An aging photographer goes looking for where the wave broke out near Yucca Valley in the Mojave Desert, not too far east of Los Angeles. It seemed like such a quaint thing to do this late in the day. Director/co-writer Joshua Erkman did the slow cinema thing well enough (Bossi Baker was the other co-writer), and Jay Keitel's cinematography and framing are fine. But the just-stay-home dogma, dialogue and scenario are witless — just too much cliche. Sort-of-lead for the second half Sarah Lind was in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) and Die My Love (2025).
Calum Marsh saw more in it than is there. Indeed, the two parts, the cruising of that white centre line and that gap-toothed Ashley B. Smith's look is enough like Patricia Arquette's to support a charge of theft from Lost Highway (1997). Simon Abrams: two stars at Roger Ebert's venue. The score by Ty Segall is fine too. Dennis Harvey: lost in the desert.
Kindle. Flabby Brunner: he had some mystery in this book that he did not want to reveal too soon, leading to extreme repetition of scenes that don't progress anything. The delay in uniting his main character with the interlocutor that enables the exposition dump is unmotivated. The intro was sufficiently disjointed that I was intrigued by how he was going to stitch it all together but soon enough (20% or so) it became a slog. I didn't come away with a clear sense of what he was trying to say.
I think it's set in a present-day London that never recovered from World War II: there are aspects of 1984 privation and lifts from Doctor Who (a room that functions much like the TARDIS) and Douglas Adams's contemporary Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980). We'll make great pets, some of us anyway. There's a rocket attack with effects perhaps somewhat like those in Francis Spufford's Light Perpetual (2021).
Goodreads. Faust, Mephistopheles.
The latest from writer/director Kelly Reichardt (Meeks Cutoff (2010), First Cow (2019)). Once again with the slow cinema but this time in Massachusetts, not the Pacific northwest.
This is yet another nostalgic period piece: black-and-white televisions, ancient drab fashions, unruly beards, yank tanks without seat belts, Pepsi at the waterbed shop, all dating from before the birth of the lead actors. There's a low-tech heist and a slow unwind in Reichardt’s signature style.
Over-exposed lead Josh O'Connor got to demonstrate both his range and limitations; I enjoyed his efforts in La Chimera (2023) a while back but not so much in Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (2025). Here he tries to trade on a shambling 1970s never-quite vibe reminiscent of Oscar Isaac in Inside Llewelyn Davis (2013) with the odd grope for Elliot Gould's charisma (that elusive universal solvent). Not much is asked of Alana Haim but even so her acting struck me as poor in a bedroom scene where (I think) she is supposed to be shocked at the way her life is turning out. On the other hand Bill Camp and Hope Davis easily dominate the parental scenes.
Reichardt's slow cinema schtick only works if the arc of what we're shown is engaging and what's in the frame speaks. Fatal to my interest were a series of inert urban driving scenes where the camera tracks the driver so closely we have no idea what the town is like; the actors' expressions do not vary enough to make up for that. Things just trundle along until they don't.
Jason Di Rosso had a chat with Reichardt. Peter Sobczynski was fascinated.
One of the few movies where ants are the main protagonists. Sophisticated and glamorous Eleanor Parker (The Man with the Golden Arm (1955)) is sent up-river in Brazil (actually Panama?) as a mail-order bride from New Orleans. At the dock Charlton Heston isn't waiting — his plantation needs him so badly — so she gets an introduction to the hacienda from the number-one right-hand man Abraham Sofaer, who, despite his early protestations, plays no significant role in what follows. She's more-and-less than he had in mind. He's the alpha thing she wants. She's always keen but he puts up a fight.
After about an hour of abrasive setup (of the when-will-they variety) we're shown how destructive the army ants can be (at least in Hollywood). This unleashes a flood of romantic expression. It's all a bit ho-hum.
Byron Haskin directed a screenplay adapted by Philip Yordan/Ben Maddow and Ranald MacDougall from a story by Carl Stephenson.
Bosley Crowther at the time. "Credit [to] Byron Haskin for directing in a slow rhythm and a mordant style."
An insider's take on the open-air rave scene in Morocco. Written and directed by Oliver Laxe with some help from Santiago Fillol on the script. Got the Jury Prize and other awards at Cannes 2025, and now a couple of Oscar noms. In two sittings, split just when things started getting dicey around the hour mark.
