Directed by François Ozon, who adapted Albert Camus's absurdist novel with some help with the writing from Philippe Piazzo. In lush black-and-white with many an overstuffed frame.
Colonial Algiers, 1940s. A dissolute young Pied-noir moves through his days with vast ennui. Somehow he's still buff despite that and having a desk job that he appears to execute with efficiency. His mother passes without a flicker of emotion. A former work colleague decides he is irresistible after all even as he weirdly insists on clinging to and expressing only his personal truth. Perhaps she mistook his ennui for aloof cool. There is swimming, cinema, shagging and coming to the aid of neighbours before the pivotal capricious event that cleaves the movie in two. The ensuing court scenes got tedious and the climactic monologue with a priest overdid it.
Lead Benjamin Voisin is mostly as facially inert as Alan Delon was in Le Samouraï (1967) but lacked Delon's physical grace and hat. That he might be neurodivergent was not considered; the religious and psychological stuff seems dated now, or at least takes aim at a more rigid society than presently exists. I met his ennui mostly with disinterest.
It reminded me most of Roma (2018) both in style and staleness.
Glenn Kenny: four stars at Roger Ebert's venue. A horror movie. Peter Bradshaw: five stars. Many divergences from the source material. "Ozon shows that it is [the lead character's] martyrdom which is absurd." Jeannette Catsoulis was less impressed than the boys. "Existential ennui is not exactly fun to watch (or, one assumes, easy to perform), yet a meaningless life has rarely looked this beautiful."
Some idle Clint Eastwood completism. Also a Carrie Snodgress jag from Rabbit, Run (1970). An anachronistic venture for the time: Eastwood directed a script by Michael Butler and Dennis Shryack — the same trio who made The Gauntlet (1977). Here Clint demonstrates what he did and did not learn or recall about Westerns from his work with Sergio Leone. His own performance is not great but the rest of the cast does OK.
It's Idaho in the latter half of the nineteenth century and everyone's mining alluvial gold in the snowy Sierra. An encampment gets overrun by some local ferals on the orders of town founder Richard Dysart. Clint turns up after the fact and proves his chops by bashing the bashers as a favour to bashee Michael Moriarty. All (that is, both of) the ladies go ga ga for Clint, especially when he pulls out the dog collar and adopts the persona of "preacher". We never see him preach except when he tells the people to stick together but goes alone himself (of course). There's some fancy shooting and an anticlimax.
The characters are annoyingly underdeveloped. For instance giant Richard Kiel seems to learn the moral aspects of violence from Clint but his main opportunity to demonstrate this is interrupted (by Clint). The negative space portraits, the dynamite, the awesome shooting are all twenty years stale; the best cinematography is of the distant mountains. There is no soundtrack. At best it's a dry run for Unforgiven (1992).
Roger Ebert: four stars. "One of the subtlest things in the movie is the way it plays with the possibility that Eastwood’s character may be a ghost, or at least something other than an ordinary mortal." Vincent Canby.
Kindle. After the obscurity of the contemporary Red Birds (2018), Hanif revisited the more fertile ground (decades-ago Pakistani politics) of his first novel A Case of Exploding Mangoes (2008) by way of a strong but more acted-against-than-acting female character ala Our Lady of Alice Bhatti (2011). This one is set at the time of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's execution in 1979 and covers the fallout on a failed revolutionary/successful English teacher, an Imam, a Field Intelligence Unit captain, the fallen angel and a few secondary characters at the pointier end of operations.
Unfortunately it's not great. We start with a bang, with a series of semi-random happenings that promise effective black humour in caper mode. But the themes are too weighty (sexual abuse, women as property/burdens, political/religious burdens/schisms, torture, so on) that soon enough we're in some kind of holding pattern, wading in treacle, as Hanif staves off anything too consequential. The ending therefore comes in an abrupt rush. It seems that women cannot be funny; the voice in her "homeworks" got flattened into the abiding third-person omniscient as the story proceeded.
