed that he would have such a gig as directing this here third instalment in a science fiction post-apocalyptic franchise.

I’m not going to pretend I haven’t watched the other ones: I have. I thought the first one was fantastic; I thought the second one was pretty okay, and when I heard they were making a third one I yawned, mightily. My jaw probably made a cracking sound.

But then I heard Lupita Nyong’o would star, and that this guy would direct, and thought “that could be something remarkable”.

Well. It’s a fine film. It’s unnecessary, and doesn’t advance anything, not that we needed to go anywhere, with the relentless illusion of constant progress, but it’s better than I thought it would be. It’s odd enough in its intentions that it works okay for what it is.

The great Djimon Hounsou had a role in the second one, as the primary family tries to get to a place where the scary aliens who hate noise can’t eat them; he’s on some island. In this flick he gets far more screen time, but to far less purpose. This flick, if it has a purpose, explains how Djimon Hounsou’s character got to that island.

dir: Josh Margolin

2024

I loved the absolute heck out of this film. I love every impulse behind it. I love that June Squibb is still alive in her 90s and could star in the flick, and do so incredibly well as the main character Thelma. I love that Richard Roundtree, legend of Blaxploitation cinema, the one the only Shaft, has a major role in this and that it was his last movie.

I love that the director is joyously paying tribute to his own grandma, being the Thelma from the movie’s title, who is still alive to this day at 103.

That’s not the same as saying that this is based on a ‘true’ story. The deliriously beautiful thing about the flick is the way it constructs something that seems like or feels like a heist flick, yet uses the low stakes befitting its characters to full comic effect. And yet the music /score doesn’t know that, and therefore barrels along like it is that high stakes heist flick.

It’s brilliant. Our protagonist, being Thelma, rolls over a bed, or evades someone on a mobility aid scooter, and the music accompanying the scene makes you think she’s robbing the vaults at Fort Knox or pulling off a caper the Ocean’s Eleven chumps wouldn’t dare to try.

It is ironic that one of her inspirations in the story is seeing Tom Cruise running and doing stunts, and being told by her grandson that “he does all his own stunts”, that inspires Thelma to do more than the people around her expect her to be capable of. Mission: Possible is what she believes in.

Despite being in her nineties, Thelma is active, energetic and walks around under her own steam. She lives alone, and not in assisted living, or some other euphemism for an old folks home, which is itself a euphemism, for those places we park the olds before they finally depart from this mortal coil.

(Kuolleet Lehdet)

dir: Aki Kaurismäki

2023

Fallen Leaves is the most recent film from Finland’s greatest ever director. Well, I say that, knowing nothing about Finland’s film industry. There could be way better directors in Finland. But none of them have had anywhere near the level of international acclaim as Aki Kaurismäki. It’s probably because he’s been doing it for forty years or so. It’s possibly because of the quality of his films.

It could be because of the fact that his name rhymes so wonderfully. Aki Kaurismäki. Rolls off the tongue.

He is at least the only one who routinely got played in arthouse cinemas in Australia over the years. If there is a single other popular or critically acclaimed Finnish director, I haven’t heard of them, and I hear about a lot of people from a lot of places. Renny Harlin is the only other one I can think of, and he hasn’t made anything vaguely good in decades. The only other Finnish film I can think of that’s come out recently is that one where the gold prospector kills all them fucking Nazis, which was delightful (Sisu), but that’s only one movie.

My man Aki has been pumping them out since the 80s. Since Leningrad Cowboys Go America, he has been delighting audiences around the world with his cinematic antics. Maybe “delighting” is too strong a term. I don’t know if he’s even that well-known and beloved in Finland.

His films are so strictly formalist and the humour is so droll and deadpan that I don’t even know if they’re really that representative of Finnish culture or sensibilities, contemporary or otherwise. Maybe they’re more sophisticated than the rest of us. Maybe they still think Benny Hill is the pinnacle of human achievement. I don’t know. I actually know some Finnish people, and, I’ll tell you something for free, they think Australians are total yokel hillbillies.

