peteg | blog 2025-09-07-TheHand.autumn

The Things You Kill (2025)

Prompted by Ben Kenigsberg making it a Critic's Pick at the New York Times. Written and directed by Iranian/Canadian Alireza Khatami. Obviously shot in Turkey; IMDB says Ankara, which was somewhat familiar from the shots of mountain ranges and windy roads in previous movies set in Anatolia.

Taken literally there's not a lot going on: a forty-ish university professor who spent fourteen years in America has strained relations with his parents and eight-year younger wife that are further strained when his mother dies and his job (teaching comparative literature or translation or something) gets canned. His orchard/garden just out of town is too arid to produce much of anything and he can't get his wife pregnant; rectifications require illegalities. But of course we're supposed to be contemplating the metaphors of generational violence and so on that elevate the meaning of all those standard plot points. There's a bemusing David Lynch Lost Highway (1997) identity switcheroo.

Robert Daniels at Roger Ebert's venue: three-and-a-half stars. It may have been that the altered identity was morally corrupt but he was also more honest.

Anemone (2025)

Idle curiosity of the how-bad-can-it-be form; the dire IMDB rating suggests it is worse than the other British nepomovie by Kate Winslet and son. Both drew strong casts and reek of L-plates on the Lamborghinis. This one was directed by Ronan Day-Lewis from a script he co-wrote with his father Daniel Day-Lewis who got top billing.

For quite a while it's difficult to figure out when it is, where we are or what we're doing there, let alone who these people are and why we should care. Something breaks in some-kind-of-father Sean Bean's household so he departs on a Honda Africa Twin for a forest of unknown distance armed with the emergency coordinates of the abode of hermit Day-Lewis. This leaves mother Samantha Morton at home with her and somebody else's son Samuel Bottomley. From there things get revelatory with lots of talk and not much show: apparently these brothers are Catholics, brought up in a boys' home, something about child abuse, something about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, revenge as fantasy, violence, a there-it-is account of a war crime, sectarian hate, family, a bizzaro scifi dream sequence. (Near as I can tell Day-Lewis has avoided the scifi genre thus far.)

I guess the central flaw with this project is its unoriginal genericity, its insincere mimesis. Day-Lewis's hermit reminded me of Hugo Weaving's (does the British film industry also need some revival?) with moments lifted from the life and times of Francis Begbie. (Danny Boyle showed us his stories; here we get only words and extreme emoting.) Apparently there is and isn't redemption in Christ. Uncontrollable teenage violence is limply intimated, in contrast to the masterful Adolescence (2025). A Magnolia (1999)-esque hail storm with no consequences, no impact.

The cinematography is a mixed bag. Initially it was so dank and dark I couldn't figure out what I was being shown. The work outdoors is far better but the great floating shots on the beach of the brothers are presumably easy now with a drone. This is life with a soundtrack: maudlin 1970s retro English rock (Black Sabbath) and otherwise heavy-duty noise.

I watched after a sneaky revisit of Gangs of New York (2002). Day-Lewis again sports a moustache, a horseshoe evoking Sean Connery in his glory years (e.g. Zardoz (1974)). This, in combination with the meme that he's everyone's favourite actor and in nobody's favourite movie, suggests that the only solution to what ails Britain is for him to sign up as the next James Bond.

Manohla Dargis. Does it take place in the present day? (Someone toasts the Queen but I guess that could have been a nod to their glory years and/or an ironic acknowledgement of Charlie.) Adrian Horton: two stars. Painfully serious. Set in the late 1980s. Peter Sobczynski. It's too easy to spill words on this thing, itself mostly words.

Cover-Up (2025)

Apparently my first time around with a Laura Poitras doco. This is the media interviewing the media as the original sources take their stories to their graves and thereby avoid embarrassing themselves with deathbed confessions to Errol Morris.

Let me say upfront that interviewing Seymour Hersh was a worthy and thankless task. However there is so much padding — stock 1960s footage including the classic Việt Nam bombing sequence but not the now-controversial napalm girl, typewriter clacking accompanying ancient documentary evidence, grabs from many of his previous interviews — that it seems Poitras and co-director Mark Obenhaus came away with very little usable footage. Hersh refuses to dish on any source who is or may still be alive, leaving us with journalism war stories not so far from the ancient ones spun by Hunter S. Thompson, Woodward and Bernstein. As always with these docos, more dates were needed to anchor things in history.

