2025

The Thing with Feathers

otherwise known as a feather duster, which you'd know if
you'd ever used one

dir: Dylan Southern

2025

“What” is the Thing with Feathers, you could be forgiven for asking with such a title, and the answer would be “Grief”. Grief is the thing with feathers. Not “Hope”, from the Emily Dickinson poem. No, she lied to us.

Grief. It makes other people uncomfortable. The critics, how shall I say this, fucking hated this flick, even though it has a Cumberbatch in it, and critics are usually well-disposed towards Cumberbatches. Maybe it is a shit film, and I just can’t see it, because I’m blinded by…something.

I feel like I got a lot out of it. I find it fascinating that there are so many films recently about people grieving in their own demented ways, with birds of different types playing such a key role in the story. H is for Hawk famously has a hawk in it, being Mabel the goshawk, but is more about Helen grieving for her father. Tuesday has a macaw standing in for Death Itself, as a mother pre-emptively grieves for her dying daughter. The recent abominable Crow remake, like all iterations of the franchise, has a character brought back to life to avenge the death of a beloved. By a puffin. No, sorry, I meant a crow.

Look, I get that we associate crows and ravens with death, but really, now it’s any and every bird standing in for the Grim Reaper.

And I think I recall watching a recentish Melissa McCarthy movie that had a bird standing in for her lost daughter in The Starling, or grief, or the general shittiness of life, something.

Birds equal death and grief and loss. Such a burden for such tiny shoulders.

Cumberbatch plays a grieving dad, a “sad dad” as he is mocked, later on. He has two young boys to look after, and he is not coping well. His wife, their mother, we never really see or get to know. Her absence leaves a tremendous void, an unfillable void. That is one of the many ways we understand grief as experienced by this character.

We like saying to people “so sorry for your loss, if there’s anything you need, I know people say that, but I really mean it, anything you need, just ask” but then we understand, you’re meant to leave it there. You did your duty, now leave the grieving person / people alone until they sort their shit out. If you do have to chat with them, make sure to make awkward jokes to try to lighten the mood or change the very uncomfortable subject to something else.

Grief is vast, yes, I’ve written that many times before, and different for different people at different times. This flick tries to go out of its ways to show the heaviness of trying to carry on and do all the ‘normal’ everyday stuff when you’re drowning in grief. One could say “no-one wants to see that”, and in truth it’s uncomfortable to watch. It is uncomfortable watching someone spiralling further and further down. It is the opposite of what people generally go to a cinema to watch.

Rating:

7 stars

Read more about The Thing with Feathers
24 reads

The Testament of Ann Lee

I testify that her testament of "don't have sex!" is not
an attractive ideology, thanks

dir: Mona Fastvold

2025

What a whacky film. I’m sure you could make a thousand films about the thousands of charlatans and lunatics the States has either bred or attracted over the centuries, but this here one is about someone almost no-one would know about, and, after watching it, you could rightly wonder why you should care.

Maybe because I’m not Christian, someone in the past declaring themselves to be the Christ Reborn, the Second Coming, doesn’t really strike me as that unusual, since there have been lots of people who lied about it and another vast sub-section of humanity deluded or deranged enough to believe it to be true, and all the beatings and medication could never change their minds until the end. There was even a guy in China in the 1800s who led a rebellion resulting in millions of deaths telling everyone he was Jesus’s brother, which is only a tiny bit less implausible than saying you’re the Big Kahuna yourself.

So, even if the delusion isn’t that rare, instances where other people believe it as well also aren’t that rare either, because people, in case you haven’t noticed, are stupid. Individually, like Tommy Lee Jones’ character says in Men in Black, a person might be smart, but collectively, people are dumb, panicky animals prone to following any leader calling themselves a guru, a Jesus or a Führer.

So desperate are we to believe in something that we’ll believe anything. There are worse things to believe in than Shakerism, though, I would hazard a guess. They were pacifists, at least, though that certainly didn’t help when people came after them.