But, and this is a big butt and I cannot lie about it, they are as likely to laugh uproariously at something they find funny, or loudly express themselves about something they care about as possibly anyone else on the planet, so this impression you get from Finnish flicks generally or the whole idea of those Nordic regions about how restrained and expression-less they are is of course bullshit.

Everyone is restrained with people they don’t know. In their own elements, well, they carry on like pork chops or whatever the Finnish equivalent is.

dir: Lee Tamahori

2024

The Convert is set in 1830, and in that place what many (coloniser) people call New Zealand, but the Māori call Aotearoa, so it’s a sad, sorry time before internets and Lynx body spray. It’s also a time of lots of killings and stuff, with the locals slaughtering each other for shits and giggles, and snacks as well, apparently.

And it’s a time when the Brits think all they need to acquire a place from whoever might be there is plant a flag, start building shit, and shoot a defined percentage of the locals at regular intervals.

It’s the only way to keep the rest of ‘em in line. This is also, despite the grimness of the times, well before the so-called Māori Wars that would pit the Brits and certain tribes against other tribes in order to steal all the land, just like God intended. This is the time when they pretend to be polite, but avoid making eye contact with them, in the hopes they’ll just go away or die from chickenpox.

Thomas Munro (Guy Pearce) has been contracted to sail out from England and come to this godforsaken outpost of the Empire in order to minister to the (white) townsfolk of Epworth. Epworth (I think?) would be where present day Canterbury would be, on the east coast of the South Island. Even though most of this flick is filmed on the North Island, but anyway.

It’s really hard to fault wherever they chose to point the camera and film stuff. Aotearoa is that place, so stunning, so daunting in scale that it looks like a fantastical place even though it already exists. It serves as the backdrop for epics like The Lord of the Rings movies, but in this context it establishes that this is a forbidding place, where maybe even humans themselves, let alone the Māori or the Pākehā, as they call them, are not really welcome.

dir: Jeff Nichols

2024

Critics (and audiences) haven’t been kind to this film. I am not entirely sure what they were expecting. The film is called The Bikeriders. It has guys riding motorbikes. For that alone it deserves points for accuracy and honesty.

Some reviews have pointed to the fact that there’s not a lot of depth to some of the characters or what amount to their storylines, and to that I say: This film is based on a coffee table book of photographs of bikers from the early to mid 1960s: the fuck were you expecting? Anna Karenina?”

For my money, I got exactly what I wanted and exactly what I expected. This is a movie. About a biker gang. About the gloriously stupid halcyon early days, and how everything turns to shit later on. Like every story of this type.

And yet I really enjoyed it. Its joys, its charms, are ineffable, mostly, but also, what’s not to like about watching some smouldering hot guys on motorbikes for 2 hours?

Really, there’s only one. Austin Butler has a face so perfectly symmetrical that he can play Elvis, a sadistic Harkonnen, and a supposedly scuzzy biker and no-one bats an eyelid, least of all him. A face that perfect papers over a lot of potential sins, because I am not sure yet if anyone is certain he can act yet. This is not a film for acting that involves people rendering their lines in a believable manner.

This is a movie to be enjoyed for the images conjured for our eyes. Butler, as Benny, lighting a cigarette; Benny outrunning the cops on his bike, and then laughing when he runs out of gas and they catch up to him, Benny nonchalantly telling two jerks in a bar that he’ll die before he takes his colours off; the delight on Benny’s face when he’s rushing into an avoidable fight just because he wants to fuck some guys up.

I think the director knew this would be the strength of the flick, but I’m not sure audiences were ready for it. I don’t know that they’re ready to commit to Butler-mania.

Tom Hardy is in this as well. You might think you don’t need anyone else in the flick if you’ve got Austin Butler for the camera to linger upon as he leans over to play pool, or pops the top off of a beer, but a gang needs a few more bodies.

dir: Wes Ball

2024

The names are getting longer, but that doesn’t mean the films are getting shittier. One day they’ll come out with The Movie about the Book about the TV series about the Unincorporated area adjacent to the Subdivision next to the Hill Below the Mountain Upon Which the Fiefdom of the Dukedom to the Empire of the Planet in the Solar System of the Apes that Talk (they don’t have tails), and people like me will still voluntarily waddle along into the cinemas to watch them. And when buying tickets I’ll just have to say, in between shoveling popcorn down my gullet “the monkey one”, and they’ll know which one I mean, unless there’s a Kong versus or x one in the cinemas concurrently.

