Drama

dir: Dylan Southern

2025

“What” is the Thing with Feathers, you could be forgiven for asking with such a title, and the answer would be “Grief”. Grief is the thing with feathers. Not “Hope”, from the Emily Dickinson poem. No, she lied to us.

Grief. It makes other people uncomfortable. The critics, how shall I say this, fucking hated this flick, even though it has a Cumberbatch in it, and critics are usually well-disposed towards Cumberbatches. Maybe it is a shit film, and I just can’t see it, because I’m blinded by…something.

I feel like I got a lot out of it. I find it fascinating that there are so many films recently about people grieving in their own demented ways, with birds of different types playing such a key role in the story. H is for Hawk famously has a hawk in it, being Mabel the goshawk, but is more about Helen grieving for her father. Tuesday has a macaw standing in for Death Itself, as a mother pre-emptively grieves for her dying daughter. The recent abominable Crow remake, like all iterations of the franchise, has a character brought back to life to avenge the death of a beloved. By a puffin. No, sorry, I meant a crow.

Look, I get that we associate crows and ravens with death, but really, now it’s any and every bird standing in for the Grim Reaper.

And I think I recall watching a recentish Melissa McCarthy movie that had a bird standing in for her lost daughter in The Starling, or grief, or the general shittiness of life, something.

Birds equal death and grief and loss. Such a burden for such tiny shoulders.

Cumberbatch plays a grieving dad, a “sad dad” as he is mocked, later on. He has two young boys to look after, and he is not coping well. His wife, their mother, we never really see or get to know. Her absence leaves a tremendous void, an unfillable void. That is one of the many ways we understand grief as experienced by this character.

We like saying to people “so sorry for your loss, if there’s anything you need, I know people say that, but I really mean it, anything you need, just ask” but then we understand, you’re meant to leave it there. You did your duty, now leave the grieving person / people alone until they sort their shit out. If you do have to chat with them, make sure to make awkward jokes to try to lighten the mood or change the very uncomfortable subject to something else.

Grief is vast, yes, I’ve written that many times before, and different for different people at different times. This flick tries to go out of its ways to show the heaviness of trying to carry on and do all the ‘normal’ everyday stuff when you’re drowning in grief. One could say “no-one wants to see that”, and in truth it’s uncomfortable to watch. It is uncomfortable watching someone spiralling further and further down. It is the opposite of what people generally go to a cinema to watch.

dir: Jim Jarmusch

2025

That sneaky director, Jim Jarmusch, maker of cool films for over 40 years, member of the secret Sons of Lee Marvin lookalike society, tried to sneak one past me. How did I not hear about this flick, that he had a new flick out, huh?

Father Mother Sister Brother is more like three short films wearing an overcoat and a fedora pretending to be one movie. Given the title you’d think it’s got something to do with families and such. And they do, but they aren’t directly linked or using the same actors in different set ups and scenarios. If they are united by anything, it is quantum entanglement where actions and connections can occur at a spooky distance.

If you know the tempo, the measure, the tenor that Jarmusch usually works in / with, this will all seem familiar even if the scenarios and dialogue aren’t. You either like the way he works or you rejected it a long while ago. Those new to his films would watch this flick and probably be perplexed by it, and why everything seems so odd.

And if you’re a long term watcher and appreciator of his movies, watching the first segment and seeing Tom Waits pop up as the chap who puts the father in the “Father” sequence would be delightful, seeing as Tom is one of a long list of people Jarmusch has worked with over the years, and a welcome one to see again (even if his character is a bit of a prick).

Two siblings, played by Mayim Bialik and Adam Driver, who seem like okay people, are driving to visit their dad, who they clearly don’t see or hear from very often. They seem to get along fairly well, with each other. The dad lives in a fairly rural area, and they look very much like city people.

As they’re travelling towards him, the odd thing is they’re discussing what his health must be like, whether he’s doing okay, how it is that he gets by financially, and we’re watching him move things around at his place. He’s not cleaning up; he’s actually trying to make the place look like more of a dump, messier. He’s covering up the nice furniture and cluttering things up.

dir: David Lowery

2026

It’s hard to feel bad for mega wealthy pop diva superstars, but this flick tries damn hard to make us feel that way.