Hersh is a funny no-sacred-cows kinda bloke. It gets amusing when he starts digging into corporations with Jeff Gerth while Hersh is at the New York Times; they start with Gulf and Western's accounts and proceed to the Times's, so of course he was going to get fired. Hersh is only thin-skinned when they try to discuss his wife or the shenanigans around his cash-in book on JFK and Monroe. His article that broke the My Lai massacre story was published in the Chicago Sun-Times on Thursday 1969-11-13; I was sufficiently disengaged to wonder if Roger Ebert had a review in the same edition. The New Yorker years are glossed over apart from Abu Ghraib; this really is a greatest hits compilation. I would've enjoyed more time with several of the auxiliary characters — General Taguba for instance. They don't delve into Hersh's presence on Substack or whether he's given any thought to leaving. Uncharitably it brought to mind Leonard Cohen's The Stranger Song: the film doesn’t get to the heart of this or any other matter, which is a shame as Hersh so often has.

A Critic's Pick by Manohla Dargis at one of his erstwhile employers. She says they interviewed him 42 times for this project. Peter Bradshaw: four stars. He was never cinematically feted, unlike the others mentioned above. Photographic evidence is now obsolete, with all forms of evidence soon to follow (?).

The Mouth of Madness (1994)

Somewhat idle John Carpenter (Dark Star (1974), The Thing (1982), Big Trouble in Little China (1986)) completism. He directed a script by Michael De Luca, who apparently had far more success as a producer, and did the soundtrack too: the metal licks are of the era.

The scenario has the writings of a horror novel author (eventually Jürgen Prochnow), bigger than Stephen King, become some kind of metafictional reality; it could be summarised, more or less, with the lines "I think therefore you are" and "God’s not supposed to be a hack horror writer" but that would be to miss the naff/goofy fun bits that kick in after a slow start. Insurance fraud investigator Sam Neill does well to hold it all together in the lead with some assistance from editor Julie Carmen and very straight publisher Charlton Heston. David Warner (Tron (1982)). Frances Bay plays a hotel concierge; she did a fair bit of work with David Lynch.

There's no doubt the whole thing disappears into its own self-satisfaction. I did not enjoy the jump scares that much, mostly because I didn't have enough opportunity to enjoy the extravagant practical effects. I imagine the kids had a ball (c.f. Weapons (2025)).

Roger Ebert: two stars. Janet Maslin.

Frankenstein (2025)

For Oscar Isaac and, to a lesser and diminishing extent, "written for the screen by"/director Guillermo del Toro. I watched the first twenty minutes or so a while back and put off the rest until now as it is lengthy and did not seem very promising, especially after his previous remakes (Nightmare Alley (2021), Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio (2022)).

Isaac finds himself excommunicated from the Victorian high science scene in London due to his ungodly "galvanic" experiments on cadavers of dubious provenance. In the audience (but not with us) is a miscast Cristoph Waltz who has more money than the godly due to supplying arms to some unnamed war on the continent. With those funds and a suitably spooky castle somewhere the modern Promethean tale unspools as it always has, without humour, terminating in some unearnt redemption as monster/Australian Jacob Elordi strides off into the sunset after a requited but unconsummated something-or-other with Mia Goth.

Visually it's mostly gloaming in the magic hour with some hydrophilic stuff recycled from The Shape of Water (2017). The CGI is not particularly good. It's graphic but not violent until it's graphic and violent. Aurally the soundtrack is mostly obtrusive heavy portentous music.

Often I felt like I'd seen most of it before. Elordi often seemed to be the second coming of Clancy Brown though the indestructibility/rapid healing and constructed-superhuman was perhaps more Hugh Jackman's Wolverine. (Can Elordi sing and dance?) There's also a dash of vintage Star Trek, of an adult human-alike learning what the kids already know, autonemesis. Motivation was generally lacking. I doubt this was on many best-of-2025 lists. All of which is to say that the story has been so thoroughly absorbed into the culture that there's little point serving it up straight now.

