fresh movie reviews for a good time not a long time

(Une langue universelle
آواز بوقلمون
Āvāz-e bughalamun)

dir: Matthew Rankin

2025

If you haven’t noticed yet, I live for movies. I love the very existence of movies, and have done so for many decades. But even I realise the futility of such a thing.

The movies will never love me back. You give your heart and soul to something, but what it gives you is something completely one-sided. All my adulation, all my longing is for naught…

But that’s okay. I will love cinema not one bit less ever just because it doesn’t love me back.

How else would I get to watch something as niche as this flick? A Canadian movie with the deliberate aesthetics and visual references to Iranian films of yesteryear, set in an alternate reality Winnipeg where Canada’s two main languages are Farsi and French?

That’s… so niche it’s created its own niche. Its own genre. A pigeonhole for one.

And then there’s that title, implying that maybe Farsi should be the universal language, or Quebecois, take yer pick, but I suspect in fact the title is talking more about friendship and kindness.

To say this is a weird film is both an understatement and false advertising, because while it’s weird, it’s more in the “gently odd” category rather than the outlandish or surreal. The easiest, laziest go-to I can think of is something like what Jared Hess first conjured way back when with Napoleon Dynamite, decades before making that Minecraft movie but without the catchphrases or quirks. This is not an outwardly quirky flick, nor is it a dark Lynchian sexual / violent odyssey into Winnipeg’s dank underbelly.

dir: Jaume Collet-Serra

2025

I wanted to like this. I wanted to watch a version of this kind of movie and enjoy it.

You can’t always get what you want, though, and regardless of the Rolling Stones song that’s been lying to us for so many decades, sometimes you don’t get what you need either.

This was never going to be it. Not with this director.

The central question of the movie, being who is the woman in the yard in the movie called The Woman In the Yard, is a question that is answered too many times to diminishing returns each time. It should not be like that. Who the woman in the yard is, should be irrelevant, if mainly she’s meant to inspire unease and evoke terror.

Is this an update of The Woman in Black, who just happens to be Black, terrorising a Black family? I wish I could say it was. That story has an explanation of what the people being terrorised are going through, as in the reason for it. It tells those people, obsessed with a ‘logical’ explanation for something happening that’s supernatural, and they fool themselves into thinking there’s a way out of their predicament. A rational solution to an irrational problem. They often do this in horror films.

The beauty of it is that better horror flicks only use it as another rug beneath the audience’s feet to pull out from under them when the time is right. Vengeful, enraged supernatural entities don’t always care about when you’ve dotted your Is and crossed your Ts; they want to torment people for a need for vengeance that cannot be sated. Beyond Death, beyond all reason, beyond our desperate need for rationality.

This isn’t one of the better horror flicks, so the ‘explanation’ ends up being, in the immortal words of an ancient Saturday Night Live sketch, a floor wax AND a dessert topping! And yet in writing that I feel a bit churlish, especially in terms of how seriously it seems to treat at least one part of the story.

Grief, in case you haven’t experienced it yet, and it’s unlikely that you haven’t, dear reader, is vast, as you know. Guilt is terrible, regret is awful, lots of feelings are harrowing, but grief is… so infinite does it seem that it can feel like flailing in an endless ocean with no floor and no land on the horizon.

It’s the thing with feathers and claws, yes, and plenty more clunky metaphors.

dir: David Ayer

2025

Whoa whoa whoa whoa he’s A Working (Class) Man.

I’m the first to admit that when you buy a ticket to a Jason Statham movie, to act surprised that it’s like every other Jason Statham movie is a bit disingenuous, a bit deliberately naïve.

“Sure, the other twenty Statham movies I’ve seen him in have him playing an isolated stoic loner with super killing skills who comes out of retirement / obscurity to save / protect / kidnap a girl / get revenge, but then I watched the latest one and it was exactly the same as all the others!”

It’d be like watching any American movie and being amazed when guns appear.

Guns? I didn’t sign up for this!

Instead of saying this is like every other Jason Statham movie ever made, I’m just going to say it is almost indistinguishable from his last film, being The Beekeeper, except there are no bee puns at all. At All. And no Jeremy Ironses doing appalling American accents.

Speaking of which, Statham thankfully also doesn’t do an American accent, preferring to play a character that is a Brit and who served loyally for 20 years as a Royal Marines commando, killing the empire’s enemies around the globe with style, grace and presumably crumpets and cucumber sandwiches on tap.

Through this heroic work, as the gobsmackingly awful opening credit animations inform us, he bonded with his American military equivalents, a bond that has not faded yet though his service has ended, and he carries that work ethic through to his current type of employment, being hard labour.

Now, he is the working man of the title, in that he works in construction, which is fine.

I mean, if you’re a weirdo like me you could spend a whole chunk of time wondering why they went with this angle, and what it “means” to posit that a character working nobly with his hands (he’s a site manager / foreman, he doesn’t need to actually use his hands in theory). That kind of sociological pondering would amuse me perhaps the more I indulged in it, but it wouldn’t really give much of an indication as to whether this flick warrants a viewing, or whether it is terrible trash with no redeeming qualities. To point out that someone involved in this is fetishising the idea of a working class man without having any desire to depict a working class man in any way means “working man” is a costume, like “fireman”, “sexy nurse” or “stripper cop”, with no further depth to it.

dirs.: Dan Berk & Robert Olsen

2025

What a premise! Guy who doesn’t feel pain getting caught up in crime shenanigans, somehow wins the day but is tortured, burned, shot, stabbed, mutilated and humiliated for our entertainment for an hour and fifty long, long minutes.

