peteg | blog 2026-04-23-DavidMalouf.autumn

Francis Spufford: Nonesuch. (2026)

Kindle. Again two-years-and-a-bit on from his previous novel. So many words have already been spilt on this London-during-the-Blitz fantasy. I ploughed through it, mostly enjoyably, hoping it'd get somewhere only to find it incomplete and to be continued. What a threat that is.

Spufford returns to peak Anglo (1939/1940) with a heroine from Watford who may grow into one of the grotesques in Light Perpetual (2021). She gets involved with an underdrawn boffin from the Backroom Boys (2003) and finds herself madly, unhappily, in love. (He's a bit of a human computer and eventually promises to be her Denis Thatcher.) There's some class warfare, generously if shallowly observed, and some supernatural machinery that drives the plot, as if the war itself was not enough. Spufford considers the period as a sort of interregnum when the vocabulary of black magic is obsolete but science isn't far enough along for the real stories. He goes lightly with the Christianity but endorses the great-man-of-history paradigm (via Churchill) as he presumably must. Sitzfleisch is what I've been lacking all my life.

Along with the main but mostly unseen antagonist, a foxy fascist toff whose perfection is clearly due to black magic, the cast put me in mind most of Amor Towles's Rules of Civility (2011) with its similarly triangular study of manners, class and aspiration in contemporaneous NYC. Spufford does not consider the colonial view; he's endorses Keynes's take on the plenty available to (some of) the residents of the metropole and the self-serving tosh that the City was self-policing and not rapacious, or at least not as rapacious as it became. The essentially-American leading lady's wish to profit from the war and get rich is presented without judgment, as is some thievery during the Blitz. It's a strange position to take in present-day England.

Spufford hits the limits of his imagination here. For instance a woman not into men is necessarily into women; he cannot imagine self-partnering or hermitude, or really think through the implications of selecting alternative possible worlds; I mean, at least some of them have to be Pareto improvements on the one we're in, right? It seems causality transcends time and monkeying with the past has limited, non-chaotic, effect; his take on what is and is not invariant was arbitrary. I did not understand how they put an upper bound on the nodes in the Bifröst; surely the door knocker was a tell if not the quotidian blessing bestowed on statuary itself. And so on.

As always Spufford writes cinematically but much is annoyingly derivative as he owns to in an afterword that is followed by a post-credits scene. There are obvious gestures to Schindler's Arc/List (1993), Watchmen (2009), and, gulp, the MCU with its consequence-free do-overs of universe-destroying events. On a more British front it struck me that Spufford was leaning comfortably into Tom Baker-era Doctor Who: the episode that didn't get made (Shada) and Pyramids of Mars. And doubtlessly a lot more.

The problem with any cinematic adaptation is that Steve McQueen got there already; the images in my mind of the Underground refuges were McQueen's. But of course there is no race in this book. And von Trier's wartime Christmas-in-a-church was far more effective.

Louisa Hall contextualises for the New York Times: in conversation with The Chronicles of Narnia and other works. Tiresome. The "heroine ... has figured out how to travel in time, but somehow here we all are, face to face again with history." James Bradley was deeply affected. Goodreads. And so on until this branch of existence gets pruned.

The Jammed (2007)

On the pile for a very long time. Written and directed by Australian-from-South Africa Dee McLachlan. Hard yakka.

The topic is human trafficking/coerced prostitution in Sydney-but-mostly-Melbourne in the mid-1990s, those dying days of neon and payphones and Kings Cross. This is shown from various angles, the most effective being some very short scenes with a variety of johns. The overarching plot has the mother (Amanda Ma) of one of the trafficked women (Sun Park) come to Melbourne from Shanghai to find her, involving an insurance something-or-other office worker (Veronica Sywak) who develops a saviour complex with oversimplifying tendencies that have fatal consequences. Emma Lung (Peaches (2004)) got lumped with the heavier coercive events. Third-wheel Saskia Burmeister did what she could. The male characters were totally ancillary: essentially corrupt or impotently inert.

The film does function as something of a time capsule, as many Australian movies do, but suffered from relentless heaviness, genericity and an inability to take any of the plausible offramps when offered. It's not Lilja 4-Ever (2002) in craft, deftness or willingness to really go there.

It later struck me that the immigration detention/deportation process Lung undergoes looked a lot like the trafficking that opened proceedings.

More a movie to read about than see, I posit. Luke Buckmaster rewatched it in 2015. David Stratton reviewed it in his Australia at the Movies (2024): Crossfire (1947). His summary is erroneous: Sunee does know people in Melbourne. Four stars from each of Margaret and David.

Vale, David Malouf. ABC obit.

The President's Cake (2025)

Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with writer/director Hasan Hadi who won the Caméra d'Or at Cannes 2025 (for best first feature).

A young girl (Baneen Ahmed Nayyef) is required by her school to make a cake for Saddam Hussein's birthday in 1990, a task that is beyond the means of her impoverished and unwell grandmother (Waheed Thabet Khreibat). The often spectacular cinematography by Tudor Vladimir Panduru shows us her lifestyle on the fabled Mesopotamian Marshes. The MacGuffin hunt for ingredients takes them and rooster Hindi to the nearby city. There they encounter some supportive people and some exploitation and a bit too much happens.

It's a well-made film. The acting is good. I found it effective in the way The Secret Agent (2025) wasn't.

Matt Zoller Seitz at Roger Ebert's venue: three-and-a-half stars. Ben Kenigsberg made it a Critic's Pick at the New York Times.

Europa (1991)

Lars von Trier completism. He directed and co-wrote it with Niels Vørsel. Somewhat gripping due to the intriguing cinematography and Max von Sydow's narration. The use of the sets pointed the way to Dogville (2003). Over two nights.

We're told that post-war Germany is in need of a little comfort. This drew ingenue deserter Jean-Marc Barr from the USA into the orbit of a railway-owning family via irresistible heiress Barbara Sukowa and his train conductor-uncle Ernst-Hugo Järegård. For some the war did not end but really the whole show boils down to the idea that not choosing a side is the biggest crime of all, a position diametrically opposed to South-East Asian values.

Roger Ebert: three stars. Stephen Holden: "[P]erhaps the eeriest is a scene in which [Barr] attends a midnight Christmas Mass in the shell of a bombed-out cathedral in the falling snow. The atmosphere of the scene suggests a a Wagnerian ceremony of zombies."

