peteg's blog - noise

A pointer from Peter Sobczynski's review of Wake Up Dead Man (2025) with the warning that it was intricately plotted but characterless, and hence unmemorable. Directed by Sidney Lumet from an adaptation of Ira Levin's stage play by Jay Presson Allen. Michael Caine, Christopher Reeve, Dyan Cannon connive in a manner too similar to the superior Sleuth (1972). As you can infer from the small cast and import of the leads there are many switchbacks that are mostly predictable as the movie disappears up its own fundament. Irene Worth's Dutch psychic is a bit tedious.

Roger Ebert: three stars. Reeve's performance "has a light, handsome comic touch not a million miles removed from Cary Grant's." Janet Maslin. Depthless.

Third outing for Rian Johnson's Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) character (after Knives Out (2019) and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022)). Again he wrote and directed, again with diminishing returns. Again I didn't really get into it.

The scenario has reformed street brawler/boxer/newly minted priest Josh O'Connor (La Chimera (2023)) sent to a small village somewhere in New York as punishment for punching out some other Catholic Church functionary. There he encounters Josh Brolin in messiah mode and soon enough Noah Segan as a barkeep in a devil-themed bar. Glenn Close keeps the church running. Doctor Jeremy Renner is bereft after his wife leaves him. Mila Kunis, implausible as police. Kerry Washington, a lawyer with a horribly caricatured adopted son Daryl McCormack. Jeffrey Wright! After excess setup there's a murder (surprise) and the explanations start with an hour to go. The exposition is abidingly excessive. The humour struck me as stale.

I had hopes that Johnson would innovate, for instance by having all of them do it. But no, this is really a treasure hunt.

Dana Stevens: better than the last one. Peter Sobczynski: better than the last one.

Exotic, pre-war Europe. Margaret Lockwood is the upper class damsel who will soon be in distress. Michael Redgrave (The Quiet American (1958)), because Errol Flynn was unavailable? They meet sorta-cute and the rest is either irrelevant to the ending (they're getting married!) or they are mostly irrelevant to the plot. Director Alfred Hitchcock did not seem to have enough faith in the script (by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, based on the story The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White) to let us in on what was going on until my interest lapsed. There's some saucy dialogue of the "preview of coming attractions" kind between a mostly-auxiliary couple on the train.

Kindle. The first half compiles Savva's columns about the previous Parliament (2022-2025) for the Channel9Fairfax entertainment complex; I skipped it as I read enough of them at the time. The second is pitched as an analysis (a second take on history?) of the election campaign and aftermath.

This is one for the insiders, being mostly a review of the theatricals and settling scores for those she spoke with. There is very little coverage of policy, or discussion of the coherency of or tensions in the way we are governed; compare, for instance, with Laura Tingle's concerns about the public service and Hugh White's ways of thinking about geopolitical forces. At some point she says:

It was [Chris] Bowen who told me after the last election that the emergence of the teal independents was for the Liberals what the great split of the 1950s — which led to the creation of the Democratic Labour Party — was for Labor.

which struck me as unusually insightful; Peter Lewis recycled this observation at the Guardian (2025-04-15) without attribution.

I felt she was too generous toward Mark Dreyfus's (anti-)achievements as Attorney General and while I might concur and even enjoy her take on the many heels in parliament there are some that deserve more sober consideration, if only because they might be ruling over us some day soon. Her own values are there but are mostly pushed aside. More context would often have helped; I wish she had mechanically listed party, seat, geography and perhaps provided a capsule bio for each politician she mentioned. Another round of editing may have fixed the typos and missing punctuation. Overall all I got was an expression of the common view (nothing new?), the odd amusing anecdote and that she's better in the short (warm take) form.

