Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with co-writer/director Boris Lojkine and lead Abou Sangaré who won a best performance award at Cannes in 2024 and a César in 2025. Delphine Agut was the other co-writer.
Illicit gig working in France by asylum seekers from Guinea and Côte d'Ivoire (I think). This involves figuring out the protocols of the homeless shelters, acquiring a fake account on a delivery platform (at a cost of about 50% of the income), a bicycle and running red lights in Paris in the cold and wet. Sangaré has some well-constructed interactions with a variety of people, humanising the French, and only a very few nasty ones that were not especially racist; it was as if everyone accepted the present moment's need for an underclass, even the gendarmerie. He clearly worked hard, especially in a concluding scene that he totally nailed with some able help from Nina Meurisse (who also won a César for her efforts). It put me in mind of that excellent two-hander interview in Adolescence (2025). This one is not violent but achieves a similar level of emotional charge. She does not ask him about the damage to his face.
The story itself doesn't have many places to go, being a tale of living at the limits of precarity while waiting for the one big event that might change things. (I was glad his bike and phone somehow did not run out of charge or get stolen.) It felt less overtly political than Welcome (2009). The lightly-drawn frenemy, family and horseplaying-buddy aspects evoked Io Capitano (2023). The cinematography is excellent.
A Critic's Pick by Natalia Winkelman: "not only build[s] empathy with its hero's pain but channels its sensation." The scene with the elderly Frenchman on the seventh floor was indeed well conceived. Michael Wood.
Based on Denis Johnson's novella (2011) of the same name. (I wasn't a fan of his famous collection of shorts.) Mostly for the cast — Joel Edgerton, William H. Macy, Kerry Condon (Breaking Bad (2008-2013), The Banshees of Inisherin (2022)), not Felicity Jones (Rogue One (2016), The Brutalist (2024)) — and the promising-by-their-recent-IMDB-ratings combination of co-writer/director Clint Bentley and co-writer Greg Kwedar.
American bucolic. In the early decades of the twentieth century, socially-isolated lumberjack Edgerton finds himself in Idaho where Jones unfathomably finds him irresistible. Even after a daughter arrives he disrupts his domestic bliss with long trips, west to the Pacific, east to Montana (something like that), for work. Soon enough the only fathomable tragedy occurs and he resumes his hermitude. (It's not like someone could have stolen his idea for a social network though just maybe they may have thieved a building block concept he dreamt up for his child.) He thoughtlessly avoids modernity, is mystified by a chainsaw. It's mostly one thing after another spiced up with endless flashbacks and flashforwards; he's aware but not that expressive or outwardly reflective. Things land with some healing not via Kelly Condon's fellow hermit (she appears to be facially converging with Toni Collette) but via the wonders of sightseeing from a biplane: ultimately he's "connected to it all".
I felt it was elegiac, sombre hokum, reflecting the mood of the present time, the primordial desire to return to a prelapsarian monoculture. It is a vote against finding redemption or solace in other people (the Condon vector) but inertia definitely leads to hermitude. Some heavy themes treated shallowly.
On the cinematic front Bentley and DP Adolpho Veloso were clearly reaching for Malick's pristine unspoilt wilderness, Rousseau's man in some kind of natural state. There's a sense of it being an uncomplicated, unsophisticated complement of First Cow (2019). On the other hand it stands against Viggo Mortensen's The Dead Don't Hurt (2023) by lacking a target for revenge; nature doesn't test a temperament in anything like the same way. The logging scenes were not a patch on Sometimes a Great Notion (1971) and it generally lacked the wild inventiveness of Ken Kesey. Edgerton is good in the lead and surely up for an Oscar nom. Macy with the explosives, an early enviro mystic. Narration by Will Patton! At least some of the soundtrack was by Nick Cave (says IMDB).
Peter Sobczynski: an Academy fight song. Justin Chang summarised it and analysed its deviations from its source material for the New Yorker. Brian Tallerico at Roger Ebert's venue: four stars. Days of Heaven (1978). Peter Bradshaw: four stars. "His emotional life is the tree that falls in the forest without making a sound."
