fresh movie reviews for a socially distanced world

dir: June Schoenbrun

2024

I saw it glow, too. Many times.

This is a complicated and awkward film to talk about. It doesn’t really follow conventional cinematic storytelling structures, and it doesn’t really look like or is set up to be like what we might expect from a movie, any movie. It looks like a low-key, small-scale story about two teens obsessed with a tv show from the 90s, but it’s really about…

I dunno, I don’t really know. This looks like it’s a lot of things, but it always takes us somewhere different.

In its most simplistic rendering, we could say this flick is about two desperately sad and lonely teenagers, who grow up to be two desperately sad and lonely adults. If we were feeling unkind, we could say it’s about two people with severe mental health issues who fixate on a tv show meant to be reminiscent of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and who start confusing reality with fantasy because of trauma and loss, and because they never get the love or support they needed, they never get to be well-rounded people with integrated personalities and senses of self.

A kinder, more empathetic and thoughtful angle would be to say this is a story about two people born with a sense that there is something inherently wrong either with the world or with them being in it, who try to find the way to live in it less painfully, in a way that allows them to be who they are meant to be, or not.

How mysterious that sounds. It doesn’t play out that way, but there are a great deal of scenes where we are not sure if what we are watching is real or imagined, or feels real enough that even if it isn’t literally happening, we are meant to think it should be(?)

(Πίσω από τις θημωνιές)

dir: Asimina Proedrou

2023

Alas this is not a biopic about the legendary wrestler Haystacks Calhoun, which is a pity...

This Greek film, Behind the Haystacks, which was Greece’s submission for 2024 in the Best Foreign Film category at the Academy Awards (don’t get me wrong, it doesn’t mean anything: every country submits their most critically acclaimed movie from that year, and all but 5 are ignored), starts grim and ends grim, because it begins and ends at exactly the same place, near a lake.

It’s grim up north, on the border between Greece and Macedonia. It is a particularly irritating area for Greece, because there is a state in Greece called Macedonia, and an entire country just outside its borders calling itself Macedonia, which Greece, peevishly, refused to acknowledge as being called that since 1991, wanting it instead to be called “the Former Yugoslavian Republic Known as Macedonia” up until recently. Kinda like that time the musical artist known as Prince changed his name to a symbol in order to fuck with his record company, forcing everyone to call him “The Artist Formerly Known as Prince”.

In 2019 there was a compromise that neither country liked resulting in the name change to North Macedonia, which means they’re still both going to keep mewling about it forever.

This flick isn’t at all about two dumb nations fighting over stuff that doesn’t matter to any other sensible person. This flick is about people’s consciences, and a country’s soul.

The film begins with a glendi, a get together of various townsfolk, with food, booze and music free flowing. Some kids wander away from their parents during the festivities and play in the reeds by a lake. And of course, while playing, the kids find some bodies.

These are young children: when they run back and tell some adults, someone sits them down and starts gaslighting them immediately, telling them they didn’t see nothing, and anyway have they ever heard the story about the fisherman who accidentally drowned? Maybe it was his ghost they saw?

Adults are the worst. The point is, the bodies were real, and the vast majority of the people not that far away don’t seem to give much of a fuck.

(Μαγνητικά πεδία)

dir: Yorgos Goussis

2022

You could be thinking, based on the title or the poster, that this could be a documentary about legendary band The Magnetic Fields, but then that’s probably unlikely, because you’re way too smart to make that mistake. And if you were a fan of The Magnetic Fields, you would probably know there was already a documentary about them from 2010 called Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields, and you probably watched it since with much enjoyment, and then went and listened to your favourite parts of their epic 3 part album 69 Love Songs.

That’s not what you’re going to get from watching this. If this wasn’t a Greek movie made during the start of the pandemic, you would think it was an American film made during the mumblecore era (2000s – 2010s) with no budget and a recommendation to the actors not to do too much acting in any given scene. Save it all for a screaming match at the end.

Most of the movie, like 99% of it, transpires on the Greek island of Kefalonia, a beautiful place that I’ve actually been to. But none of the point of this flick is to highlight any of that, because it’s not a none too subtle travel advert sponsored by the tourism bureau or anything like that.

If anything the flick is saying “if you’re bored and experiencing existential angst you could do worse than come here”. The whole flick has an experimental vibe, in that it seems like there’s a very loose premise, that the actors came up with their characters, possibly on the fly, and the overall flick has only a loose idea of where it’s going as it’s meandering along, at any given time.

That’s okay with me. I’m one of the few people on this planet films like this are made for. I don’t so much watch something like this thinking “is something interesting going to eventually happen?”, so much as “I wonder what nonsense these two will get up to next.”

dir: Richard Linklater

2024

I don’t always find myself wondering why a plethora of critics fall over themselves praising a particular movie, because I can usually see the reason. It might be lazy, simplistic reasoning, but I can usually grasp it.

The incredible reviews for this flick, being Hit Man, leave me somewhat perplexed, but in a way that shouldn’t indicate I care that much. I don’t think it really matters, and in a few months no-one will even remember this film unless someone involved goes on an actual kill crazy rampage (which, these people being in the States, is not an impossibility, in fact it’s constitutionally required).

The main statement I’ve seen about this flick is that it heralds leading man Glen Powell with his arrival at some sort of apex level of success or stardom, and, honestly, why do people continue to talk like this? That kind of promotional bullshit should have died a long time ago, long before covid, long before OJ killed his ex-wife and her partner. These people are not our friends.

