Drama

Past Lives

*does Jedi mind trick hand gesture*
This is not the K-Romance you were looking for

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.

Rating:

9 stars

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A Thousand and One

Out of the thousands who could help, there was only one...

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.

Rating:

9 stars

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You Hurt My Feelings

You Hurt My Feelings, prepare to die

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.

Rating:

7 stars

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Asteroid City

All those names, all those hungry mouths and egos to feed

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.

Rating:

7 stars

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No Bears

There's no bear in there, and no chair as well
There are people with games, and stories from hell
Open wide, come inside, it's a Brutal Regime!

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.

Rating:

8 stars

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Beau is Afraid

With a mum like that, he should be.

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.

Rating:

7 stars

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Limbo

Have cool car, will solve murders for heroin

dir: Ivan Sen

2023

Limbo. Doesn’t mean much to non-Christian types, as a concept or a ‘place’. Doesn’t mean much to most people, I think.

I think most of us just think of it as being an in-between place. Maybe a place you’re trapped in, maybe forever, maybe not.

Veteran indigenous director Ivan Sen wrote, directed and lensed this flick, and he set it in a fictional town call Limbo. It’s really Coober Pedy, in South Australia (Umoona, in Kokotha language), between Adelaide and Alice Springs, but it might as well be on the surface of the moon, considering how alien it looks in this film.

Travis Hurley (Australia’s Own Simon Baker) is a detective, who for whatever reason has been dispatched on assignment to Limbo in order to go over old information about the twenty year ago disappearance of an indigenous girl called Charlotte. He’s not reopening a cold case: there’s a chance they’re going to reopen it, but they might not. He’s in town driving around chatting tersely with the locals about what happened all those years ago.

No-one wants to talk to him, no-one has any real leads, the only legit suspect from back in the day is dead, the girl’s family don’t want to have a bar of it, so Travis gets nowhere quickly, and resolves to get the fuck out of Dodge.

Until he can’t. He’s trapped too, you see. Sure, it’s for technological reasons (someone trying to steal his car fucks up its onboard computer, which will take several days to replace). Helpfully, the mechanic loans him a cool older car, a Dodge Chrysler, which looks far cooler than the work car when Travis is tooling around Limbo.

Black, long classic car, against a white landscape. Did I neglect to mention that the flick is filmed in black and white? It somehow manages to make Coober Pedy / Limbo look even more alien and inhospitable. It looks more like a set they could use to stand in for Tatooine. Travis’s accommodation, at the appropriately named Limbo Hotel, is carved out of sandstone. Underground. A lot of people, not all, live and work underground, in these caves that are meant to recall various Biblical themes: Sepulchers, tombs, ancient chuches.

Charlotte’s family are trapped too, and have been since the disappearance. Her siblings Charlie (Rob Collins) and Emma (Natasha Wanganeen) were taken away from their mum after, on the pretext that Charlotte’s disappearance was as a result of bad parenting, which fractured them in different ways, leading to their mum’s death. Charlie lives in a caravan, avoiding the three kids being looked after by his sister, having never recovered from losing Charlotte, from being accused by the cops for her disappearance.

We wonder what Travis’ interest is in solving this crime. Well, we wonder until we watch him repeatedly shoot up heroin, and then we don’t wonder that much anymore. Travis himself is covered in mostly crude tattoos as well, and as he alludes to later on, his time undercover in the drug squad left him permanently marked by his experiences. Clearly his superiors don’t know about his heroin addiction, but this doesn’t look like a plum assignment either, so maybe he’s given dead-end scutt-work deliberately.

Rating:

8 stars

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Saint Omer

I'm glad I don't owe either of them any money

dir: Alice Diop

2023

This is a tricky film to review. Tricky. It’s hard to talk about, even though it’s a very straightforward movie.

It’s in French mostly, and it centres around… members of the Senegalese community living in France.

If you had no idea what the film was about, the first fifteen minutes would be baffling. I knew what the film was about, and was still amazed at how our introduction into the story is done.

Rama (Kayije Kagame) is an academic at university and a writer, and though she is French born she is Senegalese by culture and background. We get a few details of her life, like that she has a (Caucasian) partner (a beefy chap who’s apparently a bass player in a band), but there is something something at odds with what we’re seeing, a tension. At a moment where the family are together for lunch / dinner, bass player boyfriend seems like he’s about to announce some happy news, but Rama squashes it. Her sisters ask her if she can take their mum to an appointment, and she, not even looking at her mum, announces she won’t be around to take her anyway.

