fresh movie reviews for a socially distanced world

(Домаќинство за почетници
Domaḱinstvo za početnici)

dir: Goran Stolevski

2023

Housekeeping for Beginners gave me no tips on how to maintain a household whatsoever, though in truth I’ve been housekeeping for decades so probably need a more advanced primer for veterans of housekeeping who are still rank amateurs at what they do.

And, wow, it’s not really about housekeeping at all, unless you use the term in the broader sense of “how does one desperately keep a household together when the bond between the members is tenuous and mostly based on necessity and the general hostility outside?”

This is set and filmed in the city of Skopje, which is in the relatively new country of Northern Macedonia. Yes, I’m continuing to watch and review only films from places that are not America. This will continue for the foreseeable future, until those idiots improve or my fury abates.

This is directed by a Macedonian / Australian director called Goran Stolevski, who perhaps isn’t yet a household name, or a legend in the field of housekeeping, but he is someone who I think I will always be interested in because his first film You Won’t Be Alone was such a singularly fantastic film. I had never seen anything like it and am unlikely to ever see anything like it ever again, as long as I might live, and let’s be honest it’s probably not going to be hundreds of years.

This is a completely different film, especially since it’s set contemporarily, but it displays, just as keenly, this director’s alacrity with the camera, with actors, and with getting everything on the screen to cohere and to deliver a very human story about very messy people trying to live their lives in a society where they’re always at risk of becoming further pariahs.

Though, wonderfully, the same actor that played the diabolical Burnt Maria in You Won’t Be Alone being the great Anamaria Marinca, plays the lead here, of Dita.

It’s chaos, the whole house is chaos. Though it does seem cramped, it also seems fun. Dita is a welfare officer, a put upon and always late social worker whose work is undervalued especially by those she tries to help. One of the people she ‘tried’ to help in life in the past was obviously Suada (Alina Serban), and she’s trying to help her now, as well, through some ominous looking medical appointments with doctors that clearly do not give a shit about her.

(دانه‌ی انجیر معابد)
(Dāne-ye anjīr-e ma'ābed)
dir: Mohammad Rasoulof

2024

This is a lot of a movie, which means there’s going to probably be a lot of review.

Boo. Sounds like homework.

This director’s previous movie was the heartbreaking meditation on what the death penalty in Iran under its current leadership does to the living, more so than the dead. Called There is No Evil, in English at least, it argued in its title alone that there was no need to blame the Devil or any supernatural source for the evil that humans perpetrate, especially within a totalitarian regime.

That flick, made surreptitiously away from governmental scrutiny, earned its director a prison sentence and a beating. He has since been sentenced to more years in jail, like every decent Iranian director before him, so he had to escape the country on foot.

I don’t know how he made this flick. I worry for the actors in it, because this regime has killed people for far less. This film crosses a line that Iranian directors never cross: directly criticising the regime, openly advocating for those who protest against its strictures and draconian, inhuman ways, and openly showing footage that would get most Iranians jailed or worse for sharing.

None of it is allegorical any more, or spoken of in the abstract. It leant a quality to Iranian cinema that people appreciated, especially international film critics, having to slyly dance around its subject matter in order to keep the authorities happy. So everyday life and its complications would transpire with the state / morality police / Revolutionary Guards way, way in the background, in lyrical and poetic ways, for our amusement, but with this pleading note behind it all, begging us to support their aspiration towards freedom.

That was then. This is now.

This film includes footage from the protests that came after complete fucking idiot scumbags murdered a young woman for not wearing a hijab. But they were only doing their jobs. Her name was Mahsa Zhina Amini, and she was a young Kurdish – Iranian woman, and the authorities still deny that she was beaten to death (maintaining an official fiction that she might have died because of a random stroke), and yet when people protested en masse, the authorities starting killing people in the streets, beating and torturing them in cells, or officially executing them because they had the temerity to say that Mahsa was killed for not wearing a hijab.

Really, she was killed for being a woman.

dir: Timo Tjahjanto

2024

The Shadow Strays maybe is a bit of a return to form, but I have to say, I’m still a bit disappointed.

When I saw The Night Comes For Us a bunch of years ago, I thought “I’ve just watched the most awesome, most violent action film I have ever watched in my life”, and it was true, at the time. What I thought it meant was that the same director would go on making incredibly choreographed, immaculately shot violent actioners that would make the John Wick flicks look like the dull and repetitive pieces of shit that they are.

