Costa-Gavras's first feature and hence inevitable. Black-and-white. He adapted a novel by Sébastien Japrisot.
A woman gets murdered in a sleeping compartment on a train heading from Marseilles to Paris, so the police, led by Yves Montand, investigate. It's quite amusing and often sweet in its handling of human relations. I particularly enjoyed Charles Denner's snarky take on life and everything, and Catherine Allégret's straightforward ingénue. The shifting viewpoints are not treated quite as well as in his classic paranoid/political thrillers which may have been a matter of editing. (Christian Gaudin edited this.) The brisk pace made it hard to see everything in the frame (the details are often rewarding) while reading the subtitles and appreciating the humour. I did not grasp all the details of all the red herrings, partly because the eyeglazing final exposition dump mildly ruined the subtle work before it. In a similar space to Le Samouraï (1967) and Melville's demimonde.
And still more Lee Tamahori completism. Somehow rated near the top of his output. Written by David Mamet! — which blew my brain as the script is light on for snappy dialogue and mostly witless. Did Anthony Hopkins lead any other action movie?
Before Cocaine Bear (2023) there were three blokes who went for a look-see in some remote wooded arctic wilderness and ended up staying for longer than planned. Hopkins played a sort of Bill Gates-ish aspy billionaire (a type well out of fashion now) who somehow landed Elle Macpherson for a wife. She is, of course, too much woman for any man. Alec Baldwin photographed her during daylight hours but somehow thought a Native American would have made a better model; Harold Perrineau tagged along as some kind of factotum. There's a bear, a fair bit of blood and more survival than any character deserved.
Clearly a money job for all involved.
Roger Ebert: three stars. Subtly funny, "in some ways is typical of [Mamet's] work." "The Brother Always Dies First" but that's OK as "Mamet knows that, and is satirizing the stereotype." Janet Maslin.
Kindle. The one that didn't win him the Booker. The edition I had (2025) included a worthless introduction by Amy Liptrot (The Outrun (2024)).
To be honest I was a bit disappointed that he didn't take things much further than he had in Greenvoe (1972) and Six Lives of Fankle the Cat (1980) which I did enjoy. Perhaps I rushed it a bit or was too insapient to grasp all his subtleties; he didn't adopt the fancy tenses of Charles Yu to travel through time, or even the slick trickiness of Murray Bail's prose for that matter, but the simple mechanism of dreamlife, later recalled for profit. The stories are sufficiently straightforward that the rewards are in how they are told. And just who is this entity that is sitting beside (and not inside) the ocean of time with the rest of us?
Goodreads. Cornelius Browne points to Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1957).
Lee Tamahori's next feature after Once Were Warriors (1994). Peter Dexter wrote the screenplay with some help from Floyd Mutrux on the story.
I guess the 1990s saw many attempts to make an L.A. noir as good as Chinatown (1974), not the least being a sequel (1990). The pick was probably L.A. Confidential (1997) but this was a somewhat worthy attempt. A squad of four police officers — Nick Nolte in the lead, partnered with Chazz Palminteri from Jersey, Michael Madsen and Chris Penn just making up the numbers — is tasked with preventing the incursion of organised crime into the city of dreams. Little do they know that the biggest mob of all, the U.S. Federal Government, is already taking care of atomic business just out of town. Jennifer Connelly plays everyone's girlfriend and the main order of the day is to figure out who did her in.
They got a lot of things right enough but some characters were egregiously miscast. Melanie Griffith could do vanilla, wronged 1950s housewife any day of the week but she was capable of a lot more. Michael Madsen's signature menace was completely absent. I struggled to think of John Malkovich as a General. Nolte can do volatile/shambolic but that's not what's called for here, and it's too difficult to consider him a romantic lead at that point in his career; compare with Who'll Stop the Rain (1978) and soon enough The Thin Red Line (1998). Bruce Dern as a disingenuous police chief.
The plot is fairly linear. Mostly shot outdoors, which suited Tamahori's style. Not terrible not great. If nothing else it reminds me how good we had things in the 1990s.
Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. Very Raymond Chandler. Well cast. Janet Maslin. "And Ms. Griffith does give an unusually acute performance here, despite the limiting and even insulting aspects of her role. Once Were Warriors had its fiery feminist heroine, but Mr. Tamahori hasn't exactly made a women's picture this time." Both say the squad actually happened. IMDB trivia: cut to death by the studio.
Lee Tamahori completism. He directed a witless adaption of Philip K. Dick's The Golden Man by Gary Goldman, Jonathan Hensleigh and Paul Bernbaum. Also Nicolas Cage completism. In quite a few sittings as it just doesn't matter.
The sense of just-how-bad-can-it-be doesn't last too long: it's every bit as bad and worse. The rules of the game are that Cage can see two minutes into his own future and arbitrarily far ahead when it involves his dreamgirl Jessica Biel. The FBI, or more precisely Julianne Moore, wants to use him as whatever Samantha Morton was in Minority Report (2002), also a Dick contraption. Everything else is recycled too: some Matrix-ish bullet-time-ish multi-Agent Smith-ish dodging, the iconic eyewear from A Clockwork Orange (1971), shootouts amongst containers ala Heat (1995) at an industrial plant ala The Terminator (1984). And so on.
Cage is unusually flat. Moore's character, dialogue etc. is terrible. Biel gets to use all her facial expressions. The seeing mechanic is nonsensical; the explanations don't even try to make sense of counterfactuality. There's not a lot of action and none of it is surprising. The cinematography is not terrible; I guess Tamahori is more comfortable outdoors. There's some very poor CGI. Mark Isham (Romeo is Bleeding (1993)) composed! Everyone and everything was squandered in service to this purest of money jobs.
Park Chan-wook's latest, following the sombre Decision to Leave (2022) or The Sympathizer (2024) if TV series count. He, Lee Kyoung-mi, Don McKellar and Jahye Lee wrote a screenplay based on Donald E. Westlake's novel The Ax (1997). Apparently Costa-Gavras had a go at the very same source material (The Ax (Le couperet) (2005)).
I watched it in a few sittings as it is very amusing but it would've been better in one go as I lost track of some of the early threads. The cast is uniformly excellent. Lead Lee Byung-hun has it all but demand for his papermaking skills is falling and desperate measures are called for. Wife Son Ye-jin has her doubts and does what she can to help with the hanging on. Their very young daughter is a savant on the cello, her only ticket to independence in present-day South Korea. There are scenes of men remaining men separately, but in the same room: a sort of anti-union where everyone taps their heads while saying "there is no other choice" as the nice lady from HR shows them the latest mantras.
It obviously invites comparison with Bong Joon-ho's Parasite (2019) and Mickey 17 (2025). Wikipedia also suggests Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949).
Peter Sobczynski. Manohla Dargis. Peter Bradshaw: this film was dedicated to Costa-Gavras. Brian Tallerico at Roger Ebert's venue: four stars. Great cinematography, framing, etc.
Commander Leonard 'Bones' McCoy, M.D.: Touch God...? V'Ger's liable to be in for one hell of a disappointment. — It can get in line with the audience!
Eventually inevitable I suppose. Directed by Robert Wise from an underbaked and apparently overworked script by Gene Roddenberry, Harold Livingston and Alan Dean Foster. As soporific and derivative as reputed. Apparently most of the money, time and effort went into the sets; not enough is asked of the cast. By the time man unites with living machine (living machine having already forcibly assimilated woman) we've climbed enough mountains of illogic to cease wondering what the theme music to Star Trek: The Next Generation is doing on this stodgy old fare. I guess it is of a kind with all the other recycling.
Roger Ebert: three stars. Vincent Canby: fan service. Even the IMDB trivia is boring.
George Barley: Why doesn't the government do something? That's what I'd like to know.
Mr. Krull: What can they do? They're only people just like us.
George Barley: People my foot. They're Democrats.