The herb dealer who invents "Iron Syrup" links the book to Karan Mahajan's Complex (2026), and the haram stuff at a mosque to DJ Ahmet (2025).
Michael Gorra at the New York Times. "Often, too often, seem[s] to echo [Salman Rushdie's Shame (1983)], albeit without the fantasy." Yagnishsing Dawoor applies the Booker kiss-of-death at the Guardian. Goodreads.
Romeo and Juliet in present-day North Macedonia, facilitated by the universal solvent of EDM. It doesn't get as bogged in the scene as Sirât (2025): this is more adolescent, sweet rather than rueful. Both also involve a young woman fleeing the leash of tradition and familial binds. Written and directed by Georgi M. Unkovski. Alen Sinkauz and Nenad Sinkauz do some interesting soundtrack work.
Ahmet (Arif Jakup) gets yanked out of school by his irascible father and can see a lifetime of shepherding open up in front of him. His younger brother Naim (Agush Agushev) is mute. Gorgeous, sophisticated Aya (Dora Akan Zlatanova) returns from Germany for an arranged marriage but her temperament and/or time away has rendered her unwilling and even incapable. For further reasons underexplained the leads have a tenuous encounter at an open-air rave not too far from their parents' farms. We learn some but not enough of their backstories during other events, including a festival where some American-style dancing causes a moral panic, before things are driven off a cliff by the local villagers, I think Christian, taking out their frustrations on a mosque. The ending is unsatisfying. There's some funny stuff with a technologically inept Muezzin.
The cinematography is often beautiful. I wish they'd shown us the clothing better. It put me in mind of The Monk and the Gun (2023): a hilly, exotic location with some ethnography. If I understood the dialogue right the events took place in and near the town of Radoviš. Reference is also made to Konche and the big smoke of Strumica.
A Critic's Pick by Chris Azzopardi at the New York Times. Cath Clarke was less impressed. More details at Wikipedia.
An idle bit of James Caan completism. IMDB trivia: his first project after The Godfather (1972) and so clearly a money job. "Hot Lips" Sally Kellerman went without a bra throughout; her brand of zany clashed with Caan's unimaginative, car-thieving football hero fresh out of gaol. Notionally he's tracking down a big pile of dosh with some assistance from Swing-loving Peter Boyle (more in tune with Kellerman) and his wife/Caan fangirl Louise Lasser but that was as irrelevant as everything else. Directed by Howard Zieff from a script by W.D. Richter.
Roger Ebert: three stars. Goofy. Vincent Canby. Mountains of illogic. Caan as Candide in "a comedy-melodrama about America going to the madhouse in mobile homes."
A jag from Rabbit, Run (1970) via director Jack Smight who showed here what that could have been there: it's pretty well shot (by Jack Priestley) and assembled (by Archie Marshek). The tone wobbles (some of that is misdirection) which I put down to the adaptation by John Gay of William Goldman's dodgy source material.
The premise is not so far from The Silence of the Lambs (1991) with Rod Steiger as a strangler of women and George Segal the cop who is foisted with a relationship with him. Giving this the farcical treatment is intrinsically busted; the heavy stuff detracts from the fine domestic comedy work of Segal's mother Eileen Heckart who is by far the best thing on the screen. He hooks up with improbably single Lee Remick, a Marlboro-smoking clothes horse who is obviously going to be the last girl despite not being Steiger's type. She does OK. Murray Hamilton (Brubaker (1980)) has a minor role as a police inspector. Michael Dunn is fine in a random scene. The ending is neat and tidy and lame. Once again we visit the Pan Am building in NYC as well as the Lincoln Centre and under-construction Julliard.
I don't doubt Steiger enjoyed his performance, hamming it up to the max, but it's not so great for us. I came away thinking that Mel Brooks struck a better balance in Young Frankenstein (1974).