These relentless shitbags are in it for money and fame. Praising someone to the heavens so that he can become the next Tom Cruise is not something worth doing, unless you get rid of the previous one.

If he were a major acting talent, maybe you could justify all that bullshit, but, I’ve seen him in two films thus far, and as far as I can tell he read his lines well and doesn’t appear drunk on set. That’s not a justification for crowning him the next King of Moomba or anything.

dirs.: Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg

2024

What makes me even angrier about this movie is that when I heard that there was a horror flick called Tarot which was presumably about tarot cards, or something, I was actually excited about it?

What a fool I was! What was I thinking?

This will probably be the strangest thing I’ve ever admitted to in a review, in any review, but I actually adore tarot cards. I’ve always loved them. I’m not joking, I collect tarot card packs and have always loved them.

But don’t confuse a hobby / predilection / interest with agreement with the whole fortune-telling / divination bullshit – not for a second have I ever believed in the predictive power of the cards, nor have I ever desperately done a reading looking for Tattslotto numbers or as to where I would one day find my One True Love (turned out it was down the pub).

What I have always loved about the cards is the cards themselves, the images on the cards, the history behind them, the major arcana and the minor arcana, and that, depending on the pack, you can get images filled with explicit or subtle imagery and symbolism, or minimalist ones, or ones that err more on the side of purely aesthetics.

I love them all, from the traditional like the Rider-Waite pack to the more esoteric.

This flick, based on a book I’ll never read, takes tarot cards, the idea and the image of them, and just basically takes a huge dump over their whole existence.

(Sous la Seine)

dir: Xavier Gens

2024

Shark movies are pretty simple. Sharks eat people. And yet the list of really good shark-based action flicks is pretty short. There’s of course Jaws. There’s The Shallows. Maybe Deep Blue Sea, but we’re tipping over into camp territory here, which leaves us with the deliberate z-grade insanity and inanity of Sharknado, and that’s it. The sequels of even these decent flicks are uniformly terrible, but that’s okay.

The template is set. Sharks still eat people. The person that knows about the shark isn’t believed until it’s too late. And then there’s always the temptation to fuck with that simplicity, which is rarely resisted.

Jaws 4: The Revenge has many jaw-dropping scenes, all for the wrongest of reasons, but, other than the shame of admitting that I’ve watched it, there’s the admission that I carry the cursed knowledge that only this movie could provide audiences.

There’s the (insane, stupid, utterly bonkers) notion that these large sharks can harbour specific malice against particular people and their families. The widow of Chief Brody (Lorraine Gary) from the first two flicks, intones with a slightly manic but also weary tone that it wasn’t really a heart attack that killed her beloved husband, it was really The Shark! Which shark, since they killed all those sharks? No, it was the Fear of the Shark that killed him! And now it’s (another large shark, for some reason) again after The Brodys. Because it can somehow track them across the world, having sniffed their DNA, maybe. And it must have its Revenge! Or are they the ones getting Revenge because they somehow killed the hero of the first two Jaws with their Fear voodoo?

Who knows? Not me, and not the makers of any of these movies. Xavier Gens has clearly seen all of the shark movies, as have many of us, and has made one that gets the whole thing right, based on the original’s template. It gets it right even down to the memorable detail of having a mayor be an obstacle to public safety because of a grasping aspiration towards power and financial concerns.

(Nu astepta prea mult de la sfârsitul lumii)

dir: Radu Jude

2023

This is a lot of film to unpack.

I can’t say I know much, if anything, about Romanian cinema, having not knowingly ever watched a film from there as far as I know. I know about this director here, and Cristian Mungiu, and that’s about it.

And I know even less about Romania itself. Based on this flick, or these flicks…I am not going to pretend I know anything about Romanian life, but I do have impressions. I have opinions.

The title of this flick intrigued me too much for me to ignore it, and now, after nearly three hours of this experience, I feel like I can talk about it, finally.

There is a lot of driving in this flick, as in, a lot of a camera focused on a woman, being our main character Angela Răducanu (Ilinca Manolache), driving around the city of Bucharest for hours and hours as she tries to make her living. There are also scenes from a Romanian movie from the 1980s called Angela Moves On, about a woman driving a taxi around the streets of Bucharest, interspersed throughout the movie. Both of the leads are called Angela. And later in the movie our main character Angela meets up with the actress who played Angela in the earlier movie, being Dorina Lazar, again playing that character as if she’s a real person.

What does it all mean? I have no idea. I don’t know enough about anything to really know. There are the obvious elements of paralleling of their lives and times onscreen, but there’s also the element that films contemporary Angela in some / many of the same places that 80s Angela drives through or around. And some of it shows how little the place has changed, whereas some scenes are shot in areas where nothing remains due to the depredations of former despot Nicolae Ceauşescu.

dir: Dr George Miller

2024

You’ve got to admit, this is a fine looking movie. Like, I’m not a car guy, in that I don’t salivate over cars or read car magazines or care about them at all, but if I see a fine looking vehicle, it stands out, even to me.

This film just looks amazing. For a representation of an ecologically doomed Australia in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, there sure are a lot of bright blues, yellows and deep reds.

And some shiny, shiny rigs.

The people look pretty shiny and weird too. I don’t think any part of this is trying to look realistic. It’s trying to look mythic, and it quite often succeeds.

