fresh movie reviews for a good time not a long time

dirs: David Bruckner, Scott Derrickson, Gigi Saul Guerrero, Natasha Kermani & Mike P. Nelson

2023

The V/H/S franchise has had, I think, 6 entries thus far, and I have to say I think this is the best of the lot of them, or at least of the ones I have seen. I am not a horror film scholar (I shudder to think of what such a person would look and smell like), nor am I paid for my highly valuable insights and opinions on the internet, so I don’t have to be exhaustive in everything I do.

I basically just watch and review stuff that piques my curiosity.

V/H/S/85 succeeds, partly at least, because of the abandonment sporadically of its found footage conceit. I don’t care about the origin of footage – I don’t need for there to always be someone filming stuff (on a bulky and clunky 80s video camera, in this anthology’s context), and someone perpetually yelling at the ‘person’ filming to stop filming before, during and after something terrible starts happening. But by the same token it does add a different energy to what we’re watching sometimes. At other times, the absurdity of someone who’s being shot at or eaten by some horrific creature still managing to keep the camera relatively steady takes you out of whatever you’re watching and tells you you’re an idiot for suspending your disbelief in the first place.

Also, the segments are significantly different from each other, thematically and action-wise, even as they’re linked by a time period, aesthetics and the deliberate ‘corruption’ of the medium, being, the look and feel of degraded magnetic tape video, accumulated in almost a palimpsest of footage recorded over footage recorded over footage. Interspersed between the different segments is an overarching story which I was very dubious about each time it would pop up, which is (deliberately) so cheesy and hacky that it gives off Z-grade direct-to-video, but when I realised that it was a shaggy dog story when I saw the punch line, I do admit to laughing out loud.

It was a brief laugh, dear reader. After all, this is not a comedy anthology. This is horror.

Respect for the fallen.

dir: Tim Story

2023

I will be the first to admit, and honestly have to be the first to admit, that I am not the target audience for this movie. My opinion about this movie, like all my opinions about anything, are therefore even more important / authoritative than usual (ie. utterly worthless).

I am, however, a fan of movies / pop culture, and in the American context, of Black cinema / African-American cinema. I went into this assuming this flick, ostensibly a horror flick, was specifically about playing with the tropes of horror movies in terms of how poorly they serve African-American characters usually, but what I ended up getting was vastly different.

Tim Story is probably best known for directing Barbershop way back in the day, if he is known by international audiences at all. I am not sure that he would be well known as the director of the pretty terrible Fantastic Four movies, or the very ordinary Ride Along movies, or the terrible *belches loudly* Think Like a Man movies.

So, whatever. I have no doubt he has fans, and that he’s a talented, commercial director, in all senses of the word. He is a very successful African-American director, and he certainly has knowledge and a feel for how African-Americans are portrayed in movies, because he’s in the business of portraying them for fun and profit, and has been for decades.

This flick is replete with references that will fly by most people, I would guess, and I say that as someone who gets the references, but only because I’ve watched everything and remember all the dumbest, lamest trivia from any old tv show you care to mention. I also remember the various controversies that arose with many of those shows, like who got fired and why, and who they were replaced with, because… Well, I don’t really have an explanation for it.

dir: Daniel Levy

2024

So, with the new year freshly upon us, I thought in the spirit of new beginnings and optimism, I’d watch and review a movie about a dour group of depressed people navigating grief and loss in their late 30s early 40s.

Why not.

Good Grief is perhaps the laziest play on words you could imagine, while also being a keen Charlie Brown - Peanuts reference that, yes, is mostly about a character dealing with his grief over the recent death of his husband Oliver (Luke Evans).

But really the film is mostly about not dealing with grief.

Our introduction is a delightful Christmas party where Oliver bullies people into singing individual parts for a singalong, except for the one person Sophie (the great Ruth Negga) who he insults by giving her a handcrafted pair of maracas to play, since she is, by all estimations, tone deaf. Oliver is charming and a force of nature, and beloved by all, so it’s triply cruel that mere minutes after saying goodbye to his husband Marc (Dan Levy, who also directs), he is killed in a car accident.

Now, these details shouldn’t be important, but they’re important to me: Oliver was the very successful author of a bunch of books that, considering the economic comfort within which the main character is cocooned in, probably makes him the equivalent of a Suzanne Collins / Rick Riordan YA author, rather than a JK Rowling-level threat to the aristocracy. And, this was very nice of him, he even got something for his husband Marc to do by having him do the illustrations in his books, which are a successful movie franchise as well.

The greater meaning behind it is that Marc had previously been a successful painter, or at least someone who painted. But, for whatever reasons (grief, derr, obviously), he stopped painting after his mother died. And instead of ever doing paintings again, he relied on his husband for work and remodelled the kitchen every time Oliver dropped a new bestseller.

Probably not healthy. And now that his husband is dead, well, Marc doesn’t know what to do with himself, and spends a year not doing anything.

dir: Emerald Fennell

2023

Yikes.

This fucking film…

I don’t know how I feel about this flick. Some parts of it are funny, some are excruciating, some are downright sickening, but I still don’t know how I feel about it.

It is kind of an update on Brideshead Revisited, in that it has the similar initial setup and is mostly set at a grand / ghastly country estate, but they could not be more dissimilar in their themes or resolution. Our Charles Ryder, as in, our wide-eyed non-aristocrat innocent who finds himself hanging out with the landed gentry in this instance is called Oliver Quick. But instead of just being some young guy at Oxford with hopes and dreams, we have Oliver played by blue-eyed psychopath of the moment, being Barry Keoghan.

Since receiving plaudits for his role as the village idiot in The Banshees of Inisherin, perhaps that is pretty much the role he’ll be playing for the rest of his career? Oliver gets into Oxford, but he’s not from aristocrat money, and he’s not a social gadfly. So he’s on the outside, perpetually looking in. Much of the film literalises this by having Oliver looking through people’s windows, and only occasionally looking out of a window, at someone near his window. There’s always a pane of glass / the pain of separation between him and everyone else.

