fresh movie reviews for a socially distanced world

dir: James Gunn

2023

Sometimes, the fact that things can end, and end well, is of more comfort than the idea that something could go on endlessly forever.

The Guardians of the Galaxy movies have long been a weirder, stranger and funnier corner of the Marvel Industrial Complex’s movie output, and with this last hurrah for director James Gunn, they can wander off into the sunset of some other star system on good terms, with each other and with us, the drooling, flipper-slapping-together seals in the audience.

The main reason Gunn is unlikely to make any more of these is that now that he’s one of the CEOs at DC Films, it probably wouldn’t be considered kosher to make films for the enemy. Some agglomeration of spineless executives has decided that if they install Gunn in some important position that it will somehow resurrect the studio’s dismal fortunes so that not all their movies without “Batman” in the title keep bombing.

Whatever it ultimately means, or results in, at least Gunn can say that he’s worked in both comic-book ponds, and made flicks in either capacity that are stamped with his oddball sensibilities and personal hobbyhorses, that definitely weren’t just uniform, undifferentiated products extruded by “The System”.

Which is more than you can say about the last bunch of Marvel movies post-Endgame before this one. It’s nice that this one stands alone, for once.

Guardians 3 starts with Rocket singing along with Radiohead’s Creep as he wanders around one of the main thoroughfares in Knowhere: a cobbled together community housed with the head of a dead Celestial. I don’t know what any of that means either, I’m just a dumbed down AI that jumbles words together like they’re lego bricks, hoping things will work out.

Everyone is putting things in their right place, making everything perfect, just before a flying golden statue flies in and starts beating the shit out of everyone, including Rocket, who is mortally wounded in the fighting.

During this “re-introduction” sequence where each of the returning characters gets their moment, Peter “Star-Lord” Quill (Chris Pratt) is shown to be a total drunk, unable to recover from having lost the love of his life Gamora (Zoe Saldana) in one of the earlier movies, but provoked to confused outpourings due to the fact that a Gamora from an earlier timeline currently exists in their universe; a Gamora who’s had nothing to do with Quill or the other Guardians, and who has never reconciled with her sister Nebula (Karen Gillen).

These Guardians are strangers to her, so she has no reason to even tolerate Quill, let alone give a damn what happens to the rest of them in the hi-jinks that ensue.

dir: Ivan Sen

2023

Limbo. Doesn’t mean much to non-Christian types, as a concept or a ‘place’. Doesn’t mean much to most people, I think.

I think most of us just think of it as being an in-between place. Maybe a place you’re trapped in, maybe forever, maybe not.

Veteran indigenous director Ivan Sen wrote, directed and lensed this flick, and he set it in a fictional town call Limbo. It’s really Coober Pedy, in South Australia (Umoona, in Kokotha language), between Adelaide and Alice Springs, but it might as well be on the surface of the moon, considering how alien it looks in this film.

Travis Hurley (Australia’s Own Simon Baker) is a detective, who for whatever reason has been dispatched on assignment to Limbo in order to go over old information about the twenty year ago disappearance of an indigenous girl called Charlotte. He’s not reopening a cold case: there’s a chance they’re going to reopen it, but they might not. He’s in town driving around chatting tersely with the locals about what happened all those years ago.

No-one wants to talk to him, no-one has any real leads, the only legit suspect from back in the day is dead, the girl’s family don’t want to have a bar of it, so Travis gets nowhere quickly, and resolves to get the fuck out of Dodge.

Until he can’t. He’s trapped too, you see. Sure, it’s for technological reasons (someone trying to steal his car fucks up its onboard computer, which will take several days to replace). Helpfully, the mechanic loans him a cool older car, a Dodge Chrysler, which looks far cooler than the work car when Travis is tooling around Limbo.

Black, long classic car, against a white landscape. Did I neglect to mention that the flick is filmed in black and white? It somehow manages to make Coober Pedy / Limbo look even more alien and inhospitable. It looks more like a set they could use to stand in for Tatooine. Travis’s accommodation, at the appropriately named Limbo Hotel, is carved out of sandstone. Underground. A lot of people, not all, live and work underground, in these caves that are meant to recall various Biblical themes: Sepulchers, tombs, ancient chuches.

Charlotte’s family are trapped too, and have been since the disappearance. Her siblings Charlie (Rob Collins) and Emma (Natasha Wanganeen) were taken away from their mum after, on the pretext that Charlotte’s disappearance was as a result of bad parenting, which fractured them in different ways, leading to their mum’s death. Charlie lives in a caravan, avoiding the three kids being looked after by his sister, having never recovered from losing Charlotte, from being accused by the cops for her disappearance.

We wonder what Travis’ interest is in solving this crime. Well, we wonder until we watch him repeatedly shoot up heroin, and then we don’t wonder that much anymore. Travis himself is covered in mostly crude tattoos as well, and as he alludes to later on, his time undercover in the drug squad left him permanently marked by his experiences. Clearly his superiors don’t know about his heroin addiction, but this doesn’t look like a plum assignment either, so maybe he’s given dead-end scutt-work deliberately.

dir: Daina Reid

2023

Horror. Purest horror.

That’s what parenting is like, apparently.

Of course people watching this flick will be muttering “Babadook, Babadook” under their breath, but no-one said The Babadook was either the most original horror flick ever nor that it had the monopoly on mad mothers wanting to strangle their kids for reasons in movies.

This flick, mostly filmed in Victoria and South Australia, is ominous and filled with dread right from the start. It’s not just the exquisite cinematography, or the choice of what’s filmed, but the discomforting soundtrack does a lot of the work too. Those cello / double bass slowly bowed strings…

And then there’s all the awful things happening on screen.

It’s mostly a two-hander, with Sarah Snook playing a character called Sarah, and Lily LaTorre playing her daughter. I won’t say the name of the daughter character, because apparently no one is quite sure what it should be.

We already know terrible things are going to happen, because the daughter, while being driven in the car, asks about where someone is who she’s never met, and the mere mention of her name is enough to make Sarah somehow look even paler.

At first the name being said is “Joan, where’s Joan, is Joan going to be there?” referring to the guest list for the daughter’s birthday party. The answer is an emphatic no, because the Joan in question is Sarah’s mum, and Sarah can’t stand her mum, plus her mum is in an old folk’s home. For old folks. Speaking of which, Sarah’s dad, mostly referred to as grandpa, has recently died, and both Sarah and her daughter miss him terribly.

Sarah especially seems wounded by grief at the loss. But there is something far more seriously wrong with Sarah, and wrong with the daughter, especially when she starts insisting that her name isn’t Mia, but is in fact Alice.

