A Dick Powell jag from Murder, My Sweet (1944). Apparently he directed despite the credit going to Robert Parrish. William Bowers based his screenplay on a story by Jerome Cady.
Powell returns to Los Angeles after a five year spell in gaol after ex-marine Richard Erdman (Stalag 17 (1953), good) claims he didn't do it. We soon find out that "it" was a theft of 100k USD and indeed Powell did not do it. Erdman gets distracted by "available! that's me" Jean Porter (spouse of Edward Dmytryk who directed Murder, My Sweet (1944)) while Powell puts up a fight with old flame Rhonda Fleming (Out of the Past (1947), Spellbound (1945)) who just happened to marry his best mate after being turned down a few too many times. That bloke is still in the can on a related rap. Things sort of circle the drain as Regis Toomey's cop hovers and inscrutable underworld boss William Conrad tries to err on the legitimate side of things.
Perhaps because he was distracted by his directorial duties, Powell is a bit wooden here, at least against the solid performances he got from the rest of the cast. As a noir it's not that twisty but sufficiently fun. Erdman gets all the good lines, somehow putting me in mind of Miguel Ferrer in Twin Peaks.
Third time around with this Pixar classic, perhaps prompted by co-writer/director Andrew Stanton having a new picture out just now (In the Blink of an Eye (2026)) that by all accounts is a bit dire.
Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. What more could he want? Dana Stevens. Stephanie Zacharek.
Ken Loach directed a script by Jim Allen; they did it again a few years later in Land and Freedom (1995). This won Loach the Jury Prize at Cannes in 1990.
Journo Frances McDormand (in one of her less convincing performances) and human rights laywer/boyfriend Brad Dourif are wrapping up their activities in Belfast when he receives an apparently vital lead that takes him into the Irish countryside in the early morning. They've just completed their collection of testimony about the British authorities' dirty business in Northern Ireland but it is this last piece that somehow tips someone over the edge. Brian Cox (fine) arrives to investigate. Things go along OK in a TV police-procedural mode until we get a few zoomed-out tail-end expository dumps. McDormand's character makes little sense: she has absolutely no op-sec and shows little awareness of the danger she may be in or the damage she causes others. Why did she return to Belfast? — and who would ever expect justice from the very regime she's just spent all that time documenting?
There is some good but insufficient footage of British troops occupying the streets of Belfast.
Roger Ebert: three stars after a not-too-careful watch. Caryn James at the New York Times. "Variety staff" reckon it was based on the Stalker Enquiry of a few years earlier. IMDB trivia: McDormand and Dourif were also coupled in Mississippi Burning (1988). Some pointed to Costa-Gavras but really, come on.
Jim Jarmusch's most-recent feature, his first (fictional) one since The Dead Don't Die (2019), and therefore inevitable. He wrote and directed, and pulled a few of his usual ensemble. In two sittings due to banality.
The film is comprised of three vignettes, all gentle, unfunny comedies of manners, involving familial obligations that seem so obsolescent in these days of low and no contact. Tom Waits leads in the first as Father. I did not enjoy Mayim Bialik or Adam Driver's performances as his kids and spent most of it thinking that Jarmusch missed a trick by not casting Lily Tomlin as his wife. The ending just emphasised that the whole thing was skew-whiff. Next up matriarch author Charlotte Rampling was Mother, hosting an afternoon tea. Cate Blanchett has a nothing role as one of her daughters; at least Vicky Krieps as the other seemed to have some fun. Finally Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat played Sister Brother. Nobody covered themselves in glory.
The entirety reeks of mortality. It sort-of wanted to go where Happiness (1998) and Festen (1998) awkwardly did but is mostly just boring; I was more bored by this than by The Limits of Control (2009). The nostalgia for skating seemed so quaint. The repeated/shared motifs were trite. Apparently Jarmusch did not do the soundtrack.
Ben Kenigsberg at the New York Times. Peter Bradshaw: four stars. I wish I'd seen what they did.
Inevitable having read Chandler's source novel Farewell, My Lovely (1940). Edward Dmytryk directed a screenplay streamlined by John Paxton; they later collaborated again on Crossfire (1947). Dick Powell struck me as too graceful and insufficiently battered and bulky for Marlowe but it mostly worked. Claire Trevor and Anne Shirley did what they needed to do as the femmes fatale. Mike Mazurki's 'Moose' Malloy slotted straight in; he lived entirely in his own world. The rest of the cast is fine too. Fun and I think they succeeded in making it make and not make sense as required.