He sees one person to whom others flock, like moths to a flame, being Felix (Australia’s Own Jacob Elordi, who seems to be having his moment), but there’s no way for a nobody like Oliver to get into his world.

As luck would have it, one day Felix has a flat tyre on his bike on the way to class, and Oliver is on hand to loan him his bike instead. It’s less the start of a beautiful friendship and more just an in. Felix is plenty grateful and at least deigns to shine some of his social light in Oliver’s direction. Oliver talks of growing up in poverty and having addicts for parents.

That’s tough, and though it elicits some sympathy, eventually, Felix loses interest, especially since the rest of his friends don’t even want to sit near Oliver due to the stench of being poor.

But hark, is that another tragedy on the horizon? Oliver confesses to Felix that his father has just died, probably due to drugs. Oh, woe is me.

Woe is you, Oli. Why don’t you come out to my palatial estate after exams? Mother and Father would be delighted to meet you. And of course stay the entire summer if you like, it’ll be grand.

dir: Zach Snyder

2023

This is pretty ordinary, but it’s ordinary within what I think of as normal parameters. If any other director made this, whoever saw it would have shrugged, farted, and probably rolled over and gone to sleep without ever thinking about it ever again.

It’s like when some average car company comes up with a shitty new car: No-one other than the people dumb enough to buy those cars will care. But when someone bills themselves as a genius comes up with a terribly shitty car, like, say, the so-called Cybertruck, well, then you have to take especial notice and deliver especial insults / criticism.

People, mainly press hacks or PR flacks used to call Zach Snyder a visionary, but they stopped, several films ago, because the extent of his vision involved shitty CGI, slow motion sequences, and terrible scripts. And anyone can make that without being called a visionary. Plus, they (being Warner Brothers) started noticing that nothing he made actually made money, regardless of how much the fanboys slavered over his crap.

And since nature apparently abhors a vacuum, Netflix threw money at him and said “make whatever crap you want, we don’t care, as long as it’s content.” And, here it is, daddy made you some content.

And what content it is… This is rumoured to be pretty much a script Snyder proposed to the Lucasfilm people as a possible R rated Star Wars flick, with all the Star Wars actual references taken out when they rejected it. So what you’re left with is less a new science fiction space opera epic original intellectual property, and more a “new” generic science fiction IP so generic that it looks and sounds like every other science fiction IP you’ve ever seen. It’s so generic I’m amazed that the characters don’t accidentally talk about using the Force or about mining spice on Arrakis. It’s not just that we’re trained to expect these things and see them everywhere, it’s just that anyone working on anything like this knows what tropes to follow and how to make everything look just so everything is so fucking familiar and comfortable for everyone.

So when I tell you that the first part of the flick occurs on a farm, and everyone’s dressed like they’re in a Western, you won’t be that surprised or shocked. You’ll just think “how visionary! It’s only something I’ve seen twenty or more times in science fiction flicks!”

Also, like me, if you watch this, you will feel delighted every time you hear someone say “we’re just simple farmers” or “he’s just a simple farmer”. How surprised will you be when the “simple farmer” rises up and saves the day? You know, which never happens, expect when it does, like, every time?

These salt of the earth simple farmers grow grain, to feed themselves of course, but also to have a little extra, a little something-something for either trade or to use in times of need. They have a community mostly made up of Aryan poster children. You know, mostly Nordic types. But there are a couple of people there with different complexions. One of them clearly isn’t a simple farmer, because she’s as buff as Sarah Conner in Terminator 2. And she is called Kora (Sofia Boutella).

dir: Sam Esmail

2023

When I hear the words “Leave the World Behind” of course, having come of age in the 1990s, the first thing I think of isn’t the book that this Netflix film is based on, by Rumaan Alam. It is the legendary song by Ride off their second album Going Blank Again, being Leave Them All Behind, which would have been a way better title.

The arguable pinnacle of the shoegaze genre of music, the song and the album were so great in fact, so much of a magnum opus that the band never again achieved anything close to as good, degenerating into acrimony, jealousy, and one of them going over to Oasis after killing time as sub-standard The Black Crowes sound-alikes. The “Britpop” era of the 90s meant everyone thought they should sound like Primal Scream trying to sound like the Rolling Stones all over again.

But that song… my gods, it’s at least up there with the best of My Bloody Valentine, or peak Swervedriver, Slowdive or The Jesus & Mary Chain.

What’s that got to do with this film, you ask? Well, nothing, to be honest.

I just wanted to talk about how much I loved that song, and the shoegaze era, is all.

And they don’t even use it on the soundtrack, which is even more of a shame.

Yet again, in talking about one thing, I am going to talk about a completely different thing. Back when Steven Spielberg made War of the Worlds, an updated Americanisation of the H.G. Wells classic, the point wasn’t to mock the audience by having Tom Cruise playing a blue-collar regular joe, even if it really felt like that, and that they were taking the piss at our expense.

No, no, I assure you, Mr Spielberg is too self-serious for that. The whole point of the film was how little it would take before regular, decent, hard-working Americans turned on each other and started shooting / eating each other. Based on that very pessimistic flick, it would take about half an hour after an alien invasion before Americans started whipping out their guns.

dir: Alexander Payne

2023

It almost feels like director Alexander Payne and lead actor Paul Giamatti are coasting. Playing to their strengths, working with very familiar scenarios, and putting people in positions that feel like we’ve watched the flick (a long time ago) many times before.

It shouldn’t work, even down to a use of folk music where I wondered aloud “could they not afford a Cat Stevens song for this scene?”, only to have a Cat Stevens song start playing immediately thereafter.

But it did all work for me. It worked beautifully.

It might be set at a posh New England boys school over Christmas, 1970. It might have an intro with old timey studio titles and the (digital effect) of dust and dropouts on the “film” as it starts, but this is a film as old as time itself. It’s about lonely people struggling with grief and loss, finding it very hard to get by in life, forced together by circumstance, in order to learn things about themselves, and come to terms with things.

You know, like every movie that’s ever been made.

However familiar elements might be, it’s still a very strong film. Paul Giamatti playing a curmudgeon? Say it ain’t so! A sassy, straight-talking service industry African-American character who cuts through the privilege and pieties of the main (white) characters? A troubled teen who’s rebelling without really knowing what he’s rebelling against?