Notionally a Spanish bloke goes looking for his daughter with his son and dog amongst this overwhelmingly European crowd. An even more tenuous suggestion has him follow a couple of large all-terrain vehicles deeper into the desert in his small and unsuitable wagon. Ultimately he comes away with less than he started with, or perhaps more if you're susceptible to the half-baked thinking of this scene.
Once those vehicles took the dodgy mountain track for weak reasons I got strong The Wages of Fear (1953) vibes. This is nowhere as gripping: entirely humourless and increasingly witless, with the hardened campaigners failing to do the obvious things. The concluding movement started out pointless and became nonsensical. Some of the cinematography is decent. The soundtrack is pure pulsing dance. Overall it's more something to feel than think about.
Reviewers are polarised. Peter Bradshaw: two stars. "Slightly farcical ... later, frankly, Pythonesque." The first ten minutes promises a lot more than the rest delivers. A Critic's Pick by Manohla Dargis. And so on.
Kindle. Apparently Brunner's first under his own name, the first-first being under a pseudonym. Space opera. There's already some of his signature moves including multitrack narration and discursive smart-arse grabs at the start of each chapter. He put in a few too many underdrawn characters including a couple of token twentieth-century everypeople. Time travel, temporal inertia and surges... parallel universes with a causality repair mechanism ... oh my. God as a disembodied woman who gifts another woman to her surviving (embodied) husband. The (xenophobic) Enemy invades! The Being ... who does stuff ... ouroboric. Conceptually cracked but you can see the promise.
The other Safdie movie of 2025 and as such inevitable. Josh Safdie co-wrote the script with Ronald Bronstein and directed the result, which I would summarise as (their immediately previous feature) Uncut Gems (2019) without all that Adam Sandler brought. And perhaps Ben Safdie's input was critically lacking too. Again it's very NYC Jewish with a notionally unlikeable but actually grindingly boring lead (Timothée Chalamet) providing all the energy in a formulaic and often nonsensical sequence of set pieces. Ping pong! — some time in the 1950s. Japan versus USA! A bathtub scene that riffs on Breaking Bad. Some sort of redemption at the end, if you think the world needs more Martys.
Very widely reviewed. Dana Stevens hopes we're past peak Safdie. Stephanie Zacharek: "as hollow as a ping-pong ball" with nastier undertones than their work with Sandler. Shot by Darius Khondji. Peter Sobczynski was not impressed. Abel Ferrara! And so on.
Jason Di Rosso interviewed co-writer/director/star Dev Patel back in April 2024. It did not sound appetising at the time but just now became inevitable when I found out Sharlto Copley is in it.
The movie is simply Indian John Wick (2014) with similar aspirations to endless sequels (Gods forbid). This retreat to cliched ultraviolence is annoying as many of the visuals are intriguing and as lush as Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017). Many opportunities to dig into exotic ethnographies, even as much as Gangs of Wasseypur (2012) did, are passed over; narrative is too hard or too dead now. Copley does well enough as an impresario for a bare-knuckle brawling enterprise but is hardly ever there and is never consequential. He plays up coming from South Africa (a sort-of reverse Gandhi?) and there are some other fine but brief observations of various Commonwealth/colonised people. And, bravely, the Hindutva. But unfortunately personal revenge is all that's ever on the table in these sorts of movies. The invocation of Indian spirituality and cure-alls was conceptually stale.
On the plus side I learnt that Dev Patel was also brought up on Monkey Magic. Or perhaps not: that presented the monkey-god as a chaos agent who is coerced by Buddha into good works whereas the Hindu Hanuman represents discipline and other things. The movie spent a lot of time (I wish it had been all the time) exploring the diversity of the demimonde of the city (notionally Mumbai?) but passed up the opportunity to go ecstatic like Joyland (2022) or Return to Seoul (2022), or more deeply into the structure of power like Shoshana (2023).
Later I found I've seen more Patel than I had realised: Slumdog Millionaire (2008) of course, but he was also in Chappie (2015) and The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (2023).
Peter Sobczynski: actor yes, director of action movies perhaps not. Manohla Dargis: it never coheres. The sequence where a purse is thieved was good.
A pointer from Peter Sobczynski's review of Luc Besson's latest (Dracula (2025)). Besson directed his own story set in the comic book universe originated by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières.
