fresh movie reviews for a socially distanced world

dir: Christos Nikou

2023

Fingernails is an anti-rom com which is still somewhat a rom com. It almost acts as a parody of rom coms, while using the tropes of rom coms to further its belief that love is and always should be inexplicable.

This is the least science-fiction-y science fiction based flick that you could ever watch. There’s nothing depicted that looks like anything that you wouldn’t have seen in the 1980s-1990s. But conceptually we are dealing with a world where people can get scientific confirmation as to whether, as a couple, they are truly in love.

So. If “love” becomes measurable and quantifiable, what does that mean for actual relationships?

In this cowardly old world, when a couple have been together for a while, they go to a place, the Love Institute, and have one of their fingernails ripped off. The two fingernails are put into a machine, and then the machine divines whether the two people are perfectly in love with each other.

Most couples who take the test fail. Get zero per cent. Other couples get a 50 per cent result, meaning one person loves the other more, or that one of them is faking it till they make it.

What this means is, I guess, people who don’t pass the test don’t stay together as couples. People who refuse to do the test don’t stay together, because someone will always doubt the other’s commitment.

And even couples who do the test, and get 100 per cent positive results, well, even they have their doubts.

Anna (the great Jessie Buckley, who is mastering the art of being really good in complicated films that don’t always work) is in a relationship with Ryan (Jeremy Allen White, who most people know as the hot chef guy from The Bear). They’ve passed the test. 100 %. What more could anyone want?

dir: Gareth Edwards

2023

This was terrible on a whole host of levels, and I think I’m one of the very few to think so. How very edgy of me.

It wasn’t terrible to watch, as in, it wasn’t an entirely unpleasant experience watching it. The acting is fine, the action is okay, the digital effects are solid.

It’s just that it’s all in the service of a terrible story, conceptually, and on a bunch of levels I can only barely grasp. I’ve read so many reviews that talk about how fresh and original it is, and I feel like screaming “have you watched any science fiction movies ever?”

Nothing in this flick is even barely remotely original. Everything is cobbled together from other flicks. I’m not even going to list them. Listing them is just me mansplaining and naming the same and usual suspects every time a sci fi flick is made. There are few images from this that I haven’t scene in other movies.

And touting as it does a storyline about humans versus AI, during an era in our own history where society says it’s grappling with the ethical and technological implications of advances in so-called artificial intelligence, the flick not only manages to say nothing new about AI; it manages to say nothing about AI at all.

It’s set, mostly, in the 2070s. So, our future. But long stretches of the flick look like they’re set during the fucking Vietnam War. I am not exaggerating. The fucking Vietnam War.

For reasons that I find hilarious, an African-American man lives with a pregnant generically Asian woman on the coast of a generically Asian country. This is New Asia. Not Thailand, not Vietnam, but New Asia. That’s not me saying it, it’s the movie.

dir: David Fincher

2023

This isn’t to be confused with the legendary John Woo flick that introduced the world to the glory that is Chow Yun Fat, and the idea in movies that you could have a protagonist shoot hundreds of people before going to his eternal reward…

Now, of course, everyone gets to do it, but back then, I assure you, it was new, novel, fresh. Hong Kong fresh.

This The Killer is about a killer (Michael Fassbender) who kills people for money. Not for sexual gratification or anything so crude. It’s a purely financial transaction, which he tries to deliver in a professional and efficient manner.

He talks to us constantly, in his head, as he repeats his bullshit mantras about never having empathy or being precise or whatever, and sticking to his own rules, plan instead of improvise, be ready for every eventuality. Except he can’t even stick to his own rules, a lot of the time.

The voiceover is tiresome, but I think it’s meant to be tiresome. Without it, we’d have very little to go on. The killer rarely talks, and when he does, his words are clipped, as if almost painful.

Again, while he comes across as flat, I think it’s deliberately flat. His style is the lack of style he deliberately cultivates. There is no looking cool in a tailored bulletproof suit or swinging around wildly in elaborately choreographed sequences with flashy weapons. The one extended fight scene we get is brutal, close-up, and doled out with whatever household weapons come to hand.

dir: Christopher McQuarrie

2023

The only thing that could make this cumbersome title more cumbersome would be adding “Part 1” to it, which they did, but they’ve since decided to not call whatever comes next “Part 2”, so what even was the point?

It’s common parlance or criticism to rag on the Fast & Furious flicks as being silly, stupid, physics-insulting etc, and they truly are dumb flicks, don’t get me wrong. But the thing is, wow, in long stretches of this flick I was sure I was watching Fast X. They’re practically the same flick and they also end, after 1300 hours, on a cliffhanger. Which is pretty unsatisfying.

At least this one does not have whatever the fuck it is that Jason Momoa was doing in that other flick.

Instead of Momoa, we have Esai Morales playing an antagonist who is always several steps ahead of the heroes, and presumably won’t make a mistake until the final moments of the next film.

As these films get longer and more complicated, it’s important to remember that none of it really matters, and that Tom Cruise playing these characters in his 60s is becoming increasingly less believable. The older he gets, the more he insists on having long scenes of him running, just to let us know he can still run fast.

We get it, Peter Pan, you can run fast.

The ultimate antagonist in this flick, you’re never going to believe it, it’s an Artificial Intelligence that they call The Entity. The Entity knows all and sees all. Anywhere there’s internet, the Entity is there. It knows everything about our hero Ethan Hunt and his band of merry pranksters, and can easily predict their actions and manipulate them weeks in advance.

It’s just so fucking smart.

dir: Brian Duffield

2023

This flick was an experience.

I went in thinking it was a horror flick. I also went into to it thinking that I wish the filmmakers had the confidence to give this a better title, being There is No-one What Will Take Care of You, the first legendary album by Will Oldham of Palace / Palace Brothers / Bonnie “Prince” Billy fame or infamy.

