peteg's blog - noise

And still more Ernst Lubitsch completism. He directed a screenplay from the very strong team of Charles Brackett (The Lost Weekend (1945), Sunset Boulevard (1950)), Billy Wilder and Walter Reisch, based on an original story by Melchior Lengyel (To Be or Not to Be (1942)). It seems this was the first thing I'd seen Greta Garbo in and it's coincidentally her highest-rated feature at IMDB. Over several nights.

Three Soviet comrade-stooges are sent to Paris to flog some jewels expropriated from an Russian aristocrat (Ina Claire, reminding me a bit of no-fuss Piper Laurie in Twin Peaks) who just happens to reside there. She finds out about this in the usual screwy/small world way and her not-as-rusted-on-as-she-thought paramour Melvyn Douglas offers to help her lay claim to them. Garbo is sent to close the transaction (so the people don't starve) and of course she and Douglas meet cute and so forth. The romance is heavy-handed and the entirety is all very predictable but is made bearable by some very funny dialogue.

Garbo started out as robotic as Arnie as a Soviet fake human apparatchik but softened into dreaminess on return to privation in dreary Moscow. I was so envious of her ability to ignore irrelevant bullshit all the way along. Her performance got her an Oscar nom. Bela Lugosi appeared late-on as a commissar.

Frank S. Nugent: "gay and impertinent and malicious." This was in the time when Stalin wasn't yet beyond the pale. IMDB trivia: are we really to believe that Arnie studied Garbo's performances?

At the 14.30 session Reading Cinemas West Lakes (Adelaide), cinema 6, for 13 AUD on their cheap-ish Tuesday. I was aiming to be the last person in Australia to see Christoper Nolan's latest on a big screen, as I may have been with Tenet (2020), but I had to share that honour with at least one other bloke. The house lights did not come up at the end.

Nolan maladapted Homer and directed. Ludwig Göransson's score is bombastic, obtrusive and often unnecessary. The cinematography by Hoyte van Hoytema is sometimes effective but often jittery and uncertain of what it wants us to see; I can't imagine David Lean going for this. The length was excessive. Sepia, murky, grim. The third movement was witless after Uberto Pasolini's The Return (2024) and similarly suffered from a poorly cast Telemachus (here Tom Holland). Anne Hathaway does what she can as Penelope but never gets to stick it to her man like Juliette Binoche did. (Throughout she sounded much like Catwoman to me, without that prosthetic motorcycle.) And similarly for Odyssean Matt Damon against Ralph Fiennes, all John Brolin wannabe. (His performance was a long way from Cillian Murphy's triumphant effort in Oppenheimer (2023) and so the blame lay with him.) Robert Pattinson did what he could, camping it up. Benny Safdie as an Agamemnon we hardly got to see. John Leguizamo, effective, so long since Romeo + Juliet (1996). Himesh Patel!

So much for the sausagefest, another generation of Hollywood blokes going to war just like their elders did in The Thin Red Line (1998). Amongst the women was Charlize Theron in nothing more than a perfume ad, making me wonder why there wasn't room for Sharlto Copley too. Lupita Nyong'o, strong and underused. Zendaya as Athena, not persuasive, not great. Samantha Morton got an inspired scene as Circe which actually laid bare the problem with the whole thing: too much important material was dealt with only in cursory exposition. It made me wish that she was the focus of the whole show, that it was less All Our Tragic (2014).

The multitrack mashup was not hard to follow for the most part, or perhaps it just didn't matter. It's sexless; the Sirens were in longshot, the two matrimonial scenes all angst. I felt the trip to Hades was a bust. A wooden horse dragged up the sand, unheroically. The same horse, burning. An outro like the distended ending of Lord of the Rings: loads of not-very-convincing exposition, exit west, as if nobody saw how a master did that in 25th Hour (2002). "Zeus's Law", of hospitality for the stranger, totally bogus; the Greek gods themselves were capricious and not lawful. As everyone knows.