I mean…, you could have called it Catcher in the Rye Ice Storm at the Dead Poet’s Society, and only a few people would have batted an eyelid.

If there is a main character who is not Paul Giamatti, it’s Holden, sorry, Angus (Domenic Sessa), whose parents don’t want to see him during the Christmas break. That’s got to hurt. Still, if Angus was the kind of go along to get along chap, one who could make the best of a dire situation, well, he probably wouldn’t be in this predicament if he was a different person. Instead, he’s an isolated jerk who thinks he’s better than everyone else.

There are other boys in this unfortunate circumstance as well, it’s not just Angus, but he doesn’t really have the social skills to connect with them, or seemingly the desire to.

Charged with looking after these unwanted, misfit toys is a teacher who doesn’t really have anything better to do over the Christmas break: Mr Hunham (Paul Giamatti). He is as loathed by the students as he is by most of the faculty, and he has no life outside of the school.

He hates the students and sees the world as one that hasn’t really improved that much since the Visigoths sacked Rome all those years ago. He teaches ancient history, which means Greek and Roman history, and as such thinks their wisdom is the only wisdom worth learning or repeating.

dir: Christos Nikou

2023

Fingernails is an anti-rom com which is still somewhat a rom com. It almost acts as a parody of rom coms, while using the tropes of rom coms to further its belief that love is and always should be inexplicable.

This is the least science-fiction-y science fiction based flick that you could ever watch. There’s nothing depicted that looks like anything that you wouldn’t have seen in the 1980s-1990s. But conceptually we are dealing with a world where people can get scientific confirmation as to whether, as a couple, they are truly in love.

So. If “love” becomes measurable and quantifiable, what does that mean for actual relationships?

In this cowardly old world, when a couple have been together for a while, they go to a place, the Love Institute, and have one of their fingernails ripped off. The two fingernails are put into a machine, and then the machine divines whether the two people are perfectly in love with each other.

Most couples who take the test fail. Get zero per cent. Other couples get a 50 per cent result, meaning one person loves the other more, or that one of them is faking it till they make it.

What this means is, I guess, people who don’t pass the test don’t stay together as couples. People who refuse to do the test don’t stay together, because someone will always doubt the other’s commitment.

And even couples who do the test, and get 100 per cent positive results, well, even they have their doubts.

Anna (the great Jessie Buckley, who is mastering the art of being really good in complicated films that don’t always work) is in a relationship with Ryan (Jeremy Allen White, who most people know as the hot chef guy from The Bear). They’ve passed the test. 100 %. What more could anyone want?

dir: Gareth Edwards

2023

This was terrible on a whole host of levels, and I think I’m one of the very few to think so. How very edgy of me.

It wasn’t terrible to watch, as in, it wasn’t an entirely unpleasant experience watching it. The acting is fine, the action is okay, the digital effects are solid.

It’s just that it’s all in the service of a terrible story, conceptually, and on a bunch of levels I can only barely grasp. I’ve read so many reviews that talk about how fresh and original it is, and I feel like screaming “have you watched any science fiction movies ever?”

Nothing in this flick is even barely remotely original. Everything is cobbled together from other flicks. I’m not even going to list them. Listing them is just me mansplaining and naming the same and usual suspects every time a sci fi flick is made. There are few images from this that I haven’t scene in other movies.

And touting as it does a storyline about humans versus AI, during an era in our own history where society says it’s grappling with the ethical and technological implications of advances in so-called artificial intelligence, the flick not only manages to say nothing new about AI; it manages to say nothing about AI at all.

It’s set, mostly, in the 2070s. So, our future. But long stretches of the flick look like they’re set during the fucking Vietnam War. I am not exaggerating. The fucking Vietnam War.

For reasons that I find hilarious, an African-American man lives with a pregnant generically Asian woman on the coast of a generically Asian country. This is New Asia. Not Thailand, not Vietnam, but New Asia. That’s not me saying it, it’s the movie.

dir: David Fincher

2023

This isn’t to be confused with the legendary John Woo flick that introduced the world to the glory that is Chow Yun Fat, and the idea in movies that you could have a protagonist shoot hundreds of people before going to his eternal reward…

Now, of course, everyone gets to do it, but back then, I assure you, it was new, novel, fresh. Hong Kong fresh.

This The Killer is about a killer (Michael Fassbender) who kills people for money. Not for sexual gratification or anything so crude. It’s a purely financial transaction, which he tries to deliver in a professional and efficient manner.

He talks to us constantly, in his head, as he repeats his bullshit mantras about never having empathy or being precise or whatever, and sticking to his own rules, plan instead of improvise, be ready for every eventuality. Except he can’t even stick to his own rules, a lot of the time.

The voiceover is tiresome, but I think it’s meant to be tiresome. Without it, we’d have very little to go on. The killer rarely talks, and when he does, his words are clipped, as if almost painful.

Again, while he comes across as flat, I think it’s deliberately flat. His style is the lack of style he deliberately cultivates. There is no looking cool in a tailored bulletproof suit or swinging around wildly in elaborately choreographed sequences with flashy weapons. The one extended fight scene we get is brutal, close-up, and doled out with whatever household weapons come to hand.

dir: Christopher McQuarrie

2023

The only thing that could make this cumbersome title more cumbersome would be adding “Part 1” to it, which they did, but they’ve since decided to not call whatever comes next “Part 2”, so what even was the point?

It’s common parlance or criticism to rag on the Fast & Furious flicks as being silly, stupid, physics-insulting etc, and they truly are dumb flicks, don’t get me wrong. But the thing is, wow, in long stretches of this flick I was sure I was watching Fast X. They’re practically the same flick and they also end, after 1300 hours, on a cliffhanger. Which is pretty unsatisfying.

At least this one does not have whatever the fuck it is that Jason Momoa was doing in that other flick.

Instead of Momoa, we have Esai Morales playing an antagonist who is always several steps ahead of the heroes, and presumably won’t make a mistake until the final moments of the next film.

