8 stars

My Father's Shadow

My father's shadow could beat up your father's shadow

dir: Akinole Davies Jnr

2026

This film feels, and I feel sure, is meant to feel, less like a period piece and more like a shared memory. Admittedly, the thought of movies set in the 1990s as being period pieces is staggering to me, but I cannot ignore the march of time, no matter how much I wish I could. 1993 was many years ago. I remember (parts of) 1993 very well, but I didn’t have the experiences these two brothers did that they try to capture here, so hopefully their memories are better than mine.

Akinole Davies Jnr and his brother Wale are remembering a day they spent with their dad shortly before his death. Obviously, since 33 years have passed since then, and they might have been eleven and eight at the time, in scripting and directing this film, with child actors playing them and the talented Sope Dirisu playing their dad, it’s less about achieving historical accuracy and more about capturing the feeling of hanging out with a dad they lost too soon after these events. It’s a dream, a tightly held one, overflowing with sadness and a bit of joy, but mostly aching loss.

Folarin, their dad, is a complex character. He is not exactly a stern patriarch but he is pretty serious. He doesn’t fuck around. When he tells the brothers to get dressed to accompany him to the capital of Nigeria, being Lagos, they snap to it regardless of their misgivings.

We get the impression he is rarely around. They have a mother who works, but is absent this day. Folarin is usually away working, yet this itself is its own complication.

To get to the capital they try to catch a bus. Things are kind of messed up in Nigeria at this time. There’s been a military dictatorship for the last decade, there’s been a free and fair election recently, and everyone is on edge waiting for the results to be announced. How that results in a national fuel shortage is not entirely clear, but it’s so bad that the bus they’re travelling on conks out half-way to the capital, due to a lack of fuel. Some guy had been collecting money from everyone that was getting on, but he’s got nothing to say other than “the bus is out of fuel” when people start complaining.

How else to get the rest of the way? Taxis are too pricey, so Folarin asks a guy with a bike to take them some distance. Four people, two of them admittedly children, on one bike. Now that’s practically an ad for whatever company that bike was from.

Rating:

8 stars

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Mother of Flies

I knew a flick about that woman who poisoned people
with mushrooms in the Beef Wellington would get a
dramatisation, but damn that was quick!

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.

Rating:

8 stars

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Project Hail Mary

I would have gone with "Project Not a Hope in Hell"

dirs.: Phil Lord and Christopher Miller

2026

I haven’t read the book, but I hear it’s a good read, if you’re into that kind of thing. I feel like, perhaps unfairly, Andy Weir’s books are for people who like easily digestible science fiction where something exciting happens at the end of every chapter, and every chapter is only a page and a half.

Probably not true, but we all have our biases. Based on this unfounded set of assumptions, I think that could be one of the reasons why his books translate into flicks so easily. The Martian was hard to hate even if it mostly had one person, being Matt Damon, Matt Damoning his way across Mars and jabbering at us in voiceover for over two and a half hours.

Project Hail Mary similarly has mostly one person on screen for most of its length, with a bunch of flashbacks to Earth, but has the added bonus of a cute alien friend for our main character to chat with.

Also unlike The Martian, while the flick might rest on the shoulders of a scientist type doing science-y things in order to survive (with a confident and calm manner), this time around our main character may be science smart, but he’s a raging, cowardly doofus who bangs around like a pinball in order to make us laugh. The makers really lean in on that shit.

When you’re thinking of someone playing the lead in one of these kinds of flicks, Ryan Gosling wouldn’t usually be where your mind would go. Sure, he can play stoic robots, and dead-eyed psychopaths, but a role like this needs someone who can express stuff. He’s the guy you get when you need a white guy to save jazz, but not usually the one you want to save the world.

Gosling cries multiple times in this movie. I just want to reassure potential audiences, he mostly acts humanly and humanely in this movie, and is not like a glum robot like in most of his roles.

He plays someone whose surname is Grace, so they call him Grace for most of the movie, despite the fact that he has a first name, you know. Ryland. Anyway, this jerk wakes up on a spaceship with a beard and long hair. He has no idea how he got there and doesn’t really know why he’s there. He slowly pieces it together, that he’s on some mission to save the Earth.

