peteg's blog - noise

I always enjoy listening to George Miller chatting about his life philosophy (he's regularly on the ABC) but am generally less enthused by his movies (Mad Max (1979), the premise of Lorenzo's Oil (1992), Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022), etc). Apparently I saw this one before but I don't remember.

This time around I felt like Roger Ebert must have felt when he finally understood David Lynch via Mulholland Drive (2001): the relentless action of the first movement is all too much and yet when things slowed down I felt that every moment spent on the plot was wasted. The reason is that Miller does a huge amount of character development through interaction and not dialogue. And fashion, let's not forget that. This must be Nicholas Hoult's finest performance. Shot by John Seale. #182 on the IMDB top-250 list. What a blast.

The dreck that Florence Pugh makes me watch. The main problem here is that she's so much better than everything else on the screen; perhaps it is time she took a leaf from Clint Eastwood's playbook and sunk her MCU winnings into her own production company.

This movie's purpose is to get a team together, much like earlier MCU instalments, Suicide Squad (2016), Justice League (2017), etc. Getting in the way is the need to acknowledge general eye-rolling exhaustion with this stale property. The writing room's solution was to smoodge Pixar's Inside Out (2015) with a Cube (1997) multiverse into something very emo. The superman thing initially put me in mind of Matthew Goode's Ozymandias in Watchmen (2009) but really it's a humourless reheat of Iron Man 3 (2013) or Age of Ultron (2015) with a dash of that Guardians (2014) zaniness. So, not entirely fan service, just mostly fan service.

On the civilian side we get Geraldine Viswanathan (same-same as she was in Drive Away Dolls (2024): a relatable Gen-Z/Gen-Alpha type?) playing baddie Julia Louis-Dreyfus's personal assistant. The Kierkegaard regurgitation is cringey, and there's way too much "exposition" with "finger-quotes". Were these scenes from a Seinfeld reboot?

It took me a while to recognise Lewis Pullman; he has the same eyes and sheepish grin as his dad Bill. Perhaps he'll be President one day! (Later I found out he was in Bad Times at the El Royale (2018)). The homage to The Matrix was lame. Settling his personal (brain chemical) issues with violence was lame. Not being asked to factor huge numbers was lame. So much lame.

Manohla Dargis. I did not enjoy David Harbour's showboating. Flo's doing her own stunts, just like Tom Cruise ... therefore Mission Impossible beckons? Brian Tallerico at Roger Ebert's venue. Hannah John-Kamen really did get a numpty of a character.

I've seen a few of Miyazaki's movies (Howl's Moving Castle (2004), The Wind Rises (2013)) but somehow not this, his masterwork. The art is gorgeous. I can't say I grasped the whole mythos; I think it's a Japan-ified Wizard of Oz. There's a small homage to it and to Pixar as the young girl makes her way up a path. The humour is fantastic. #31 in the IMDB top-250.

Roger Ebert: four stars at the time and another four stars as a "great movie" in 2012. Alice in Wonderland. Kamaji is a great invention. (It was the hopping light pole that I took as a homage to Pixar.) This "ma", the emptiness between actions, is exactly what George Miller omitted. Elvis Mitchell made it a Critic's Pick. Apparently now a stage production.

I dodged this movie at the time but just now got suckered by the New York Times placing it at #18 on their list of the best movies of this century. I am not a fan of the director/co-writer Alfonso Cuarón (Children of Men (2006), Gravity (2013), Roma (2018)) which made it hard to indulge. The other co-writer was his brother Carlos Cuarón.

This is adolescent male fantasy stuff though I grant that the pervy camera ecumenically reduces everyone to sex objects. It's a pile of cliches: the mateship of two horny young blokes from Mexico City is put to the test by an older, marginally more mature but similarly oversexed woman from Madrid who has her reasons to get loose and enjoin them to a road trip to a paradisaical beach. The narration aims for the quirkiness of contemporaneous Amelie (2001) but adds little. There's not one but two lame Fight Club (1999)-esque manifestos. The only thing anyone ever thinks about or discusses is sex, so much so that they're getting it on in public.