Before watching this I only read Emily Wilson's fine essay and listened to Jason Di Rosso's take which I interpreted as a pan. He did not interview anyone. Of course reviews are legion. Peter Sobczynski was emotionally unmoved; O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) makes for the better rewatch. Dana Stevens: matinee swords-and-sandals at all scales. Too much too shallowly drawn. Christos Tsiolkas: debts to Terrence Malick. Humourless. Too many strands. Damon showed "range and quiet strength as an actor" in the scene where he is tied to the mast so he can listen to the Sirens. (I wasn't as entranced.) Many ineptly-staged scenes such as the sacking of Troy. Daniel Mendelsohn had expectations that Nolan could finesse the material but of course there's more Nolan than Homer in the result. Pedestrian dialogue throughout. And so on and on.

Ernst Lubitsch completism. He directed a screenplay by Samson Raphaelson who had help from Grover Jones in adapting Aladár László's play.

Very funny screwball. The setup is similar to Read My Lips (2001): Miriam Hopkins thinks she has found her next mark in the form of Herbert Marshall (sporting hair like Robert S. McNamara's) as does he. Fortunately both realise that they have found something far more valuable in each other and things are halcyonic until they come across the very glamorous widow Kay Francis in Paris. She's disinterested in running her husband's family's perfume company or in her Thomson-and-Thompson suitors, making her easy prey for Marshall's suave shtick. They meet in a scene where purses stand in for Cinderella's clogs. Things proceed as true love must.

The Art Deco modernism is spectacular. Hopkins got the best lines but is unfortunately onscreen for the least time. IMDB trivia suggests it was a long way from complying with the Hays code. Clock faces indicating hours spent in passion!

Roger Ebert: four stars as a "great movie" in 1998. Mordaunt Hall for the New York Times at the time.

Jean Renoir directed and co-wrote with Charles Spaak. Set during World War I but almost entirely disregards the violent aspects to instead focus on the decay in class solidarity amongst the European gentry. Erich von Stroheim (Sunset Boulevard (1950)) played the German side of that, Pierre Fresnay the French. Lead Jean Gabin represented the working class who demonstrated their own enduring comradery across racial (and some national) lines in the full knowledge that they were getting stiffed; revolution was in the air but the upper classes did not seem to know that things had to change.

Most of the action occurs in several officers' camps where English and French are detained by Germans. There's a staged performance, something like what's in Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be (1942). The French have sex on the brain, as in Costa-Gavras's Shock Troops (1967). The English cross-dress. There's a great scene where the Russians receive a crate of books from their caring Empress and a touching romance at the end.

In two sittings. Jean Gabin struck me as a French Robert Mitchum (in affable mode).

Roger Ebert: four stars as a "great movie" in 1999. The Great Escape (1963). Casablanca (1942). Frank S. Nugent at the time.

A smoogery of footage and audio from the Apollo manned moon missions, some of it great, much of it overly familiar. Too often I wanted to know who was speaking and that got increasingly frustrating, as did the authentically hokey bits and fatuous narration. Despite that it could've gone much longer. Brian Eno's incidental music is too obtrusive, worse than Vangelis's for Cosmos (1980), or perhaps it was Carl Sagan's tonsils that made the difference; these space cowboys declaimed like schoolboys. Over two nights.

Caryn James for the New York Times at the time: "It's not a bad idea to ignore the narration ... the better to appreciate its astonishing visual spectacle." Terrence Rafferty in 2009 (?): "At first ... you wonder whose voice it is, but after a while you stop wondering." Or maybe you don't. Achieved essentially Soviet collectivism through elision of individuality.

On the pile since it was released and probably eventually inevitable despite my abiding dislike of Darren Aronofsky's efforts (with the singular exception of The Wrestler (2008)). Likely prompted by the confected conflict around Rachel Cusk's portrait of Natalie Portman. Mark Heyman, Andrés Heinz and John McLaughlin were responsible for the screenplay. It's a breaking-bad fever dream made like these blokes saw Mulholland Drive (2001) and thought they could do it better on the East Coast.