Savva stuck with her advice to Albo that he should go this term (from December 2024). She thinks he should be satisfied with about five years on the throne but that assumes he has other things to do than politic and set records of increasing vacuity. The ALP becoming "the natural party of government" has meant that it has adopted a policy suite that would not have embarrassed John Howard. (Scott Morrison's greatest achievement and/or legacy may well have been Albo.) But Howard achieved far more (some good things even!) by this point in his reign. Perhaps someone can press Albo on what he means by "fighting Tories"; one has to wonder what's in it for the rusted-on Laborites.

With Tingle now covering foreign/global affairs it would seem that Savva is the last journo of any standing left in the Canberra press gallery (in my bubble at least). She's a fan of Tom Connell on Sky During Daylight (who is now President of the National Press Club).

The platformed commentariat of Australia appears to be engaging in a great silence about this book. Goodreads: excess #leadershit. Nothing said about how and why Australia is the most secretive democracy in the world. Lacked the connections to do what she's done in previous books (?) so there's a lot more on Libnat failure than ALP success/internecine warfare. Does not get to the heart of the matter, e.g. why Albo was so much hungrier this time around. Her earlier work is superior.

Some Spierig brothers completism. After a sneaky and satisfying rewatch of Predestination (2014). They wrote and directed with some help from Tom Vaughan on the script. Also for Sarah Snook (in an entirely unchallenging role). Jason Clarke led. Helen Mirren got top billing. Over two nights due to tedium.

This is the worst thing I've seen by them so far. The premise is that the ghosts of people killed by the Winchester rifle are haunting the wife of the company's founder. Her solution is to build a rambling mansion until Clarke can bring the necessary manliness. If I got it right, the solution to being haunted by vengeful ghosts killed with the Winchester rifle is to kill them with the Winchester rifle.

The cinematography is uninventive by their standards. I quickly got sick of the jump scares. There really is nothing going on here except for Bruce Spence who does well with the little he is given to work with.

Jeannette Catsoulis.

Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with co-writer/director Boris Lojkine and lead Abou Sangaré who won a best performance award at Cannes in 2024 and a César in 2025. Delphine Agut was the other co-writer.

Illicit gig working in France by asylum seekers from Guinea and Côte d'Ivoire (I think). This involves figuring out the protocols of the homeless shelters, acquiring a fake account on a delivery platform (at a cost of about 50% of the income), a bicycle and running red lights in Paris in the cold and wet. Sangaré has some well-constructed interactions with a variety of people, humanising the French, and only a very few nasty ones that were not especially racist; it was as if everyone accepted the present moment's need for an underclass, even the gendarmerie. He clearly worked hard, especially in a concluding scene that he totally nailed with some able help from Nina Meurisse (who also won a César for her efforts). It put me in mind of that excellent two-hander interview in Adolescence (2025). This one is not violent but achieves a similar level of emotional charge. She does not ask him about the damage to his face.

The story itself doesn't have many places to go, being a tale of living at the limits of precarity while waiting for the one big event that might change things. (I was glad his bike and phone somehow did not run out of charge or get stolen.) It felt less overtly political than Welcome (2009). The lightly-drawn frenemy, family and horseplaying-buddy aspects evoked Io Capitano (2023). The cinematography is excellent.

A Critic's Pick by Natalia Winkelman: "not only build[s] empathy with its hero's pain but channels its sensation." The scene with the elderly Frenchman on the seventh floor was indeed well conceived. Michael Wood.

Based on Denis Johnson's novella (2011) of the same name. (I wasn't a fan of his famous collection of shorts.) Mostly for the cast — Joel Edgerton, William H. Macy, Kerry Condon (Breaking Bad (2008-2013), The Banshees of Inisherin (2022)), not Felicity Jones (Rogue One (2016), The Brutalist (2024)) — and the promising-by-their-recent-IMDB-ratings combination of co-writer/director Clint Bentley and co-writer Greg Kwedar.

