8 stars

dir: The Adams Family

2025

Mother of Flies is the most recent horror movie from a family of talented weirdos, possibly the most talented family of weirdos, that I’ve ever come across.

Rather than extol the virtues of their previous films, let me just launch in to why this flick works so well; lots of movies have witches as characters, as threats, as the big bad, and these flicks are often set in nature, but few flicks fuse together their natural settings and their themes in a manner that works perfectly from a storytelling perspective.

Is a witch a magical being made powerful by being outside of nature, above nature, more than nature, or does their power derive from being so in tune with nature that magical stuff happens?

In this flick someone who embraces nature fully has to embrace if not seduce Death as well in order to neither be living nor dead, but some third state in between, which is all well and good for witches and necromancers, but what about regular people? Regular shmoes, just trying to survive the everyday?

Micky (Zelda Adams) has been struggling with cancer and chemo / radiation therapy for years, but it hasn’t staved off the tumour that now seems like it’s going to kill her. There is nothing more that so-called Western medicine can do for her. So she turns to an unlikely possible cure.

I’m not talking about alternative medicine, or those dickheads who will tell you / sell you ivermectin / horse dewormer, or like Helen Garner’s friend in her novel The Spare Room who had cancer and had been convinced that massive doses of Vitamin C would save her (dear reader: it didn’t).

In Mother of Flies, a witch contacts Mickey through her dreams and tells her where to come so that they can help each other out.

dir: Andrew Stanton

2026

It’s kind of miraculous that they still let Andrew Stanton make movies, especially in this day and age where moviemaking is seen as a dying, legacy art form, akin to opera and ballet, don’t you know. In the past if you made a flick that massively bombed and lost a studio a massive amount of money they rarely if ever allowed you to make a movie again.

Stanton directed Finding Nemo, and WALL-E, which I’m sure did very well in the era when all Pixar movies did very well, but then they let him make John Carter, which, adjusted for inflation lost more money than any other flick ever, even more than Pluto Nash or Wild Wild West or almost every release since the covid era that hasn’t made its money back. And yet the dream factory hasn’t slowed down at all…

The truth is, a lot of it is bullshit. As per Hollywood accounting, even successful movies don’t make a cent because the studios don’t want to pay taxes or residuals, so it’s all a smokescreen to allow money to keep pouring into a black hole of neediness, with almost nothing coming out of it except memes and cute visuals.

All the same, the sheer scale of John Carter’s floppiness has been a joke haunting Stanton’s career ever since then. Disney clearly still loves him, though, because they let him direct humans again here in a curious science fiction flick before they let him direct Toy Story 5.

In the Blink of an Eye seems ambitious, in that it pretends it’s telling three interlinked stories set in three distinct and distant time periods that seek to embody aspects of our (collective, human) past, present and future. It isn’t really that ‘big’ or complicated. When I was watching this, I mostly felt glad I was watching a science fiction flick that didn’t degenerate into contrived conflict and action for the sake of action when it trusted the story it was telling to be told in a fairly standard way.

But that’s another reason why I think not that many people are going to catch this on the streaming services (on Hulu if you’re taking notes).

Forty five thousand years ago, there are these people, who happen to be Neanderthals, and they basically live at the mercy of nature and whatever fate befalls them. They find food, they fuck, and the next generation comes along. Just like us in the present.

In the present, a couple very decisively don’t fuck, with the main character in this section kicking out the guy she’s brought home, pointedly reaching for her trusty device to see the job done properly. She happens to be an academic archaeologist, trying to figure out what she’s just pried out of the fossilised grasp of a Neanderthal skeleton.

O Agente Secreto

dir: Kleber Mendonça Filho

2025

This was a fascinating film to watch. Oppression, and living under a fascist dictatorship never looked so glowing and golden, and sounded so cool.

We get it. Fascism is terrible. Dictatorships are horrible. Fascist military dictatorships are the worst. We, or at least those of us of a certain age or who have lived long enough to watch all the films about awful oppressive regimes expect grim scenes, blank cruel functionaries, dungeons, lots of grey concrete and innocent people being annihilated. The Secret Agent takes a different tack to tell its story, set in the middle of the military dictatorship that brutally ruled Brazil up until the mid 80s. It’s not about all the awful things that this junta did or that juntas did or do.

