fresh movie reviews for a socially distanced world

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.

dir: Alex Garland

2024

I remember when I first heard that such a flick as this was coming out, I thought “too soon”. I thought it would be about the abject and persistent stupidity of the Trump years resulting in some ill-considered what if? scenario whereby even worse things happened than what happened, like, millions of deaths and such due to covid-related madness.

And then when I found out “it’s not about America’s gun obsession or the orange emperor – it’s about war correspondent journalists” I thought it would be an odd concoction, indeed.

I wasn’t really worried about the current status of legacy journalism. I mean, we all should be, since the blank eyed salamanders of Silicon Valley and venture capital have gutted newsrooms and papers the world over, to be replaced with whatever trenchant thoughts complete idiots think need to be loaded into the push notifications on our phones. But honestly the last time I thought about war correspondent photographers was… never.

They can look after themselves. There have always been sets of clichés about them, like they’re a cut above regular boring journalists because they put themselves in such proximity to danger for the good of the rest of us. The main cliché in American stuff that I recall is the one about how they all wear vests with pockets and such, and that they’re undependable adrenalin junkies who don’t feel alive unless bullets are flying past their ears.

I don’t feel any particular way about them, though I am in general a fan of journalists and journalism. Photographers on the other hand…

dirs: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillet

2024

Abigail is a ‘perfect’ action-y horror-ish flick to watch on a Saturday night after the better part of a six-pack has been consumed. For some people a six-pack will have them giggling like idiots, and for others a six-pack consumed means you’re barely getting started.

I’m not here to argue the merits of alcoholism and such, but I will make the (weak) case for Abigail being a reasonably well done movie of whatever genre it is.

I think it’s impossible to spoil a movie whose poster and ads spoil everything to do with the so-called movie. I’ve seen ads on tv, and if audiences didn’t figure out from that what was going on, they’re probably still going to be confused after they watch the flick.

“wait, so, she’s a mermaid?” they’ll probably ask the person next to them, tapping them on the shoulder, who will recoil and growl “don’t touch me, nothing gives you that right!”

A bunch of professional crims are enlisted for a job. They don’t know each other, but they are competent and do what needs to be done, not knowing until the last moments that they’ve been enlisted to kidnap a young girl who dresses as a ballerina.

She is the Abigail of the title (Alisha Weir). One of the crims, later to be dubbed Joey (Melissa Barrera) enquires as to her wellbeing, and promises her, despite all appearances to the contrary, that she won’t let anything bad happen to Abigail, well, anything worse than being kidnapped and chained up.

Abigail apologises to Joey for everything that’s about to happen.

Hmm. Does she know something that we don’t?

Well, the whole movie is named after her, so she probably is in the know.

The guy that hired them, Lambert (Giancarlo Esposito, wasted in a thankless role), tells them not to tell each other any personal details, so he gives all six of the crims names from the Rat Pack, which turns out to be so pointless. I mean, wonderful history lesson for the kids, but…

dir: Martine Syms

2022

Watching this flick made during the covid era set and filmed at a liberal arts college in upstate New York, the painfully obvious fact hit me that it’s impossible to satirise this setting. It’s beyond satire. Everything that comes out of these people’s mouths sounds like they’re taking the piss.

The first ten minutes of the film involve our main character, being Palace Bryant (Diamond Stingily) having to defend her dissertation for her masters in fine arts. The words that pour forth from the mouths of these people sound like an alien tongue spoken by a species who delight in obscuring all meaning in what they say.

Even though it seems like a strange ritual for its own sake, Palace passes, and has completed her MFA. And that’s it in terms of her academic career, apparently. We spend pretty much 24 hours with Palace as she fends off the urgings of her friends to attend a graduation party that night, that she’s meant to be DJing at.

The whole point of the flick would be obvious if I’d mentioned it earlier: it’s not a film about what it was like to finish an MFA from Bard: it’s about what it was like for an African-American artist to attend school at a so-called bastion of liberalism, only to find out they’re just as racist as the Republican Party.

Yee haw. Palace herself seems to barge through life with few fucks given, but the aggressions, both micro and macro, of people who think they’re “allies”, take a toll on her. She is over being at this school (I have no idea what her work is actually like, other than some brief glimpses at the start of some stuff she threw together her work as a sculptor is referenced but not shown), and over being as a fetishized object even by people who are friendly to her.

This sounds more serious that it actually is, because when I say the film covers a day in the life of…, it mostly consists of Palace having conversations with other young people in the barely comprehensible dialect of the youngs, and mostly being plied with drugs. So many drugs! Palace and the people around her take recreational drugs from pretty much 10 minutes after the film starts until virtually the end.