Alice. Alice? Who the fuck is Alice? That’s a name to conjure with. Plus there’s a white rabbit that seems to have appeared out of nowhere, who just hangs around ominously in the house, only earns its keep once when it takes a chunk out of Sarah’s hand.

Alice…white rabbit… I can’t tell if we’re through the looking glass or in a wonderland, but this flick is short on wonder, and long on dread. Mia keeps getting injuries, and Mummy Dearest keeps asking her if someone is hurting her, bullying her. Mia keeps shaking her head, but at random times seems to insist she’s not Mia anyway, she’s this other girl.

And Sarah doesn’t want to talk about Alice, because clearly she’s still traumatised by something that happened 30 years ago.

Like always in these flicks, the mum is either a widow or divorced. The ex-husband / still dad (Damon Herriman) is nice enough, but he’s got a new wife, and they’re trying for another kid, and for some reason this really brings out the Shiv Roy in Sarah, who is always either terrified and confused, or profoundly irritated by people trying to bring up the past all the time.

dir: Sam Hargrave

2023

Instead of doing something, I dunno, meaningful, like acknowledging the traditional owners of the land upon which I pontificate (sovereignty never having been ceded), instead I’d rather bring us together and acknowledge that Extraction is a terrible name for a movie and even worse for some kind of proposed franchise. The Extraction franchise? Ew. Nine out of ten dentists agree that “extractions” are procedures that even they don’t like performing, but they’re happy to accept the money for them anyway.

How do I know it’s a franchise? Because against all logic or expectations, by the end of the flick they clearly imply there’s going to be more of these, and they brought in Idris Elba in a small and strange cameo role as some mysterious rep of some agency or group that needs lead hero Tyler Rake’s extraction skills to extract people from various difficult places like the infected teeth that they are.

Tyler Rake is a hell of a name for an extractor. Thankfully he’s played by Australia’s Own Chris Hemsworth. Hemsworth is the Mid Chris. Chris Pine is currently the Good Chris. Chris Pratt is the Bad Chris and Hemsworth is the medium one. I don’t make the rules, I just read a lot of trash mags in doctor’s waiting rooms.

Always waiting. Hemsworth can be charming or funny in other roles. He very much isn’t here. Here he just has to kill all the people that are attacking him, for two hours, and to feel bad about his son dying of cancer.

You might think “but wasn’t that the plot of the first Extraction? Yes, but this time he’s not killing all of Bangladesh to save a drug dealer’s son; he’s killing half of Georgia and then Austria, to save some other criminal’s family (from the criminal’s crime family).

You also may be thinking “um, didn’t the main character get killed at the end of Extraction?” Someone clearly didn’t sit through the credits.

Who would dare leave franchise opportunities on the table by allowing such a charmless character to die?

Look, the Australian SAS need all the positive press they can get at the moment. Just recently their poster boy for courageous bravery was revealed to be a psychopathic liar, bully and murderer. So they need a positive example for recruitment purposes.

Tyler Rake is the embodiment of a highly trained, highly skilled guy who can kill a thousand people, get stabbed, shot and run over a dozen times and still keep ticking along. He’s less an advertisement for the efficacy of the SAS’s training regime, and more just an Australian John Wick killing everyone who comes after him.

dir: Julius Avery

2023

You can completely not believe in something, and know that it’s highly refined bullshit, and still find it terrifying.

Having been brought up in the Christian faith, and educated at Catholic schools, there are no elements of these stories that are unfamiliar. And I long ago recoiled in horror from the actual, incalculable evils perpetrated and covered up by the Catholic Church, and dismissed the mythological bullshit elements, seeing how the whole edifice was propped up with fear and control, covering hollow lies all the way down.

And yet… Sure, okay, I know this is all hysterical supernatural bullshit, fantasy stuff no more real than anything in the Lord of the Rings movies or Star Wars…

And yet… I can still find this stuff terrifying. The Exorcist still remains one of the most terrifying films I’ve ever seen, and that’s unlikely to ever, ever change. All I have to do is remember certain sequences and I get cold chills.

There was a scene in a recent, quite stupid movie called Ghosted where the two main characters have a conversation at a set of steps, and Chris Evans’ terrible character tells Ana De Armas “These are the steps from The Exorcist!”, and she’s like “okay grandpa””, but I was like “oh shit those are the cursed steps from The Exorcist?”

I don’t believe in ghosts and demons and such, but there is something about the idea of demonic possession that I find deeply, deeply disturbing. And again, though I don’t for a second believe in possession or exorcisms or any of that fucking bullshit, and also, not all flicks about demonic possession are created equally; when they work I am horrified beyond belief.

Most of the stuff I saw in terms of reviews about this flick dismissed it for a bunch of reasons – demonic possession stories are dumb, or the flicks not horrifying enough, or it’s not camp enough, or it’s too funny, or it’s not comical enough, or Russell Crowe is terrible with a risible accent, or Crowe is really good but slumming in a role that is beneath him.

Those are all takes. They’re wrong, but people are entitled to their takes.

dir: Daniel Goldhaber

2023

Wow. This flick isn’t fucking around.

In a trend that is getting more prevalent, film titles are being awfully literal these days. Plane was about a plane, Cats was about a group of hideous cats, and this film How to Blow Up a Pipeline is about how to blow up a pipeline.

I am not advocating for civil disobedience, property damage, or so-called eco-terrorism. If anything, I am a card carrying member of the Establishment that every activist says they are against and every politician pretends they’re not a part of.

In short, I’ve been working for the Empire for decades, so make of that what you will. But I am also a human with eyes and ears, and I look at the inexorable march of time, and the continuous destruction of the environment and the climate, and I can see how so many activists and concerned citizens, tired of marching, tired of holding placards and being ignored or demonised could eventually think “fuck it – protesting isn’t getting the job done.” They know, like a lot of us do, that too many vested interests make too much money from the fossil fuel industry to ever do anything actually against those interests. As such, the markets should be allowed to decide what the oil price should be.

After someone blows up their pipelines and fucks up production, of course.

The activists here are not naïve. They know this action will do little in either the short or medium term. But it’s meant to show people what can be done.

So, given the name, it goes into great detail about the “how”, but there is much made of “why” as well. The “why” is not just about the parlous state of the climate, with its once in a hundred year floods happening every other year, its atmospheric rivers and its wildfires resulting in smoke plumes circling the earth. The “whys” are personal and different, depending on the person.

dir: Marie Kreutzer

2022

I cannot tell you how little I care about the lives of aristocrats, any aristocrats.

Oh wait, I just did. I am no royalist, no defender of monarchies or privilege, let me tell you for free. My feelings towards the divinely anointed and all new fangled tech billionaires or old school robber barons are best summed up by the title of and lyrics to the Motörhead song Eat the Rich, which advocates for a very elegant solution to the eternal question of “how best do we dispense with this bullshit?”

