8 stars

dir: Jake Scherier

2025

What do people want from superhero films anymore? I genuinely don’t know. I don’t know what studio heads imagine people want, what audiences want, at this stage, after almost everything that can be done, punched, shot or blown up, has been. Icons have been created, have done their bit, have been destroyed, have gone away. We have seen it all, and so anything else becomes just a variation on a theme.

There are no worlds left to conquer, surely?

The thing about success under late stage capitalism is that you can never stop until you become so unsuccessful that you can’t keep going. Then you go bankrupt, then some other entity comes along and strip mines your legacy for exploitable intellectual property that they can then recycle. If Marvel have released 73 movies so far, you get the feeling that they’re never going to stop, like some kind of relentless Terminator, until they’re destroyed. While it’s profitable, and someone somewhere is profiting from it, the rollout continues.

Thunderbolts* is an admission by Marvel that, despite all their grand plans for the future, for an industry that is 95% superhero flicks and 5% Sydney Sweeney / Glenn Powell movies, blowing shit up is pretty redundant. They’re at the stage of saying “Heroes? Tired. Anti-heroes? Inspired!”

(Une langue universelle
آواز بوقلمون
Āvāz-e bughalamun)

dir: Matthew Rankin

2025

If you haven’t noticed yet, I live for movies. I love the very existence of movies, and have done so for many decades. But even I realise the futility of such a thing.

The movies will never love me back. You give your heart and soul to something, but what it gives you is something completely one-sided. All my adulation, all my longing is for naught…

But that’s okay. I will love cinema not one bit less ever just because it doesn’t love me back.

How else would I get to watch something as niche as this flick? A Canadian movie with the deliberate aesthetics and visual references to Iranian films of yesteryear, set in an alternate reality Winnipeg where Canada’s two main languages are Farsi and French?

That’s… so niche it’s created its own niche. Its own genre. A pigeonhole for one.

And then there’s that title, implying that maybe Farsi should be the universal language, or Quebecois, take yer pick, but I suspect in fact the title is talking more about friendship and kindness.

To say this is a weird film is both an understatement and false advertising, because while it’s weird, it’s more in the “gently odd” category rather than the outlandish or surreal. The easiest, laziest go-to I can think of is something like what Jared Hess first conjured way back when with Napoleon Dynamite, decades before making that Minecraft movie but without the catchphrases or quirks. This is not an outwardly quirky flick, nor is it a dark Lynchian sexual / violent odyssey into Winnipeg’s dank underbelly.

(Straume)

dir: Gints Zilbalodis

2024

When was the last time you watched an animated movie from Latvia? When was the last time you watched anything from Latvia? I watch films from anywhere, but I don’t think I’ve watched anything from Latvia, ever.

Then I wondered if maybe Latvia was a made up place, since it sounds awfully similar to Latveria, the made up country from which comic book villain Doctor Doom comes from, and is the king of. But no, it’s real, snuggled up as it is between Lithuania and Estonia, all three of which are former Soviet republics.

You know, one of those places Putin has, like Doctor Doom, vowed to re-conquer, just like Ukraine.

No. Latvia is a real place, and this is a real film, albeit an animated one, albeit an animated film from Latvia that won an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film a couple of weeks ago.

It probably helps that there were no subtitles. The movie is entirely dialogue free, which makes sense when I tell you that there are no humans in this flick. There are lots of animals, but they are of the lazy, non-talkative kind. They’re not voiced by celebrities, and they don’t have catchphrases, more’s the pity.

dir: Robert Eggers

2024

I… am scared of this film.

I’ve always found the Nosferatu version of the vampire story far scarier and far more off-putting than the sexy – sparkly – romantic versions. And, yeah, like most people of a certain age, I watched the original playing at a repertory cinema like the Astor or the old Valhalla, back in the day, and once with a live orchestra or band playing either the score or their own score for it. Might have been the Blue Grassy Knoll, if I recall.

It’s just the kind of thing we did back in the 1990s – early 2000s, if you were a film lover / film wanker.

I still find the image of Max Schreck as Count Orlok walking around in his stilted manner as the essence of cinematic horror. Fast hot vampires zipping around faster than the eye can see like The Flash I guess is scary conceptually, because it means you can’t outrun them, but there’s something viscerally horrible about some dread creature slowing coming towards you, as you cower in terror, knowing that you can’t get away.

That’s not to ignore the sexual aspect of these stories, but the Nosferatu version has the creature being a mostly dead being that brings with it pestilence and plague. There’s no threat / promise of eternal life – eternal sexiness, like with Anne Rice’s vampires: there’s just putrescent death wanting to consume everything that is alive.

And, yes, belabouring the point further (of not talking about the present film, and talking around all other sorts of nonsense), there is the Werner Herzog remake Nosferatu the Vampyre from the 1970s, which also had an actual monster playing the vampire, being Klaus Kinski, and I’ve seen that version too, and laughed a fair bit through it, though I think that was unintentional on Herzog’s part. That flick is not as well respected, though it deserves some credit, since you will I hope never see that many live rats in one place again as long as you live, and it uses some of Wagner’s Ring cycle music in superb ways as the plague sweeps across the city.

Last pre-digression – there’s also the superb film Shadow of the Vampire from 2000 that conspires to be a ‘making-of’ of the making of the original Nosferatu, but the sting in the tail is that the director, F.W. Murnau, played with the insanity that we used to admire in John Malkovich, actually found a monster to play Orlok onscreen, and happily lets him eat away at cast and crew in order to get the perfect shots he needs to make the classic that would be still be known a hundred years hence. Nothing says “Hollywood will chew you up and spit you out” more than a movie where none (except the studio executives) are safe.