Parts of Samuel Beckett's life. On the pile for quite a while due to the poor reviews and expectation that it would be a (possibly rewarding) slog. Directed by James Marsh (Man on Wire (2008), The Night Of (2016)) from an assembly by Neil Forsyth of raw material provided by Beckett (I think).
There are some good bits, and those are probably lifted more-or-less directly from Beckett's work. Things begin somewhat effectively with Joyce (Aidan Gillen) in Paris after a weak, symbolic start with his mother and father in Dublin. He has "less a bonding, more an unhappy welding" with Lucia Joyce (Gráinne Good) who he is charged with taking out dancing. (He doesn't dance, so presumably he's doing the "think later" aspect of the full titular pseudo-quote.) We then meet his Jewish mate Alfy (Robert Aramayo) and long-term partner/wife Suzanne (Léonie Lojkine / Sandrine Bonnaire) and mistress Barbara (Maxine Peake). Nothing suggests he was worthy of the Nobel or why he'd consider it a catastrophe; Suzanne is drawn far more clearly, and even Barbara has more character. Very little of his work is presented or contextualised.
Fionn O'Shea is good as the youthful Beckett; Gabriel Byrne less so as the elder. The rest of the cast does what they are asked to do. The cinematography is unexciting. The soundtrack is loaded up with classical themes that might have been meaningful. I wondered if anyone has drawn the comparisons with George Orwell.
Ben Kenigsberg at the New York Times: an "argu[ment] for printing the legend". Glenn Kenny at Roger Ebert's venue. Reductive, as was Marsh's The Theory of Everything (2014). Peter Bradshaw. Mark O'Connell at the New York Review of Books had so many problems with it that you wonder why he bothered to write a review. Bronagh Gallagher is indeed fine as Nora Barnacle Joyce and is probably why those early dinner scenes work so much better than the rest. It is as if modernism never happened. Is Beckett unsayable? Perhaps this demands a Wittgensteinian analysis.
Spierig brothers completism, inevitable after Predestination (2014). It's either a high-concept vampire flick or low scifi, something that Arnie may've been proud to star in back in the 1990s.
The premise is that for one reason or another most of the population are now vampires. By obvious Malthusian logic this put excess pressure on the availability of human blood leading to an expanding underclass of brainless desperadoes who look like a horde of junkies. Sam Neill heads a vast corporation that aims to produce synthetic blood (retaining the upsides of the condition) but of course there are humanists too. One such is Willem Dafoe (in the Arnie role) who undergoes a revelatory accident, leading to the only science we see: Victorian-era self experimentation by Ethan Hawke in a wine vat. Vince Colosimo is undertasked with some nonsense towards the end. Claudia Karvan does her best to ameliorate the sausagefest so typical of post-apocalyptic movies.
Some of it is very funny: an early gag is an ad for whitening toothpaste, and the science proves to be not so straightforward. It's a bit auteur-ish, like Dark City (1998) with some direct lifts from The Matrix (1999) (farming humans as blood bags, corporate brainlessness, mobs of military thugs, aesthetics). Clearly some funding came from General Motors: every vehicle is a(n electric?) Chrysler or a Chevrolet. I thought they missed a trick by not incorporating a zombie theme (may as well use the whole human) but it seems the Spierigs have been there already with Undead (2003).
Roger Ebert: two-and-a-half stars. "This vampire health plan has no public option" — was it an allegory for Obamacare? Jeannette Catsoulis made it a Critic's Pick. Wikipedia. It seems to have been thought of as a response to Twilight.
A high concept time-travel scifi from writer/director/etc. Shane Carruth, a former engineer with a microscopic budget. A pointer from Peter Sobczynski's review of Predestination (2014). All the high science happens in a suburban Texas garage and self-storage facility. I can't say I followed the details. The overlapping dialogue, sometimes mumbled and often clearly intended to be obscurantist, is sometimes frustrating. I guess the mechanism at the core of the story is one way to deal with continuity errors in films. It might pay a rewatch.
Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. Peter Bradshaw got it backwards: they travel into the past, not the future. A. O. Scott knew better than to even get that concrete. Everyone could feel their neurons firing.
Idly curious about why it is so highly rated at IMDB. Co-written and directed by Matt Reeves. Peter Craig was the other co-writer. A Zoë Kravitz jag from Caught Stealing (2025), and Jeffrey Wright from Highest 2 Lowest (2025). And I guess Andy Serkis via Career Girls (1997) and Paul Dano ex The Ballad of Jack and Rose (we've seen him do exactly this before), Jayme Lawson from Sinners (2025). Robert Pattinson leads in emo mode; he was far better in Mickey 17 (2025) and even (probably) The Lighthouse (2019). Colin Farrell is unrecognisable as the Penguin. Always good to see John Turturro and the streets of Chicago.
With a cast like that how can it fail? But fail it does. The cinematography is very murky. Nobody can shoot straight. All myth-challenging plot points are swiftly reversed. So much of it seemed lifted from The Matrix movies. Too much exposition.
David Cronenberg's latest. For Guy Pearce who essentially reprises his alpha geek role from Iron Man 3. Vincent Cassel leads as the only sexy man in this universe, and he's only available because his wife (Diane Kruger) has died; Kruger (in multi-role reprise) and Sandrine Holt each have a go. I felt something was seriously broken here, beyond all the underbaked technobabble: I did not follow the themes, plot, narrative or comprehend any of the points being made. The acting seemed arch and wooden. The big info dump in nature between the two men surely revealed how flawed the conceits were well before it got shot. Was the idea that the Chinese, Russians and Western Civ are soon going to go at it over Grave Tech? — which is the next frontier after ads and AI?
All the reviews took it seriously (as a dark comedy?) and found depths I passed over. Elisabeth Vincentelli: "some men engage with technology to disengage with reality. And that is more unsettling than any body horror." — what's with the "some" and "men"? Luke Goodsell. Peter Sobczynski got right into it: good grief.
On the pile for a very long while for reasons unknown. Still #248 on the IMDB top-250. Directed and co-written by Anurag Kashyap. I thought I was in for about three hours but that was only the first part; the second brought it up to about five-and-a-half in total. Over two nights therefore.
Dynastic gangland Bollywood that samples from everything. Loads of violence, some of it is very bloody but mostly not graphic (think John Woo, Scarface (1983), Gomorrah (2008)). This is cut up with romance and musical numbers with (according to the subtitles) raunchy prove-you're-a-man lyrics. The script is weak, a bit brainless, too repetitive: there's no escape from the cycle of life which here means finding a baby momma, killing those who killed your father, having a few kids, mindlessly thieving what you can, getting killed by the next generation. That really starts to drag in the second part. A few editing and/or continuity errors mar the presentation of the plot which is often progressed in brief dialogue between the big scenes. Some are distended, as if we're supposed to care about these shallowly-drawn characters whose motivations are either obvious or implausible. The final part is a tame recreation of John Woo's shooting up a hospital from Hardboiled (1992). The cinematography is generally quite good. The butchers turn out to be irrelevant.
Ben Kenigsberg at the New York Times. Not The Godfather, not Casino, perhaps City of God. Wikipedia.
Cillian Murphy's and director Tim Mielants's followup to Small Things Like These (2024). Adapted by Max Porter from his own novel.
Murphy is the principal of a house for boys who have run out of chances. It operates on a logic much like Will Self's The Quantity Theory of Insanity (1991). There's some tepid comedy, some The Office squirm, loads of swearing and a baseline implausibility with too much going on on this particular day. Tracey Ullman plays his straight woman (work wife). Emily Watson as a humourless shrink. The kids are sometimes interesting but mostly aren't given enough time or diverse scenarios to really express their personalities.
The structure is documentary (but not a mockumentary though there are aspects of that). Each point of view gets its own video stock. I wonder how close it was to meeting the Dogme 95 manifesto. Some of the cinematography is quite fancy but is not sustained at length as in Adolescence (2025). I think they missed a trick by not haunting the house.