So any and all of my appreciation for any flick should never be construed as an endorsement or support for any of these stratified lies of divine right or superiority-from-birth ideas.

There are, all the same, some great character studies in literature and film arising from depicting the lives of these awful people, make no mistake. Any character study of any historic person is only as powerful as the actor that depicts them, and the writer / director bringing them to life, all the same, whether they be princes or paupers or both.

I have never given much thought to the so-called Empress Sisi (Vicky Krieps) of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire (RIP Sisi and Archduke Franz Ferdinand, rest in power), and this flick is unlikely to cause me to fall down a rabbit hole of finding out everything about her. But I did enjoy watching Corsage, because it’s a very well made film with a luminous central performance by an amazing actor.

Corsage in the context of this flick is not a reference to that strange bouquet or posy of flowers that teenaged American high schoolers are given as a token earning the right to engage in some unseemly and not always entirely consensual activities after The Prom. That is something I know about only through decades of exposure to American movies and television, since it doesn’t seem to be a thing that exists anywhere else (and no I’m not talking about school formals etc).

Corsage here is a reference to the corset that we often watch Sisi being laced into. Of course, those of us who have been watching period piece / Regency bullshit for the last however many years automatically associate corsets as a physical manifestation of the oppression of women, of their enforced subservience throughout history and across society, of the general misogyny and specific chauvinism of patriarchy. Of how it grinds women down, making them smaller, making them lesser, until they disappear completely.

dir: Nida Manzoor

2023

There were only two things this flick needed to entice me in – I heard it was a solid action movie (which is a lie), and I heard it was directed by the woman responsible for the great tv series We Are Lady Parts, about a group of observant Muslim girls in Britain wanting to play in a punk band together.

As far as I’m concerned, give Nida Manzoor all the moneys and let her make whatever the hell she wants. I daresay it will be entertaining.

Polite Society is not what I thought it would be, and that is totally fine. It is much funnier and much sillier than I thought it would be.

And that is absolutely fine too. I am probably not the target market for this flick, and I do not find that threatening or disconcerting at all.

Ria (Priya Kansara) is a bundle of nerves and energy. She very clearly has her life’s path figured out. She trains for, and wants more than anything, to become a stuntwoman, and to fight on screen in the movies.

In the movie’s only implausibility, she writes multiple emails to an actual stuntwoman, being Eunice Huthart, in ways that suggest the prime example of a ‘parasocial relationship’, like where regular humans think they’re friends with famous people just because they’ve got access to them on social media.

Other than that, Ria is totally fine and not at all delusional. I actually enjoyed that element of her one-sided correspondence, because to me it was more a reminder of Jack Nicholson’s character in About Schmidt writing letters to a young boy overseas he sponsors, starting all his letters with “Dear Ndugu”, after which he’d start ranting and raving about people and stuff little Ndugu couldn’t possibly understand or know about or relate to. We got to see it as a welcome example of just how self-involved Schmidt was, not as any comment on Ndugu, who was just a boy, and someone we never see. Though he’s probably A Man now…

She is absolutely going to be a stuntwoman, and her older sister Lina (Ritu Arya), who recently dropped out of art college and seems very depressed, is absolutely going to be a successful artist.

They are from a Pakistani-British background, which carries with it certain expectations, mostly being that, being female in a conservative and overly “polite society”, means they really can’t expect to end up as stuntwomen and artists, respectively.

dir: Kurtis Davis Harder

2023

With a title like Influencer, it’s not unreasonable having some expectations going in to this experience.

All I initially heard was, there’s a film coming out soon called Influencer, and it’s a horror flick. And I was like “Great! Fucking love the idea”, and I made sure that the second it was available on streaming service Shudder, that I would watch the fuck out of it and review it.

And now I have done so. Perhaps I was a little bit over-amped for it.

Perhaps, like with a lot of horror flicks, the mere thought I had that this would be a hard take on the newly discovered species known as the “influencer”, Latin name narcissus maximus, which would, I dunno, get revenge on them by either showing how awful they are and then maybe torturing them? It’s a horrible place to be coming from, I have to admit.

I don’t think (I hope) that I actually wish harm on anyone, no matter how awful they are, because that goes against my beliefs as a Buddhist, but the whole glory of fiction and movies is that maybe there’s some transgression, some schadenfreude that we can be allowed to experience without anyone actually getting hurt.

The film opens with an Insta influencer called, of course, Madison (Emily Tennant), going through the motions at a Thai resort. She’s American, and takes the right photos, uses the right products, says all the right things, but whenever she’s not taking a tortured selfie or taking snaps of food she doesn’t want to eat, she looks sad.

Fuck you for trying to make me feel sorry for some vacuous influencer. Madison is alone, and sad. The resort looks pretty much abandoned. They don’t make a big deal out of it, but I’m pretty sure this was probably filmed in the covid / shutdown era, hence the many scenes of the vacant resort.

dir: Chad Stahelski

2023

Please, no more. That’s enough, thanks.

I have had ample sufficiency. John Wick has, by now - by film’s end - killed everyone that can be killed. There’s no one left. Each film has had an exponential increase in the amount of people he has to kill, and now, well, he’s done. We’re done.

I watched more people die in this flick than died in the entirety of Saving Private Ryan, and that was a WWII movie, in case you forgot, that starts with the invasion by the allied forces of the beaches of Normandy.

But there are deaths, and then there are deaths. Very few of the deaths in this flick matter, except when it’s characters you know or actors you recognise, and you forget them seconds after they happen, because they’re only happening to literally faceless goons.

And yet the mountains of corpses left in his wake…

So if we care at all, we care that the man of the title gets to have his way. He never sought all these people out – they come after him, and he has to defend himself. He only kills those trying to kill him. It’s just that everyone wants to kill him, mostly due to the bounty on his head of several million.

What is money, anyway? It has a siren call that none of these faceless goons can resist, even if Wick’s unkillability is well known. Presumably the assassin characters in this flick that are part of this strange world know that literally thousands of people have tried to kill Wick in the last 3 movies and failed, all mostly having been shot in the face or head, and yet they still keep dreaming the impossible dream and thinking “maybe I’ll be the one to defy fate and the gods”.

And the bounty keeps going up and up. It’s really beyond absurd. “I wasn’t prepared to go after the unkillable super assassin for only $10mill, but I’ll sure as heck give it a go for $15mill!”

dir: Ben Affleck

2023

A generous way to talk about this flick is to describe it as a mildly entertaining biopic about the guy who put together the deal that resulted in the creation of the Air Jordan basketball shoe, which changed the game as it related both to sneakers as consumer products and the arrangements basketball stars would have with merchandising companies for ever more.

