8 stars

dir: Rich Peppiatt

2024

Wow. This was like a breath of fresh air.

Well, admittedly, some parts of it felt like familiar, recycled air, with a strong smell of alcohol on its breath, but it was a lot of fun, and a trenchant reminder that Ireland is still an occupied country.

Also, within the context of a film about the attempts by certain Irish people to keep their language (and thus identity outside of the UK) alive, and the repositioning of the Irish Republican movement as an indigenous movement against the occupying British, it’s a fucking funny, deeply political, yet chaotic story.

For all its seeming DIY-zine-handcrafted-mixtape-bedroom recording aspects, there are a bunch of professionals thrown into the mix with the rank amateurs that are the two rascally ‘boys’ that really make up both the narrative and the band known as Kneecap.

And what a pair they are. I should probably mention, this is only the second film I’ve seen that’s mostly in Gaelic, or Irish as they call it to each other here. In other words, it’s subtitled a lot of the time. Because the speaking of their so-called native tongue plays such a big part in the story, and the lads are shown (and we hear them) rapping in Gaelic, it’s safe to say that at least from a viewer’s perspective, if you’re not okay with subtitles, this is not a flick you’re going to get a lot out of beyond the visuals of crazy drug-addled partying and Trainspotting inspired cheeky violence and shenanigans.

Which is, I guess, not much of a problem for me, as a non-Gaelic speaker but who absolutely loves to read subtitles. I’m not sure who the actual target market is for such a flick, beyond Ireland itself, but its argument is mostly a universal one. Well, it’s universal unless you’re actually one of those strange, dead inside people who support the oppressors over the oppressed, colonisers over those striving for freedom or if you stan for billionaires.

As for the music / rapping well, they have a target audience, and I’m not it, since I’m not Irish and I take no drugs whatsoever (in case the peelers are listening in on this one-sided conversation), but I can enjoy people rapping about their lives and keeping it real and falling all over the place whilst smacked out of their heads on coke and ketamine often at the same time.

Into their orbit these fuckups luck upon someone both sympathetic to their cause and who can actually put together some tracks. He’s a teacher who moonlights as a translator when one of the boys gets picked up by the peelers and refuses to speak anything other than his mother tongue.

dir: Chris Sanders

2024

Okay, so, yes – this is a far more conventional “animated” movie of what people think of when you say that something is animated – lots of movement, lots of colour, lots of dialogue filling up the empty spaces, far more so than the last animated movie that I watched, being Robot Dreams. There should be room in this world for both, but let’s be honest; for every quiet, dialogue-free painstakingly animated story that talks about the sorrows and aches of loneliness and love lost, there are three million animated flicks with pets and their secret lives or yellow idiots or ogres or dragons being trained or toys who’ve lost their way but have a story to tell.

Also there’s those Pixar ones about people’s feelings ugh.

So, whilst this is conventional, as in, a story so simple and straightforward you feel like you’ve watched it before you’ve even watched it, it manages to be very enjoyable.

Very enjoyable. As in, it deliberately crowbars the emotions out of you that a subtler flick would gently try to coax.

Lifting from almost every animated movie ever made, The Wild Robot sort of manages to be its own thing, at least for long enough at certain moments, that you can forget all of that. Comparison is the thief of joy, or so they say, so talking about a movie where the main character is a robot that transcends the limitations of its programming and learns to love seems like you could be describing almost every movie where the music swells and people / creatures / androids hug.

But that’s okay. I grinned / cried like an idiot at several points, knowing full well that I was being manipulated, and that’s… acceptable. They fooled me yet I am thanking them for it.

Rozz (Lupita Nyong’o) is a robot that’s washed up on the shores of an island somewhere. There are a bunch of animals on the island, but none of them speak English, motherfucker, do you speak it? Sorry, that was from Pulp Fiction, about the only flick this doesn’t lift from.

Rozz has their programming. They are programmed to do whatever a customer wants or requires. But there are no customers on the island that can communicate a need or a want. There’s just a bunch of animals, who regard the robot as a monster.