As these films get longer and more complicated, it’s important to remember that none of it really matters, and that Tom Cruise playing these characters in his 60s is becoming increasingly less believable. The older he gets, the more he insists on having long scenes of him running, just to let us know he can still run fast.

We get it, Peter Pan, you can run fast.

The ultimate antagonist in this flick, you’re never going to believe it, it’s an Artificial Intelligence that they call The Entity. The Entity knows all and sees all. Anywhere there’s internet, the Entity is there. It knows everything about our hero Ethan Hunt and his band of merry pranksters, and can easily predict their actions and manipulate them weeks in advance.

It’s just so fucking smart.

dir: Brian Duffield

2023

This flick was an experience.

I went in thinking it was a horror flick. I also went into to it thinking that I wish the filmmakers had the confidence to give this a better title, being There is No-one What Will Take Care of You, the first legendary album by Will Oldham of Palace / Palace Brothers / Bonnie “Prince” Billy fame or infamy.

At least I’m guessing that’s the title they really wanted, but they chickened out. I mean, No One Will Save You is direct, punchy, and accurate, but There is No-One What Will Take Care of You, is plaintive, soulful, lyrical and also passive-aggressive, manipulative, mean-spirited; it could be a lament, it could be a threat. There’s a lot potentially going on there.

Piss-weak alternative.

This film is a marvel, in that it is quite experimental in some ways, even as it seems extremely conventional in others. There is no dialogue between characters in this film whatsoever. Our protagonist, Brynn (Kaitlyn Dever), only ever gets to say one line of dialogue in the whole film. And yet there’s acres of storytelling going on. We are left with no doubt as to what’s happened in the past, and what’s going on in Brynn’s terrible present.

Even though it’s tempting to call this a science fiction film, I think it’s more of a horror film, since Brynn fights valiantly to save herself from an uncertain but probably horrible fate. And yet the other factor is that I want to joke about the aliens from M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs coming back to Earth and figuring out how to tolerate water (on a planet five sixths of which is water), to finish the job they started over two decades ago.

발레리나

dir: Lee Chung-hyun

2023

Ballerina is a South Korean actioner where a depressed looking woman kills a bunch of men for the purposes of revenge, and also because they’re a pile of criminal misogynist arseholes.

This is not unlike many of the South Korean action films I’ve seen over the last few years. In fact, now that I think of it, even when the lead character wasn’t a woman, in at least 3 films I can think of, there was a depressed female co-star who for whatever backstory reasons had access to weapons and skills in order to punish a bunch of criminals.

It seems to be a common trope, but I guess I don’t watch enough South Korean movies to know how pervasive it is. Could just be a coincidence. Could just be that the times where I’m intrigued enough to start watching a South Korean violence action flick, it just so happens to have a depressed young woman wanting to get revenge on a bunch of loathsome criminals.

Maybe it says more about me than it does about South Korean cinema.

The film opens with a scene at a convenience store where a bunch of crims assault and try to rob the attendant. A young woman in a hoodie just wants to buy her can of soup or bag of crisps or whatever, and doesn’t even seem to really acknowledge that anything is going on. Once the shitheads start actively attacking her, she goes into full-blown Wolverine mode and starts tearing them apart with whatever is to hand, despite the fact that they have knives and use a lot of harsh language.

Ok-ju (Jeon Jong-seo) is some kind of former…I’m not entirely sure what. Bodyguard for hire? Security contractor? Often in these kinds of films the person is an ex or current National Intelligence Service agent, someone with serious skills and a sociopathic ability to apply them to…other sociopaths.

dir: Alexis Jacknow

2023

Clock is a disturbing and potent horror flick about how annoying it is to be told you have to have kids when you don’t want to have them.

Honestly, there is no shortage of arseholes on this planet. There’s like 7 billion of them. Soon there will be 8 billion. We are consuming this planet and rendering it inhospitable as we speak. The last thing we need is more people fucking up the joint.

That’s one take a person could make. On the other hand we are told we have these natural biological and evolutionary urges that, were we not to possess them or give in to them, our species would have died out long ago.

Heavens forfend! Sure, we all know the urges to have sex, but thankfully we found ways to make it not always result in pregnancy. But that only counts if you’re not an American woman. If you’re an American woman (or a ten year old child) in a state where abortions are all but outlawed now, you are legally obligated to carry a baby to term even if it fucking kills you.

Sorry, I don’t make the rules, I just recoil in horror from them. Speaking of horror, this horrific flick is horrific not only in what it shows, but in some of the arguments characters have.

There can’t be a form of horror more visceral than horror about pregnancies. There’s nothing that can be more horrifically biological than weaponising those bodily processes against a woman, whether it’s in Rosemary’s Baby, Alien or this here Clock streaming on Hulu.

I’ll leave out mother! because I still have no fucking idea what happened in that Darren Aronofsky movie.

In Clock, our protagonist Ella (Dianna Agron) is perfectly happy not to have children. She is told that she is somehow defective, or wrong, but she just doesn’t want kids. That should be okay, but people in these kinds of stories, and let’s face it in real life too, constantly feel obligated to tell other people what to do. So there’s no shortage of arseholes telling her she’s wrong.

Let the woman be. Let her live her life, and you worry about yours.

dir: Ángel Manuel Soto

2023

It wasn’t as terrible as I thought it would be.

That’s not saying much, admittedly. The new low bar that was created when they released that awful Flash movie earlier this year (unless it was all just a bad dream) means that some things just have to be passable, and have nice people delivering dialogue in an okay manner in order to be pretty good in comparison.

This flick doesn’t have Ezra Miller in it, not even a tiny cameo. Not even a picture of him. So that’s extra points right there. It has a charming and eager young chap in the lead role of Jaime Reyes / Blue Beetle, in the form of Xolo Maridueña. He has a lovely / embarrassing family surrounding him, and truth be told all the best bits of the film are or involve Jaime and his family.

That being said, even with all the elements of Latin / Mexican culture wedged into it, this kind of cultural cringe comedy is as generic as can be, whether it’s My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Fresh Off the Boat or whatever the hell they’re doing here. They say that you can’t be what you don’t see (representation), but I wonder how well they do with representing aspects of Latin culture in specific ways (but generic enough not to alienate the gringos), since I’m not from that culture.