Vincen Canby. Oedipean. "Mr. Gay has written an exposition-free, gag-filled cartoon, which is the manner in which Jack Smight directs it."
The rapidly diminishing returns of Clint Eastwood completism. He plays a cowboy cop from Arizona. Also a Melodie Johnson jag from Rabbit, Run (1970). She's married but home alone in some dusty ranch in the middle of nowhere. Her task (in short-and-blonde mode) is to keep him entertained for an hour or two before he heads off to NYC for some more hunting and tracking. Directed by Don Siegel from a screenplay by Herman Miller, Dean Riesner and Howard Rodman. It's something of a Cro-Magnon Dirty Harry (1971). Lee J. Cobb, squandered as a proforma police lieutenant. Seymour Cassel got some fondling in. Don Stroud (Django Unchained (2012)) brought some genuine menace.
The plot is very dodgy but sort-of works as a time capsule for the sybaritic demimonde of NYC with some semi-decent footage of a big open-air party/discotheque that our man has to traverse to locate double-crossing tramp Tisha Sterling who knows where their man is. Clint's methods offend his ostensible brand-new lady-love, social worker/shrink Susan Clark but she gets over his lack of exclusivity before he gets back into that helicopter on the roof of the Pan Am building. All the women are savvy in their own ways but go weak-kneed at the mere prospect of being treated as sex objects.
Given a choice Eastwood himself went with filming the far more genteel jazz concert in Monterey, California (retaining the crazy women) in Play Misty for Me (1971).
Roger Ebert: three stars. Vincent Canby: "The screenplay is so predictable in situation and so arch in its supposedly tough, blunt, wise talk that it turns into a joke told by someone with no sense of humour."
An Anjanette Comer jag from The Loved One (1965). I hadn't seen her in anything else. Also some James Caan completism. An embarrassment for all involved.
I haven't read anything by John Updike and having seen this have even less interest. Some of the dialogue sounded like it was lifted directly from the source book he got published in 1960, and similarly for many of the scenes. The entirety is very clunky: poorly edited for sure but the raw material is rubbish too, so blame all of director Jack Smight, adaptor Howard B. Kreitsek, cinematographer Philip H. Lathrop and editor Archie Marshek.
Briefly Updike wrote about the chafing of the American husband at his domestication, which was possibly transgressive or at least a bit naughty at the time. On screen it is overly reductive soap opera: Carrie Snodgress (Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970)), in her first outing, plays a dipso, pregnant housewife who just sits around smoking, drinking and watching Looney Tunes cartoons all day. Caan, who peaked in high school, wants to feel his oats again and so heads out into what passes as the demimonde of Reading, Pennsylvania with his old basketball coach who brings along part-time call girl Comer. The characters are so poorly drawn it is not clear why she's hard up for a man or what it is she sees in Caan. There's also golf-mad Christian minister Arthur Hill, sticking his oar in, married to foxy and dissatisfied Melodie Johnson. Things proceed as you'd expect with a putatively shocking accidental infanticide thrown in just for the frisson. Nobody asks what the women might want except a husband.
Apparently it did not get much of a release at the time and hence was not reviewed by the usual venues. I guess nobody got what they wanted.
Third time around with this thing adapted by Terry Southern and Christopher Isherwood from Evelyn Waugh's novel. Directed by Tony Richardson (Look Back in Anger (1959)).
The cast is top shelf. Southern does bring some of the Dr. Strangelove (1964) out of the source material and I found it often hilarious. Unsubtle yes, but at this remove how could anyone be offended? It is let down by some clunky editing.
Bosley Crowther. "It is when Terry Southern and Christopher Isherwood move this absurd conceit beyond the morbid adventures of their hero in the land of Whispering Glades and go in for a lot of raucous kidding of real estate development, senior homes, junior geniuses in the space age and a plan to launch bodies into space that the whole thing goes into an orbit of witless inanity."