Roger Ebert: four stars and a lengthy summary. There's a semi-serious critique of Mexican culture/politics/etc. bubbling along underneath! — what I saw I dismissed as mere colour. His main point was it goes where American movies could not. Elvis Mitchell.

Kindle. There is opportunity in the current chaos! But does anyone think that Australia's leadership can grasp it?

Against Mishra he provides a solid, brief bibliography that deserves a scrape. I now wonder if Fred Kaplan gave Des Ball his due (Can Nuclear War Be Controlled?, Adelphi Papers 1981). He does not cite Daniel Ellsberg or his pithy take, that nuclear weapons are used all the time, as threats. On the other hand I'm sure Mishra would argue that the extended peace in Imperial Europe and the Americas up the World War I was underpinned by extreme violence in the colonies.

Excerpted everywhere but there are not many reviews yet. White is extensively touring; for instance he spoke with Allan Behm at the ANU recently.

Written and directed by Rolf de Heer. It took many goes to get through, mostly because there's nothing of interest here unlike some of his previous features like Ten Canoes (2006) and Charlie's Country (2013).

The lack of dialogue and the overly-photographed locations (the Flinders Ranges and (IMDB tells me) Tasmania) means the experience degenerates to parsing visual cliches. The obviously-bad guys mumble in something vaguely Germanic, wear World War I-era gas masks like an old episode of Doctor Who and wield bolt-action rifles of a similar vintage. Obviously bad guys are white and racist and so they strand Mwajemi Hussein (credited as BlackWoman) in a cage on a trailer in a salt pan in the middle of nowhere for reasons unknown. She breaks out and walks to an industrial area, having a few unkind encounters along the way, where she is enslaved (I think), again in a Doctor Who sort of way. Breaking free she returns to her country with an injured young Indian woman (Deepthi Sharma credited as BrownGirl) only to expire in the locked cage on the trailer as if it was all a dream.

I guess you could consider it a theatrical take on the great cycle of life, the karmic wheel, the alienation of humanity from both nature and industry, the survival of a woman named Kindness, I don't know. Nothing much is made of the fact that she is Black but not Australian Indigenous. It reaches for District 9 (2009) at times but lacks the humour of that and The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (1971). The best bit was Sharma doing tai chi in a graveyard with a mountain backdrop. The cake at the start reminded me of the The Missing Picture (2013).

Surprisingly widely reviewed. The mainstream reviewers tried to boost: Luke Buckmaster (cryptic, meditative, burrows in deep), Paul Byrnes, and less so Peter Bradshaw (dreamlike, floatingly indeterminate). Those less reflexive about pumping the local product were unenthusiastic: Norah Masige (essentialises coloured people, trauma porn), Nadine Whitney (unsubtle).

Kindle. Depressing. Extremely referential, even more so than his previous non-fiction works such as The Age of Anger (2017). These references come so thick and fast, and the hefty bibliography is more intimidating than helpful (quantity having a lack of quality all its own), that I just let it wash over me. This is annoying as he does give the odd intriguing pointer (such as to elements of Muhammad Asad's identity) that may be worth chasing up.

One argument he wants to make is the consanguinity of European colonialism and Nazism, that the lack of German overseas colonies after World War I motivated them to colonise Europe itself. The blowback from that was the construction of Israel by Europeans paid for with Arab lands; that is, yet another colonial project. I don't think he explained how Europe has benefited from this beachhead in Arabia. Things are not connected to the exigencies of the Cold War. I couldn't see the Holocaust as a uniquely Jewish experience given the Australian Government's historical policies towards the Indigenous peoples of this country.