We don’t know where she’s going, she hasn’t told us or any of the other characters yet, but they must already know. We have some flashbacks, to a time before her father died (as they watch an old video tape?), and then her as a younger girl, in short, abrasive moments with her mother, who is later on referred to as a “broken” person.

After a train trip to some town, presumably the Saint-Omer of the title, she has something of a strange routine in a hotel room. She clearly isn’t comfortable in the hotel room, something about the bed squicks her, but she is prepared. The film makes sure we watched her pack a sleeping bag, which we later on watch her spread out over the bed.

Rating:

8 stars

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Hit the Road

And with his joyful rage he will consume the world

جاده خاکی, Jadde Khaki

dir: Panah Panahi

2022

There’s been all this blather about nepo babies lately, as in, the children of famous people supposedly getting a leg up due to nepotism, and I wanted to issue something of a corrective – sometimes being the son of one of Iran’s most famous directors isn’t really the boon that it might sound like.

Sure, Jafar Panahi is one of Iran’s most celebrated directors (outside of Iran), but he’s also a director most often punished by the regime for his movies. He’s been jailed, banned from making movies, banned from leaving the country, all that good stuff. So being his son isn’t really going to open a lot of doors for you.

Panah Panahi probably doesn’t have anything to prove to anyone, but he’s made a film even his father would envy.

Hit the Road is mostly a flick about a family travelling on the road. They’re travelling fairly far, for reasons that are unclear at first. The dad (Hasaan Madjooni) has a broken leg, and can’t drive. The mum (Pantia Panahiha) is sleepy. They have a young son who might be part demon (Rayan Sarlak), and a nervous older son (Armin Simiar), who’s doing the driving, in this borrowed car.

Wherever they’re going, they don’t seem to be in a rush to get there, and they’re only travelling during the day. They’re a family in that they have a shit-stirring energy with each other, and clearly a lot of family favourite songs and in-jokes.

They’re not meant to be using or even possessing mobile phones, which is a bit weird. It’s not weird to see this in other films, where people are paranoid about being tracked or spied on. But this is an Iranian flick. Let’s not forget that Iran has a brutal totalitarian regime in place since the Revolution in the late 70s, which replaced the totalitarian regime under the Shah. The morality police kill women for not wearing a headscarf in public. The Revolutionary Guards torture and kill those who complain about living in a country where women are killed for not wearing a fucking headscarf.

If this family is scared of someone tracking them, isn’t it the regime’s goons they’re afraid of?

What I’m saying is, how did this film get made without everyone involved not being hung?

It’s not like this regime shies away from executing women and children. All in the name of maintaining their tenuous grip on power. The more brutal the regime, the more fragile its grip.

So maybe I answered my own questions. They’re scared of the government’s goons, which is also the reason for the trip, because the older son is sneaking out of the country and into Turkey, but not through legal means.

Rating:

9 stars

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Empire of Light

Who except dogs doesn't like fireworks

dir: Sam Mendes

2022

Empire of Light is a curious thing. It’s a film that has an almost reverential love for old cinemas, but not that much interest in being cinematic, or really that interested in movies. Of the films of the era that are depicted or referred to, Chariots of Fire gets a lot of mentions, but not much else in terms of screen time.

And there are a few scenes from Sidney Poitier’s Stir Crazy, with Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder, and there’s a bit about Being There towards the end of the film, but it’s not about film itself as a medium, or what it can mean to us.

Because it’s not really about the transformative power of the movies. It’s about racism, and a character who struggles with mental illness, and what it was like in the early 1980s in Britain, maybe?

Olivia Colman is the biggest name in this flick, except maybe for Colin Firth, who has a small but odious role, but, really, only about half the flick is about her character. At first I thought we were just going to be watching a film about a depressed woman called Hillary who works at a cinema but never watches the movies playing, who is having something of a desultory affair with her boss (Firth), leading to highly unsatisfying sex in his office.

But then a new chap starts called Stephen (Michael Ward), and he’s young and beautiful, and Hillary is happy again.

For a while.

The old cinema, called The Empire, is already old and in parts run down, even 40 years ago. Its prime, like that of Great Britain, is long gone. Parts of the cinema are shutdown or unusable, and there’s a rooftop bar that goes unused except by pigeons.

There is an inscription on the wall telling people “Find where light in darkness lies” at this old art deco cinema, and I wish that’s as pretentious as the flick got, but it’s bookended with and divided by poetry, so…

Rating:

6 stars

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Drama

Past Lives

A Thousand and One

You Hurt My Feelings

Asteroid City

No Bears

Beau is Afraid

Limbo

Saint Omer

Hit the Road

Empire of Light

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