Since this director has been making Mad Max films since the 1970s, I can’t really fault him for making the same kind of flick again and again, and also, I can’t really imagine anything more pointless than an origin story for the Furiosa character. Her origin story, for all that we needed to know, occurred in Fury Road. She drives cars and trucks real good, she’s missing an arm, she’s mean as fuck and she hates the jerks who rule the wasteland.

That’s all we needed to know. The look of absolute contempt Charlize Theron aimed at most people, but especially at Tom Hardy as some kind of rejiggered Max was more than enough to know everything we needed to know about Furiosa.

But Dr Miller figured there was essential stuff we absolutely needed to know about the past. Backstory to be filled out. Details to unpack. References to reference.

It’s his call, and he is absolutely meticulous about it.

The wasteland is a terrible and unforgiving place, still. But there was one enclave, one green place left, and little Furiosa was from there. A place of abundance. With trees, and peaches, even.

And then some jerk bastards on bikes came along and kidnapped her, prompting her mother to grab her sniper rifle and go off in pursuit.

dir: Jalmari Helander

2022

Now, having watched a film where people skilfully murder legions of Nazis a couple of nights ago, I decided to stick with the theme and watch another film about someone murdering Nazis, except this one is more of a one-man-genocide type of thing, and he never asked for it anyway.

He didn’t start the fight, but he’s going to finish it.

In the last days of World War II, Nazis are fleeing Finland, but they’re also scorching the earth as they retreat, laying land mines and slaughtering innocents just for the fuck of it on their way out the door. A platoon of salty fuckers come across a man who was minding his own business, and try to end him for whatever he was carrying, which in this case happens to be a shitload of gold that he dug up himself.

Nazis, being Nazis, don’t know how to share, or just let people be. So Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila) is forced to painfully slaughter these malign idiots one by one.

It’s funny to me that this flick, with a different emphasis and shift of perspective, and a bit of re-writing, could just as easily be a story where a scared, remorseful squad of Nazi deserters are terrorised and gruesomely dispatched by a ruthless, almost mythological monster, picking them off in the dark or through the fog until the last man is left standing, or clutching a bloodied stump.

This is, like all films about World War II currently, indebted openly to fucking Quentin Tarantino, and not only his take on Italian 70s exploitation trash like Inglourious Basterds, but also his reinterpretation / re-appropriation of Sergio Leonie’s spaghetti Western motifs, musical cues, even down to the goddamn fonts (and their colour) used for the onscreen text. It’s, like, I’m sick of Tarantino’s infection infecting everything (which was painfully obvious in Guy Ritchie’s recent The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare), but it’s not ill-used here.

What is the purpose of this movie… well, everyone else gets to make patriotic movies about what badasses they are, why not the Finns? In Aatami, as per the title of the movie, they have the literal embodiment of a national character trait they believe is not only specific to Finns, but that it’s untranslatable to non-Finnish speakers. It’s beyond stoicism, beyond resoluteness, beyond grit and determination. Beyond brutal.

It’s probably a crock of shit, and I roll my eyes whenever I hear anyone say something so patronising as “oh, well, this concept doesn’t translate properly into your petty bullshit language”.

dir: Guy Ritchie

2024

Pish-posh fiddle-faddle jibber-jabber chuckaboo collie-shangies toodle-pip dimber-damber nanty narking whooperups.

All those interjections existed before I existed or wrote them down, and they’re actual phrases dating from the Victorian era, when Victoria ruled much of the world, apparently. Somehow, for reasons beyond me, this is the cartoonish level of flimflammery that Guy Ritchie, a Brit himself, chooses to use in order to tell and sell a story about some chaps who gave the Germans what-for, during the war.

It is a completely fake version of Britishness that Brits happily still recreate in truest pantomime form for movies they hope to “sell” to American audiences, predominately.

Everyone’s always asking for tea. People talk about cricket. Characters who would otherwise have working class accents have posh accents, and vice versa. The Germans won’t know or understand what hit them.

That this film is based around an actual thing that happened during the war doesn’t make any of it look or feel any less cartoonish, and that some of these chaps played by Henry Cavill, Hero Fiennes Tiffin and Carey Elwes actually existed. But we’re not meant to mutter “that never fucking happened” under our breaths while watching this movie any more than we were while watching Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds back in 2009.

dir: Alec Tibaldi

2024

So, quite often, because I’ve watched so many films, I often feel like I’ve watched a film before even when I’m seeing it for the first time.

That’s not the same as times when I’ve watched a film and forgotten it, only to watch it again down the track and realise “oh shit, I’ve already seen this.”

Such different circumstances. What I’m actually getting at is that so many screenwriters seem to be starting from exactly the same place.

In premise, and at least initially, this is pretty much the same set up as a Nicolas Cage film I watched a couple of weeks ago, called Arcadian. Except instead of a sweaty, concerned Nicolas Cage bringing up two boys after an apocalypse, we have a decidedly non-sweaty Ashley Judd bringing up two girls after an apocalypse.

Pretty much Ashley Judd is, therefore, playing Nicolas Cage.

In this version of that story, there are no monsters eating people with hyperactive hypermobile mouths, but there is a virus.

A virus, huh? Who could have thought of that?