It's meant to be fun, I guess.

dir: Andrew Cumming

2022

This Stone Age-set horror flick was made during the dreaded covid era, but was only released this year in cinemas, I think. It’s a perfect covid era flick: it’s all filmed outdoors, some people are wearing masks, no toilet paper anywhere, fear drives people to do terrible things to each other…

Forty three thousand years ago is long enough ago that you can make up whatever shit you want as to how ‘early’ humans might have acted, thought or behaved. If you believe archaeologists and palaeontologists (and what would they know, being people who’ve devoted their lives to academic study and figuring out what went on literal ages ago), this was before agriculture, before alphabets and before social media. How did they know who to cancel, then?

This flick takes a curious yet welcome approach to how these early humans communicate. I am not going to pretend that I know or knew what “Tola” was prior to this experience, but I can say now that most of our protagonists here speak a made up Basque/Arabic dialect. I don’t know how much to read into that, but for the purposes of our story, I think it runs something like this: A group of ‘early’ homo sapiens travel from possibly the coast of what we call Spain today to the eastern shores of what we call Scotland these days.

How do I know any of that? I don’t. I know it was filmed in Scotland, but that doesn’t mean it’s set in Scotland, since 43,000 years ago, it wasn’t called Scotland, it was probably called something like *click* *pop* *snik* “cold death land” or something like it by these people. They’ve left an inhospitable place and come to an even more inhospitable place. Nothing grows on the blasted heath that they can eat, they’re terrified of forests, and there doesn’t seem to be anyone or anything around.

In other words it’s only slightly less hospitable than it is today.

The leader is called Adem (Chuku Modu), and he’s a violent bully and a piece of shit, but in this day and age, that makes you a natural leader. He has a pregnant partner, Ave (Iola Evans) and a teenage son, Heron (Luna Mwezi), and a fearful brother, Geirr (Kit Young). There’s also an old ‘wise’ man, Odal (Arno Luening), and a young woman they refer to as a stray, Beyah (Safia Oakley-Green).

Adem thinks he is the main character and skips reading the assignment. He is incorrect. Beyah is the main character, and she has very much read the assignment.

dir: Sean Durkin

2023

This is such a profoundly sad story, served up with the visual trappings of brawny success and triumph, seemingly about the great achievements of a talented family.

But it’s far more about the catastrophes, some avoidable, some not, faced by successive members of a family ruled by a cruel tyrant.

I can’t speak as to what the actual Fritz Von Erich was like. The actual Kevin Von Erich, not Zac Efron playing him, claims that the film misrepresented what his dad was actually like, and that he was a decent and wonderful man.

And yet…

I wonder what he thinks is the reason that the family went through so much misfortune, with so many of his brothers taking their own lives. I take that back, that was unkind. I have no doubt, being the only one left standing, that he has thought long and hard over the years about everything that happened, as to how and why he lost all of his brothers.

Of course you can argue that the film’s narrative of a toxic father bullying his sons to greatness and that resulting in their early deaths is too neat, too pat, and you’d be right. It takes away people’s agency, implying that the Von Erich brothers all were victims with no ability to make decisions for themselves.

In reality apparently Kevin didn’t think there was a ‘curse’ on the family name “Von Erich”. After all, his father only went by the name, his mother’s maiden name apparently, because he thought it’d pop more since he wrestled as a heel, and post-WWII, who was hated more than the Nazis?

Very different to today, where too many people are being all Nazi-curious. Instead of asking “are we the baddies?” they keep instead asking “were they really so bad?”

Yes. They were. Stop it.

dirs.: Colin & Cameron Cairnes

2024

This is a surprisingly accomplished film, especially for one made in Melbourne. I can’t remember the last time I saw a movie made in Melbourne. Love and other Catastrophes? Chopper? The Book of Revelation?

Fortunately or not, none of ‘Melbourne’ or Naarm factors into the story because it’s set in America in the 1970s, and mostly all transpires in or around a tv studio where a “Tonight” type program is being filmed.

The lead in this is Jack, played by David Dastmalchian, who has often played weirdos or psychos or a combination of both, but here plays the charismatic host of a late night program that is suffering in the ratings and doesn’t look like it’s going to survive. Even if you haven’t watched a tonight show lately, or in the last ten years, or even longer, the format hasn’t changed. There’s a host, there’s a sidekick, there’s a band, and there’s a studio audience made up of clapping seals who applaud and laugh whenever a sign lights up telling them to laugh like the mindless automatons that they are.

There’s musical guests, there’s people with animals, there’s probably movie stars and comedians and, I dunno, local celebrities, and it all transpires under the studio’s bright lights and beige / burnt orange / brown set designs.

But since the ratings for his show, which used to threaten Jimmy Carson, but now are scraping the bottom of the barrel, are terrible, he’s desperate for something to change his loser narrative.

Hence, the occult. The show goes to extreme lengths to court controversy, and there’s nothing more controversial, for the time period, than bringing on a teenage girl who says she’s possessed by a devil.

Not The Devil, mind you, but some other low-ranking shmuck who can still do the scary voices and the rotating head thing.