With its roots in Quakerism, this mob starting off in Manchester in the 1700s believed that this particular woman was the Second Coming of the Christ, and, honestly, they could have done worse. Amanda Seyfried is no-one’s favourite actor, like, I don’t imagine anyone has pictures of her on their folder / trapper keeper for school or on their teen wonderwall at home, but she tries her darnedest to win a golden statue for her performance in this flick. Biopic? Tick. Persecuted religious figure? Tick. Nudity? Unfortunately tick. Sexual, um, unpleasantness? Tick.

Songs? Lots of them. So many of them, and none of them are certified bangers. This flick takes what is for me an unusual route and treats the beliefs of Ann Lee and her followers with absolute seriousness, as if to say “we have no idea, maybe she was the real deal?”

I mean, I don’t know for a fact that she wasn’t the Second Coming of Christ. The ways and motivations of gods and demi-gods are not for me to know or scrutinise. To quote the legendary song by Andy Prieboy called Tomorrow Wendy:
“I told the priest, don’t count on any second coming
God got his ass kicked the first time he came down here slumming
He had the balls to come, the gall to die, and then forgive us
No I don’t wonder why, I wonder what he thought it’d get us”

So He came down again, in the form of a woman this time, from Manchester. Manchester! And was tormented pretty much, based on this film, all of her miserable life, and died at the ripe old age of 48.

And yet… and yet… She still found some joy along the way.

Rating:

7 stars

Read more about The Testament of Ann Lee
51 reads

Father Mother Sister Brother

Families really are the worst, until you lose them

dir: Jim Jarmusch

2025

That sneaky director, Jim Jarmusch, maker of cool films for over 40 years, member of the secret Sons of Lee Marvin lookalike society, tried to sneak one past me. How did I not hear about this flick, that he had a new flick out, huh?

Father Mother Sister Brother is more like three short films wearing an overcoat and a fedora pretending to be one movie. Given the title you’d think it’s got something to do with families and such. And they do, but they aren’t directly linked or using the same actors in different set ups and scenarios. If they are united by anything, it is quantum entanglement where actions and connections can occur at a spooky distance.

If you know the tempo, the measure, the tenor that Jarmusch usually works in / with, this will all seem familiar even if the scenarios and dialogue aren’t. You either like the way he works or you rejected it a long while ago. Those new to his films would watch this flick and probably be perplexed by it, and why everything seems so odd.

And if you’re a long term watcher and appreciator of his movies, watching the first segment and seeing Tom Waits pop up as the chap who puts the father in the “Father” sequence would be delightful, seeing as Tom is one of a long list of people Jarmusch has worked with over the years, and a welcome one to see again (even if his character is a bit of a prick).

Two siblings, played by Mayim Bialik and Adam Driver, who seem like okay people, are driving to visit their dad, who they clearly don’t see or hear from very often. They seem to get along fairly well, with each other. The dad lives in a fairly rural area, and they look very much like city people.

As they’re travelling towards him, the odd thing is they’re discussing what his health must be like, whether he’s doing okay, how it is that he gets by financially, and we’re watching him move things around at his place. He’s not cleaning up; he’s actually trying to make the place look like more of a dump, messier. He’s covering up the nice furniture and cluttering things up.

Rating:

7 stars

Read more about Father Mother Sister Brother
65 reads

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

Read more about Mother of Flies
87 reads

Honey Don't

Honey, you do whatever the heck you want: you're
an American with a gun

dir: Ethan Coen

2025

Lesbians. Tricia Cooke has made two movies, and they’ve mostly been about how much fun it is to be a lesbian. Oh I know it says the director is Ethan Coen, but everyone knows it’s Tricia pulling the lesbian strings.

Otherwise it looks very strange as to why a middle-aged cis het man is making so many movies with them as the main characters.

Although I will point out that none of the actors playing these lesbians identifies as gay or lesbian, but then they’re also not private detectives, cops or murderers in real life either, so I guess it’s all staying true to acting being a curiously expensive form of playing make believe.

There have been oodles of other plot elements in these two films of a threatened lesbian detective trilogy of films, but like the Maltese Falcon in The Maltese Falcon, and the suitcase in Pulp Fiction, it doesn’t really matter what the special item people are after is, what matters is whether the lesbians have sex on screen in a convincing manner.