For reasons unexplained and unexplored white, virginal, uptight, perfectionist Portman wants the lead role in a contemporary/modernised production of the ballet Swan Lake (1875) in NYC. Vincent Cassel, in a huge climb down from his efforts in (for instance) Read My Lips (2001), plays the genius, womanising auteur who only has one thing to say: she needs to get more black. He encourages west-coast dancer Mila Kunis to help out with that through insinuation and competition while the film's auteurs deployed faded star Winona Ryder and mother Barbara Hershey as exemplars of failure. It is earnest and utterly humourless, mostly an entirely stock bitchkrieg.

Whether this pressure-cooker approach (also seen in Whiplash (2014)) actually yields better performances or just lawsuits is not the point. (At least here not all is technique.) Prolific cinematographer Matthew Libatique's camerawork is tight and jittery, often occluding the performance failures by, for instance, only showing the top half of Portman's dancing. CGI covered up a bit more. The body horror soon became trying. Generally tedious and completely ridiculous.

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. Like Dana Stevens I struggle to engage with Portman; she's my model of Deb Olin Unferth's fake human robot. Apparently the choreography was conventional; clearly Aronofsky had no interest in ballet as an art form and many other activities (such as selling ice cream) would have functioned just as well. Unlike Stephanie Zacharek I only started laughing in the last ten minutes or so. Dennis Lim: it's a (camp?) comedy, "a schizoid piece of high-minded trash". Showgirls (1995)-adjacent. "Aronofsky ... just loves a freak show."

Al Pacino's first role in a feature film. He has a very brief scene as a cocky/sleazy Fonz-like character in a Brooklyn dance hall, reinforcing lead Patty Duke's lack of self esteem as she comes of age. She moves to "the Village" (apparently Greenwich Village) to get away from her stodgy parents and their vintage fashion. There she encounters and gets involved with a man, an architect down from Connecticut who is also trying to rediscover or reinvent himself through painting female nudes. She undergoes some of the requisite personal development but of course hasn't thought most of it through. The ending was a bust.

The majority of the runtime is colour and as such it sort-of works as an NYC time capsule, at least of making movies in that city. Could you really ride a Honda scooter in the pedestrian lanes in those days? And rent that enormous apartment on 10 USD an hour? A. Martin Zweiback's screenplay cleaves overly closely to the source material (due to him and Stanley Shapiro). Fred Coe directed. It reminded me of Adrienne Shelly's work with Hal Hartley (The Unbelievable Truth (1989), Trust (1990)) but without (enough of) the artifice.

Roger Ebert: three stars. His art is terrible. Vincent Canby. Knives out and fair enough.

Likely only the second time around with David Lynch's masterwork. Prompted by Christos Tsiolkas's 25th anniversary take, and also for the Kenneth Anger-ish double/triple/... exposures. Lynch mostly gave us time to appreciate his images.

Wikipedia says this is an assembly (and extension) of a television pilot. I do wish they'd made it at Twin Peaks length as there are perhaps too many teasing, promising fragments: the two blokes at the diner, the hitman at the office, Melissa George, Robert Forster. (Some of this put me in mind of Pulp Fiction (1994).) The main thread, involving Naomi Watts and Laura Harring, is an identity masala that showcased the former's range. The Justin Theroux line is far more banal, mostly ignored by reviewers, and really, who even dreams of keeping tins of fluorescent pink paint in their house? Lynch filled the minor roles with great actors. It is never less than engrossing.

Roger Ebert: four stars in 2001 and another four stars in 2012 as a "great movie". Stephanie Zacharek.