The ethics of bringing out a clearly mentally ill teenager and putting her in front of a national audience, well, let’s remember the time period. Sexual harassment was mandatory, everyone was smoking, even babies in the womb, and no one ever drank water, only spirits, all of the time, apparently.

dir: Zack Snyder

2024

If you were a Zach Snyder fan, the only thing better than a year where one of his films comes out is a year in which two of his films come out. So, 2024, a banner year for Snyderfans.

For the rest of us, it’s a second chance to sneer and deride and throw as much shade as can be thrown at a hack of his monumental proportions.

This here film Rebel Moon: The Scargiver is the sequel to that other film that he expelled into the universe, being Rebel Moon: A Child of Fire. No-one asked for these films, let alone sequels and such. I watched that earlier film, more with disbelief than hate, unable to believe that people with millions of dollars at their disposal would make something so generic and so familiar that it would have all the originality and creativity of an episode of Paw Patrol.

This here ‘sequel’ works so perfectly well that there is absolutely no reason for anyone to watch the earlier film. Watching the earlier film provides the viewer with nothing extra, nothing additional, nothing more illuminating. All the main characters / archetypes get a scene that explains their motivations for fighting the Empire, I’m sorry I meant the Imperium.

They fight the Imperium, and then that’s that, with another implied sequel at the end. We didn’t need that. We didn’t ask for that.

What did we ask for… I dunno. I expected there to be a big battle in the film, and I guess that’s there, the big classic showdown since this is space Seven Samurai / The Magnificent Seven / Battle Beyond the Stars. If it doesn’t make sense, well, where’s your sense of adventure? Your sense of whimsy? Has life crushed your spirit so much that you can’t suspend a little bit of disbelief to enjoy a Zach Snyder adventure-fest?

Yeah, me neither. It’s a bit of a chore watching action scenes that ape his own previous movies, staging things like 300 but with one side mostly shooting laser guns, and the other running around with swords and axes. It’s pretty goofy. They belabour the humble farmer stuff so much that you wonder how these Aryan lumpenproles were ever able to survive thus far.

dir: Raven Jackson

2023

Just to assert the stonkingly obvious – films are a visual medium. But what about when a film tries to convey something about the senses other than the visual and the auditory ones?

It’s considered a failure, but one of my favourite books and eventual films ever made was Perfume, a beautifully written book by Patrick Suskind, and, to me, a delightful, awe-inspiring macabre movie made by Tom Tykwer. Its great attempt, and perhaps great failure, is attempting to tell a story so centred around the human animal’s sense of smell.

For me to accept that the film is a failure means I have to accept that the book is a failure, and that I cannot do. Just because they tried to tell a story about smell in a visual form doesn’t mean they didn’t succeed. The writer and the filmmaker went to great lengths to convey what they tried to convey, and for some people they got the visceral, transporting sensation across, and for others, they didn’t.

Why in fuck’s name are you yet again talking about a different film, I hear you groan. Well, my point is, this film here All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt tries to tell, in a visual and auditory medium, being film, a story that is mostly conveyed through the sense of touch. In other words, using visuals and sound design to try to convey how something feels, both in an emotional and tactile sense. A grandmother’s hands; a sister’s shoulder; a beloved’s shoulder, a dying fish’s scales, a baby’s head, the feel of dirt in your hand; a hand swirling in water, a mother’s reproach…

That’s not easy. Movies show us what to feel. They often tell us what to feel. We often have characters or voiceovers tells us exactly how characters feel. But we rarely have actors trying to convey something about the tactile sense of how something physically felt at the time. And we almost never have entire films which are about how existence felt for a person at different times in their lives through who they touched and how.

There is no plot in this film, and the chronology jumps around continuously. There’s very little dialogue throughout, and much of the cinematography involves filming people in close up, their faces, especially their hands, their heads, their backs, and how they interact with people or with the world.

dir: Meredith Hama-Brown

2024

This has been an autumn of disappointments when it comes to movies promising something and not delivering. I watched About Dry Grasses in the hope that I’d learn something about dry grasses, but I got nothing on the topic.

Similarly, when I hoped that Seagrass would teach me something about seagrasses, instead I found out just how fucking tedious it must have been to be trapped in this particular family way back in the 1980s.

This flick has had rave reviews at festivals and such, and upon reading some of the most glowing reviews that have ever been expelled onto a Substack platform or a WordPress website, I thought “I should watch this promising sounding Canadian film.”

What a fool I was. The merits of this flick called Seagrass are almost entirely lost upon me.

A family travel to an island resort. The mum Judith (Ally Maki) is grieving the loss of her mother, dealing as one does with feelings of loss, confusion, guilt and disconnection. Her mother was Japanese-Canadian, and was actually interred involuntarily during World War II, which is a reminder that Canada hasn’t always been the beacon for politeness and progressivism that we imagine it to be.

dir: Denis Villeneuve

2024

When they announced that Dune Part II was going to be released this year, I was like “oh, yeah, that” having pretty much completely forgotten about the first part.