At least I’m guessing that’s the title they really wanted, but they chickened out. I mean, No One Will Save You is direct, punchy, and accurate, but There is No-One What Will Take Care of You, is plaintive, soulful, lyrical and also passive-aggressive, manipulative, mean-spirited; it could be a lament, it could be a threat. There’s a lot potentially going on there.

Piss-weak alternative.

This film is a marvel, in that it is quite experimental in some ways, even as it seems extremely conventional in others. There is no dialogue between characters in this film whatsoever. Our protagonist, Brynn (Kaitlyn Dever), only ever gets to say one line of dialogue in the whole film. And yet there’s acres of storytelling going on. We are left with no doubt as to what’s happened in the past, and what’s going on in Brynn’s terrible present.

Even though it’s tempting to call this a science fiction film, I think it’s more of a horror film, since Brynn fights valiantly to save herself from an uncertain but probably horrible fate. And yet the other factor is that I want to joke about the aliens from M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs coming back to Earth and figuring out how to tolerate water (on a planet five sixths of which is water), to finish the job they started over two decades ago.

발레리나

dir: Lee Chung-hyun

2023

Ballerina is a South Korean actioner where a depressed looking woman kills a bunch of men for the purposes of revenge, and also because they’re a pile of criminal misogynist arseholes.

This is not unlike many of the South Korean action films I’ve seen over the last few years. In fact, now that I think of it, even when the lead character wasn’t a woman, in at least 3 films I can think of, there was a depressed female co-star who for whatever backstory reasons had access to weapons and skills in order to punish a bunch of criminals.

It seems to be a common trope, but I guess I don’t watch enough South Korean movies to know how pervasive it is. Could just be a coincidence. Could just be that the times where I’m intrigued enough to start watching a South Korean violence action flick, it just so happens to have a depressed young woman wanting to get revenge on a bunch of loathsome criminals.

Maybe it says more about me than it does about South Korean cinema.

The film opens with a scene at a convenience store where a bunch of crims assault and try to rob the attendant. A young woman in a hoodie just wants to buy her can of soup or bag of crisps or whatever, and doesn’t even seem to really acknowledge that anything is going on. Once the shitheads start actively attacking her, she goes into full-blown Wolverine mode and starts tearing them apart with whatever is to hand, despite the fact that they have knives and use a lot of harsh language.

Ok-ju (Jeon Jong-seo) is some kind of former…I’m not entirely sure what. Bodyguard for hire? Security contractor? Often in these kinds of films the person is an ex or current National Intelligence Service agent, someone with serious skills and a sociopathic ability to apply them to…other sociopaths.

dir: Alexis Jacknow

2023

Clock is a disturbing and potent horror flick about how annoying it is to be told you have to have kids when you don’t want to have them.

Honestly, there is no shortage of arseholes on this planet. There’s like 7 billion of them. Soon there will be 8 billion. We are consuming this planet and rendering it inhospitable as we speak. The last thing we need is more people fucking up the joint.

That’s one take a person could make. On the other hand we are told we have these natural biological and evolutionary urges that, were we not to possess them or give in to them, our species would have died out long ago.

Heavens forfend! Sure, we all know the urges to have sex, but thankfully we found ways to make it not always result in pregnancy. But that only counts if you’re not an American woman. If you’re an American woman (or a ten year old child) in a state where abortions are all but outlawed now, you are legally obligated to carry a baby to term even if it fucking kills you.

Sorry, I don’t make the rules, I just recoil in horror from them. Speaking of horror, this horrific flick is horrific not only in what it shows, but in some of the arguments characters have.

There can’t be a form of horror more visceral than horror about pregnancies. There’s nothing that can be more horrifically biological than weaponising those bodily processes against a woman, whether it’s in Rosemary’s Baby, Alien or this here Clock streaming on Hulu.

I’ll leave out mother! because I still have no fucking idea what happened in that Darren Aronofsky movie.

In Clock, our protagonist Ella (Dianna Agron) is perfectly happy not to have children. She is told that she is somehow defective, or wrong, but she just doesn’t want kids. That should be okay, but people in these kinds of stories, and let’s face it in real life too, constantly feel obligated to tell other people what to do. So there’s no shortage of arseholes telling her she’s wrong.

Let the woman be. Let her live her life, and you worry about yours.

dir: Ángel Manuel Soto

2023

It wasn’t as terrible as I thought it would be.

That’s not saying much, admittedly. The new low bar that was created when they released that awful Flash movie earlier this year (unless it was all just a bad dream) means that some things just have to be passable, and have nice people delivering dialogue in an okay manner in order to be pretty good in comparison.

This flick doesn’t have Ezra Miller in it, not even a tiny cameo. Not even a picture of him. So that’s extra points right there. It has a charming and eager young chap in the lead role of Jaime Reyes / Blue Beetle, in the form of Xolo Maridueña. He has a lovely / embarrassing family surrounding him, and truth be told all the best bits of the film are or involve Jaime and his family.

That being said, even with all the elements of Latin / Mexican culture wedged into it, this kind of cultural cringe comedy is as generic as can be, whether it’s My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Fresh Off the Boat or whatever the hell they’re doing here. They say that you can’t be what you don’t see (representation), but I wonder how well they do with representing aspects of Latin culture in specific ways (but generic enough not to alienate the gringos), since I’m not from that culture.

Unfortunately, there’s also George Lopez. George fucking Lopez. If you don’t know who he is, and you haven’t endured his stand-up, or seen him in terrible things, you might think “who is this old man shouting at clouds all the time?” If you do know who he is, well, I feel your pain.

The plot is so generic. The villain, Victoria Kord, played by Susan Sarandon, is so generic and unmemorable that I feel like saying “that’s nice, dear” whenever I think of her on-screen moments. The villain’s henchman is also very generic, in that it’s a shouty chap called Carapax (Raoul Max Trujillo), but he at least looks terrifying regardless of what armour he’s wearing.