A Dylan O'Brien jag from Send Help (2026). He's a bit more lively here but still not great. Directed by Graham Moore (his first time) from a script he co-wrote with Johnathan McClain. Apparently Moore got an Oscar for his adaptation for The Imitation Game (2015).
Actually the draw was Mark Rylance who I remember was quite good in Bridge of Spies (2015), a performance for which he won an Oscar. As a snooty English tailor in gangland Chicago in 1956 he puts the rest of the cast firmly in the shade, excepting perhaps Irish mob boss Simon Russell Beale (The Death of Stalin (2017)). The plot is quite trashy: Rylance and receptionist/gamine Zoey Deutch ostensibly get on with their bespoke-clothes business while the gangsters get on with theirs but of course things veer off course in a way that would be unimaginable in the Phantom Thread (2017) universe.
It mostly goes agreeably but every so often drops its pseudo-realism with unlikely exposition dumps; Hitchcock did a far better job with that aspect in Rope (1948) and as with Jimmy Stewart it is inconceivable that Rylance is harmless. Conversely his main interlocutor, scarface Johnny Flynn (who wants to be James Wood when he grows up), may plausibly have thought so, partly because England does snobbery like no other culture. The holes in the plot — just why do they not even start torturing Deutch? — ruined it for me, as did the self-congratulatory conclusion that slid towards a zombie flick. Given the very limited sets I wondered if it may have worked better as a stage show. Dick Pope did the cinematography.
Manohla Dargis: "a moderately amusing gangster flick that doesn’t make a great deal of sense." It is a relief when glamour puss Nikki Amuka-Bird enters the story. Stephanie Zacharek. Calling Rylance's tailor "humble" illustrates the culture gap.
Kindle. I remember (perhaps faultily) enjoying his previous novels: Family Planning (2008) and The Association of Small Bombs (2016). This one is perhaps a lengthy and not great expansion on the first.
After a first-person intro that sketches how things are going to go we get a series of character studies intermingled with some minor-note action. It's set mostly in the airless Delhi complex that appears to be the sole legacy of nation-builder SP Chopra to his children with a completely vanilla take on Desi in London and nowhereland Michigan, from (ballpark) the 1970s to mid-1990s. I didn't feel any of the characters popped and none did anything particularly interesting or novel; stuff just happens. The politics is mostly described and not explained, excepting one incident where the BJP needed to manufacture a distraction. At times he seems to be drawing a line from the Nehru regime to Modi via the naysayers, Hindutva, Indira and Sonia Gandhi. Humourless.
Jonathan Dee at the New York Times. Goodreads.
Inevitable once I realised Lukas Moodysson was still active. This is apparently the first thing he's done since the TV series Gösta (2019) and his first feature after Vi är bäst! (2013). The latest in a long line of uncalled-for sequels. It seems he managed to convince almost all of the original cast to reunite; notably missing are Michael Nyqvist who passed in 2017 and Ola Norell/Rapace; the latter's Lasse was recast. In a few sittings due to a failure to grip.
It doesn't function as a standalone film but if you've just rewatched the original it also mostly just doesn't work as you can see everything coming a long way off. Some of it is just plain sad, not poignant or effective, and other bits are outright boring. There's a sense of gutlessness, of punching down. Moodysson should have just left things be.
Thinly reviewed. Cath Clarke at the Guardian. Moodysson is becoming misanthropic. Henric Brandt: stagnancy.
Third time around with this Lukas Moodysson classic. Prompted by the realisation that he made Tillsammans 99 (2023) while I wasn't watching. Also Ola Norell (later Ola Rapace) was in Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017), and Michael Nyqvist in A Hidden Life (2019).
As cringe comedy it felt like Moodysson crested the Dogme 95 wave with steadier camerawork and a soundtrack drawn entirely from the scenario. That early kitchen scene is still the best. The ending felt unearnt.