Peter Sobczynski. Dana Stevens spends a lot of words not talking about the movie. "[S]eems designed to be a moody steampunk melodrama." Lots of dazzling practical effects. Marya E. Gates: poor. Jason Di Rosso interviewed Guillermo del Toro and talked up Mia Goth. He liked her earlier stuff but she didn't have much to work with here.

Flow (2024)

An animated fable from Latvia. Apocalyptic without a clear moral. No dialogue (nothing was spoken in the version I watched). They got many of the cat behaviours right but not all: I've never met a cat with any loyalty not secured with food and the right kind of scratching, or seen one climb down a vertical structure (here a mast). I hadn't heard a feline growl in so long. The other animals mystified me.

I can't say I understood the point of it all. At one point things get a bit transcendental, a bit Terrence Malick as the bird ascends to something-or-other. It won the Oscar earlier in the year for best animated feature film; even so the animation itself struck me as a long way from the state of the art. Over two nights due to a lack of grip.

Calum Marsh made it a Critic's Pick at the New York Times. "[A]voids the sort of whimsy and sentimentality that might plague, say, a Disney movie with the same premise." Carlos Aguilar at Roger Ebert's venue: four stars. Wendy Ide: four stars. All claim there's not a lot of anthropomorphism going on. but really, come on.

Jigsaw (2017)

More Spierig brothers completism, and my first and last encounter with the never-promising Saw franchise. Also a pointer-of-sorts from Peter Sobczynski's review of Weapons (2025). Execrable. Obviously a money job for everyone.

IMDB has this rated higher than Winchester (2018); I can't agree.

Simon Abrams at Roger Ebert's venue: two-and-a-half stars and a lot of words. So bad it's sorta good (but only sorta). Apparently beneath everyone else's notice.

The Confession (L'aveu) (1970)

Inevitable Costa-Gavras and Yves Montand completism following Z (1969). Over two nights as I found it to be hard work, as was doubtlessly intended. Again in French.

In 1952, for reasons unshown, the Communist regime of Czechoslovakia decided to liquidate some of their leaders who were veterans of the Spanish Civil War. This apparently required a show trial. Most were then executed but a few were given life sentences instead. The bulk of the movie involves the interrogation of Montand — essentially wearing him down with privation and repetition over many months. His odd sharp ripostes to his captors, along the lines of why appeals to his being a good Communist and these charges of treason were contradictory, added welcome but insufficient depth to the politics. The scenes involving his wife (Simone Signoret) were well-constructed and sometimes effective (her response to having her house searched, the congratulations from her fellow factory workers to the trial's outcome).

By way of George Orwell, we know how this scenario goes. I hoped to gain some insight into what value these vintage Communist show trials had to these regimes; the charges were so vague, the evidence mostly omitted, that this process could have applied to anyone and should have convinced no one. It's unclear why Montand's character survived but the others did not. It didn't function quite as well as a time capsule. It closes with some footage of the occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968, which in combination with the swift reversals of fortune for the interrogators, showed that this approach to controlling the populace (?) was ineffective, brief and illusory.

Roger Ebert: four stars and an excellent review. Based on the memoirs of Lise and Artur London from 1968 (and once again adapted by Jorge Semprún). "Costa-Gavras has made a point of insisting that the movie is anti-Stalinist, not anti-Communist. For that matter, we had some show trials trying to get themselves under way in this country in 1952." Ironically in both of these movies we're shown states suppressing left-wing political movements. Vincent Canby. All about showing interiority by physicality. Fancy cinematic devices, again due to Françoise Bonnot. André Malraux: "A life is worth nothing, but nothing is worth a life." — a sentiment that did not make it far into the twenty-first century.

Deathtrap (1982)

A pointer from Peter Sobczynski's review of Wake Up Dead Man (2025) with the warning that it was intricately plotted but characterless, and hence unmemorable. Directed by Sidney Lumet from an adaptation of Ira Levin's stage play by Jay Presson Allen. Michael Caine, Christopher Reeve, Dyan Cannon connive in a manner too similar to the superior Sleuth (1972). As you can infer from the small cast and import of the leads there are many switchbacks that are mostly predictable as the movie disappears up its own fundament. Irene Worth's Dutch psychic is a bit tedious.