In voiceover an aunty’s dulcet tones tells her charges of the world that existed before the virus, and of the idyllic place they now live at, one which protects and sustains them, far from the ruins of what looks like Seattle, in a forest.

dir: Moritz Mohr

2024

This film is absolutely brutal and absolutely frenetic and yet still doesn’t entirely work.

I can’t say I had a ball watching it for most of its running time, but at least during the majority of the action sequences I was thinking “damn, these are some incredibly strong action sequences”.

If there is a problem, and I’m not saying there is, necessarily, because after all it’s just my opinion, man, it’s that while a revenge epic with head smashing, limb tearing bone crunching action can be entertaining, something with this much voiceover or narration or anything where a voice is talking this fucking much, is never going to fly that well, no matter who you get in to do the voiceover.

Also, why is the main character a deaf mute?

I’m sure if you asked the screenwriters nicely, they’d say “Well, because…” and then they might trail off, thinking about how they can’t really remember, because they were stoned at the time, but there was some reason they thought it would be cool, and then they realised it would make the flick a headache to make, but then they pressed on because they didn’t want to admit it was a stupid idea.

There is no reason why the Boy of the title is deaf and mute. There is rarely a good reason in any movie to have a character be deaf or mute, unless you’re adding something to give the character obstacles to overcome, or something for the character to come to terms with in order to understand themselves or the people they care about or some other bullshit. Or, you know, casting a person who is deaf and mute, with all that it entails, and the representation it brings.

And to then have a voice as recognisable as H. Jon Benjamin, I mean come on. I have actually read that when the film was first completed and shown at some film festivals, all the narration originally was done by Bill Skarsgård himself. And then either audiences didn’t care or the producers got antsy and thought “let’s bring in a comic-type voice guy and try to make it more of a jokey-larf comedy type thing”

dir: Brad Peyton

2024

Like, did you ever want to watch a whole movie where Jennifer Lopez argues continuously with her GPS / Alexa / Siri for two hours?

Because if you have a subscription to Neflix, all this and more can be bafflingly yours.

This curious lite sci-fi flick has a hero, being JLo, representing humanity, and a villain, Harlan (Simu Liu), representing AI. Don’t worry yourself, the flick goes to absolutely no trouble to define or explain what AI means in this context: all it means is when computers or robots want to kill us.

Like almost every instance of cinematic AI, in this film’s world, an AI that was otherwise docile has a moment and loses its shit, and infects all the other AIs, and they start killing humanity. So it’s Skynet, but instead of the Austrian beefcake of a young Arnold Schwarzenegger representing the AI, it’s the young handsome features of Simu Liu, but with blue eyes, so we know he’s evil.

He has decided that in order to save humanity he has to kill most of them, but leave a tiny fraction alive, to keep as pets, maybe? Anyway, in the middle of some crucial battle he flies off into outer space, eventually to return, we presume.

Twenty eight years later, a woman called Atlas, being JLo, who clearly is carrying the whole world on her shoulders, gets a chance to find out where he is so she can presumably kill him, kill him dead, and save humanity.

She is very distrustful of AI technology, but, wouldn’t you know it, the plot compels her to put aside her misgivings about AIs in order to bond with an AI in order to bring Harlan down. So the vast majority of this movie is watching JLo arguing with someone who isn’t there physically. Because us humans are quite dumb, and nowhere near as smart as AIs, to represent this disembodied AI, we are shown a glowing orb of some description, blue and yellow, sort of, so we know that she isn’t completely crazy and just talking to herself.

What doesn’t help, in terms of not seeming ‘crazy’, is that fucking hairstyle.

dir: David Leitch

2024

If you’ve ever read any of my reviews, you would occasionally see me ask the question “who is this for” or “what is the intended audience for this flick?” Sometimes it’s rhetorical, because I can’t figure it out. Other times I’m making the statement to shame the filmmakers for pandering to a particular imagined section of society.

And if you haven’t read any of my reviews, you wouldn’t have noticed that, and you’re not reading this now, or ever, so, yes, I am talking to myself again.

Other times I ask myself the question while watching a film, and then I figure it out as a painful realisation dawns upon me.

Why you would be using fifty year old KISS songs on a soundtrack, why you would have multiple references to the Miami Vice tv show, why you would even resurrect a tv show from the 80s that this arises from, that starred Lee Majors, why you would then have visual and auditory call backs to The Six Million Dollar Man, which also starred Majors, why you would even be talking about the mechanics of filmmaking and the logistics of stuntwork, and then have an abundance of other references to the ancient times of yore?

And then it hit me, and I felt a deep, deep shame. The audience, imagined or otherwise, was me, specifically me, and other fat movie nerds of my exact vintage.

Much younger people than I, like, my kid’s age, don’t care about movies and don’t know, or get, any references earlier than the late 2000s. People older than me routinely yell “EH?” and cup their hand over one of their ears because they didn’t quite hear what you just said, or they didn’t understand most of the words you used in a sentence. You would say “it was a tv show in the 80s with Lee Majors”, and then they’d think you were talking about Lee Marvin, and start talking about how great he was in Cat Ballou and what a lovely singing voice he had in Paint Your Wagon.

悪は存在しない
Aku wa Sonzai Shinai

dir: Ryusuke Hamaguchi

2024

This film’s title is awfully similar to another film from a few years ago, being There is No Evil, by Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof, but they are making very different points.

The earlier film is about how terrible the theocratic regime in Iran is and has been for the last forty years, tormenting, executing and terrorising its own citizens for having the temerity to exist and breathe. This Japanese film makes the point that no evil exists, in the natural world. Until maybe it spontaneously pops into existence for brief moments in time.