Prompted by Pamela Hutchinson's recent review which mentioned that it drew from the same well as David Lean's Madeleine (1950) albeit bent to an affluent East Coast of the Western Hemisphere milieu. Directed by Clarence Brown from an adaptation by John Meehan and Wanda Tuchock of Marie Belloc Lowndes's novel of the same name, or as the lawyers had it, a plagiarisation of a stage play. Joan Crawford (Mildred Pierce (1945)) led. Not great.

Scandinavian Nils Asther (cast as a Latino Lover) shows clothes horse Crawford a good time in Montevideo until she's had enough and it's time to head home. Aboard ship she meets keeper Robert Montgomery but the previous bloke knows she's the only eligible woman in this movie and won't give up without a fight. Stuff happens back in NYC and the situation is adjudicated by cadaverous District Attorney Lewis Stone who knows how these things have to go. Louise Closser Hale as Miranda (Crawford's maid) is perhaps the most fun with a fruity performance.

Mourdant Hall at the New York Times at the time. Wikipedia.

Inevitable after accidentally watching Ernest and Celestine (2012) at the Music Box Theatre back in 2014. I hadn't realised (but am not surprised to find) that it's based on a book series, like Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017). It was a lot more fun than Toy Story 5 (2026). I saw the version with French voices.

Being French the movie goes its own way: it did not pretend to grapple with present day tech, instead going all-in on the eternal French concerns of comradery, liberty, architecture, mechanism, music and absurdism. And, of course, the law being a necessary/necessarily an ass that can be reformed. I'm not going to claim it all hang together flawlessly but there are many fun images beautifully rendered. Somewhat amazingly Celestine's unyielding positivity doesn't grate, perhaps because she's selfless and takes immense pleasure in Ernest's music.

Three stars from Shiela O'Malley at Roger Ebert's venue. A Critic's Pick by Natalia Winkelman at the New York Times.

Inevitable despite Lightyear (2022) and Toy Story 4 (2019). Co-written and co-directed by (Mc)Kenna Harris and Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo (2003), Wall-E (2008), Finding Dory (2016)). No more John Lasseter! — but still plenty of retro nostalgia.

This one is yet another ode to consumption, of loving stuff and needing to escape from even the most halcyon suburban family. Girls are foregrounded which I guess makes sense as present-day tech has had the most pernicious effect on them, though the most malevolent thing here is an under-analysed group of mean girls. (Surely they need liberation from their screens too.) Just maybe it functions as a bit of a mental health PSA but overall it is accepting of technology, exactly as you'd expect from a company (Pixar) whose movies used to showcase the state of computer animation art. Now that anything can be CGI and/or deep fake the aesthetic becomes more important (which they acknowledge by shifting styles for the girls' imaginative play) but this is not Studio Gibli or The Mitchells vs the Machines (2021). The emotional manipulation remains masterful however.

Perhaps realising that the well is running dry, the auteurs have loaded it up with references: Woody's poncho obviously evokes 1960s Clint Eastwood, the arc of the fleeing toys E.T. (1982), various aspects classic Star Wars (1980s), the fleet of Buzz Lightyears Iron Man 3 (2013), etc. The Lightyears replay Martin Sheen's big move at the end of Apocalypse Now (1979). And I'm sure a lot more. Other issues of the day, such as the environmental impact of plastic toys/packaging and lack of room to store all these toys or play outside, is completely ignored.

Peter Sobczynski: big thumbs up despite the major themes being respins of those of the first two Toy Storys. Dana Stevens: "the premise recalls that of the original movie." Manohla Dargis: "[T]he proceedings [..] never achieve liftoff. It's fine, pretty and amusing, but if no one's heart seems in it, perhaps it’s time to make way for other toys."

More Dick Powell (Murder, My Sweet (1944), Cry Danger (1951)). Directed by Anthony Mann from a screenplay that George Worthing Yates and Art Cohn developed from a story by the former and Daniel Mainwaring/Geoffrey Homes. Thoroughly mediocre with a misleadingly high rating at IMDB.

