8 stars

dir: Rian Johnson

2025

It’s hard to talk about a film that’s really about faith without sounding like I’m succumbing to the religious bullshit we snorkel through in every day life (as atheists, obviously believers and godbotherers don’t have this problem). This film isn’t about religion, or against religion per se, but it’s not coming from the usual place you’d expect when it comes to which side it’s on.

Daniel Craig, again playing detective Benoit Blanc for the third time, might seem to be a stand in for the director, or the main character in this ambiguously named flick, but it’s not really about him, and I feel like Josh O’Connor plays the real main character. For most of the flick, or at least the entirety of the first half, he’s relating the events he experienced leading up to the murder of a beloved monsignor, in the hopes of enlisting someone’s aid in proving his innocence. It’s O’Connor who somehow walks away with the film, somehow managing to credibly and believably portray something I had no idea was still possible, being an earnest Catholic priest who actually believes in his faith and who actually wants to love and help people.

That in itself is something of a miracle. He even does okay with the American accent, which couldn’t have been easy against the Foghorn Leghorn bullshit of Benoit Blanc (admittedly with the volume turned way down this time around).

Even with these solid performers in the mix, there’s also towering performances from Josh Brolin and Glenn Close to compete with, since this flick is somewhat more dramatically serious and less openly comedic than the earlier two movies (Glass Onion especially, which was way more farce than class). All the while I don’t want to make the flick sound like a slog; murder mysteries after all aren’t meant to be stolidly ‘serious’ cinema, unless you’re talking about the true crime variety. It’s meant to almost be fun and breezy, despite the number of bodies piling up.

These films are never about grief over who died, they’re whodunits and howdunits, and even then, I hesitate to mention, the good versions of these mean that the actual solution doesn’t really matter that much, it’s just punctuation at the end. This film, being a self-aware entity, even knows this, mentions all the predictable plot requirements and sources (locked room mysteries, or impossible crimes) and only subverts them in the mildest of manners.

dir: Paul Thomas Anderson

2025

I never thought I’d live long enough to see Paul Thomas Anderson make another great movie. I keep being told that he’s made lots of great movies since Boogie Nights, but mostly I’ve found his films since then to be extremely frustrating.

With the advantage of time I think there have been occasions where I haven’t been that fair, or been generous enough to accept that no flicks, whether PT Anderson’s or not, have to perfectly conform with my expectations in order to actually be good or not. It’s just that it had become for me a major stumbling block with his movies, whereby there would inevitably be an aspect of it, or, in the case of There Will Be Blood or The Master, a final section so bonkers that it made me question whatever merits I thought I’d experienced up to that point.

I’ve long known above movies having terrible endings because sometimes directors just don’t know how to end their stories, but rarely do I experience endings that make me hate the whole fucking movie.

That rare honour is Anderson’s, in that I’ve felt duped multiple times by his filmography, even more times than by M. Night Shyamalan.

Well, as usual, an unasked for preamble saying the opposite of what I want to say about a movie: this is a strong movie, with an ending that doesn’t sink the whole endeavour or render it embarrassing, one that I enjoyed / was thrilled by almost from beginning to end. It’s got some great characters, it’s got some insanely great performances; it depicts the recognisable slide into authoritarianism that we see playing out in the States under the guise of border enforcement, and yet it’s not at all about the current ICE goon squads rounding up anyone vaguely ethnic looking, whether citizens or not, or about the MAGA fuckheads explicitly. It’s about the excitement, the thrill of revolution and rebellion in the 60s-70s which gave way to disillusionment and destruction when it all turned to shit.

And it’s about a secretive cabal of white supremacists trying to recruit a new member to their Christmas Adventurers Club.

dir: Michael Shanks

2025

Now this is a bit more my tempo.

This, too, is a film about a couple in danger of tearing each other and themselves apart, but this works far batter, way way better even if it doesn’t have Sir Lord Esquire Benedict Cumberbatch and Academy Award Winner Olivia Colman in the lead roles, unlike the bloody Roses.

In fact, it has Alison Brie and Dave Franco, instead. You could probably not get two actors more opposite than them to the classy Brit thespians of the aforementioned title. Dave Franco is the younger, non-problematic Franco compared to his brother James, who, while a great actor, is also a notorious serial assaulter of women. Alison Brie is, if you like her work, a delight in shows as varied as Mad Men, GLOW, Community and a bunch of films, and yet also an accomplished actor capable of tremendous nuance and complexity in her roles. And she’s pretty fearless.

And Dave Franco… is Dave Franco. You wouldn’t think that they would suit such roles in a keen body horror flick, but they’re perfect for these roles.

Another key difference is that Brie and Franco are married in real life, so when they’re playing a couple in distress, it is somewhat more believable. They’re not playing a couple who have turned murderous due to decades of resentment and generally being very shitty people – they are playing a (younger) couple, despite being in their 40s who have only recently moved to the country, and who don’t seem to be sure of each other even after nearly ten years of being together.

Excruciatingly, Brie’s character Millie gets down on bended knee, for some reason, to propose to Tim when they’re having their hipster abundant going away party with all their friends. He awkwardly demurs yet they still go through with the move. He doesn’t really have a job and doesn’t want to give up his dream of being an unsuccessful musician, whereas she’s a teacher, and has apparently been supporting them both for the longest time.

In a new town, in a small town where they don’t know anyone, they are similarly repelled by and entirely dependent on each other, which creates its own pressures. Couples who spend too much time together, without clear boundaries in their heads, can get confused: Where do you end and I begin? A lack of boundaries, projected harsh boundaries that are too extreme or exclusionary; withholding oneself, depriving the other of what they want or need; relationships are hard, aye?

dir: Mike Flanagan

2025

The Life of Chuck is a flick that seems to have not found much of an audience, despite being the creation, at least in its written form, of America’s most prolific, best and possibly most handsome writer, being Stephen King. He is a one man industry, or at least, his ideas are so great that all of them have to be adapted into something.

Unlike most of his stuff, this isn’t horror – this is something… else. Maybe it’s existential in nature, maybe it’s a gentle “live life to its fullest because we never know when it’s going to end” type of story, maybe it is a story about how life is like a box of chocolates, so you might as well dance before the world ends.

Who knows (Stephen King probably knows)? What I did see in reviews of the flick, from those reviewers that I follow, or respect, or both, is that those who loved it really thought it was one of the films of the year. I’m going to lazily say that half the people who saw it thought it was great and half thought it was absolute hollow dogshit, because I’m not sure I want to take the time to calculate the real statistic.

Reviews were very much like that. I only mention it (I mean, who cares what reviewers say about anything, huh?) because it really was one of those cases where those who loved it really did, and those who didn’t thought it wasn’t mediocre, they thought it was fucking terrible. That level of hostility, I’m not going to read too much psychology into it, but to me that kind of extreme comes from people feeling actively betrayed by what they watched.

I don’t really get it. I neither think it’s a great film, nor do I think it’s terrible. I didn’t find its central conceit too insulting, nor did I find its seeming message to be anything that extraordinary. I find it perplexing that Tom Hiddleston is in this, because he really doesn’t have that much to do, and he doesn’t even play the Chuck character for the majority of the flick.

My main agreement with anyone else that might complain is that it is a very strange story told arse-backwards for a very good reason, that reason being it’s about the life of Chuck rather than his death. We know he’s going to die, because everyone does, but if there’s anything this flick is trying to impress upon us, is that you should really take up every opportunity to dance with someone while you can.