American bucolic. In the early decades of the twentieth century, socially-isolated lumberjack Edgerton finds himself in Idaho where Jones unfathomably finds him irresistible. Even after a daughter arrives he disrupts his domestic bliss with long trips, west to the Pacific, east to Montana (something like that), for work. Soon enough the only fathomable tragedy occurs and he resumes his hermitude. (It's not like someone could have stolen his idea for a social network though just maybe they may have thieved a building block concept he dreamt up for his child.) He thoughtlessly avoids modernity, is mystified by a chainsaw. It's mostly one thing after another spiced up with endless flashbacks and flashforwards; he's aware but not that expressive or outwardly reflective. Things land with some healing not via Kelly Condon's fellow hermit (she appears to be facially converging with Toni Collette) but via the wonders of sightseeing from a biplane: ultimately he's "connected to it all".

I felt it was elegiac, sombre hokum, reflecting the mood of the present time, the primordial desire to return to a prelapsarian monoculture. It is a vote against finding redemption or solace in other people (the Condon vector) but inertia definitely leads to hermitude. Some heavy themes treated shallowly.

On the cinematic front Bentley and DP Adolpho Veloso were clearly reaching for Malick's pristine unspoilt wilderness, Rousseau's man in some kind of natural state. There's a sense of it being an uncomplicated, unsophisticated complement of First Cow (2019). On the other hand it stands against Viggo Mortensen's The Dead Don't Hurt (2023) by lacking a target for revenge; nature doesn't test a temperament in anything like the same way. The logging scenes were not a patch on Sometimes a Great Notion (1971) and it generally lacked the wild inventiveness of Ken Kesey. Edgerton is good in the lead and surely up for an Oscar nom. Macy with the explosives, an early enviro mystic. Narration by Will Patton! At least some of the soundtrack was by Nick Cave (says IMDB).

Peter Sobczynski: an Academy fight song. Justin Chang summarised it and analysed its deviations from its source material for the New Yorker. Brian Tallerico at Roger Ebert's venue: four stars. Days of Heaven (1978). Peter Bradshaw: four stars. "His emotional life is the tree that falls in the forest without making a sound."

More guff from director/co-writer Noah Baumbach. (Emily Mortimer was the other co-writer and had a minor role as a vacuous something-or-other.) His first project since White Noise (2022) and/or Barbie (2023), depending on what you count.

The cast is amazing. George Clooney led with an orange-man tan, making me wonder if it is now a requirement for U.S. presidential candidates. I was hoping for more from Adam Sandler: there's a feeling that he's barely getting out of second gear for most of it. He had some great scenes with Laura Dern (solid), impassive while her head, hair and hands went in all directions and her face took on all expressions. I would have far preferred to see their Eiffel Tower story. This proves that there is material that even Jim Broadbent cannot elevate. Billy Crudup! Alba Rohrwacher (La Chimera (2023))! Stacy Keach, never sharkier, as Clooney's dad! And of course Greta Gerwig.

The story itself is the purest Hollywood navel gazing. Clooney knows just how much self awareness he can get away with, most days, but age and daughters have caught up to him. His performance was something of a complement to Bill Shatner's Has Been (2004) persona, or perhaps just minor variations on himself. The concluding homage reminded me of the similarly-flawed The Fabelmans (2022) and Hugo (2011).

The cinematography is effective but uninventive. The story is a pile of cliches made even more tedious by repeated tics: the cheesecake, "Can we go again?", the loneliness, Baumbach telling us something then showing how it went down. This telegraphing is indistinguishable from padding. It would've helped if it was in any way funny, like those long-gone Coen brothers flicks. Overlong.

Peter Sobczynski: shallow. If only it went all-in on Sandler's character. Dana Stevens: lifts from Fellini, "pays tribute to François Truffaut and Preston Sturges."

A (director) Jules Dassin jag from Thieves' Highway (1949). Richard Brooks adapted a story by Robert Patterson. Also a bit of Burt Lancaster completism.