Bosley Crowther: "a superior piece of tough melodrama".
A Jane Alexander jag from Brubaker (1980). Directed by Robert Benton who adapted a novel by Avery Corman. Heavily Oscared. Not being a fan of either of the leads did not help.
For reasons unexplained creative Meryl Streep found herself hitched to fellow creative Dustin Hoffman in NYC and after too many years discovered she didn't like that very much. The first half sets Hoffman up as a loving and increasingly capable single father to their six-year-old son. The last half has her return from California and demand custody. The ending is tidy and unsatisfactory, an unstable state to leave things in. Alexander played the ambiguous neighbour who also had singledom thrust upon her.
The whole thing is hard work. Despite her lengthy absence you know Streep is coming back but she has so little character that you can't realistically hope that she's developed in any interesting way. Indeed her therapied older-and-wiser woman presents as fragile, teary, grasping and still unaware of what she really wants or can make work until she's forced to. We never see how she functioned with Hoffman, what drew them together or how it's still possible for there to be tenderness between them. I had no interest in the advertising backdrop.
Roger Ebert: four stars. He claims it doesn't take sides but clearly it does: we spend most of the movie with Hoffman.
Gus Van Sant's latest. I'm not a big fan; I saw My Own Private Idaho (1991) a long time ago and (I think) nothing since. He directed a script by Austin Kolodney. There's not a lot to recommend it.
The poster and early scenes clearly signal Arnie-in-T2 shotgun (but no roses) retro-nostalgia. It's 1977 and in this inspired-by-real-life flick, despite being at most two years since Dog Day Afternoon (1975), no reference is made to that classic. Bill Skarsgård leads as the semi-hinged Tony Kiritsis who kidnaps mortgage company scion Dacre Montgomery (entirely personality free, a thankless role) in some fantasy vengeful scheme that will only lead to good things. Colman Domingo is the golden-tonsiled Black man on the radio, the voice of Indianapolis, just like Cleavon Little in Vanishing Point (1971), charged with intervening. Many scenes just drag on. The outcome was predictable — the only variable was whether our main man would get killed by the police, but of course those were more civilised times. I had no doubt at any point that he should have hijacked a plane instead.
This thing does not even function as a proof-of-life for Al Pacino.
Ben Kenigsberg at the New York Times: low energy, needed more crazy. Skarsgård impersonates an imagined Michael Shannon performance. Peter Bradshaw: gripping.
A Judd Hirsch jag from Ordinary People (1980). He doesn't get much opportunity to show his range or humour. Apparently Stanley R. Jaffe's sole directorial effort. Beth Gutcheon adapted her own novel which was, of course, inspired by actual events.
Columbia arts prof Kate Nelligan (Franky and Johnny (1991)) sees her young son off to school in Brooklyn but he doesn't make it. Hirsch is the investigating police officer. Things unwind over months.
I felt the script let the show down, especially in the last third as the scenario lost its shape on the way to an unearnt happy ending that leaves the few clues we're informed of mostly dangling. The leads are fine but too many scenes do not work; one has everyone sitting around watching TV coverage of the very events they're involved in. Early 1980s NYC (Brooklyn) is portrayed as a very trusting place where the highly cultured rub shoulders with the hoi polloi until they just can't take it any more.
Janet Maslin. Needed more thought put into it.
More Robert Redford; apparently he finished acting in this just before he directed Ordinary People (1980). Also for Yaphet Kotto who is fine but mostly just rolls his eyes at everything. Directed by Stuart Rosenberg (Cool Hand Luke (1967)) from material drawn from real-life events. In two sittings.
We're told Redford used to run a military prison (I think) and has been charged by Jane Alexander's intriguing but insufficiently drawn political animal to fix a prison farm somewhere in the South. This fixing involves the usual stuff and reducing the exploitation of the inmates by the trusties and local merchant class; the prisoners mostly just take it, as if they are nowhere near breaking point. Things fall apart over the last third or so. There are too many dangling loose ends pretty much all the way through. Some of it is funny but mostly it's just trying to make the obvious points about how corrupt the system is.
Apparently this was Morgan Freeman's first movie and he's very hard to miss. M. Emmet Walsh is unchallenged in Southern greaser mode as a lumber merchant. Everett McGill, inexpressive but perhaps that's what he was asked to do.
Roger Ebert: two-and-a-half stars. Grim and depressing. Needed more focus on the characters and less on the issues. Redford's performance is of "a frustratingly narrow range". Needed more action between Alexander and Redford (in what is otherwise a sausagefest). Vincent Canby. Both observe the characters just espouse points of view. I think they did not account for how these movies function as time capsules.