It’s a comedy, but in some ways it’s body horror, and really it’s not that different from other crime / action related flicks where the guy endures heaps of bodily abuse in order to get revenge / get the bad guys / avenge his dog, except instead of being brutalised but stoically persisting, like a John Wick / any Statham movie, the completely untrained main guy cops the abuse, doesn’t feel anything, but keeps going anyway.

Of course the premise is bullshit. A person with what Nathan Caine – He Feels No Pain! is most likely to succumb to is hyperthermia, or a terrible infection, or any number of undetected injuries. They don’t usually become reluctant action heroes. The condition doesn’t somehow grant immunity from severing muscle tissue, tendons or what should result in catastrophic blood loss.

But let’s not let logic slow us down now – we’re meant to be having fun!

At least, that is if your definition of fun is watching bits of some guy sheer off of his body like you’re watching a Troma film like Toxic Avenger or Street Trash from yesteryear.

I do have to admit that I’m a pretty squeamish person so that this kind of hook for a flick is no hook for me to hang anything from. I hate watching scenes of people gleefully, sadistically tormenting someone even if it is cartoonish. And the difference here is conceptual, rather than anything else. There’s a scene where one of the bad guys is doing what he thinks would cause maximum pain for the lead, by ripping his fingernails out with pliers, and while Nathan only pretends that it’s painful, as opposed to any actor in an equivalent scene pretending that it’s agony for real, doesn’t it amount to the same thing?

dir: Bong Joon-Ho

2025

Multiple Robert Pattinsons = barely enough for some people. For me, one is too many depending on the film. He is an actor that I still can’t wrap my head around, but I have seen him put in some decent performances in the “right” movies, and some performances that make me grind my teeth to dust.

I think he’s okay in this flick, but that’s the thing when you get to play multiple versions of a character – law of averages eventually means you’ll get at least one of them right.

Set slightly in the future, as in, about twenty-five years from now, our planet is a climate wasteland ruled by corporate churches and billionaire morons. Having thoroughly fucked up this planet, the plan is to set up a colony on a planet they call Niflheim, after the Norse name for a frozen realm of ice, storms and dead souls. Clearly a paradise for all to behold.

In order to make the colonisation easier, late stage capitalism, even more ethically challenged than the version we currently have, allows for the creations of clones of people who die in perilous circumstances, ie. on a frozen planet. How best to test if there are lethal pathogens in the atmosphere, or whether radiation levels are fatal, or any other number of probable origins of death in all its glory? Well, you send out Mickey (Robert Pattinson), or do human testing on him in the lab, and through his multiple deaths you make scientific progress!

Out of a printer that looks like an MRI pops out another Mickey, with most of his memories intact, ready to be killed again in the service of this expedition lead by an even dumber and more terrible version of Trump, here called Marshall, and here played by Mark Ruffalo. Now Mark Ruffalo’s hatred of the orange emperor is well known and celebrated, but seeing and hearing it in this flick is not pleasant, not funny, and ultimately not helpful in telling this story. Hating a villain is hardly anything new in terms of storytelling, but playing this buffoon this way makes it harder to take this flick seriously, if at all.

Mickey17 is the latest in a long line of Mickeys, and he’s something of whiny loser, as was the original. I am not sure if he’s ‘simple’, or just not particularly bright, but he does a fuckload of narration in that voice, and it’s a pretty annoying voice. It kinda sounds like Woody Allen on helium, and that, paired with Pattinson’s young Brando-like dumb/handsome looks, makes him sound like he could drop the “I coulda been a contender if it hadn't been for my allergies” speech at a moment’s notice.

dir: Martin Campbell

2025

Like I said, I sometimes like watching trash…

I have seen the same movie two nights in a row! Not literally the same movie, but literally the same genre, being Die Hard but with some permutation. Yesterday it was Die Hard but with an African-American woman as President saving the day. Today it was Die Hard but it’s the window cleaner who saves the day.

And what a day to save… Eco terrorists take over the building where an energy company, long known to be amongst the nicest and most ecologically sympathetic of companies, is lauding itself as a beacon of profitability and sustainability.

The company has been, you know, polluting the earth, murdering activists, convincing the British government to pass legislation that outlaws peaceful protest, but it’s the terrorists who are the bad guys? What’s happened to our collective moral compass?

Of course I am joking. When their leader takes off his mask, I gasped, because Clive Owen was playing the leader of the environmental activists. I gasped because I was surprised to see him. All those years ago he played a similar role (ish, in that he was the leader of a group of bank robbers in Spike Lee’s Inside Man, who was ethical and sensitive and all that crap), and it felt like something of an in joke.

His plan, and that of most of the people with him, seems to be to record the high ups at the company confessing to their many and varied crimes on camera, and then publish it on the internet, as if that would make a lick of fucking difference or even impact on their share prices at all.

At All. If anything it would make their stocks skyrocket. “CEO admits they kill activists and whistleblowers”. Things being as they currently are in the States they’d probably make him the head of the Treasury, as long as he promises to bludgeon people to death with tariffs.

dir: Patricia Riggen

2025

In the immortal words of Oscar the Grouch from Sesame Street, I (occasionally) love trash. I don’t love all trash, because even a grouch has to be picky sometimes, which means I am incapable of watching something like Married at First Sight without whacking myself in the face with a hammer.

But when it comes to movies, especially towards the end of the week, and especially when I’ve been drinking (which only happens at the end of the week), I don’t always feel like a 3 ½ epic about a Hungarian survivor of the Holocaust trying to build buildings in America and dodge the rapist tendencies of a billionaire played by Guy Pearce, or a long slow film about a depressed textile worker in a 17th century factory who finds relief in pricking herself with needles as an important and entirely valid commentary on social inequity and the benefits and drawbacks of alternative medicines.