Natalia Winkelman at the New York Times. Peter Bradshaw. Brian Tallerico at Roger Ebert's venue.
John Huston completism (he directed), and for Albert Finney (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960)) who plays a dipso erstwhile British Navy commander-turned-diplomat in Mexico on their Day of the Dead, 1938. Guy Gallo adapted Malcolm Lowry's novel.
The scene somewhat echoes, or perhaps brackets, Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1957): the next war is in the pipe while the previous one, still fresh in the mind, is tamed with oceans of booze. Finney's brother Anthony Andrews was reporting on the Spanish Civil War, again echoing Hemingway. For reasons incompletely presented wife Jacqueline Bisset decides to undivorce Finney despite having dallied with the brother. There is a beautiful cat that is blamed for howling all night, and a bullfight.
The plot is barely there. The themes are mostly to do with making permanent what others may try to undo. Finney is quite fine in Richard Burton mode but to no ultimate end. The Night of the Iguana (1964) this is not.
Roger Ebert: four stars. Huston mostly omitted the politics of the book ("the political disintegration of Mexico in the face of the rising tide of Nazism"). IMDB trivia: Burton declined to appear. Janet Maslin made it a Critic's Pick. Vincent Canby.
Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with writer/director Charles Williams. A prison drama. Guy Pearce added his shoulder to Hugo Weaving's quixotic efforts to renew Australian cinema by playing a sort of uncharismatic hustling prisoner who knows the score and what it takes to act normal but is incapable of regulating himself. This is not a challenging role for Pearce. Cosmo Jarvis (Lady Macbeth (2016)) is fresh in from supermax where he discovered (a Christian) God. Again his performance is solid but I wasn't sold on his charisma. I hadn't seen Leah Vandenberg since Erskineville Kings (1999), another sausage fest. She's tasked with getting the inmates to think about their (paroled) futures, something about as futile as Weaving's project.
It's well constructed for the most part but too often events are bent to fit the narrative; for instance it is implausible that fresh-from-juvie Vincent Miller would be put in with Jarvis. Miller's character is central but underdrawn; he's a blank canvas for the others to draw on which becomes problematic when he's tasked with making the big move. Toby Wallace (The Royal Hotel (2023), The Bikeriders (2023)) plays Pearce's son in a brief scene that didn't work. Sean Millis was more memorable in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024).
As far as the genre goes this wasn't Ghosts... of the Civil Dead (1988) (it's not apocalyptic) or Chopper (2000) (it's humourless). There are mild redemptive themes maybe but (fortunately) it doesn't go all The Shawshank Redepmtion (1994). Chiara Costanza's compositions are obtrusive.
Luke Buckmaster. Williams got the Short Film Palme d'Or at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival for All These Creatures (2018). It also has obtrusive compositions by Chiara Costanza.
An idle bit of David Gulpilil completism. Ozploitation! I haven't seen Jaws (1975) but by all accounts (including the IMDB trivia) this is it with a "dreaming" croc subbed in for the shark. Everything is poor: the acting, the cinematography, the beer (XXX Gold), the plot, the editing, the plausibility, the mythos, the continuity. Even the croc is a crock! Everything except some of the locations (who ever knew that Simpsons Gap was so close to, and connected with, the Mitchell River?) and Gulpilil's dancing and singing, which director Arch Nicholson (Fortress (1985)) often squandered by placing him just out of frame. Sonia Borg wrote the screenplay based on Grahame Webb's novel Numunwari.
All the details at Ozmovies. Lead John Jarratt reckoned it was not great!
Second time around with this pinnacle of Dogme 95.
Roger Ebert: three stars. "[The Dogme 95] style does work for this film. A similar style is at the heart of John Cassavetes' work." Janet Maslin: "A Family Making Orphanhood Look Good."
