More Matthew McConaughey completism; he's so young here. Directed by Joel Schumacher from a script by Akiva Goldsman that adapted the book by John Grisham.
The premise is that Mississippi lawyer McConaughey is defending labourer Samuel L. Jackson on a couple of murder charges after the latter lays great vengeance and furious anger upon two rednecks who have raped his 10 year old daughter. The complete absence of greys in the racial, epistemic and moral setup means the whole edifice is mere emotive provocation, a chance for everyone to take to their soapboxes and spout the obvious catechisms about justice, vigilanteism, the death penalty, the optionality of underwear. Given Grisham's background as a lawyer it's surprisingly not very equal-opportunity about that. So much dodgy dialogue, so much dead air while we await the obvious outcome. It's not Mississippi Burning (1988), it's not 12 Angry Men (1957).
Some of the supporting cast had it a bit better than the leads: Sandra Bullock has some fun as a sultry northern scion as does Oliver Platt as a divorce lawyer. Kevin Spacey is a generically bland prosecutor in his signature smooth/slick/smirking mode. Kiefer Sutherland and Donald Sutherland phone it in. Not enough if asked of Chris Cooper. Brenda Fricker is solid but to no end.
Roger Ebert: three stars. McConaughey's climactic courtroom speech made me queasy too. Janet Maslin: there's more grey in there than I'm prepared to admit.
Prompted by wonderment about what else Kathryn Bigelow has done beyond fluffing the military (The Hurt Locker (2008), A House of Dynamite (2025)). Mostly written by James Cameron (tidied by Jay Cocks) as a high-concept scifi riffing on the Rodney King incident in Los Angeles... and still leaning heavily on a lot of hardware. The brain hacking/virtual reality angle, the Bladerunner badlanding of L.A., the Roboocop police brutality are pure 1980s cyberpunk. The dinky TDK CDs that carry the damning recorded experiences, the millenarianism, the grungy, exclusive nightclubs and soundtrack (Tricky's reworking of Karmacoma, Skunk Anansie), the Total Recall are pure 1990s. Ralph Fiennes, looking so young and winning and much like Bradley Cooper, leads as a sort-of Johnny Mnemonic vendor of experiences with a fatal obsession with Juliette Lewis who has run off with Michael Wincott. (Her acting is perhaps in line with the conceit but not with that of the other actors.) Angela Bassett (looking fabulous) and Tom Sizemore (what was with that hair) play his supportive buddies, rusted on, handy in a fight. Bizarrely Vincent D'Onofrio and William Fichtner have almost no lines, squandered as Terminator cops who commit the original plot point.
I didn't enjoy the restless, giddy camera very much. The soundtrack is obtrusive but works well as a time capsule. The maximalist set-piece scenes are effective in themselves. There's a relentlessness to most of it that is its own kind of tedium. Expertly assembled.
Roger Ebert: four stars. Vintage 1940s noir. The plot has a few issues. Janet Maslin: "explores [...] corruption so avidly that it happens to illustrate the same runaway sensationalism it condemns" — much like Natural Born Killers (1994). IMDB trivia.
More Matthew McConaughey completism after a sneaky rewatch of The Lincoln Lawyer (2011). He has a very small role here; Chris Cooper leads. John Sayles wrote and directed.
This struck me as some kind of Texan version of Tracy Letts's August: Osage County (2007) (Cooper is in the movie of that). It's got a dash of the Touch of Evil (1958) borderlands: whose land is it anyway, when the indigenous, Latinos and whites have all lived in Rio County, Texas for ages anyway? Perhaps they can agree that it ain't the Spanish's. There's some fabulously-shot shifts in time between the parental generation and Sheriff Cooper's who's doing his best to avoid drawing the movie-obvious conclusion that his father did not do it. The auxiliary shenanigans at a nearby army base centred on Joe Morton (Terminator 2 (1991)) were dispensable. Frances McDormand has a small scene as Cooper's ex-wife. Elizabeth Peña looks so lovelorn.
The whole thing is a bit clunky and every scene is mostly predictable. The ending upsets the applecart by brushing off the implications of incest.
Roger Ebert: four stars. Janet Maslin.