More guff from director/co-writer Noah Baumbach. (Emily Mortimer was the other co-writer and has a minor role as a vacuous something-or-other.) His first project since White Noise (2022) and/or Barbie (2023), depending on what you count.
The cast is amazing. George Clooney led with an orange-man tan, making me wonder if it is now a requirement for U.S. presidential candidates. I was hoping for more from Adam Sandler: there's a feeling that he's barely getting out of second gear for most of it. He has some great scenes with Laura Dern (solid), impassive while her head, hair and hands go in all directions and her face takes on all expressions. I would have far preferred to see their Eiffel Tower story. This proves that there is material that even Jim Broadbent cannot elevate. Billy Crudup! Alba Rohrwacher (La Chimera (2023))! Stacy Keach, never sharkier, as Clooney's dad! And of course Greta Gerwig.
The story itself is the purest Hollywood navel gazing. Clooney knows just how much self awareness he can get away with, most days, but age and daughters have caught up to him. His performance was something of a complement to Bill Shatner's Has Been (2004) persona, or perhaps just minor variations on himself. The concluding homage reminded me of the similarly-flawed The Fabelmans (2022) and Hugo (2011).
The cinematography is effective but uninventive. The story is a pile of cliches made even more tedious by repeated tics: the cheesecake, "Can we go again?", the loneliness, Baumbach telling us something then showing how it went down. This telegraphing is indistinguishable from padding. It would've helped if it was in any way funny, like those long-gone Coen brothers flicks. Overlong.
Peter Sobczynski: shallow. If only it went all-in on Sandler's character. Dana Stevens: lifts from Fellini, "pays tribute to François Truffaut and Preston Sturges."
A (director) Jules Dassin jag from Thieves' Highway (1949). Richard Brooks adapted a story by Robert Patterson. Also a bit of Burt Lancaster completism.
Lancaster, once again a jailbird (before Birdman of Alcatraz (1962)), finds himself at the mercy of sadistic and manipulative Captain Munsey (Hume Cronyn). Things tend inexorably towards a prison break with all the action jammed into the last five minutes. The best parts of the buildup explain how the five cellmates ended up inside, usually via some entanglement with a gorgeous woman. (There's a stylised image of a woman in their cell who stands in for all of them; I think Dassin and co missed a trick by not having that woman play all the femme fatales. My favourite involved Flossie (Anita Colby), what a doll.) There's a dash of Natural Born Killers (1994) in the riot and politics amongst the prison staff.
The acting was generally fine. Lancaster was a bit inert but does OK with what's asked for. He engaged in some minor acrobatics that show what might have been. Charles Bickford could've used more screen time. Ann Blyth was squandered as some sweet soul.
After a sneaky rewatch of Two Hands (1999) a few weeks ago. Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with writer/directory Mary Bronstein. This led me to expect a performance from Rose Byrne something like Gina Rowlands's in A Woman Under the Influence (1974), and for her character to be unlikeable. Whatever her merits the scenario does not allow her to reach any significant heights, and more problematically, this character is boring as she lacks backstory and motivation.
In essence this mother is left to tend to her only child who has an eating disorder while she tries to function as a therapist. (Husband Christian Slater appears mostly as an annoying voice on the phone and in a brief what-did-you-do ending scene.) A housing disaster causes the mother/daughter pair to move to a motel for most of the movie where they encounter the underdrawn Ivy Wolk at the front counter and co-resident A$AP Rocky who does what he can. (He has one of the few characters that make sense and is totally different from Highest 2 Lowest (2025). He tries to sort her out on the dark web!) She's got a drowning-woman thing for fellow shrink Conan O'Brien (good and somewhat amusing as the straight man in a bent situation) and finding psychedelic experiences in holes. Danielle Macdonald (The Tourist (2022)) went looking for help in all the wrong places. Bronstein herself is flat as the doctor treating the daughter.