Don’t get me wrong, or, get me wrong if you really want, I didn’t dislike the first part, in fact I thought it was pretty good / okay. It seemed pretty faithful to the book, and ignored more of the boring bits and felt somehow expansive and fleet at the same time.

I’ll be really honest with you: At the time when it came out we were in the midst of lockdowns, so anything vaguely good was like cool water to someone dying of thirst. All it needed was cool visuals and nice music, and I was ready to praise it to the high heavens and the lowest hells.

It’s not lost on me, or anyone of a certain age, that Dune is sci-fi Lawrence of Arabia. But even knowing that, and having a liking for desert cinematography, that’s not the only charm or the point of watching this flick.

Because of the built in “white saviour” narrative, this flick, very much unlike the great one from the 80s directed by David Lynch, of all people, worries about its main character being a super messiah, instead of accepting it as an inherently good thing (for our heroes).

What ensues is a narrative in which someone will say Paul (Timothee Chalamet) is the prophesied messiah of the Fremen people, and then someone will say either “no he’s not” or “that’s just what they want you to think, so they can control us” and then “is so”, and then “nuh uh”.

It’s exhausting. It transcends it merely being “meta”, in that the screenplay and the makers anticipating audience reactions to white saviour narratives are constantly signposting that they know it’s a white saviour narrative, and so they try to undercut it or emphasise it (by having the whole messiah prophecy idea being one the arch-manipulators, the Bene Gesserit order, have artificially implanted within Fremen culture), in ways that are very repetitive.

dir: Bryce McGuire

2024

This is a thoroughly unremarkable family focussed horror flick, though competently done. The camera doesn’t fall over, the boom mic doesn’t leer into shot constantly, not too many actors accidentally put stuff in their mouths that they shouldn’t, while the cameras are rolling, at least.

But there was plenty that amused me about the flick, though I don’t know how much of it was intentional.

The opening sequence is confronting enough, yet it kind of ends up being a reworked, pool-based version of the opening sequence from the first It film, by which I mean Part 1 rather than the first time they tried to make it. I’m confusing myself. Whatever it is, it works, I guess, because a child is gone. Gone!

We don’t like to see that. No-one likes it when kids get eaten / captured / drowned, unless they’re absolute sickos. But if we’re going to keep watching a horror flick, and, let’s face it, if you voluntarily started watching the horror flick in question, then, yes, you are some version of a sicko, we’re going to need something more to sustain us.

We might wonder: What got the kid? Was it…something in the pool? Or was it the pool itself?

Is it a haunted demonic pool? Wait, what? An evil pool? That’s the fucking dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of. Tell me more.

Pretty early on, yes, now is the moment where I completely diverge from talking about a film into some other absolute nonsense, I couldn’t help but think of something from many, many years ago.

dir: Rose Glass

2024

It’s..a lot.

This director’s previous film, Saint Maud was a whole hell of a lot as well, but that was a queasy, intimate, horrific character study about a very troubled young woman (brilliantly played by Morfydd Clark who went from that to playing a ‘young’ Galadriel in The Rings of Power). This is…what this is.

It’s set in the 1980s? It has the trappings, the energy, the aggression of flicks that I can’t even think of, but it’s filtered through a sensibility that is completely unlike whatever flicks we might think of from the era?

I am phrasing all of my statements as questions, because I’m unsure of a lot except for my reactions to the flick. I understand my more visceral reactions to the flick, but I’m not entirely across my intellectual reactions to much of what ensues, or many of the themes that crop up.

And there are some elements, like a bonkers scene of Ed Harris eating a giant beetle, that I have no idea what to do with, at all.

This isn’t a cool crime caper, though it has the trappings of such. This isn’t a Tarantino-esque flick with witty dialogue, obscure facts no-one asked for and eruptions of apocalyptic violence. But this is also an overtly sexual, queer forward flick that disdains the often quoted “male gaze” to replace it with something special, but somehow no less vicious.

This is not a flick intended for mass audiences, maybe, but it’s also swinging for the fences in a wild manner that seems like it could be trying to cover almost everything possible and every genre imaginable.

If there was something cinema / the ‘culture’ was obsessed with in the 80s, it was aerobic fitness, with the accompanying gear, and musclebound hulks like Arnie and Stallone ruling the cinematic roost. This flick imposes the same conceptual aesthetic, but it’s in the service of its two main characters / heroines / villains?

dir: Ava duVernay

2023

Sometimes, adaptations of non-fiction, non-narrative books get you something like Adaptation: A rare flower of absolute creativity and insanity.

Sometimes, film adaptations of non-fiction, non-narrative books result in something utterly completely unlike the bestselling books that they’re based on. There are virtues and problems to that approach, but what the best way to adapt a book is, is well beyond my paygrade, and I wouldn’t presume to tell other people how best to tell the stories they want or need to tell.