Ultimately his prognosis is bleak and he explores few recognisably novel or optimistic ideas. Deep into the epilogue, when the text is almost exhausted, Mishra says:

As the climate crisis brings forth a world of barbed-wire borders, walls and apartheid, and cruelty in the name of self-preservation receives singularly wide sanction, most recently in Donald Trump’s electoral triumph, Israel will most likely succeed in ethnic-cleansing Gaza, and the West Bank as well.

Goodreads. Omer Bartov read it alongside other takes. Ben Hubbard attempted a summary for the New York Times. Charlie English, similarly for the Guardian but with more context: where do Hamas and Iran fit in this account? Mishra was at the Adelaide Writers' Week back in March after visiting UNSW in February.

Wes Anderson's latest. He's been in linear decline since The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) and this continues that trend. The repeated verbal tics (Benicio Del Toro's "Myself, I feel very safe" and "Help yourself to a hand grenade") echoed those in Jim Jarmusch's similarly unsuccessful The Limits of Control (2009). The holes in the plot are observed (in a scene with Jeffrey Wright) then brushed off. By then, or perhaps it was when Scarlett Johansson contemplated marriage, or when I realised Mia Threapleton was going to deliver everything flat, I had stopped trying to follow anything. Visually it's OK but he's done better.

Dana Stevens: "Wes Anderson’s New Movie May Be His Worst Yet." Peter Sobczynski: is it or is it not "another odd and idiosyncratic trifle from Anderson"? And so on.

Visually lush animation. Written and directed by Makoto Shinkai. I wasn't so enthralled that I didn't feel the echoes of American teenage classics Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986) and Catcher in the Rye (1951). The synthetic mythos was probably mostly of a piece with Japanese lore (like Godzilla (1954)) but the literal doors between realms is a tired trope that doesn't hold up too well in the action sequences.

The plot has the teenage heroine somehow unplugging a god in cat form from a node that prevents earthquakes. She then traverses Japan (how much I do not know) in pursuit of the incoherent animal with a bloke who has been transformed into a chair; the chair put me in mind of Wall-E (2008). Along the way she has a few funny vignettes about Japanese life, which, like the rest of the movie, hint at dangers that we know will not matter. The conclusion is all schmaltzy love like Interstellar (2014). This mother-daughter (and/or self) love stands in stark contrast to the rest of the movie where (as far I could be bothered to remember) nobody is coupled up.

I don't think I've ever met a cat that wouldn't prefer to help destroy (at least parts of) the human realm. The theme of doors that need closing, the ancestor worship, the evocation of the firebombing of Tokyo (? — or Hiroshima or Nagasaki) suggest the auteur is pining for historically insular Japan.

Maya Phillips: leans on Miyazaki's Spirited Away (2001) and Howl's Moving Castle (2004). Brian Tallerico at Roger Ebert's venue: three stars. A Japanese movie that was big in China.

Apparently before Dan Brown there was Umberto Eco. Directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud (Seven Years in Tibet (1997)). Apparently this revived Sean Connery's career sufficiently for him to go on to greater heights in Highlander (also 1986)... or was it the other way around? A very young Christian Slater. Michael Lonsdale does his usual.

Rationalist Franciscan monk Connery arrives at an austere knowledge-preserving Benedictine monastery in wintry northern Italy in 1327 as bad stuff is happening. Supernatural or just a side effect of things having to change to stay the same? Or a foreshadowing of a debate about how much property Jesus had? Or perhaps merely an excuse for the Inquisition (in the form of F. Murray Abraham) to intervene? Slater is Connery's pupil, notionally recounting the events from old age. Without his entanglement with "the girl" (Valentina Vargas) I doubt it was all that memorable. So much effort was poured into something so humourless.

Roger Ebert: two-and-a-half stars. Connery as "the first modern man"; shades of Zardoz (1974) therefore. It could have been something. (And that was a barrel of pig's blood not wine!) Vincent Canby. Obviously Holmes and Watson.