This was on the pile since the 1980s. Directed by Robert Wise who also directed Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) which has also been on the pile for about as long. Edmund H. North adapted a story by Harry Bates, apparently quite loosely.
Things go as demanded by classic scifi: a bloke (Englishman Michael Rennie) arrives from another planet, robot in tow, and seeing as he presents as human and not a thing he must have come in peace and he must be misunderstood. American insecurity is eternal. It does not reward much thinking or a close watch. Sam Jaffe (Gunga Din from Gunga Din (1939)) plays Einstein's hair, Patricia Neal (A Face in the Crowd (1957), Hud (1963), Cookie's Fortune (1999)) a war widow with a young son.
Lee Tamahori completism. The middle entry in a trilogy bookended by Once Were Warriors (1994) and The Convert (2023). John Collee (The Return (2024)) wrote the screenplay based on a novel by Witi Ihimaera.
Temuera Morrison plays a Māori patriarch who arrived in the district of Gisborne / Poverty Bay (northeastern corner of the North Island of New Zealand) a while back, did what it took to establish and enforce his particular notions of muscular, landed patriarchy and now, ballpark 1960, has to contend with a grandson (Akuhata Keefe) who refuses to quieten his modern, liberal ideas. Each generation gets its Romeo and Juliet, Tamahori being such a romantic, but it is only this third one that can provoke a reckoning with the founders and Pākehā notions of justice.
The arc of the story is predictable and clearly Tamahori is more interested in conveying details, for instance by contrasting this bloke with Morrison's timeless portrayal of Jake the Muss and showing the increasing utility of abstract thought and ideals married with conviction (and muscle but perhaps not violence). The boy is already brave and tough but has a lot to learn; a variety of scenes demonstrate how he benefits from interactivity rather than the trial-by-failure methods of his grandfather which do nothing but rile him up. (There are some great collaborative shearing scenes shot well by Ginny Loane.)
The women seem generally happy, leaving aside grandmother Nancy Brunning who has her own particular grievances with the patriarch. Apart from her none are drawn in much depth.
Māori culture isn't explained much here. There is a fair bit of breath-sharing, some of it surprisingly aggressive. A haka (?) at a funeral seems at best insensitive. A destitute family hacked into the bush with such abandon that I wondered how much connection they felt to the land; perhaps it was a case of one dispossessed clan despoiling the property of another now long gone.
Thinly reviewed. David Stratton at The Australian: "essentially a variation on classic western themes", owes "a considerable debt to Elia Kazan’s 1954 film of John Steinbeck's East of Eden". "In this context it was amusing to note from the end credits that one of the film's producers is named James Dean." Two funerals and a wedding. Keefe's inexperience let the show down. Wendy Ide found the plot "glaringly unsubtle" but did not use her surplus attention to dig into its other aspects. But she got it broadly right: those CGI bees are terrible.
Written and directed by Jafar Panahi (Offside (2006)). Autofiction of sorts. Widely feted as one of the best movies of the year. Won the Palme d'Or at Cannes 2025.
A coincidence brings generic everyman/nobody Vahid Mobasseri into contact with Ebrahim Azizi who just maybe tortured him during a bout of incarceration for industrial relations activity. After abducting him and digging the requisite grave but failing to bury the man alive, he goes to George Hashemzadeh (in a bookshop) for advice who punts him to hard-boiled wedding photographer Mariam Afshari. (They later share some kind of minor-note PTSD romance that is underexplored.) The to-be-wed couple (Majid Panahi and Hadis Pakbaten) tag along in their wedding togs and she drags in her ex Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr as supposedly only he can positively ID the man.
I'd say it's just one damn thing after another if it weren't for the excess verbiage and histrionics. I felt it lost its shape with 30 minutes to go as the crowd mounted a quixotic mission to help the man's wife. (Don't they have ambulances in Iran?) The narrative arc is very similar to State of Siege (1972) and doubtlessly many other movies that try to show heroic human responses to implacable regimes. The cinematography is quite good; apparently it was an urban guerrilla shoot.