Aronofsky's latest. Not especially violent or graphic by his standards. Was he trying to plug the gap in the shaggy cat story market vacated by the Coen brothers or countervail Gunn's superdog? Drugs and dive bars, alcoholism and busted baseball dreams; has NYC (1998) ever looked so completely unappetising? — but what a cast! Austin Butler (The Bikeriders (2023)) did not lift his performance to match the Tonic-the-cat's (unlike Oscar Isaac). Zoë Kravitz as a paramedic girlfriend just looking for the right man to exploit her poor judgement after a long shift. Matt Smith with a mohawk! Regina King, police detective! Ethnic gangsters! — Vincent D'Onofrio (who I saw most recently in The Cell (2000)) and Liev Schreiber as Hasids. Stick around to see Laura Dern!
Charlie Huston adapted his own novel with pedestrian results. I think some of it was supposed to be comedic but everything falls on its face.
Manohla Dargis. Peter Sobczynski: a homage to After Hours (1985). Whatever attracted Aronofsky to this project? Peter Bradshaw.
Kindle. One of the few pointers provided by Pisani. Conrad's first published novel. He clearly aimed for tragedy but got very bogged in excess colour. The structure is overly complex for so simple and transparent a tale. I waited in vain for a swerve away from the generic romance and back to the mountains of gold in the interior of Borneo. Most of it was eye-glazingly boring.
Goodreads: Conrad is never an easy read.
Prompted by Hari Kunzru's review at the New York Review of Books (which I read afterwards) and a decent rating at IMDB. Co-written by Stephen Graham who featured in two of the four episodes and had a cameo in a third. He had a lot more to work with here than in Blitz (2024) and is the better for it. The direction by Philip Barantini and cinematography by Matthew Lewis are amazing: it looks like it was shot in seamless real time (right down to some improv in the second episode that seemed to paper over a timing issue) with a restless (sometimes drone-based) camera that avoided the usual drawbacks of handheld work. I wonder what Welles and Hitchcock could've done with this tech. Jack Thorne was the other co-writer.
The topic is the impact of toxic masculinity / the manosphere on young high schoolers. Kunzru spills many words on this. Owen Cooper is very good as an unregulated 13 year-old, the main focus of the plot and episodes one (a police procedural, somewhat like The Bill) and three (a two-hander psychological interview with a very game Erin Doherty). The second episode deals with present-day schooling but leaves us hanging about the goings-on in the life of Jade (Fatima Bojang) and others. Ashley Walters anchors the first two as a detective inspector who gets this new world explained to him by his son (Amari Bacchus); while Cooper and Doherty are excellent I enjoyed his performance the most.
The final episode doesn't work as well as the first three, and lays bare the limitations of a retrospective take. Graham is a bit less modulated as the father though there are some fine observations about his controlling behaviour (excused by an old-school indulgent love) of his wife (Christine Tremarco) and daughter (Amelie Pease) and his difficulty in being proud of his son who fails to express traditional masculinity but is not effeminate. I suspect parents have been bewildered by their children since at least the 1970s; these have little insight into why their boy broke bad except that maybe he spent a bit too much time on the computer in the privacy of his room. It's not at all clear why their son comes around to accepting that he did what he did, which is unfortunate as his psychological arc was likely more interesting than theirs.
Kunzru (and doubtlessly many many others) touches on the obvious issues raised here: the social Darwinism and punching-down that fuels incel culture, the irony of straight men seeking gender affirmation. He doesn't explore where the boy's violence came from (given his weediness) or the general lack of critical thinking (especially amongst those deemed intelligent or good students). It mystifies me why people feel entitled to other people; as Alvin Roth put it so well, many things you may want also have to want you.
Nandini Balial at Roger Ebert's venue: four stars. Cooper has a long career to come.
Co-written and directed by Karim Aïnouz. Prompted by Beatrice Loayza making it a Critic's Pick at the New York Times.
Well it's quite bad. The plot is very cliched: a bad boy (bad due to his lack of parenting, bad signalled by his darker skin) finds himself in the care of a couple who run a love motel. She's randy and sick of her abusive husband while he needs a handyman who can get the AC going again. It's a love triangle made in Brazil! Everything is saturated in unsexy sex, so much so that at times it could have been a comedy. The cinematography tries to be edgy. Loads of symbology for the semioticians to work out.