This monster, struggling for meaning and purpose, goes “native” and learns the local lingo through a process I call “magic”, since animals don’t speak languages, and they don’t all speak English, but which the flick calls “deep learning” or something similarly made up. They can now speak to all the creatures in a manner even Doctor Doolittle would envy, but they’re still not getting anywhere closer to meaningful work.

Please state the nature of the medical emergency. On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your pain?

(دانه‌ی انجیر معابد)
(Dāne-ye anjīr-e ma'ābed)
dir: Mohammad Rasoulof

2024

This is a lot of a movie, which means there’s going to probably be a lot of review.

Boo. Sounds like homework.

This director’s previous movie was the heartbreaking meditation on what the death penalty in Iran under its current leadership does to the living, more so than the dead. Called There is No Evil, in English at least, it argued in its title alone that there was no need to blame the Devil or any supernatural source for the evil that humans perpetrate, especially within a totalitarian regime.

That flick, made surreptitiously away from governmental scrutiny, earned its director a prison sentence and a beating. He has since been sentenced to more years in jail, like every decent Iranian director before him, so he had to escape the country on foot.

I don’t know how he made this flick. I worry for the actors in it, because this regime has killed people for far less. This film crosses a line that Iranian directors never cross: directly criticising the regime, openly advocating for those who protest against its strictures and draconian, inhuman ways, and openly showing footage that would get most Iranians jailed or worse for sharing.

None of it is allegorical any more, or spoken of in the abstract. It leant a quality to Iranian cinema that people appreciated, especially international film critics, having to slyly dance around its subject matter in order to keep the authorities happy. So everyday life and its complications would transpire with the state / morality police / Revolutionary Guards way, way in the background, in lyrical and poetic ways, for our amusement, but with this pleading note behind it all, begging us to support their aspiration towards freedom.

That was then. This is now.

This film includes footage from the protests that came after complete fucking idiot scumbags murdered a young woman for not wearing a hijab. But they were only doing their jobs. Her name was Mahsa Zhina Amini, and she was a young Kurdish – Iranian woman, and the authorities still deny that she was beaten to death (maintaining an official fiction that she might have died because of a random stroke), and yet when people protested en masse, the authorities starting killing people in the streets, beating and torturing them in cells, or officially executing them because they had the temerity to say that Mahsa was killed for not wearing a hijab.

Really, she was killed for being a woman.

dir: Fede Alvarez

2024

I have to say I am quite surprised by how entertaining this flick is. I say that because I feel like the two films before it, being Alien: Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, I am pretty sure, were made to leach all hope and life from those watching, and to convince us all we’re total fools for expecting anything good to come of any franchise ever again.

That’s a bit harsh. Let me say instead that there were a lot of ideas in those two Ridley Scott directed films that didn’t sit well with me and just annoyed me, more than anything. They felt like an elaboration on themes that felt unnecessary and unwarranted, and I couldn’t imagine the person who cared about any of it who wasn’t Ridley Scott. Whatever it was that made people battling the xenomorphs in the very first two films enjoyable to watch, was entirely absent for me in films that argued that their origins, actually, were because of a bad robot and a race of albinos with a magical evil liquid that kills things or makes them more evil.

This flick perversely situates itself somewhere in what ends up feeling like the past. It’s set some time between Alien and Aliens, I think, with the deliberate aesthetics to match. And as the setting is a space station divided into two halves, one of those halves matches the aesthetics of Alien, so it looks gritty and industrial (with an orange gel / filter to match, in terms of cinematography), and the other half is blueish, and looks a bit shinier (to match some of the look of the James Cameron helmed Aliens.

In a similar manner, bits and pieces across many of the films are picked up and slotted in to areas, kinda like a jumble of Lego plot points, or a Tetris-like melange where the familiar is woven into a newish pattern. Generally, or when done by hacks, this would strike me as lazy filmmaking. But I genuinely think Fede Alvarez and the screenwriter do what they do adeptly, with known / familiar material, in a similarly competent manner like they did with Evil Dead Rise. It’s using established elements well but not slavishly adhering to scenes and shots like too much variance would be blasphemy.

And again, just like in Evil Dead Rise, there is practically no mercy shown to anyone. You think “surely they won’t kill…”, and they’re like “of course we’ll kill them, we’re looking forward to it”.