Quarterly Essay #101, Michael Wesley: Blind Spot: Southeast Asia and Australia's Future. (March 2026)

The costs of Australia's serial distraction from its own geopolitical imperatives have been masked by the fact that maritime Southeast Asia has been peaceful, focused on economic development and benignly disposed towards Australia since 1966.

I had to wonder what I was reading when this came at the 10% mark given that the ADF was active in Việt Nam at the time, and to my mind Việt Nam is very maritime. Eventually I was told that the "strategic core" of Southeast Asia is Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. This hierarchical take is a category error even on the terms laid out in this essay. I surmise the date is probably when it became apparent that Suharto had bedded down his coup and the largest domino was not going to fall. But the war continued anyway. Upon its conclusion the American-sponsored SEATO folded and ASEAN's indigenous consensus-driven, unaligned, non-interference model rose and has proven durable. The latter has often been a venue for expressing negative sentiment about Australia by various post-colonial states. But you won't find that kind of framing here.

Wesley's essay is annoying like this all the way along, doubly so as I am very sympathetic to the point he is trying to make, that point being Keating's from the early 1990s about Australia finding its security not from Asia but in Asia. He wants a return to the policies of the period from 1975 to 2005 (he does not appear to argue for those dates) that saw a deepening of expertise in this country about our neighbours and increasingly broad engagement with them. What's mostly absent is any account of why things are as they are; the diversity, tensions and even contradictions within ASEAN are not explored. On some fronts his proposals are already archaic (the rules-based international order is a dead letter) or just not going to happen (a revision of AUKUS). There's a lot of assertion, e.g. Australia is "difficult to invade, but relatively easy to coerce if hostile forces gain access to the islands to our north." but no grappling with how we may realistically, even unilaterally ameliorate those risks.

It's unclear to me just how vulnerable the Straits of Malacca are; unlike Hormuz there is the possibility of at least some cargo taking longer routes. Wesley does not dig into the connectivity between the Indian and Pacific Oceans and who might wish to sever it.

Google suggests the author toured widely and discussed his essay on a variety of podcasts but it appears to be thinly reviewed and discussed in prose. Mark Beeson found more novelty than I did. Huiyun Feng spills many fewer words arguing along the same lines for the incorporation of ASEAN into the G2. This sounds great but contradicts the rising spheres-of-influence/great-man-of-history model. More realism about ASEAN and Australia from Lindsay R. Dodd (2025).

The Stranger (L'Étranger) (2025)

Directed by François Ozon who adapted Albert Camus's absurdist novel with some help with the writing from Philippe Piazzo. In lush black-and-white with many an overstuffed frame.

Colonial Algiers, 1940s. A dissolute young Pied-noir moves through his days with vast ennui. Somehow he's still buff despite that and having a desk job which he appears to execute with efficiency; no tang ping here! His mother passes and he does the customary without a flicker of emotion. A former work colleague decides he is irresistible after all even as he weirdly insists on clinging to and expressing only his personal truth. Perhaps she mistook his ennui for aloof cool. There is swimming, cinema, shagging and coming to the aid of neighbours before the pivotal capricious event that cleaves the movie in two. The ensuing court scenes got tedious and the climactic monologue with a priest overdid it.

Lead Benjamin Voisin is mostly as facially inert as Alan Delon was in Le Samouraï (1967) but lacked Delon's physical grace and hat. That he might be neurodivergent was not considered; the religious and psychological stuff seems dated now, or at least takes aim at a more rigid society than presently exists. I met his ennui mostly with disinterest.

It reminded me most of Roma (2018) both in style and staleness.

Glenn Kenny: four stars at Roger Ebert's venue. A horror movie. Peter Bradshaw: five stars. Many divergences from the source material. "Ozon shows that it is [the lead character's] martyrdom which is absurd." Jeannette Catsoulis was less impressed than the boys. "Existential ennui is not exactly fun to watch (or, one assumes, easy to perform), yet a meaningless life has rarely looked this beautiful."

Pale Rider (1985)

Some idle Clint Eastwood completism. Also a Carrie Snodgress jag from Rabbit, Run (1970). An anachronistic venture for the time: Eastwood directed a script by Michael Butler and Dennis Shryack — the same trio who made The Gauntlet (1977). Here Clint demonstrates what he did and did not learn or recall about Westerns from his work with Sergio Leone. His own performance is not great but the rest of the cast does OK.

It's Idaho in the latter half of the nineteenth century and everyone's mining alluvial gold in the snowy Sierra. An encampment gets overrun by some local ferals on the orders of town founder Richard Dysart. Clint turns up after the fact and proves his chops by bashing the bashers as a favour to bashee Michael Moriarty. All (that is, both of) the ladies go ga ga for Clint, especially when he pulls out the dog collar and adopts the persona of "preacher". We never see him preach except when he tells the people to stick together but goes alone himself (of course). There's some fancy shooting and an anticlimax.

The characters are annoyingly underdeveloped. For instance giant Richard Kiel seems to learn the moral aspects of violence from Clint but his main opportunity to demonstrate this is interrupted (by Clint). The negative space portraits, the dynamite, the awesome shooting are all twenty years stale; the best cinematography is of the distant mountains. There is no soundtrack. At best it's a dry run for Unforgiven (1992).

Roger Ebert: four stars. "One of the subtlest things in the movie is the way it plays with the possibility that Eastwood’s character may be a ghost, or at least something other than an ordinary mortal." Vincent Canby.

Mohammed Hanif: Rebel English Academy. (2026)

Kindle. After the obscurity of the contemporary Red Birds (2018), Hanif revisited the more fertile ground (decades-ago Pakistani politics) of his first novel A Case of Exploding Mangoes (2008) by way of a strong but more acted-against-than-acting female character ala Our Lady of Alice Bhatti (2011). This one is set at the time of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's execution in 1979 and covers the fallout on a failed revolutionary/successful English teacher, an Imam, a Field Intelligence Unit captain, the fallen angel and a few secondary characters at the pointier end of operations.

Unfortunately it's not great. We start with a bang, with a series of semi-random happenings that promise effective black humour in caper mode. But the themes are too weighty (sexual abuse, women as property/burdens, political/religious burdens/schisms, torture, so on) that soon enough we're in some kind of holding pattern, wading in treacle, as Hanif staves off anything too consequential. The ending therefore comes in an abrupt rush. It seems that women cannot be funny; the voice in her "homeworks" got flattened into the abiding third-person omniscient as the story proceeded.