Idle Wes Anderson completism. Much of his usual ensemble was there: Ed Norton as a scoutmaster/maths teacher, Bill Murray, the father of wayward Kara Hayward (Manchester by the Sea (2016)) and three indistinguishable boys, abidingly but unsatisfyingly married to Frances McDormand who's having a thing with Bruce Willis, Island Police. Harvey Keitel an unmodulated scout camp commander. Tilda Swinton is Social Services! Jason Schwartzman. Anderson directed and co-wrote with Roman Coppola.
Notionally this is about two twelve-year olds (Jared Gilman and Hayward, both later in Paterson (2016)) who meet cute at a pageant in 1964 (?) on an island and decide they'd like to spend some of the next summer together far away from the adults. Events ensue but I wasn't invested enough in Anderson's way of doing things to care too much. There's an air of innocence over the entire production, even the violent bits.
Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. He too thought it was played seriously/earnestly. Dana Stevens: "maybe it's OK to find Moonrise Kingdom both dramatically inert and aesthetically entrancing." And so on.
On the pile since Robert Redford passed last September. This was his directorial debut. He worked from a screenplay by Alvin Sargent and Nancy Dowd that was derived from Judith Guest's novel. He did not appear onscreen. Won Oscars for best picture, best screenplay, best director, best supporting actor.
The scenario is a classical Amercian one: success has been attained but the rot has set in. (See, for instance any of Death of a Salesman (1949), The Swimmer (1968), The Great Gatsby (1925/2013), The Sun Also Rises (1926/1957), etc.) The genre generally requires that the tragedy (if any) be offset by at least a glimmer of hope for a better tomorrow, and so it goes here.
Redford takes us to Lake Forest along Lake Michigan in the northern suburbs of Chicago to a huge suburban house similar to the one in Risky Business (1983). This is financed by even-tempered father/husband Donald Sutherland's tax lawyering and is inhabited by his picture-perfect housewife Mary Tyler Moore (Oscar nominated) and increasingly troubled son Timothy Hutton (Oscared), who despite the billing is actually the lead. We also spend some time at the high school where M. Emmet Walsh is the swim coach and a very young Elizabeth McGovern makes a pass at Hutton after enjoying his breath down her neck at choir. But perhaps the best scenes (in a neo-noirish style) are those between Hutton and his shrink Judd Hirsch (Oscar nominated).
The impact of Redford's direction is abundantly clear and he definitely earnt that Oscar. There's some fantastic and effective proto-Hal Hartley loops in the dialogue and mistimed responses. Hutton is often lost but never absent. Hirsch is (even) better here than he was in Running on Empty (1988). This was the best performance from Sutherland that I can recall seeing. Moore initially seemed less effective but the latter half clarifies it all. I'm not sure they entirely stuck the ending, which seemed to want to head off a charge of misogyny.
Roger Ebert: four stars. Mostly about love, a concept which somehow combines an emotional state, misperception and a building material. Vincent Canby: Chicago's poshest suburb! — so we can add humanising the upper classes to Redford's achievements. The fragility of "the contemporary white Anglo-Saxon Protestant psyche." Janet Maslin interviewed Redford at (worthwhile) length. "It's a paradox, really — I've played so many roles where the character is alone, he's apart," [Redford] said. "But I respond to work most when it's integrated, when the actors are integrated into relationships. One of the sad things for me is not finding enough films with the kind of relationships that interest me. This time I found it in something I really didn't want to be in." Redford also asserts that The Great Gatsby (1925) is overrated. Wikipedia. IMDB trivia.
An aging photographer goes looking for where the wave broke out near Yucca Valley in the Mojave Desert, not too far east of Los Angeles. It seemed like such a quaint thing to do this late in the day. Director/co-writer Joshua Erkman did the slow cinema thing well enough (Bossi Baker was the other co-writer), and Jay Keitel's cinematography and framing are fine. But the just-stay-home dogma, dialogue and scenario are witless — just too much cliche. Sort-of-lead for the second half Sarah Lind was in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) and Die My Love (2025).
Calum Marsh saw more in it than is there. Indeed, the two parts, the cruising of that white centre line and that gap-toothed Ashley B. Smith's look is enough like Patricia Arquette's to support a charge of theft from Lost Highway (1997). Simon Abrams: two stars at Roger Ebert's venue. The score by Ty Segall is fine too. Dennis Harvey: lost in the desert.