I thought the three movies that starred Andy Serkis as Caesar, obviously under layers and layers of digital effects, were absolute aces, real good, better than bad. Genuinely, I thought they were amazing, underpinned as they were by Serkis’ magnificent performance as the lead.

Of course, with the ending of War for the Planet of the Apes, and with this flick jumping about 300 years into the future, one in which apes rule and humans mostly drool, Caesar himself is no more. But his name lives on, and some of his beliefs, and teachings, linger.

At this stage of life on the planet, apes live in their tribes, humans are rarely glimpsed, and if they’re seen at all they’re mostly seen as a nuisance, kind of like foxes or possums. They’re not exactly writing hip-hop musicals or social media apps to bully each other with, but they are training eagles to hunt fish for them. Whatever intelligence they got that humanity lost hasn’t translated into using language beyond the spoken, so they have not advanced to a comparable level that humanity was at when it fell. They’re probably at the stage humanity was at 10,000 years ago, at the agrarian stage.

Noa (Owen Teague) is our new audience surrogate, or at the very least our main character. He is the son of the chief, naturally, in a tribe where one’s ability to train eagles seems to be of paramount importance. He is a chimpanzee, like Caesar, and has some leadership qualities. But he has doubts.

He is not the strongest chimp, nor the smartest, and as the son of a chief who isn’t, at the ordained time, able to bring back an eagle egg safely for some bonding ceremony, it looks like he’s cursed to live a life of mediocrity, even as a nepo baby.

(Le Règne animal)

dir: Thomas Cailley

2023

This is an okay film, don’t get me wrong, it’s just that I thought it would be about more than it appears to be, and I think I was wrong on that count.

I started off thinking that the people in the story undergoing changes, as in, the premise of this film is that set contemporarily, some kind of virus or something similar randomly causes people to start changing into animals, that they must symbolise something.

This being set in France, and being filled with French people, I at first assumed the animal-human hybrids probably symbolised immigrants or refugees. And they probably do, at first.

And then as the film chugged its way along, I thought “well, these people are transitioning, from one state to another, from one form to another, transforming, and a lot of people hate them, so maybe this is a literalisation of the pro-trans / anti-trans debate. At least twice conflict / assaults happen in or near bathrooms. But that’s when I thought “nah, I’m reading too much into this.”

This is a flick where some people, no matter how much you love them, grow and change into something unexpected, and, in some cases, dangerous. You can delay it for a while, hide it for a while, but ultimately cannot stop it.

And that’s it, really, no matter how much I read into things just because there are French people involved.

dir: Baloji

2023

The actual title for this in English is Omen, but I went with the French-Walloon title because I didn’t want it to be confused with one of the multitude of Omen horror flicks that are out there in the wild.

At first, as Koffi (Marc Zinga) and his wife Alice (Lucie Debay) travel back to Koffi’s hometown of Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of Congo, I wondered if this was going to be one of those many films that’s about someone introducing someone to their family, only for everyone to have a heart attack, and endure hours of culturally or linguistically-based misunderstandings before eventually coming to accept things, and come to terms with things, and everyone hugs in the end.

Even though the form predates the movies entirely, I do selfishly think of it as the My Big Fat *insert ethnicity as required* Wedding format. This film… does not follow that path, to say the least.

The Democratic Republic of Congo seems like… a complicated place. Koffi hasn’t been back home for 18 years, which I’m guessing means he’s in his mid thirties, and has been happily living in Belgium all this time. His pregnant wife Alice, is pretty clearly not Congolese, but she is Belgian, so at least they have that in common. As I alluded to before, they are nervous to meet with Koffi’s family, especially his mum Mujila (Yves-Marina Gnahoua) and his dad Abel (some guy always out of shot, existing only offscreen), and they have good reason to.