Roger Ebert: three stars. Reeve's performance "has a light, handsome comic touch not a million miles removed from Cary Grant's." Janet Maslin. Depthless.

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (2025)

Third outing for Rian Johnson's Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) character (after Knives Out (2019) and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022)). Again he wrote and directed, again with diminishing returns. Again I didn't really get into it.

The scenario has reformed street brawler/boxer/newly minted priest Josh O'Connor (La Chimera (2023)) sent to a small village somewhere in New York as punishment for punching out some other Catholic Church functionary. There he encounters Josh Brolin in messiah mode and soon enough Noah Segan as a barkeep in a devil-themed bar. Glenn Close keeps the church running. Doctor Jeremy Renner is bereft after his wife leaves him. Mila Kunis, implausible as police. Kerry Washington, a lawyer with a horribly caricatured adopted son Daryl McCormack. Jeffrey Wright! After excess setup there's a murder (surprise) and the explanations start with an hour to go. The exposition is abidingly excessive. The humour struck me as stale.

I had hopes that Johnson would innovate, for instance by having all of them do it, or none. But no, this is really a treasure hunt.

Dana Stevens: better than the last one. Peter Sobczynski: better than the last one.

The Lady Vanishes (1938)

Exotic, pre-war Europe. Margaret Lockwood is the upper class damsel who will soon be in distress. Michael Redgrave (The Quiet American (1958)), because Errol Flynn was unavailable? They meet sorta-cute and the rest is either irrelevant to the ending (they're getting married!) or they are mostly irrelevant to the plot. Director Alfred Hitchcock did not seem to have enough faith in the script (by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, based on the story The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White) to let us in on what was going on until my interest lapsed. There's some saucy dialogue of the "preview of coming attractions" kind between a mostly-auxiliary couple on the train.

Winchester (2018)

Some Spierig brothers completism. After a sneaky and satisfying rewatch of Predestination (2014). They wrote and directed with some help from Tom Vaughan on the script. Also for Sarah Snook (in an entirely unchallenging role). Jason Clarke led. Helen Mirren got top billing. Over two nights due to tedium.

This is the worst thing I've seen by them so far. The premise is that the ghosts of people killed by the Winchester rifle are haunting the wife of the company's founder. Her solution is to build a rambling mansion until Clarke can bring the necessary manliness. If I got it right, the solution to being haunted by vengeful ghosts killed with the Winchester rifle is to kill them with the Winchester rifle.

The cinematography is uninventive by their standards. I quickly got sick of the jump scares. There really is nothing going on here except for Bruce Spence who does well with the little he is given to work with.

Jeannette Catsoulis.

Souleymane's Story (L'histoire de Souleymane) (2024)

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.

Train Dreams (2025)

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 stood in need of the keen eye and wild inventiveness of a 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."

Jay Kelly (2025)

More guff from director/co-writer Noah Baumbach. (Emily Mortimer was the other co-writer and had 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 had some great scenes with Laura Dern (solid), impassive while her head, hair and hands went in all directions and her face took 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."

Brute Force (1947)

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.

Bosley Crowther.

If I Had Legs I'd Kick You (2025)

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 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.

No Way Out (1973) (aka Big Guns)

A Richard Conte jag from Thieves' Highway (1949). Also some Alain Delon completism. Completely dire.

Thieves' Highway (1949)

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.

Vincent Canby.

Hard Truths (2024)

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)

Somewhat 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).

The Rover (2014)

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."

One Battle After Another (2025)

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.

Roofman (2025)

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.

Odds Against Tomorrow (1959)

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.

Bosley Crowther.

Once Were Warriors (1994)

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.

Z (1969)

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 postwar 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 for the Criterion Collection 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."

Gilda (1946)

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.

The Set-Up (1949)

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 Smashing Machine (2025)

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.

Capricorn One (1978)

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.

Vincent Canby.

Hedda (2025)

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.

A Time to Kill (1996)

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 is 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.

Strange Days (1995)

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.

Lone Star (1996)

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 aeons? Perhaps they can all 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.

A House of Dynamite (2025)

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.