The herb dealer who invents "Iron Syrup" links the book to Karan Mahajan's Complex (2026), and the haram stuff at a mosque to DJ Ahmet (2025).

Michael Gorra at the New York Times. "Often, too often, seem[s] to echo [Salman Rushdie's Shame (1983)], albeit without the fantasy." Yagnishsing Dawoor applies the Booker kiss-of-death at the Guardian. Goodreads.

DJ Ahmet (2025)

Romeo and Juliet in present-day North Macedonia, facilitated by the universal solvent of EDM. It doesn't get as bogged in the scene as Sirât (2025): this is more adolescent, sweet rather than rueful. Both also involve a young woman fleeing the leash of tradition and familial binds. Written and directed by Georgi M. Unkovski. Alen Sinkauz and Nenad Sinkauz do some interesting soundtrack work.

Ahmet (Arif Jakup) gets yanked out of school by his irascible father and can see a lifetime of shepherding open up in front of him. His younger brother Naim (Agush Agushev) is mute. Gorgeous, sophisticated Aya (Dora Akan Zlatanova) returns from Germany for an arranged marriage but her temperament and/or time away has rendered her unwilling and even incapable. For further reasons underexplained the leads have a tenuous encounter at an open-air rave not too far from their parents' farms. We learn some but not enough of their backstories during other events, including a festival where some American-style dancing causes a moral panic, before things are driven off a cliff by the local villagers, I think Christian, taking out their frustrations on a mosque. The ending is unsatisfying. There's some funny stuff with a technologically inept Muezzin.

The cinematography is often beautiful. I wish they'd shown us the clothing better. It put me in mind of The Monk and the Gun (2023): a hilly, exotic location with some ethnography. If I understood the dialogue right the events took place in and near the town of Radoviš. Reference is also made to Konche and the big smoke of Strumica.

A Critic's Pick by Chris Azzopardi at the New York Times. Cath Clarke was less impressed. More details at Wikipedia.

Slither (1973)

An idle bit of James Caan completism. IMDB trivia: his first project after The Godfather (1972) and so clearly a money job. "Hot Lips" Sally Kellerman went without a bra throughout; her brand of zany clashed with Caan's unimaginative, car-thieving football hero fresh out of gaol. Notionally he's tracking down a big pile of dosh with some assistance from Swing-loving Peter Boyle (more in tune with Kellerman) and his wife/Caan fangirl Louise Lasser but that was as irrelevant as everything else. Directed by Howard Zieff from a script by W.D. Richter.

Roger Ebert: three stars. Goofy. Vincent Canby. Mountains of illogic. Caan as Candide in "a comedy-melodrama about America going to the madhouse in mobile homes."

No Way to Treat a Lady (1968)

A jag from Rabbit, Run (1970) via director Jack Smight who showed here what that could have been there: it's pretty well shot (by Jack Priestley) and assembled (by Archie Marshek). The tone wobbles (some of that is misdirection) which I put down to the adaptation by John Gay of William Goldman's dodgy source material.

The premise is not so far from The Silence of the Lambs (1991) with Rod Steiger as a strangler of women and George Segal the cop who is foisted with a relationship with him. Giving this the farcical treatment is intrinsically busted; the heavy stuff detracts from the fine domestic comedy work of Segal's mother Eileen Heckart who is by far the best thing on the screen. He hooks up with improbably single Lee Remick, a Marlboro-smoking clothes horse who is obviously going to be the last girl despite not being Steiger's type. She does OK. Murray Hamilton (Brubaker (1980)) has a minor role as a police inspector. Michael Dunn is fine in a random scene. The ending is neat and tidy and lame. Once again we visit the Pan Am building in NYC as well as the Lincoln Centre and under-construction Julliard.

I don't doubt Steiger enjoyed his performance, hamming it up to the max, but it's not so great for us. I came away thinking that Mel Brooks struck a better balance in Young Frankenstein (1974).

Vincen Canby. Oedipean. "Mr. Gay has written an exposition-free, gag-filled cartoon, which is the manner in which Jack Smight directs it."

Coogan's Bluff (1968)

The rapidly diminishing returns of Clint Eastwood completism. He plays a cowboy cop from Arizona. Also a Melodie Johnson jag from Rabbit, Run (1970). She's married but home alone in some dusty ranch in the middle of nowhere. Her task (in short-and-blonde mode) is to keep him entertained for an hour or two before he heads off to NYC for some more hunting and tracking. Directed by Don Siegel from a screenplay by Herman Miller, Dean Riesner and Howard Rodman. It's something of a Cro-Magnon Dirty Harry (1971). Lee J. Cobb, squandered as a proforma police lieutenant. Seymour Cassel got some fondling in. Don Stroud (Django Unchained (2012)) brought some genuine menace.

The plot is very dodgy but sort-of works as a time capsule for the sybaritic demimonde of NYC with some semi-decent footage of a big open-air party/discotheque that our man has to traverse to locate double-crossing tramp Tisha Sterling who knows where their man is. Clint's methods offend his ostensible brand-new lady-love, social worker/shrink Susan Clark but she gets over his lack of exclusivity before he gets back into that helicopter on the roof of the Pan Am building. All the women are savvy in their own ways but go weak-kneed at the mere prospect of being treated as sex objects.

Given a choice Eastwood himself went with filming the far more genteel jazz concert in Monterey, California (retaining the crazy women) in Play Misty for Me (1971).

Roger Ebert: three stars. Vincent Canby: "The screenplay is so predictable in situation and so arch in its supposedly tough, blunt, wise talk that it turns into a joke told by someone with no sense of humour."

Rabbit, Run (1970)

An Anjanette Comer jag from The Loved One (1965). I hadn't seen her in anything else. Also some James Caan completism. An embarrassment for all involved.

I haven't read anything by John Updike and having seen this have even less interest. Some of the dialogue sounded like it was lifted directly from the source book he got published in 1960, and similarly for many of the scenes. The entirety is very clunky: poorly edited for sure but the raw material is rubbish too, so blame all of director Jack Smight, adaptor Howard B. Kreitsek, cinematographer Philip H. Lathrop and editor Archie Marshek.