Oscar bait season has brought forth this first feature from director Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker (2008)) since 2017 or so. Once again with the unsteady handheld camerawork, the take-no-prisoners dialogue, the humourlessness.
It's a nuclear command-and-control thriller along the lines of Dr. Strangelove (1964) or Fail Safe (1964). We're drip fed information in an irritating structure (looping back to the same 18 minutes or so, synchronized by some signal events) and it is difficult to discern the details of the scenario; I'd say the goal is to get everyone to wet their beds and demand action. That action will probably take the form of more bucks for Golden Dome.
As cinema the cast had potential (Rebecca Ferguson’s accent wobbles disconcertingly like an old Doctor Who set, Idris Elba evokes Obaman hope, Jason Clarke is one of the few competent technicians, Tracy Letts a General who'd prefer to talk about the baseball, etc.) and the parts are expertly assembled into a slick whole. The flaw lies in the script by Noah Oppenheim (who has form for poor scripts) which is not worth much consideration.
So I'll limit myself to a few observations (possibly spoilers, if you're invested in this hokum). Why did whoever-it-was nuke Chicago? As far as I know the city has no strategic value, and you're only going to disappoint NYC if you're a believer in symbols; of course the east coasters are going to blow the world up for that insult. The final groundhog is something of a replay of George W. Bush's day on September 11, 2001, which in combination with it being an isolated attack suggests a War on terror do-over with a wiser head on the throne. What was the hurry to respond? (Google suggests an ICBM would take more like 30 minutes, not 18, to get to Chicago from the countries cited, and I repeat it is presented as a singular missile strike.) It seems clear that the U.S. submarines were still in contact with their controllers and hence capable of a MAD (mutually-assured destruction) response, so there was a lot more time to ruminate. We're shown one interaction with the Russian foreign secretary (as this would obviously still be Sergey Lavrov come what may they should've offered him the role) but if the world really is going to end I'd expect all the phones to be ringing off all the hooks; every country has an interest in cooperating with the U.S. to put the genie back into the bottle. (Consider what happened immediately after 9/11.) And so on — the railroading is ridiculous. The ending is a bust as far as these sorts of movies go, so maybe Bigelow is contemplating a sequel ... and what was that about Gettysburg?!?
Glenn Kenny at Roger Ebert's venue: four stars. Peter Bradshaw: five stars. A Critic's Pick by Manohla Dargis. Dana Stevens. Fred Kaplan rushed his hot take/analysis; the movie contains not one strategic flaw but many. I expect the U.S. cities would devolve into chaos no matter how the President responded. Contrarily, the Pentagon reckons their interceptors haven't missed in more than a decade.
The rating at IMDB is poor and dropping steadily, once again exhibiting the vast and increasing gap between the commentariat and the unwashed masses who are resisting being force fed; perhaps they're just waiting for Robert Downey Jr to return to the MCU, to make everything all right again. I except Peter Sobczynski who resides in the greatest city in the world.
Matthew McConaughey completism. I'd been putting this off for a long time as it seemed unappetising, and so it proved. Written and directed by Jeff Nichols (The Bikeriders (2023)).
We're somewhere in Arkansas on a river. Leads, the young boys Tye Sheridan and mate "Neckbone" Jacob Lofland, discover a boat in a tree on an island (I think; it may have been a remote unsettled elbow) which happens to be McConaughey's idea of a good time. The latter has his reasons to hang around but not for too long. Conversely the boys really should be doing other things, like going to school or helping with the fishing, but find ample time to aid the plot.
The remainder of the cast have minor roles. Sam Shepherd looks perpetually constipated as a former Marine sharpshooter. Michael Shannon is a young, apparently single uncle who collects shellfish for a living. Reese Witherspoon is the girl of youthful dreams. Lurv here does not function as it did in Interstellar (2012); father Ray McKinnon reckons it's not a load-bearing concept. A soft-focus misogyny permeates the whole script as marriages and lifelong infatuations dissolve due to the actions of the underdrawn women. Somewhat jarring are the odd grabs of some vintage Dirty Three tunes.