A less generous approach would be to say it’s a movie about a fucking shoe.

This is Australia. We used to call them runners, no matter their purpose, though I guess the kids of today probably don’t call them that. But, yes, back in the day, whether they were Dunlop Volleys or branded stuff with logos or the knockoffs you got from the Victoria Market, we called them runners, regardless of how much or little running you actually did in them

I’ve never owned a pair of Air Jordans. I’ve never really aspired to own a pair, and, to be more accurate, have rarely been in a position to be able to afford a pair. Taking out a mortgage in order to secure a pair of shoes designed for basketball players, being a sport I do not play, seems extravagant even for me, and I waste money on all sorts of nonsense. But I know what they are. I know of them. Billions of people know what they are. Surely that means they are important, as, I dunno, some kind of cultural artefact?

I mean, I just wrote that, and I’m not really convinced. It’s a thing, a highly sought after thing that has generated billions of dollars in revenue for Nike and millions of dollars for Michael Jordan personally, but so fucking what? Tulips, Beanie Babies, Cabbage Patch Kids, iPods, Harry Potter books, all sorts of useless crap have generated billions of dollars for a select few.

And there’s no pseudo-docos about them. I guess I should be talking about the flick more in line with how Tetris approached the topic, being less about the money, and more about the unlikely result (of besting the combined fury of the mighty USSR and mogul Robert Maxwell in order to steal some computer program from them).

dir: Niki Caro

2023

The Mother is the very necessary sequel to The Father from a couple of years ago. But instead of a senile Anthony Hopkins battling with unseen forces arrayed against him, we have a Jennifer Lopez with perhaps early-onset dementia fighting against the forces of, I dunno, patriarchy maybe?

Otherwise, the nonsense plot makes very little sense. And we need things to make sense this close to Mother’s Day, yeah?

I mean the flick dropped onto vaunted streaming service Netflix just in time for people to be able to honour their mothers by watching a flick specifically called The Mother.

To not watch it is to spit in your own mother’s face, if not the faces of mothers everywhere.

The Mother of the title is only referred to as “the mother”, but I’m pretty sure her name is probably Karen. Very implausibly, she is a highly decorated and highly important special forces sniper for the United States of America. She gets involved with… I still have no fucking idea, and I’ve watched the thing, but for whatever reasons, she gets involved with a corrupt higher up (Joseph fucking Fiennes) AND some Cuban criminal (Gael Garcia Bernal, in a throwaway role), because she wants to know about some weapons they’re smuggling (or maybe it was exclusive Pokemon cards?). But then she finds out that they’re also smuggling some very dirty looking people somewhere.

I don’t know where. To the States maybe? Smuggling people into the Communist paradise that is Cuba, alternatively? To give them the better life they always dreamed of?

Why is she Special Forces, but also patrolling the famous “wall” at Guantanamo Bay, the one which Jack Nicholson’s overacting in A Few Good Men was trying to protect the rest of America from, AND she’s conducting investigations AND getting pregnant to one of those two men?

dirs.: Scott Beck and Bryan Woods

2023

Are you fucking kidding me?

Terrible, just terrible. I’m glad I paid nothing to see this, other than in time and irritation.

It’s such a dumb fucking premise. How is Sam Raimi involved with this?

How dare people waste Adam Driver’s talents like this.

I guess part of the attraction for making this during the covid lockdown era is that it meant it would be easier to make because there are never more than two people on screen at any given time. Sure there are some establishing scenes at the beginning, showing that Mills (Driver) has a family and a daughter, and she’s sick, and he has to take difficult jobs that take him away from home for years at a time.

Those scenes are terrible and ill-conceived, like the entire movie. In lieu of any characteristics about the character that we couldn’t figure out for ourselves, the only trait they give him is pretty much the same trait they’ve given every character in the last 30 years, which is an either sick or dying kid as a motivator to look after some other kid.

Newflash, fuckos, any decent person would look after and try to save any kid, regardless of their tragic backstory. It’s so fucking lazy that…I will be one of hundreds of reviewers who make a crack like “this script could easily have been written by a dumb Chat GPT ripoff…”

And it could have. People keep claiming that AIs are going to ruin the world, or destroy the film industry (for writers, at least), but the fact is hack writers have been writing horrible generic scripts for decades.

Maybe Scott Beck and Bryan Woods are AIs. If so, maybe they’re North Korean ones.

With an awful premise that I could never take seriously, for any reason, the opening titles on screen tell us that 65 million years before humans existed, there were these people, and they’re pretty much humans. They look identical, and they speak English. And they talk about years and kilometres.

And they’re on some other planet, in some far away system, long ago, far far away, possibly.

dir: Alice Diop

2023

This is a tricky film to review. Tricky. It’s hard to talk about, even though it’s a very straightforward movie.

It’s in French mostly, and it centres around… members of the Senegalese community living in France.

If you had no idea what the film was about, the first fifteen minutes would be baffling. I knew what the film was about, and was still amazed at how our introduction into the story is done.

Rama (Kayije Kagame) is an academic at university and a writer, and though she is French born she is Senegalese by culture and background. We get a few details of her life, like that she has a (Caucasian) partner (a beefy chap who’s apparently a bass player in a band), but there is something something at odds with what we’re seeing, a tension. At a moment where the family are together for lunch / dinner, bass player boyfriend seems like he’s about to announce some happy news, but Rama squashes it. Her sisters ask her if she can take their mum to an appointment, and she, not even looking at her mum, announces she won’t be around to take her anyway.

We don’t know where she’s going, she hasn’t told us or any of the other characters yet, but they must already know. We have some flashbacks, to a time before her father died (as they watch an old video tape?), and then her as a younger girl, in short, abrasive moments with her mother, who is later on referred to as a “broken” person.

After a train trip to some town, presumably the Saint-Omer of the title, she has something of a strange routine in a hotel room. She clearly isn’t comfortable in the hotel room, something about the bed squicks her, but she is prepared. The film makes sure we watched her pack a sleeping bag, which we later on watch her spread out over the bed.

(Hai Phượng)

dir: Lê Văn Kiệt

2019

Well, now I can say I’ve seen 3 Vietnamese flicks.

It was inevitable that I was going to see this, the first in what I assume is eventually going to be at least a trilogy of violent Viet flicks where women beat three hundred shades of fuck out of their opponents in order to protect themselves and those they love.

It also helps, of course, that it was so conveniently accessible on Netflix.