Ava DuVernay has made powerful movies and limited series about the trials and tribulations of African-Americans and Latinos as their lives bump up against the American legal system, which we keep being reassured is completely colour-blind and utterly fair to all, or the civil rights movement, or, in the case of A Wrinkle in Time, something about cool space aunties with more costume changes than Jane Fonda in Barbarella.

That’s probably as obscure a reference as I can get away with without convincing myself that I’m just muttering to myself at the back of a bus.

Origin seeks to adapt Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, but seeks to do so by not only telling the story through a narrative form, with an actor (the always wonderful Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) playing the author at a critical time in her life, but tries (perhaps pretends) to deliver on the central thesis of the book’s premise by re-enacting scenes around the world and through history in order to best explain how they all relate, how it’s all connected.

It’s always worrying when you have a scene when two people are talking, and, both of the people speaking in English, and one of the people speaking says “Can you repeat that in plain English?”

You know you’re about to hear a long exposition dump. Adapting books in such a way must be so daunting. It delivers reams of arguments and ideas, and feeds them through other dialogue and conversation that’s about the person and all the stuff going on in their own lives, that doesn’t necessarily reflect the central themes even if they’re tangential.

dir: Rachel Lambert

2024

Rarely do I go on such an emotional rollercoaster as I did with this film.

I started off loving it, loving the heck out of it. I really did.

I feel like such a fool. I feel like someone examined my psyche and watched my many habits and behaviours from a distance, then proceeded to seduce me, and I’ve woken up the next morning with my wallet empty, any valuables gone and my bank accounts drained.

And then I’m left lying on the floor, wondering where it all went wrong.

The thing is, for a sucker to be sucked in, they have to already want to be tricked.

Set in a small coastal town on the Oregon coast, this flick takes its times to show the world that what I thought was the main character, being Fran (Daisy Ridley), lives in. She gets up, walks to work, doesn’t interact with people at work, finishes work, comes home, does a Sudoku or two, eats like a sparrow, drinks a tiny bit, then sleep.

Rinse repeat. When circumstances threaten to require her to interact with people, she deftly avoids it, sidesteps it, does the bare minimum required. When called upon to write in a card for a co-worker who’s retiring, she can’t muster any positive feelings or any words beyond “happy retirement”.

And like the title indicates, she often thinks of herself as being dead. She imagines herself dead in a forest, or dead on a beach, just generally the world without her being alive.

(Bastarden)

dir: Nikolaj Arcerl

2023

After spending time in the Land of Saints and Sinners, via a detour through the Land of Bad, we’ve ended up in The Promised Land, which seems like a nice place to visit, but I’m not sure I would want to live there.

A title like that promises something Biblical, and what this film delivers is a curious and phenomenal looking film about a guy who wants to claim a bit of land and make a go of it no matter the cost to himself and the people around him. But of course there is some rich fuck nearby who doesn’t want him to succeed and does all sorts of awful things to Our Hero and the people around him in order to get his way.

Nothing deters our hero. Played by Danish superstar Mads Mikkelsen, you can pretty much expect just how emotionless and stoic he’s going to be for 90 per cent of the flick while dealing with superstitious serfs or sadistic aristocrats.

If you know, you know. That face of his… So handsome, so cruel. But he is not the cruel one in this flick, though he has his moments.

This flick is set around 1750 in Denmark, at a time when feudal lords own the serfs on their lands, slavery is considered wonderful, and these awful aristocrats rape and murder whoever they feel like with impunity. There is a region called Jutland, which is all moors and heather. The blasted heath. A place where no-one does agriculture. But Ludvig Kahlen is going to do agriculture. BECAUSE HE SAID HE WOULD! And everyone saying “Nu uh” makes him say “uh hu” even more.

He gets some undertaking from some corrupt courtiers that if he makes a go of it and gets a yield, he’ll be made a noble and get a mansion and all sorts of complimentary merch, probably.

And so he starts his journey, with a horse and one tool, and somehow thinks it will all work out.

It seems like lunacy, but the man has been planning this for a while. After a 25 year stint in the German army, earning the rank of Captain, all Kahlen wants is to farm, earn a further title, and then every hardship and slight he’s endured will be worth it. No course runs so smoothly as that.

The local (young, hot) priest (Gustav Lind) takes an interest, and starts helping him out after introducing a young couple he has been hiding from the local lord’s men. Ana Barbara and Johannes bear scars both psychological and mental from their time at Schinkel’s estate, but they are still indentured to him, and legally he still owns them. So they have to work for no pay and hide while on Kahlen’s property.

dir: William Eubanks

2024

They say we live in divisive times. That people can’t even agree on the basics anymore. The tiny surges in dopamine levels we’ve been trained to crave via the algorithms of social media apps and the online world means we fight with absolute strangers about the most miniscule of things, just to feel something.

I don’t know if that’s anymore true today that it has been in the past, but I feel almost certain about one thing, and one thing only: Land of Bad is a fucking terrible name for anything, let alone a movie. Flat out fucking terrible.

