7 stars

dir: Kathryn Bigelow

2025

Fuck this film, honestly.

Sure, it’s well made, the performances are all fine, the tension is over the top, but come on.

I don’t think anyone other than the dumbest of Americans thinks nuclear war is winnable, that there’s a scenario whereby one can win a war by using nuclear weapons (now). I think most people get that having them means countries without them can’t attack you or talk too much shit about you. With the countries that have them, well, you fight through proxies, but never directly, because you don’t want to nuke each other.

We all pretty much get that if one was launched at the States, or at China, or Russia, from anywhere, we’re pretty much all fucked. It’s all over. Done. This film goes to some trouble to explain why.

In the 80s at least, though it was policy probably decades before (since Eisenhower), the president at the time, who the rest of us naively thought would be the worst president those fuckheads would come up with after Nixon, explained to the American people that Reagan’s policy with respect to what would happen if the Soviets ever launched or detonated a missile over the US would mean there would be Mutually Assured Destruction. If the States couldn’t rule the world, there was no way they were going to let the Russkies have all the cake and eat it too. If we go, we all go, was the message.

dir: Viktor Kossakovsky

2024

You won’t usually hear me praising documentaries, mostly because when they’re really good I find them so depressing I can’t even write about them, and when they’re bad I don’t want to bring any additional notice to them, however meagre it might be.

A24, also, isn’t that well known for snapping up and releasing docos, so that A24 being involved was the first thing that intrigued me about this. Plus the name. It sounds like some villain out of ages past, or a Transformers movie.

In Greek it just means “architect”, which I guess shouldn’t be surprising because it’s right there in the name, but here I think, given the subject matter, it’s meant to mean more, as in, what are we making of this world?

It’s about cement, but you’re not going to know that until way, way into the film, almost towards the end. Until you get there, you’re going to think maybe it’s about the destruction of war (specifically the destruction wrought by that pigfucker Vladimir Putin in Ukraine), or the patient destruction that comes with time, as we see so much footage of ancient structures, of places where all that remains are the arches above entrances or doorways.

And rocks, lots of rocks, how they are wrenched from the earth, how they are broken down to powder.

dir: Thordur Palsson

2025

To be clear this isn’t the flick from 1967 made by the great communist aristocrat director Luchino Visconti starring Dirk Bogarde; this is a recent flick by an Icelandic director set in Iceland in the 1870s about a bunch of people at a fishing station trying to do some fishing and then bad things happen to them.

I hadn’t heard of fishing stations either, but I guess they were a thing at some point in human history? A lot of Nordic looking people wearing black in the most forbidding environment you can imagine outside of Antarctica talking about fish and the sea like they know the sea hates them?

That must have been a thing, else there wouldn’t be a terrifying movie like this about such a scenario.

Unlike the last horror flick I saw that had some people being tormented near the sea, this flick has a well-crafted story with compelling performances from decent (mostly) character actors confronting the unknown with sheer terror and a tremendous sense of foreboding. And even involving a group of people even Ingmar Bergman would think should lighten up, anything you shoot in or near Iceland is 1000% more compelling, and makes these people seem more credible.

Eva (Australia’s Own Odessa Young) is a young widow whose husband died a year ago. She owns the fishing station where these grimy chilly souls are trying to do their thing. It’s the middle of winter, so it’s not like they can leave, and they haven’t had a good run lately. In terms of stores they only have fish left over for bait, and they’re resorting to eating that.

(十一人の賊軍)

dir: Kazuya Shiraishi

2024

11 Rebels joins the illustrious ranks of Japanese period piece katana wielding action movies where a small number of wonderful people fight a much greater force and somehow come out on top but also all still mostly die by the end.

Why, yes, I am taking the piss, but am I exaggerating? Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai is literally about seven guys who fight off 40 or so bandits, and win but mostly die. This flick set the template for so many action flicks for decades to come, not just in Japan, that we’re still suffering for it to this very day. Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins, itself a loose remake of Kurosawa’s masterpiece, doubled the number of fighters but multiplied the enemy into the hundreds.

And of course I can’t not mention 47 Ronin, which literally has a bunch of ronin get revenge on a lord who dishonoured them, and once they’ve won their epic battle (after four hours of screen time), they all commit harakiri, which is just insane, the most insane thing that’s ever happened in the history of insane things happening. And Japanese people love that fucking story!

This flick has 11 people forced to fight against their will, or against being immediately executed, with the promise of maybe not being executed later if they survive, which they’re not meant to, and it’s all a lie because the sneaky piece of shit who’s really pulling all of the strings needs everyone to be dead anyway.

Everyone thinks they’re the main character in this flick. All of them with the exclusion of one character, being Mizoguchi (Sadao Abe) are profoundly wrong. The young lord who thinks he runs this province is wrong. The smug generals who lead two competing armies are wrong. The de facto and completely unwilling leader of the 11 rebels doesn’t want to be the main character at all, and he gets his wish. The samurai bullying the rebels into defending a key bridge and a key fortress thinks he’s the main character, because he’s a samurai, but guess what, he’s not right either.

They’re all wrong except for Mizoguchi. This is the era in Japanese history where samurai had to shave the middle bit of their heads, so many of the samurai look, to use the culturally sensitive term, fucking ridiculous. Mizoguchi definitely has that, as well as beady, froglike eyes, and is middle-aged, so he doesn’t lop off a single head or limb. But there is no doubt at all that everything that happens for the next two plus hours is because he wills it to happen.