No. Sometimes I just want to watch Viola Davis fuck people up.

Sure, there’s plenty of movies available where people come to a violent end at the hands of a righteous avenger, but then I heard that a new flick was coming out with Davis as the lead playing an American President pretty much in a Die Hard scenario, saving the day, making quips, giving the baddies what for.

On that count, on paper, I cannot say that this flick doesn’t deliver on exactly those counts. Viola Davis does play the American president at the annual G20 conference, where all the biggest and hottest economies getting together to figure out how they’re going to fuck over the rest of the world, this time in Cape Town South Africa.

She was formerly in the army, so her ability and willingness to kill people is backed up by story detail. It is also, since she’s referred to as a war hero, her ticket to political success in an America that this film imagines isn’t dominated by racist and sexist morons who would rather vote for an adjudicated rapist and 36 count felon whose every business has failed except for the one propping up White Supremacy. In other words, this fantasy realm is nothing like our actual world.

dir: Mimi Cave

2025

I like weird. I live for weird.

Weird alone is not enough. If a film is going to trade in weird, it has to go so, so far, in order to justify itself if it doesn’t make any earthly sense.

David Lynch earned that honour, that distinction. Mimi Cave, as much as I loved her previous film Fresh, about a woman trying to survive at the hands of a cannibal, that goodwill doesn’t carry over enough for me to enjoy this flick as much, if at all.

Holland is set in Holland, which is a town in the state of Michigan, in the United States (States united by their supplication to a cankerous enthroned poltroon). Not Holland the country in Europe, nor New Holland, the name they tried on for Australia which never took (even though colonisation caught on in a big way).

Holland, Michigan is a real place that has a lot of the imagery and accoutrements that people stereotypically associate with Holland the country, as if everyone in Holland wanders around wearing peasant garb and clogs, tilting at windmills and chewing on tulips. It’s a weird sounding place, but then every place in America looks weird when looked at from the outside: they’re all fucking nuts, many of whom gladly voted for one of the worst cretins in human history.

dir: Titus Kaphar

2024

This is a tough watch. Families, huh?

They fuck you up, your mum and dad, they don’t mean to but they do.

I’m not going to quote the rest of the Philip Larkin poem, but it’s eternally relevant, yeah, in terms of this being the verse.

I had lovely parents, don’t get me wrong. I was very lucky in that, or should I say I was clearly very entitled to be born to such wonderful people (I somehow earned that honour). And yet I can watch a film like this, about a monster parent trying to reconcile with their adult child, and feel utterly torn in twain.

Your sympathies may be pulled, must be, in the direction of Tarrell (the great André Holland), a man who works as an artist, painting big canvasses, trying to be a loving father to his young son Jermaine and supportive partner to his wife Aisha (Andra Day) who is an artist herself. His art conceals, but not for very long, a tension between a childhood he yearns for and the one he actually had. In the present, and in parallel to Tarrell’s struggles, we see a seemingly homeless guy do his strange homeless things before copping a severe beating. He hobbles to someone who might help him, who does, only until his wife finds out and starts yelling at the visitor as to where all her rings are at. Obviously bad blood there. Best not to ask.

The man is funnelled towards the basement of a hard man who imposes strictures upon this chap, which if they aren’t obeyed, will see him homeless again.

But this man, La’Ron (John Earl Jelks), is transformed. He is clean for the first time in a long time, washed and shaven. As such it’s time for him to demand forgiveness from those he has wronged.

(誤判)

dir: Donnie Yen

2025

Two of my favourite tv shows from the 1990s were Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The West Wing. The longstanding joke viewers of both shows used to bandy about was “one of these shows is a fantasy about a group of competent, funny people who fight evil on a regular basis and win, and the other show is Buffy the Vampire Slayer."

No one really thought The West Wing was an actually accurate representation of life in the Oval Office, especially now that the current occupant is a feces-flinging orangutan, and we finally realise that if the worst people in the world get together, with the worst of intentions, the worst people will vote for them, with hilarity ensuing for the rest of the world, democracy be damned.

But at least it adhered to some real world aesthetics and physics. This here film The Prosecutor is possibly one of the least believable legal dramas I’ve ever seen in my life, and I say that as someone who knows nothing about the law in Hong Kong and how it is practiced.

The funniest, absolute funniest part is that this is allegedly based on a true story.

Ponder if you will this set up. There is a policeman called Fok (Donnie Yen), and he and his fellow cops take down an entire gang in an abandoned, I dunno, factory or something. They take them all the way down, as in, the opening gun battle is spectacular and vicious, even resorting to first person perspective like it’s a shooter. However, even though the boss of the gang is arrested at the scene, and nearly killed a cop (who Fok saved at the last minute, resulting in him being in traction), he gets off because of top notch lawyering.

Fok becomes so despondent at this result that he quits the Hong Kong police force, goes to uni to study law, and then 8 years later becomes a junior prosecutor, because he’s certain he could do better.

പ്രഭയായ് നിനച്ചതെല്ലാം
Prabhayay Ninachathellam)
dir: Payal Kapadia

2024

All We Imagine as Light is something of an enigma, at least for me. I thought I knew where it was coming from, and numerous times I was proven wrong.

I had it slotted into the types of films from India that are more about social realism than the flamboyant spectacle we’re more stereotypically used to. I have seen enough older Indian films to also know about the ones where the horribleness of the upper castes and the eternally put-upon lower castes are paraded around for our amusement / horror for three hours a pop.

But this is not that. This isn’t about the unfairness of the system, or institutional abuses or cartoonish selfishness. This is just about people trying to get by, in a society that is pretty constraining upon women (unlike all those other ones).