Unfortunately, there’s also George Lopez. George fucking Lopez. If you don’t know who he is, and you haven’t endured his stand-up, or seen him in terrible things, you might think “who is this old man shouting at clouds all the time?” If you do know who he is, well, I feel your pain.

The plot is so generic. The villain, Victoria Kord, played by Susan Sarandon, is so generic and unmemorable that I feel like saying “that’s nice, dear” whenever I think of her on-screen moments. The villain’s henchman is also very generic, in that it’s a shouty chap called Carapax (Raoul Max Trujillo), but he at least looks terrifying regardless of what armour he’s wearing.

He’s a mean looking motherfucker, and so always plays mean looking motherfuckers. If he and Danny Trejo had a baby together, it would look like Tommy Lee Jones.

dir: Guy Ritchie

2023

I have no idea why this is called Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant, because I don’t think anyone was too confused about whose covenant it is. If Guy Ritchie directed it, and we are reliably informed that he did, then we would have assumed it was his flick called The Covenant.

But isn’t it really The Covenant between the two main characters here? The sacred promise Jake Gyllenhaal’s character makes to Ahmed, his faithful interpreter? The promise to save Ahmed and his family? Guy Ritchie didn’t make this promise to this Afghani interpreter. So why the fuck is it his covenant anyway?

Is it God’s covenant with Abraham, or that with Noah after the Flood, that he wouldn’t slaughter humanity again just for shits and giggles, or the one he made with Jesus that everything would be fine if he just went down to Earth and was a good boy?

Hmm, someone doesn’t seem to honour his covenants…

Of these bullshit semantic games, I never tire of them. Whoever the fuck’s The Covenant it is, this here is a film, that came out this year, set mostly in Afghanistan, to do with men and the promises they make to other men, and the lengths they’ll go to not break their promises.

It's beyond me why Guy Ritchie thought he needed to tell this particular story, but, unlike many of his more recent films, I don’t feel ripped off in having sat through it. At least it’s not just another smug gangster flick set in London amongst the stereotypes with constant flashbacks, at that. He wants to be taken ever so seriously. You can feel it wafting off of the screen. “This is my important film”, he tells himself and his assistant. “This will earn me the respect I deserve.”

“Yes sir, Mr Ritchie, here’s your everything bagel, just as you ordered, with nothing on it”, says the assistant.

“Excellent.”

dir: Antoine Fuqua

2023

I am forced, against my will, to use the American spelling of this movie, though it goes against every fibre of my being.

I also applaud the makers for not going with “Equaliz3r” or “3quilzer” or even “Threequelizer” with some random 3s thrown in.

This is an enjoyable film if, like me, you could watch Denzel Washington pretty much do anything, sit at a table at a café, rearrange the napkins endlessly, drink tea, or watch him huffing and puffing up some steps. That’s the film, for me, watching a man approaching 70 climbing steep steps, and order tea. I don’t really need the other stuff so much.

Of course, that covers maybe 80 per cent of the film: Denzel just doing stuff, and coming to terms with his own mortality.

10 per cent is lectures on the physiology of hummingbirds. Fascinating stuff.

The other 10 per cent is watching Denzel brutally murder people with anything that comes to hand. There are killings so brutal in this that I hope I don’t have nightmares about it.

How do we reconcile these disparate energies within the one character, this strange monk-like man, so peaceful, so deadly? Well, does it really matter anyway?

dir: Maggie Betts

2023

There are no burials in The Burial. I can’t even guess why it’s called such. Sure, it involves funeral parlours, but there’s no specific burial.

Is there a general burial, one symbolising the finality of one’s hopes and dreams finally being put to rest? Is it a reference perhaps to what happens to the Goliath part of this David and Goliath story?

Plus I don’t remember any references in the Bible to how they buried this alleged giant felled by a sling and a stone. Maybe they used a bulldozer, maybe they blew him up like a dead beached whale with dynamite.

I mean, that sounds unlikely, but it’s happened. I’ve seen the footage. You can’t unsee it.

Jaime Foxx, for all his health problems this year, which nearly led to him dying, has put in two very solid performances in two flicks that will only be seen on streaming services. It’s a shame because they deserved to be seen by more people, maybe in cinemas, maybe projected onto the sides of large buildings. The other performance was in They Cloned Tyrone, but this performance, at least for the first half of the film, was much bigger and brasher (despite the fact that he played a pimp in the other film).

Willie E Gary seems like a persona created for a movie or for wrestling, but he is a real alive person who walks this earth and does his preacher / lawyer shtick for reals. Foxx plays him, in court, like a preacher expecting the jurors and other members of the court to yell “Amen!” after any of his statements. In case we didn’t figure it out seeing him in action in court, they also show him in a Black Baptist church firing up the locals.

He is immensely successful as a personal injury lawyer, very wealthy, rich enough to be showcased on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous *ugh*. He is vibrant and full of life, and he has an entire entourage of lawyers to both back him up and to keep things real.

In contrast, Tommy Lee Jones, my gods, age has not been kind to you. He plays the role of Jeremiah O’Keefe, the owner of a bunch of funeral homes way down South in Mississippi. He is a dull, destroyed man, whose bad choices in business are in stark contrast to what a good and noble man he is.

dir: Greta Gerwig

2023

It’s a testament to either the surprising quality of this flick, or the extent of my gullibility, that I actually found myself enjoying this flick despite myself. Well, not despite myself, that sounds like I went in not wanting to like it (like a lot of male critics seemed to make a point of in all their reviews).

Maybe because I’m secure enough in myself, or maybe the content of big budget flicks rarely has anything to do with my emotional state, but for whatever reasons I, as a man, enjoyed this strange movie and didn’t in any way feel like it diminished my inherent awesomeness or took anything away from me, including any of the additional 28 cents per dollar I am usually paid compared to my nearest female equivalent.

Radical, I know. If I had any misgivings about this flick it’s that with people like Noah Baumbach and the actual director, Greta Gerwig involved, it could have made for a horrible experience (for me).