Rating:

8 stars

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In the Blink of an Eye

Blink your eyes and it's all gone

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.

Rating:

8 stars

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Sirāt

Slave... to the rhythm

dir: Oliver Laxe

2025

What…

Huh? Sirāt is, well, you can’t accuse it of being the same old same old as usual.

The name in Arabic means way or path, but it’s commonly, at least religiously, a reference to the path to Paradise, which is a very difficult place to get to, apparently. Fall either side of the path, as in, fall short along the path and you’ll either be cut to shreds or burned to ashes.

This film is about… I have no idea what it’s about, to be honest. Maybe it’s how great electronic dance music is, or how great it is to dance to rave music, how great it truly can be to feel like part of a collective, and like you’re not alone, if only for a time.

Beyond that, I dunno. Your guess, if you haven’t seen it, is as good as mine. If you have, well, you have my condolences.

We watch as some roadies stack up some speakers, in a desert. Towers of speakers. Against an ancient backdrop of cliffs, mesas, the old bones of the earth and the defiant sky, mocking us.

Then there’s music, and entranced people dancing, dancing, dancing. These people, if you have an eye for it, are not extras selected to fill in the background of a rave / nightclub scene, like what we’ve seen in countless movies. These people are… you can tell they are living a lifestyle, a certain lifestyle. They are the chemically affected worshippers of a techno god, and I don’t mean the DJ. Their worship is their dancing, like Sufi dervishes, like mystics themselves, in furious motion with elegant purpose.

And intruding into that world comes someone who clearly doesn’t belong there, handing out fliers and asking one question: Have you seen this girl?

The question is asked in an array of languages, but the person asking is clearly Spanish, even if all this dancing mania is happening somewhere that is either Morocco or meant to be Morocco, where raves go for days and apparently, for these people, only lead to more raves afterwards.

Luis, the man asking the question, who I said is obviously Spanish, I said because I recognised the actor, being Sergi Lopez, who might not be a household name but he’s well known to people who watch sub-titled movies. He played the evil Captain / Generalissimo Franco stand-in in Pan’s Labyrinth all those years ago. Now, well, these days he looks more like me.

Rating:

8 stars

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The Secret Agent

Secret... Agent, Man! Secret... Agent, Man!

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.

Rating:

8 stars

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H is for Hawk

And 'A' is for 'Avoiding difficult emotions and people in general'

dir: Philippa Lowthorpe

2025

When they talk about books that couldn’t or shouldn’t be made into movies, they’re talking about books like the one this movie is based on. I acknowledge the irony of my writing that in a review of said film, just like I acknowledge the lands of the First Nations people upon which I unleash my dribble from.

Sovereignty was never ceded. Anyway, I am lucky enough, blessed enough to have read the book, and I remember being deeply moved and affected by it, seeing as I read it at a time when I was also grieving for a beloved parent that I had lost at the time. The writing was precise, exquisite, evocative, and transporting.

It was also about a person at a very difficult, very fraught period in her life, rendered into a successful art form, but still predominately about the most muddled, harrowing, isolating, claustrophobic, mentally unstable time of her life. And you can get away with that, so to speak, in a novel, because one has the perspective, the elocution and erudition of this author, in order to capture all of that, with a distance afforded by time.

Short of having reams and reams of voiceover, which this flick never uses, we do not have access to the author’s thoughts, or, since the lead actor is playing the author here, the character’s thoughts other than what she does, what she says, or what expressions we see on her face.

I just don’t see how audiences who haven’t read the novel would be able to get as much from this flick. The story’s scope, rendered visually, is so narrow, in a lot of ways, so limiting.

Without the eloquent prose of the book, you have a story about a woman who loses her father, whom she loved dearly, who cannot either handle her grief or acknowledge her grief, who lets everything else (job, friends, family, paying bills, hygiene) fall by the wayside as she fixates on a goshawk she calls Mabel.

Watching the film, you’d be like “How random!” Though there are an array of movies, even just recently where someone, usually a fairly famous actor, acts with a mostly CGI bird. It’s almost like a rite of middle-age passage. There was…Naomi Watts and some magpie? Steve Coogan and some penguin? Julia Louis-Dreyfuss and some parrot?