Mohammad Rasoulof has now fled from Iran, and probably won’t be returning any time soon, since, for his crime of accurately representing the barbarity of his home country’s ruling totalitarian regime, he has been convicted of crimes against the state. Ryusuke Hamaguchi probably isn’t facing any such punishment from the Japanese government, mostly because, for all their faults, they don’t execute or convict people for making movies, or for being artists, or for being women.

That being said, I can imagine that there might be a fair few people who would wish this director bodily harm over the way the film ends…

If you’re familiar with Hamaguchi’s work, or his celebrated 3 hour low-key epic Oscar winning flick Drive My Car, you know his films spool out at a leisurely rate. He is in no rush to do anything, ever. He’s happy to plonk a camera down in a spot and have it record acres and acres of footage of stuff happening or not happening, until the batteries run out. Perhaps like in the gargantuan films of Andrei Tarkovsky himself, Hamagushi uses the opening hour or so of a flick to weed out the impatient and the hyperactive from the audience.

Thankfully, this flick is only an hour and 40 or so minutes long, and it practically flies by. In comparison. Only in comparison.

The first ten minutes of this flick is footage of a camera being pulled slowly through a forest, as the camera records the overcast sky through the treetops. A lush orchestral piece plays as an accompaniment, but whatever warmth or comfort it might have provided, the music becomes strident, and almost threatening, before cutting off abruptly. The next twenty minutes or so is spent recording a man chopping wood and filling containers with spring water, chat with a guy about wild wasabi, and then rush to his young daughter when he realises he’s forgotten to pick her up from day care.

dir: Alejandro Monteverde

2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

dir: Luca Guadagnino

2024

Well. That was… something.

I’m not entirely sure what. I feel like I’ve been tricked by a film again, but I can’t accuse it of a bait-and-switch, because the bait was “hot young tennis players in steamy love triangle”, which was never that appealing, and the “switch”, given the ending, is “absolutely nothing.”

My one point of interest in watching this is that Luca Guadagnino is making interesting films, sometimes with Tilda Swinton, sometimes, like this one, without. I think there’s an aspect of the film that REALLY interested or energised him greatly, which is the relationship between Patrick and Art (Josh O’Connor who is trying to be in everything currently, and Mike Faist), there’s an aspect that somewhat interests him, being the motivations and machinations of le femme athlétique Tashi (Zendaya).

And then there’s… I dunno, a lot of hollow nonsense to fill out the already lengthy running time. This is definitely one of those films that feels longer than what the clock tells you. Though having said that, I wasn’t really bored, but I wasn’t really enraptured either.

This flick tells a story about three people in a non-linear way, having something happen in the “present”, then thirteen years in the past, and then it jumps all over the place with the lynchpin being what’s happening at a low grade tournament in New Rochelle, New York, proudly sponsored by Phil’s Tyre Town. It will then jump randomly weeks before, hours before, days before, a decade again, and you think it’s building towards explanation or meaning, but you realise the revelations of the past don’t really amount to much.

I mean, there’s info we want to know, somewhat. Like, we might be curious as to how and why Tashi went from a world-class player to a coach living through her husband’s success, when she was so driven and fixated on success. We wonder why Patrick is pretty much homeless, despite that charming smile and those sticky-outy ears of his.

dir: Julio Torres

2023

Problemista is, I guess, by its very nature, a pretty niche seeming movie, and while I’d never argue that its themes are universal (especially for the mostly whitebread hipster audience that would even make the time to watch such a film), they impact millions of people's lives in the States, but it’s treated here with a comical and deeply absurdist approach that doesn’t detract from its overall message.

What are its overall messages? Well, the first one is that anyone in or around the Arts ‘industry’ is a monster and should be totally avoided at all costs, because they only bring misery to the people around them. That checks out. Tilda Swinton plays that embodiment of the terribleness of arts-adjacent curators/creators/parasites/critics as The Hydra / Elizabeth.

The real message is that the work visa scheme, the pathway to being able to stay and work in the United States, is an absurdist, coldly cruel, convoluted and contradictory nightmare that puts people through hell for no better reason than appealing to voters by saying “we’re tough on immigrants”, as if that’s a good thing. You can’t earn while in this state but you still have to pay about $6000 in fees, in order to get sponsored by someone, but they can’t sponsor you until you start earning, so you have to earn cash money for it to be hidden, and if you get caught or they decline to sponsor you, you’re kicked out anyway.

It’s a Kafkaesque nightmare that would bring Kafka himself to say “this is needlessly cruel dehumanising bullshit.”

dir: Ira Sachs

2023

I watched a profoundly stupid film a couple of nights ago (no, not this one here), and one of the many exceedingly stupid moments, doubled, involves multiple people receiving a bullet through a “vascular corridor” or passage, which looks like it’s a deathly wound, straight through the heart

It’s a location so carefully calibrated that if it’s done right, not one but two people get to survive being shot in the chest. A bullet, passing through your heart, that somehow doesn’t kill the person it’s happened to.

I thought of this when I was watching this film here Passages. In fact it’s the only positive thing that’s stayed with me from the entire experience of watching the other movie. To be fair, and I don’t want to be, to the other movie, that idea was ripped off from earlier movies, possibly even the Zhang Yimou flick Hero from over twenty years ago? Fuck!, which had someone ‘pretend’ to kill an opponent with a sword, but who perfectly places the sword stroke such that it looks like a fatal heart wound, but it’s only a scratch.