Second time around with another vintage Mike Leigh. Since High Hopes (1988) the working class has been evicted from their townhouses and corralled into the projects. Ruth Sheen works at the supermarket with Lesley Manville. Both are fantastic though Manville sometimes gets too close to Blenda Blethyn's performance in Secrets and Lies (1996) for my comfort. She has two children with the very stable cab-driving Timothy Spall who mumbles his way to greatness; he shares a fantastic slow-burning scene with notional-Frenchwoman Kathryn Hunter (one of a montage of cab riders) and a tragicomic fundraising round with his family. Sally Hawkins is so young here. Mostly it's a bunch of character studies — Spall and Manville picking up where Sheen and Phil Davis left off in 1988 — until a crisis brings the stakes into sharp relief.

I have a feeling that Leigh pushed the winning formula a bit too far this time and perhaps he felt the same way; his next effort was Vera Drake (2004).

Roger Ebert: four stars. The final scene brings that dominant positive emotion of the twenty-first century, relief. A Critic's Pick by A. O. Scott. Lots of swearing. Four stars from Peter Bradshaw and a ranking of the caricatures.

#70 on David Stratton's list of marvellous movies. Directed by Paul Ireland from a script by Damian Hill who also stars. Astronomy Class provided the opening track (Four Barang In A Tuk-Tuk) but lead John Brumpton (Romper Stomper (1992)) prefers talkback radio on his commute to his pawnshop in Footscray.

This is a series of vignettes about some people centred on that shop. The suburb felt tiny, that everyone knows everyone, but without a justification like the house sharing of John Birmingham's He Died With a Felafel in His Hand (2001) or a life event as in Erskineville Kings (1999). (The bookshop here is a clanger, a built-yesterday outpost of inner-city clean living whereas Gould's there was a decades-long grimy landmark.) Or the hermetic asociality of boarding-house Brisbane and Sacha Horler in Praise (1998). The vibe is 1990s, a time when you could idle on the street all day, live on the kindness of rollies begged from strangers, bet on the dogs at all hours. The audience were all young smokers then and probably noticed the absence of pubs in this scenario.

The script is generally weak. I did not enjoy the time spent with the two blokes evoking Jay and Silent Bob; Malcolm Kennard aims for Spiteri but he's no David Wenham while Mark Coles Smith is saddled with a numpty of a character that prevents him using the skills he showed in Last Cab to Darwin (2015). Ngoc Phan, essentialised, WTF. Naomi Rukavina, WTF. The dialogue is often cringe worthy and I could often predict it, especially as the romance between pawnshop-employee Hill and bookshop-employee Maeve Dermody warmed up with seconds to go. (She seemed a bit lost so far from Mosman.) Many of the storylines dangled — Kerry Armstrong beamed in from another movie for a bit, one closer to Lantana (2001) — while suicide and sundry heaviness descended without much thought or motivation. (I read Hill committed suicide in 2018; he radiates unhappiness throughout. See Wikipedia for a link to The Rooster (2023).) It doesn't even function as a time capsule of the place or era.

Heavily pumped by Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz at the time. Luke Buckmaster: two stars. Russell Marks at brutal and tenderising length. Mike Leigh-adjacent, poorly executed. (I'm not sure I agree but this is obviously not The Pawnbroker (1964).) Marketed multiculturalism, nostalgia for the mythic monoculture. Ruther Scouller also got the Bryan Brown vibes from Brumpton. Rod Quinn: "I never thought that hanging out in a pawnshop all day would be all that interesting, and I think that this film proves that."

A pointer from Peter Sobczynski's review of The Surfer (2025) to a less hinged performance by Nicolas Cage. Directed by Robert Bierman from a script by Joseph Minion who also wrote the similar After Hours (1985). In two sittings. I should have known better.

As everyone knows NYC is full of office jobs but really it's about the nightlife. For unclear reasons literary agent Cage is going nuts and imagines he has a mutually-satisfying thing going with vampire Jenifer Beals (Devil in a Blue Dress (1995) etc.). Maria Conchita Alonso (The Running Man (1987)) plays his secretary, Elizabeth Ashley (Happiness (1998)) gamely and gravelly his shrink. Throughout I felt I was laughing at more than with when I wasn't bored. The misogynistic violence is misguided, uninspired, tasteless. There is no point.