A movie, an honest to god movie. With people in it. Like, multiple Hemsworths (not Chris, but eh). And Australia’s Own (New Zealander) Russell Crowe. They’re in this movie, and whatever their contributions, with a title like that, how can they feel anything but shame, shame, shame?

Like, I can imagine how someone thought it up, maybe on drugs, not good ones:
“What’s another way of saying ‘You’re in for a World of Hurt’?
- How about, “Land of Bad?”
“Put down that crack pipe, you’ve got yourself a deal!”

Stop drilling, because you’ve struck oil. Paydirt. It almost doesn’t matter what you come up with next, what tedium you will put your audience through.

Starting from that absolute low point, the only direction is probably sideways.

The point of US military thrillers is mostly to reassure American audiences that their military is still the best in the world with all the best tech and weapons and that no-one else should even bother. In this age of drone strikes and satellites spying on people, the point is still, even with that technology, the US is the biggest and baddest, and everyone else sucks.

dir: Robert Lorenz

2024

Stop me if you’ve heard this story 14,000 times before.

An aging hitman decides he wants to stop killing people for money. But then something happens, and he has to kill more people, and then probably dies or stops killing people at least for a while.

Sound familiar? What if I told you it starred Liam Neeson? Wouldn’t you then say “you’re lazily describing every film Liam Neeson has been in for the last twenty years?”

And you would not be wrong. Ever since Taken convinced every middle-aged, middle-class dad that they, too, could torture and kill dozens of criminals if one of their kids were kidnapped, even lacking that special set of skills, Neeson has been the lead in these violent actioners that try to argue that a man in his 70s can still kick arse.

I admit that there are some fit men in their 70s. They shouldn’t be fighting people. They shouldn’t be punching people or kicking them down escalators or anything. They certainly shouldn’t be wrestling with other younger men. They should be wrestling with their consciences, with moral dilemmas, with their regrets.

This steady progression of dumb action flicks that he’s been in, including ones recently that account for his age, and one in particular called Memory where he plays a character with Alzheimer’s, makes you wonder why Neeson is in so many films every year. Why not take a break?

This is not a dumb action flick. There’s very little action in it, and there’s no need for stunt work, or for Neeson to risk throwing his back out or straining himself too bad.

And yet he still plays a chap who up till recently has killed men for money. In Ireland, of all places.

This flick is set in 1975, in County Donegal, so it’s one of those rare instances where a film has characters in Ireland talking about the conflict between the Catholics and the Protestants.

It’s also a rare flick where the ‘bad guys’ are IRA terrorists.

I mean, I thought they were all saints, serving their noble cause.

dir: Alice Rohrwacher

2023

This is the second time in as many months where I have allowed myself to seem extremely pretentious by titling a review I’ve written in English with a title in another language.

I don’t make these decisions, I just have to live with the consequences. The film was released as La chimera, just like Io Capitano was released as it was released internationally a couple of months ago.

Thus, here I am, talking about La chimera, or The Chimera if that little ‘La’ is so distracting.

And then most people would be like “what TF is a chimera anyway” but it won’t be phrased as a question, because they don’t care, and they’re not reading this review anyway, the salty jerks.

What this flick is about, beyond chimeras, is a British guy (Josh O’Connor) who’s in Tuscany for reasons not immediately obvious. Initially he’s just a young, thin Brit in a shabby white linen suit lolling about the countryside despite it clearly being a cold time of year. He is recently out of jail, and returns to a charming little hovel next to the walls of some ancient castle because he presumably has nowhere else to go.

Ancient indeed. This strange flick is not about what you assume it would be about, which is, why did all those people believe that bullshit last year that every (white, middle-class, middle-aged, Westerner male) thinks about the Roman Empire at least once a day, but instead is about a bunch of reprobates who try to eke out a meagre living finding and pilfering artifacts that predate the Romans, being remnants of the Etruscan peoples.

But then in truth it’s not really about that either, I don’t think. It’s possibly more about the main guy Arthur / Arturo’s grief about losing a woman called Beniamina, or the deep connection he still has with her, and the desire to be with her again beyond all else. His affinity for the ancient is really his inability to want to live without her; his ability to find these ancient burial grounds, tombs or shrines arises solely from his longing for Beniamina, or for death.

dir: John Ridley

2024

There was already a film a few years ago called Shirley.

That was about a different Shirley. In that flick, an absolute queen called Elizabeth Moss played legendary miserable author Shirley Jackson, in a complicated biopic with manipulative twists and turns.

This Shirley is played by an absolute queen of the movie screen, being Regina King, playing a pretty interesting woman who strove for political power, called Shirley Chisholm, in a simplistic biopic with no twists and a couple of turns.

It’s a very strong performance, and yet it’s a flick that suffers from a collective desire to avoid some level of embarrassment.

