6 stars

dir: Rachel Lambert

2024

Rarely do I go on such an emotional rollercoaster as I did with this film.

I started off loving it, loving the heck out of it. I really did.

I feel like such a fool. I feel like someone examined my psyche and watched my many habits and behaviours from a distance, then proceeded to seduce me, and I’ve woken up the next morning with my wallet empty, any valuables gone and my bank accounts drained.

And then I’m left lying on the floor, wondering where it all went wrong.

The thing is, for a sucker to be sucked in, they have to already want to be tricked.

Set in a small coastal town on the Oregon coast, this flick takes its times to show the world that what I thought was the main character, being Fran (Daisy Ridley), lives in. She gets up, walks to work, doesn’t interact with people at work, finishes work, comes home, does a Sudoku or two, eats like a sparrow, drinks a tiny bit, then sleep.

Rinse repeat. When circumstances threaten to require her to interact with people, she deftly avoids it, sidesteps it, does the bare minimum required. When called upon to write in a card for a co-worker who’s retiring, she can’t muster any positive feelings or any words beyond “happy retirement”.

And like the title indicates, she often thinks of herself as being dead. She imagines herself dead in a forest, or dead on a beach, just generally the world without her being alive.

dir: Stephen Williams

2022

Chevalier is a remarkable story about someone ill-served by history (and this film) who nonetheless seems like he was a pretty accomplished guy. The France that the movie is mostly set in is the France of just before the revolution. Marie Antoinette is Queen. Louis XVI is King. They are just begging to have their heads cut off.

France is one of the pre-eminent colonial powers on the planet. Slavery is its great source of wealth. The peoples of the colonies are considered sub-human. Someone who's found his way from the colonies to mainland France is, at this time in history, up to and including the present, going to find it hard to be accepted for who they are beyond their skin colour.

Make no mistake – the France depicted here is the kind of France you’d expect depicted (by non-French people) as in, so deeply and openly racist you’d think this was set in the antebellum South. One of the many points the flick is making is that whatever pretensions France had of being a beacon to the world of culture and refinement, even as it’s on the precipice of a revolution that would eventually reorder all of Europe, it’s a deeply racist place. They will literally have scene after scene of people telling the protagonist that he is seen as subhuman regardless of and in spite of his brilliance and accomplishments.

The film opens (somewhat unfortunately) with a strange scene where a young Mozart is playing to rapturous acclaim in front of a Parisian audience with an orchestra. He asks the audience if they have requests. The audience start yelling out their favourites. A piece is decided upon, something like “Cantata in E major, third movement”, they start playing it, the interloper borrows a violin and competes against Mozart himself, and everyone is just blown away by how much better this other blow-in is.

“Who the fuck is that guy?” yells a chastened Mozart, just in time for the title.

In the list of things that never happened, this never happened the most.

This is a true story, as in the chap that this is all about actually existed, but so many things depicted in this flick never happened, or are unlikely to have happened. One could argue that, considering the racist hostility that existed around and against him and people like him, efforts were made to erase Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de St George from history, so that the scant record for many of these occasions was deliberate.

dir: Kristoffer Borgli

2023

Dream Scenario seems like it would be something good, something like the good movies people made with Spike Jonze back in the day. Also, it would be either scripted by Charlie Kaufman or someone would be playing a more pathetic version of Charlie Kaufman (or even his more confident twin brother Donnie). In case you, dear reader, are a young person, I am referring to the ancient film Adaptation and…that came out so long ago, now.

It sounds like an intriguing premise: a guy starts appearing in people’s dreams. Not just people who know him, but people everywhere.

The guy is Paul Matthews (Cage): a balding middle-aged professor of evolutionary biology. For once Cage does not overact in this role. If anything, he leans into the sad-sack patheticness of this chap, and plays him as needy, whiny and defensive. You know, like most older people.

People sleep, they dream, and then Paul appears, just standing around, not doing anything. If people are in danger in their dreams, Paul doesn’t do anything about it, or help in any way, or do anything, really. He’s just passively there. Not even observing their suffering. Just…standing around.

How is this happening? Why is this happening? Well, think of some reason, and go with it, because that’s the most you’re ever going to get with regards to an explanation.

Well, will they do anything amusing with it?

Mileage significantly varies between audience members, don’t it?

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?