2025

狂野时代
Kuángyě Shídài

dir: Bi Gan

2025

Well. That was…something.

Something extraordinary. I have not seen a film like it, I think, probably ever.

That’s not necessarily a good thing.

Resurrection is quite a baffling movie. It might be because it’s really 6 short movies wearing a trenchcoat and hat pretending to be one movie. I don’t know the origin of this flick or how this director operates generally, so I wonder whether the whole production was planned out the whole way, or whether it’s become this out of necessity. Even directors as celebrated as Davids Lynch and Cronenberg have had to reconfigure their projects sometimes cobbled together into movies when they started as series and then funding was pulled.

But there is an overarching story being told (I think?), a theme being played out, something about the senses, and there’s something about history, and the history of cinema, and dreams.

There is some entity, referred to as a Deliriant, who dreams when others have given up their dreams for immortality instead. And it’s happening in a silent movie? And the Deliriant eats a bunch of poppies? And has like a film projector inside his heart?

And then there’s a story about some guy maybe driven mad by a sound, or someone’s voice. Someone maybe was murdered, and a suspect (Jackson Yee, who also plays the Deliriant), being tortured. I wasn’t sure who was doing the torturing, whether it was cops or secret police or someone even worse. There is something said about the Japanese, so maybe it’s the 1930s – 1940s. Is it spies? Is it wartime traitors? I have no idea. People get stabbed in the ear, or stab themselves in the ear, some guy plays the theramin.

Then the older guy stabs the younger guy, which definitely, totally, no way is that intended homoerotically, and then it’s on to the next story before the bafflement truly sets in.

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.

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.

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.