The celebration they get to is surprisingly unwelcoming, so I guess it’s not in their honour. Look, I’m a fairly sensitive and paranoid kind of chap, always assuming that I’m the one at fault when misunderstandings happen or when things go wrong – I don’t think people are out to get me: I assume I’m out to get myself. Watching Koffi go through what he goes through with his family, be rebuffed, and then have things go even worse (though thankfully not in a violent sense, though it’s very close to the line) is like every paranoid person’s nightmare. It goes about as bad as one could imagine, and it’s not because of anything Koffi deliberately does.

Yes, a lot of it has to do with the superstitiousness of these people and this place. Rural Lubumbashi doesn’t seem like a place overflowing with appreciation for science or rational arguments. Koffi is doomed before he ever crossed the threshold: for stuff completely out of his control. His mother’s meanness and coldness isn’t explained until late in the film, and yet mostly all of his problems seem to stem from the fact that he has a birthmark on his cheek which these superstitious yokels think means he’s marked by the devil, which is why he had to leave in the first place.

A birthmark? A facial difference? How dumb are the superstitions of these tribal folks?

怪物
Kaibutsu

dir: Hirokazu Kore-Eda

2023

This is a film you watch for twenty minutes and have various opinions about the characters, and their various doings and transpirings.

Then you watch it for another half hour, and have a completely different set of opinions about the same characters, having observed the same doings and transpirings, but from other people’s angles or perspectives.

And then there’s a third or fourth run through of the same events, the same people, again with another vantage point, and then you’re left breathless at what the director has pulled off.

This is like watching Simone Biles perform another never-done-before gymnastics move and make it look effortless. Hirokazu Kore-Eda is the Simone Biles of Japanese filmmaking with regards to getting amazing performance from kid actors, which is notoriously hard.

It is so notoriously hard notorious drunk W.C. Fields once said you should never work with children or animals, and he was probably right, but then again, he was a hopeless drunk.

But this director… he gets such gentle, unprecocious and heart-rending performances from kids. If you ever watched Nobody Knows, way back in the day, about a bunch of kids trying to survive without any adult giving a damn about them, and how that works out, well you won’t be surprised by how things play out here.

dir: Joanna Arnow

2024

Occasionally, a film comes along, and you think maybe you’ve accidentally seen a parody trailer for something so outlandish that it can’t be real. And then you watch it, and you find out that’s it’s not a parody, and it’s something of a horrifying shock. It slowly dawns on you that what you thought was a sketch taking the piss out of arthouse flicks is a full length film, and it’s a comedy that you’re meant to take seriously and laugh at. And that’s when the depression kicks in.

The Feeling that the Time for Doing Something Has Passed is the second longest title for a movie that I think I’ve ever seen or reviewed, at least this year. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World beats it by one scant word. But while the latter Romanian film was nearly three hours long, and profoundly nuts, that was a breeze to enjoy compared to this 87 minute film that was agonising to get through. I hate watching videos of actual surgeries, and this film was like watching an 87 minute surgery video, except the patient / victim was / is me.

Excruciating doesn’t even get close to covering the cringing experience I had watching this. Maybe I’m lacking in sufficient maturity. Maybe I’m too squeamish when it comes to the depiction of ‘mature’ sexual relationships between practitioners of consensual BDSM. Maybe my expectation that scenes that start and end should have something happen in between to justify their presence in a film is unreasonable.

Maybe I’m just not on the filmmaker’s wavelength. It’s not that I don’t want to be; I really wish I understood where she was coming from. I’ve read a couple of interviews with her, and what she was going for, but the idea that this, as billed, is an actual comedy, utterly perplexes me.

Maybe if I watched this at an open air cinema on the top of a tenement building in Brooklyn with a bunch of film students or arts poseurs, I might have seen the level upon which this works. As it is, though, I watched it far from Brooklyn, alone, probably with an involuntary look of bemusement on my face.

The director plays the main character here too. That is her right. If she’s going to make a movie, she can cast herself as herself. From beginning to end she delivers almost all of her dialogue in a flat, emotionless monotone that Daria herself would have envied. She is also naked for much of the movie. She’s the only one naked throughout the movie. It’s an almost aggressive level of vulnerability.