Last time they collaborated, the flick was called White Noise, and it was based on a Don DeLillo novel, and it was a horrible time inflicted on everyone, at nearly three hours as well, and I’m still mad about it.

I had no idea what they were going to do here, but whatever it actually is, it worked for me.

I have already diminished Gerwig’s work here unintentionally: I’m not implying Baumbach secretly wrote or directed anything – she’s plenty talented enough to have already directed a bunch of flicks. They are partners in real life too, so there’s nothing unlikely about them being able to collaborate in the truest sense of the word – incorporating some ideas, discarding others because they might not gel properly.

I have no idea what thought process they went through putting this frankly bizarre film and cultural phenomenon together. I don’t think it was ever guaranteed that this flick was going to succeed as it has, because I don’t think even the most drug addled executives at Mattel or Warner Brothers could have imagined it was going to literally make billions of dollars.

People who I know for a fact weren’t going to cinemas even pre-Covid went to see this flick. My kid, their partner and their friends ALL went to see this flick together.

I had co-workers who went and saw the flick, barely able to articulate how much they didn’t like it or why, and yet the same chumps went and saw Oppenheimer and couldn’t shut up about what a genius Christopher Nolan must be for hours on end.

dir: André Øvredal

2023

How do you do a new movie version of Dracula without telling people it’s about Dracula? You do what they did here, and don’t even mention his name, just like several years ago where Ron Howard made a new film version of Moby-Dick without telling anyone, and called it In the Heart of the Sea.

I would also further go on to argue that a title that generic helps no-one, absolutely no-one. I have a particular dislike for these recent titles for things that are simultaneously very specific and very abstract at the same time.

I am still trying to wrap my head around All the Light We Cannot See. Yes, I get what it means in the context of the story (blind woman in Nazi France, radio waves), but on the other hand, who fucking cares? And we can’t see it, because it’s not light.

That’s a different fight, a different pointless battle to get energised over. The Last Voyage of the Demeter, is a very specific title about a place, being a ship, that presumably never sails again. We are meant to ask ourselves “Um, I wonder what happened to the Demeter and its crew?”

Well, we get to find out, if we can make it through a stylish two hour horror flick. The film starts with the stately, portentous titles that inform us what we are about to watch is taken from the logbook of the Captain of the Demeter, but then it spoils the illusion, the necessary suspension of disbelief, by telling us that it’s a chapter from Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

If you’ve ever read it, you would know how different it is from the chapters that come before and after. The gothic potboiler aspects of the rest of the novel are contrasted with the difference in approach that arises from the difference in perspective. Captain Elliot, the captain keeping the log, hasn’t read the preceding chapters, and doesn’t know what’s going on. We know, but it’s a complete mystery to him for most of the chapter.

dir: Anna Zlokovic

2023

Appendage, despite the name, which sounds like a prequel to Boogie Nights, is funny and horrifying in appropriate measure, and works in ways and on levels that Cobweb, the horror flick I saw just before it, never does.

This flick works more on a close-up, bonkers queasy physical level, because at first at least it’s about an anxious and stressed out person physically reacting to all the bullshit life throws up for us on a daily basis. We’re not talking about anything radically inventive or brand new – there are countless movies and stories about people and their darker selves, the shadow self that Carl Jung constantly banged on about; the Jekyll and Hyde nature of humanity.

This flick though…

Hanna (Hadley Robinson) is young, and yet stressed the fuck out. She has a wonderful boyfriend (Brandon Mychal Smith), a job as a fashion designer with an acclaimed atelier, an intense best friend (Kauser Mohammed) that she also works with, and she’s blonde, young and white in America. What could she possibly have to complain about?

Well, you know, sorry to have to mansplain things to you, but however matters may look on the surface of people’s lives, none of that necessarily prevents or alleviates the potential impact of trauma, of depression or anxiety on any individual.

The body keeps the score, or so the saying goes. Hanna’s nervous tics in the face of the instances of frustration or disappointment seem to be escalating, and regardless of her polite and pleasant outward demeanour, her insides are roiling, and she is struggling.

And something seems like it’s growing out of her left side, out of her birthmark.

dir: Samuel Bodin

2023

Cobweb is… less than great, in fact it’s not even close to great.

It barely approaches adequate. Which is a shame. Promising premise devolves into derivative dumbness, like most uninspired horror flicks. Like most flicks, probably.

In the run up to Halloween I will doubtless see a stack of horror flicks, some of which will have Halloween as an element or as a setting. Few will be (I hope) as poorly realised as this one.

Peter (Woody Norman) is a frightened, delicate boy, perfect for a role like this. He has pale skin, gigantic brown eyes and curly brown hair. Yes, he could probably perfectly play a role as Frodo in an inevitable Lord of the Rings remake.

He is (rightly) bullied at school, and his home life isn’t much grander. But whatever happens during the day, his nights are plagued with the inexplicable. He hears a tapping on his bedroom wall, sometimes he hears words being whispered.

His parents aren’t much help. The frazzled, brittle mother (Lizzie Caplan) is high pitched and hysterical even before things go wrong. The father is played by Antony Starr, so anyone who watched the Amazon series The Boys where he plays Homelander knows already that the character will clearly be some version of a charming psychopath.

Less charming, more psychopath. With everything that’s going wrong, Peter suspects that he can’t really trust his parents because, over-protective and violent as they are, they are clearly afraid of something.

One of those things that they’re afraid of clearly should be Child Protective Services, because her fragile Suzy Homemaker bullshit, which never makes a lot of sense since this is set contemporarily and that shit is from the 1950s, isn’t going to cut it. Both parents act like off chops long before there are any reveals, or any reasons given for why they might be acting like this.

The dad especially acts like a barely restrained lunatic right from the start.

dir: Kelly Reichardt

2023

Hmm.

I am not really sure who this film is for.

You could say that about many of Kelly Reichardt’s films, and I’m not saying that to invalidate her approach or sound dismissive. They’re just… idiosyncratic films.

Lizzy (Michelle Williams) is a middle-aged artist. She sculpts figurines, of women.