Caryn James. Peter Travers. IMDB trivia: a source book for Christian Bale's performance in American Psycho (2000).

Another ozploitation pointer from Harry Windsor. Directed by Arch Nicholson from a script by Everett De Roche (Long Weekend (1978), Road Games (1981), etc.) derived from Gabrielle Lord's novel from 1980 which drew inspiration from the actual Faraday School kidnapping of 1972. And obviously Lord of the Flies.

There's not a lot to it. Somewhere out near the Grampians and/or Gippsland (the Buchan Caves) we meet Rachel Ward in a farmer's homestead, implausibly sleeping alone. She's the teacher at the local one-room all-grades school. After the customary horsing about by the kids four masked blokes get the action started with their sawnoff shotguns, hustling the cast into a rusty old Ford van. Things go as they must from there, incorporating enough gore and wildlife shots to meet expectations for the genre. Ward struggles with fractions but knows her high science. A very young Asher Keddie appears as one of the younger kids. Robin Gray's soundtrack is generally obtrusive. Essentially TV.

John J. O'Connor at the New York Times at the time: "Throughout, Miss Ward has the good sense to look as if she would rather be back in the mini-series The Thorn Birds." All the details at Ozmovies. "Mutton Dressed as Rambo." Ward lacks the conviction and dramatic range to pull it off. The novel has her character contemplating an abortion; "Without exploring, or perhaps suspecting, all the implications of its story, Fortress presents the most disturbing, pre-emptive strike of children against the older generation that Australian fiction has to show." But various aspects of it have many precursors. And a link to Mondo Exploito in 2013.

Prompted by vague curiosity about what Rami Malek has been up to since Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) and Oppenheimer (2023). I think this proves that unless he's playing Freddie Mercury he's not leading man material. Also for Larry Fishburne who, despite being deep-sixed in the credits is on the IMDB poster. Directed by James Hawes (mostly TV) off a script by Ken Nolan (Black Hawk Down (2001) then downhill) and Gary Spinelli. Robert Littell wrote the source novel in 1981.

Much is lifted from The Odessa File (1974), though the international market destroying politics has been removed. Where Voigt got trained up to lethality by Mossad, Malek proves his incompetency with firearms to CIA dark op Fishburne and proceeds to rely on his epic IQ (170 genius points so recently in the service of the agency) to settle the score with some terrorists who have killed his wife in London for reasons. Those guys are Russians (or at least Eastern Europeans) and everyone in the target markets knows they are born bad. Where things deviate from the stock are the creative kills, perhaps echoing the Final Destination franchise that Di Rosso enjoys so much, with a geek standing in for Death. On the other hand all the office scenes are as dead as doornails, and there's far too much script kiddie and witless stuff like a burnt CD-ROM; I mean, who even has the hardware to read optical media in 2025?

The closing scenes intimate sequels, maybe even a franchise that replaces Jason Statham's notion of what the everyman can do with an office worker's or perhaps that of the last man on campus, now busy switching off lights; Matt Damon in his Good Will Hunting (1997) persona rather than Bourne, Malek as Ben Affleck's accountant without the build. (Incidentally Jon Bernthal appears for reasons unknown; he is squandered alongside those fabulous ancient cafes ala The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2012).) There's a dash of Reality (2023) in trying to mine the chasm between what the agency knows and what the media says which is remarkable for its touching faith in people still caring. Perhaps this is a red state, blue state thing too.

The cast is quite good. Holt McCallany is either having a moment or has debts no honest man can pay. Fishburne does what he can, as does Michael Stuhlbarg. I did not enjoy Rachel Brosnahan's vacuity as the wife of Malek. However the movie becomes something else when Irishwoman Caitríona Balfe steps out of a vintage John le Carré adaptation with a performance of heft and ballast. With her up front it could maybe have been something. The cinematography is rubbish.