Kindle. Flabby Brunner: he had some mystery in this book that he did not want to reveal too soon, leading to extreme repetition of scenes that don't progress anything. The delay in uniting his main character with the interlocutor that enables the exposition dump is unmotivated. The intro was sufficiently disjointed that I was intrigued by how he was going to stitch it all together but soon enough (20% or so) it became a slog. I didn't come away with a clear sense of what he was trying to say.
I think it's set in a present-day London that never recovered from World War II: there are aspects of 1984 privation and lifts from Doctor Who (a room that functions much like the TARDIS) and Douglas Adams's contemporary Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980). We'll make great pets, some of us anyway. There's a rocket attack with effects perhaps somewhat like those in Francis Spufford's Light Perpetual (2021).
Goodreads. Faust, Mephistopheles.
The latest from writer/director Kelly Reichardt (Meeks Cutoff (2010), First Cow (2019)). Once again with the slow cinema but this time in Massachusetts, not the Pacific northwest.
This is yet another nostalgic period piece: black-and-white televisions, ancient drab fashions, unruly beards, yank tanks without seat belts, Pepsi at the waterbed shop, all dating from before the birth of the lead actors. There's a low-tech heist and a slow unwind in Reichardt’s signature style.
Over-exposed lead Josh O'Connor got to demonstrate both his range and limitations; I enjoyed his efforts in La Chimera (2023) a while back but not so much in Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (2025). Here he tries to trade on a shambling 1970s never-quite vibe reminiscent of Oscar Isaac in Inside Llewelyn Davis (2013) with the odd grope for Elliot Gould's charisma (that elusive universal solvent). Not much is asked of Alana Haim but even so her acting struck me as poor in a bedroom scene where (I think) she is supposed to be shocked at the way her life is turning out. On the other hand Bill Camp and Hope Davis easily dominate the parental scenes.
Reichardt's slow cinema schtick only works if the arc of what we're shown is engaging and what's in the frame speaks. Fatal to my interest were a series of inert urban driving scenes where the camera tracks the driver so closely we have no idea what the town is like; the actors' expressions do not vary enough to make up for that. Things just trundle along until they don't.
Jason Di Rosso had a chat with Reichardt. Peter Sobczynski was fascinated.
One of the few movies where ants are the main protagonists. Sophisticated and glamorous Eleanor Parker (The Man with the Golden Arm (1955)) is sent up-river in Brazil (actually Panama?) as a mail-order bride from New Orleans. At the dock Charlton Heston isn't waiting — his plantation needs him so badly — so she gets an introduction to the hacienda from the number-one right-hand man Abraham Sofaer, who, despite his early protestations, plays no significant role in what follows. She's more-and-less than he had in mind. He's the alpha thing she wants. She's always keen but he puts up a fight.
After about an hour of abrasive setup (of the when-will-they variety) we're shown how destructive the army ants can be (at least in Hollywood). This unleashes a flood of romantic expression. It's all a bit ho-hum.
Byron Haskin directed a screenplay adapted by Philip Yordan/Ben Maddow and Ranald MacDougall from a story by Carl Stephenson.
Bosley Crowther at the time. "Credit [to] Byron Haskin for directing in a slow rhythm and a mordant style."
An insider's take on the open-air rave scene in Morocco. Written and directed by Oliver Laxe with some help from Santiago Fillol on the script. Got the Jury Prize and other awards at Cannes 2025, and now a couple of Oscar noms. In two sittings, split just when things started getting dicey around the hour mark.
Notionally a Spanish bloke goes looking for his daughter with his son and dog amongst this overwhelmingly European crowd. An even more tenuous suggestion has him follow a couple of large all-terrain vehicles deeper into the desert in his small and unsuitable wagon. Ultimately he comes away with less than he started with, or perhaps more if you're susceptible to the half-baked thinking of this scene.
Once those vehicles took the dodgy mountain track for weak reasons I got strong The Wages of Fear (1953) vibes. This is nowhere as gripping: entirely humourless and increasingly witless, with the hardened campaigners failing to do the obvious things. The concluding movement started out pointless and became nonsensical. Some of the cinematography is decent. The soundtrack is pure pulsing dance. Overall it's more something to feel than think about.
Reviewers are polarised. Peter Bradshaw: two stars. "Slightly farcical ... later, frankly, Pythonesque." The first ten minutes promises a lot more than the rest delivers. A Critic's Pick by Manohla Dargis. Peter Sobczynski. And so on.