2025-11-16: Lavrov unsighted for three weeks, perhaps ousted.

Mud (2012)

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.

A Critic's Pick by A. O. Scott.

The Old Man & the Gun (2018)

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.

Interstellar (2014)

Second time around. Matthew McConaughey as a space grandpa. Still hokum; it's all about the boomers wanting to be younger than their kids.

Safety Not Guaranteed (2012)

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.

Idiocracy (2006)

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.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965)

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)).

Bosley Crowther.

Undead (2003)

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."

True Detective (Season 4): Night Country (2024)

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.

Dance First (2023)

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.

Daybreakers (2009)

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.

Primer (2004)

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.

The Shrouds (2025)

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.

The Batman (2022)

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.

A. O. Scott. Dana Stevens.

Gangs of Wasseypur (2012)

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.

Steve (2025)

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.

Under the Volcano (1984)

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.

Inside (2024)

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.

Dark Age (1987)

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!

Festen (1998)

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."

Caught Stealing (2025)

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.

Adolescence (2025)

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 (his weediness suggests he has no form for it) 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.

Motel Destino (2024)

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."

The Ballad of Jack and Rose (2005)

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."

Relay (2024)

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.

My Beautiful Laundrette (1985)

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.

Honey Don't! (2025)

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!

Fearless (1993)

Prompted by Rosie Perez's cameo in Spike Lee's latest. Here she is, a year on from White Men Can't Jump (1992), in a performance as a bereaved mother that got her an Oscar nom. And really, how bad can anything be with Jeff Bridges in the lead?

Well, I hadn't factored in director Peter Weir or the banality of writer Rafael Yglesias. Basically Bridges survives a plane crash and loses his fear, making him into some kind of angel, and, at times, a proto-Dude. He helps fellow-survivor Perez recover while leaving wife Isabella Rossellini mystified. It's schmaltz and nobody comes out of it well.

Roger Ebert: three stars. Vincent Canby couldn't quite bring himself to say meh.

Weapons (2025)

Prompted by Peter Sobczynski's positive review and Jason Di Rosso's sharp interview with writer/director Zach Cregger; I would otherwise have given it a miss as the genre generally doesn't appeal.

That American suburbia is its own special kind of horror was observed at length by David Lynch. Here young children mysteriously vanish one morning at 2:17am. We get told the story of the fallout in the community in chapters that take the perspective of about six characters whose activities intersect on a fateful couple of days a while after the event. This put me in mind of Magnolia (1999) and Brick (2005) (movies amongst my favourites). The (few) jump scares were dispensable. The gross outs were minimal (cartoonish like Tarantino) and the only egregiously violent bit could also have been omitted. The (somewhat harried) climax pays homage to Kubrick; it looks like the cast had a lot of fun shooting it. Room is left for a sequel.

The cast is quite good: Julia Garner does as well as I've seen her do, perhaps encouraged by the support of the broad shoulders of Josh Brolin, Benedict Wong and squeeze Alden Ehrenreich. Amy Madigan is fine in a more singular role.

Manohla Dargis: the AR15 in the sky evoked real-life school shootings. The structure I enjoyed was just a delaying tactic! She was not impressed. Di Rosso pointed to George Romero's zombie classics as vehicles for political criticism. Sobczynski was thoroughly grossed out. The structure is reminiscent of Altman. Sinners (2025).

The Hand (2004)

First time around with this brief (56 min) effort from Wong Kar-Wai and Christopher Doyle. It's once again 1960s in Hong Kong (a setting we got to know so well in their earlier work) and Gong Li finds herself in the lead as a working woman who is in demand until she isn't. Chang Chen (who apparently led in Edward Yang's A Brighter Summer Day (1991) which I have yet to get to) is her tailor-in-training. She encourages his belief in her with the titular means and yes, the dresses he makes for her are fabulous. Things are often shot in negative space, yielding such novelties as a bed making very mechanical noises (in contrast to earlier sexy scenes). There's a dash of The Remains of the Day (1989) ruefulness in how he never gets over his first, unrequited love.

Apparently this was originally the first of three movies released as Eros (2004). A. O. Scott expressed what I think is the common opinion that this was the only one that worked. Roger Ebert appreciated it but did not give a rating (?).