Lancaster, once again a jailbird (before Birdman of Alcatraz (1962)), finds himself at the mercy of sadistic and manipulative Captain Munsey (Hume Cronyn). Things tend inexorably towards a prison break with all the action jammed into the last five minutes. The best parts of the buildup explain how the five cellmates ended up inside, usually via some entanglement with a gorgeous woman. (There's a stylised image of a woman in their cell who stands in for all of them; I think Dassin and co missed a trick by not having that woman play all the femme fatales. My favourite involved Flossie (Anita Colby), what a doll.) There's a dash of Natural Born Killers (1994) in the riot and politics amongst the prison staff.

The acting was generally fine. Lancaster was a bit inert but does OK with what's asked for. He engaged in some minor acrobatics that show what might have been. Charles Bickford could've used more screen time. Ann Blyth was squandered as some sweet soul.

Bosley Crowther.

After a sneaky rewatch of Two Hands (1999) a few weeks ago. Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with writer/directory Mary Bronstein. This led me to expect a performance from Rose Byrne something like Gina Rowlands's in A Woman Under the Influence (1974), and for her character to be unlikeable. Whatever her merits the scenario does not allow her to reach any significant heights, and more problematically, this character is boring as she lacks backstory and motivation.

In essence this mother is left to tend to her only child who has an eating disorder while she tries to function as a therapist. (Husband Christian Slater appears mostly as an annoying voice on the phone and in a brief what-did-you-do ending scene.) A housing disaster causes the mother/daughter pair to move to a motel for most of the movie where they encounter the underdrawn Ivy Wolk at the front counter and co-resident A$AP Rocky who does what he can. (He has one of the few characters that make sense and is totally different from Highest 2 Lowest (2025). He tries to sort her out on the dark web!) She's got a drowning-woman thing for fellow shrink Conan O'Brien (good and somewhat amusing as the straight man in a bent situation) and finding psychedelic experiences in holes. Danielle Macdonald (The Tourist (2022)) went looking for help in all the wrong places. Bronstein herself is flat as the doctor treating the daughter.

I found it hard to watch. Many scenes don't work; one has a hamster in a car that just sequences cliches and too many others are similarly uninspired. The cinematography was often too murky for me to make things out or too annoyingly jittery. I had an abiding sense of waiting for it to get good and it just didn't. Byrne's performance had shades of Julianne Moore's from Magnolia (1999). The body horror tropes evoked David Cronenberg, the apartment horrors Rosemary's Baby (1968), and the scenario just maybe The Exorcist (1973). It's autofic and I should have skipped it (as I have Celine Song’s output): I am not in the target demographic that demands relatability, either in the form of characters recognisably themselves or in Bad Mother variation. The dodgy psychologising and spacey logic tediously aimed to validate.

A Critic's Pick by Jeannette Catsoulis. I acknowledge that it tried to be funny. Dana Stevens: "Uncut Gems (2019) for motherhood." — Safdie brothers adjacent. Byrne is impossible to stop watching. Epic self absorption. Unmodulated script. Relieved when it was over.

A Richard Conte jag from Thieves' Highway (1949). Also some Alain Delon completism. Completely dire.

A black-and-white noir directed by Jules Dassin (Night and the City (1950), Rififi (1955)). Notionally-Greek Richard Conte (later Barzini in The Godfather (1972)) returns to Fresno from the war to find his sweetheart (Barbara Lawrence) waiting and father (Morris Carnovsky) in need of some justice. This leads him to finance a possibly-shonky operation with Millard Mitchell that involves them driving trucks from an apple orchard to the badlands of the markets of San Francisco. There he encounters sharky trader Lee J. Cobb (On the Waterfront (1954), 12 Angry Men (1957)) who has engaged the services of foxy Italianate streetwalker-with-a-heart-of-gold Valentina Cortese (The Visit (1964), The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988)) to distract him and us at critical moments. Most of the characters are of uncertain virtue.

Things get a bit racy (he gets his shirt off and so does she) and violent. It seems to endorse migrants marrying migrants because those settled in the U.S. for longer just want your money but don't have the courtesy to ask for it. The trucking aspect put me in mind of The Wages of Fear (1953). It's not always engrossing but it was always possible that it could have been.

Vincent Canby.