Roger Ebert: three stars and a very dodgy lagom-for-me-tack review. Stephanie Zacharek at length. Dave Kehr at the New York Times. Wikipedia has all the details. Nobody compared it with Mike Leigh's English realism.
Prompted by Jeannette Catsoulis making it a Critic's Pick at the New York Times. She promised it'd be a trashy and fun return-to-form for director Sam Raimi. In two sittings.
It's a workplace comedy! — which means it's got a lot of #metoo and everyone is everyone else's frenemy. We spend the first hour and a bit with a dorkified "strategy and planning" Survivor fan Rachel McAdams and her vacuous scion-boss-bro Dylan O'Brien and others getting things set up, culminating in the lead pair being stranded on an island in the Bay of Thailand. As a two-hander it gets a bit Misery (1990) and as trash it fares maybe a little better than The Housemaid (2025) despite the clunkiness. But I can't say I enjoyed his performance much — he's too bro and uninventive. As for McAdams, she has a bit of fun and does OK within her limited range. Her character did not make a tonne of sense as she unstably alternates between knowing survivalism and getting suckered by the man-boy; is she all tactics and no strategy? Is she incapable of learning? Raimi does not stick the ending. Cracked but not cracked enough.
Bill Pope's cinematography is quite fine.
Peter Sobczynski. I did not know where to look for Bruce Campbell.
Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with co-writer/director Jaydon Martin. Both were excited about the film receiving a prize at Rotterdam. More slow cinema.
I was hoping for another work that explained Queensland and Queenslanders to the rest of us. Canonically there are Chris Master's The moonlight state (1987), Cane Toads: An Unnatural History (1988) and Rick Morton's A Hundred Years of Dirt (2018), each of which digs deep from a distinct perspective. John Birmingham and Spiteri add essential colour. In contrast this "docufiction", funded by VicScreen and featuring, at a guess, zero Victorians, tries to mine a new-age spirituality whose time has passed. One suspects that Victoria's civilising mission has stalled out far south of Bundaberg where the film spends most of its time.
Notionally the lead is dying from some malady and is looking for some kind of redemption, or at least a spot in the Christian section of God's heaven. He had a lot of fun in Kings Cross as a young man and has suffered a lot since. We're shown him, second-bean fish-and-chipper Andrew Wong and some randoms in a variety of locations: at home, in the shower, in an MRI machine, at the takeaway shop, a ten-pin bowling alley, watching a biff in the carpark of a pub that is nowhere close to a Bruce Springsteen ballet. Bibles are bashed, the old codger gets baptised in a non-flooding river somewhere. Some blokes unload some guns, perhaps gratuitously killing some wildlife off screen. (Come on guys, we've seen Wake in Fright (1971), we know the score.) Toyotas! Living in caravans. Parents dying. The archaic, iconic burning of the cane fields is referenced. So much pain, so many quacks. All soaked in alcohol. I do not recall any mention of sport.
The black-and-white cinematography is lush, like Ivan Sen's, but lacks his sense of belonging to country. There are some great images — that decaying Queenslander was crying out for a proper horror movie treatment — but not enough propulsion. For all the craft we never find out where he buys his smokes.
Wikipedia has a roundup. Wendy Ide says it is "unvarnished" while Martin Kudlac says that it "exhibits a level of formal polish uncharacteristic of a straightforward documentary." Most reviewers do not distinguish (regional) Queensland from the rest of the country.
Second time around with the first two seasons of Lars von Trier's classic (or at least cult) TV series, prompted by him producing a third. Also an improbable Udo Kier jag from The Secret Agent (2025).
There's some inspired stuff up front: the Bondo arc is great, as is the playing up of the Danish and Swedish cultural conflicts and (sometimes) the juxtaposing of the spiritual and the scientific. The first two seasons also function as proto-Dogme 95 time capsules. The third season fails to cohere — perhaps because Ernst-Hugo Järegård's Helmer was so effectively stagey whereas Mikael Persbrandt's half-Helmer is so bland — and the steadier digital cinematography looks a lot more generic. I couldn't get excited about "Swedes Anonymous" or von Trier's take on sexual, etc. politics; the dumb stuff here is too often just dumb and not funny. That may be Willem Dafoe's most inert performance. In any case the whole thing owes a lot, too much, to David Lynch.