Highest 2 Lowest (2025)

Spike Lee's latest, a reheat of Kurosawa's High and Low (1963) which drew on Ed McBain's novel King's Ransom (1959). A surfeit of raw material!

Denzel Washington leads, somewhat ruefully and at times with excessive force, as a music mogul still with the best ears in the business despite his autumnal years. Notionally he had it all before losing control of his record label so we're shown a series of airless business meetings that aim to put things right. (Wendell Pierce (Superman (2025)) got a very few moments to administer an unsatisfying coup de grâce that we somehow know is not going to be consequential.) This setup had little relevance to the main thread where "Yung Felon" A Rocky abducts a son and stars in a few music videos. I enjoyed Jeffrey Wright's performance (as a bottled-up but explosive older felon) far more than I usually do; a career-best effort even? Ilfenesh Hadera as Denzel's wife was static. Rosie Perez got a cameo that reminded me of White Men Can't Jump (1992) and I had to wonder what could have been.

Along those lines: the story and editing were too disjointed for me to fully grasp Lee's point. There's money versus morality but nowadays the currency is not just cash and hits on the archaic music charts (if it ever just was) but also likes on social media and avoiding the omnipresent opprobrium of the mob. (Lee misses a trick by not equating the vacuous, manufactured, soulless pop music that has historically dominated the charts with present-day influencer chic.) Doing the right thing apparently leads to more success and therefore more luxe consumption. Some parts felt like a retread of Mo' Better Blues (1990), which contends that the entirety of American culture is due to the efforts of Black people, but this lacks a Wesley Snipes to take the edge off Denzel. The cops were useless and the well-worn class distinctions were observed.

Dana Stevens. Intercutting the Puerto Rican Day Parade footage with the high-stakes train sequence did not work for me either. A glitchy screenplay. Manohla Dargis. Uneven casting. Things between men stood against the patriarchy of the family. Peter Sobczynski. But the first half is boilerplate ... Later: Michael Wood summarised it.

Made in Hong Kong (1997)

Fruit Chan's breakthrough feature. I haven't seen anything from him before. Over two nights as I found it a bit of a grind.

Sam Lee does well in the lead as a low-level triad member, or at least a debt collector for a local Hong Kong hood. He gets organised with Faye Wong-adjacent Neiky Hui-Chi Yim during a job of work but actually has a thing for suicide Ka-Chuen Tam; his life goes wonky after he recovers her two final notes. The concluding thirty minutes is trying as Chan struggles to find a moral to draw; ultimately it seems to be that everyone's life has a story for everyone else's life.

The teenage rebellion/do nothing-ism/tang ping reminded me somewhat of Rebels of the Neon God (1992) and so I was surprised to find them tied at #58 on the Golden Horse list of the 100 Greatest Chinese-Language Films. (That movie is far more engrossing than this.) Some of the cinematography is good, perhaps because it leans so heavily into Christopher Doyle and Wong Kar-Wai's style.

Career Girls (1997)

Second time around with Mike Leigh's followup to Secrets and Lies (1996). The two-track structure follows besties Katrin Cartlidge and Lynda Steadman over their time at university and six years later as thirty year olds. I doubtlessly missed all the fine class markers but it's clear that getting educated has not lead to the employment or men of their dreams; Leigh wants to push the determinism of origins, particularly family. The prospective men are all caricatures or at best shorthands, such as Andy Serkis's futures trader who is all nerve endings. There's less pain here than usual and more ruefulness. Minor by Leigh's lofty standards.

Roger Ebert: three stars. Yep, Leigh missed a trick by not getting Ewan McGregor for the real estate agent role. Janet Maslin: Cartlidge adapted David Thewlis's performance from Naked (1993) in something of a role reversal. Every character is an island.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)

Inevitable after Fury Road (2015). I wasn't interested at the time as I'm not much of a fan of Anya Taylor-Joy; she leads here but is in at most two-thirds of it. (Alyla Browne is fine as the younger version of her character and I was happy she got so much screen time.) Things are once again batshit but less relentlessly so; I feel director/co-writer George Miller and co-writer Nick Lathouris had too much plot to get through, too much to explain or retconn, which yielded an excess of dialogue and straitening. For instance we know from the start that Chris Hemsworth's Dementus (a vintage performance of principled (or at least philosophical) boganism right up there with David Wenham's) is not going to make it. That and the aimless riding around the Wasteland robs it of tension. The CGI did not do justice to the stunts.