I found it hard to watch. Many scenes don't work; one has a hamster in a car that just sequences cliches and too many others are similarly uninspired. The cinematography was often too murky for me to make things out or too annoyingly jittery. I had an abiding sense of waiting for it to get good and it just didn't. Byrne's performance had shades of Julianne Moore's from Magnolia (1999). The body horror tropes evoked David Cronenberg, the apartment horrors Rosemary's Baby (1968), and the scenario just maybe The Exorcist (1973). It's autofic and I should have skipped it (as I have Celine Song’s output): I am not in the target demographic that demands relatability, either in the form of characters recognisably themselves or in Bad Mother variation. The dodgy psychologising and spacey logic tediously aimed to validate.
A Critic's Pick by Jeannette Catsoulis. I acknowledge that it tried to be funny. Dana Stevens: "Uncut Gems (2019) for motherhood." — Safdie brothers adjacent. Byrne is impossible to stop watching. Epic self absorption. Unmodulated script. Relieved when it was over.
A Richard Conte jag from Thieves' Highway (1949). Also some Alain Delon completism. Completely dire.
A black-and-white noir directed by Jules Dassin (Night and the City (1950), Rififi (1955)). Notionally-Greek Richard Conte (later Barzini in The Godfather (1972)) returns to Fresno from the war to find his sweetheart (Barbara Lawrence) waiting and father (Morris Carnovsky) in need of some justice. This leads him to finance a possibly-shonky operation with Millard Mitchell that involves them driving trucks from an apple orchard to the badlands of the markets of San Francisco. There he encounters sharky trader Lee J. Cobb (On the Waterfront (1954), 12 Angry Men (1957)) who has engaged the services of foxy Italianate streetwalker-with-a-heart-of-gold Valentina Cortese (The Visit (1964), The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988)) to distract him and us at critical moments. Most of the characters are of uncertain virtue.
Things get a bit racy (he gets his shirt off and so does she) and violent. It seems to endorse migrants marrying migrants because those settled in the U.S. for longer just want your money but don't have the courtesy to ask for it. The trucking aspect put me in mind of The Wages of Fear (1953). It's not always engrossing but it was always possible that it could have been.
Mike Leigh's latest (his first since the epic Peterloo (2018)) and therefore inevitable. His second effort with Marianne Jean-Baptiste (The Cell (2000), Spy Game (2001)) after Secrets and Lies (1996). This is a slice of the Caribbean community in London, sort-of updating Steve McQueen's Small Axe (2020) to the present, post-COVID, day. Most of it is generous, some of it gently humorous but Jean-Baptiste's character is too much hard work. Michele Austin (also Secrets and Lies (1996), Another Year (2010)) has more fun as her hairdresser/sister with her daughters Sophia Brown and Ani Nelson. The catharsis, when it comes, is not enough and they do not stick the ending. The overweight, underemployed, underdeveloped son trope, here embodied by Tuwaine Barrett, recurs from All or Nothing (2002).
Like Lee Tamahori Leigh has most often taken the women's point-of-view.
A Critic's Pick by Manohla Dargis. Wendy Ide: three stars. "Pansy is the most relentlessly abrasive character in a Mike Leigh film since David Thewlis’s rampaging Mancunian hate machine in 1993’s Naked." — but his running-at-the-mouth was far more amusing than anything here! Peter Sobczynski. Andrew Katzenstein summarises it at length for the New York Review of Books. Jason Di Rosso.
Mesrine: Killer Instinct (2008) and Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1 (2008)
Tue, Nov 18, 2025./noise/movies | LinkSomewhat strangely a Vincent Cassel jag from The Shrouds (2025). I'd say he's better here as a young man, in French, playing another bloke with a massive appetite who wants to live forever. Apparently a biopic of a master criminal (banks and kidnapping) of the 1960s and 1970s. The cinematography left me cold (things get very jittery every time there's some action). The lifestyle looked really boring: in and out of gaol, one lady at a time (or several depending on payment), no drugs. I had some difficulty figuring out if we were in Canada, the U.S.A., France or elsewhere. Over two nights as it's lengthy (in two parts) and my interest regularly flagged.