He’s a mean looking motherfucker, and so always plays mean looking motherfuckers. If he and Danny Trejo had a baby together, it would look like Tommy Lee Jones.

dir: Guy Ritchie

2023

I have no idea why this is called Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant, because I don’t think anyone was too confused about whose covenant it is. If Guy Ritchie directed it, and we are reliably informed that he did, then we would have assumed it was his flick called The Covenant.

But isn’t it really The Covenant between the two main characters here? The sacred promise Jake Gyllenhaal’s character makes to Ahmed, his faithful interpreter? The promise to save Ahmed and his family? Guy Ritchie didn’t make this promise to this Afghani interpreter. So why the fuck is it his covenant anyway?

Is it God’s covenant with Abraham, or that with Noah after the Flood, that he wouldn’t slaughter humanity again just for shits and giggles, or the one he made with Jesus that everything would be fine if he just went down to Earth and was a good boy?

Hmm, someone doesn’t seem to honour his covenants…

Of these bullshit semantic games, I never tire of them. Whoever the fuck’s The Covenant it is, this here is a film, that came out this year, set mostly in Afghanistan, to do with men and the promises they make to other men, and the lengths they’ll go to not break their promises.

It's beyond me why Guy Ritchie thought he needed to tell this particular story, but, unlike many of his more recent films, I don’t feel ripped off in having sat through it. At least it’s not just another smug gangster flick set in London amongst the stereotypes with constant flashbacks, at that. He wants to be taken ever so seriously. You can feel it wafting off of the screen. “This is my important film”, he tells himself and his assistant. “This will earn me the respect I deserve.”

“Yes sir, Mr Ritchie, here’s your everything bagel, just as you ordered, with nothing on it”, says the assistant.

“Excellent.”

dir: Antoine Fuqua

2023

I am forced, against my will, to use the American spelling of this movie, though it goes against every fibre of my being.

I also applaud the makers for not going with “Equaliz3r” or “3quilzer” or even “Threequelizer” with some random 3s thrown in.

This is an enjoyable film if, like me, you could watch Denzel Washington pretty much do anything, sit at a table at a café, rearrange the napkins endlessly, drink tea, or watch him huffing and puffing up some steps. That’s the film, for me, watching a man approaching 70 climbing steep steps, and order tea. I don’t really need the other stuff so much.

Of course, that covers maybe 80 per cent of the film: Denzel just doing stuff, and coming to terms with his own mortality.

10 per cent is lectures on the physiology of hummingbirds. Fascinating stuff.

The other 10 per cent is watching Denzel brutally murder people with anything that comes to hand. There are killings so brutal in this that I hope I don’t have nightmares about it.

How do we reconcile these disparate energies within the one character, this strange monk-like man, so peaceful, so deadly? Well, does it really matter anyway?

dir: Maggie Betts

2023

There are no burials in The Burial. I can’t even guess why it’s called such. Sure, it involves funeral parlours, but there’s no specific burial.

Is there a general burial, one symbolising the finality of one’s hopes and dreams finally being put to rest? Is it a reference perhaps to what happens to the Goliath part of this David and Goliath story?

Plus I don’t remember any references in the Bible to how they buried this alleged giant felled by a sling and a stone. Maybe they used a bulldozer, maybe they blew him up like a dead beached whale with dynamite.

I mean, that sounds unlikely, but it’s happened. I’ve seen the footage. You can’t unsee it.

Jaime Foxx, for all his health problems this year, which nearly led to him dying, has put in two very solid performances in two flicks that will only be seen on streaming services. It’s a shame because they deserved to be seen by more people, maybe in cinemas, maybe projected onto the sides of large buildings. The other performance was in They Cloned Tyrone, but this performance, at least for the first half of the film, was much bigger and brasher (despite the fact that he played a pimp in the other film).

Willie E Gary seems like a persona created for a movie or for wrestling, but he is a real alive person who walks this earth and does his preacher / lawyer shtick for reals. Foxx plays him, in court, like a preacher expecting the jurors and other members of the court to yell “Amen!” after any of his statements. In case we didn’t figure it out seeing him in action in court, they also show him in a Black Baptist church firing up the locals.

He is immensely successful as a personal injury lawyer, very wealthy, rich enough to be showcased on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous *ugh*. He is vibrant and full of life, and he has an entire entourage of lawyers to both back him up and to keep things real.

In contrast, Tommy Lee Jones, my gods, age has not been kind to you. He plays the role of Jeremiah O’Keefe, the owner of a bunch of funeral homes way down South in Mississippi. He is a dull, destroyed man, whose bad choices in business are in stark contrast to what a good and noble man he is.

dir: Greta Gerwig

2023

It’s a testament to either the surprising quality of this flick, or the extent of my gullibility, that I actually found myself enjoying this flick despite myself. Well, not despite myself, that sounds like I went in not wanting to like it (like a lot of male critics seemed to make a point of in all their reviews).

Maybe because I’m secure enough in myself, or maybe the content of big budget flicks rarely has anything to do with my emotional state, but for whatever reasons I, as a man, enjoyed this strange movie and didn’t in any way feel like it diminished my inherent awesomeness or took anything away from me, including any of the additional 28 cents per dollar I am usually paid compared to my nearest female equivalent.

Radical, I know. If I had any misgivings about this flick it’s that with people like Noah Baumbach and the actual director, Greta Gerwig involved, it could have made for a horrible experience (for me).

Last time they collaborated, the flick was called White Noise, and it was based on a Don DeLillo novel, and it was a horrible time inflicted on everyone, at nearly three hours as well, and I’m still mad about it.

I had no idea what they were going to do here, but whatever it actually is, it worked for me.

I have already diminished Gerwig’s work here unintentionally: I’m not implying Baumbach secretly wrote or directed anything – she’s plenty talented enough to have already directed a bunch of flicks. They are partners in real life too, so there’s nothing unlikely about them being able to collaborate in the truest sense of the word – incorporating some ideas, discarding others because they might not gel properly.