Jason Di Rosso interviewed Miller and producer Doug Mitchell. Dana Stevens. Peter Bradshaw. Luke Goodsell had seen enough of it before. Andy Hazel on the making of. The budget was huge.

Crime Story (1993)

Apparently Jackie Chan's first serious dramatic role. The entirety is serious excepting a few brief comedic bits in the middle that made me wonder what could have been; perhaps those were directed by Chan rather than Kirk Wong (The Big Hit (1998)). The plot started out looking like a dry run for Infernal Affairs (2002) but shifted to something more vanilla. There's a trip to Taiwan that echoes A Better Tomorrow (1986). Some aspects dangle; police psychiatrist Ling Ling Pan has no influence over anything. Kent Cheng pays off his paramour (Christine Ng) with an abode on the Gold Coast. The cinematography and editing are mostly excellent.

Some details at Wikipedia. Claims to be derived from a real story. The (nuts) climactic scenes were shot in the soon-to-be-razed Kowloon Walled City. City on Fire.

Superman (2025)

Dreckier than the reviews suggested. Writer/director James Gunn more-or-less just leaned on recycled MCU tropes, an admission that the Superman character is now too boring to anchor an entire feature. David Corenswet led but was eclipsed in all his scenes by everyone else: Bradley Cooper as Jor-El, Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor, Nathan Fillion from Firefly/Serenity. Rachel Brosnahan had more to work with than she did in The Amateur (2025) but her Lois Lane is still no more than a damsel not in distress. Parker Posey did far better as Luthor's girlfriend/sidekick in Superman Returns (2006) than model Sara Sampaio here.

There's far too much exposition, most of it delivered rapidly by walk-and-talk, much of it denying the possibility of deep fakery against a backdrop of generic CGI. Perhaps the dog swung it for the susceptible.

Dana Stevens: "What if, instead of forever grittily rebooting the same stories, we let ourselves hope for something different and good?" Peter Sobczynski: "yet another misfire"; cluttered with characters who will soon get their own reboots.

The Sun Also Rises (1957)

More Errol Flynn completism, and for Ava Gardner too. This adapts Hemingway's take (1926) on the Americans who stayed behind in Europe, specifically Paris, after World War I, and while I did somewhat enjoy the later A Farewell to Arms (1929) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) I won't be seeking out the source material for this one.

There are many problems with this movie. The largest by far is that Flynn steals every scene he's in; his Scottish-gentry dipso is magnetic and graceful where leading man Tyrone Powell is leaden, declamatory, wooden. Gardner is clearly rusted on to the wrong man but that's her prerogative as the only American girl-woman in Paris and Pamplona. (She's a lot younger here than, for instance, The Night of the Iguana (1964), where she shows more determination to get what she wants.) Too many ancillary characters don't contribute to what we're shown though are perhaps necessary to illustrate the multitudes Papa Hemingway thought he contained. But his notions of manliness are variations on a very narrow theme.

The cinematography is often quite good but was just as often ruined by the editing. The street fete/carnival scenes are chopped up so poorly; Coppola did far better in The Godfather Part II (1974).

Bosley Crowther gave it the thumbs up. "[Gardner] simply doesn't, or can't, convey the lady's innate, poignant air of breeding, for all [her] promiscuity. Sorry, Miss Gardner." Details at Wikipedia. Hemingway himself: "I guess the best thing about the film was Errol Flynn." Too many bistros.

Meek's Cutoff (2010)

More slow cinema from director Kelly Reichardt and writer Jonathan Raymond (also jointly responsible for First Cow (2019)). Once again on the Oregon Trail. In a couple of sittings due to a lack of grip.

The script is a bit weak with the usual tropes: an encounter with a native American divides the settlers in the obvious way, disaster strikes but even before that hunger and thirst are close. The men and women are divided along gender and every other line. And then it just evaporates.