I didn't see anything here that hasn't been shown before: the indulgent, gleeful coupled-up ultraviolence of Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Natural Born Killers (1994), the notional charm of The Old Man and the Gun (2018), the sheer relentless percussive repetition of Gangs of Wasseypur (2012). The bloke was like a humourless Chopper (2000) who worked with and/or got many more chicks. It generally does not function as a time capsule (in contrast with the old Melvilles). At some point there's a kamikaze that made me wish I was watching another of Costa-Gavras's efforts. I guess every crim dreams of a lawyer like Mesrine's.
Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars for the first part, three-and-a-half stars for the second. Public Enemies (2009). A Critic's Pick by Stephen Holden: "Mr. Cassel’s monumental performance fuses the cobralike menace of the young Robert Mitchum with the whipsaw, shape-shifting (from wiry to bulbous) volatility of classic Robert De Niro, and lightens it with a cat burglar's grace and agility." — I wish I was watching what he did. Lots of gaps in the story. A Gallic Scarface (1983).
An accidental rewatch; I saw this at a cinema in Chicago in 2014 and forgot almost all of it. Written and directed by David Michôd after a spitballing with Joel Edgerton. No greater love has a man for his dog. Colin Stetson on the soundtrack!
A. O. Scott: "much of what happens seems arbitrary."
Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, and therefore inevitable. Apparently a loose adaption of Thomas Pynchon's Vineland (1990) which I'm even less likely to read now. As with its predecessor Licorice Pizza (2021) it is so nostalgic that maybe you had to have been there (or are there now). The appropriation of Gil Scott-Heron made me wonder what he would have made of these revolutionaries being filmed. It leans into gynephilia with mouth-breathing gusto. There's nothing much on the logic or philosophy of revolution, or even history beyond a stray comment from Benicio Del Toro about Mexico and a mention of the Philippines. Some of it dragged, like "gringo Zapata" Leonardo DiCaprio's password fails that were played for stale laughs. Teyana Taylor (A Thousand and One (2023)) does the heavy lifting early on; she departs with all the cabin pressure. Sean Penn as a Terminator-ish soldier doing domestic immigration police work. I did not get much of a grip on Eric Schweig's (The Last of the Mohicans (1992)) character. Alana Haim has a small role. Overlong. Jonny Greenwood's score is obtrusive. The humour felt downhill from the Coen brothers.
Widely feted as more-or-less the movie of the year; the competition is so thin I doubt it will be challenged. Dana Stevens: long in the oven. So many subcultures get their closeups. Oodles of cinematic debt: Leonardo's "wake-and-bake weed smoker and bathrobe-clad layabout" is (obviously) a direct lift from The Big Lebowski (1998), Penn nods to Sterling Hayden in Dr. Strangelove. What is Anderson actually saying here? Peter Sobczynski. Nashville! The firing of heavy machine guns by pregnant women/nuns ... I guess you just have to be American. Jonathan Lethem at the New York Review of Books: The Weather Underground (2002). Jason Di Rosso interviewed Anderson. And so on.
Directed and co-written by Derek Cianfrance (Blue Valentine (2010), The Place Beyond the Pines (2012), The Light Between Oceans (2016), Sound of Metal (2019)). For Kirsten Dunst, Ben Mendelsohn, Peter Dinklage — one could be forgiven for having expectations! Channing Tatum leads. Kirt Gunn was the other co-writer.
This is tabloid fare, more (based on) true crime from 2004. The story has many all-American trimmings, some cute: the mode of robbing a number of McDonald's (etc), living in a Toys'R'Us box store, meeting the love of a life at a Presbyterian church, being impoverished and at a loose end after military service, unable to keep up with the Joneses or wifely expectations of material plenitude, the Southern accents. The setup in the first half chugs along agreeably but after that things really drag. Dinklage probably does the best as a store manager; at least I found his acting (facial work) the funniest in an Office Space (1999) sort of way. I'm not sure what Mendelsohn was thinking as the church leader. Dunst does what she can as a woman who'd like to be saved in this world and the next.
There's a reality version over the credits which shows that about five minutes is enough to do the story justice.
Natalia Winkelman at the New York Times. Marya E. Gates at Roger Ebert's venue: two stars, "a slick but incurious film". Jason Di Rosso interviewed Cianfrance. The latter two both remark on some very good acting from Tatum and Dunst.