Briefly Updike wrote about the chafing of the American husband at his domestication, which was possibly transgressive or at least a bit naughty at the time. On screen it is overly reductive soap opera: Carrie Snodgress (Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970)), in her first outing, plays a dipso, pregnant housewife who just sits around smoking, drinking and watching Looney Tunes cartoons all day. Caan, who peaked in high school, wants to feel his oats again and so heads out into what passes as the demimonde of Reading, Pennsylvania with his old basketball coach who brings along part-time call girl Comer. The characters are so poorly drawn it is not clear why she's hard up for a man or what it is she sees in Caan. There's also golf-mad Christian minister Arthur Hill, sticking his oar in, married to foxy and dissatisfied Melodie Johnson. Things proceed as you'd expect with a putatively shocking accidental infanticide thrown in just for the frisson. Nobody asks what the women might want except a husband.

Apparently it did not get much of a release at the time and hence was not reviewed by the usual venues. I guess nobody got what they wanted.

The Loved One (1965)

Third time around with this thing adapted by Terry Southern and Christopher Isherwood from Evelyn Waugh's novel. Directed by Tony Richardson (Look Back in Anger (1959)).

The cast is top shelf. Southern does bring some of the Dr. Strangelove (1964) out of the source material and I found it often hilarious. Unsubtle yes, but at this remove how could anyone be offended? It is let down by some clunky editing.

Bosley Crowther. "It is when Terry Southern and Christopher Isherwood move this absurd conceit beyond the morbid adventures of their hero in the land of Whispering Glades and go in for a lot of raucous kidding of real estate development, senior homes, junior geniuses in the space age and a plan to launch bodies into space that the whole thing goes into an orbit of witless inanity."

The Outfit (2022)

A Dylan O'Brien jag from Send Help (2026). He's a bit more lively here but still not great. Directed by Graham Moore (his first time) from a script he co-wrote with Johnathan McClain. Apparently Moore got an Oscar for his adaptation for The Imitation Game (2015).

Actually the draw was Mark Rylance who I remember was quite good in Bridge of Spies (2015), a performance for which he won an Oscar. As a snooty English tailor in gangland Chicago in 1956 he puts the rest of the cast firmly in the shade, excepting perhaps Irish mob boss Simon Russell Beale (The Death of Stalin (2017)). The plot is quite trashy: Rylance and receptionist/gamine Zoey Deutch ostensibly get on with their bespoke-clothes business while the gangsters get on with theirs but of course things veer off course in a way that would be unimaginable in the Phantom Thread (2017) universe.

It mostly goes agreeably but every so often drops its pseudo-realism with unlikely exposition dumps; Hitchcock did a far better job with that aspect in Rope (1948) and as with Jimmy Stewart it is inconceivable that Rylance is harmless. Conversely his main interlocutor, scarface Johnny Flynn (who wants to be James Wood when he grows up), may plausibly have thought so, partly because England does snobbery like no other culture. The holes in the plot — just why do they not even start torturing Deutch? — ruined it for me, as did the self-congratulatory conclusion that slid towards a zombie flick. Given the very limited sets I wondered if it may have worked better as a stage show. Dick Pope did the cinematography.

Manohla Dargis: "a moderately amusing gangster flick that doesn’t make a great deal of sense." It is a relief when glamour puss Nikki Amuka-Bird enters the story. Stephanie Zacharek. Calling Rylance's tailor "humble" illustrates the culture gap.

Tillsammans 99 (Together 99) (2023)

Inevitable once I realised Lukas Moodysson was still active. This is apparently the first thing he's done since the TV series Gösta (2019) and his first feature after Vi är bäst! (2013). The latest in a long line of uncalled-for sequels. It seems he managed to convince almost all of the original cast to reunite; notably missing are Michael Nyqvist who passed in 2017 and Ola Norell/Rapace; the latter's Lasse was recast. In a few sittings due to a failure to grip.

It doesn't function as a standalone film but if you've just rewatched the original it also mostly just doesn't work as you can see everything coming a long way off. Some of it is just plain sad, not poignant or effective, and other bits are outright boring. There's a sense of gutlessness, of punching down. Moodysson should have just left things be.

Thinly reviewed. Cath Clarke at the Guardian. Moodysson is becoming misanthropic. Henric Brandt: stagnancy.

Karan Mahajan: Complex. (2026)

Kindle. I remember (perhaps faultily) enjoying his previous novels: Family Planning (2008) and The Association of Small Bombs (2016). This one is perhaps a lengthy and not great expansion on the first.

After a first-person intro that sketches how things are going to go we get a series of character studies intermingled with some minor-note action. It's set mostly in the airless Delhi complex that appears to be the sole legacy of nation-builder SP Chopra to his children with a completely vanilla take on Desi in London and nowhereland Michigan, from (ballpark) the 1970s to mid-1990s. I didn't feel any of the characters popped and none did anything particularly interesting or novel; stuff just happens. The politics is mostly described and not explained, excepting one incident where the BJP needed to manufacture a distraction. At times he seems to be drawing a line from the Nehru regime to Modi via the naysayers, Hindutva, Indira and Sonia Gandhi. Humourless.

Jonathan Dee at the New York Times. Goodreads.

Tillsammans (Together) (2000)

Third time around with this Lukas Moodysson classic. Prompted by the realisation that he made Tillsammans 99 (2023) while I wasn't watching. Also Ola Norell (later Ola Rapace) was in Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017), and Michael Nyqvist in A Hidden Life (2019).

As cringe comedy it felt like Moodysson crested the Dogme 95 wave with steadier camerawork and a soundtrack drawn entirely from the scenario. That early kitchen scene is still the best. The ending felt unearnt.

Roger Ebert: three stars and a very dodgy lagom-for-me-tack review. Stephanie Zacharek at length. Dave Kehr at the New York Times. Wikipedia has all the details. Nobody compared it with Mike Leigh's English realism.

Send Help (2026)

Prompted by Jeannette Catsoulis making it a Critic's Pick at the New York Times. She promised it'd be a trashy and fun return-to-form for director Sam Raimi. In two sittings.

It's a workplace comedy! — which means it's got a lot of #metoo and everyone is everyone else's frenemy. We spend the first hour and a bit with a dorkified "strategy and planning" Survivor fan Rachel McAdams and her vacuous scion-boss-bro Dylan O'Brien and others getting things set up, culminating in the lead pair being stranded on an island in the Bay of Thailand. As a two-hander it gets a bit Misery (1990) and as trash it fares maybe a little better than The Housemaid (2025) despite the clunkiness. But I can't say I enjoyed his performance much — he's too bro and uninventive. As for McAdams, she has a bit of fun and does OK within her limited range. Her character did not make a tonne of sense as she unstably alternates between knowing survivalism and getting suckered by the man-boy; is she all tactics and no strategy? Is she incapable of learning? Raimi does not stick the ending. Cracked but not cracked enough.