I have no idea what thought process they went through putting this frankly bizarre film and cultural phenomenon together. I don’t think it was ever guaranteed that this flick was going to succeed as it has, because I don’t think even the most drug addled executives at Mattel or Warner Brothers could have imagined it was going to literally make billions of dollars.

People who I know for a fact weren’t going to cinemas even pre-Covid went to see this flick. My kid, their partner and their friends ALL went to see this flick together.

I had co-workers who went and saw the flick, barely able to articulate how much they didn’t like it or why, and yet the same chumps went and saw Oppenheimer and couldn’t shut up about what a genius Christopher Nolan must be for hours on end.

dir: André Øvredal

2023

How do you do a new movie version of Dracula without telling people it’s about Dracula? You do what they did here, and don’t even mention his name, just like several years ago where Ron Howard made a new film version of Moby-Dick without telling anyone, and called it In the Heart of the Sea.

I would also further go on to argue that a title that generic helps no-one, absolutely no-one. I have a particular dislike for these recent titles for things that are simultaneously very specific and very abstract at the same time.

I am still trying to wrap my head around All the Light We Cannot See. Yes, I get what it means in the context of the story (blind woman in Nazi France, radio waves), but on the other hand, who fucking cares? And we can’t see it, because it’s not light.

That’s a different fight, a different pointless battle to get energised over. The Last Voyage of the Demeter, is a very specific title about a place, being a ship, that presumably never sails again. We are meant to ask ourselves “Um, I wonder what happened to the Demeter and its crew?”

Well, we get to find out, if we can make it through a stylish two hour horror flick. The film starts with the stately, portentous titles that inform us what we are about to watch is taken from the logbook of the Captain of the Demeter, but then it spoils the illusion, the necessary suspension of disbelief, by telling us that it’s a chapter from Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

If you’ve ever read it, you would know how different it is from the chapters that come before and after. The gothic potboiler aspects of the rest of the novel are contrasted with the difference in approach that arises from the difference in perspective. Captain Elliot, the captain keeping the log, hasn’t read the preceding chapters, and doesn’t know what’s going on. We know, but it’s a complete mystery to him for most of the chapter.

dir: Anna Zlokovic

2023

Appendage, despite the name, which sounds like a prequel to Boogie Nights, is funny and horrifying in appropriate measure, and works in ways and on levels that Cobweb, the horror flick I saw just before it, never does.

This flick works more on a close-up, bonkers queasy physical level, because at first at least it’s about an anxious and stressed out person physically reacting to all the bullshit life throws up for us on a daily basis. We’re not talking about anything radically inventive or brand new – there are countless movies and stories about people and their darker selves, the shadow self that Carl Jung constantly banged on about; the Jekyll and Hyde nature of humanity.

This flick though…

Hanna (Hadley Robinson) is young, and yet stressed the fuck out. She has a wonderful boyfriend (Brandon Mychal Smith), a job as a fashion designer with an acclaimed atelier, an intense best friend (Kauser Mohammed) that she also works with, and she’s blonde, young and white in America. What could she possibly have to complain about?

Well, you know, sorry to have to mansplain things to you, but however matters may look on the surface of people’s lives, none of that necessarily prevents or alleviates the potential impact of trauma, of depression or anxiety on any individual.

The body keeps the score, or so the saying goes. Hanna’s nervous tics in the face of the instances of frustration or disappointment seem to be escalating, and regardless of her polite and pleasant outward demeanour, her insides are roiling, and she is struggling.

And something seems like it’s growing out of her left side, out of her birthmark.

dir: Samuel Bodin

2023

Cobweb is… less than great, in fact it’s not even close to great.

It barely approaches adequate. Which is a shame. Promising premise devolves into derivative dumbness, like most uninspired horror flicks. Like most flicks, probably.

In the run up to Halloween I will doubtless see a stack of horror flicks, some of which will have Halloween as an element or as a setting. Few will be (I hope) as poorly realised as this one.

Peter (Woody Norman) is a frightened, delicate boy, perfect for a role like this. He has pale skin, gigantic brown eyes and curly brown hair. Yes, he could probably perfectly play a role as Frodo in an inevitable Lord of the Rings remake.

He is (rightly) bullied at school, and his home life isn’t much grander. But whatever happens during the day, his nights are plagued with the inexplicable. He hears a tapping on his bedroom wall, sometimes he hears words being whispered.

His parents aren’t much help. The frazzled, brittle mother (Lizzie Caplan) is high pitched and hysterical even before things go wrong. The father is played by Antony Starr, so anyone who watched the Amazon series The Boys where he plays Homelander knows already that the character will clearly be some version of a charming psychopath.

Less charming, more psychopath. With everything that’s going wrong, Peter suspects that he can’t really trust his parents because, over-protective and violent as they are, they are clearly afraid of something.

One of those things that they’re afraid of clearly should be Child Protective Services, because her fragile Suzy Homemaker bullshit, which never makes a lot of sense since this is set contemporarily and that shit is from the 1950s, isn’t going to cut it. Both parents act like off chops long before there are any reveals, or any reasons given for why they might be acting like this.

The dad especially acts like a barely restrained lunatic right from the start.

dir: Kelly Reichardt

2023

Hmm.

I am not really sure who this film is for.

You could say that about many of Kelly Reichardt’s films, and I’m not saying that to invalidate her approach or sound dismissive. They’re just… idiosyncratic films.

Lizzy (Michelle Williams) is a middle-aged artist. She sculpts figurines, of women.

And that’s pretty much it. We watch her process, watch her sculpting, watch her take her sculptures out of the kiln, sometimes mount them on stands, stare at them with a critical eye, and...

Does a film need to be more than that? I guess it depends on what you expect out of a movie-going experience.

I think, maybe, this film asks a bit much of the viewer.

Set as it is where it is, it is a very low-key look at the everyday lives of a bunch of people. There’s no pretense that there is anything about these people that is that interesting. They just are who they are, and they do what they do.