For murky reasons NYC policeman Powell boarded a train to Washington, intent on foiling a plot against Honest Abe's life before he can be installed as POTUS and kick off the Civil War. He mostly just went through the motions with a flimflam plot that makes little sense. (Did people really just leave guns lying around train carriages in 1861?) Militia Colonel Adolphe Menjou (Paths of Glory (1957)) helped and hindered as need be. A very young and radiant Ruby Dee (Do The Right Thing (1989)) played Paula Raymond's slave maid. They were tasked with breaking up the sausagefest and acting suitably shocked as the plot against the POTUS unravelled; a Trumpish manoeuvre ensured things ended well.

Most of the political rhetoric in this film is against Lincoln (stop the warmonger, etc.) perhaps reflecting the spirit of the early 1950s.

Bosley Crowther at the time. Wikipedia. It's not The Lady Vanishes (1938).

Prompted by a five-star review by Peter Bradshaw and a strong cast; Björk's first role in a feature film since Drawing Restraint 9 (2005) and Lars von Trier's traumatising Dancer in the Dark (2000). Robert Eggers (The Lighthouse (2019)) directed and co-wrote with Sjón. The script is an overly literal, fussy and witless adaptation of the Scandinavian legend of Amleth. Elements are familiar from Shakespeare's Hamlet (~ 1600), Braveheart (1995), Gladiator (2000) and Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005). Much of the plot is disjointed (the plan to instil terror in the uncle's household over many nights does not seem to occur) and/or nonsensical (why drag out the killings?). It's all fates and bloodlines and determinism. Never give a sucker an even break.

Alexander Skarsgård (The Little Drummer Girl (2018), etc.) led in the humourless-Arnie Conan the Barbarian (1982) role. Obviously he took the opportunity to extend his line with Anya Taylor-Joy's earth-witch. Nicole Kidman did OK as anybody's queen. (The matriarchal aspect was underexplored.) I was hoping for more from King Ethan Hawke; so much early gravitas simply evaporated with his expiry. Willem Dafoe as a fool. Graphically violent but did not linger on anything in particular for long.

Dana Stevens wanted more equal-opportunity/less tasteful nudity. A. O. Scott: no camp, no irony. IMDB trivia. And so on.

Orson Welles completism. Also a Peter van Eyck jag from a sneaky rewatch of The Wages of Fear (1953), and also Michael Redgrave from The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962). The latter is very fruity here as a post-war fence/purveyor of junk in Copenhagen.

Producer/writer/director Welles tried to rebottle the lightning of Citizen Kane (1941) but apparently the budget didn't stretch far enough to encompass his high-concept aspirations. Lead Robert Arden (far down the billing) was a lot weaker than all the other players. His thief, smuggler, etc. is tasked by billionaire Welles to find out what the world knows about Welles's life before 1927 as the man himself has lost it all due to a mysterious bout of amnesia. This leads to much traversal of Europe and a jaunt to Mexico. His sometime lady-friend Patricia Medina runs a parallel operation. That things don't make a tonne of sense does not occur to Arden. Notionally the two men are duking it out for the affections of Paola Mori who has flashes of independence and yet never goes looking for a better man.

Much of the dialogue was dubbed and the lips do not match the sounds. Jean Bourgoin's cinematography was adventurous. It's engaging but the production could've been a lot better.

Someone at the New York Times at the time. J. Hoberman at length for the Criterion Collection in 2006. IMDB trivia. Wikipedia.

Kindle. Unferth's first novel. It's a bit underbaked: a bloke chases another bloke from NYC to Syracuse, NY and then to Nicaragua on the very thin premise that the latter is somehow involved with the former's wife. There's a sideline in dolphin untraining (reconditioning for release into the wild) that prefigures the concerns of her later works. Very occasionally she comes out with a great line but the bulk is a lot of foreshadowing and circling the drain. By the two-thirds mark it's clear there's not going to be a payoff that makes slogging through all the mystifying, fragmentary setup worthwhile.