It's like Besson wanted to remake Avatar (2009). If you squint you may discern a bit of signature French absurdist humour (sorta like Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Alien3). He stole from everything: a galactic utopia somewhat ruined by individuals ala Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991), the lead actrons ending in a garbage dump ala Star Wars. Maybe there's some of The Fifth Element (1997) in there, though hot chick Cara Delevingne (London Fields (2018)) is a lot further out of her acting depth than Milla Jovovich was. Dane DeHaan (The Place Beyond the Pines (2012)) is marginally more competent but far from plausible as a space stud. (Besson appears to have adopted the Michael Bay approach to casting.) And there's nothing like Bruce Willis here; the live action is mostly woeful when set against the trippy CGI. There are some good bits, even fun bits, and it is often visually engrossing even if the world building falls far short. There are too many exposition dumps.
Peter Sobczynski at Roger Ebert's venue: four stars. Cheerfully bonkers. A 200M USD budget, the largest in French history! Rihanna was in some good bits. But come on, Delevingne's "climactic oratory on the importance of love" was as hokey as Interstellar (2014)'s. Stephanie Zacharek. Hipster space spies. Rihanna was the main reason to see it. A. O. Scott wanted to spend more time with Ethan Hawke and Rihanna.
A mediocre, misjudged and dutiful adaptation by adaptor/director Kei Ishikawa of the weak source material by author/executive producer Kazuo Ishiguro. It's not clear why anyone thought this was a good idea. I struggled to grasp the concluding movement largely because what came before was tedious.
Brian Tallerico saw it at Cannes 2025.
Vaguely prompted by Jason Di Rosso's chat with director Paul Feig back in December and even vaguer curiosity about Sydney Sweeney's acting chops. Rebecca Sonnenshine derived a screenplay from Freida McFadden's book. I did not believe one part of this movie.
Di Rosso billed it as some kind of throwback to the 1980s/1990s erotic thrillers, perhaps even mentioning the master Paul Verhoeven. However the first hour and a bit of setup is painfully slow and clunky and so much less inspired than Emily the Criminal (2022). It doesn't help that Aubrey Plaza is far better there than Sweeney here: her facial inertness etc. worked OK in Reality (2023) but proves inadequate when a larger emotional range is called for. Strangely enough male lead Brandon Sklenar (acting like a lost Baldwin brother) was in that too.
Therefore and given the genre I was just waiting for the twist(s). Ultimately it sorta wanted to be #metoo Gone Girl (2014) stiffened with some American Psycho (2000) but ultimately settles into a mimetic Promising Young Woman (2020) (and didn't we miss Carey Mulligan). There are also some moments of Alexandra's Project (2003) from long ago. None of it makes a tonne of sense. Nobody has any opsec. The soundtrack was not to my taste at all.
The sole thing on the saving-graces front is Amanda Seyfried. Everything lifts whenever she's on the screen and that makes the second half a lot more watchable than the first.
Monica Castillo at Roger Ebert's venue: two-and-a-half stars. Indeed Sweeney is far better in the final parts than all that came before. Peter Sobczynski. "[T]o call the film twisted trash would be a massive understatement."
Kindle. Inevitable after Mueenuddin's debut collection of shorts. Unfortunately this novel isn't any better.
The first three chapters/parts are relatively short. Initially we're filled in on an orphan boy's origins in a Rawalpindi bazaar in the 1950s, giving me the expectation that he'd be a major player later. The second recounts the problems a youthful American-educated scion/feudal lord has with controlling his ancestral lands and serfs in the 1980s, notionally juxtaposing raw power with Western humanism. It ends without resolution, leading me to think we'll get the rest of the tale in passing later. The third is about how the landed gentry hook up, the heir and the spare. Finally the latter half of the text agonises over how a servant botched his failproof get-rich scheme in the 2010s that put me in mind of Coffs Harbour.
The central flaw with this work is that it's all been done before, not the least by Salman Rushdie in Shame (1983) and Mohsin Hamid in How to get Filthy Richy in Rising Asia (2013). There's no humour, political commentary or class struggle so we can quietly ignore Mohammed Hanif and Aravind Adiga. The anachronistic view from the upper class/feudal seat was mined by Aatish Taseer, Rohinton Mistry and many others. Pankaj Mishra recently wrote about the Himalayas as a place for romantic escapes. The servant's view palely foreshadows the one in The Remains of the Day (1989). To echo Rushdie from a long time ago: this novel does not expand the space of things that can be thought.