There are lots of scenes of people either making their art, installing art for exhibition, or talking about upcoming shows, that you might think the flick is saying anything about art scenes in general or the art scene of Portland, Oregon, where this is set. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is a Kelly Reichardt film. She doesn’t tell you what to think about anything. She doesn’t even give you an inkling as to why she was interested enough to make the film about this art scene, because she’s not mocking it (that much) nor is she showing it up for the bunch of pretentious twats that you know must populate it.

dirs.: Daniel and Michael Philippou

2023

Wow. That first five minutes…

This flick starts with a deceptive scene. It has an energy completely different from the rest of the movie. A brother is trying to find his younger brother at a massive house party, calling out his brother’s name, and asking if anyone has seen Duckett.

At least I think it’s Duckett. As one guy yells in response, who the fuck is Duckett? Is that his first name? Why is he called Duckett? It can’t be his surname; why would he be calling his brother by his surname?

These questions will never be answered but will stay with me forever. That whole sequence is a continuous take, and it’s shocking, its climax is shocking, and then the rest of the flick transpires in a different way and in a different register, thank Christ.

And it’s all the better for it. A whole film like the first five minutes would have killed me.

Instead it becomes a much more relatable story about a kid who misses her mum indulging in the supernatural in order to avoid her obvious problems.

I mean, who hasn’t logged on to a Ouija board in a moment of weakness?

Maybe it’s more of a metaphor for disassociation or mental state altering drug use, but within the context of the flick at least, we know all the cool kids are into this latest trend, because everyone’s filming it and making TikToks out of it.

Two siblings have this weird ceramic hand. The experience is, you strap someone to a chair, they hold the hand, and say the fateful words “Talk to me”. Much to anyone’s shock, but not of the people watching this flick, a spirit appears before you. If you then say “I let you in”, for a period of time that’s not meant to exceed 90 seconds, that supernatural spirit inhabits your body, and gives you an incredible experience.

dir: Celine Song

2023

Past Lives, a semi-autobiographical story, is a lot of things to different people. If you want it to be the greatest film of the year, it can be. For you. It’s on a lot of film critics lists already.

The thing is, if you’re going to do that, say it’s one of the best films of the year, you’re really going to have to do yeoman’s work showing to the uninitiated *why* it’s so great.

Its charms, I would argue, are ineffable and hard to grasp. It is a really well-made film, with perfect performances. But it’s realised in such a personal way, one which doesn’t tell us what to think or how to feel about any particular scene, such that we impose our own feelings, our own impressions onto what we’re watching.

The film opens as three characters sit at a golden bar. A couple of voices, perhaps representing us, the viewers, try to theorise as to what’s going on over there. Are the Asian male and female a couple, or siblings, and who is the white guy next to them? An interloper? Why does he look so insecure and unhappy? Why does the female look so happy and energised, with those energies directed towards the other Asian guy, and deliberately physically turning her back on the other guy?

We are going to find out, but we’re still going to wonder. And yet (the woman) looks directly at us (down the camera), as if to challenge us, as if to say “you think you know what their story is, but you have no idea”.

Though it’s called Past Lives, this is not a supernatural romance about people finding each other over the course of multiple incarnations. In truth sometimes we get to live multiple lives even over the course of the one life we’re given.

dir: A.V. Rockwell

2023

Life is hard, whether it’s today or 1994 New York, if you’re an ex-con. Especially if you’ve burned every bridge, and lost custody of your child, who ends up in the welfare – foster system.

A Thousand and One puts us in the unenviable position of watching a character who often does the worst possible thing in a given situation, and still hope that she’ll be able to find a way to get by and get through. It’s a hard balancing act, because she’s a complex character, and she is certain she’s doing the right thing, but most people who do stuff that turns out awful are certain they’re doing the right thing.

Inez (the formidable Teyana Taylor) is just out of Riker’s, and has nothing, and no place to stay. It’s the early 90s, so we have multiple scenes of her using a phonebook to try and call people that might still take her in for a while. At something called a “phone booth”, with that accordion glass door and all.

Drifting back to her Brooklyn neighbourhood, there are as many people who remember her skills with a hot comb, finger weaves and box braids, as remember her for whatever landed her in jail again.

She’s spying on someone in the neighbourhood that she’s likely enjoined by law not to approach, a little guy she calls T (Aaron Kingsley Adetola), for Terry. He can’t even make eye contact with her, but he knows who she is. Life in foster care doesn’t seem to be that enjoyable, which results in Terry spending some time in hospital, which gives mother and son more of a chance to bond, somehow, despite Terry’s constant fear that she’s going to disappear again.

Inez herself is a product of the foster system. I should just call it “The System”. Later on she’ll refer to it as being the reason why she is so hard, so uncompromising, so brittle and fierce.

The boy speaks of his earliest memory, of being abandoned by his mother on a street corner. Inez is stunned, and aflame from this, and embarks on a course of action as unwise as it is heartfelt.

dir: Juel Taylor

2023

I feel like, considering the fact that no-one was ever going to see this anyway, they should have gone with “Oh No! Bro? They Cloned Tyrone!” as an alternate, if not better, title. I mean, it would have been terrible, with all that punctuation, but for some reason it could have been more fitting.

I thought this flick was hilarious. I loved it. It’s one of the funnier flicks that I’ve seen this year, and it’s a shame that it’s been relegated to the relative ghetto that is Netflix. It’s also funny to me that one of the lazier, dumber flicks I watched earlier this year, also on Netflix, also starring Jaimie Foxx, got nowhere near the same heights despite treading familiar genre ground (that waste of time was called Day Shift, in case you’re wondering).

If it feels like an amalgam, an accumulation of Blaxploitation elements, from the cookie-cutter characters, the slinky soundtrack that Curtis Mayfield would have enjoyed listening to (though he would have composed something way more exceptional), and dialogue and performances that wouldn’t have been out of place in flicks from Black Dynamite to I’m Going to Get You Sucker, that's because it is.