Madison Smartt Bell at the New York Times: the characters are so abstract that the contrivances are assets. Unferth's take on human connection is bleak. Goodreads.

Kindle. Notionally about underground/experimental/avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger's short Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969) but more on the California/San Francisco counterculture that Kobek mined a few years previous. Brand new you're retro! — as someone once said. This one is Haight/Ashbury, LSD, occult, the end of the Summer of Love, Manson-adjacent, like Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood (2019). I guess Ken Kesey never did fit that frame.

The book has three parts, a structure that imitates the film as explained towards the end. The focus is on Bobby Beausoleil who Kobek interviewed recently. There are also snippets of an interview with Anger. The thesis is that this movie, or at least a falling-out between these two men, had a major causal role in the Manson Family murders. The first part Therefore is a ramble through the SF and LA scenes and was a bit of a slog. The second [Filmic Material] is an analysis of the film in Kobek's signature style. That was fun and worth the entry price. Finally Because lays out the causal argument. It leans too heavily on some counterfactuals. The whole show is heavily footnoted and referenced, mostly to web resources of dubious veracity. So much tat, ecumenical between DC and Marvel, like the MCU four decades early. Kobek mentions but does not dwell on the Thelema, Aleister Crowley, etc. aspects which link Anger to, for instance, Jimmy Page.

After reading the book I watched the film itself (YouTube). It runs about 11 minutes and is visually more interesting (overloading) than I expected. I would have been totally mystified without Kobek's close analysis of it; the Batmen, for instance, are hilarious while Anger's theatricality in his "The Equinox of the Gods" ceremony was quite boring, as were the cremation of the dead black cat, the Rolling Stones concert footage, Marines exiting helicopters in Việt Nam, the Orkustra. I had expected to see more of Anton LaVey who represented the more commercial end of Thelema. Some of the visual compositions are great but it's all too much too quickly. The music is quite good; it's a Moog synth loop with authorship ascribed to Mick Jagger but Kobek claims it was actually just a demo loop set up by the salesman. Whoever heard of Jagger working for free?

Goodreads. Someone suggested that this is Kobek's masterwork; before watching the movie itself I would've insisted on Atta (2011) but afterwards I can't disagree.

Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with director/co-writer Olivier Assayas (Irma Vep (1996)). Based on a novel by Giuliano Da Empoli. Emmanuel Carrère helped with the adaptation.

The idea was to take a look at how present-day Russia emerged from the Yeltsin era under Putin, coming at it from the view of confected "wizard of the Kremlin" Vadim Baranov (who I later read is a fictionalisation of Vadislav Surkov). He's played by Paul Dano who does not succeed in the lead. Dano delivers tonnes of exposition in a style that is intended to be coldly insinuating. He somehow lands manic pixie dream squeaky party girl Alicia Vikander who is tasked with breaking up the sausagefest. She knows what she wants (excess) but I was never convinced Dano could satisfy that, and she never seemed to enjoy her spoils anyway. For reasons often unknown she just disappears from large parts of the movie.

But the main draw was Jude Law who does function very effectively as Putin. He got the body language down and the brutality, opacity and sheer rapacious vacuity of the ideology across; it seems at this time Putin is paranoid but not as (insecurely) paranoid as he appears to be now. He too lacks much outward expression of the joy of being the new Tzar. Things flag whenever he's not on the screen.

Beyond the obvious decline in civil liberties the movie fails to explain what really changed since the 1990s; apparently it's just a game of oligarchs underpinned by some emotional manipulation of the masses, a fending-off of Western influence in Ukraine. The present-day framing interview with Jeffrey Wright seemed inessential. The visual metaphors are crass. Yorick Le Saux's cinematography is uninspired which is weird as he did far better with, for instance, Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), Little Women (2019), and Blitz (2024).