The writing is often OK and even more often flabby and repetitive. The voices of the characters are flattened and often indistinguishable. Neither of the female characters is interesting or well-drawn. Category errors are rampant. There are no twists. The caste system (I didn't know there was such in Muslim Pakistan) is not clearly articulated though the feudal system is. Mueenuddin's use of the third-person appears to preclude an unreliable narrator but every so often he adopts a phrasing that in other hands would signal a departure from truth. It's a bit boring and there are no payoffs or even moments of quiet grandeur.
Dwight Garner saw a lot more in it than I did but also threw in enough references to signal he knows it's a bit stale. Goodreads.
A Charles Bickford jag from Brute Force (1947). Loaded with Oscar nominations and a decent rating at IMDB so I could be forgiven for having expectations. Only Jane Wyman (The Lost Weekend (1945)) came away with Best Actress though. Directed by Jean Negulesco from a script by Irma von Cube and Allen Vincent who adapted Elmer Harris's stage play.
A series of segments introduces us to a small village of Scots (?) in Nova Scotia where people farm when they're not hauling in boatloads of cod. Doctor Lew Ayres (All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)) has the post war blues and is too cultured for the ignorant locals. He encounters deaf and mute Wyman, daughter of struggling farmer Bickford, niece of Agnes Moorehead (The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)) and teaches her sign language and lip reading. Stephen McNally (No Way Out (1950)) plays a lad with a mean streak who all the girls have eyes for. There's some very nasty behaviour (including a rape and a murder) that is resolved overly neatly. The final scene, where the remaining non-traditional family ride off into the sunset on a horse-drawn cart, put me in mind of The Night of the Hunter (1955).
Bosley Crowther. The stage play was not great. A mix of grotesque, banal, lurid. IMDB trivia: "While the film won the best actress Oscar, it lost in the other 11 categories in which it was nominated. This is still, as at 2024, a record (tied with Becket (1964)) for the most number of categories lost by a single film."
Raymond Chandler: The Lady in the Lake (1943), The Little Sister (1949), The Long Good-bye (1953), Playback (1958).
Sun, Jan 25, 2026./noise/books | LinkKindle. The remaining four of Raymond Chandler's novels over several months. The collection I have includes the incomplete The Poodle Springs Story (1962) which I'll skip.
The first two are good. The Long Good-bye (1953) is clearly his masterwork: twisty and funny, a rich source for Altman's adaptation (1973). The last just has Marlowe running around in circles in Esmeralda, somewhere north of San Diego, and is quite unsatisfying; so much so that Chandler concludes with a character from a prior story propositioning Marlowe for marriage!
Hal Hartley's latest feature and hence inevitable. It's been a while since the last one — Ned Rifle (2014) — and I hadn't followed what happened since I saw the original Kickstarter pitch from 2019. That included enough of his collaborators from his 1990s glory years (Bill Sage, Elina Löwensohn, Parker Posey but not Martin Donovan) to get me a little excited. Apparently the pandemic led to the project being abandoned and the rebooted Kickstarter ("three and a half years" later) was shorn of all the stars except Sage. Hmm.
The runtime is brief — barely 75 minutes — with some scenes (all those on the subway) running long enough to feel like padding. Sage is a proxy for Hartley to get his musings on aging out there. It's a life full of people and stuff: records and books, romantic comedies made, some dodgy philosophy. Curated collections in other words. Initially Sage goes looking for a job with cemetery-maintainer Robert John Burke that palely echoed their earlier work in Simple Men (1992). Afterwards he visits an older lady (Kathleen Chalfant) who engages in a expository philosophical dump, and then everyone piles into his apartment. It did not achieve his signature arch artificiality; by falling so far short it just felt bogus. Perhaps he couldn't pull enough actors of the requisite calibre.
Brazil's entry to this year's Oscars. Also nominated for best casting, best picture and best actor for Wagner Moura's performance. Written and directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho. In several sittings due to a failure to grip.
Just like the previous year's I'm Still Here (2024) it's once again 1977 in Brazil but this time we're in the small town of Recife. Actually we're there now and then, with Moura also playing his own son in the present day on a somewhat jarring interleaved second track. We're told firstly via an interview and then shown how Moura's academic comes into conflict with a capitalist/industrialist/member of the extractive class from the other side of the north/south split in the country. This leads to him being targeted for assassination in the 1977 timeline. At that time his wife is gone but I don't recall finding out why or how.