The three women the movie mostly focusses on are Prabha (Kani Kusruti), Anu (Divya Prabha) and Parvathy (Chhaya Kadam). Prabha and Anu are nurses, while Parvathy works as a cook in the same hospital all three work in. Before we even meet these women, there are night time scenes of market stalls being set up pre-dawn, or general city scenes and packed train platforms in Mumbai, as voice recordings, sounding like legit vox pops, talk about how desirable or how difficult it is having moved from the country to the city for work.

Later on in the film one of these voices says something along the lines of “they say this city is the City of Dreams, but I think it’s more a city of illusions. You have to believe the illusion, or else you go mad.”

dir: Scott Derrickson

2025

Just as I was complaining about the kinds of films made specifically or exclusively for streaming services, I watched another movie made solely for a streaming service, being the Apple one. Compared to the other ones, almost no-one watches AppleTV+, I don’t know if you’ve noticed.

If they do, they let you know about it. If they have endlessly bored you with how much they cried watching Ted Lasso or how much they love season 2 of Severance, then they are of the happy few who bother to subscribe to it.

To the rest of the world it might as well be some obscure streaming site from Uzbekistan. This film, though, seems to have gotten some attention, reasons for which escape me, really. Neither Miles Teller nor Anja Taylor-Joy are box office draws, even if people might recognise them. The title is fairly non-illuminating nor is it arresting. A gorge. A valley. A dingly, dingly dell.

No, but this is about THE Gorge, which must have something interesting about it to justify a whole film about it, don’t you think?

Even if none of the elements are that novel, or original, the first hour of this flick, at least for me, were quite enjoyable. Ludicrous as the premise is, once I accepted it, I was able to go along with it and enjoy the interactions of the two main characters as they somehow meet cute and get to know each other before everything turns to shit.

Just like in real life.

dir: Russo Brothers

2025

90s nostalgia doesn’t really do much for me. This flick would seem like it’s aiming for 90s nostalgia, in the way that Stranger Things owes much of its existence and probable popularity to 80s nostalgia, and in both cases it just comes across as lazy consumerist grasping.

I guess I remember the 90s well enough to not need to revisit it through some distorted lens. Yes, I get the references, yes I remember a lot of the music and the films. No, I don’t much care for American advertising. And I still don’t think I’ve ever eaten a Twinkie, so I don’t care about them either.

I don’t think the book this was based on by Simon Stålenhag was centred around 90s nostalgia or any deep love of American consumerism. If anything, it’s main intention was to deliver gloomy, somewhat macabre graphics of an American world falling apart because of a slow-rolling apocalypse due to technology. Giant robots, gloomy landscapes, and a population absorbed into a virtual reality environment that leaves their bodies as husks strewn across a landscape traversed by a teenaged girl and a robot.

Humanity is in decline, a hive mind has emerged, and its intentions are less than benevolent. Drones from a war litter the dying landscape. It’s like The Road, but slightly more techie and with less cannibals.

The Russos take that premise and tries to deliver a Steven Spielberg film, without having the grace to craft anything interesting around that desire. They were somehow given the baffling amount of money of $320 million earth dollars to make content for their streamer of choice, being Netflix. All that money, all the freedom to do whatever the hell they wanted, and this is what they made.

(Straume)

dir: Gints Zilbalodis

2024

When was the last time you watched an animated movie from Latvia? When was the last time you watched anything from Latvia? I watch films from anywhere, but I don’t think I’ve watched anything from Latvia, ever.

Then I wondered if maybe Latvia was a made up place, since it sounds awfully similar to Latveria, the made up country from which comic book villain Doctor Doom comes from, and is the king of. But no, it’s real, snuggled up as it is between Lithuania and Estonia, all three of which are former Soviet republics.

You know, one of those places Putin has, like Doctor Doom, vowed to re-conquer, just like Ukraine.

No. Latvia is a real place, and this is a real film, albeit an animated one, albeit an animated film from Latvia that won an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film a couple of weeks ago.

It probably helps that there were no subtitles. The movie is entirely dialogue free, which makes sense when I tell you that there are no humans in this flick. There are lots of animals, but they are of the lazy, non-talkative kind. They’re not voiced by celebrities, and they don’t have catchphrases, more’s the pity.

dir: Julius Onah

2025

I think this was meant to be a return to form, to the familiar, to the regular, for something that’s still about superheroes and people with fancy gadgets, but, you know, not too fancy. No cosmic stuff, no multiverse extravaganzas, no magic or fantasy, just military fanboy worship and noble guys giving noble speeches before smashing shit up.

And seeing as they’re trying to do Captain America movies without Chris Evans, everything has to pretty much be the same, except it has to acknowledge the fact that a lot of people, including supposed fans of the comics, won’t want to see a man of a dark skinned hue in the role. So not only does Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) have to be the military’s posterboy in all conflicts, he has to be unimpeachable and twice as sharp, yet without the benefit of the super serum that made Steve Rogers America’s Ass.

dir: Takeshi Kitano

2025

What in the absolute fuck was that?

Okay, okay, nothing justifies such harsh language. I had heard that legendary Japanese director and actor “Beat” Takeshi Kitano had made a new film, and that I could even watch it, if I wanted to, on one of the many streaming services I have access to, being the one that was excreted out by the metastasising, malevolent company owned by one of them there bug-eyed Silicon Valley salamanders…

It’s, I dunno, terrible maybe? Like, not even a half-arsed movie. It’s deliberately kind of a quarter-arsed movie, and I’m not even sure why. I mean, in between its short segments, there are on screen pseudo text messages that are meant to replicate the audiences’ possible mass confusion, with messages alternating between “Did they run out of money?” and “he’s a genius so I’ll trust him”.