You kinda get that it’s not about the bird itself, but then it’s also all about the bird? I mean the beautiful, majestic goshawk does look incredible, close up and in flight, with those piercing eyes, and those monstrous talons and a beak that can pierce through flesh and bone with ease?

Rating:

8 stars

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April

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

(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.

Rating:

8 stars

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Christy

Not once did they use "Eye of the Tiger" on the
soundtrack, but you just know for sure she was
playing it on her Walkman during those training
montages, absolutely no doubt

dir: David Michôd

2025

This flick died a strange death at the cinemas, critically and commercially.

I know, you don’t need to tell me, none of that dictates whether a flick is actually good or not.

I just find it funny when people scream from the rooftops when something is obvious Oscar-bait, and it’s punished as something completely worthless, and the times when they not only let it slide but praise it to the high heavens.

You can’t tell me that Hamnet was less Oscar-baity than this flick. There’s no way.

And yet…

I have no doubt someone at some point probably mentioned to Sydney Sweeney that this could do for her what Million Dollar Baby did for Hillary Swank or Monster did for Charlize Theron. Considering how young she is she might have said “Who?” but that’s neither here nor there.

Since its release just before the Oscars I haven’t been able to find a single positive review for it, although most of the reviews don’t fault the acting, they blame the Australian director David Michôd for not finding the hidden depths of these characters, or for not making it more stylish or melodramatic than it already is.

I don’t feel the same. This is a sad film about a woman who fought like a demon to escape poverty, was trapped in a horrible marriage to a horrible man, and then eventually got free because he tried but failed to murder her.

And she boxed a bunch of times in the interim.

Rating:

8 stars

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100 Nights of Hero

100 nights of solicitude

dir: Julia Jackman

2025

100 Nights of Hero is a curious thing.

I feel like… it’s what Emerald Fennell was trying to do with her version of ”Wuthering Heights”, but couldn’t quite grasp. It is not based on a beloved literature classic, but instead a graphic novel by Isabel Greenberg, that is still connected to the One Thousand and One Nights, that classic compilation of Middle Eastern, Asian and North African folklore, in concept if not in content.

Singing for your dinner is not a new concept, and neither is telling stories in order to stop the executioner’s axe. 100 Nights transmutes these ideas into a fairy tale (of sorts) that seeks to save women with storytelling.

It is an explicitly feminist story, since it is told about a world not our own, but somehow even more structurally misogynistic that this one. How is that even possible, you could be thinking, given who our world elevates as its leaders, and celebrates on the daily?

On this planet, which has three moons, people were created by some weird god-like figure called Kiddo, but her father objected to their existence because they weren’t suffering enough (at least half of them), so he made them oppress all the women and focus all their spiritual thinking on him and only him. So they all worship Birdman (briefly played by Richard E. Grant, which is such a weird cameo), and institutionally and structurally oppress women at His Divine, Bird-Like bidding.

Their entire belief system seems to be built on this terror of women, so much so that women are forbidden from learning how to read and write and legally have some lower status than probably bits of furniture. Executions of women are frequent and meant to be educational.

The main part of the story has to do with Jerome (Amir El-Masry), who has a young bride called Cherry (Maika Monroe). Because she has not yet had a child, people are concerned. And by people, I mean some weird bird skull wearing priest-like dude who declares that if Cherry hasn’t gotten pregnant within 100 days, she’s going to get the chop, and by ‘chop’ I don’t mean divorce.

Jerome is… hard to work out. It is not clear whether he hates Cherry because she’s a woman in a world where women are detested, or whether he’s just gay, and does not want to have sex with her because eww girl germs. His family won’t leave him alone if he doesn’t have an heir, but that pressure is not enough for him to transcend his feelings about women and their womanly parts.

Rating:

8 stars

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8 stars

My Father's Shadow

Mother of Flies

Project Hail Mary

In the Blink of an Eye

Sirāt

The Secret Agent

H is for Hawk

April

Christy

100 Nights of Hero

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