And even though it’s set contemporarily, there would be moments where one could be unsure as to whether it’s set now, twenty years ago, or twenty years before that. When Slick Charles yells about winning Pimp of the Year at the International Players Ball of 1995, you feel like saying “but that was 30 years ago bro…”

You might have assumed that the main character, or someone close to the main character, would be called Tyrone. You would be mistaken. If our flick here has a main man, a main character, it’s Fontaine (the great John Boyega).

Fontaine wakes up and goes about his day. He is an archetypal drug dealer. This is his world. It mostly seems to revolve around hassling people for the moneys he is owed, and assessing the dimensions of his empire. Though he does check in on his momma, calling through the door to see if she wants a sandwich.

She’s happy with her stories on the telly. Don’t know why he never opens the door?

dirs: Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K Thompson

2023

There is so much going on here.

Visually, this film, like its predecessor, pushes the possibilities of the medium (animation) by not just trying to replicate the aesthetics of the comic book format, but creating entirely new ways of displaying images, action, and the fluid transitions between them for the purposes of telling this story. And, yes, we are all completely getting sick of the multiverse stuff, but this flick manages to be extra-dimensional beyond that as well, having Miles and his mates fight in more than just four dimensions.

It's visually intense but on point, maybe a lot of it is for its own sake but there’s just so much going on, with a kind of go for broke energy, an almost terror of not getting every single brilliant idea represented, that it really asks a lot of the viewer. I’m not sure what the ideal state of mind or being is for watching this. It demands your attention, filling every frame with dense detail, and if you’re not in the right frame of mind I could see why this would be baffling / overwhelming.

And that beginning, my gods.

Miles Morales isn’t even in it for the first twenty minutes. It’s Gwen’s story up till that point. And what a story it tells, as she’s narrating to us, but alternating drumming with a band she quits and fighting an Italian Renaissance version of The Vulture, as well as finding out about some other Spider-Persons who travel through the dimensions trying to fix anomalies.

And there’s the fact that her Peter Parker died on her watch, after trying to get revenge on their version of Flash Thompson, after turning himself into The Lizard, and how her dad thinks she killed him.

Not “she” Gwen Stacy (Hailie Steinfield), but “she” Spider-Woman, the one with the white/pink hood and the ballet flats/Converse sneakers.

That intro is so good, both excellently written and delivered. And yet it’s just a part of a mosaic, one which is perhaps too complicated even for abject fans of the first film or the comic books.

Miles (Shameik Moore) is still only fifteen, and still having to keep his parents happy while he tries to balance school and his superheroics. His parents are all parent-y, so it’s the not unusual shenanigans of having to get to parent / teacher meetings, get celebratory cakes and battle the villain of the week, The Spot (Jason Schwartzman), who makes holes appear everywhere, and maintain his secret identity.

And he has to pine after Gwen, apparently.

dir: Nicole Holofcener

2023

Wah wah you hurt my feewings wah wah

No this isn’t the brutal takedown of contemporary morals and morays, millennial pieties or Gen Z or even Generation Alphas, and their woke sensitivities to not murder asylum seekers or torment endangered species or intersectionality bingo.

This flick is all about middle-aged white people! Being middle aged! And sensitive! With feelings!

Their feelings! Not your pathetic feelings. Their feelings!

If you aren’t familiar with the films of Nicole Holofcener, you may not be that interested in a new one of her films coming out. But if you’re a fan of her flicks, such as Friends with Money, Please Give, Enough Said, and now this one, you’re in for a treat.

Well, as much as a treat as you can expect from these low-key, subdued movies.

Enough Said was particularly enjoyable, not only for another wonderful performance by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, but also as a gentle swan song for the great James Gandolfini, who died soon after. Best known for playing a raging psychopath mob boss in The Sopranos, Gandolfini got to go out in style playing a quiet, complex man who doesn’t have to strangle people to death in order to get his feelings across.

Louis-Dreyfus, if you like her, is just the gift that keeps on giving. Best known for playing Elaine in Seinfeld, with each film role and other show that she’s done she’s consistently shown that there’s so much more to her than any of the other hacks on that terribly watchable sitcom (with the possible exception of Jason Alexander, who also always had more depth than the show allowed him to show: Jerry and Kramer on the other hand? Nothing but surface).

This is not that much of a variation on her usual films, in terms of how it feels, rather than the themes. It’s still low stakes small potatoes stuff, but that’s the inherent pleasure of it.

(범죄도시3
犯罪都市3
Beomjoedosi3)

dir: Lee Sang-yong

2023

This film, with the most generic of titles, is the third in a series.

None of that matters.

Here, at least in a country outside of South Korea, the title is the ineffable The Roundup: No Way Out. The title is purest nonsense. There is no rounding up of anyone or anything. Nothing is rounded up or down. There are no horrible herbicides from Monsanto or Bayer sprayed on any plants during the course of the film. There is no Taking Down or Up of anything either. And there are multiple ways out. It could just as easily have been called The Takedown Roundup Countdown Electric Boogaloo Part Three

None of that matters.

It’s set mostly in Seoul and Incheon, and has to do with Korean and Japanese criminals fighting over some mythical drug, and killing a whole bunch of people, with plot machinations and double crosses and people wanting this or that.

Doesn’t matter.

The lead in this series of films is Ma Dong-seok. His cop character in these films is called Detective Ma Seok-do, which is everyone involved taking the piss. Ma Dong-seok also goes by Don Le, and is somehow one of the biggest stars of Korean action cinema. He was even in that darned Marvel Eternals movie that no-one liked.

The only thing that matters is that Detective Ma, a fat middle-aged guy who wears the same tracksuit throughout the entire film, punches people.

He punches them really hard. He punches them so hard that he can pretty much warp reality with the force of his mighty fists.

dir: Wes Anderson

2023

It’s okay!

There’s no way to review Wes Anderson films other than to say “If you like Wes Anderson’s fussy oeuvre, you probably will like this!!”. And the corollary absolutely must be true as well, in that haters of Wes Anderson won’t be any more won over by his bullshit here than ever before.