I’m belaboring the point, but this flick is called Passages, and those other flicks reference a way of giving people mortal wounds through their hearts, and yet the victims keep on living.

Maybe it won’t be a good life, but alive they remain, because of that mysterious vascular passage.

dirs: Indianna Bell & Josiah Clark

2023

Thank you, yet again, Shudder. Without you, I’d have to watch, uh, something else on some other streaming service.

This Australian horror flick has appeared, indistinct, barely visible, just out of sight, gradually coming out of the gloom, on this most excellent of streaming services, and as such I went into this knowing absolutely nothing about it, other than that it was a newish flick with sterling reviews (overseas).

It’s not for everyone. It’s mostly set in one location. Scratch that, it’s only shot in one location, and only has two actors in it who speak. One of them is Patrick (Brendan Rock), who lives in a trailer home somewhere near the coast, and the other is the visitor who knocks on his door during a storm (Jordan Cowan).

It is really pouring down outside, at least that’s what it sounds like to Patrick. Before there’s even a knock at the door he seems distraught, or drunk, or both.

Things you can tell just by looking at him: he’s on his own, and probably has been for a long time. Isolation, we might think, has brought him to a place of paranoia and fear of the world outside his trailer. However long it’s been since he’s had a visitor, he does not seem to be that welcoming, telling the woman knocking to fuck off.

Nevertheless, she persists, and he eventually lets her in, dripping wet and muddy footed. She’s very grateful, and seems a bit confused about where she came from, how she got to his trailer, and where she should be going.

dir: Matthew Vaughn

2024

Who is this movie for?

Sometimes the (imagined) answer can be illuminating, if you can get close to the movie production’s thinking. Mostly, it’s an excuse for baseless speculation and mean-spirited conjecture on the part of jerks just like me.

If I was to be cynical, and cavalier, which is not a state that comes naturally to me, I would guess that this was kinda sorta aimed at a middle-aged, middle-class ‘white’ female audience. The kind “they” imagine reads trashy thriller / romance novels in a bubble bath while drinking large glasses of wine. There might be the glow of candles present as well.

What I’m getting at is that this is an imagined category, not necessarily by creative people, but by the types of people who work in marketing. They imagine that there’s a market of abundant gin-soaked ladies who would want to burst into a cinema after a boozy afternoon in order to watch the same kind of wish-fulfilment action flicks that usually cater to men who watch in between picking up the remnants of chips or twisties that have fallen onto their chests. Maybe the crumbs fell inside their t-shirts even, which makes them even harder to get at.

Life is a struggle. But the imagined middle-aged woman, who, for some reason still really likes Barry White and all disco music in general, doesn’t like violent action flicks where people get shot in the head or have their limbs sliced off – they want the same kind of action (apparently), just without any blood and with lots and lots of colour.

dir: Alberto Corredor

2023

What a strange movie. Imagine your father dying, in a horrible seeming accident, and you find out you’ve inherited a pub from him in Berlin. Berlin! And not even a good pub.

And it’s not even an ongoing business, so you don’t even have to go to the trouble of disappointing the regulars by telling them you don’t want them coming around anymore, and that you want a better class of patrons to frequent the place, not you rusted on day drinkers and shambolic alcoholics. I don’t know if German people put bets on dog races, but it’d be that level of peeps.

And they’d be the types that would nurse a pint for over an hour, because they’re there just for the familiarity, the routine, and not the ambience or the 20 Euro cocktails or the loaded bratwurst.

Maybe you’d meet a local, or a rival pub owner, and after an hour and a half of rivalry and misunderstandings, maybe finally, someone would run somewhere just in time to stop the other from leaving forever, and they’d kiss passionately as the orchestra swells, the music builds (unfortunately it’s oompah oompah polka music with all the tuba you can handle), and the happily ever afters start as the credits roll.

This is not that film. This film is about evil things, not love. This is about grief, with no consolation. And it’s also about how young people with nothing will fall victim to any scam or scheme that will give them even a hint of money for their troubles.

dirs: Tricia Cooke & Ethan Coen

2024

I have to admit that I went into this flick a bit annoyed from the get go. The knowledge that Pedro Pascal was in the flick was definitely something that attracted me towards it. Seeing him killed within the first few minutes is… a guarantee that I’m going to be off-put or put off, take yer pick.

Classic bait and switch. Worst of all they seem to reference what was for me one of the most horrific onscreen character deaths in a tv show that I’ve ever seen, being the brutal death of Oberyn Martell in Game of Thrones.

Too soon. You don’t get to joke about that, to me. Still hurts.

So. Chap nervously cradling briefcase is murdered, presumably the people who acquired the briefcase have alternative plans for it. Those plans involve transporting the briefcase, and a bag with Pedro’s head in it, to Tallahassee, Florida. Instead of doing so with a modicum of forethought or intelligence, the criminals somehow fuck it up.

Enter our two protagonists, onto the scene. Two friends. One is a confident and assertive lesbian called Jamie (Margaret Qualley) shown cheating on her cop partner as the flick begins. The other is a less assertive, more insecure lesbian called Marian (played by Australia’s Own Geraldine Viswanathan), who isn’t cheating on anybody anytime soon. She is more inhibited, which we know because she wears tight-laced blouses that seem to be strangling her throat.