Kindle. Inevitable after Yilkari (2025). The story goes as the summaries have it. It's written in a very discursive style with an irritating iterative-deepening structure. I didn't get any grip on the horror angle as it is all innuendo; I was more frightened that Lovecraft was going to take as many pages to get out as he took to get in. The epistemics are highly dodgy (it was all a dream) and the time travel aspect not very baked. I wonder why he picked that location in the Pilbara (spelt "Pilbarra" in the text I had) as the site of the happenings.

Mike Leigh's latest (his first since the epic Peterloo (2018)) and therefore inevitable. His second effort with Marianne Jean-Baptiste (The Cell (2000), Spy Game (2001)) after Secrets and Lies (1996). This is a slice of the Caribbean community in London, sort-of updating Steve McQueen's Small Axe (2020) to the present, post-COVID, day. Most of it is generous, some of it gently humorous but Jean-Baptiste's character is too much hard work. Michele Austin (also Secrets and Lies (1996), Another Year (2010)) has more fun as her hairdresser/sister with her daughters Sophia Brown and Ani Nelson. The catharsis, when it comes, is not enough and they do not stick the ending. The overweight, underemployed, underdeveloped son trope, here embodied by Tuwaine Barrett, recurs from All or Nothing (2002).

Like Lee Tamahori Leigh has most often taken the women's point-of-view.

A Critic's Pick by Manohla Dargis. Wendy Ide: three stars. "Pansy is the most relentlessly abrasive character in a Mike Leigh film since David Thewlis’s rampaging Mancunian hate machine in 1993’s Naked." — but his running-at-the-mouth was far more amusing than anything here! Peter Sobczynski. Andrew Katzenstein summarises it at length for the New York Review of Books. Jason Di Rosso.

Kindle. More true crime, this time more tabloid. Overlong; not all of it is salient to the story at hand, of couple Willie Roger Holder and Catherine Marie Kerkow and their plane hijacking antics. It is kooky. The Black Panthers in Libya! Narrative non-fiction. I thought I was going to get it good and hard, or at least fast.

Dwight Garner. Goodreads.

Somewhat strangely a Vincent Cassel jag from The Shrouds (2025). I'd say he's better here as a young man, in French, playing another bloke with a massive appetite who wants to live forever. Apparently a biopic of a master criminal (banks and kidnapping) of the 1960s and 1970s. The cinematography left me cold (things get very jittery every time there's some action). The lifestyle looked really boring: in and out of gaol, one lady at a time (or several depending on payment), no drugs. I had some difficulty figuring out if we were in Canada, the U.S.A., France or elsewhere. Over two nights as it's lengthy (in two parts) and my interest regularly flagged.

I didn't see anything here that hasn't been shown before: the indulgent, gleeful coupled-up ultraviolence of Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Natural Born Killers (1994), the notional charm of The Old Man and the Gun (2018), the sheer relentless percussive repetition of Gangs of Wasseypur (2012). The bloke was like a humourless Chopper (2000) who worked with and/or got many more chicks. It generally does not function as a time capsule (in contrast with the old Melvilles). At some point there's a kamikaze that made me wish I was watching another of Costa-Gavras's efforts. I guess every crim dreams of a lawyer like Mesrine's.

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars for the first part, three-and-a-half stars for the second. Public Enemies (2009). A Critic's Pick by Stephen Holden: "Mr. Cassel’s monumental performance fuses the cobralike menace of the young Robert Mitchum with the whipsaw, shape-shifting (from wiry to bulbous) volatility of classic Robert De Niro, and lightens it with a cat burglar's grace and agility." — I wish I was watching what he did. Lots of gaps in the story. A Gallic Scarface (1983).

An accidental rewatch; I saw this at a cinema in Chicago in 2014 and forgot almost all of it. Written and directed by David Michôd after a spitballing with Joel Edgerton. No greater love has a man for his dog. Colin Stetson on the soundtrack!