You might think there’s no point saying this stuff again and again with every (new) Wes Anderson review, but it bears repeating, mostly because his composition of scenes, visually fussy aesthetic and strict formalism does not vary from flick to flick, even when the aesthetics themselves and the themes and plots of his movies are significantly different each time (well, as much as is possible for him).

Also, not everyone knows what a film being a “Wes Anderson” flick even means. I find that beyond my own film nerdism, very few regular (normal, well adjusted) people remember the names of directors no matter how many films they watch. They know Spielberg, they know Scorsese, and that’s about it. Hundreds of films come out every year, most people never care about these details.

But I care. Okay, so of all the output this jerk is responsible for, this is as much part of his output as much as anything else is. In no way does it challenge his previous output. If anything it’s even more of a Wes Anderson film than usual: it is, after all, a formal exercise within a formal exercise, a play within a movie, within a play.

What’s the theme… well, stories within stories sounds awfully convoluted, but it doesn’t come across like that. It’s easy enough to follow, if you care.

I think there’s an element throughout the flick about men generally being disconnected from their feelings, leading to conversations between men who are hard pressed to admit how much they don’t care about each other. Or the widower who barely seems able to muster a hint of feeling towards his recently departed wife, and has delayed telling his kids of their mother’s passing for several weeks. He really doesn’t seem able to express anything, and doesn’t seem that bummed out by it.

dir: Travis Stevens

2022

A Wounded Fawn is not a predictable film, and that’s one of the things I liked about it the most. It is horror, definitely, but depending on how you look at it, it is less of the supernatural revenge thriller that it may look like, and a more straight-forward look at an awful man, and one of the women that he tries to prey upon.

Meredith (Sarah Lind) is recently out of an awful marriage, and is looking forward to her date with Bruce (Josh Ruben). They’re going away for the weekend, to a cabin in the woods.

The problem is, in the film’s intro, which follows a snooty auction for a piece of ancient Greek sculpture, we watched Bruce murder the successful bidder for the statue, as a weird red owl looking chap looks on.

So, okay, Meredith may be dating a serial killer.

Well, maybe “dating” is assuming a bit much. It doesn’t seem like he’s planning on a long term relationship with Meredith.

The opening speech from the auctioneer explains that the sculpture is of certain avengers from Greek mythology, the Erinyes, or Furies, as they are otherwise known; avengers of wronged women, scourges of those who murder or harm women. Hopefully they go after the manipulators and the gaslighters too. Regardless, right out of the gate, they’re saying that tied to the sculpture is the idea that some force exists in the universe, hinted at in mythology, of divine retribution that apportions cosmic justice.

If only it were true. I so wish it were true.

The reality is, there’s nothing there. Nothing punishes the worst of the worst unless the cops are lucky, and it’s arguable as to how you can get justice on serial killers. Capital punishment seems almost like a favour, and decades in jail seems like a joke.

All we can do as viewers is hope that the piece of shit fucks up, slips up in some way, and gets his just deserts.

Doesn’t look like it’s going to happen, though. Maybe Bruce, too, is powered by the supernatural? I mean, whenever he’s about to kill a woman, a weird humanoid owl turns up, telling him to do it. Then he does it, horribly, jerks off, and then everything’s better in his world as he sets about dealing with the body.

Eww, no thanks, don’t drag us into your sexual dysfunction bullshit.

dir: Andy Muschietti

2023

On the long list of things that exist that perhaps shouldn’t, maybe we’re safe to add this flick without delay. I mean, I could definitely be wrong. In the fullness of time, its worth might spontaneously appear out of nowhere, perhaps creating a context and appeal where currently those things are so profoundly absent.

I am not a betting man, being a shameless addict of many inclinations and permutations, but all the same I would not bet on it.

The sheer, staggering pointlessness of it all…

I watched it asking myself aloud “who the fuck is this for?” at several junctures.

People trained like performing seals by the Marvel Industrial Complex aren’t going to be interested in it, as it lacks colour, decent action set pieces, competent CGI, but in truth many of the most recent Marvel flicks lack that also, especially the ones tackling multiverses or quantum realms and such. Fans of the comic or the TV show with Grant Gustin as Barry aren’t going to like it, because this is a terrible approximation of the character in comparison. I can’t imagine, if there are Snyder-Bros so adamant that Batman V Superman or Justice League were great, ackshually, that they’d be willing or able to defend this, since Snyder didn’t direct it.

Ezra Miller fans? Do they have fans anymore? If people liked them previously for their cinematic performances in such flicks as We Need to Talk About Kevin, or the Fantastic Beasts movies, they may have second thoughts now considering Miller’s extensive legal troubles.

If you’re wondering why I’m playing the pronoun game, well, Miller identifies as non-binary, and as such I am using the plural pronouns not with respect for Miller, but more so for the non-binary community. Call people what they ask. It’s common courtesy, even if they’re crims, and it costs nothing.

The Flash didn’t have to be terrible. I have to imagine a reality where it isn’t a terrible and pointless flick. Somewhere in the multiverse there is a good version of this flick.

Sadly, we don’t have access to that one – we’re stuck with this one.

dir: Lee Cronin

2023

Irish director, with a bunch of Australians, making the flick in New Zealand, setting it in Los Angeles… What could go wrong?

Not much, it seems, because this flick works much better than I thought it could.

It only really doesn’t work if Bruce Campbell is all you care about when it comes to these flicks. And honestly, I love Bruce Campbell, and his character of Ash, and I consider Evil Dead 2 and Evil Dead 3: Army of Darkness to be absolute classics, for different reasons.

And I’m aware of the tv series Ash versus Evil Dead.

But we don’t want Bruce Campbell, at his age (though I have no doubt he could physically do everything required of him) being attacked by the forces of evil still. Let him rest. He’s at retirement age now. Let him play golf, drink pina coladas and relax by a pool. He’s earned it.