A Critic's Pick by Manohla Dargis. She goes to the Waiting for Godot well several times but does not draw much enlightenment. Peter Sobczynski. And so on. Most react to it more as a present-day political document (bareheaded women, my how things have changed!) than cinema.
The successor of The Confession (1970) and third of Costa-Gavras's paranoid/political thriller collaborations with Yves Montand for me to get to. Franco Solinas wrote the screenplay in consultation with Costa-Gavras.
Set in Latin America (some signage says Montevideo, Uruguay) where everyone unfathomably speaks French and United Fruit calls the shots. Family-man Montand presents as a technician with USAID cover who liaises with regional police forces on topics of communications and traffic. So far so The Quiet American (1955) but the local left wing is sufficiently organised to discern his involvement in violent reactionary activities. They abduct him and two (eventually three) others. His interrogation (a non-violent interview) is brisk and lays out the facts for us as he issues mechanical denials until an eleventh-hour crater. Concurrent events in the outside world show the limitations of the revolutionaries' opsec and failure of their strategy: their ultimatum only yields a loss of the moral high ground.
Apparently this was shot in Valparaíso and Santiago, Chile during the brief reign of Salvador Allende, based on the actual abduction etc. of Dan Mitrione. The cinematography is once again serviceable and improved by Françoise Bonnot's editing. There are some negative-space portraits of the kind that Sergio Leone made famous. Amongst the actors O.E. Hasse has the most fun as a knowing journalist.
Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. Wikipedia.
Prompted by Ben Kenigsberg making it a Critic's Pick at the New York Times. Written and directed by Iranian/Canadian Alireza Khatami. Obviously shot in Turkey; IMDB says Ankara, which was somewhat familiar from the shots of mountain ranges and windy roads in previous movies set in Anatolia.
Taken literally there's not a lot going on: a forty-ish university professor who spent fourteen years in America has strained relations with his parents and eight-year younger wife that are further strained when his mother dies and his job (teaching comparative literature or translation or something) gets canned. His orchard/garden just out of town is too arid to produce much of anything and he can't get his wife pregnant; rectifications require illegalities. But of course we're supposed to be contemplating the metaphors of generational violence and so on that elevate the meaning of all those standard plot points. There's a bemusing David Lynch Lost Highway (1997) identity switcheroo.
Robert Daniels at Roger Ebert's venue: three-and-a-half stars. It may have been that the altered identity was morally corrupt but he was also more honest.
Idle curiosity of the how-bad-can-it-be form; the dire IMDB rating suggests it is worse than the other British nepomovie by Kate Winslet and son. Both drew strong casts and reek of L-plates on the Lamborghinis. This one was directed by Ronan Day-Lewis from a script he co-wrote with his father Daniel Day-Lewis who got top billing.
For quite a while it's difficult to figure out when it is, where we are or what we're doing there, let alone who these people are and why we should care. Something breaks in some-kind-of-father Sean Bean's household so he departs on a Honda Africa Twin for a forest of unknown distance armed with the emergency coordinates of the abode of hermit Day-Lewis. This leaves mother Samantha Morton at home with her and somebody else's son Samuel Bottomley. From there things get revelatory with lots of talk and not much show: apparently these brothers are Catholics, brought up in a boys' home, something about child abuse, something about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, revenge as fantasy, violence, a there-it-is account of a war crime, sectarian hate, family, a bizzaro scifi dream sequence. (Near as I can tell Day-Lewis has avoided the scifi genre thus far.)
I guess the central flaw with this project is its unoriginal genericity, its insincere mimesis. Day-Lewis's hermit reminded me of Hugo Weaving's (does the British film industry also need some revival?) with moments lifted from the life and times of Francis Begbie. (Danny Boyle showed us his stories; here we get only words and extreme emoting.) Apparently there is and isn't redemption in Christ. Uncontrollable teenage violence is limply intimated, in contrast to the masterful Adolescence (2025). A Magnolia (1999)-esque hail storm with no consequences, no impact.