Brian Tallerico: one-and-a-half stars at Roger Ebert's venue: "go watch Spy Game instead." Alissa Wilkinson: tries for 1970s paranoid thriller, misses. A remake of a 1981 film featuring Christopher Plummer. Peter Sobcynski.

Prompted by author Frederick Forsyth's recent passing. This was director Ronald Neame's followup to The Poseidon Adventure (1972). Kenneth Ross and George Markstein adapted Forsyth's book from 1972 which I haven't read. Ross did better with the earlier The Day of the Jackal (1973) and that is the better movie. Andrew Lloyd Weber provided the soundtrack.

Jon Voigt, two years after Deliverance (1972), played a German journo freelancing in Hamburg who, on the night of Kennedy's murder (1963), chances upon a suicide that suggests members of the SS are still present in the area. Devoted but underdrawn squeeze Mary Tamm (memorably the first Romana in Tom Baker-era Doctor Who) works in a cabaret that is only shown from the street. In flashback we're shown the activities of "Butcher of Riga" Eduard Roschmann (Maximilian Schell, name changed to protect the guilty) so all that remains is the timing of his comeuppance. Too much of the plot depends on coincidence; this is not a well-made plan unfolding like clockwork. There's a framing story of Israel's conflict with Egypt and Mossad's activities in Europe.

Nora Sayre at the time: being the only star, Jon Voigt must be invincible.

Prompted by some curiosity about what Nicolas Cage could do for ozploitation, how-bad-can-it-be and Jason Di Rosso's interview with the director, Irishman Lorcan Finnegan. He worked off a script by fellow Irishman Thomas Martin.

The template is Wake in Fright (1971) but less motivated. Cage arrives at the beach/bay of his youth only to find it has become locals-only to a clutch of neo-pagan menchildren who appropriate his surfboard. They write "sanctuary" on it and hang it above the door to their redoubt then claim it has been there for at least seven summers. Julian McMahon (offspring of Billy and Sonia McMahon) tries to locate his inner hardarse as the leader-guru. He spouts random platitudes (selected unoriginal cliches of toxic masculinity) mixed with degraded Christian tropes into a witless literalism that is supposed to degrade Cage's heavily financialised character into acceptance/acceptability/geekdom. A hobo living in a car! A handgun! — uncommon in Australia so it must go off. Some cute wildlife shots. All the blokes are childish and asinine and none of the actors come out looking good. The major flaw, edging out many others, is that it is never adequately established why Cage returns to the beach/bay after dropping his son off somewhere. Why does he never leave, even just to get some food or clothes? I was mostly waiting for Cage to go psycho but he never properly does. For all that they got the stakes right: Cage does it all for a house.

I can't see this film being made anywhere other than Australia; obviously it riffs on the Bra Boys and the (illegal/semi-formal) enclosure of the commons. That doesn't explain why Screenwest would fund it: why make your awesome beaches look so unfriendly? Is the great state of Western Australia full now, like Sydney was back in 2000? I guess they did also fund Last Train to Freo (2006) — this one should've been called Last Lexus to Margaret River.

Peter Sobczynski: two stars at Roger Ebert's venue, "resembl[es] a feature-length meme." Jamie Tram: the sermons regurgitate those of Fight Club. Glenn Kenny avoids assessment/judgement.

A week or two after a sneaky rewatch of The Accountant (2016) which proved unnecessary; there is no essential continuity with the first one. Once again directed by Gavin O'Connor from a script by Bill Dubuque. Once again Ben Affleck plays a man with autism who has the movie-trope mental gifts as well as being bulletproof and ultraviolent. There's no kink this time; it's a strictly linear buddy flick with Jon Bernthal once again playing the normie/less lethal/more vulnerable buddy-brother.

