More Lee Byung-hun completism. Highly rated at IMDB. Directed by Kim Jee-woon (The Foul King (2000), The Good, The Bad, The Weird (2008), I Saw the Devil (2010)) who wrote a script based on a "character created by" Dong-Cheol Kim. Shades of Tarantino (Kill Bill) and ultraviolent Hong Kong. A henchman enforcer goes on a rampage after the boss tries to discern why he no longer wants to follow clear orders. Their mutual incomprehension is supposedly provoked by luxury superfluity Shin Min-a who notionally plays a mean cello but does not get particularly romantic with any of her three paramours. The cycle of life, or at least generic cinematic paydays, in the dens, hotels, bars, private rooms and so on of demimonde Seoul.
Peter Bradshaw: three stars.
Inevitable after reading Atticus Lish's source novel (2014) more than a decade ago. Apparently director Bing Liu was making docos before this, even scoring an Oscar nom for his skateboarders/masculinity-in-Chicago Minding the Gap (2018). Adapted by Martyna Majok, her first such after what appears to be a successful career in theatre and perhaps drawing on her play Queens (2018/2025) and own experience. Plenty of people with deep pockets/connections wanted this made including producer Barry Jenkins, executive producer Brad Pitt, and consulting producer Lish.
As with the book it's essentially a two-hander. Sebiye Behtiyar (in her feature debut) leads as Aishe, a Chinese Uyghur Muslim undocumented immigrant. In a clunky meet-cute street scene she encounters Fred Hechinger's Skinner, recently (and ambiguously) out of the military and looking for some recreation in NYC. What follows is a minor-note romance that is often difficult to fathom. Their connection does not evolve much; we really only learn more about his instabilities but not its causes or prospects for treatment. Notionally they bond over fitness but the scene in the gym is ineffective as we don't see them making a habit of it. The ending is uncertain, and we never really know what he sees in her or what she wants her life to amount to, beyond some kind of self-sufficiency. (He seems content to self-medicate.) While she refuses to reduce him to instrumentality (a meal ticket, a vector to formal US residency) or go all-in on the unsalvageable boy, everyone else exploits her.
The narrative arc is not close to the book's; in fact the themes have been wound back, the teeth filed down to the gums. It lacks the clarity of Lish's prose and edges toward the recurring ever now (Charles Yu's present indefinite) and moralism of an American drug flick.
Most of the time it felt like more effort had gone into the cinematography than the script: there's a lot of arty lighting and fancy shots. It might have worked better as a gritty guerilla shoot amongst the people of uncertain residency in NYC. Emile Mosseri's soundtrack adds to the doom. There's a literal echoing The Outrun (2024) and the precarity is a sedentary version of Souleymane's Story (2024). Both actors did what they could.
A Critic's Pick by Jeannette Catsoulis. I can't agree that "Aishe is driven to achieve legal status and financial security." Peter Bradshaw: three stars.
Post apocalyptic Seoul. Directed by Taehwa Um who wrote the script based on a "webtoon" by Lee Shin-ji and Kim Soong-nyung (says IMDB).
I guess the first apocalypse was the urbanisation of Korea, with the bulk of the population living in apartments that are heavily stratified by class, wealth, etc. as explored at feature length in Parasite (2019) (amongst others) and summarised in a rueful intro here. The second is a massive earthquake that levels the city with the singular exception of a block where young couple Park Bo-young and Park Seo-jono reside. A third takes the form of eventual "delegate" leader Lee Byung-hun (OK but far better in No Other Choice (2025)) who happens to be settling a score there that day and so survives while his wife and child do not.
Things go tediously predictably: Korean Lord of the Flies (1954). The initial mildly amusing black social comedy quickly yields to unfunny repetition and shouty histrionics with too many overlong scenes that canvas some but not all of the things that happen when infrastructure fails. Soon enough it's a boring slog.
A Critic's Pick by Jeannette Catsoulis. "Smoothly shap[ed] familiar genre tropes into a brutal study of class warfare and the stifling of pity".
I liked what director Boris Lojkine did with actress Nina Meurisse in Soleymane's Story (2024) and wondered about this prior art. He wrote the script with Bojina Panayotova.
This is a biopic of French photojournalist Camille Lepage. For reasons unexplored here she went to the Central African Republic to cover the (ongoing) civil war from about 2012 to about 2014. Her addiction proves predictably fatal, and her interest in accompanying the violent young men is sometimes hard to fathom as she always seems to be surprised and disgusted by the killing, dismemberment etc. Perhaps her need to record their stories dominated. The narrative arc can't go anywhere novel — the opening scenes imply she does not survive, and if she hadn't succeeded in getting published in the mainstream media nobody would have known about her. We're told she had no interest in taking assignments in other unsettled regions (specifically Ukraine).
There is some good cinematography, and of course some striking stills. At some point the French media contingent pile into a 78-series troopy. Often the crowds (large and small) burst into song as in Io Capitano (2023).
Costa-Gavras's first feature and hence inevitable. In French, 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 follow 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 Jean-Pierre Melville's demimonde; the car chase at the end is a bit Bob le flambeur (1956).
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.
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.
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 recounted 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 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.