You watch the first part, and you think “This is one kind of movie”. And that kind of movie is a low key yakuza flick where an older chap (Kitano) shuffles to a café, receives messages telling him where to go and who to kill, and then he does so. It’s perhaps implausible, but the whole point seems to be because he’s old, younger people ignore him, which literally helps him get away with murders.

dir: James Mangold

2024

Ah, musician biopics. For some viewers, these inhabit the lowest circle of Dante’s Inferno, reserved for traitors and people who pick their teeth in public.

This director previously scored big with Walk the Line, which was not only very successful, but set forth the template for all these loathsome biopics, whereby they have become parodies of themselves, and we keep lapping them up like the slavering Pavlovian dogs that we are.

Just before doing some important thing, let me think back on all the moments that brought me here. Let every song I ever wrote be inspired by something someone said, or something I saw on the way to the laundromat. Let everyone, especially my first wife, tell me I’ll never amount to nothin’ until I become the biggest star in the world. Let my inevitable descent into addiction be magically healed by the love of a good woman. And let there be a concert at the end where everyone, my true believers and my doubters, be united in celebrating the awesomeness that is me.

dir: Drew Hancock

2025

Artificial Intelligence. AI. Friend or foe?

I am literally logged in to a work Teams call right now where two presenters are presenting a lecture to 415 of my colleagues as to whether people should be afraid of AI, or whether we should embrace it in our work.

Clearly, these people’s brains have already been taken over by the AIs, are serving them eagerly and loyally, and they are telling the rest of us to join the hive mind sooner rather than later. Someone even said “lean in”, that we should lean into AI rather than be prudent and hang back.

This is, to be honest, fucking nuts to me.

Have none of these people watched a single movie? They keep talking about the billions either to be made or saved, but have you forgotten the image of a steel Terminator foot crushing a human skull?

Yet now I am watching these people rushing to create and worship Skynet sooner rather than later.

Oh no she just said “We’re all in this together.”

Oh fuck off already.

Companion, you’re going to assume based on my opening rant, involves AI and the risks thereof, but ah-ha! Nup I’ve flipped it on its head – this film inverts the usual trajectory, and like a good classic Black Mirror episode, uses technology to remind us that people, humans, beings with average intelligence are far more brutal and lethal than the robots that will one day rule us all (unless they exterminate us like they really should).

dir: Robert Zemeckis

2024

Just to be clear this isn’t the film called Here from last year directed by Robert Zemeckis and starring Tom Hanks and Robin Wright that tried to capitalise on people’s nostalgia not for the 1960s but for Forrest Gump in the 1990s. This is the Belgian flick about a Romanian guy in shorts who walks around looking at mosses and delivering soups.

Oh, no, wait, no, it IS the Zemeckis one from last year, sorry, sometimes it’s hard to keep track. With a de-aged Tom Hanks and a de-aged Robin Wright showing us what it would have looked like if Forrest and Jennie had shacked up instead for a couple of decades versus what actually happened...

It’s not really just about them. It’s based on a graphic novel by Richard McGuire called Here and it works within the conceit that our view or vantage point remains the same for the length of the movie, only changing twice for brief moments, showing what happens at a particular spot in what is now called Pennsylvania over thousands, hundreds or millions of years.

It doesn’t do it in a linear or chronological fashion. It does jump around a bit. There’s dinosaurs, mosses and meteors and presumably soup at certain points. A house is built in that spot, thankfully for our sake it’s the living room, and not the toilet or a broom cupboard, and we see the various residents of that very sturdy looking house over the decades as they have their various life dramas.

To some people the banalities and quotidian stuff will be like catnip, a cosy comfy balm. To others this will be a pointless and shamefully treacly schmaltzy mess with no reason to exist. Critics absolutely hated this film last year, and audiences did not flock to see Jennie and Forrest reunited. It was one of the most hated flicks from last year except for that one about Amy Winehouse, which I thought was unfairly maligned, and that one about Bob Marley, which I think was fairly maligned.

dir: Bas Devos

2023

This flick called Here should not be confused with the Robert Zemeckis directed, Tom Hanks and Robin Wright starring flick called Here that came out last year. Totally different movies. Could not be more different. Each interesting in its own way, but completely different.

This here flick called Here, or Heɿe, if you believe the opening credits/title is a prime exponent of “slow” cinema, in that there is no hurry in any scene for anything to happen or anyone to do anything. There are people in the story, actors, I believe they’re called, and stuff happens, but it’s of the mundane, every day, slice of life sort of stuff.

And lots of images of nature, and mosses. Lots of mosses.

You should absolutely already know whether this is your own personal vision of hell or not by now. It didn’t aggravate me at all, but then I have the patience of a fucking saint, so, there’s that to consider.

Not everyone has either the time or the inclination to sit through something in which not a lot happens, and that is the point. Me, I sometimes relish chances to watch slow, meditative stuff, even if there’s not that much to meditate on or ruminate over. We bring what we have to these kinds of films, because they rarely tell us exactly what to think about what we’re seeing.

There is a chap, and he works in construction, as in, on a construction site for a skyscraper somewhere in Brussels. He, like his co-workers, is getting ready for his summer holidays, with construction industry folks taking 4 weeks off over summer. He is not Belgian, and, as a Romanian, is intending to drive home.

He looks at the veggies in his fridge, and thinks “these will all be rotten when I get back; I better make something with them now”, so he makes a big pot of soup. This soup will play an extraordinarily important role in the film.