Bill Pope's cinematography is quite fine.

Peter Sobczynski. I did not know where to look for Bruce Campbell.

Flathead (2024)

Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with co-writer/director Jaydon Martin. Both were excited about the film receiving a prize at Rotterdam. More slow cinema.

I was hoping for another work that explained Queensland and Queenslanders to the rest of us. Canonically there are Chris Master's The moonlight state (1987), Cane Toads: An Unnatural History (1988) and Rick Morton's A Hundred Years of Dirt (2018), each of which digs deep from a distinct perspective. John Birmingham and Spiteri add essential colour. In contrast this "docufiction", funded by VicScreen and featuring, at a guess, zero Victorians, tries to mine a new-age spirituality whose time has passed. One suspects that Victoria's civilising mission has stalled out far south of Bundaberg where the film spends most of its time.

Notionally the lead is dying from some malady and is looking for some kind of redemption, or at least a spot in the Christian section of God's heaven. He had a lot of fun in Kings Cross as a young man and has suffered a lot since. We're shown him, second-bean fish-and-chipper Andrew Wong and some randoms in a variety of locations: at home, in the shower, in an MRI machine, at the takeaway shop, a ten-pin bowling alley, watching a biff in the carpark of a pub that is nowhere close to a Bruce Springsteen ballet. Bibles are bashed, the old codger gets baptised in a non-flooding river somewhere. Some blokes unload some guns, perhaps gratuitously killing some wildlife off screen. (Come on guys, we've seen Wake in Fright (1971), we know the score.) Toyotas! Living in caravans. Parents dying. The archaic, iconic burning of the cane fields is referenced. So much pain, so many quacks. All soaked in alcohol. I do not recall any mention of sport.

The black-and-white cinematography is lush, like Ivan Sen's, but lacks his sense of belonging to country. There are some great images — that decaying Queenslander was crying out for a proper horror movie treatment — but not enough propulsion. For all the craft we never find out where he buys his smokes.

Wikipedia has a roundup. Wendy Ide says it is "unvarnished" while Martin Kudlac says that it "exhibits a level of formal polish uncharacteristic of a straightforward documentary." Most reviewers do not distinguish (regional) Queensland from the rest of the country.

The Kingdom (Riget) (1994, 1997, 2022)

Second time around with the first two seasons of Lars von Trier's classic (or at least cult) TV series, prompted by him producing a third. Also an improbable Udo Kier jag from The Secret Agent (2025).

There's some inspired stuff up front: the Bondo arc is great, as is the playing up of the Danish and Swedish cultural conflicts and (sometimes) the juxtaposing of the spiritual and the scientific. The first two seasons also function as proto-Dogme 95 time capsules. The third season fails to cohere — perhaps because Ernst-Hugo Järegård's Helmer was so effectively stagey whereas Mikael Persbrandt's half-Helmer is so bland — and the steadier digital cinematography looks a lot more generic. I couldn't get excited about "Swedes Anonymous" or von Trier's take on sexual, etc. politics; the dumb stuff here is too often just dumb and not funny. That may be Willem Dafoe's most inert performance. In any case the whole thing owes a lot, too much, to David Lynch.

Brian Tallerico at Roger Ebert's venue on the third season: three-and-a-half stars and all the context.

Henry Reynolds: Looking from the North: Australian history from the top down. (2025)

I figured I should try more history since reading Dean Ashenden's view from the north, and having enjoyed David G. Marr's excellent work. I was hoping Reynolds would provide an overview of evolving conceptions of sovereignty and property across the Australian continent and lay out just what native title is and allows, but this is not that book. (This text suggests I consult Reynolds's Aboriginal Sovereignty: Reflections on Race, State and Nation (1996) but surely that lacks reflection on the impact of the Wik decision of the same year and anything that has happened since.) Indeed Reynolds's (revisionary) focus is on the British/European settlement of the country and race relations; he does not discuss, for instance, the bombing of Darwin by the Japanese in World War II, the Kokda Track, Cyclone Tracey or other natural disasters, anthropology, science, culture/arts (no Gulpilil!), why treaties weren't signed, etc. Perplexingly he takes the Northern Territory to be just the Top End (the Yolŋu of Arnhem Land), despite Alice Springs being just short of his Tropic of Capricorn demarcation and Ashenden's Tennant Creek well in scope.

Overall I didn't find it as good as his essays; a few chapters needed another round of editing and I often wished he'd expanded on the assertions and self-citations in this text. In brief his thesis is that the indigenous peoples of Australia's north generally remained on their lands while working for cockies/squatters on a mutually-beneficial or at least placatory basis, in contrast to the south where the connections were mostly severed. This was due to labour shortages, of the unwillingness of the young colonials to settle in the harsh northern climate, which of course led to misunderstandings in the faraway centres of power about how things actually worked in the north. There is also an account of nineteenth-century multiculturalism in the new tropical towns: Chinese merchants, tailors, miners, railway constructors, etc., Japanese pearlers, South-East Asians, Pacific Islanders working the cane fields; Australia is forever short of agricultural labour.

The final chapter is the best as it is succinct and clear like his essays. We're told the pastoral leases of the mid-nineteenth century already required that access be provided for cultural purposes but this provision was not enforced. (Reynolds asserts that plain-vanilla common-law leases would have extinguished native title which makes it all the more perplexing that the imperial regime (out of London) did not sort out their intent towards the indigenous peoples well before Federation brought White Australia in 1901.) He does not explain why the British colonial powers took three goes at claiming sovereignty over the continent. I also wanted to understand what the native title regime provides for; from the little I understand it is a very degraded notion of property, at least by the standard of freehold. This may be a reasonable or at least workable compromise in the context of pastoral leases, etc. (I don't know) but the legal regime in places where the people have never been dispossessed (cf the peoples of the Kimberley, the Yolŋu, the Torres Strait Islanders and elsewhere) needed more explication.

The north is now being occupied; where the romantic propaganda failed the military (specifically the U.S. military) is pulling people in and aiming to stay. At least until the next big one.