Politically there is lots of the usual stagey posturing which yielded much personal peril and no actual change. There's a network that supports survivors of the regime's nastier behaviours but we're not shown how that functions, just that it does.
The film acts as something of a time capsule lovingly made in the present day, much like the current retro computer scene and One Battle After Another (2025). There is no nuance; all the effort went into simulating mystery by delaying the inevitable expositions with excessive nesting of stories. (As with The Outrun (2024) you need to pay attention to the hair, here facial.) Too many scenes are overlong. Much of it is generic; the carnival scenes are the same as so many before. Some of the editing is strange: Moura walks out of a darkened cinema straight onto the street and a reverse-angle shot shows us a lit window right next to the door he came out of. The severed leg (found in the gut of a shark) is weird and the CGI for it is terribly cartoonish. I did not understand the weird two-faced cat.
A Critic's Pick by Manohla Dargis. Circuitous. Peter Bradshaw: five stars. Novelistic.
John Brunner: The Webs of Everywhere/Web of Everywhere. (1974)
Tue, Jan 20, 2026./noise/books | LinkKindle. Thin Brunner. Not much chop. Piles on the cliches and moralism to no discernible end. Somehow Alice Springs survives a nuclear exchange, suggesting that Pine Gap wasn't common knowledge at the time (?). The Māori are once again warriors! Teleportation! The Infinitive of Go (1980). All women are mentally unwell.
Kindle. Not great. A sapient ship (Ship!) has seeded the promising planets of the arm of a galaxy with humans and is now revisiting them for the nth time. There are rules of the game, of course, and Ship gets lonely so human companions are the order of the day. It's a bit fat Brunner but has more biology than sociology. The time travel mechanic does not work well; that and the exotic landscapes and biospheres evoke 1960s Doctor Who. The closing exegesis needed expansion and more weaving into the main text. There are some cute ideas (and some lazy historical lifts) that have effects too neat and tidy. Too much moralising again. You can see his interest flagged in this project as he was writing it.
Produced by, and starring, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. A confected, Sicario (2015)-adjacent paramilitary-cop operation, bent, nowhere as smart as it needed to be. The cash involved is not in the Breaking Bad league but they pretend it is. The procedural aspects are rubbish. Michael Mann got a lot more out of Miami (2006), and those final chase scenes are so lame compared to Heat (1995).
Stop me if you've seen something similar but better before; clearly these boys are too far from Boston (2010), just looking for a payday. The epistemics are very poorly handled: we have little reason to believe anything we’re told at any point. I waited for a twist that just didn’t come.
What's frustrating is that they pulled a strong cast and squandered them. Steven Yeun does what he can but is really only asked to hold on. Teyana Taylor is tame; actually all the female characters do so little that I don't know why they were included. Roid-rage Affleck did not nail the Rambo/Stallone/Josh Brolin role. The cinematography is dingy and washed out. The soundtrack is obtrusive and poor. Directed by Joe Carnahan (The A-Team (2010)) who co-wrote the script with Michael McGrale. The prior art made me wonder why thy didn't pull Sharlto Copley into this as it's not too far from that and Free Fire (2016).
Brandon Yu at the New York Times: "Training Day (2001), with a dash of Bad Boys (1983)".
And yet more John Woo completism. Wedged uncomfortably between the superior Bullet in the Head (1990) and Hard Boiled (1992), or perhaps just because Woo felt playful and wanted a vacation in Paris and Cannes. In two sittings along its natural cleavage.
The setup is something like Once Upon a Time in America (1984): three street urchins, played as adults by Chow Yun-Fat (maximal clowning), Leslie Cheung (serious, miscast) and Cherie Chung (mostly the third leg of the inevitable love triangle/ménage, essentialised) are schooled in crime by "father" Kenneth Tsang. "Dad" Kong Chu, a policeman, somehow takes care of them too. The boys are master art thieves, she's a capable pickpocket. The heists are not particularly imaginative. Luxe living! You too could (aspire to) rob an art warehouse/freeport in a wheelchair. The signature gun scenes are uninspired: there's more danger in boredom than anything our heroes face. It's all a bit weird.