Ben Kenigsberg saw it at Cannes in 2024. The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981). "It is not a good movie ... But getting your eyeballs scorched for two hours counts for something."
More idle Day-Lewis completism. Written and directed by his wife Rebecca Miller (daughter of Arthur). Quite poor.
The scenario has Day-Lewis play a once-idealistic Scotsman who became an American in the 1960s and is now in declining health. He lives with facially-inert daughter Camilla Belle in a Tolkien-esque hobbit-hole, buried in the side of a hillock in an otherwise-deserted commune on an island off the east coast of the U.S.A. (It must be summer. The geography of the island is not established very well.) Catherine Keener does what she can as his mainlander girlfriend (and that isn't much). For reasons unknown she takes payment from him and herds her two boys (soft Ryan McDonald and creepy Paul Dano) into the abode. Belle doesn't take this too well as she has an unhealthy fixation on her father; it's something like Lolita with all the Vladimir Nabakov removed.
The plot goes as you'd expect: mostly rejection of one sort (other humans) or another (NIMBYism) and some teenage wild life. Day-Lewis is solid but absolutely squandered.
Roger Ebert: three stars. Manohla Dargis at length. It's 1986! Oedipal. Peter Bradshaw: "a curious, overcooked affair, composed in the indie-70s manner of Hal Ashby."
IMDB says this was Riz Ahmed's only feature for 2024. Written by Justin Piasecki. Directed by David Mackenzie (Hell or High Water (2016)).
A high-concept, deep-throat adjacent thriller (vale Robert Redford) that begins with Ahmed somewhat mysteriously monitoring the passing of documents from a worker bee to a corporate suit in a generic NYC restaurant. Soon enough we meet Lily James (Baby Driver (2017)) who is trying to evade responsibility for some seriously under-researched/written/baked agricultural blah blah. A romantic arc inevitably ensues but proves insufficient distraction from the flaws in this take on the mechanics of whistleblowing. It's just not clever enough, and the movie loses its shape well before we get to the pointy end.
Ahmed doesn't talk much; he's far more inert than in Sound of Metal (2019) which is not to say he's bad as it's a coiled-tension sort of inertia. Homage is paid to that movie in the titular TTY relay service and a beaut (but too brief) scene where he shares a laugh with a deaf identity forger, and also to The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2012) in the bio he provides to his Alcoholics Anonymous group. He presents as wooden and earnest, more on the spectrum than addicted, but I guess the former does not entail falling off the wagon.
Sam Worthington does OK as muscle. He looks so much older now.
The whistleblowing aspect reminded me a bit of Rusty Crowe's tobacco movie with Michael Mann, The Insider (1999), perhaps because so much of this is anachronistic analog in a digital world. Similarly it is not an obvious platform for action, and those parts felt as bolted on as in Hugh Jackman's misfire Swordfish (2001).
Manohla Dargis. Lily James was miscast! They should have asked for more from Worthington. Benjamin Lee saw it at TIFF. The Conversation (1974), Blow Out (1981). James was ineffective at charming us. He reckoned things go downhill after the concert on Broadway but that's leaving it a bit late. At Roger Ebert's venue: Peter Sobczynski from Tribeca, briefly, and Matt Zoller Seitz at length (two-and-a-half stars), Three Days of the Condor (1975). The latter observes that everything is too cynical now for whistleblowing to work as it once sorta maybe did, but he misses the trick of this movie: the SEC still has some very sharp teeth. It seems I am susceptible to a good paranoid thriller.
Elizabeth Pisani: Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation. (2014)
Tue, Sep 16, 2025./noise/books | LinkKindle. Probably eventually inevitable after reading her The Wisdom of Whores (2008) fifteen years ago. Prompted by a recent column by Duncan Graham.