But what I was doing was limiting and pigeonholing of this director, who clearly wants to make all sorts of flicks, not just hyperkinetic homages to the Hong Kong flicks of the 80s and 90s. He wants to make horror flicks, and comedies, and variations thereof. His flick after The Night Comes For Us was called The Big 4, and, yeah, it was nothing like his earlier masterpiece of carnage. It was disappointing, to say the least.

I think the technical, film criticism term is that it was “so fucking dumb”, and it felt 14 hours long. It took me a year to finish it, an entire year. I hated it so much I couldn’t even bring myself to write a negative review of it, and I live for such opportunities. It was a cartoon, and not in a good way, because none of it was animated.

Being the simpleton that I am, however, when I heard he had a new film out, my heart skipped a beat, my hopes flew sky high, and here we are now, entertain us.

It starts off promising enough. Lots of carnage. Perversely, there’s a whole bunch of ninja like stuff where someone ploughs through a bunch of yakuza, some with swords, some with guns; all are wheat before Death’s cruel scythe. Somehow things go wrong, kinda, and the main person who was chopping up crims willy-nilly is yelled at for stuffing things up by her boss.

dir: Nora Fingscheidt

2024

Reviewing movies about addiction is sometimes hard, for me. I feel like a bit of a hypocrite ‘sitting’ in judgement of people who struggle with their demons, on our screens, for our entertainment or edification or both / neither. It doesn’t help when it’s a true story either.

That makes it even harder to have some distance from. And yet perhaps for those very reasons I am drawn to these kinds of stories, to these people who have struggled and ‘won’ and ‘lost’, who have hit bottom again and again, only to not give up hope. We don’t get the stories from those who lost hope, because they’re not around anymore, or sometimes didn’t last long enough to record their struggle. Amy Liptrot did get to survive, and did get to write her memoir, and here is the movie made about that time, with Saoirse Ronan as her stand in Rona.

The story is told in a non-linear, non-chronological fashion, jumping around in time depending on what wounds Rona has on her, and her hair colour (in that it has a partial similarity to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, where Clementine’s hair colour would indicate where in time the story was up to, but there are no other similarities thematically). There is a central event that the narrative keeps going back to, again and again and again, of a night where Rona refused to leave a pub that was closing, drank stray drinks, fought with staff, was physically thrown out, and ended up being assaulted by an opportunistic predator, resulting in hospitalisation.

(გადასვლა)

dir: Levan Akin

2024

At the moment, at this very moment, I don’t want to think about, talk about, watch or write about Americans. I am so thoroughly fucking sick of them. I don’t want to have to think about them or their appalling politics, at least for the next, I dunno, four years or so. The way they pervade everything, and force us to have to watch them, like a dog licking its anus and maintaining eye contact with us the whole while, against our will or our own priorities; it is really is quite terrible, honestly.

So instead of thinking or talking about them, let us look at the lives, the troubles, the daily lived realities of a bunch of Georgians and at least one Turkish woman. No, not appalling people from that southern state of the Americas: I mean the former Soviet republic and now currently Russian occupied / vassal state with its own wacky language and alphabet. I mean look at how cool it looks “საქართველო”.
Now that’s wacky. Solely from what I’ve seen in this movie, which I think is my first exposure to movies from this country, I’m guessing it’s a pretty impoverished place. One person’s squalor is another person’s luxury, I guess, but it’s hard to see these lives as occurring in anything other than precarious circumstances.

But that’s how it looks to me. To people from there or around there maybe these people are living the high life, I dunno. When the film starts at some coastal town, there are a bunch of adults in a shack mostly yelling at each other. The main guy is yelling at his wife, who is trying to breastfeed, his younger brother is just waking up, who he seems to routinely violently attack, and he probably also starts yelling at some random cloud floating by. Making matters worse it looks like it’s a one room shack, at best two. Constructed maybe out of cigarette packets, or other shack-like materials.

And then a woman walks past, clearly not from around there but also looking for something or someone.

dir: Fede Alvarez

2024

I have to say I am quite surprised by how entertaining this flick is. I say that because I feel like the two films before it, being Alien: Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, I am pretty sure, were made to leach all hope and life from those watching, and to convince us all we’re total fools for expecting anything good to come of any franchise ever again.

