7 stars

dir: Steven Soderbergh

2024

America’s most reliably competent director is back with another reliably competent movie / genre exercise. It’s too much of an experiment to just consider it as a straight haunted house / ghost story flick, but it’s one that aims to tell its story somewhat uniquely, rather than just deliver thrills and/or chills.

Soderbergh has long been his own cinematographer, under the fake name of Peter Andrews this time, which means he’s the one holding the camera during these long, choreographed takes. The slight difference here, is that the ‘camera’ is the ‘presence’ of the title, a presence that observes what’s happening (which is why we get to see it), but is also occasionally sensed by some of the characters.

Nothing indicates why the presence, or ghost, is where it is. It roams through the empty house and settles back into a closet, before doing it all again as a realtor shows a family through the house. The teenage girl of the family is the only one who feels that there’s something wrong, some ‘thing’ floating around observing her, being the camera/ghost. It’s weird.

It’s weird on a number of levels. It’s weird in the sense that she sense’s there’s a supernatural presence there. It’s weird because she’s directing her attention towards the camera, something that never happens in 99 per cent of movies, whereby the unspoken rule is “never look at the camera, and never make eye contact with Tom Cruise”. It’s weird on a third level because it’s almost (at least for me) like she’s detecting that we, as in the audience, are watching her. Like she knows we’re there, and she’s uncomfortable about it, which kinda makes me feel voyeuristic and uncomfortable about it, too.

dir: Ryan Coogler

2025.

Damn. I really wanted to love this flick, like really love it. As it stands, or at least after one viewing, I like it but wonder what else could have been done instead, how it could have gone in a different direction.

The setup is immaculate, the look of the film is sublime. The cinematography by Autumn Durald Arkapaw is so perfect you wish you could frame countless scenes, countless images, on the walls or screensaver of your mind. The acting is spot on as well. If you like Michael B. Jordan, you’re lucky enough to get two performances, as he plays twins Elijah and Elias Moore, better known as hardened veterans and crims Smoke and Stack. They are identical except for the fact that one wears a red hat and the other wears a blue cap.

If you don’t like Michael B. Jordan, then there’s twice as much of him to dislike, and you’re also probably the kind of jerk that doesn’t even know what D’Angelo screaming “Where’s Wallace?” means.

I despair for you and sigh despondently in your general direction.

They are both fierce, and fairly quick to violence. I will admit to not knowing which one was which much of the time, and then there’s a fight between them towards the end and I was like “which one do I want to win again?”

The brothers have returned from Chicago, having worked in the crime mines created by Prohibition, now with a bunch of Irish beer, Italian wine and oodles of money at their disposal. Back to Clarksdale, Mississippi, to do what they’ve always wanted to do which is to run their own juke joint.

A place catering entirely to a Black clientele, in the 1930s, at a time when the children and grand-children of the losing side of the Civil War still think they’ve got a chance of re-litigating the argument, so to speak. When they hand over the cash for the sawmill, the constantly spitting owner gives no indication that this arrangement has any permanency. When the twins solemnly intone that if they see a single Klansman set foot on the grounds of their new property, they’ll be promptly shot.

“There’s no Klan here” smiles the guy, clearly the Grand Octopus or Pulsating Rectum or whatever the head honcho of the Klan hereabouts is called. I have to admit, both because I’m such a nerd, and because I’m also a despicable bureaucrat that every government tries to get its populace to resent, what with our stylish cardigans and countless elitist perks like tap water and workspaces where you can never open a window, all I could think of during this scene was “how are you genius twins going to prove you purchased the property legally? Where’s the title? Who’s doing the conveyancing?”

dir: Christopher Landon

2025

There’s something a bit brave about making a flick dependent on some fad app that is already forgotten by the time audiences get to watch the flick. If there is an app that insists, that allows random fuckheads to force you to download it in order to receive messages which disappear after you look at them, I don’t know about it, but I am aware that people can “drop” messages or photos to each other using a panoply of apps, but it’s already wronger than wrong.

And I don’t care. This story is entirely dependent on these apps to maintain tension or a sense of being surveilled at all times, but it’s bullshit, and it doesn’t matter in the end. The point of the premise is that it’s a thriller premise, and a woman at one location, being a fancy restaurant, is being watched constantly by someone in the restaurant, who forces her to do things because, back at home, her son and sister are being menaced by some jerk with a gun, which she can also see via her phone.

Depending on who you believe, almost everyone in America is either being menaced with a gun in their homes or is doing the menacing themselves at any given moment. The strength or failure of such a premise is entirely dependent on whether we think it’s believable for someone to be trapped in such a way, and to go along with what her antagonists want, until she finds a heroic solution to all her problems. If you buy it, then this flick becomes an exciting thrill ride as a young widow chooses to either go along with or reject the dictates of what the unknown psycho pestering her through her phone is forcing her to do.

I can’t think of many flicks like this, but I’m sure there are a bunch of them. There are plenty of flicks where someone forces the protagonist to do whatever under threat of something worse happening, but I can’t think of too many where someone is restricted to one location and observed from every possible angle which the protagonist can’t figure out for most of the plot.

dir: Martin Campbell

2025

Like I said, I sometimes like watching trash…

I have seen the same movie two nights in a row! Not literally the same movie, but literally the same genre, being Die Hard but with some permutation. Yesterday it was Die Hard but with an African-American woman as President saving the day. Today it was Die Hard but it’s the window cleaner who saves the day.

And what a day to save… Eco terrorists take over the building where an energy company, long known to be amongst the nicest and most ecologically sympathetic of companies, is lauding itself as a beacon of profitability and sustainability.

The company has been, you know, polluting the earth, murdering activists, convincing the British government to pass legislation that outlaws peaceful protest, but it’s the terrorists who are the bad guys? What’s happened to our collective moral compass?

Of course I am joking. When their leader takes off his mask, I gasped, because Clive Owen was playing the leader of the environmental activists. I gasped because I was surprised to see him. All those years ago he played a similar role (ish, in that he was the leader of a group of bank robbers in Spike Lee’s Inside Man, who was ethical and sensitive and all that crap), and it felt like something of an in joke.

His plan, and that of most of the people with him, seems to be to record the high ups at the company confessing to their many and varied crimes on camera, and then publish it on the internet, as if that would make a lick of fucking difference or even impact on their share prices at all.

At All. If anything it would make their stocks skyrocket. “CEO admits they kill activists and whistleblowers”. Things being as they currently are in the States they’d probably make him the head of the Treasury, as long as he promises to bludgeon people to death with tariffs.