So they have to torment a new generation. Of Australians, apparently.

The flick, which mostly works, has strange bookends, strange in the sense that I’m not sure why we needed them in order to allow mentally for the possibility of sequels. We already know that anything that gets made, from Pride and Prejudice and Zombies to Titanic is going to have sequels and prequels and remakes and reboots anyway, we know that going in. Ideas are Intellectual Property that have to have every potential dollar squeezed out of them, so why not. Late stage capitalism isn’t going to milk itself.

Three people at a cabin in the woods. One of them starts tearing the other two apart, while harming herself. What complex set of circumstances could have led to her being in such a place mentally where such things… holy shit she’s floating above the water holding someone’s head, and the very scary looking words EVIL DEAD RISE are floating above her! It must be a cheesy, cheeky horror movie, then.

خرس نیست Khers Nist

dir: Jafar Panahi

2022

So, a couple of months ago, I watched and reviewed a flick called Hit the Road by Panah Panahi, son of legendary Iranian director Jafar Panahi, and made a joke about nepo babies getting gigs they otherwise wouldn’t get except for their successful parents.

Of course I was being ironic, because few directors in Iran since the Islamic Revolution have been punished and jailed more than the father of that director. Now I have a chance to review, or at least talk about, a movie made by that chap’s father, from whom all the nepo glory flows.

I think Jafar Panahi is either in jail currently or under house arrest. Last year he was sentenced to six years in prison. He has been imprisoned, on and off, for ages. The regime doesn’t like it when he makes movies, feeling somehow that their fragile totalitarian state will somehow crumble into dust if people either inside or outside of Iran see his films. But like many of his fellow Iranian directors, when his films win awards or acclaim at film festivals, the regime happily claims credit for their success bringing glory to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

A recent flick he made was called This is Not a Movie, because he was banned by the regime from making movies. So he made something that technically, sort of, maybe, wasn’t a movie, because what else is the man going to do? His son’s out now making awesome movies, so Jafar can’t sit back on his laurels anymore, even if they keep punishing him.

When this flick starts, it’s a long continuous scene, filmed somewhere in Turkey, and it eventually shows a couple fighting over a passport, and how one of them seemingly is going to fly to Europe, and the other is not. But then someone calls ‘cut’, and the actors, and another chap who was previously offscreen, start addressing the camera directly, talking to the director, Jafar Panahi.

dir: Ari Aster

2023

You may hear such a title and wonder if the Beau the title refers to is just generally afraid, or whether he’s afraid because of specific things.

Let me just help you out a tad by pointing out that Beau, or perhaps director Ari Aster, are both afraid of a lot of things.

It is really hard to talk about this movie, this long arse movie. It’s exactly 2 hours and 59 minutes long, including credits. You might wonder why it’s not easier to say it’s 3 hours long. But you see making the length exactly 2 hours and 59 minutes long is just another way for Aster to fuck with the audience.

The Beau of the title, Beau Wasserman, is played by Joaquin Phoenix. He is paunchy, middle-aged, balding, and fearful. He is afraid of practically everything, but what he is most afraid of is disappointing his mother. This is 3 hours (sorry, 2h59m) of a film saying “The main character is deeply fucked up because his mum is a monster”.

The audience tolerance for this will vary wildly. This is not the extreme, terrifying horror of Hereditary, where family is a curse beyond your control, or the sly take on Wicker Man-style folk horror that was Midsommar.

No, this is…something else.

Beau lives in the kind of awful New York apartment that you imagine Travis Bickle lived in before shooting everyone at the end of Taxi Driver. Awful, and tiny, in a terrible area where people are screaming constantly, there are corpses in the street and someone called the Birthday Boy Stabber runs around naked stabbing people, and the cops don’t seem to want to stop him.

Beau is about to travel by plane to visit his mother. It’s the anniversary of his father’s death, a man who died before Beau was born, or so he has been told. Beau discusses all of this with his therapist, who asks him if he has any trepidation about seeing his mother, or whether he just wants her to die.

Beau thinks this is an odd question, because the audience thinks so too, but the wise old therapist assures him it’s perfectly normal for two things to be true – that he might love his mother but also want her to shuffle off this mortal coil.

It’s not clear how long Beau has been seeing this therapist, but it’s clear that he’s been talking about his mother for decades.

As Beau returns to his apartment building, he makes eye contact with an entirely tattooed man who ferociously runs at Beau as Beau tries to get into his front door.

We start to wonder how any of this can be real. And what we never get is any evidence that it’s not.

dir: Louis Leterrier

2023

It’s pretty shit, even for this profoundly dumb movie series.

Of course, one has to grade entries in the Fast & the Furious franchise on an incredibly generous curve, but still, by any reasonable measure this movie Fast X is a major fail.

They do give Dom Toretto more screen time than they have in a long while, but… No, it’s nice to see him again, and to hear his endless excuses as to why Brian can’t help or how he just talked to Brian a few seconds ago, and maybe he’s just offscreen somewhere doing something important.

The most important and baffling thing in these films is that any character shown to have died onscreen is eventually revealed to be less than dead. To be immortal. Essentially unkillable. So whenever any scene slows down, and the music gets sad, and they start talking about someone who’s dead in a mournful way, I’m like “The fuck are you doing? I’ll bet you anything that whoever will be revealed at a climactic moment to still be alive”.

And they did it again at the end of this stupid film, when a certain character who died, I dunno, four films ago is revealed to still be alive.

You may think, well, who gives a fuck. You would be right. Why are you always so handsome / attractive, stylish and right all the time? What’s your secret?

Whatever it is, I don’t have access to your level of wonderfulness, the ability to blithely accept the lack of ideas and death of inspiration that the perpetual reuse of old rope and older tropes represents in billion dollar franchises. The GDP of a nation is spent making these films, and they still can’t do anything more clever than “You’ll never believe who they’re going to resurrect NEXT!”