I’m not going to argue about how the title in English makes less sense, but I can see how they didn’t want people to confuse this flick with the recentish flick Fury about Brad Pitt and an angry tank. In Vietnamese the title of the flick is the name of the protagonist, being Hai Phuong.

This flick is set contemporarily. The flick Furies, which is pretty much the origin story for the main villain here, called Thanh Soi, was set in the 1990s. The main character in Furie is played by Veronica Ngo. She also plays a character seeking revenge on the jerks who butchered her family in Furies AND she directed it as well. Now you should be thoroughly confused.

Just to be very flippant for a sec, I liked Furie plenty, but Furies is probably a better flick, mostly because it triples down on everything, especially the violence, and is less of a melodrama. But that’s just by the by.

Let’s focus on this one, aye? Hai Phuong lives a quiet life in the countryside. Plenty implies that she’s way better, and way meaner than the peasant folk that surround her. Like the trigger for all these kinds of action flicks, someone makes a terribly stupid mistake and kidnaps her kid. They don’t do it deliberately, as in, they’re just a gang of jerks who kidnap kids. It’s their bread and butter.

But the cardinal mistake is that they kidnapped her kid, not knowing or caring that she would punch a hole through the world in order to get her kid back, let alone destroy their gang, and all their hopes and dreams for the future.

dir: Johnathan Goldstein & John Francis Daley

2023

Nerds. They have infected everything, everywhere, all at once.

So open, out and proud, no longer hiding in the shadows. They even get to make movies these days.

Seeing a fantasy movie with the title Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves would have delighted me once upon a time, because I lived and breathed this nonsense as a teenager. But then an actual movie came along called Dungeons & Dragons back in 2000, and it made most of us realise that we were never going to get what we either wanted or needed, just lame generic fantasy-ish stuff with all the signposts and references, and none of the appeal, with terrible acting to boot. I mean, Jeremy Irons, you’re in a class of your own.

Not long after that, though, the Lord of the Rings movies came along, with vast budgets and vast running times, and the masses liked them, and the nerds thought “maybe they aren’t going to turn all of our beloved childhood stuff into absolute shit”. But it wasn’t just nerds – it was normal people too going along to see the flicks that made them a success. If only nerds went along, it barely would have registered, but the cinemas would have smelled pretty awful.

And now. Now everyone thinks they can make Dungeons & Dragons happen again, I suspect only because of the success of Stranger Things, in which the venerable roleplaying game keeps being played and keeps being mentioned. Other than that I can’t figure out what the impetus was to inflict this “property” onto the world again.

I don’t really think it can happen, because everything from D&D now just looks like a generic fantasy setting, and we’ve had plenty of movies and tv / streaming series set in generic fantasy settings. Now of course it’s just easier to lift directly from the LotRs movies when it comes to what cities should look like, or rampaging hordes of creatures that live underground, but we’ve had no shortage of fantasy franchise crap over the years.

(Thanh Sói - Cúc dại trong đêm

dir: Veronica Ngo

2023

Way, way back in the day, the only place on Earth regularly pumping out quality martial arts movies was Hong Kong. Wasn’t even close, Sure, plenty of other shmucks were trying to do the same thing, but it was embarrassing. Stop it, you’d feel like saying, sitting through one of their ghastly knockoffs, you’re embarrassing yourselves and your country.

Eventually, the skills transfer occurred in filmmaking, in the same way that British control of Hong Kong transferred to the totalitarian Communist regime in China, and other countries buffed up their film productions so that a great martial arts epic can come from anywhere.

Indonesia, India, France, now even Vietnam. Still, not Australia. Never Australia.

Furies is a brutal and highly competent martial arts flick from Vietnam. It is a prequel to the most successful flick in Vietnamese box office history, which uses the singular Furie as a title, which makes absolutely no sense to me, but I doubt that’s the title in Vietnamese.

Before my involvement here I can honestly say I’d only ever watched one Vietnamese flick previously. It was called Cyclo, back in the 90s, and about the only things I can remember about it is that it had Radiohead’s Creep on the soundtrack, which many 90s flicks were obligated to have, and it was quite moody and boring, like the average teenager.

That being said, I have seen plenty of flicks about English people, Americans and Australians in Vietnam. Most of those weren’t shot in Vietnam, and they weren’t about Vietnam. They were about how brave and heroic everyone else was in trying to “save” the Vietnamese from the scourge of Communism.

How’d that work out for you, champs?

dir: Jon S. Baird

2023

There are (unfortunately or fortunately) lots of movies based on games, but less movies about the games themselves, or about the creation of those games.

Or, even more boringly, practically no movies about someone desperately trying to get the regional licensing rights for a game. A goddamn game. Contracts and stuff.

Not just any game, though. Tetris, the best-selling and most played game of all time.

I know, I know that something like this should be dull as fucking dishwater. And let’s be honest, in reality, it would be. A documentary about this would probably be pretty fucking dull, even more so than most documentaries are about whatever their subjects might be.

But I think, as inconsequential as this flick probably is, they get the approach right, in that they give us an idea of just how fucking important it was to the people who were involved, who put their entire lives on the line, just to give the rest of us a few hours of amusement.

Plus, it was Tetris what brought down the Berlin Wall and destroyed the Soviet Union, doncha know?

Henk Rogers is not exactly a household name, and nor will it be after this. I’ve watched the film, and read the Wikipedia entry on him, and to me he’s just a guy with a moustache. There are other guys with moustaches. The actor playing him grows a moustache; a nice, solid triangular one. A weird moustache, but most / all moustaches are weird, and I say that as a man who has one, hidden within a goatee/mo combination.

Other than that, what defines him? He’s a guy, played by Taron Egerton, who foresees early that computer games are going to be the next big consumer purchase, back in the 1980s. Being the late 80s at that, he’s not exactly a prescient seer or anything – it’s already happening, and he’s just trying to jump on the bandwagon. All he needs is one great game.

And he sees it, on someone else’s computer, at a different stall at the Consumer Electronics Show that year.

(길복순)

dir: Byun Sung-hyun

2023

The main character in this flick is called Gil Bok-soon (ably played by Jeon Do-yeon). She is so good at her job as a professional killer that she has earned the nickname “Kill” Bok-soon, despite the fact that, eh, Kill isn’t a Korean word.

But we non-Koreans might get it. We might think “Hey, this Netflix flick has “Kill” in the title, like Kill Bill, or Kill Your Darlings, or To Kill a Mockingbird, I should watch it! At least until I get enough tips on how to kill mockingbirds.”

It would seem that this flick transpires in the same universe as the John Wick movies, in that there don’t really seem to be any cops around, and if they exist, they’re part of the “establishment” anyway. And this weird criminal underworld operates within a strict set of rules.