This is a polemical piece of travel writing, light on the anthropology and freed of her focus on public health though some of her professional interests do leak through. She leans into a "Bad Boyfriend" motif of about 25 years standing. The general avoidance of commentary on the more populous areas, tourist Meccas (she acknowledges leaning on the restorative powers of Bali and so forth but does not detail how) and "tourist objects" (beaches, volcanoes, etc.) makes stretches of it seem like hard and thankless slog: days on boats with barely room to sit out of the sun and rain, jaunts into degraded rainforests on motorcycles with people she doesn't know, unskilled hard yakka.
Pisani obviously has deep connections with Indonesian culture, very strong language skills and a bravery I once may have envied. I wonder how much of the ready Indonesian hospitality she encounters is due to this. Many of her experiences seem inaccessible to a man (and in counterpoint I guess she missed out on the men-only things — but it is possible that there aren't any.) She doesn't dwell too much on foody things; memorable but unenticing are the sugary drinks and the omnipresent Padang restaurants. She must have guts made of iron. Some stories just tail off.
Keeping it light, the book is thin on the literature. She updates Koch (1965/1978) on how wayang is very different now. I wanted to know more about land tenure and property rights in general, given all the upheaval and disposition of various groups over the decades; did Indonesia go through a redistribution like Việt Nam (disastrously in the 1950s)? Where are the lines drawn between personal and clan property?
Pisani recounts some great yarns but with enough cracks to make me suspect that the best bits were unpublishable.
Idle Daniel Day-Lewis completism. Directed by Stephen Frears (Dirty Pretty Things (2002), The Grifters (1990)) off a script by Hanif Kureishi.
A character-driven portrait of the Pakistani community of south London, some of whom are thriving in the early years of Thatcherism. The titular laundrette is next door to a "turf accountant". Main character Omar (I mostly heard "Omo", played by Gordon Warnecke) is encouraged by his leftist/intellectual/journalist/dipso father (Roshan Seth, surely a shoo-in for a subcontinental Doctor Who) to work for his entrepreneurial uncle (Saeed Jaffrey, The Man Who Would Be King (1975)) between school and university. The young man turns out to have a strong sense of business and ability to tame notionally-wild punk/fascist Johnny (Day-Lewis) which is to say he can get actual work out of a no-hope, uneducated, lower-class white boy, perhaps because they're lovers. Shaping proceedings are Derrick Branche's Salim, a greasy drug dealer who is the actual source of the family's wealth, and dissolute daughter Rita Wolf, just waiting for her life to start. Shirley Anne Field (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960)) played the British trophy mistress. Things inevitably go all Do the Right Thing (1989).
Despite the good work of the actors this lacks the unity of vision of a Mike Leigh or social realism of a Ken Loach. Nick Cave, Rowland S. Howard, etc. would have done a stretch in those squats when they fled to the mother country in the late 1970s/early 1980s. The focus on the well-connected in the Pakistani community (poor though some relatives may be) coming into contact with people Britain could no longer deport to the colonies is well-worn; some scenes directly appealed to A Clockwork Orange (1971) and I never felt that Johnny was as dangerously, unstably violent as Stephen Graham's Combo was in This is England (2006). The racism is far more muted than in Romper Stomper (1992). Overall it lacked teeth.
The cinematography is drab, evoking the English climate of course, and countless TV soap operas.
Roger Ebert: three stars. A Critic's Pick by Vincent Canby. Complementary to Gandhi (1982), A Passage to India (1984), etc. Excess details at Wikipedia.
Director/co-writer Ethan Coen and wife/co-writer Tricia Cooke's followup to Drive Away Dolls (2024). It's worse! Far worse. So bad that even Aubrey Plaza cannot elevate the material. Margaret Qualley leads again as something like a lesbian Sam Spade; her character is made of reactionary one liners and some epic that-shit-will-get-you-killed revenge fantasising. Chris Evans is unsuccessful as an insincere sex cult leader. The dialogue is terrible, the plot irremediably defective.
Peter Sobczynski: better than the last one!