The cinematography is a mixed bag. Initially it was so dank and dark I couldn't figure out what I was being shown. The work outdoors is far better but the great floating shots on the beach of the brothers are presumably easy now with a drone. This is life with a soundtrack: maudlin 1970s retro English rock (Black Sabbath) and otherwise heavy-duty noise.
I watched after a sneaky revisit of Gangs of New York (2002). Day-Lewis again sports a moustache, a horseshoe evoking Sean Connery in his glory years (e.g. Zardoz (1974)). This, in combination with the meme that he's everyone's favourite actor and in nobody's favourite movie, suggests that the only solution to what ails Britain is for him to sign up as the next James Bond.
Manohla Dargis. Does it take place in the present day? (Someone toasts the Queen but I guess that could have been a nod to their glory years and/or an ironic acknowledgement of Charlie.) Adrian Horton: two stars. Painfully serious. Set in the late 1980s. Peter Sobczynski. It's too easy to spill words on this thing, itself mostly words.
Apparently my first time around with a Laura Poitras doco. This is the media interviewing the media as the original sources take their stories to their graves and thereby avoid embarrassing themselves with deathbed confessions to Errol Morris.
Let me say upfront that interviewing Seymour Hersh was a worthy and thankless task. However there is so much padding — stock 1960s footage including the classic Việt Nam bombing sequence but not the now-controversial napalm girl, typewriter clacking accompanying ancient documentary evidence, grabs from many of his previous interviews — that it seems Poitras and co-director Mark Obenhaus came away with very little usable footage. Hersh refuses to dish on any source who is or may still be alive, leaving us with journalism war stories not so far from the ancient ones spun by Hunter S. Thompson, Woodward and Bernstein. As always with these docos, more dates were needed to anchor things in history.
Hersh is a funny no-sacred-cows kinda bloke. It gets amusing when he starts digging into corporations with Jeff Gerth while Hersh is at the New York Times; they start with Gulf and Western's accounts and proceed to the Times's, so of course he was going to get fired. Hersh is only thin-skinned when they try to discuss his wife or the shenanigans around his cash-in book on JFK and Monroe. His article that broke the My Lai massacre story was published in the Chicago Sun-Times on Thursday 1969-11-13; I was sufficiently disengaged to wonder if Roger Ebert had a review in the same edition. The New Yorker years are glossed over apart from Abu Ghraib; this really is a greatest hits compilation. I would've enjoyed more time with several of the auxiliary characters — General Taguba for instance. They don't delve into Hersh's presence on Substack or whether he's given any thought to leaving. Uncharitably it brought to mind Leonard Cohen's The Stranger Song: the film doesn’t get to the heart of this or any other matter, which is a shame as Hersh so often has.
A Critic's Pick by Manohla Dargis at one of his erstwhile employers. She says they interviewed him 42 times for this project. Peter Bradshaw: four stars. He was never cinematically feted, unlike the others mentioned above. Photographic evidence is now obsolete, with all forms of evidence soon to follow (?).
Somewhat idle John Carpenter (Dark Star (1974), The Thing (1982), Big Trouble in Little China (1986)) completism. He directed a script by Michael De Luca, who apparently had far more success as a producer, and did the soundtrack too: the metal licks are of the era.
The scenario has the writings of a horror novel author (eventually Jürgen Prochnow), bigger than Stephen King, become some kind of metafictional reality; it could be summarised, more or less, with the lines "I think therefore you are" and "God’s not supposed to be a hack horror writer" but that would be to miss the naff/goofy fun bits that kick in after a slow start. Insurance fraud investigator Sam Neill does well to hold it all together in the lead with some assistance from editor Julie Carmen and very straight publisher Charlton Heston. David Warner (Tron (1982)). Frances Bay plays a hotel concierge; she did a fair bit of work with David Lynch.
There's no doubt the whole thing disappears into its own self-satisfaction. I did not enjoy the jump scares that much, mostly because I didn't have enough opportunity to enjoy the extravagant practical effects. I imagine the kids had a ball (c.f. Weapons (2025)).
Roger Ebert: two stars. Janet Maslin.
