9 stars

dir: Edward Berger

2024

Who knew a movie about voting for the next pope could be such a thrilling and exciting rollercoaster ride of surprise and mystery?

Well, almost no-one, and this flick is certainly not really like that, even if the music, the editing and the camerawork tries hard to convince you that this is the most exciting thing you’ve watched since the early Bourne spy action movies.

It is a thriller if you think that it matters who is at the head of the oldest corporation / crime family in world history, being the Catholic Church. Few organisations have done more to loot and pillage the world, or to bring more harm to more people than the Catholic Church, yes, it’s well known, but I’m not going to belabour the point. I am instead going to show heroic restraint and not make endless references to all the children that were sacrificed for the pleasure of these awful men, and the grand scheme imposed to protect the perpetrators and shield the Church’s money from its many criminal actions and atrocities.

Instead, I’m just going to talk about this movie like it’s a movie, based on a book, with a beginning, a middle and a shocking end, if by “shocking” I mean something that barely raised an eyebrow for me.

The only change from the Robert Harris novel, as far as I can recall, is not the alleged shock ending, but the name and ethnicity of the main character, and the ethnicity of the mysterious Cardinal Benitez, being changed from Filipino to Mexican, which makes next to no difference for my money. But other people’s money is different from mine. More volatile. More likely to start croaking “woke!” at the drop of a pope’s hat.

Our main character / detective here is Dean Lawrence, and that’s not his first name, but his title, as the Dean of the College of Cardinals. Upon finding out about the beloved pope’s death, he hurries back to the Vatican, not only to shed tears, but to manage the election of the new pope.

dir: Coralie Fargeat

2024

What a year of wonders 2024 is turning out to be. I’m not even talking about all the insanity outside of the world of cinema. Now is not the time for that conversation.

No, I’m just talking about within the realm of films. This here film The Substance has to be about the most bonkers thing I’ve seen in a good long while, yet it also manages to be one of the funniest films of the year. Solely from a filmmaking point of view, it’s an incredibly well put together, intricately constructed, horrifically grotesque and sickening movie. There are incredible scenes, immaculate shots piled on top of each other, with no concern, with no regard for our well being whatsoever.

Of course the focus will be on the flick’s purported all caps blankly stated feminist statements, but the flick is too subversive, too ambitious to be confined by such simplicity. And, honestly, this might sound like a deliberately ignorant thing to say, but beyond the assertion of certain ideas, the film is more interested in pushing the possible or the acceptable than it is in underlining its points.

This is a bit of a genre straddling colossus, because it doesn’t neatly fit into either the science fiction or the horror genres, though its premise is entirely dependent on a heavy sci fi concept, and it is monstrously horrific in its visual (and auditory) depictions. It has a level of set design that would have made the set designers and art directors that worked with Stanley Kubrick green with envy (and possibly litigious for having lifted so many of their designs). There are other elements that mirror the precise striking visuals of make-up and perfume commercials, aligned with an aesthetic that seems like it’s channelling a runway catwalk in Berlin during fashion week.

And then there’s the sound design. Watching a gross older man devouring prawns is one thing, but what if you get to hear it in such a way that scars your soul? What if the sound cues throughout the flick effectively demand your attention, and sometimes feel like a punch in the head, just for good measure?

dir: Josh Margolin

2024

I loved the absolute heck out of this film. I love every impulse behind it. I love that June Squibb is still alive in her 90s and could star in the flick, and do so incredibly well as the main character Thelma. I love that Richard Roundtree, legend of Blaxploitation cinema, the one the only Shaft, has a major role in this and that it was his last movie.

I love that the director is joyously paying tribute to his own grandma, being the Thelma from the movie’s title, who is still alive to this day at 103.

That’s not the same as saying that this is based on a ‘true’ story. The deliriously beautiful thing about the flick is the way it constructs something that seems like or feels like a heist flick, yet uses the low stakes befitting its characters to full comic effect. And yet the music /score doesn’t know that, and therefore barrels along like it is that high stakes heist flick.

It’s brilliant. Our protagonist, being Thelma, rolls over a bed, or evades someone on a mobility aid scooter, and the music accompanying the scene makes you think she’s robbing the vaults at Fort Knox or pulling off a caper the Ocean’s Eleven chumps wouldn’t dare to try.

It is ironic that one of her inspirations in the story is seeing Tom Cruise running and doing stunts, and being told by her grandson that “he does all his own stunts”, that inspires Thelma to do more than the people around her expect her to be capable of. Mission: Possible is what she believes in.

Despite being in her nineties, Thelma is active, energetic and walks around under her own steam. She lives alone, and not in assisted living, or some other euphemism for an old folks home, which is itself a euphemism, for those places we park the olds before they finally depart from this mortal coil.

dir: Alejandro Monteverde

2024

I admit that I’m not the intended audience for such a film, being a filthy maltheist as I am, baptised into a different strain of Christianity, and a full-throated, ‘til-the-day-I-die loather of the Catholic Church.

Just to clarify, a “maltheist” believes that God exists, but that He really, really fucking hates us.

But I still enjoyed the heck out of this biopic, about a formidable woman who strove her whole life to improve the lot of orphans and immigrants, in general, and Italian-Americans, specifically in the 1890s onwards in the States, of all places.

It helps that they get such a strong actor to play this incredible woman. Christiana Dell’Anna gives a stunning performance as a nun who is hated by the Church, by the whitebread Americans, by the Pope, the Archbishop and the Mayor of New York himself. A woman with that many powerful enemies has to be doing something right.

I have no doubt the backing for this flick came from moneyed up conservatives whose agenda, broadly speaking, is pushing Christian nationalistic bullshit (in the American context), which neatly folds guns, red meat, voting Republican at all costs and no matter the candidate all into an appalling burrito of cloddishness, but I don’t care. I honestly don’t care. This film and the central performance, and the way it’s all put together works so beautifully that I don’t care about the intentions of the people behind it, who think telling the story of what a great person Mother Cabrini was reflects positively on American Christians.

It is the sweetest of ironies that the film, as it openly stands, argues the complete opposite. The entire film argues that Mother Cabrini achieved everything she achieved despite the opposition of almost every single man in power, whether within the Vatican, the Italian Senate, the New York hierarchy, and almost every (non-Italian) New Yorker. You cannot have a more anti-Establishment, anti-powers that be, anti-conservative argument than that.