Glenn Kenny at Roger Ebert's venue: three-and-a-half stars.

Kindle. Eventually inevitable due to the gravitation of Malick's movie (1998).

This is Jones's take on the Guadacanal campaign of 1942/1943 that was "the first major Allied land offensive against Japan" of World War II. (Guadalancal, for those of us born long after, is one of the Solomon Islands.) It's relentless, well written, never boring, sometimes hilarious and yet somehow not as iconic as Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961); Witt is a bit like Yossarian in being doctrinaire but is not as overtly philosophical about it. (Perhaps the relative lack of enduring recognition is because, like Milton Friedman and the money supply, everything reminds Jones of sex.) The cast of characters initially seems daunting but are sufficiently distinct that they're not hard to follow. His deft treatment of PTSD ("combat numbess") was perhaps novel at the time.

Goodreads. Maxwell Geismar at the New York Times at the time.

Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with co-writer/director Yeon Sang-ho (Train to Busan (2016), Peninsula (2020)) who has made yet another zombie flick. Choi Kyu-seok helped him out with the script. Jun Ji-hyun (Assassination (2015)) led. Generally underbaked.

For generic reasons of revenge mad genius bio-scientist Koo Hyo-hwan cooks up a "virus" and a "vaccine" and proceeds to inconvenience not only the attendees of a biotech conference (where the colony concept is explained to us by Steve Jobs-ish CEO Kom Jeong-tae) but also the civilians in the shopping mall in a high-rise building in Seoul. The survivors/counter-revengers, quasi-led by strong-willed scientist Jun Ji-hyun, dwindle by the numbers. Much of the plot hinges on highly suspect reasoning; for instance, how do the responders even know there's a vaccine? Quite often the players (human and post/sub-human) hang around, inexplicably inert, waiting for a cue. Pretty much all of the characters suck. The ending threatened a sequel. Bring me the zombie king.

I wish the Koreans would get around to remaking Shaun of the Dead (2004).

Clint Worthington at Roger Ebert's venue: two-and-a-half stars. The zombie genre has seen a lot of innovation including the conceit used here. Seongyong Cho: two-and-a-half stars, "another typical zombie movie which does not surprise me a lot." Fungal not viral. Later, Peter Sobczynski.

Written and directed by Michael Haneke. Drug up for reasons unknown; perhaps for Juliette Binoche who leads with Daniel Auteuil or maybe because the precis evoked the early parts of Lost Highway (1997). I did not understand this movie.

Video tapes (how quaint) mysteriously arrive on the doorstep of the middle-class Parisian couple that contain surveillance footage referring to unshared events in the man's childhood. Their son is becoming more troublesome as he undergoes puberty (no other motivation is provided). The police are mostly as disinterested as I was.

The characters are weak stereotypes; Binoche made the most sense as a bewildered wife. Husband Auteuil is mystifying. The couple inhabits a highly-paid literary fantasy land that has surely been eroded by now. Both are so quick to jump to conclusions and stand on their own amour-propre that we rarely get access to anything factual. I guess this is one way for the guilty to respond when challenged (guilt being an obvious theme of the movie) but it is unsatisfying that so many scenes dragged on or replayed earlier scenes with minor variations. I was not engrossed and things did not conclude satisfactorily; it wasn't so much that the plot dangles as the motivations remained opaque or trivial. For instance, why did Maurice Bénichou (Majid) cut his own throat at that plot-convenient time?

The cinematography is harshly digital, of a piece with the video tapes. Most of the movie is dialogue in tell-don't-show mode.

Roger Ebert: four stars at the time and another four stars as a "great movie". A. O. Scott wants it to be deeper than it is. Wikipedia. All claim the mystery of who sent the tapes is answered in the final shot — I was too impatient for it to be over to scan the frame sufficiently but apparently it was the sons wot did it — and if that was the (trite) intention then we needed to see more of the other characters.