For…reasons, they end up driving a rental car down to Tallahassee. The car happens to have the briefcase and the head loosely stored in the trunk.

So, is this a comic caper, a violent Tarantino-esque lolfest with pithy dialogue and a score of soon-to-be-classic lines? Or is it a serious crime drama about two completely different people realising how deeply incompatible they are, deciding after much travail to go their separate ways?

dir: Benjamin Brewer

2024

This is a surprisingly good action-y horror flick, and the main reason I say that with surprise is that Nicolas Cage is in it, and doesn’t really overact at all.

Which is… sometimes it feels like I criticise Nicolas Cage for overacting and for underacting and generally for acting, and it feels like I’m not fair to the guy at all.

Seriously, anyone could have played the role he plays here, that’s how unnecessary he is in the scheme of things. Nah, that’s unfair again.

This is a post-apocalyptic flick, in that something happened, civilisation fell apart, and a man (Cage) brought up his two sons on some isolated farm. The film starts with Cage’s character strapping on a back pack and hightailing it out of a wartorn city, struggling to get to two baby boys, who don’t seem that grateful to see him, after all he must have done to get back to them…

Fifteen years later, they live a strange existence on this farm which makes it look like they’re really afraid of vampires or something. Maybe werewolves. Regardless, it’s well into the movie before the threat is shown. We know they’re some kind of creature afraid of or pissed off by daylight, and they have serious claws.

Could be big angry guinea pigs? After Cage and his boys, at sundown, batten down the hatches and secure every window and door, something attacks one of the barricaded doors repeatedly. And it sounds pretty pissed off. Like it really, really likes eating humans.

dir: Luca Guadagnino

2018

You might be asking yourself as to why I’m reviewing a six-year old movie when there are all sorts of films, contemporary or otherwise, that I could be finally getting around to seeing. I’ve been trying to make myself (almost at gunpoint) watch this for years, and I finally made myself do it.

Also, since Luca Guadagnino has the quite successful Challengers in cinemas at the moment, I thought I’d look back before looking forward.

Part of my reluctance to really watch this remake / redo all the way through is that I adore the original Suspiria. Seriously one of my favourite films. That’s not the same as me saying I think it’s a great film. It’s definitely not one of the greatest flicks of all time.

It was a lot of things. It was like the most extreme alternate reality version of an Alice in Wonderland-like story that you’ll probably ever see that isn’t pornographic. It had a strong visual palate that’s been imitated continuously since then. It also had a magnificent soundtrack by progressive metal band Goblin that I had a CD copy of.

Remember CDs? They were great! Their cases were perfect for doing lines on…

But anyway. I’m not a purist that hates the idea of flicks being remade in principle, but the idea of someone remaking Suspiria filled me with trepidation. I can’t claim to know Luca Guadagnino’s oeuvre that definitively, but I’ve seen enough to know that he’s a careful filmmaker. I loved his Io Sonno Amore / I Am Love way back in the day, which was when I thought he started working with Tilda Swinton. And I thought highly enough of Call Me By Your Name, before we got sick of Timothee Chalomet being everywhere, and before finding out Armie Hammer was a sadistic cannibal.

This flick is plenty faithful to the original film. Many of the same characters appear. The setting is similar, in that it’s a German dance academy, and the protagonist is again a naïf waif from America. Jessica Harper, who played the lead in the original back in the 70s, gets to have a cameo appearance, which is the price of entry.

But the new Susie Bannon is played by Dakota Johnson. She is a Mennonite from Ohio. When people ask her where she’s from, they don’t believe the answer.

How does a Mennonite, which is a step removed from the Amish (who they hate with a passion), get to be a dance star?

Isn’t that the thing about dance? With enough talent, drive, determination, hard work, starving yourself and nicotine you, too, can come from anywhere and become the lead in a hardcore dance troupe.

dir: Christos Massalas

2022

What is this film about…

I’m not entirely sure. It’s maybe about a bunch of people who have ended up as outcasts, of a sort, who gravitate to a mothballed theatre called the Broadway, somewhere in Athens, who get through life as petty criminals.

But that would be a simplistic rendering. The main character is Nelly (Elsa Lekakou), or at least I assume she’s the Main Character because she often shares her thoughts with us, the shmucks in the audience. She seems like she gives zero fucks about anything, but I think that might not be entirely true.

She implies that she is fleeing from a wealthy family, for reasons that are not shared with us, so she doesn’t do what she does, whether it’s stripping or aiding the other pickpockets, for the money, per se. She doesn’t have expensive habits, since her one vice seems to be petrol sniffing.

I have to admit that I was stunned when that was shown, but then I remembered that Greece has been an economic basket case for decades, and then it made perfect sense. If petrol is about 2 euro a litre in Greece, and she only needs to half fill a small bottle, she can get a numbing buzz for a few cents at a time, which lasts days and days.

Please don’t see this as endorsement: I’m still horrified.