All assassinations in this world are controlled by MK Enterprises. The person at the top decides who is to be killed, by whom, and how. The “work” is then allocated to the top employees of the various “companies”, as in, gangs of assassins, who then have to create a “show”.

These are the three rules – no children, no stealing work from other crews, and the job absolutely always has to be completed.

I don’t know how much of this is lost in translation, but maybe it’s lots of it. What’s clear is that Bok-soon, (I think?) a middle-aged single mother, is at the top of her hierarchy. She is A-list. She works for the MK of the MK Ent., being the slightly older Cha Min-kyu (Sol Kyung-gu), the guy who effectively rules the entire underworld.

dir: Dexter Fletcher

2023

Ghosted is the kind of flick that you could make from the deleted scenes from a bunch of other action movies. Plus it very much coasts on the idea that Chris Evans and Ana de Armas make a cute couple, and that having one of the biggest stars of the Marvel flicks play a non-action hero, herb nerd / farmer is fucking hilarious.

Of these multiple premises, there’s only partial truth, or partial success, in any of them. Yes, de Armas and Evans on paper sound like a charming couple, and seemed to have a certain energy in the delicious Knives Out a few years ago, and a great big galoot like Evans as an underpowered shlub sounds funny. And they also starred in an action flick from last year called The Grey Man, though they played antagonists, which left me hoping that they’d gotten Ryan Gosling to play the villain this time, just to emphasise how interchangeable all these actors and components are.

And Ana de Armas, when she’s not playing Marilyn Monroe in the much maligned Blonde, is always playing some kind of superspy, since that’s what she played in the last Bond film, Grey Man last year, and will be playing in the John Wick spin-off Ballerina.

I shouldn’t be the guy saying this, but whatever happened to flicks where people just talk about stuff? Does everyone have to be shooting or punching someone in order to have a career?

In this era where generic spy action flicks, whether the lead character is Melissa McCarthy or Rowan Atkinson, are a dime a dozen, they need something to stand out a bit, because anyone can make them (with cheaper digital effects), especially if they’re only going to show them on streaming services. This flick doesn’t really try too hard to do anything to stand out, which is…fine.

dir: Peyton Reed

2023

The Ant-Man flicks at least previously had the purpose of being lower stakes, a bit silly, a bit goofy, and more comedic than the serious / serious universe ending crap.

Now, no-one trusts that Paul Rudd on his own, with the help of his mates, and occasionally his girlfriend, is enough to carry a flick. Now it has to be him against a multiverse spanning supervillain who, I dunno, wants to control everything. Why can’t he just steal some shit and help people out?

Nup, they have to use his flick to presage the entry of another Thanos-type villain, except this time he’s like the worst person in every single universe, so even if they kill a whole bunch of him / them, there’s plenty more where he came from.

Most of the flick transpires in the Quantum Realm, a realm below the sub-atomic, which is basically considered to be just a freaky looking place where there’s people and strange organisms, and sentient broccoli-headed dudes, but mostly it’s just like yet another planet in Star Wars. Some of the visuals are okay. Mostly it’s just a missed opportunity.

The flick hinges a lot on Janet Van Dyne’s character (Michelle Pfeiffer) not having told anyone about what she got up to for 30 years when she was trapped in the Quantum Realm. It’s been years, but she never thought to tell anyone about how there was a super scary tyrant that she helped rise to power, or that she banged Bill Murray. You would think she would have told someone about that, but then again, maybe she regretted it a tad.

The sex with Bill Murray, I mean, not the tyrant-enabling, but then I’m not completely sure.

dir: Damien Chazelle

2022

Well, that was a lot of film. It was definitely not one of the best flicks of last year, but it was definitely one of the most films of the year.

It’s three hours and 10 minutes long. I pity the bladders of anyone that saw this on the big screen, and didn’t want to miss a thing thinking something important might happen. I watched this in the luxury of my unheated lounge room, perched on the edge of a milk crate, on an old black and white 30cm television, just like the makers intended, just to make the experience really authentic.

I’m not a film snob. I don’t pretend to know more than anyone else about the history of cinema, or the transition of the industry from the silent era through to the so-called ‘talkies’. In fact, it’s info I try to actively avoid, because, honestly, who gives a fuck. But it’s impossible for me to have been watching movies for as long as I have without picking up some reverence for the art form and its history, even if it mostly seems like I only watch movies to kill time and have something to bitch about online.

I daresay Damien Chazelle also has some reverence for American movie history, but then he’s also a big la de da Hollywood film director, and can make and shape his efforts to say whatever it is that he wants to say about it.

And what does he have to say about it? Seeing movies on the big screen is glorious and transcendent. Working in the so-called film industry is like being showered in elephant shit at the beginning, doing okay for a while, and then you get brutally booted just for the fuck of it at the end.

In other words, nothing we didn’t already know, which we’re told non-stop for over 3 hours.

I maybe don’t have any real knowledge of what the 1920s looked like, but I have to say there were very few scenes in this flick where I felt like I was watching something set in the 1920s. And the weird thing about that is that the production goes to extreme lengths to achieve its version of authenticity, at great expense, with a great deal of effort.

And I found pretty much none of it convincing.

Especially, especially, especially…I have to say, the element that was least convincing, this feels so disloyal and unAustralian, but it’s Margot Robbie, I’m so sorry.

She is, again, sorry, she’s terrible in this. I don’t get it, unless the whole point is that she’s playing a terrible actress. She also looks like nothing from that era that I’ve ever seen, like no other person alive in the 1920s. Maybe she’s an alien who’s been kicked off the UFO for being too annoying.

(헤어질 결심: Heeojil gyeolsim)

dir: Park Chan-wook

2022

I don’t know that Park Chan-wook is the best director out of South Korea, but he’s probably one of the most famous Korean directors outside of Korea, probably along with Bong Joon-ho (after he won his Oscar for Parasite, and for mocking all those people who can’t bring themselves to watch a subtitled film because of the pesky one-inch barrier at the bottom of the screen). After shaming half of the world to death, what has he done for me lately?

Nothing, which is why it’s up to Park Chan-wook to bring the noise. Brutalising audiences as he did with his so-called “Vengeance” trilogy, but then making a whole bunch of different kinds of films, he’s pretty much shown only that he has no interest in making the same movie endlessly. So one can’t readily pigeonhole his most recent flick easily either.

It's something of a “straight” detective mystery, but it operates on a different kind of level, in that you don’t feel like you’re watching an instalment in a detective character’s drama – you’re watching a weird and brutal drama that happens to involve a detective as one of the main characters.