Here’s what I mean: A few years ago, there was a mini-series called Mrs America. It starred Cate Blanchett as I guess the main character, being the both venomous and poisonous Phyllis Schlafly, which focussed on her opposition to the Equal Rights Act that they tried to pass in the States in the 70s. In the series there’s a whole rogues gallery of great actresses playing a collection of famous feminists like Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem and Uzo Aduba played Shirley Chisholm.

I’d heard of most of the women that were represented in the show, and was glad to learn about impressive people I didn’t know anything about. But when there was an episode devoted to Shirley, and the fact she tried to run as the Democratic candidate for President in the 1970s, I was like “how the fuck did I not know about this? Seems like someone should have mentioned it in the vast raft of American material I’ve consumed over the last 40 years or so.”

Maybe I had heard or read about it, and maybe I didn’t take any notice. That’s shameful, isn’t it? The first African-American woman to win a seat in Congress in the 1960s, and who wanted to run for President against Nixon in 1972? Apart from the fact that she should have won (I’m not saying she could have, I’m just saying if we lived in the just universe that the religious claim to believe in, it would have happened), how is that not a story better known?

dir: Michael Mohan

2024

Damn. And I thought I hated the Catholic Church.

I mean, no, there’s no doubt how much I loathe the Catholic Church, but the makers of this flick have an even keener and more creative way of getting back at that august, malevolent institution that’s been treating, amongst so many others, women like crap for millennia.

Don’t get me wrong – I know that other cultures, other religions are just as awful about women, and their perceived status as helpmeets and handmaidens to those that matter (men), if not more so – but, wow, the Catholics refined their misogyny and used the words of God to justify all sorts of fuckery against women right from the get go.

And they’re still fucking at it, don’t forget that the Catholic Churches motto is, in reality, whatever nonsense they preach about the wisdom of St Augustine or St Thomas Aquinas, they barely considered women above dogs, writing that women were defective and incomplete men.

Regardless of their veneration of Jesus’s mum, and maybe because of it, their loathing for women was a feature, and not a bug, right from the get go. It’s been used to justify all the awful things that men do to women, but worst of all, the justification for trying to disallow by law women’s bodily autonomy, as in, the right to decide what to do and when to do it with one’s own body.

I had no idea that was even a theme in the flick up until the “turn” happens, and it’s a mighty one, and perhaps, in retrospect, not all that surprising considering the title.

Sister Cecilia (Sydney Sweeney) arrives in Italy from the States. She is ushered into the welcoming bosom of a convent whose main purpose seems to be looking after the elder nuns who are suffering physically or mentally the ravages of age. Many are on the way out, so their noble task is bringing them comfort until their last days, when they presumably fly on up to heaven and, I dunno, have group sex with Jesus finally.

Is…Isn’t that what they’ve been waiting for? I mean, they’ve been married to Jesus for so long, finally they can get some satisfaction.

dir: Doug Liman

2024

There are, like, literally thousands of movies you can imagine some lazy ingrates could want to do remakes of. There’s no doubt someone wanting to remake Casablanca, somewhere. Someone who thinks of doing a new version of Billy Wilder’s The Apartment or Sunset Boulevard.

I mean, the reprobates wanting to make the umpteenth version of one of Shakespeare’s plays in modern dress; they’re just uninspired hacks trying to borrow someone else's credibility.

I ask this question with all due respect and humility: who the fuck thought Road House needed to be remade? Is it the same person that thought Point Break also needed to be redone, in order to completely desecrate Patrick Swayze’s grave?

If this is happening now, surely the remake of Weekend at Bernie’s can’t be far behind?

Road House needed a remake like I needed a fourth superfluous nipple on my forehead, but what are you going to do? Who could say no to Jake Gyllenhaal and his quivering magnificent physique?

The one from the 80s? It had Patrick Swayze. Patrick Swayze. Fresh off the success of Dirty Dancing, Swayze strode through the bonkers action flick with the supreme confidence of someone so sure of himself that it didn’t matter if he didn’t look like he could lift a kettlebell let alone throw some guy three times his size out of a scuzzy bar.

It didn’t matter. Dalton was that confident.

(Kuru Otlar Üstüne)

dir: Nuri Bilge Ceylan

2023

About Dry Grasses contains absolutely no information about grasses, dry or otherwise. Which is probably a good thing, since the flick is a phenomenal 3 hours and 10 minutes long. Three hours and 9 minutes of that running time contain no mentions of dry grasses whatsoever. But in that last minute, in voiceover, our jerk of a main character mumbles some depressing stuff about how no one notices or cares that much about the dry grasses growing on a hillside.

To be fair, as Homer Simpson once wisely intoned, To Kill a Mockingbird contains no useful information about how to kill mockingbirds, which means the book, banned in some states in the US for being too racist, and in other states for not being racist enough, is a textbook case of false advertising.