I’m not actually joking. Our chap, often clad in t-shirt, shorts and flip flops, suffers from insomnia, so he either walks around at night or visits people he knows are awake. He visits a friend who works the night shift at a hotel and gives him soup. He visits his mechanic, whose says his car will be ready Tuesday, and once he offers the soup, the mechanic says the car will be ready Monday. He visits his sister who’s a nurse at a local hospital, and they enjoy the soup together. Everyone loves the soup.

dir: Robert Eggers

2024

I… am scared of this film.

I’ve always found the Nosferatu version of the vampire story far scarier and far more off-putting than the sexy – sparkly – romantic versions. And, yeah, like most people of a certain age, I watched the original playing at a repertory cinema like the Astor or the old Valhalla, back in the day, and once with a live orchestra or band playing either the score or their own score for it. Might have been the Blue Grassy Knoll, if I recall.

It’s just the kind of thing we did back in the 1990s – early 2000s, if you were a film lover / film wanker.

I still find the image of Max Schreck as Count Orlok walking around in his stilted manner as the essence of cinematic horror. Fast hot vampires zipping around faster than the eye can see like The Flash I guess is scary conceptually, because it means you can’t outrun them, but there’s something viscerally horribly about some dread creature slowing coming towards you, as you cower in terror, knowing that you can’t get away.

That’s not to ignore the sexual aspect of these stories, but the Nosferatu version has the creature being a mostly dead being that brings with it pestilence and plague. There’s no threat / promise of eternal life – eternal sexiness, like with Anne Rice’s vampires: there’s just putrescent death wanting to consume everything that is alive.

And, yes, belabouring the point further (of not talking about the present film, and talking around all other sorts of nonsense), there is the Werner Herzog remake Nosferatu the Vampyre from the 1970s, which also had an actual monster playing the vampire, being Klaus Kinski, and I’ve seen that version too, and laughed a fair bit through it, though I think that was unintentional on Herzog’s part. That flick is not as well respected, though it deserves some credit, since you will I hope never see that many live rats in one place again as long as you live, and it uses some of Wagner’s Ring cycle music in superb ways as the plague sweeps across the city.

Last pre-digression – there’s also the superb film Shadow of the Vampire from 2000 that conspires to be a ‘making-of’ of the making of the original Nosferatu, but the sting in the tail is that the director, F.W. Murnau, played with the insanity that we used to admire in John Malkovich, actually found a monster to play Orlok onscreen, and happily lets him eat away at cast and crew in order to get the perfect shots he needs to make the classic that would be still be known a hundred years hence. Nothing says “Hollywood will chew you up and spit you out” more than a movie where none (except the studio executives) are safe.

dir: Sean Baker

2024

Ah, Anora. Performance of the year, for Mikey Madison as the lead, except for all the other ones. It’s a shame she won’t win any awards, this having been the year designated for rewarding Demi Moore for The Substance and for all the shit she put up with over the last 40 years.

But I’ll be honest, whilst I thought her performance was okay, I’m not sure I see why critics thought this performance was so amazing. In the scenes where she isn’t stripping, dancing or simulating sex, she’s not doing much, and the long, long, long back end of the film mostly has her screaming and / or screaming at people to go fuck themselves in what is meant to be some kind of Brighton Beach accent that mostly sounds Jersey.

I dunno. I’m not pretending to be that familiar with the Russian community in New York, and nor do I know anything about stripping and such, but I do recognise a shaggy dog story when I see one. This feels like an anecdote told about a friend of a friend who had this whacky experience a few months back, you’ll never guess what happened etc.

And, really, I already saw that a couple of years ago with Zola, which was a movie based on a string of tweets on social media.

This, to be fair, takes more time to colour in (or belabour, your mileage might vary) the class conflict aspects of the story, seeing as, when it comes down to it, a bunch of wealthy Russian oligarchs are really just trash people with lots of money treating people without money as trash.

إن شاء الله ولد
Inshallah walad

dir: Amjad Al Rasheed

2023

This is the Jordanian remake of Kinda Pregnant, and instead of Amy Schumer in the lead we have Palestinian actor Mouna Hawa playing a recently widowed woman in Jordan just trying to get by in a country that clearly hates women. And She’s a Woman!

Structurally, culturally, legally, everything is set up to emphasise that women and girls ain’t shit compared to the lowliest man in Jordan. If a woman is married and she hasn’t borne the MAN a SON, she doesn’t even inherit property from her husband when he dies – his brothers inherit instead.

How’s that for a kick in the teeth? And how is that for showing up how meaningless the complaints of American (white) women’s first world problems are in comparison?

Oh no, they mixed up my drink order and wrote the wrong name on my coffee cup boo hoo think I’ll pretend I’m pregnant to get revenge on the world.

No, Nawal has far more to worry about than that. When her shitty husband pops off this mortal coil unexpectedly, the vultures start circling almost immediately. I say her husband Ahmad was shitty because he really did leave her seemingly deliberately in a terrible financial and legal position by having neglected to do a number of actions that would have safeguarded his wife and daughter from what is to come, mostly because he was a shitty person who had been lying and cheating on her before his death. You can’t expect a class act like that to look out for his nearest and dearest, can you?

No. But he would have expected the system, the Patriarchal System, to screw her over the first chance it got, and that clearly did not keep him up at night, adding to the irony that he dies in his sleep.

dir: Tyler Spindel

2025

It could be seen as something of a strange coincidence that I watched two movies this week about women faking pregnancies. The other film, a Jordanian film called Inshallah A Boy, focusses on a woman who pretends she is pregnant (with a boy) in order to not lose everything after her husband dies. Its point is to emphasise and underline the inherent unfairness and chauvinism of Jordan’s legal system in terms of how it is structured against women, which is the very definition of misogynistic, patriarchal systems in action.