The other main character happens to be the suspect in one, and then a bunch, of other murders. The detective, Jang Hae-jun (Park Hae-il), can’t seem to get over the fact that an apparent suicide is a suicide, and cannot believe that the suspect, being the victim’s wife, Song Seo-rae, isn’t guilty.

It’s not because of the evidence, because everything, up to a point, looks exactly like it should if it was a suicide, or an accident. But the only suspect doesn’t act or speak like an innocent person. If anything she’s perpetually goading him into finding holes in her story. And the guy who died was a total piece of shit who was also a sadistic abuser.

There is something about her, something in the way she exists. She doesn’t seem to particularly miss the husband, nor does she mourn his loss or his absence. Nor does she seem to be offended at being accused of anything.

عنکبوت مقدس, Ankabut-e moqaddas

dir: Ali Abbasi

2022

Holy Spider is a movie I have been obsessed with for many months, but not because of anything to do with the movie itself, other than its name.

Every time I saw the name Holy Spider, whether it was on the list of films playing at the most recent Melbourne International Film Festival, or other festivals’ playlists, or mentioned in people’s “Best of” lists for 2022, or in discussions of contemporary Iranian movies, the first and only thing I thought of was “Respect The Rock!”

Respect the Rock is a show that’s been on radio station 3RRR for an absolute age, hosted by Nicole Tadpole, and every single edition of the show has Nicole playing a recording of herself (possibly drunkenly) singing along with a recording of Ronny James Dio singing the song Holy Diver.

Holy Diver, you’ve been down too long in the midnight sea, oh what’s becoming of me?

What the fuck does any of it mean? Who cares? It’s great! Too great to require explanation or understanding.

It’s a legendary song, recorded just after Dio and the drummer left Black Sabbath and formed Dio back, way back in the early 1980s.

What’s it got to do with anything? Nothing, nothing at all.

Got to get away, Holy Diver! Uh uh oh o o dun duh dun duh dun

So every time you see a reference to the title “Holy Spider”, you must imagine it being said loudly, in a metal voice *Holy! Spider!*

All this foolishness… Holy Spider is a bleak, brutal film based on a true story, of an awful man that killed a bunch of women in Iran.

You might say to yourself “well, the vile regime in place kills Iranian women all the time, sometimes just for not wearing a headscarf”, and I would say “Yes, that is true.”

But that’s part of the awfulness that goes along with the story: in an incredibly repressive and entirely misogynistic society such as Iran post-1979 revolution (and, most likely, before it as well), a serial killer of women would be something these morality police or revolutionary guards wouldn’t necessarily be opposed to, especially since he targeted sex workers, and drug addicted sex workers at that.

You would think they would have wanted to promote him to Ayatollah, maybe, but no.

The strong implication the film conveys is that because the higher ups in the regime felt that there were pluses to these killings, the cops on the ground, whose job it is to catch people who commit awful, awful murders, were told to look the other way.

dir: Siddharth Anand

2023

I have been on something of an Indian film kick lately, and I think I’m pretty much at the end of it, for now. I know nothing about this franchise, or about anything surrounding these flicks, other than the “real” world stuff around them, and as such I am as uninterested in watching nationalistic propaganda that is pro-India as I am to watch any nationalistic bullshit that’s pro any country. Also, this is India’s biggest box office flick of the year, and the second biggest flick in Hindi of all time. So someone went to see it, lots of patriotic someones.

Your countries and their governments are all equally worthless and self-serving, in my eyes, so fuck all y’all.

But within a certain context, I can allow for that kind of bullshit, when it suits the setting and a narrative – in other contexts it can be almost inspiring - hence my enjoyment for the equally implausible Indian film R R R that came out last year and wowed audiences. It worked because the Indian heroes (yay!) were fighting the colonialist and cruel British (boo!).

Here, the heroes are conspicuously Hindu Indian, and the villains are kinda Pakistani Muslims, and former Indian heroes turned villains who renounce their homeland. And they’re fighting over Kashmir, so…

Agents who die in service of their country in this movie yell “Jai Hind!” before they die, which doesn’t translate to but means “Long Live India!” The villain routinely mocks the hero for loving “Mother India”, which he feels isn’t worthy of that love. In the flick’s creepiest and least comprehensible scene, the villainous Jim (John Abraham) tells the hero that he never thought of India as his mother, and more of as a lover, and I was like “the fuck is this idiot talking about? What weird nationalistic incest bullshit is he peddling?”

dir: Kyle Edward Ball

2022

What is this movie? What even is a movie, anyway?

If a person was to watch this movie, they could honestly say “welp, I watched something, not entirely sure what it was, but I watched it.” It is generally safe to say that most people would never have seen anything like it before, and hopefully never again. Not voluntarily, I don’t think. Not without a gun pointed at your head.

Skinamarink is some kind of horror movie, but not the kind of horror movie where anything happens or your capacity for absorbing scares or gore is rewarded. The only criterion for watching this flick is patience. The only way to get through the whole flick is even more patience.

The first time I tried to watch this flick, it knocked me the fuck out within 10 minutes. The film is about 100 minutes long. It is mostly long takes of indistinct walls or ceilings, floors or toys, occasionally a tv screen. It is filmed on what looks like degraded video tape, but there is also a filter which makes it also look like degraded film stock (with fake dust and scratches), giving you the feeling that you’re watching something that is a copy of a copy of a copy, and maybe you shouldn’t be watching, or even be able to watch it at all.

There are rarely any people onscreen, and when they are, you never see them clearly. You often see feet, or legs, but they’re not usually doing much of anything. There are no creatures, or monsters, or hideous creatures like Pauline Hansons / Marjorie Taylor Greenes ever appearing on screen to terrorise anyone, least of all the children.

The children… there is a boy and a girl, I’m sure they have names but it hardly matters. These kids are in a house in the middle of the night, and their parents don’t seem to be around. There is a television playing old cartoons from so long ago that they’re out of copyright, and so it costs nothing to have them. If there is any sound or music in the flick that isn’t the kids whispering, it’s from these cartoons. There is no soundtrack or score, so all sounds and music are in the scenes themselves (diegetic sound versus non-diegetic sound).

جاده خاکی, Jadde Khaki

dir: Panah Panahi

2022

There’s been all this blather about nepo babies lately, as in, the children of famous people supposedly getting a leg up due to nepotism, and I wanted to issue something of a corrective – sometimes being the son of one of Iran’s most famous directors isn’t really the boon that it might sound like.

Sure, Jafar Panahi is one of Iran’s most celebrated directors (outside of Iran), but he’s also a director most often punished by the regime for his movies. He’s been jailed, banned from making movies, banned from leaving the country, all that good stuff. So being his son isn’t really going to open a lot of doors for you.

Panah Panahi probably doesn’t have anything to prove to anyone, but he’s made a film even his father would envy.