It’s about how living in a place under such rule corrupts everything all the way down to the street level, to the personal level, and how casually life can go on not noticing the awfulness embedded all around.

The opening sequence, deceptively languid in how it’s paced, delivers the film’s premise and thesis statement without having to highlight or underline anything. It’s such a brilliant sequence. There are plenty of other sequences that are solid throughout the flick; I’m not implying it peaks in its opening 15 minutes. It’s just such a great encapsulation of the era the flick is situated in.

There’s a phrase I have to actively stop myself from using too much in relation to the central character here, as played by Brazilian actor Wagner Moura; everything he does, he does with effortless cool. Whatever it is that he might look like, whatever it is that he feels inside in a given scene, he does everything, whether lighting a cigarette or staring at someone who might want to kill him, he does it with effortless cool. I don’t know how, but it’s a great ability for an actor.

In that opening scene I alluded to earlier, all he’s doing is driving his yellow VW Beetle to a petrol station, looking to get some fuel. It’s in a rural area, and there’s a dead body on the ground nearby, with a few bits of cardboard over him. No-one seems to be too put out about the body, but it’s definitely something of a hassle when local stray dogs try to rip off some souvenirs.

The proprietor of the petrol station explains the thief was shot by another attendant a couple of days ago when he tried to rob the place. Since then, none of the actions you assume would happen in a functioning society, even in 1977, have taken place, because no-one gives a fuck.

(აპრილი)

dir: Dea Kulumbegashvili

2024

Let me tell you about the next film you’re going to go out of your way to watch. It’s incredibly slow, it’s set in a miserable rural area of Georgia (the country not the American hillbilly southern state), and it’s the bleakest most unflinching character study (of an inscrutable character) who is a celebrated OB/GYN who illegally performs abortions down in the villages for desperate women and children.

If that sounds like a barrel of laughs, read on, fair reader, read on.

There’s no good reason to fuck around talking about this flick: It is super bleak, that’s true, and that’s even well before we get to the subject matter that the flick is ostensibly about. This is a place with very little hope. It is a brutish and chauvinistic rural area (unlike all the other ones world-wide), but it doesn’t have that aura just because of poverty, specifically. It’s a poverty of the soul, the collective soul of the place. Women live in perpetual fear. Not just of bad health care choices or the selfishness of men, but this is a place where if you’re husband doesn’t murder you for finding out you’re on the pill because you don’t want a tenth child, it could be your fathers or brothers who kill you because you somehow did something to bring shame upon the family.

The country of Georgia surely has shitloads of problems, not least of which being that it is again controlled by a puppet regime that takes its marching orders from Putin. But even in the so-called “independent” areas where this flick was secretly filmed, mostly being the regions around Lagodekhi, surrounded as it is by the Caucasus mountains, women have less rights than, um, even women in the Southern state of Georgia, which also outlawed abortions and thinks women having rights is wokeness gone mad.

The second scene of this film is a birth scene, as in an actual scene of a woman giving birth. It’s not special effects, it’s not CGI. Hopefully not in reality, but within the context of the movie, the baby doesn’t survive the delivery.

In the third of 72 very long, extended scenes, the hospital administrator explains to the glowering expectant father that Nina, our main character (Ia Sukhitashvili) is the hospital’s best obstetrician, and it surely wasn’t her fault the infant didn’t survive, but they will do a full inquest to figure out what happened. Once the other people leave the room, leaving the father and Nina alone, he tells her he knows what she does down in the villages, and then spits on her.

Nina is… a complicated character, as depicted. She maintains an inscrutable passivity throughout the movie which belies a nature that seems at odds with her actions and her beliefs. She seems almost determined to destroy herself professionally and personally. In other characters it would be an obligation to adhere to the truth of something that motivates them to do what they do and not lie about it, but in her, I dunno.