And that’s pretty much it. We watch her process, watch her sculpting, watch her take her sculptures out of the kiln, sometimes mount them on stands, stare at them with a critical eye, and...

Does a film need to be more than that? I guess it depends on what you expect out of a movie-going experience.

I think, maybe, this film asks a bit much of the viewer.

Set as it is where it is, it is a very low-key look at the everyday lives of a bunch of people. There’s no pretense that there is anything about these people that is that interesting. They just are who they are, and they do what they do.

There are lots of scenes of people either making their art, installing art for exhibition, or talking about upcoming shows, that you might think the flick is saying anything about art scenes in general or the art scene of Portland, Oregon, where this is set. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is a Kelly Reichardt film. She doesn’t tell you what to think about anything. She doesn’t even give you an inkling as to why she was interested enough to make the film about this art scene, because she’s not mocking it (that much) nor is she showing it up for the bunch of pretentious twats that you know must populate it.

dirs.: Daniel and Michael Philippou

2023

Wow. That first five minutes…

This flick starts with a deceptive scene. It has an energy completely different from the rest of the movie. A brother is trying to find his younger brother at a massive house party, calling out his brother’s name, and asking if anyone has seen Duckett.

At least I think it’s Duckett. As one guy yells in response, who the fuck is Duckett? Is that his first name? Why is he called Duckett? It can’t be his surname; why would he be calling his brother by his surname?

These questions will never be answered but will stay with me forever. That whole sequence is a continuous take, and it’s shocking, its climax is shocking, and then the rest of the flick transpires in a different way and in a different register, thank Christ.

And it’s all the better for it. A whole film like the first five minutes would have killed me.

Instead it becomes a much more relatable story about a kid who misses her mum indulging in the supernatural in order to avoid her obvious problems.

I mean, who hasn’t logged on to a Ouija board in a moment of weakness?

Maybe it’s more of a metaphor for disassociation or mental state altering drug use, but within the context of the flick at least, we know all the cool kids are into this latest trend, because everyone’s filming it and making TikToks out of it.

Two siblings have this weird ceramic hand. The experience is, you strap someone to a chair, they hold the hand, and say the fateful words “Talk to me”. Much to anyone’s shock, but not of the people watching this flick, a spirit appears before you. If you then say “I let you in”, for a period of time that’s not meant to exceed 90 seconds, that supernatural spirit inhabits your body, and gives you an incredible experience.

dir: Celine Song

2023

Past Lives, a semi-autobiographical story, is a lot of things to different people. If you want it to be the greatest film of the year, it can be. For you. It’s on a lot of film critics lists already.

The thing is, if you’re going to do that, say it’s one of the best films of the year, you’re really going to have to do yeoman’s work showing to the uninitiated *why* it’s so great.

Its charms, I would argue, are ineffable and hard to grasp. It is a really well-made film, with perfect performances. But it’s realised in such a personal way, one which doesn’t tell us what to think or how to feel about any particular scene, such that we impose our own feelings, our own impressions onto what we’re watching.

The film opens as three characters sit at a golden bar. A couple of voices, perhaps representing us, the viewers, try to theorise as to what’s going on over there. Are the Asian male and female a couple, or siblings, and who is the white guy next to them? An interloper? Why does he look so insecure and unhappy? Why does the female look so happy and energised, with those energies directed towards the other Asian guy, and deliberately physically turning her back on the other guy?

We are going to find out, but we’re still going to wonder. And yet (the woman) looks directly at us (down the camera), as if to challenge us, as if to say “you think you know what their story is, but you have no idea”.

Though it’s called Past Lives, this is not a supernatural romance about people finding each other over the course of multiple incarnations. In truth sometimes we get to live multiple lives even over the course of the one life we’re given.

dir: A.V. Rockwell

2023

Life is hard, whether it’s today or 1994 New York, if you’re an ex-con. Especially if you’ve burned every bridge, and lost custody of your child, who ends up in the welfare – foster system.

A Thousand and One puts us in the unenviable position of watching a character who often does the worst possible thing in a given situation, and still hope that she’ll be able to find a way to get by and get through. It’s a hard balancing act, because she’s a complex character, and she is certain she’s doing the right thing, but most people who do stuff that turns out awful are certain they’re doing the right thing.

Inez (the formidable Teyana Taylor) is just out of Riker’s, and has nothing, and no place to stay. It’s the early 90s, so we have multiple scenes of her using a phonebook to try and call people that might still take her in for a while. At something called a “phone booth”, with that accordion glass door and all.

Drifting back to her Brooklyn neighbourhood, there are as many people who remember her skills with a hot comb, finger weaves and box braids, as remember her for whatever landed her in jail again.

She’s spying on someone in the neighbourhood that she’s likely enjoined by law not to approach, a little guy she calls T (Aaron Kingsley Adetola), for Terry. He can’t even make eye contact with her, but he knows who she is. Life in foster care doesn’t seem to be that enjoyable, which results in Terry spending some time in hospital, which gives mother and son more of a chance to bond, somehow, despite Terry’s constant fear that she’s going to disappear again.

Inez herself is a product of the foster system. I should just call it “The System”. Later on she’ll refer to it as being the reason why she is so hard, so uncompromising, so brittle and fierce.

The boy speaks of his earliest memory, of being abandoned by his mother on a street corner. Inez is stunned, and aflame from this, and embarks on a course of action as unwise as it is heartfelt.

dir: Juel Taylor

2023

I feel like, considering the fact that no-one was ever going to see this anyway, they should have gone with “Oh No! Bro? They Cloned Tyrone!” as an alternate, if not better, title. I mean, it would have been terrible, with all that punctuation, but for some reason it could have been more fitting.

I thought this flick was hilarious. I loved it. It’s one of the funnier flicks that I’ve seen this year, and it’s a shame that it’s been relegated to the relative ghetto that is Netflix. It’s also funny to me that one of the lazier, dumber flicks I watched earlier this year, also on Netflix, also starring Jaimie Foxx, got nowhere near the same heights despite treading familiar genre ground (that waste of time was called Day Shift, in case you’re wondering).