Mother Mary is a strange flick. When it starts, right from the start, we are put in a certain position because of the words we keep hearing uttered by a very angry fashion designer, being Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel), who, due to the sheer magnitude of the hate she has for the star, can feel that she is travelling towards her.

Sam’s hatred is pure, and she wants some kind of revenge, and, initially, we are somewhat convinced that she is entitled to her feelings, if not her revenge. Her main beef is that she helped create this pop persona that Hathaway’s character rode to global success, and yet she was never credited for it and was cut off by the pop starlet when she made it big.

As it goes on a bit, though, I started thinking “is it reasonable for someone to feel entitled to a life long commitment from a Madonna / Kylie / Beyoncé / Taylor Swift type?” I mean, pop stars probably go through fashion designers the way that someone with a cold goes through boxes of tissues. I’m not discounting the work they would do: the iconic looks crafted for these divas that make them global icons have to be created by someone. And ‘created’ doesn’t mean being yelled at by a star until you somehow get it right: one has to craft the vision both of them see.

Sam’s business has flourished in the years that have passed since their estrangement, but from Sam’s telling she felt compelled to make her business succeed solely out of spite. Spite is a decent motivator for creative endeavours, no doubt. Such is her malice towards, uh, Mother Mary, that she intends to relish the fuck out of this opportunity to berate and humiliate this star, who has literally come crawling back. “You’ll come crawling back” is a thing someone yells as an ex departs, but they rarely, if ever, do.

But back she has come, and she is somewhat crawling.

David Lowery, famous for a bunch of weird but great looking films, seems a bit perplexed as to what the point of this flick is, I feel. He is trying to capture that feel of a top of the world performer, or like a melodramatic two hander where two actors are going at it hammer and tongs, but neither really succeeds. For all of Sam’s venom, and the relish with which Michaela Coel delivers her lines, this isn’t a flick where the banter between two characters is like a tense tennis match. Mostly it’s Sam spitting fire, and Mother Mary responding with wet newspaper.

dir: Oliver Laxe

2025

What…

Huh? Sirāt is, well, you can’t accuse it of being the same old same old as usual.

The name in Arabic means way or path, but it’s commonly, at least religiously, a reference to the path to Paradise, which is a very difficult place to get to, apparently. Fall either side of the path, as in, fall short along the path and you’ll either be cut to shreds or burned to ashes.

This film is about… I have no idea what it’s about, to be honest. Maybe it’s how great electronic dance music is, or how great it is to dance to rave music, how great it truly can be to feel like part of a collective, and like you’re not alone, if only for a time.

Beyond that, I dunno. Your guess, if you haven’t seen it, is as good as mine. If you have, well, you have my condolences.

We watch as some roadies stack up some speakers, in a desert. Towers of speakers. Against an ancient backdrop of cliffs, mesas, the old bones of the earth and the defiant sky, mocking us.

Then there’s music, and entranced people dancing, dancing, dancing. These people, if you have an eye for it, are not extras selected to fill in the background of a rave / nightclub scene, like what we’ve seen in countless movies. These people are… you can tell they are living a lifestyle, a certain lifestyle. They are the chemically affected worshippers of a techno god, and I don’t mean the DJ. Their worship is their dancing, like Sufi dervishes, like mystics themselves, in furious motion with elegant purpose.

And intruding into that world comes someone who clearly doesn’t belong there, handing out fliers and asking one question: Have you seen this girl?

The question is asked in an array of languages, but the person asking is clearly Spanish, even if all this dancing mania is happening somewhere that is either Morocco or meant to be Morocco, where raves go for days and apparently, for these people, only lead to more raves afterwards.

Luis, the man asking the question, who I said is obviously Spanish, I said because I recognised the actor, being Sergi Lopez, who might not be a household name but he’s well known to people who watch sub-titled movies. He played the evil Captain / Generalissimo Franco stand-in in Pan’s Labyrinth all those years ago. Now, well, these days he looks more like me.