2025

dir: James Griffiths

2025

The only reason I watched this flick, the only way in which I heard about it, is because it was recommended by Marina Hyde and Richard Osman on their podcast The Rest is Entertainment, one of the few podcasts I still listen to.

If you’re wondering why, and you’re probably not, but I have to imagine that you briefly rolled your eyes and then wondered, “why, fuckface?” in order for the bit to work, well, not only am I a very busy man with a lot on my plate, but I cut out / deleted any of the podcasts I used to listen to that have anything to do with politics.

Who can listen to that bullshit anymore? Every single one of them talking about the latest antics or spoutings of shite from the same appalling people invariably about the same shitty person. I can’t do it anymore. People, we’re all going to die. Some of us sooner than others, but, fuck, we can’t keep talking and thinking about the same appalling person all of the fucking time! That’s no way to spend however much time we have left.

Anyway, Marina and Richard, two people who I like and enjoy listening to, saw it and recommended it, and so like the sheep that I am I saw the flick too, knowing nothing else about it.

And I’m glad I did because I enjoyed the heck out of it. I am not entirely sure what kind of flick it is, in that you could just as easily call it a gentle drama as you could a light comedy, but both pigeonholes sell the flick a bit short.

Similarly, saying the flick is about loneliness, longing, re-connection or grief would additionally short sell what is really an airy and wry confection, despite most of the flick being set on a Welsh island.

Back in the early 2000s, there was a British folk band (in the world of this movie, not in ‘our’ world) called McGwyer Mortimer, a two-piece, and they achieved a modest amount of success, before seemingly breaking up acrimoniously. The two members were Herb McGwyer (Tom Basden) and Nell Mortimer (the great Carey Mulligan). I’m not sure they’re based on any particular band in British history, but there are no shortage of bands where performers got romantically involved and things fell apart.

A decade later, Mortimer doesn’t perform anywhere, and McGwyer has transitioned to pop bullshit writing commercial hits and having his songs presumably used in commercials. The well has run dry. Inspiration left a long time ago, possibly around the time (Nell) Mortimer left.

Money. Everyone needs money, that’s why it’s called money. Herb is lured to a gig on the aforementioned island, being deposited not on the shore but in the waist deep waters, in anticipation of one well-paid performance. He doesn’t know the person proposing the gig, and he doesn’t know that the person setting things up has lured Nell to the island as well.

dir: Jesse Armstrong

2025

Ye gods I fucking hated this movie.

But I have to be fair – I have no doubt the intention was to get us to hate these people with every fibre of our beings. After all, the writer and director of this horrible satire is Jesse Armstrong, probably best known for creating Succession: a series about a terrible media mogul and his defective children. Any resemblances to Rupert Murdoch and his cursed progeny are purely intentional.

The luxury that the series had was having the time to show these despicable characters from a number of different angles, such that the sheer enormity of their vileness could be appreciated from different perspectives, in numerous contexts, in countless ways, for years.

This here movie Mountainhead is just a movie, so we’re hopefully only ever going to have this exposure to these deeply shitty billionaires this one time for this collection of toxic minutes, 109 of them, to be exact. Amidst all of those minutes were scant moments where I didn’t want to kick my screen in.

There are some things too strange to satirise. The rise of the tech billionaires has given us these strange people to mock or, for many even stranger people, symbols to idolise, envy or bootlick. They have acquired political power through their control of social media or through the sheer magnitude of their wealth; they wield outsized influence with complete impunity, and we just shrug our shoulders, and go back to whatever it was we were doing before. Probably doomscrolling.

This stuff is well known if you’ve read any news at all over the last however many years, but the solution, unless you’re Luigi Mangioni, isn’t immediately clear. It’s one thing to joke about whipping the guillotines out, but the reality is that they are the new aristocracy, so high above us, and who’s going to lug a guillotine up into the mountains of Utah, anyway?

(파과)

dir: Min Kyu-dong

2025

I’ve never pretended to be an expert on South Korean culture or South Korean movies, but I can definitively say that they sometimes make great films.

This isn’t one of them, but it’s important to remind yourself of that fact.

This flick is okay, though. It is essentially a South Korean take on John Wick, just with a woman of the same age in the role, and instead of killing thousands of people she only kills a hundred or so. It must be a modesty thing.

The strongest element in this flick’s favour is that it delivers exactly what the title promises: There is an older South Korean woman in this flick, and she is often shown holding a variety of knives, with which she usually kills people. Or she at least harms them greatly and gets them to reconsider the life choices that brought them to this moment in time.

On the other hand you could argue that instead of being an example of truth in advertising, that it’s actually false advertising because, like in a lot of South Korean action flicks, sure they start off with knives, but then by the end there’s guns akimbo, hammers and anything else that comes to hand involved.

There isn’t anything particularly unusual or novel about this flick, but it has something of a more melodramatic premise than these kinds of flicks usually require. I mean the aforementioned Keanu Reeves franchise used the murder of the protagonist’s dog as the starting point of a 4 movie killing spree that killed most of the (assassin) population of three continents. This flick, again about a stone cold killer, really leans in to the (fairly generic) premise of that stone cold killer having at least one thing or one person or one group of people that they really care about to justify all the wickedness that is to come.

dir: Fleur Fortuné

2025

At this stage, I think it has become redundant to say things like “this new sci fi film is set in a dystopian future”, because when I look at the sci fi flicks I’ve watched in the last couple of years, the last one that wasn’t set in a bleak, dystopian future was… no idea. Maybe After Yang, that was the least bleak. None of them foretell a future that isn’t grim, where there aren’t vast wastelands or forbidden zones everywhere, where the world isn’t scarred by climate change related disasters. They’re not all Mad Max, but they’re not far off.

So, yes, in this latest film that I watched, called The Assessment, terrible things have happened to the world, but a select few live in some domed place somehow exempt from the ravages of anthropomorphic climate change. These select few live elongated lives, but are forbidden from procreating naturally (the same drug that gives them longevity prevents them from being fertile). In order to have a child, ex-vitro being the term, they have to apply to the regime in control, and be assessed by an assessor, hence the title.

Mia (Elizabeth Olsen) and Aaryan (Himesh Patel) are the couple that want a baby, and Virginia (Alicia Vikander) is the assessor. She will make their lives a living hell for the next 7 days, under the guise of testing their suitability as parents.

She’s from The Government, you see, so everything she does must be for the greater good, surely?

The couple live near the ocean, in an incredibly expensive looking place. I guess not all apocalypses are equal. They seem to be doing okay, but I guess they’re bored, so they think a child will save their relationship.

Reference is often made to the “Old World”, as a terrible place where people are sent as a punishment or because they’re poor. Mia’s mother, we are told over and over, was exiled to the Old World to punish her presumably for telling the truth about something, like what a terrible regime is in power ruling over their lives with petty, persistent drudgery.

Probably fascist, probably voted for by a majority of voters, who knows. They probably campaigned on “We’ll make your lives a living hell, but at least we hate refugees more” and won in a landslide.