Drama

dir: Paul Thomas Anderson

2025

I never thought I’d live long enough to see Paul Thomas Anderson make another great movie. I keep being told that he’s made lots of great movies since Boogie Nights, but mostly I’ve found his films since then to be extremely frustrating.

With the advantage of time I think there have been occasions where I haven’t been that fair, or been generous enough to accept that no flicks, whether PT Anderson’s or not, have to perfectly conform with my expectations in order to actually be good or not. It’s just that it had become for me a major stumbling block with his movies, whereby there would inevitably be an aspect of it, or, in the case of There Will Be Blood or The Master, a final section so bonkers that it made me question whatever merits I thought I’d experienced up to that point.

I’ve long known above movies having terrible endings because sometimes directors just don’t know how to end their stories, but rarely do I experience endings that make me hate the whole fucking movie.

That rare honour is Anderson’s, in that I’ve felt duped multiple times by his filmography, even more times than by M. Night Shyamalan.

Well, as usual, an unasked for preamble saying the opposite of what I want to say about a movie: this is a strong movie, with an ending that doesn’t sink the whole endeavour or render it embarrassing, one that I enjoyed / was thrilled by almost from beginning to end. It’s got some great characters, it’s got some insanely great performances; it depicts the recognisable slide into authoritarianism that we see playing out in the States under the guise of border enforcement, and yet it’s not at all about the current ICE goon squads rounding up anyone vaguely ethnic looking, whether citizens or not, or about the MAGA fuckheads explicitly. It’s about the excitement, the thrill of revolution and rebellion in the 60s-70s which gave way to disillusionment and destruction when it all turned to shit.

And it’s about a secretive cabal of white supremacists trying to recruit a new member to their Christmas Adventurers Club.

dir: Rungano Nyoni

2025

Because I am a creature of habit, and of several dark habits, I feel compelled to point out that this is not the sequel to Kirsten Dunst’s one season series On Becoming a God in Central Florida, and that it has nothing to do with mid-level marketing schemes or cult leaders, either. Yet similarly, no-one turns into a Floridian God nor does anyone physically turn into a guinea fowl.

So both titles suffer ultimately from false advertising. In this instance, however, there is more of an explanation as to why one would aspire to become as such.

A young woman driving home at night, happy, after a dress-up party (where I think she’d gone as Missy Elliot?), sees a body on the other side of the road. She is driving somewhere on the outskirts of the capital of Zambia, being Lukasa. She is not distressed by the sight of the body, and she happens to know the body’s name.

She is neither happy nor sad that she has found her uncle Fred here. Maybe she even feels relieved. Out of nowhere a drunk appears and starts calling her by name through the car windows, but she ignores the woman, who recognised her, since they’re cousins, and also recognises the body, since he was uncle to them both. Nsansa (Elizabeth Chisela) likes to party, though, so death hasn’t seemed to bum her out, as she twerks to a song playing from her portable speaker, mere metres from the body.

There is no urgency; the cops tell them to not worry, it will be all be sorted in the morning; the initial woman, Shula (Susan Chardy) calls her dad, and he doesn’t seem to care, but hits her up for some money for a taxi ride to the site that he never takes. The call to her mother, the sister of the dead uncle, has a different effect, though.

dir: Spike Lee

2025

I do admit I still get excited when I hear that there’s a new Spike Lee movie coming out.

Yes, it’s because I’m a slave to the past. He made some great films back in the day. Genuinely great flicks. Do the Right Thing. Malcolm X. Mo’ Better Blues. Inside Man. 25th Hour. Some other ones, surely…

As a legacy Great One, does that mean his new flicks warrant attention/distraction/adulation? Of course! For me, at least.

And that it’s a remake of an Akira Kurosawa flick, well, that’s two good reasons. The presence, the dominance of Denzel? Three strikes, I’m in!

I have actually seen the original, High and Low a few times, and thought it was an amazing flick, mostly because I had forced myself initially to watch it because I couldn’t believe that Kurosawa made other films that weren’t about samurai lopping off each other’s limbs and heads with their shiny swords. That he made other flicks about doctors with syphilis or cops who’d lost their guns or the poorest of the poor sleeping around and eking out their miserable existences amazed me (at the time, late 90s), because I thought surely if you could make flicks with guys running around with swords, you’d just do that all the time.

But Kurosawa drew inspiration from lots of sources, almost always from outside of Japan, and liked doing way more than just period pieces. In High and Low he managed to make a taut little thriller half of which seemed to be filmed in one room, in one house, high up on a hill, and was the better for it.

There’s only one flaw in a flick that otherwise would be a masterpiece, and that’s the very ending, which has the antagonist turn into an incoherently screaming lunatic, just to reassure 1950s Japanese audiences that criminals like this were rare and utterly bonkers, so, nothing to worry about here, move along, citizen.

Transposed to modern day New York, a city Spike Lee seems to have some affinity for, the idea is the same; the presentation is very different.

dir: Pedro Almodóvar

2024

Who else was excited by the prospect of watching another film by Pedro Almodóvar, one of the world’s (not just Spain’s) great directors for the better part of the last 45 years? What about getting to watch his first film in English, with two greats in lead roles, being Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, at the peak of their powers? What about that it’s based on a novel by Sigrid Nunez?

Nothing? No-one? Huh.

I remember when this was playing the film festivals, there was this thing called “buzz” about the new film by Almodóvar. And then the flick was screened, and picked up for international distribution, got an award or two, and everyone was very polite about it. It’s like when you have a new article come out, or get something new published, and people are like “yes, that was a thing that happened.” It doesn’t mean it’s bad, or that people are embarrassed to be associated with you. It’s that it happened, they saw it / read it / endured it, it’s over, and now we can get on with our lives.

I don’t actually know why this didn’t connect with more people, unless it’s the issue of the subject matter, maybe in a religious context, but then Almodóvar’s films have never shied away from controversial topics like murder, sexual abuse and violence, intimate partner violence, child abuse, LGBTQI+ themes etc etc. Few (successful, Spanish) directors have opposed the Catholic Church, the religious establishment, the previous appeasers of fascism as much as Almodóvar.

I’m going to stop saying his name now. Maybe he’s not as popular as he was. I mean, I haven’t truly loved his films since maybe Volver all those years ago with Penelope Cruz in the lead role, but I’ve admired his subsequent films, and I admire this one.

I didn’t love it, it didn’t deeply resonate with me, I didn’t love the performances, but I enjoyed it as much as one can enjoy a film about one person who’s dying from cancer and wants to end things before it gets too much worse, and another person who wants to help their friend but can’t handle the idea of death at all.

It’s not a barrel of laughs, that’s for fucking sure, but neither is it a morose or depressing experience either. None of the harsh realities of what being in that state are depicted; it’s more about what a person thinks about, chooses to articulate, or how they make peace with their lives and the people they care about in the time they have left.