Broadly reviewed when it was released in November 2025. Glyn Davis. Mark McKenna sounds like he's read all Reynolds's books and can't separate this one from its predecessors. Judith Brett summarised it. Indeed it does add to the why-Queensland-is-different canon. And so on.

Crime 101 (2026)

Written and directed by Bart Layton who based his script on a novella by Don Winslow. Widely billed as a derivative of Michael Mann's classics — I'd say it's Heat (1995) with a Collateral (2004) of Thief (1981) — but, perhaps because of a semi-recognisable Halle Berry, Australian slab of a lead Chris Hemsworth and a dodgy plot, it more often put me in mind of Swordfish (2001).

Basically Hemsworth (in the Robert De Niro role) is supposed to be a very competent high-class thief who abhors violence. That being the case, why doesn't he just get with the crypto or some other zero-contact sport? He gets sick of mentor Nick Nolte (think Jack Nicholson in The Departed (2006)) taking a cut and declines the next gig, leaving the floor to Barry Keoghan's psycho. Or perhaps it was because Monica Barbaro (Joan Baez in A Complete Unknown (2024)) is so very distracting. (She finds the mystery man appealing but remains a mystery to us. Apparently she trained as a dancer; I can only wonder what a pairing with Mads Mikkelsen may have achieved.) Mark Ruffalo got the Al Pacino role, or on another vector, John Hamm's. Much is made of Berry's disgruntled high-end insurance agent being an age-appropriate 53 but nothing happens between her and Ruffalo, or Ruffalo and his wife Jennifer Jason Leigh for that matter. The last is quite fine in a very small role.

It's all exit scams and one-last-gigs. The opsec and logic are generally poor and there is no James Caan or Tom Cruise competency here: Thor does not properly settle with Nolte and the ending is very unsatisfying. I don't know how Storm expected to get her cut, but near as I could tell she showed Thor a photo of the bloke who was supposed to be carrying the diamonds and that certainly wasn't the Hulk. This left two options: either Thor aborts the whole show due to excess risk or recognises the silly buggers going on and realises he could still get the cash. Similarly the Hulk must suspect Keoghan is going to show which again raises the risk too high for him to go through with things, being a police officer and all. Neither take a considered option.

The cinematography is sometimes OK but does not make the city pop: no neon on car hoods, no harsh fluoros, just the head and tail lights of endless commuter traffic against glass-and-steel skyscrapers. The editing (by Jacob Secher Schulsinger and Julian Hart) is often very good. The acting is generally no more than adequate. Humourless.

Matt Zoller Seitz at length for Roger Ebert's venue: three-and-a-half stars. Not cute. The "luxurious cinematography [..] transforms Los Angeles into a city of dark magic." Peter Bradshaw: four stars. Missing only two elements for it to be a full homage to Mann. Who knew there was this much pent-up demand for Mann-style capers? — but IMDB suggests the great unwashed masses were less into it than the paid reviewers. Ben Kenigsberg at the New York Times: the debt to Mann is "so immense that it’s hard not to come away feeling that the movie itself is stolen goods." Reheated. Barbaro got the Amy Brenneman role. Payman Maadi did not get the Adam Sandler role. Self help! Peter Sobczynski: achingly familiar. "Hemsworth [..] [never got] a chance to demonstrate the sense of sly humour found in his best performances."

Two Prosecutors (2025)

Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with writer/director Sergey Loznitsa. Georgy Demidov provided the source material. In two sittings due to tedium.

Loznitsa is Ukrainian and had interesting things to say in that interview, making me think there was going to be more going on than there was. The first half is pure slow cinema: we spend a lot of time waiting with freshly-minted lawyer now prosecutor Alexander Kuznetsov to visit political prisoner Aleksandr Filippenko during Stalin's purges in the 1930s. He provides an expository dump that causes the credulous protagonist to travel to Moscow in search of the Attorney General who will doubtlessly make things right for Party members in good standing. More happens in the latter half but nothing surprising; the entire project is riven by a naivete that might be touching if only the world wasn't as it is. There is a little of that signature black Russian humour but none of it bites.

Ben Kenigsberg at Roger Ebert's venue: "There isn’t, in the final analysis, that much that happens in the movie [...]. The suspense is simply in waiting for the totalitarian machinery to grind into place." We have ample time to admire the care taken with the details. Nicolas Rapold made it a Critic's Pick at the New York Times. Peter Bradshaw: five stars. "It is a very disturbing parable of the insidious micro-processes of tyranny." — but surely everyone is familiar with weaponized slow walking these days.

Cry Danger (1951)

A Dick Powell jag from Murder, My Sweet (1944). Apparently he directed despite the credit going to Robert Parrish. William Bowers based his screenplay on a story by Jerome Cady.

Powell returns to Los Angeles after a five year spell in gaol when ex-marine Richard Erdman (Stalag 17 (1953), good) claims he didn't do it. We soon find out that "it" was a theft of 100k USD and indeed Powell did not do it. Erdman gets distracted by "available! that's me" Jean Porter (spouse of Edward Dmytryk who directed Murder, My Sweet (1944)) while Powell puts up a fight with old flame Rhonda Fleming (Out of the Past (1947), Spellbound (1945)) who just happened to marry his best mate after being turned down a few too many times. That bloke is still in the can on a related rap. Things sort of circle the drain as Regis Toomey's cop hovers and inscrutable underworld boss William Conrad tries to err on the legitimate side of things.

Perhaps because he was distracted by his directorial duties, Powell is a bit wooden here, at least against the solid performances he got from the rest of the cast. As a noir it's not that twisty but sufficiently fun. Erdman gets all the good lines, somehow putting me in mind of Miguel Ferrer in Twin Peaks.

Bosley Crowther.

Wall-E (2008)

Third time around with this Pixar classic, perhaps prompted by co-writer/director Andrew Stanton having a new picture out just now (In the Blink of an Eye (2026)) that by all accounts is a bit dire.

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. What more could he want? Dana Stevens. Stephanie Zacharek.

Hidden Agenda (1990)

Ken Loach directed a script by Jim Allen; they did it again a few years later in Land and Freedom (1995). This won Loach the Jury Prize at Cannes in 1990.