When hired goons turn up where she works, and try to manhandle her, a steely eyed grey haired crim called Markos (Stathis Apostolou) knocks them about and “rescues” her. In her voiceover, she relates to us her general luck in getting out of sticky situations: someone always comes along and rescues her, which she is tired of, because for once she wishes she could be the one doing the rescuing.

dir: Adam Wingard

2024

I thought it would be “funny” to review Godzilla Minus One, a ‘serious’ throwback take on the genre that reviewers treated like it was Important and Meaningful, and then Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, which no-one thought was important and meaningful, but does have no Japanese people in it and giant creatures fighting each other which totally don’t exist as a metaphor about scientific hubris or humanity’s place in the universe or anything, for that matter

I set myself these pointless little tasks because it amuses me, and it just makes my life harder for no good reason, but I stick to my pointless and arbitrary tasks, because someone has to…

So having watched the Toho - Japanese retro version, I am now set to review the ‘American’ version, which is from the Chinese film production company Legendary Films.

They could not be more different. I am sure such statements shock and confound the reader. This has far more scenes of giant creatures trashing and thrashing each other, killing probably hundreds of thousands of people, but that’s not a big deal anymore? In this world that they’ve put together, which initially mimicked the progression of the Japanese monster flicks by having Godzilla fight more and more monsters, instead has conjured a world where, yes, many of these so called Titans exist, but there’s also this supra-government entity called Monarch that tries to control or nudge the Titans depending on what they’re doing.

You might think their main task would be saving people’s lives but that wouldn’t look as interesting on the big screen, I guess.

And I didn’t really mind, to be honest. These Godzilla versus or Kong times etc flicks have zero regard for human life except for whoever the filmmakers put forward as the representatives of humanity, because tonnes of faceless people die, since the major punch ups always happen in populated areas, but it’s accepted as like the cost of doing business.

If all you want is to watch CGI Godzilla fight CGI King Kong, and then CGI other giant creatures, why would you care about the humans at all? Humans are like puny ants at the feet of these gods.

dir: Takashi Yamazaki

2023

And none too soon, finally, the sequel to Oppenheimer.

A joke already old and stale (in 2024), but I felt obligated to go with it anyway.

In a world where the contemporary American version of Godzilla is wary best buds with King Kong as they fight with all manner of giant monsters for the benefit, somehow, of humanity, the Japanese filmmakers, with their OG Godzilla, have chosen to go way back in time, back to the dark days just after the war.

Like they didn’t have enough to worry about…

See, this is a bit fascinating to me. For people who know a little bit about Japanese cinema, especially post-World War II, it’s interesting to see something set just after the war, because in Japan at that time, the Americans were in charge for a good long while. One of the prohibitions they had in place was that Japanese film studios couldn’t make any movies about the war or about just how horrible the reconstruction of the country was. They didn’t want to risk audiences getting riled up with propaganda pieces about how noble the Emperor was, how great his armies, and how unfair it was that the Americans annihilated so many of them.

So that’s one of the main reasons why almost every Japanese flick from the late 1940s – 1950s was generally a samurai era set period piece (chambera, I believe the genre was called).

And then there’s Godzilla from 1954, seventy goddamn years ago.

Everyone and his or her dog has an opinion on what Godzilla represents, but let’s just forestall any more bullshit theorising – obviously the Japanese mindset was horribly impacted by having two atom bombs dropped on two of their cities, killing hundreds of thousands, and then even more over time. Godzilla doesn’t exist, even as a fictional character, without American testing of nuclear bombs (in the original it was ‘hydrogen bombs’, just to please the censors).

Godzilla is the unforeseen legacy of the atomic age. But in this flick Godzilla is the personal nemesis of one guy who was too cowardly to fulfil his mission as a kamikaze pilot.

dir: Warwick Thornton

2023

This flick is a bit of a wonder.

I think when it was screened at Cannes the year before, it was in the form of a two hour movie. When it was released in cinemas it had been trimmed down to about 90 minutes. The version I watched is the two hour version, so I can’t comment on the theatrical release, because…

Why would anyone want a Warwick Thornton film to be any shorter?

If you are a fan of his films and of his cinematography, you would want everything to be fifteen hours long and never end.

One of my favourite things he’s been involved in was The Beach, which was a strange 6 episode 3 hour ‘doco’ about Warwick in a shack on a beach, and that’s about it. You watch him curse at some chooks, plant some seeds and call them “bastards” while doing so, drive in an ancient jeep, do some fishing and cooking, and… it goes on for hours and hours, with lots of drone footage, and lots of static shots that go on for eternity.

They played this on NITV / one of the SBS channels way back during the lockdowns, under the banner of “slow tv”, which was something, perversely, many of us got into during a time when we couldn’t go anywhere. Four hour train journeys with minimal cuts. Drone footage of beaches that go on for days and days. It was very therapeutic, thanks.

dir: Dev Patel

2024

I dunno – I think the argument about who should be the next James Bond’s just been settled.

Not only should Dev Patel play Bond next, he makes a strong case for directing the next Bond film as well.

That’s not meant as any disrespect to the other (pseudo) fan frontrunner, which is what certain chumps have been saying about Idris Elba for the last twenty years. The absolute truth is there is no way Barbara Broccoli would agree to either of them playing the role, lest she be hung at the Tower of London by a lynch mob made up of the last gasps of British colonialism made up of Nigel Farage, Jacob Rees-Mogg, the ghost of Prince Phillip and Rishi Sunak, ironically enough.

Nah, if anything he’s now overqualified.

He made this flick for $10mill, which is practically unheard of. And to the dinguses that will accuse him of ripping off the John Wick franchise, I tell you not only do they have their math wrong, they have zero knowledge of action movie history if they think the genre started and ended with Keanu fucking Reeves.