For Oscar Isaac and, to a lesser and diminishing extent, "written for the screen by"/director Guillermo del Toro. I watched the first twenty minutes or so a while back and put off the rest until now as it is lengthy and did not seem very promising, especially after his previous remakes (Nightmare Alley (2021), Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio (2022)).
Isaac finds himself excommunicated from the Victorian high science scene in London due to his ungodly "galvanic" experiments on cadavers of dubious provenance. In the audience (but not with us) is a miscast Cristoph Waltz who has more money than the godly due to supplying arms to some unnamed war on the continent. With those funds and a suitably spooky castle somewhere the modern Promethean tale unspools as it always has, without humour, terminating in some unearnt redemption as monster/Australian Jacob Elordi strides off into the sunset after a requited but unconsummated something-or-other with Mia Goth.
Visually it's mostly gloaming in the magic hour with some hydrophilic stuff recycled from The Shape of Water (2017). The CGI is not particularly good. It's graphic but not violent until it's graphic and violent. Aurally the soundtrack is mostly obtrusive heavy portentous music.
Often I felt like I'd seen most of it before. Elordi often seemed to be the second coming of Clancy Brown though the indestructibility/rapid healing and constructed-superhuman was perhaps more Hugh Jackman's Wolverine. (Can Elordi sing and dance?) There's also a dash of vintage Star Trek, of an adult human-alike learning what the kids already know, autonemesis. Motivation was generally lacking. I doubt this was on many best-of-2025 lists. All of which is to say that the story has been so thoroughly absorbed into the culture that there's little point serving it up straight now.
Peter Sobczynski. Dana Stevens spends a lot of words not talking about the movie. "[S]eems designed to be a moody steampunk melodrama." Lots of dazzling practical effects. Marya E. Gates: poor. Jason Di Rosso interviewed Guillermo del Toro and talked up Mia Goth. He liked her earlier stuff but she didn't have much to work with here.
An animated fable from Latvia. Apocalyptic without a clear moral. No dialogue (nothing was spoken in the version I watched). They got many of the cat behaviours right but not all: I've never met a cat with any loyalty not secured with food and the right kind of scratching, or seen one climb down a vertical structure (here a mast). I hadn't heard a feline growl in so long. The other animals mystified me.
I can't say I understood the point of it all. At one point things get a bit transcendental, a bit Terrence Malick as the bird ascends to something-or-other. It won the Oscar earlier in the year for best animated feature film; even so the animation itself struck me as a long way from the state of the art. Over two nights due to a lack of grip.
Calum Marsh made it a Critic's Pick at the New York Times. "[A]voids the sort of whimsy and sentimentality that might plague, say, a Disney movie with the same premise." Carlos Aguilar at Roger Ebert's venue: four stars. Wendy Ide: four stars. All claim there's not a lot of anthropomorphism going on. but really, come on.
Kindle. A lengthy, engrossing everything novel in the spirit of his earlier Parasites Like Us (2003). After a stuttered start I finished it in a few lengthy sessions.
In broad terms Johnson takes us to the Tongan empire of a while back, when they were having a forever war with Fiji, but only after a peppy first-person beginning from a young woman that evoked Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (2005). Soon enough we're told that she's from that other great tribe of Polynesians, the Māori, and her small, diminishing and amnesiac clan has much to teach the peoples of other islands. This is despite their lack of lineage (they are descended from slaves) and the basic skills of navigation and shipbuilding.
The genocidal war is necessitated by the resource exhaustion, ecological collapse and steady flow of extinctions caused by the overpopulation and cupidity of the imperial centre. Much of this is directly observed by an imported red-shining parrot (apparently tasty) that is sufficiently sapient to comprehend the apocalypse being visited on the ecosphere by humans, a role similar to Ned Beauman's venomous lumpsuckers (2022). This setting draws in all the issues of the present moment as collateral damage: the ill-treatment of women by powerful men, whiplash #metoo, a queen bee, abortifacients ("This allows you to put love first"), excessive lawyering (the matāpule), zombies, ineffectual transactionalism, migration, globalisation, a rejection of isolation, that the future is nomadism ("That there’d been a time before islands, when all was water. That a day would come when the islands slipped back beneath the waves, taking all the drowsy dirt-dwellers with them."). In short, everything is too much excepting technology (just boats, the necessary botanicals and special gifts to individuals descended from the gods) and romantic opportunities.