Journo Frances McDormand (in one of her less convincing performances) and human rights laywer/boyfriend Brad Dourif are wrapping up their activities in Belfast when he receives an apparently vital lead that takes him into the Irish countryside in the early morning. They've just completed their collection of testimony about the British authorities' dirty business in Northern Ireland but it is this last piece that somehow tips someone over the edge. Brian Cox (fine) arrives to investigate. Things go along OK in a TV police-procedural mode until we get a few zoomed-out tail-end expository dumps. McDormand's character makes little sense: she has absolutely no op-sec and shows little awareness of the danger she may be in or the damage she causes others. Why did she return to Belfast? — and who would ever expect justice from the very regime she's just spent all that time documenting?

There is some good but insufficient footage of British troops occupying the streets of Belfast.

Roger Ebert: three stars after a not-too-careful watch. Caryn James at the New York Times. "Variety staff" reckon it was based on the Stalker Enquiry of a few years earlier. IMDB trivia: McDormand and Dourif were also coupled in Mississippi Burning (1988). Some pointed to Costa-Gavras but really, come on.

Father Mother Sister Brother (2025)

Jim Jarmusch's most-recent feature, his first (fictional) one since The Dead Don't Die (2019), and therefore inevitable. He wrote and directed, and pulled a few of his usual ensemble. In two sittings due to banality.

The film is comprised of three vignettes, all gentle, unfunny comedies of manners, involving familial obligations that seem so obsolescent in these days of low and no contact. Tom Waits leads in the first as Father. I did not enjoy Mayim Bialik or Adam Driver's performances as his kids and spent most of it thinking that Jarmusch missed a trick by not casting Lily Tomlin as his wife. The ending just emphasised that the whole thing was skew-whiff. Next up matriarch author Charlotte Rampling was Mother, hosting an afternoon tea. Cate Blanchett has a nothing role as one of her daughters; at least Vicky Krieps as the other seemed to have some fun. Finally Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat played Sister Brother. Nobody covered themselves in glory.

The entirety reeks of mortality. It sort-of wanted to go where Happiness (1998) and Festen (1998) awkwardly did but is mostly just boring; I was more bored by this than by The Limits of Control (2009). The nostalgia for skating seemed so quaint. The repeated/shared motifs were trite. Apparently Jarmusch did not do the soundtrack.

Ben Kenigsberg at the New York Times. Peter Bradshaw: four stars. I wish I'd seen what they did.

Murder, My Sweet (1944)

Inevitable having read Chandler's source novel Farewell, My Lovely (1940). Edward Dmytryk directed a screenplay streamlined by John Paxton; they later collaborated again on Crossfire (1947). Dick Powell struck me as too graceful and insufficiently battered and bulky for Marlowe but it mostly worked. Claire Trevor and Anne Shirley did what they needed to do as the femmes fatale. Mike Mazurki's 'Moose' Malloy slotted straight in; he lived entirely in his own world. The rest of the cast is fine too. Fun and I think they succeeded in making it make and not make sense as required.

Bosley Crowther: "a superior piece of tough melodrama".

Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)

A Jane Alexander jag from Brubaker (1980). Directed by Robert Benton who adapted a novel by Avery Corman. Heavily Oscared. Not being a fan of either of the leads did not help.

For reasons unexplained creative Meryl Streep found herself hitched to fellow creative Dustin Hoffman in NYC and after too many years discovered she didn't like that very much. The first half sets Hoffman up as a loving and increasingly capable single father to their six-year-old son. The last half has her return from California and demand custody. The ending is tidy and unsatisfactory, an unstable state to leave things in. Alexander played the ambiguous neighbour who also had singledom thrust upon her.

The whole thing is hard work. Despite her lengthy absence you know Streep is coming back but she has so little character that you can't realistically hope that she's developed in any interesting way. Indeed her therapied older-and-wiser woman presents as fragile, teary, grasping and still unaware of what she really wants or can make work until she's forced to. We never see how she functioned with Hoffman, what drew them together or how it's still possible for there to be tenderness between them. I had no interest in the advertising backdrop.

Roger Ebert: four stars. He claims it doesn't take sides but clearly it does: we spend most of the movie with Hoffman.

Dead Man's Wire (2025)

Gus Van Sant's latest. I'm not a big fan; I saw My Own Private Idaho (1991) a long time ago and (I think) nothing since. He directed a script by Austin Kolodney. There's not a lot to recommend it.

The poster and early scenes clearly signal Arnie-in-T2 shotgun (but no roses) retro-nostalgia. It's 1977 and in this inspired-by-real-life flick, despite being at most two years since Dog Day Afternoon (1975), no reference is made to that classic. Bill Skarsgård leads as the semi-hinged Tony Kiritsis who kidnaps mortgage company scion Dacre Montgomery (entirely personality free, a thankless role) in some fantasy vengeful scheme that will only lead to good things. Colman Domingo is the golden-tonsiled Black man on the radio, the voice of Indianapolis, just like Cleavon Little in Vanishing Point (1971), charged with intervening. Many scenes just drag on. The outcome was predictable — the only variable was whether our main man would get killed by the police, but of course those were more civilised times. I had no doubt at any point that he should have hijacked a plane instead.

This thing does not even function as a proof-of-life for Al Pacino.

Ben Kenigsberg at the New York Times: low energy, needed more crazy. Skarsgård impersonates an imagined Michael Shannon performance. Peter Bradshaw: gripping.

Without a Trace (1983)

A Judd Hirsch jag from Ordinary People (1980). He doesn't get much opportunity to show his range or humour. Apparently Stanley R. Jaffe's sole directorial effort. Beth Gutcheon adapted her own novel which was, of course, inspired by actual events.

Columbia arts prof Kate Nelligan (Franky and Johnny (1991)) sees her young son off to school in Brooklyn but he doesn't make it. Hirsch is the investigating police officer. Things unwind over months.

I felt the script let the show down, especially in the last third as the scenario lost its shape on the way to an unearnt happy ending that leaves the few clues we're informed of mostly dangling. The leads are fine but too many scenes do not work; one has everyone sitting around watching TV coverage of the very events they're involved in. Early 1980s NYC (Brooklyn) is portrayed as a very trusting place where the highly cultured rub shoulders with the hoi polloi until they just can't take it any more.

Janet Maslin. Needed more thought put into it.

Brubaker (1980)

More Robert Redford; apparently he finished acting in this just before he directed Ordinary People (1980). Also for Yaphet Kotto who is fine but mostly just rolls his eyes at everything. Directed by Stuart Rosenberg (Cool Hand Luke (1967)) from material drawn from real-life events. In two sittings.