Damn, what a journey (absolutely nowhere) this dense flick is. Set in the Eastern, quite backwards looking parts of Anatolia, in the country we now all are meant to call Türkiye, a disgruntled teacher called Samet (Deniz Celiloğlu) acts disgruntled for over three hours. He’s not from around here. He resents the backwards residents of this town and their backwards kids. He feels like everyone and everything sucks and is against him.

Although he does seem to have favourites. Upon returning from holidays, he gives a gift to one of his students, being Sevim (Ece Bağci), who I think is a young Kurdish girl in his class. It’s just a little hand mirror, but if your red flag senses are tingling, they probably have every right to.

dirs: Toby Poser, John Adams and Zelda Adams

2023

I love that the Adams family exists. I’m not talking about the other one, with two Ds in their name, those ones who are creepy and they’re kooky, mysterious and ooky.

I mean the real life family of John Adams and Toby Poser, and their daughters Zelda and Lulu, who make movies together, on the virtual smell of a digital oily rag ie. with no money.

I don’t know how they fund their movies, I don’t know how they paid to rent a Model T Ford or to pay crew, extras etc in anything other than hugs and sandwiches. And I kinda wish someone would hand them a ridiculous budget so they could blow it all on trips to the Riviera and inflatable furniture (is that what rich people buy?)

But I can’t see that big budgets would compel them in inventive and creative ways to create the kinds of flicks they make. I saw and loved Hellbender from a couple of years ago, and while I didn’t get into this flick quite as much, it still has a similar anarchic energy of a movie that doesn’t follow a well-trodden path.

That being said, I couldn’t help but be reminded of probably the only Rob Zombie flick I’ve ever liked, being The Devil’s Rejects. That’s to my shame, not the Adams’.

Set during the Great Depression, Maggie (Toby Poser), Seven (John Adams) and Eve (Zelda Adams) travel around with carnie folk and pretty much just murder people. Maggie I think does most of the murdering, Eve takes photos, and Seven looks away because he can’t stand the sight of blood, having seen way too much during the Great War to ever be a normal person again.

And that’s pretty much it. Visually the flick has a whole bunch of scenes of startling quality and composition, just because they’re so different from shots you see in any other flick, perhaps deliberately. Compared to their earlier flick this is much gorier, much more macabre. But there’s also a fairly menacing element to it, and I put it down to both the awkward phrasing of much of the dialogue, deliberately striving to make it sound like words that could have dropped from the mouths of John Steinbeck’s characters, and the almost otherworldly, almost Amish sensibility of working in such a wood paneled period setting.

dir: Savanah Leaf

2023

We have been living in an era, for the longest time, where we are told that people need to take responsibility for their actions, that their circumstances are the product of their choices, and that if their circumstances are difficult, well, it’s only because of the bad choices that they made along the way.

IF they struggle and work hard, eventually ‘good’ things will come their way. If something “good” happens to them, that good favour still has to flow from somewhere else, it’s still because of something external to them (the grace of God, the benefits of the welfare safety net system). If something bad happens, well, it’s entirely their own fault.

The ‘logic’ of all this bootstrap nonsense only seems to apply to poor people, though. Poor people are defined as people who don’t have enough money to be shielded from the implications of their choices, right or wrong.

Wealthy people worked hard for what they have, however they got it.

Of course.

Poor people don’t work hard enough and keep making bad choices.

Of course.

Earth Mama is about a woman who can’t get anywhere, can’t get through the difficult circumstances of her life, and her kid’s lives, no matter how hard she tries, because she’s not meant to. She is young, with two kids that have been taken away from her by Child Protective Services already, but she’s also heavily pregnant. The kids were probably taken away because of her previous drug use, which we only know because she keeps being drug tested. There’s an array of requirements she has to adhere to in order to get to spend an hour of supervised time with her kids, per week. And she has to pay child support for the kids even when they have been taken away from her and put in the foster system.

dir: C.J. ‘Fiery’ Obasi

2023

I was not sure what this flick was going to be like, or what it was about, knowing nothing about it. But now I’ve watched it, and presumably that means I know something about it and have a relevant, informed opinion.

Well. I’m not sure how much I have to say about a flick set contemporarily, shot in black and white, that’s really about matrilineal matriarchal monarchies. I mean, I guess they’re better than the alternatives, but they’re still not a decent form of government.

I have to say “in general”, because I would be taking the piss if I implied that the point of the film is that we should all be living in matrilineal, matriarchal monarchies.

This film is just saying that, for these people, of the Iyi village, they need to keep being ruled by a matriarch, because of their connection to Mami Wata, who is a benevolent water spirit / deity who looks after them, thanks to their connection through their Intermediary.

Their Intermediary, sort of like a cross between a priestess and a conduit for Mami Wata’s will, is Mama Efe (Rita Edochie).

While the people believe in Mami Wata, and her earthly ambassador, they give of their bounty to her, out of respect, out of fear, to earn favour. Lots of reasons. And she in turn does…

She does stuff. She is regal, her belief is unwavering, and she does all the rituals they all love. She plays the hits, so to speak.