Biography

dir: Ira Sachs

2025

This could be, I imagine, one of the most boring films that 2025 conjured, for certain people.

Let’s be honest, for most people. I don’t think most people, most humans, though not most people who love film, would have the time or the inclination to watch a flick like this. They would have far more entertaining things to do with their lives and their time, which could include anything from whacking cane toads, to counting trains to even jogging.

But for weird people (like me), who make decisions on what to watch based on what films esteemed film critics like Richard Brody of The New Yorker nominate in their best of end of year lists, you would come along to a film like this primed, ready to be fascinated and entertained.

And of course it helps that the film stars two people, both accomplished actors, both dream boats in their own ways. If you love Ben Whishaw, then this flick would be like crack to you: It’s 70 or so minutes of him talking talking talking endlessly and smoking. It further helps if you think Rebecca Hall is the bee’s knees too, which I do. She’s a great actor and an accomplished director as well.

The other criteria for possibly enjoying something like this is that it helps if you’re a bit of an art wanker, or whether you’re art wanker adjacent. I’m not going to pretend I knew who either Linda Rosenkrantz or Peter Hujar were back in the day or before watching this flick, and I’m not going to pretend I’ve learned that much about them, but they namedrop Susan Sontag, Fran Lebowitz, Warhol and Allen Ginsburg, and I know all of them, so I get some of the milieu they were swimming around in, back in December of 1974.

1974! That long ago? That’s like… 52 years ago! Wow, imagine if someone was, like, born in 1974? They’d be ancient! I feel like disintegrating into dust and flying away in the wind right now, but anyway…

People back then were very different, mostly because of a profound lack of technology. They didn’t fill their days with endless doomscrolling, or with posting movie reviews on websites, or shopping for furry costumes online.

They called people. On telephones. And talked to them. They smoked cigarettes, and talked face to face with people. They left their domiciles and travelled to other buildings in order to photograph people, or record them talking about themselves on tape recorders.

Sounds like the Middle Ages or something.

Artist Linda Rosenkrantz gets the idea to interview artist friends she knows in order to capture every detail of a given day of their artistic lives. She interviews her friend Peter (Whishaw), as he relates to her every single thing he did, every thought he had, every lie he said or thought of, every element of every task he performed on that particular day, being the previous day.

dir: Marianne Elliot

2025

Talk about missing the boat on something…

I don’t even really know if it’s possible to talk about this flick without mentioning or being mindful of the firestorm that arose a month after this flick appeared in cinemas, even Australian cinemas, though admittedly of the arthouse kind. Your Dendys, your Novas, your Lidos, your Palace Cinemas; your places where oldies go to in droves and young people avoid with a shudder.

For almost a month they would have been packing the oldies in, probably overselling seats and stacking them up to the rafters as they watched on in salty joy as grateful tears streaked down their leathery faces, revelling as they were in the heartfelt experiences of Raynor Winn and her husband Moth as life dealt them bad card after bad card and they just kept trucking on, kept walking that salty Cornwall path, not letting the world get them down.

Maybe some of them, the cinema patrons, that is, were clutching one of Raynor Winn’s many books to their chests as they dutifully filed in to the theatre, seeing as they have been bestselling books. To them, the legions of the dusty faithful, they just wanted to hear and see and feel all the things the books had given them thus far in black and white paper form, but now with people and images and music etc.

They would have dried their tears on the pages of her memoirs, content that they’d just watched a wonderful pair of actors, being the great Gillian Anderson and the pretty okay Jason Isaacs, bring to life these heroic characters of Raynor and Moth, two absolute troopers, two modern day saints who walk amongst the rest of us lowly scum.

dir: Vera Drew

2024

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

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

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

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

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

dir: Reinaldo Marcus Green

2024

Hmm. Well. That was a movie.

Bob Marley: One Love is a film about an epileptic hamster living on a musical brick taken from one of the Egyptian pyramids placed on an ice volcano on one of the many moons of Jupiter painted silver and gold, silver and gold…

Nah, I might be fibbing.

It’s about a couple of years in the life of global reggae superstar Bob Marley. And they’re not even the good ones.

I guess, for people of a certain age, not only was Bob Marley a household name for the longest time, depending on your household, but there was also a time when every CD collection had to have, by law, a copy of his greatest hits compilation Legend. I didn’t make the rules, I just abided by them.

Every share house in Melbourne had a copy of it, at least one. These days, of course, there are few CD collections not shoved away somewhere in some dusty corner, and even less share houses in Melbourne. But Legend still gets millions of streams a day on whatever streaming service you can think of. Many of those songs still get played on greatest hits / golden oldie radio every day.

It’s not for me to talk about the man’s music or legacy, because, honestly, who the fuck cares about my opinion about Bob Marley? It’s like, yes I know, no-one should care about my opinions about anything (that isn’t about the sacred and divine medium of cinema!) But, like, I haven’t expressed my opinions about The Beatles, orange juice, the Eiffel Tower, the Mona Lisa or Mount Everest recently, either.

My hot take, by the way, is that they’re all shit / overrated, but that’s by the by, and just between you and me shh don't tell anyone.

Anyone who has listened to popular music over the last forty years has heard all of these songs a million times, so you either like them and are filled with a warm, gooey feeling whenever they come up, or you’re coldly indifferent to them. Which means it’s doubly unlikely that you are reading a review about a film you’ll never watch.