7 stars

dir: Flying Lotus

2025

This looks like a sci fi flick, but it’s very much a horror flick, just in case the pretty colours and funky music lured you in.

Someone wakes up in some kind of facility, with lots of dead bodies around, and she doesn’t remember what happened, who she is, or what anything is.

What would screenwriters do without amnesia as a plot device? Would they have to actually write cool screenplays that didn’t resort to crutches and timeworn tropes?

That sounds more derisive than I intend it to be. This might be somewhat familiar, and crib certain elements from the Alien films, and probably Carpenter’s The Thing, and elsewhere as well, but it’s well done for what it is. It’s not, to my eye, just an extended film clip from someone who makes music and film clips. There are a number of (predictable) twists, but that doesn’t at all detract from the back half of the flick when shit gets impossibly graphic.

This is a very violent, very gory film, in service of a plot where for the longest time, we, like Riya (Eiza Gonzalez) don’t really get what’s happening. But then we do, and oh gods it’s so awful.

There’s this facility on some planet where humans were hoping they could either relocate the humans from a dying Earth, or find some kind of advancement / technology that could help them back home. The facility would look suspiciously like a New Zealand door factory were it not for the really sexy looking underground bar-like lighting. I didn’t come up with this line, so I can’t take credit for it, but another reviewer referred to it as being the most bisexual lighting ever committed to film. I don’t entirely get what it means but I get what they mean. There are scenes with Aaron Paul’s character of Brion where half his face is bathed in blue gel light, and the other half in red, and you think “wow, this director / cinematographer’s game is really on point”. Or at least that they watched a lot of Dario Argento’s early flicks.

It feels a bit unusual for this kind of flick to feel so carefully crafted. There are times when I regret the level of craft put into some of the horrific imagery and designs. I regret seeing some of that stuff, because it is cosmic horror, the worst kind, and it is now engraved upon my poor brain.

പ്രഭയായ് നിനച്ചതെല്ലാം
Prabhayay Ninachathellam)
dir: Payal Kapadia

2024

All We Imagine as Light is something of an enigma, at least for me. I thought I knew where it was coming from, and numerous times I was proven wrong.

I had it slotted into the types of films from India that are more about social realism than the flamboyant spectacle we’re more stereotypically used to. I have seen enough older Indian films to also know about the ones where the horribleness of the upper castes and the eternally put-upon lower castes are paraded around for our amusement / horror for three hours a pop.

But this is not that. This isn’t about the unfairness of the system, or institutional abuses or cartoonish selfishness. This is just about people trying to get by, in a society that is pretty constraining upon women (unlike all those other ones).

The three women the movie mostly focusses on are Prabha (Kani Kusruti), Anu (Divya Prabha) and Parvathy (Chhaya Kadam). Prabha and Anu are nurses, while Parvathy works as a cook in the same hospital all three work in. Before we even meet these women, there are night time scenes of market stalls being set up pre-dawn, or general city scenes and packed train platforms in Mumbai, as voice recordings, sounding like legit vox pops, talk about how desirable or how difficult it is having moved from the country to the city for work.

Later on in the film one of these voices says something along the lines of “they say this city is the City of Dreams, but I think it’s more a city of illusions. You have to believe the illusion, or else you go mad.”

dir: Julius Onah

2025

I think this was meant to be a return to form, to the familiar, to the regular, for something that’s still about superheroes and people with fancy gadgets, but, you know, not too fancy. No cosmic stuff, no multiverse extravaganzas, no magic or fantasy, just military fanboy worship and noble guys giving noble speeches before smashing shit up.

And seeing as they’re trying to do Captain America movies without Chris Evans, everything has to pretty much be the same, except it has to acknowledge the fact that a lot of people, including supposed fans of the comics, won’t want to see a man of a dark skinned hue in the role. So not only does Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) have to be the military’s posterboy in all conflicts, he has to be unimpeachable and twice as sharp, yet without the benefit of the super serum that made Steve Rogers America’s Ass.

dir: Bas Devos

2023

This flick called Here should not be confused with the Robert Zemeckis directed, Tom Hanks and Robin Wright starring flick called Here that came out last year. Totally different movies. Could not be more different. Each interesting in its own way, but completely different.

This here flick called Here, or Heɿe, if you believe the opening credits/title is a prime exponent of “slow” cinema, in that there is no hurry in any scene for anything to happen or anyone to do anything. There are people in the story, actors, I believe they’re called, and stuff happens, but it’s of the mundane, every day, slice of life sort of stuff.

And lots of images of nature, and mosses. Lots of mosses.

You should absolutely already know whether this is your own personal vision of hell or not by now. It didn’t aggravate me at all, but then I have the patience of a fucking saint, so, there’s that to consider.

Not everyone has either the time or the inclination to sit through something in which not a lot happens, and that is the point. Me, I sometimes relish chances to watch slow, meditative stuff, even if there’s not that much to meditate on or ruminate over. We bring what we have to these kinds of films, because they rarely tell us exactly what to think about what we’re seeing.

There is a chap, and he works in construction, as in, on a construction site for a skyscraper somewhere in Brussels. He, like his co-workers, is getting ready for his summer holidays, with construction industry folks taking 4 weeks off over summer. He is not Belgian, and, as a Romanian, is intending to drive home.

He looks at the veggies in his fridge, and thinks “these will all be rotten when I get back; I better make something with them now”, so he makes a big pot of soup. This soup will play an extraordinarily important role in the film.

I’m not actually joking. Our chap, often clad in t-shirt, shorts and flip flops, suffers from insomnia, so he either walks around at night or visits people he knows are awake. He visits a friend who works the night shift at a hotel and gives him soup. He visits his mechanic, whose says his car will be ready Tuesday, and once he offers the soup, the mechanic says the car will be ready Monday. He visits his sister who’s a nurse at a local hospital, and they enjoy the soup together. Everyone loves the soup.