The opening scene has Affleck attending a dating meetup that he's hacked, and like most of the other comic relief it does not land. There's an extended sequence where Affleck's people (the children at this universe's equivalent of the X Mansion) engage in Bladerunner-ish enhancement of surveillance images that suggest the USA has cameras everywhere now, just like the U.K., but Hollywood has yet to move on from the Sneakers (1992) (etc) conception of or consistency in what computers can do.

After all the necessary buildup, where the law is found to be inadequately effectual (just like Dirty Harry did in 1971), things get Rambo-esque (or perhaps just generically action-McJackson) over some human trafficking from Mexico; the last 30 minutes is almost pure video game violence. Yes, having American men saving Latin American children with machine guns is served up straight. Alongside this we see Daniella Pineda discharge a few contracts (evoking the ultra capable femme of Logan (2017)). J.K. Simmons reprises his earlier role as an investigator and Cynthia Addai-Robinson is again the G-woman-in-distress, much like Emily Blunt in Sicario (2016/2018). There's very little to recommend it.

Manohla Dargis: don't think too hard, it works! Brian Tallerico at Roger Ebert's venue: two circumspect stars.

Kindle. I fondly remember reading McCann's This Side of Brightness (1998) about twenty years ago. One big part of that was his excellent use of his research and empathy for the people he encountered in the tunnels of NYC; the result was (as I recall) a powerful mix of history, engineering and present-day precarity. This gave me reason to expect he'd do the same for those who repair the fibre optic cables that now bind the world together.

And he mostly does, excepting an unnecessary binding of his tale to Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899) and Apocalypse Now (1979). The style is first-person autofic and I guess (as with life) the author-narrator doesn't quite know what to do with his enigmatic free-diving lead character or even himself, a long-form journalist. I didn't feel he got to the heart of anything much but it was a pleasant read; the writing is great. I wish he had developed his thoughts on Samuel Beckett some more.

Goodreads. Marcel Theroux.

Ryan Coogler's latest; apparently the only other thing I've seen from him is Black Panther (2018). He wrote and directed. Long-term collaborator Michael B. Jordan led as gangster twins, just like Tom Hardy in Legend (2015) and Robert De Niro just now in The Alto Knights (2025).

The template is essentially From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) transplanted from dangerous present-day Mexico to lethal Mississippi in 1932. There's a cracker soundtrack that fuels a virtuoso bridging scene in the middle, encompassing Black music culture in the USA, warming up the jukes of all times. More of this would've been very welcome (c.f. Small Axe (2020)). Beyond that it's just what was widely telegraphed/spoiled: tired vampire tropes leavened by symbolism and gestures to history that, if you don't recognise them, are meaningless. For instance there's a staging scene where master vampire/Irishman Jack O'Connell is hunted by members of a Choctaw tribe only to be rescued by some people we later understand to be Klanspeople. O'Connell later engages in some mad craic just like a gospel meeting, suggesting that it wasn't just the Blues (at least as played by Miles Caton) that was the devil's music. I didn't try to unpick the commentary on Christianity. I was very happy to see Delroy Lindo (as always). And there's nothing to complain about in Jordan's performance, excepting perhaps that it lacks the humour and vulnerability of a Jamie Foxx.

A Critic's Pick by Manohla Dargis. Coogler is feted at least partly because he survived/elevated the MCU and Rocky. That opening scene, of Caton bursting into his father's church, echoed Kill Bill (2003/2004). Romance yielding to violence, the vampire's promise of taking the pain away. Wendy Ide: the threads of story get messy. Dana Stevens: Caton's "true power as a performer [is] to bring together musical spirits from the past and future in a delirious alchemy that transcends time and space." — and having summoned them, what a waste not to put them to more use. Reminded her of Jordan Peele's Us (2019) and Nope (2022), which I found far more opaque. Peter Sobcynski: "suggestive of one of the big-canvas works of Robert Altman." Lindo MVP!

Later the romance, doomerism and reliance on the soundtrack put me in mind of Crazy Heart (2009).