Brian Tallerico at Roger Ebert's venue on the third season: three-and-a-half stars and all the context.
Henry Reynolds: Looking from the North: Australian history from the top down. (2025)
Wed, Mar 18, 2026./noise/books | LinkI figured I should try more history since reading Dean Ashenden's view from the north, and having enjoyed David G. Marr's excellent work. I was hoping Reynolds would provide an overview of evolving conceptions of sovereignty and property across the Australian continent and lay out just what native title is and allows, but this is not that book. (This text suggests I consult Reynolds's Aboriginal Sovereignty: Reflections on Race, State and Nation (1996) but surely that lacks reflection on the impact of the Wik decision of the same year and anything that has happened since.) Indeed Reynolds's (revisionary) focus is on the British/European settlement of the country and race relations; he does not discuss, for instance, the bombing of Darwin by the Japanese in World War II, the Kokda Track, Cyclone Tracey or other natural disasters, anthropology, science, culture/arts (no Gulpilil!), why treaties weren't signed, etc. Perplexingly he takes the Northern Territory to be just the Top End (the Yolŋu of Arnhem Land), despite Alice Springs being just short of his Tropic of Capricorn demarcation and Ashenden's Tennant Creek well in scope.
Overall I didn't find it as good as his essays; a few chapters needed another round of editing and I often wished he'd expanded on the assertions and self-citations in this text. In brief his thesis is that the indigenous peoples of Australia's north generally remained on their lands while working for cockies/squatters on a mutually-beneficial or at least placatory basis, in contrast to the south where the connections were mostly severed. This was due to labour shortages, of the unwillingness of the young colonials to settle in the harsh northern climate, which of course led to misunderstandings in the faraway centres of power about how things actually worked in the north. There is also an account of nineteenth-century multiculturalism in the new tropical towns: Chinese merchants, tailors, miners, railway constructors, etc., Japanese pearlers, South-East Asians, Pacific Islanders working the cane fields; Australia is forever short of agricultural labour.
The final chapter is the best as it is succinct and clear like his essays. We're told the pastoral leases of the mid-nineteenth century already required that access be provided for cultural purposes but this provision was not enforced. (Reynolds asserts that plain-vanilla common-law leases would have extinguished native title which makes it all the more perplexing that the imperial regime (out of London) did not sort out their intent towards the indigenous peoples well before Federation brought White Australia in 1901.) He does not explain why the British colonial powers took three goes at claiming sovereignty over the continent. I also wanted to understand what the native title regime provides for; from the little I understand it is a very degraded notion of property, at least by the standard of freehold. This may be a reasonable or at least workable compromise in the context of pastoral leases, etc. (I don't know) but the legal regime in places where the people have never been dispossessed (cf the peoples of the Kimberley, the Yolŋu, the Torres Strait Islanders and elsewhere) needed more explication.
The north is now being occupied; where the romantic propaganda failed the military (specifically the U.S. military) is pulling people in and aiming to stay. At least until the next big one.
Broadly reviewed when it was released in November 2025. Glyn Davis. Mark McKenna sounds like he's read all Reynolds's books and can't separate this one from its predecessors. Judith Brett summarised it. Indeed it does add to the why-Queensland-is-different canon. And so on.
Written and directed by Bart Layton who based his script on a novella by Don Winslow. Widely billed as a derivative of Michael Mann's classics — I'd say it's Heat (1995) with a Collateral (2004) of Thief (1981) — but, perhaps because of a semi-recognisable Halle Berry, Australian slab of a lead Chris Hemsworth and a dodgy plot, it more often put me in mind of Swordfish (2001).