Hit the Road is mostly a flick about a family travelling on the road. They’re travelling fairly far, for reasons that are unclear at first. The dad (Hasaan Madjooni) has a broken leg, and can’t drive. The mum (Pantia Panahiha) is sleepy. They have a young son who might be part demon (Rayan Sarlak), and a nervous older son (Armin Simiar), who’s doing the driving, in this borrowed car.

Wherever they’re going, they don’t seem to be in a rush to get there, and they’re only travelling during the day. They’re a family in that they have a shit-stirring energy with each other, and clearly a lot of family favourite songs and in-jokes.

They’re not meant to be using or even possessing mobile phones, which is a bit weird. It’s not weird to see this in other films, where people are paranoid about being tracked or spied on. But this is an Iranian flick. Let’s not forget that Iran has a brutal totalitarian regime in place since the Revolution in the late 70s, which replaced the totalitarian regime under the Shah. The morality police kill women for not wearing a headscarf in public. The Revolutionary Guards torture and kill those who complain about living in a country where women are killed for not wearing a fucking headscarf.

If this family is scared of someone tracking them, isn’t it the regime’s goons they’re afraid of?

What I’m saying is, how did this film get made without everyone involved not being hung?

It’s not like this regime shies away from executing women and children. All in the name of maintaining their tenuous grip on power. The more brutal the regime, the more fragile its grip.

So maybe I answered my own questions. They’re scared of the government’s goons, which is also the reason for the trip, because the older son is sneaking out of the country and into Turkey, but not through legal means.

dir: Elizabeth Banks

2023

Cocaine Bear is an actual movie that exists. It is about a bear that finds a tonne of cocaine, and really likes eating it and snorting it.

The words “based on a true story” have never done heavier lifting than in the sentence “Cocaine Bear is based on a true story”. Yes, there was once a shitload of cocaine dumped out of a plane. And yes a bear found these packages and enjoyed their contents.

That’s where all similarities between that story and the story depicted here end.

This feels like it should have been called Cocaine Bear? Fuck Yeah! or That Fuckin’ Cocaine Bear!. It should have had Werner Herzog in it, or at least have him doing ample amounts of voice over.

It should have embraced the complete idiocy of its premise and just had a rampaging massive black bear terrorising a city, having been made invincible through its ingestion of a tonne of cocaine, just killing crackers left right and centre.

Instead it manages to not even really be about the bear. It’s about a bunch of puny humans, most of whom get between the bear and more cocaine, and so they suffer the ultimate indignity of being killed indifferently by a bear that just wants more cocaine.

These humans vary greatly in whether they amuse us until the bear comes back, or whether they make us grind our teeth, begging for the bear to come back and kill them so they can shut the fuck up. Isaiah Whitlock Jnr is a cop who wants to find the cocaine, but is more affronted because he tried to get a decent dog, but ended up with a froo-froo Maltese Terrier, which threatens his masculinity way too much. I have no idea why he’s in the flick.

Margo Martindale plays a weird park ranger who flirts with some weird animal activist (Jesse Taylor Ferguson) until thankfully, blissfully, the bear kills them both. I disliked almost every second that they were onscreen, and I love Margo Martindale. She did not read the assignment.

Ray Liotta, Ray fucking Liotta, the original cocaine bear, plays the drug dealer whose drugs were thrown out of the plane and are now giving the bear the high of its life in the Georgia mountains. He somehow manages to look way scarier than the bear. This was his last role before he died; he died literally a week after re-recording some lines in post-production. And that’s pretty shameful.

He should have played the bear. It would have been more convincing to have him wear a costume and growl at people. I feel sad that he’s gone, but, honestly, some people are too terrifying for this world.

dir: Brandon Cronenberg

2023

Few people could start a career with a mission statement that reads something like “I will make my father’s movies look like children’s television”, but here we are.

The son of David Cronenberg, in at least the last two flicks of his that I’ve watched, is making films so visually and viscerally disturbing that the flicks of his horror auteur father now look quaint in comparison.

Infinity Pool is his latest outing / atrocity, and unlike his last flick Possessor, seems like it has more of a social commentary component. It deals, after all, with a bunch of rich fucks who think they can get away with anything.

But those aspects aside, which are pretty gruesome and galling, the real horrors visited upon our eyeballs are aimed at, really, someone who’s just a chancer, like one of us.

Chancers are great for fiction in general and movies specifically. I think chancers are great audience surrogates generally. They are not an overused trope in movies. It’s the rare chancer that’s not relatable. Chancers usually are trying to “get” something, whether they’re entitled to it or owed it or not. In a comedy, they don’t get it until the very end, if at all. In a drama or a tragedy, they might get it, but at the cost of everything, if not their lives.

The chancer here, being James (Alexander Skarsgård), is aspiring to something else, something he doesn’t recognise yet, but he’s really yearning for it, in the way that only rich people with no cost of living pressures can.

He and his wife Em (Cleopatra Coleman) are not having a great time on their holiday, in some fictional Mediterranean coastal country (it’s really Croatia). They are in some high security resort that tries to keep the locals well away from the tourists. They are absolutely not allowed to leave the compound.

Unless they really, really want to.

dir: Sam Mendes

2022

Empire of Light is a curious thing. It’s a film that has an almost reverential love for old cinemas, but not that much interest in being cinematic, or really that interested in movies. Of the films of the era that are depicted or referred to, Chariots of Fire gets a lot of mentions, but not much else in terms of screen time.

And there are a few scenes from Sidney Poitier’s Stir Crazy, with Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder, and there’s a bit about Being There towards the end of the film, but it’s not about film itself as a medium, or what it can mean to us.

Because it’s not really about the transformative power of the movies. It’s about racism, and a character who struggles with mental illness, and what it was like in the early 1980s in Britain, maybe?

Olivia Colman is the biggest name in this flick, except maybe for Colin Firth, who has a small but odious role, but, really, only about half the flick is about her character. At first I thought we were just going to be watching a film about a depressed woman called Hillary who works at a cinema but never watches the movies playing, who is having something of a desultory affair with her boss (Firth), leading to highly unsatisfying sex in his office.

But then a new chap starts called Stephen (Michael Ward), and he’s young and beautiful, and Hillary is happy again.

For a while.

The old cinema, called The Empire, is already old and in parts run down, even 40 years ago. Its prime, like that of Great Britain, is long gone. Parts of the cinema are shutdown or unusable, and there’s a rooftop bar that goes unused except by pigeons.

There is an inscription on the wall telling people “Find where light in darkness lies” at this old art deco cinema, and I wish that’s as pretentious as the flick got, but it’s bookended with and divided by poetry, so…