Many elements of the story evoke Greek mythology; there's a tale told about a journey to Pulotu reminiscent of Orpheus's visit to Hades, and the concept of do-overs was given the same even-handed treatment it received in the MCU, albeit the other way around. I felt the exotic ontology and belief structure was insufficiently explored; life is somehow something extra to Cartesian body and soul, and I wonder if the people of the time considered brains to cause minds, and hearts the same way we do now. What about love? Intriguingly there was no worship, just rank and tapu. The eventual redemption felt unearned.
Johnson obviously did a mountain of research for this book and integrated it very well. However the two-track structure was somewhat flawed: by the time the big events roll around we almost always know their outcomes, and by then the details are not as important or interesting as they would have been earlier in the story. At times it felt we were waiting for the other track to sync up. Moreover Johnson struggled to construct distinct voices for enough of the characters, making it sometimes challenging to remember which track we're on as events converge. The romantic pairings were telegraphed with no subtlety; there's no playing of the field or left swipes, perhaps suggesting sexual egalitarianism or cosmic predestination.
Ian McGuire at the New York Times made enough errors to suggest he skimmed some parts, like the ending which explicitly calls out Kōrero as the titular character. Goodreads e.g. Steven: one for fantasy fans, a "Western story in Polynesian dressing".
More Spierig brothers completism, and my first and last encounter with the never-promising Saw franchise. Also a pointer-of-sorts from Peter Sobczynski's review of Weapons (2025). Execrable. Obviously a money job for everyone.
IMDB has this rated higher than Winchester (2018); I can't agree.
Simon Abrams at Roger Ebert's venue: two-and-a-half stars and a lot of words. So bad it's sorta good (but only sorta). Apparently beneath everyone else's notice.
Inevitable Costa-Gavras and Yves Montand completism following Z (1969). Over two nights as I found it to be hard work, as was doubtlessly intended. Again in French.
In 1952, for reasons unshown, the Communist regime of Czechoslovakia decided to liquidate some of their leaders who were veterans of the Spanish Civil War. This apparently required a show trial. Most were then executed but a few were given life sentences instead. The bulk of the movie involves the interrogation of Montand — essentially wearing him down with privation and repetition over many months. His odd sharp ripostes to his captors, along the lines of why appeals to his being a good Communist and these charges of treason were contradictory, added welcome but insufficient depth to the politics. The scenes involving his wife (Simone Signoret) were well-constructed and sometimes effective (her response to having her house searched, the congratulations from her fellow factory workers to the trial's outcome).
By way of George Orwell, we know how this scenario goes. I hoped to gain some insight into what value these vintage Communist show trials had to these regimes; the charges were so vague, the evidence mostly omitted, that this process could have applied to anyone and should have convinced no one. It's unclear why Montand's character survived but the others did not. It didn't function quite as well as a time capsule. It closes with some footage of the occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968, which in combination with the swift reversals of fortune for the interrogators, showed that this approach to controlling the populace (?) was ineffective, brief and illusory.
Roger Ebert: four stars and an excellent review. Based on the memoirs of Lise and Artur London from 1968 (and once again adapted by Jorge Semprún). "Costa-Gavras has made a point of insisting that the movie is anti-Stalinist, not anti-Communist. For that matter, we had some show trials trying to get themselves under way in this country in 1952." Ironically in both of these movies we're shown states suppressing left-wing political movements. Vincent Canby. All about showing interiority by physicality. Fancy cinematic devices, again due to Françoise Bonnot. André Malraux: "A life is worth nothing, but nothing is worth a life." — a sentiment that did not make it far into the twenty-first century.