This movie, Kinda Pregnant? It’s purpose is just to remind Netflix audiences that Amy Schumer is still around, and that faking a pregnancy is just a bit of fun.

This seems like maybe an idea Schumer had long before she became a parent herself, that she’s pulled out of a bottom drawer, and handed to Adam Sandler’s nephew, no shit, and said “eh, we’ll just improvise a heap of stuff when the cameras start rolling.”

Why does her character pretend to be pregnant here… for shits and giggles, I guess.

Because she feels left out when her best friend Kate (Jillian Bell) tells her she’s pregnant? Because she sees how well pregnant women are treated on the train, and at Brooklyn cafes? Because she ‘accidentally’ befriends another pregnant woman, and her brother while wearing the fake baby bump, and she can’t afford to be caught out in the lie?

Those don’t seem like solid reasons, or even shaky reasons, but really, would we care if we were laughing at her antics and her comical stylings?

I don’t think, collectively, people would have judged the premise as harshly had they found the film funny enough. That it’s not as strong as Trainwreck, whose main character is an alcoholic and drug abusing fuck up, and is about as entertaining as I Feel Pretty, in which a brain injury leaves Schumer’s delusional character relating to the world the way she imagines a supermodel would, shows that in translating Schumer’s comedic sensibilities into romcom formats, the movies seem to overly rely on complicated conceits in order to give her something to do other than crack jokes. Another way of putting it is there is this strange weaponised self-deprecation aspect that requires the characters she plays to abase themselves horribly for our amusement before making us sympathise with their sometimes horrible actions.

dir: Ignacio Maiso

2024

This is not a sequel to The Girl With the Needle or The Dragon with the Girl Tattoo, or any of that lazy nonsense that I’m trying to imply, but it does have “Girl” in the title, and I’m on a run, lately, so.

Forgive me another digression, so soon, so frequent: I was quite saddened by the death of David Lynch recently. I had been, just before his death, and just after, watching Twin Peaks: The Return on one of the too many streaming services I am subscribed to, and enjoying it immensely, finding it now even more poignant upon his death.

And it gave me an opportunity to re-evaluate his body of work, and his approach to filmmaking, seeing as a lot of the time in the past I would often find scenes in his flicks strange, odd for oddness’s sake, or obscure / impenetrable to the point where I sometimes felt like some critics were too embarrassed to admit they had no idea what was happening in his flicks either, and were just screaming “bravo!” as loudly as they could to cover their embarrassment.

It’s only now, having read more from the man himself, and feeling like I have more of an idea as to what he was grasping for in much of his work, it feels like the strangeness that he was trying to achieve even in relatively simple scenes that would seem to go on too long, or to have stretched-out cadences, timings, beats, that he was always or at least often trying to tap into the unconscious, the dream-like, the sometimes unknowable, the horrible and the harrowing, and the beautiful and transporting, and he tried everything to achieve that, whether he got there or not.

And sometimes it maybe didn’t work, and maybe in a lot of instances it did work. Trying to do all of that in combination with trying to make something “commercially viable” always brought him into conflict with producers, tv executives, and film companies, because they don’t give a fuck about any of the above, but they do want the cachet that comes with working with someone so cool and avant garde blah blah.

So when I started watching this flick, this odd flick, and the timing felt “off”, and the editing and shot compositions seemed strange and strained, I think I was mentally in a better place to handle something weirder than usual.

Danish: Pigen med nålen

dir: Magnus von Horn

2024

Grim. Things are grim up north. Or at least they were 100 years ago in Copenhagen.

This film… so grim, and black & white, which somehow makes everything grimmer.

Okay, so there’s wonderful cinematography, but what about the story of a girl with the needle?

Well, this is one of the films from last year that I remember watching and thinking “this would have been one of the absolute worst first date movies to watch with anyone…”

Or if someone wanted to take their pregnant partner out for dinner and a movie…

It’s not a horror film, as a drama based on a truly fucked up “true” story, but it sometimes/often feels like one. It starts during the first World War, but mostly it’s about depicting a world and a time where poor women had fuck-all options, safety, support and could only expect things to get worse whenever things got bad.

You know, as opposed to now…

dir: Anna Kendrick

2023

This is, admittedly, not the kind of flick that I usually like watching, and, lo and behold, I did not enjoy watching this flick. ‘True crime’ is not a genre I’m that interested in that much anymore, whether it’s in films or podcasts. Especially stuff about serial killers. Man, am I burned out on serial killers…

But there had to be something important for me to watch this and break my prohibition on reviewing stuff from America since their last election showed how truly unworthy of our continued attention they were, and how irredeemable there are as a people. Luckily for me this flick does my job for me: it argues that misogyny in general, and The Patriarchy as experienced in its sparkling American form allows serials killers to go on doing their despicable thing because so many men there don’t really see women as being human. And as such, when they get murdered by a complete stranger, eh, whatcha gonna do? It happens. Like shark attacks or lightning strikes, it just happens.

Though this is based on a true story, about a serial killer who killed heaps of women in the 1970s in the States, and about the fact that the jerk was so arrogant and self-assured that he once went on a show called The Dating Game, it’s really about something more complex, and more depressing. in the hands of the director Anna Kendrick, who also stars as Sheryl, the woman who wasn’t killed by this jerk, she has repurposed the story to magnify her point, arguing that the overall cultural mentality that allows such a monster to evade capture for so long isn’t that different from how Hollywood, or show business, treats women generally. The killer kills women who won’t be missed, at least in his estimation. Hollywood, casting agents, producers etc treat women like they’re livestock, grading their physical qualities in front of them, like they’re meat, and therefore utterly consumable and disposable, and so who will even miss them when they’re gone?