Basically Hemsworth (in the Robert De Niro role) is supposed to be a very competent high-class thief who abhors violence. That being the case, why doesn't he just get with the crypto or some other zero-contact sport? He gets sick of mentor Nick Nolte (think Jack Nicholson in The Departed (2006)) taking a cut and declines the next gig, leaving the floor to Barry Keoghan's psycho. Or perhaps it was because Monica Barbaro (Joan Baez in A Complete Unknown (2024)) is so very distracting. (She finds the mystery man appealing but remains a mystery to us. Apparently she trained as a dancer; I can only wonder what a pairing with Mads Mikkelsen may have achieved.) Mark Ruffalo got the Al Pacino role, or on another vector, John Hamm's. Much is made of Berry's disgruntled high-end insurance agent being an age-appropriate 53 but nothing happens between her and Ruffalo, or Ruffalo and his wife Jennifer Jason Leigh for that matter. The last is quite fine in a very small role.
It's all exit scams and one-last-gigs. The opsec and logic are generally poor and there is no James Caan or Tom Cruise competency here: Thor does not properly settle with Nolte and the ending is very unsatisfying. I don't know how Storm expected to get her cut, but near as I could tell she showed Thor a photo of the bloke who was supposed to be carrying the diamonds and that certainly wasn't the Hulk. This left two options: either Thor aborts the whole show due to excess risk or recognises the silly buggers going on and realises he could still get the cash. Similarly the Hulk must suspect Keoghan is going to show which again raises the risk too high for him to go through with things, being a police officer and all. Neither take a considered option.
The cinematography is sometimes OK but does not make the city pop: no neon on car hoods, no harsh fluoros, just the head and tail lights of endless commuter traffic against glass-and-steel skyscrapers. The editing (by Jacob Secher Schulsinger and Julian Hart) is often very good. The acting is generally no more than adequate. Humourless.
Matt Zoller Seitz at length for Roger Ebert's venue: three-and-a-half stars. Not cute. The "luxurious cinematography [..] transforms Los Angeles into a city of dark magic." Peter Bradshaw: four stars. Missing only two elements for it to be a full homage to Mann. Who knew there was this much pent-up demand for Mann-style capers? — but IMDB suggests the great unwashed masses were less into it than the paid reviewers. Ben Kenigsberg at the New York Times: the debt to Mann is "so immense that it’s hard not to come away feeling that the movie itself is stolen goods." Reheated. Barbaro got the Amy Brenneman role. Payman Maadi did not get the Adam Sandler role. Self help! Peter Sobczynski: achingly familiar. "Hemsworth [..] [never got] a chance to demonstrate the sense of sly humour found in his best performances."
Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with writer/director Sergey Loznitsa. Georgy Demidov provided the source material. In two sittings due to tedium.
Loznitsa is Ukrainian and had interesting things to say in that interview, making me think there was going to be more going on than there was. The first half is pure slow cinema: we spend a lot of time waiting with freshly-minted lawyer now prosecutor Alexander Kuznetsov to visit political prisoner Aleksandr Filippenko during Stalin's purges in the 1930s. He provides an expository dump that causes the credulous protagonist to travel to Moscow in search of the Attorney General who will doubtlessly make things right for Party members in good standing. More happens in the latter half but nothing surprising; the entire project is riven by a naivete that might be touching if only the world wasn't as it is. There is a little of that signature black Russian humour but none of it bites.
Ben Kenigsberg at Roger Ebert's venue: "There isn’t, in the final analysis, that much that happens in the movie [...]. The suspense is simply in waiting for the totalitarian machinery to grind into place." We have ample time to admire the care taken with the details. Nicolas Rapold made it a Critic's Pick at the New York Times. Peter Bradshaw: five stars. "It is a very disturbing parable of the insidious micro-processes of tyranny." — but surely everyone is familiar with weaponized slow walking these days.
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 when 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.