That’s a bit harsh. Let me say instead that there were a lot of ideas in those two Ridley Scott directed films that didn’t sit well with me and just annoyed me, more than anything. They felt like an elaboration on themes that felt unnecessary and unwarranted, and I couldn’t imagine the person who cared about any of it who wasn’t Ridley Scott. Whatever it was that made people battling the xenomorphs in the very first two films enjoyable to watch, was entirely absent for me in films that argued that their origins, actually, were because of a bad robot and a race of albinos with a magical evil liquid that kills things or makes them more evil.

This flick perversely situates itself somewhere in what ends up feeling like the past. It’s set some time between Alien and Aliens, I think, with the deliberate aesthetics to match. And as the setting is a space station divided into two halves, one of those halves matches the aesthetics of Alien, so it looks gritty and industrial (with an orange gel / filter to match, in terms of cinematography), and the other half is blueish, and looks a bit shinier (to match some of the look of the James Cameron helmed Aliens.

In a similar manner, bits and pieces across many of the films are picked up and slotted in to areas, kinda like a jumble of Lego plot points, or a Tetris-like melange where the familiar is woven into a newish pattern. Generally, or when done by hacks, this would strike me as lazy filmmaking. But I genuinely think Fede Alvarez and the screenwriter do what they do adeptly, with known / familiar material, in a similarly competent manner like they did with Evil Dead Rise. It’s using established elements well but not slavishly adhering to scenes and shots like too much variance would be blasphemy.

And again, just like in Evil Dead Rise, there is practically no mercy shown to anyone. You think “surely they won’t kill…”, and they’re like “of course we’ll kill them, we’re looking forward to it”.

dir: Coralie Fargeat

2024

What a year of wonders 2024 is turning out to be. I’m not even talking about all the insanity outside of the world of cinema. Now is not the time for that conversation.

No, I’m just talking about within the realm of films. This here film The Substance has to be about the most bonkers thing I’ve seen in a good long while, yet it also manages to be one of the funniest films of the year. Solely from a filmmaking point of view, it’s an incredibly well put together, intricately constructed, horrifically grotesque and sickening movie. There are incredible scenes, immaculate shots piled on top of each other, with no concern, with no regard for our well being whatsoever.

Of course the focus will be on the flick’s purported all caps blankly stated feminist statements, but the flick is too subversive, too ambitious to be confined by such simplicity. And, honestly, this might sound like a deliberately ignorant thing to say, but beyond the assertion of certain ideas, the film is more interested in pushing the possible or the acceptable than it is in underlining its points.

This is a bit of a genre straddling colossus, because it doesn’t neatly fit into either the science fiction or the horror genres, though its premise is entirely dependent on a heavy sci fi concept, and it is monstrously horrific in its visual (and auditory) depictions. It has a level of set design that would have made the set designers and art directors that worked with Stanley Kubrick green with envy (and possibly litigious for having lifted so many of their designs). There are other elements that mirror the precise striking visuals of make-up and perfume commercials, aligned with an aesthetic that seems like it’s channelling a runway catwalk in Berlin during fashion week.

And then there’s the sound design. Watching a gross older man devouring prawns is one thing, but what if you get to hear it in such a way that scars your soul? What if the sound cues throughout the flick effectively demand your attention, and sometimes feel like a punch in the head, just for good measure?

dir: Todd Phillips

2024

It seems like no-one was meant to enjoy this flick. That would seem to be a strange thing to say about any flick, generally, but this flick seems so deliberately intended to undo whatever the first flick did that it seems bizarre that executives would have agreed to spend $200mill to make it and then another $100mill to market it to the world. There are few bus shelters right now in Melbourne that don’t have that film’s poster on them. They paid some sell-out muralist to cover a whole side of a building with an image of Joaquin and Gaga on it, several storeys high in the CBD.

But then, what about the film they made? I don’t know, as in I can’t pretend to have any secret knowledge of why they did what they did with this film, but I have to assume that this is exactly the film Todd Phillips and Joaquin Phoenix wanted to make. The first one made over a billion dollars. Joaquin got a shiny golden award for Best Actor for that film.

It feels like whatever they wanted people to think about Joaquin and the character in the first flick had to be the opposite of what they get here in this anti-sequel.

Allow me to reiterate that I loathed that first film that was very successful. I did not loathe it for its success, but because I thought it was a facile and ludicrous rendering of a character (one that I don’t really care for anyway, regardless of which version is portrayed).

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?

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.