Kindle. Apparently Brunner's first under his own name, the first-first being under a pseudonym. Space opera. There's already some of his signature moves including multitrack narration and discursive smart-arse grabs at the start of each chapter. He put in a few too many underdrawn characters including a couple of token twentieth-century everypeople. Time travel, temporal inertia and surges... parallel universes with a causality repair mechanism ... oh my. God as a disembodied woman who gifts another woman to her surviving (embodied) husband. The (xenophobic) Enemy invades! The Being ... who does stuff ... ouroboric. Conceptually cracked but you can see the promise.
The other Safdie movie of 2025 and as such inevitable. Josh Safdie co-wrote the script with Ronald Bronstein and directed the result, which I would summarise as (their immediately previous feature) Uncut Gems (2019) without all that Adam Sandler brought. And perhaps Ben Safdie's input was critically lacking too. Again it's very NYC Jewish with a notionally unlikeable but actually grindingly boring lead (Timothée Chalamet) providing all the energy in a formulaic and often nonsensical sequence of set pieces. Ping pong! — some time in the 1950s. Japan versus USA! A bathtub scene that riffs on Breaking Bad. Some sort of redemption at the end, if you think the world needs more Martys.
Very widely reviewed. Dana Stevens hopes we're past peak Safdie. Stephanie Zacharek: "as hollow as a ping-pong ball" with nastier undertones than their work with Sandler. Shot by Darius Khondji. Peter Sobczynski was not impressed. Abel Ferrara! And so on.
Jason Di Rosso interviewed co-writer/director/star Dev Patel back in April 2024. It did not sound appetising at the time but just now became inevitable when I found out Sharlto Copley is in it.
The movie is simply Indian John Wick (2014) with similar aspirations to endless sequels (Gods forbid). This retreat to cliched ultraviolence is annoying as many of the visuals are intriguing and as lush as Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017). Many opportunities to dig into exotic ethnographies, even as much as Gangs of Wasseypur (2012) did, are passed over; narrative is too hard or too dead now. Copley does well enough as an impresario for a bare-knuckle brawling enterprise but is hardly ever there and is never consequential. He plays up coming from South Africa (a sort-of reverse Gandhi?) and there are some other fine but brief observations of various Commonwealth/colonised people. And, bravely, the Hindutva. But unfortunately personal revenge is all that's ever on the table in these sorts of movies. The invocation of Indian spirituality and cure-alls was conceptually stale.
On the plus side I learnt that Dev Patel was also brought up on Monkey Magic. Or perhaps not: that presented the monkey-god as a chaos agent who is coerced by Buddha into good works whereas the Hindu Hanuman represents discipline and other things. The movie spent a lot of time (I wish it had been all the time) exploring the diversity of the demimonde of the city (notionally Mumbai?) but passed up the opportunity to go ecstatic like Joyland (2022) or Return to Seoul (2022), or more deeply into the structure of power like Shoshana (2023).
Later I found I've seen more Patel than I had realised: Slumdog Millionaire (2008) of course, but he was also in Chappie (2015) and The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (2023).
Peter Sobczynski: actor yes, director of action movies perhaps not. Manohla Dargis: it never coheres. The sequence where a purse is thieved was good.
A pointer from Peter Sobczynski's review of Luc Besson's latest (Dracula (2025)). Besson directed his own story set in the comic book universe originated by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières.
It's like Besson wanted to remake Avatar (2009). If you squint you may discern a bit of signature French absurdist humour (sorta like Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Alien3). He stole from everything: a galactic utopia somewhat ruined by individuals ala Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991), the lead actrons ending in a garbage dump ala Star Wars. Maybe there's some of The Fifth Element (1997) in there, though hot chick Cara Delevingne (London Fields (2018)) is a lot further out of her acting depth than Milla Jovovich was. Dane DeHaan (The Place Beyond the Pines (2012)) is marginally more competent but far from plausible as a space stud. (Besson appears to have adopted the Michael Bay approach to casting.) And there's nothing like Bruce Willis here; the live action is mostly woeful when set against the trippy CGI. There are some good bits, even fun bits, and it is often visually engrossing even if the world building falls far short. There are too many exposition dumps.
Peter Sobczynski at Roger Ebert's venue: four stars. Cheerfully bonkers. A 200M USD budget, the largest in French history! Rihanna was in some good bits. But come on, Delevingne's "climactic oratory on the importance of love" was as hokey as Interstellar (2014)'s. Stephanie Zacharek. Hipster space spies. Rihanna was the main reason to see it. A. O. Scott wanted to spend more time with Ethan Hawke and Rihanna.