Directed by David Lowery (A Ghost Story (2017)) from his adaptation of a New Yorker article by David Grann. What a cast! — everyone must've wanted in on Robert Redford's final feature. Danny Glover and Tom Waits play his offsiders, all in avuncular mode. Sissy Spacek as the age-appropriate squeeze. Casey Affleck doesn't mumble! A John David Washington jag from a sneaky rewatch of Tenet (2020) (which made more sense on a rewatch, convincing me that it isn't worth a rewatch). He has a very brief scene in the middle somewhere that added nothing, as does Isiah Whitlock Jr. Elisabeth Moss is not plausibly Southern.
There's not much in the way of a story. It's about 1980. Redford plays a charming, aged gentleman bank robber (Forrest Tucker) who doesn't want to retire but wouldn't mind riding Spacek's horses in between the operations. He's escaped gaol 16 times so far. That's about it and it's not enough to carry a feature.
A. O. Scott: does you a kindness by taking your money. Dana Stevens.
Second time around. Matthew McConaughey as a space grandpa. Still hokum; it's all about the boomers wanting to be younger than their kids.
It seems likely that Mike Judge never got back to the heights of Office Space (1999) but I had to give this one a try. Luke Wilson leads. It starts out in a somewhat inspired but derivative mode but slides into dross. The epic-oversleep mechanic is identical to (one of?) the ending(s) of Army of Darkness (1992) which knew the limits of the lark. It may've worked better if it was bolted onto some other thing; the aesthetic is a somewhat less brutal Total Recall (1990), a movie that had a different idea about time travel.
... and in any case reality has now far outstripped anyone's imaginary.
Time travel, Seattle-style. For Aubrey Plaza who made hay with very dodgy dialogue in a perfectly deadpan performance. Some of it is very amusing though the humour falls away as the conceit — an advertisement for "someone to go back in time with me" — gives way to the needs of plot, which are of the unimaginative rom-com kind. Karan Soni's character would probably not have made it into a post-#metoo production. Jake Johnson does well as a vacuous writer for a magazine who knows what interns are for. Mark Duplass is also effective as the adwriter.
Directed by Colin Trevorrow from a script by Derek Connolly. These guys look they went on to mostly work on reboots (more's the pity).
Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. "How to make a time-travel movie containing no apparent paradoxes." Dana Stevens provides context. "[A]n unconvincingly Spielbergian happy ending." Stephen Holden.
nth time around with this Richard Burton / John le Carré classic. Directed by Martin Ritt (Hud (1963)) from an adaptation by Paul Dehn and Guy Trosper (One Eyed Jacks (1961), Birdman of Alcatraz (1962)).
Inevitable Spierig brothers completism after Daybreakers (2009). A maximalist zombie/scifi flick made for peanuts in Woodford, Queensland. I found it initially quite funny as the performances are quite arch, though that may have been due to the limitations of the cast. Soon enough it became tedious as the absence of plot becomes clear. The bodies-in-the-sky imagery is a direct lift from Magritte.
Roger Ebert: one-and-a-half stars. Ozmovies. Margaret and David: three stars each. Laura Kern for the New York Times: "it is a wonder it made it to the United States at all."
After a sneaky rewatch of the original True Detective (2014). Written and directed by Issa López. Happenings in a remote Alaska mining town over Christmas/New Year when the sun does not rise. Quite bad. I was so happy to clock Christopher Eccleston though his (minor) role is mostly explained while he is off screen. He shares an execrable sex scene with Jodie Foster. Kali Reis has her moments in valiant support as a sort of Dale Cooper (Twin Peaks) ingenue, and this points to the central flaw: it cannot make up its mind whether it is a supernatural or small-town horror. Far too many characters and jump scares, so much withheld information, malfunctioning scenes and dialogue of increasing quantity as the season drug on, so much auxiliary dross that did not further the story or characterisation. Nothing new is said. The cinematography is uninventive and flawed. I hated the soundtrack. It would have worked better as a two-hour movie, which is not to say it would have worked.
The ratings at Rotten Tomatoes show a massive divergence in opinion between the commentariat and the unwashed masses. Mike Hale at the New York Times.
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.
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.
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.
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.