A. O. Scott: "much of what happens seems arbitrary."

Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, and therefore inevitable. Apparently a loose adaption of Thomas Pynchon's Vineland (1990) which I'm even less likely to read now. As with its predecessor Licorice Pizza (2021) it is so nostalgic that maybe you had to have been there (or are there now). The appropriation of Gil Scott-Heron made me wonder what he would have made of these revolutionaries being filmed. It leans into gynephilia with mouth-breathing gusto. There's nothing much on the logic or philosophy of revolution, or even history beyond a stray comment from Benicio Del Toro about Mexico and a mention of the Philippines. Some of it dragged, like "gringo Zapata" Leonardo DiCaprio's password fails that were played for stale laughs. Teyana Taylor (A Thousand and One (2023)) does the heavy lifting early on; she departs with all the cabin pressure. Sean Penn as a Terminator-ish soldier doing domestic immigration police work. I did not get much of a grip on Eric Schweig's (The Last of the Mohicans (1992)) character. Alana Haim has a small role. Overlong. Jonny Greenwood's score is obtrusive. The humour felt downhill from the Coen brothers.

Widely feted as more-or-less the movie of the year; the competition is so thin I doubt it will be challenged. Dana Stevens: long in the oven. So many subcultures get their closeups. Oodles of cinematic debt: Leonardo's "wake-and-bake weed smoker and bathrobe-clad layabout" is (obviously) a direct lift from The Big Lebowski (1998), Penn nods to Sterling Hayden in Dr. Strangelove. What is Anderson actually saying here? Peter Sobczynski. Nashville! The firing of heavy machine guns by pregnant women/nuns ... I guess you just have to be American. Jonathan Lethem at the New York Review of Books: The Weather Underground (2002). Jason Di Rosso interviewed Anderson. And so on.

Directed and co-written by Derek Cianfrance (Blue Valentine (2010), The Place Beyond the Pines (2012), The Light Between Oceans (2016), Sound of Metal (2019)). For Kirsten Dunst, Ben Mendelsohn, Peter Dinklage — one could be forgiven for having expectations! Channing Tatum leads. Kirt Gunn was the other co-writer.

This is tabloid fare, more (based on) true crime from 2004. The story has many all-American trimmings, some cute: the mode of robbing a number of McDonald's (etc), living in a Toys'R'Us box store, meeting the love of a life at a Presbyterian church, being impoverished and at a loose end after military service, unable to keep up with the Joneses or wifely expectations of material plenitude, the Southern accents. The setup in the first half chugs along agreeably but after that things really drag. Dinklage probably does the best as a store manager; at least I found his acting (facial work) the funniest in an Office Space (1999) sort of way. I'm not sure what Mendelsohn was thinking as the church leader. Dunst does what she can as a woman who'd like to be saved in this world and the next.

There's a reality version over the credits which shows that about five minutes is enough to do the story justice.

Natalia Winkelman at the New York Times. Marya E. Gates at Roger Ebert's venue: two stars, "a slick but incurious film". Jason Di Rosso interviewed Cianfrance. The latter two both remark on some very good acting from Tatum and Dunst.

Directed by Robert Wise (The Set-Up (1949)) from a script by Abraham Polonsky and Nelson Gidding adapting William P. McGivern's novel.

Harry Belafonte led and was successful in a series of set-piece scenes, especially the jazzy ones in a nightclub where he memorably played the vibraphone and sabotaged Mae Barnes's performance of All Men Are Evil. Robert Ryan's (also The Set-Up (1949)) hard boiled racist is boring. Home-alone housewife Gloria Grahame had just enough screentime to ask "what’s going on in there? an orgy?" at his door (while his regular squeeze Shelley Winters is out working) but I couldn't believe Grahame would ever have been that hard up. Mastermind Ed Begley rounded out the trio of desperadoes from NYC who tried it on upstate, much as Linda Fiorentino did a few decades later. Unfortunately the plot is pedestrian and went as the production code required. Notionally noir but the best bits are jazz.

Bosley Crowther.