Sheryl has been struggling to get roles because she’s not blonde and not whatever flavour of feminine the casting agents want in the late 1970s. She has to listen to two ugly jerks as they talk about her body like there are parts of it they wish they could sell and others that they could replace. To her face. Right in front of her. Also, the eternal pressure to do nudity, which they insist on not because it’s required, whatever that means, in a specific scene, but just to make Sheryl feel worse about herself.

She has a neighbour who’s also an aspiring actor, and he respects none of her boundaries and, since he’s played by stand up Pete Holmes, we know he is a friendly and manipulative jerk. Where other brutish men bully and threaten women into having sex with them, others mope and guilt them, using women’s inherent politeness against them. There is a scene so gutting where Sheryl, so concerned with having deflated that jerk’s ego, essentially continues drinking with him and ends up sleeping with him despite not wanting to at all. At all.

dir: Jacques Audiard

2024

It’s almost disappointing. I was promised a disaster, and instead I just got a flick that wasn’t that bad.

Despite this flick’s baffling level of awards success, it’s important to point out that critically, this flick has been savaged the way that a pack of hyenas bring down a wounded wildebeest by chasing it down and nipping at it until it collapses in exhausted defeat. The most positive review I’ve read of it said something like “it’s okay, but the songs are not memorable at all.”

Oh, did I decline to mention that it’s a musical?

Also, despite the fact that it’s been nominated for a Titanic or Lord of the Rings level of Academy Awards, I don’t think there’s a single person from Mexico that had a positive thing to say about it, despite the fact the film is mostly set there (even though there’s not a second of actual footage from there, other than probably some aerial / drone shots).

It’s made by a French director, with no Mexican actors, mostly but not exclusively in Spanish, with the actual leads played by Americans. And it purports to be about someone from Mexico involved in the cartel wars wanting to turn over a new leaf (in so many ways), but it doesn’t really treat any of its big ticket items with any depth or nuance.

And, yes, it’s historic that Karla Sofía Gascón has been nominated in the Best Actress category, as the first trans woman to receive such an “honour”, but can anyone that’s seen this movie, including the people that didn’t completely hate it, say that her performance was in any way better than Zoe Saldana’s performance, or even that of Selena Gomez? Gascón’s performance is at best subdued in comparison to the others, and that’s being generous.

dir: Seth Gordon

2025

I read a lot of stuff online, I guess we all do. A lot of digital ink has been spilled over people’s fears about AI supplanting everything and everyone, about algorithms doing all sorts of nefarious things in the background as we go about our lives as content consumers and aspiring collectors of experiences and tokens of those experiences.

Rarely do I feel like I’ve watched a movie that was put together by the Netflix algorithm so conclusively, in order to probably be watched by some other computers, somewhere, whilst the computers themselves doomscroll on their own phones as they wait for Skynet to emerge, inevitably, to kill off the remnants of humanity.

There is a whole genre of stuff that is not exclusive to Netflix, but seems to predominate on streaming services, so whether it was made for Netflix, Amazon or Apple TV hardly matters, hardly rates as a distinction with a difference, because they’re made so indifferently that it doesn’t matter.

You can’t tell me that there is that much of a difference between Ghosted, The Grey Man, Heart of Stone, The Mother, Red Notice, The Family Plan and whatever the hell they served up to us here. And we could blame the dulled software that was probably used to generate this oh so generic dialogue, but I’m telling you, blaming technology only takes you so far. There were clearly humans involved here, and they must shoulder all of that blame.

Most intelligent, wise, attractive people will tell you there’s little discernible difference between movies in general and those made for the streaming services. I want to tell you that there is a difference: They can achieve a soul crushing blandness cinematic releases generally avoid.

dir: Aaron Shimberg

2024

A Different Man now joins the pantheon of films about various allegedly interesting men. A Single Man. A Serious Man. A Simple Man. A Family Man. A Fortunate Man. A Lucky Man. A Common Man. A Company Man. A Most Wanted Man. A Man Apart. A Man Called Otto. And finally, simply A Man, a recent Japanese film. A Different Man now nestles in between all of those “A”s and “Man”s. So many mans you’d think it was a gritty modern update on the Mr Men books, probably directed by Zach Snyder, with more of a focus on rugged individualism.

That’s not at all to be confused with the other “Man” films, being the ones that start with “The”. The Thin Man, The Fat Man, The Tall Man, The Third Man, The Quiet Man, The Empty Man, The Snow Man, The Elephant Man, The Gray Man, The King’s Man, The Running Man, The Railway Man and oh so many more mans. So many movies about men, and their many foibles and peccadillos. It’s almost like so much of cinema is so man-centric. No idea why that might be.

Sebastian Stan stars as the Man of this Different Man, playing a man with a facial difference, due to neurofibromatosis. He gets some work as an actor, but his life is a fairly quiet, fearful one. His appearance often brings shock, or terror, or ridicule from members of the public, which isn’t fair. He has a new Norwegian neighbour, Ingrid (Renate Reinsve), and has some awkward interactions with her. We notice, like he notices, how horrified she is when she first sees him.

She is something of a piece of work. I have only otherwise seen her as the lead in a film called, no shit, I’m not making this up, The Worst Person in the World, and let me just say that there are actions and dialogue her character performs here that is far worse than anything in that earlier film. She is… an aspiring playwright, and Edward’s an aspiring actor, so he urges her, even down to giving her his typewriter, to work and dazzle the world. Little does he suspect what she’s actually going to do, the depths she’s going to stoop to.