If it feels like an amalgam, an accumulation of Blaxploitation elements, from the cookie-cutter characters, the slinky soundtrack that Curtis Mayfield would have enjoyed listening to (though he would have composed something way more exceptional), and dialogue and performances that wouldn’t have been out of place in flicks from Black Dynamite to I’m Going to Get You Sucker, that's because it is.

And even though it’s set contemporarily, there would be moments where one could be unsure as to whether it’s set now, twenty years ago, or twenty years before that. When Slick Charles yells about winning Pimp of the Year at the International Players Ball of 1995, you feel like saying “but that was 30 years ago bro…”

You might have assumed that the main character, or someone close to the main character, would be called Tyrone. You would be mistaken. If our flick here has a main man, a main character, it’s Fontaine (the great John Boyega).

Fontaine wakes up and goes about his day. He is an archetypal drug dealer. This is his world. It mostly seems to revolve around hassling people for the moneys he is owed, and assessing the dimensions of his empire. Though he does check in on his momma, calling through the door to see if she wants a sandwich.

She’s happy with her stories on the telly. Don’t know why he never opens the door?

dirs: Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K Thompson

2023

There is so much going on here.

Visually, this film, like its predecessor, pushes the possibilities of the medium (animation) by not just trying to replicate the aesthetics of the comic book format, but creating entirely new ways of displaying images, action, and the fluid transitions between them for the purposes of telling this story. And, yes, we are all completely getting sick of the multiverse stuff, but this flick manages to be extra-dimensional beyond that as well, having Miles and his mates fight in more than just four dimensions.

It's visually intense but on point, maybe a lot of it is for its own sake but there’s just so much going on, with a kind of go for broke energy, an almost terror of not getting every single brilliant idea represented, that it really asks a lot of the viewer. I’m not sure what the ideal state of mind or being is for watching this. It demands your attention, filling every frame with dense detail, and if you’re not in the right frame of mind I could see why this would be baffling / overwhelming.

And that beginning, my gods.

Miles Morales isn’t even in it for the first twenty minutes. It’s Gwen’s story up till that point. And what a story it tells, as she’s narrating to us, but alternating drumming with a band she quits and fighting an Italian Renaissance version of The Vulture, as well as finding out about some other Spider-Persons who travel through the dimensions trying to fix anomalies.

And there’s the fact that her Peter Parker died on her watch, after trying to get revenge on their version of Flash Thompson, after turning himself into The Lizard, and how her dad thinks she killed him.

Not “she” Gwen Stacy (Hailie Steinfield), but “she” Spider-Woman, the one with the white/pink hood and the ballet flats/Converse sneakers.

That intro is so good, both excellently written and delivered. And yet it’s just a part of a mosaic, one which is perhaps too complicated even for abject fans of the first film or the comic books.

Miles (Shameik Moore) is still only fifteen, and still having to keep his parents happy while he tries to balance school and his superheroics. His parents are all parent-y, so it’s the not unusual shenanigans of having to get to parent / teacher meetings, get celebratory cakes and battle the villain of the week, The Spot (Jason Schwartzman), who makes holes appear everywhere, and maintain his secret identity.

And he has to pine after Gwen, apparently.

dir: Nicole Holofcener

2023

Wah wah you hurt my feewings wah wah

No this isn’t the brutal takedown of contemporary morals and morays, millennial pieties or Gen Z or even Generation Alphas, and their woke sensitivities to not murder asylum seekers or torment endangered species or intersectionality bingo.

This flick is all about middle-aged white people! Being middle aged! And sensitive! With feelings!

Their feelings! Not your pathetic feelings. Their feelings!

If you aren’t familiar with the films of Nicole Holofcener, you may not be that interested in a new one of her films coming out. But if you’re a fan of her flicks, such as Friends with Money, Please Give, Enough Said, and now this one, you’re in for a treat.

Well, as much as a treat as you can expect from these low-key, subdued movies.

Enough Said was particularly enjoyable, not only for another wonderful performance by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, but also as a gentle swan song for the great James Gandolfini, who died soon after. Best known for playing a raging psychopath mob boss in The Sopranos, Gandolfini got to go out in style playing a quiet, complex man who doesn’t have to strangle people to death in order to get his feelings across.

Louis-Dreyfus, if you like her, is just the gift that keeps on giving. Best known for playing Elaine in Seinfeld, with each film role and other show that she’s done she’s consistently shown that there’s so much more to her than any of the other hacks on that terribly watchable sitcom (with the possible exception of Jason Alexander, who also always had more depth than the show allowed him to show: Jerry and Kramer on the other hand? Nothing but surface).

This is not that much of a variation on her usual films, in terms of how it feels, rather than the themes. It’s still low stakes small potatoes stuff, but that’s the inherent pleasure of it.

(범죄도시3
犯罪都市3
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dir: Lee Sang-yong

2023

This film, with the most generic of titles, is the third in a series.

None of that matters.

Here, at least in a country outside of South Korea, the title is the ineffable The Roundup: No Way Out. The title is purest nonsense. There is no rounding up of anyone or anything. Nothing is rounded up or down. There are no horrible herbicides from Monsanto or Bayer sprayed on any plants during the course of the film. There is no Taking Down or Up of anything either. And there are multiple ways out. It could just as easily have been called The Takedown Roundup Countdown Electric Boogaloo Part Three

None of that matters.

It’s set mostly in Seoul and Incheon, and has to do with Korean and Japanese criminals fighting over some mythical drug, and killing a whole bunch of people, with plot machinations and double crosses and people wanting this or that.

Doesn’t matter.

The lead in this series of films is Ma Dong-seok. His cop character in these films is called Detective Ma Seok-do, which is everyone involved taking the piss. Ma Dong-seok also goes by Don Le, and is somehow one of the biggest stars of Korean action cinema. He was even in that darned Marvel Eternals movie that no-one liked.

The only thing that matters is that Detective Ma, a fat middle-aged guy who wears the same tracksuit throughout the entire film, punches people.

He punches them really hard. He punches them so hard that he can pretty much warp reality with the force of his mighty fists.