Directed by Robert Wise (The Set-Up (1949)) from a script by Abraham Polonsky and Nelson Gidding adapting William P. McGivern's novel.
Harry Belafonte led and was successful in a series of set-piece scenes, especially the jazzy ones in a nightclub where he memorably played the vibraphone and sabotaged Mae Barnes's performance of All Men Are Evil. Robert Ryan's (also The Set-Up (1949)) hard boiled racist is boring. Home-alone housewife Gloria Grahame had just enough screentime to ask "what’s going on in there? an orgy?" at his door (while his regular squeeze Shelley Winters is out working) but I couldn't believe Grahame would ever have been that hard up. Mastermind Ed Begley rounded out the trio of desperadoes from NYC who tried it on upstate, much as Linda Fiorentino did a few decades later. Unfortunately the plot is pedestrian and went as the production code required. Notionally noir but the best bits are jazz.
Vale Lee Tamahori (The Convert (2023)). Perhaps my third time around with his classic take on what it meant to be Māori in the latter half of the twentieth century. Riwia Brown adapted Alan Duff's novel of the same name from 1990. The cast is perfect. It now also functions as a time capsule of Auckland and surrounds.
Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. He didn't grasp any cultural specifities or comment on the cinematic aspects. Janet Maslin: she grasped more of the details but still produced some clangers. I guess international audiences latch onto the universals — the dispossession, the love and domestic violence, the alcoholism, the wayward children, etc. — and miss the carefully constructed nuances. For instance we're shown at least five versions of the overhang of traditional Māori cultural practice, of which one seems to endorse the removal of children from families and another the impossibility of social and economic mobility. Strangely absent were the All Blacks.
Greek director Costa-Gavras was unknown to me. He adapted Vassilis Vassilikos's novel of the same name with help from Jorge Semprún and Ben Barzman. It rates highly at IMDB on the paranoid/political thriller scoreboards, and indeed in general. Somewhat timely I guess, or perhaps it is always timely.
Yves Montand leads, at least for the setup, as a leftist politician who is in town to deliver a speech and rile up the masses. (Perhaps this is how George McGovern presented.) The local powers-that-be want to plausibly-deniably obstruct the gathering and just maybe put a stop to this socialist nonsense. But some go further than that, and then a magistrate ("Le juge d'instruction", an enjoyably ice-cold and chic Jean-Louis Trintignant) drives the whole show off a cliff.
It is incredibly well made and entirely engrossing. We're shown how everything goes down with scenes that are fluently sliced up in ways that exhibit the internal states and histories of the characters while leaving us solidly anchored in time and perspective. (Lone Star (1996) tried for a similar effect but was nowhere as ambitious.) The cast is solid, the pacing excellent, the telling well-humoured. It doubles as a post-war time capsule for Algiers. There's some good work on the soundtrack (by Mikis Theodorakis), especially in the scene where a bloke is cheating at pinball.
I was a bit mystified why this Greek director made this actual Greek story (from 1963) in French with French actors (excepting Irene Papas who mostly facially emotes) in Algeria. It got the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar for 1970 (submitted by Algeria!). Françoise Bonnot also deservedly won for Best Film Editing. I see that Costa-Gavras and Montand established a partnership similar to that of Melville and Delon (Le Samouraï (1967), etc.) and now have a new vein to mine.
Roger Ebert at the time: four stars, universal, Chicago and Sài Gòn. Armond White in 2009: it's not about the ideology... I'm not sure I can buy that. IMDB trivia: "The three-wheeled delivery vehicle that is referred to as 'kamikaze' is a 1965 Innocenti Lambretta Lambro 450."
More noir. Directed by Charles Vidor. Rita Hayworth (Only Angels Have Wings (1939), The Lady from Shanghai (1947)) leads, mostly desperately trying to catch Glenn Ford's attention after something unexplained went direly wrong with their previous romance. Inexplicably she turns up married to George Macready (a steely, Germanic performance not far from his turn as the General in Paths of Glory (1957)) who is running an illicit casino in Buenos Aires and has hired Ford as his number-two man. Steven Geray (Spellbound (1945), In a Lonely Place (1950), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953, etc. etc.)) as the bloke in the gents who does more than you want is somehow omniscient.