We're told Redford used to run a military prison (I think) and has been charged by Jane Alexander's intriguing but insufficiently drawn political animal to fix a prison farm somewhere in the South. This fixing involves the usual stuff and reducing the exploitation of the inmates by the trusties and local merchant class; the prisoners mostly just take it, as if they are nowhere near breaking point. Things fall apart over the last third or so. There are too many dangling loose ends pretty much all the way through. Some of it is funny but mostly it's just trying to make the obvious points about how corrupt the system is.

Apparently this was Morgan Freeman's first movie and he's very hard to miss. M. Emmet Walsh is unchallenged in Southern greaser mode as a lumber merchant. Everett McGill, inexpressive but perhaps that's what he was asked to do.

Roger Ebert: two-and-a-half stars. Grim and depressing. Needed more focus on the characters and less on the issues. Redford's performance is of "a frustratingly narrow range". Needed more action between Alexander and Redford (in what is otherwise a sausagefest). Vincent Canby. Both observe the characters just espouse points of view. I think they did not account for how these movies function as time capsules.

Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

Idle Wes Anderson completism. Much of his usual ensemble was there: Ed Norton as a scoutmaster/maths teacher, Bill Murray, the father of wayward Kara Hayward (Manchester by the Sea (2016)) and three indistinguishable boys, abidingly but unsatisfyingly married to Frances McDormand who's having a thing with Bruce Willis, Island Police. Harvey Keitel an unmodulated scout camp commander. Tilda Swinton is Social Services! Jason Schwartzman. Anderson directed and co-wrote with Roman Coppola.

Notionally this is about two twelve-year olds (Jared Gilman and Hayward, both later in Paterson (2016)) who meet cute at a pageant in 1964 (?) on an island and decide they'd like to spend some of the next summer together far away from the adults. Events ensue but I wasn't invested enough in Anderson's way of doing things to care too much. There's an air of innocence over the entire production, even the violent bits.

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. He too thought it was played seriously/earnestly. Dana Stevens: "maybe it's OK to find Moonrise Kingdom both dramatically inert and aesthetically entrancing." And so on.

Ordinary People (1980)

On the pile since Robert Redford passed last September. This was his directorial debut. He worked from a screenplay by Alvin Sargent and Nancy Dowd that was derived from Judith Guest's novel. He did not appear onscreen. Won Oscars for best picture, best screenplay, best director, best supporting actor.

The scenario is a classical Amercian one: success has been attained but the rot has set in. (See, for instance any of Death of a Salesman (1949), The Swimmer (1968), The Great Gatsby (1925/2013), The Sun Also Rises (1926/1957), etc.) The genre generally requires that the tragedy (if any) be offset by at least a glimmer of hope for a better tomorrow, and so it goes here.

Redford takes us to Lake Forest along Lake Michigan in the northern suburbs of Chicago to a huge suburban house similar to the one in Risky Business (1983). This is financed by even-tempered father/husband Donald Sutherland's tax lawyering and is inhabited by his picture-perfect housewife Mary Tyler Moore (Oscar nominated) and increasingly troubled son Timothy Hutton (Oscared), who despite the billing is actually the lead. We also spend some time at the high school where M. Emmet Walsh is the swim coach and a very young Elizabeth McGovern makes a pass at Hutton after enjoying his breath down her neck at choir. But perhaps the best scenes (in a neo-noirish style) are those between Hutton and his shrink Judd Hirsch (Oscar nominated).

The impact of Redford's direction is abundantly clear and he definitely earnt that Oscar. There's some fantastic and effective proto-Hal Hartley loops in the dialogue and mistimed responses. Hutton is often lost but never absent. Hirsch is (even) better here than he was in Running on Empty (1988). This was the best performance from Sutherland that I can recall seeing. Moore initially seemed less effective but the latter half clarifies it all. I'm not sure they entirely stuck the ending, which seemed to want to head off a charge of misogyny.

Roger Ebert: four stars. Mostly about love, a concept which somehow combines an emotional state, misperception and a building material. Vincent Canby: Chicago's poshest suburb! — so we can add humanising the upper classes to Redford's achievements. The fragility of "the contemporary white Anglo-Saxon Protestant psyche." Janet Maslin interviewed Redford at (worthwhile) length. "It's a paradox, really — I've played so many roles where the character is alone, he's apart," [Redford] said. "But I respond to work most when it's integrated, when the actors are integrated into relationships. One of the sad things for me is not finding enough films with the kind of relationships that interest me. This time I found it in something I really didn't want to be in." Redford also asserts that The Great Gatsby (1925) is overrated. Wikipedia. IMDB trivia.

John Brunner: Players at the Game of People. (1980)

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.

A Desert (2024)

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.

The Mastermind (2025)

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.

The Naked Jungle (1954)

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."

Sirât (2025)

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. Peter Sobczynski. Later Jason Di Rosso interviewed auteur Laxe. And so on.

John Brunner: Threshold of Eternity. (1957-1959)

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.

Goodreads. Apparently reworked by Damien Broderick in 2017.

Marty Supreme (2025)

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.

Monkey Man (2024)

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.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017)

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 Pale View of the Hills (2025)

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.

The Housemaid (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."

Johnny Belinda (1948)

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."

Daniyal Mueenuddin: This is Where the Serpent Lives. (2026)

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.

Raymond Chandler: The Lady in the Lake (1943), The Little Sister (1949), The Long Good-bye (1953), Playback (1958).

Kindle. 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!

The Secret Agent (2025)

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.

Where to Land (2025)

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.

John Brunner: The Webs of Everywhere/Web of Everywhere. (1974)

Kindle. 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.

Goodreads.

John Brunner: A Maze of Stars. (1991)

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.

Goodreads.

The Rip (2026)

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)".

Once A Thief (1991)

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.

City on Fire.

A Bittersweet Life (2005)

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.

Preparation for the Next Life (2025)

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.

Concrete Utopia (Konkeuriteu yutopia) (2023)

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".

Camille (2019)

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).

The Sleeping Car Murder (Compartiment tueurs) (1965)

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).

The Edge (1997)

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.

George Mackay Brown: Beside the Ocean of Time. (1994)

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).

Mulholland Falls (1996)

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.

Next (2007)

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.

Stephanie Zacharek.

No Other Choice (2025)

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.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)

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.

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)

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.

Bosley Crowther.

Mahana (aka The Patriarch) (2016)

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.

It Was Just an Accident (2025)

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.

State of Siege (État de siège) (1972)

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.