No, it’s not that either. It’s all about the banter.

Both of these films have starred Margaret Qualley in the lead role. Now, when I first saw Drive Away Dolls, I hadn’t seen Margaret Qualley in anything as yet, and didn’t think that much of her abilities as an actor. Since then I have seen her in at least 3000 movies, and now, watching her in this, I have a far greater appreciation for her qualities as an actor.

She plays this role “straight”, as in, like she’s a detective in a 1970s flick, even if it’s set contemporarily, but she’s not hamming it up for the camera. Everyone else acts like they’re in a comedic crime caper, but she’s dedicated to her deadpan role.

She’s so dedicated to deadpan that when they bring Aubrey Plaza into the story, Qualley out-deadpans her, which is no minor achievement.

Rating:

7 stars

Read more about Honey Don't
118 reads

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

Read more about The Secret Agent
206 reads

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

Read more about H is for Hawk
219 reads

Sorry, Baby

Nobody puts Baby in the Sorry Corner

dir: Eva Victor

2025

Eva Victor wrote the screenplay, directs the film, and stars as the main character. I’m guessing they have some random connection to the story…

I shouldn’t be glib. This is a pretty serious story, dealt, dare I say it, with a light and humorous touch, and it’s not just about the terrible thing it’s about. It’s also about friendship, and how those relationships (just as important if not more so than ‘romantic’ ones) change over time, and need to change regardless of all the reasons we don’t want them to.

And it’s mostly about our odd main character, Agnes (Eva Victor). As the story opens she’s greeting her dearest friend Lydie (Naomi Ackie) who is in town just to visit her. This is several years after they both did grad studies at this particular, small liberal arts college (I’m guessing somewhere in New England), one that Lydie has moved away from, and that Agnes is still entrenched in.

Amidst their catching up, and the kinds of goofy carry-ons that only long time intense friends have, there is concern on Lydie’s part, and continuous, unconvincing reassurance on Agnes’ part, that she’s okay, she’s not trapped, she’s not suicidal, it’s okay. They dance around The Bad Thing that must have happened to her, but not for too long, because it’s important to let us know what the Bad Thing was that happened to Agnes, that now colours many aspects of her life, so that it doesn’t become a distraction that they keep being mysterious about it.

The film is separated into chapters based on particular years that don’t follow chronologically, but the film does start and end in the same year, the Year of the Baby. It then jumps back to the Year with the Bad Thing, and the years that followed, and then it’s back to where the flick gets its title from, being Agnes apologising to an actual baby.

I feel like… maybe the chapter titles are a not-so-subtle allusion to David Foster Wallace, since Agnes is a lecturer in Modern American Literature, and though I doubt she has Infinite Jest on her syllabus, at least none of the chapters was titled The Year of the Chewable Ambien Tab or the like. Could be a bit of a reach, on my part. But it wouldn’t be out of line with the environment, seeing as it’s people who voluntarily immerse themselves in the cozy, smothering world of academia, with its attendant pitfalls and pretentious prats.

If you went to uni, and especially if you lived on campus, the vibes of these kinds of college set stories (though this is not to be confused with the “college novel” genre, like Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History or Bret Easton Ellis’ early novels before he tried to hide his proximity from the closet by making everything about murder from American Psycho onwards) are familiar. Universities are absurd places. Plus, if you were there for any length of time, you either experienced sexual assault, had friends who survived it (or didn’t), or, in the least likely category if you’re ever reading one of my reviews, you committed it. Statistically speaking, three likely options, many horrible outcomes.

Rating:

9 stars

Read more about Sorry, Baby
240 reads

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

Read more about Christy
229 reads

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

Read more about 100 Nights of Hero
219 reads

2025

The Thing with Feathers

The Testament of Ann Lee

Father Mother Sister Brother

Mother of Flies

Honey Don't

The Secret Agent

H is for Hawk

Sorry, Baby

Christy

100 Nights of Hero

Pages

Movie Reviews by Year

Movie Reviews by Genre

Author Rating

2025

Pages

User login