Schematically the plot is not terrible (it's not so far from Casablanca (1942)) but the script (IMDB says it was heavily doctored) was. The characters are generally inscrutable, the timeline doesn't really work, and who really cares about the international tungsten trade anyway? It's all a bit frustrating as there's enough there for it to have been something.
Bosley Crowther at the time: crude and nonsensical.
Something of the complement of Kubrick's Killer's Kiss (1955): a boxer (Robert Ryan) is expected to throw a fight but his manager got greedy and didn't tell him. His wife (Audrey Totter (Alias Nick Beal (1949)) wants him to retire and has a restless evening strolling the demimonde while he's in the ring.
Directed by Robert Wise (who went on to collect two Oscars each for West Side Story (1961) and The Sound of Music (1965); he edited The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) and Citizen Kane (1942)!) from a script by Art Cohn. Brief, completely linear, very well constructed; the crowd shots are telling and often horrible-hilarious against the tension of what's happening in the ring. One of those things people did before T.V.
The reviews were generally dire but I was curious to see what Benny Safdie could do without his brother Josh (Uncut Gems (2019)). The obvious referent is Aronofsky's The Wrestler (2008) and, like Mickey Rourke there, you cannot fault Dwayne Johnson's commitment. Apparently some parts are shot-for-shot remakes of The Smashing Machine (2002) and it is never clear why anyone would want that. (That earlier doco about early MMA fighter Mark Kerr was directed by John Hyams, making this an improbable jag from Capricorn One (1978).)
Fatally none of the characters have any depth. Emily Blunt's is the most annoying as she never found the right register; I felt she was miscast as there are plenty of American actresses who know how. In mitigation they did equip her with a beautiful cat. Nala Sinephro (having a moment?) mangled The Star Spangled Banner, and there's a scene that proves that some things even Bruce Springsteen cannot elevate. Perhaps they should have cast Adam Sandler.
Dana Stevens: superficial. Peter Sobczynski: quite flawed. Both struggled to discern what the Safdie(s) are trying to say and why anyone should care. Jason Di Rosso interviewed the cinematographer Maceo Bishop.
They may or may not have faked the Moon landings but they definitely faked the Mars landings! — and the reasons were uninspired. Written and directed by Peter Hyams who seemed to want to make something encompassing all the genres; bits and pieces sorta work but the whole thing is busted, ending up like the dog that caught the car. There are some vintage 1970s touches like two helicopters chasing a biplane cop duster. Shades of Firefox (1982). Elliott Gould! Karen Black! O.J. Simpson! (As you might expect from this 1990s performances he was always a poor actor.) David Huddleston! In two sittings as it's pretty tedious.
I'm always tempted to see what people make out of Henrik Ibsen's plays; a while ago I saw fantastic stage productions of A Doll's House and Ghosts, and even another bowdlerised version of Hedda at NIDA so long ago. This one took two nights to get through; it's airless and no fun. Directed by Nia DaCosta from her own adaptation of Hedda Gabler (~ 1891); she made the derided The Marvels (2023).
The scenario has Hedda (Tessa Thompson) swanning around a huge country mansion that she's convinced her new husband (Tom Bateman) is the prix d'amour. This night she hosts a party of academicians who will or won't grant him the role that could finance her lifestyle. (The house, the adults-behaving-as-kids, the psychologising, the substance abuse put me in mind of Steve (2025).) The whole edifice does not make a tonne of sense: so many scenes do not work, all of the characters are frenemies, and whyever would you bring your McGuffin to a party like that one? Imogen Poots, Nina Hoss, neither great. Hildur Guðnadóttir's score is often obtrusive.
A Critic's Pick by Natalia Winkelman at the New York Times: sure, Hedda just wants to have fun but what's in it for us? — and I definitely miss my appendix. "They say that lying is the second most fun a girl can have." Marya E. Gates at Roger Ebert's venue: two-and-a-half stars and an even-handed diagnostic. Peter Bradshaw: literally Chekhovian, as if there was any doubt. Peter Sobczynski.