This leaves the stellar cast with not enough to do. Bruce Greenwood (Exotica (1994), The Sweet Hereafter (1997)) plays a coarse outdoorsman who is charged with leading the group to the promised land. Will Patton, in his least creepy role ever, has Michelle Williams as his second wife. She's the actual lead, or at least the most interesting. Shirley Henderson forms half of another couple, and similarly Paul Dano.

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. "More an experience than a story." A Critic's Pick by A. O. Scott. Reichardt had already spent a lot of cinematic time in Oregon. Dana Stevens: "there's something about [Williams's] character that doesn't sit quite right." I agree: she never seems to bear the risks she runs.

Spit (2025)

A sequel to Gettin' Square (2003) that nobody asked for, much like T2 Trainspotting (2017). David Wenham starred (of course) and produced. He's hard to hate. Chris Nyst wrote and Jonathan Teplitzky directed both. Timothy Spall, Freya Stafford, Sam Worthington and Richard Carter do not return; Carter's character got recast (Bob Franklin).

It's a nostalgia kick. The plot is very woolly, the jokes very stale, the confected slang trying. The retroconned backstory moved things from the zany subtropical crime scene toward Australiana soap-and-away. The reheating of scenes from the original, specifically that court scene, are cringe. Redemption! They try to reflect multiculturalism via asylum seekers, Syrians and Maori (hey that's Indira!). Sombre, elegiac: so much death. Mere TV.

Luke Buckmaster. Sandra Hall. Both indulge the local product.

Irma Vep (1996)

Maggie Cheung completism. Released the same year as Comrades: Almost a Love Story (1996).

Mainly this critiques the sad state of French and American filmmaking both directly and via the reductive meta navel gazing mechanism of freshening up a French classic of the silent era (Les Vampires (1915)) with a foreign actress (Maggie). Auteur Olivier Assayas loved the conceit so much he remade this very movie with Alicia Vikander in 2022.

Some of it is amusing (I did enjoy Nathalie Richard’s efforts as the costumer) but there's a tad too much of the French self-referential tradition that I lacked the background for. That made it mostly about Maggie for me: she cops some stick for starring in Police Story (1985) with Jackie Chan. An interviewer lays it on thick by championing Bullet in the Head (1990) and John Woo's masculinity. Does she think Alain Delon is much chop? Even his repetition and inarticulate slagging-off of arthouse cinema is of a piece with the rest of it: heavy-handed and stale.

The best parts were Maggie notionally playing herself, unaffectedly out of her element in Paris but speaking enough French to bring into question her ignorance of the other proceedings. She made a great catwoman and perhaps Hong Kong should have paid tribute to Hollywood with a Batman remake.

Janet Maslin: sardonic. Stephanie Zacharek let her youthful exuberance run away with her.

Ellis Park (2024)

At Alice Springs Cinema, cinema #2, front row, 18.30, almost just me. Directed and co-written by Justin Kurzel (The Order (2024), etc.). Nick Fenton is credited as the other co-writer. It seemed to take an age to get a release (on 2025-07-12?) after its premiere at MIFF 2024 last August.

There are three interleaved storylines. One has Warren Ellis engineering the soundtrack for this movie in Paris and is essentially padding. I guess it's sorta fun hearing him speak French and wondering what the sound engineer makes of his Australianisms. And hear him layering sounds, some of which reminded me of Ben Frost. Another lays out the purpose of the Ellis Park home for trafficked animals, perhaps too briefly. (The park of that name in Adelaide (where the best speed in Australia may or may not be sold) and the famous rugby field in Johannesburg do not feature. Kurzel shows that he is no David Attenborough, or Errol Morris for that matter.) The main thread tracks Ellis on a visit to Victoria, presumably in 2023 as he was recording Love Changes Everything (2024) with the Dirty Three, released after their Australian tour in 2024, through to a visit to the titular park in Sumatra and the passing of his father in December 2023.

The early camerawork during the return to Ballarat was not promising but at some point things settled down enough for me to enjoy Ellis's unaccompanied violin in spaces that had meant something to him as a young man. I'd forgotten that he'd released a memoir (Nina Simone's Chewing Gum (2021)) and therefore lacked the context that may have made that motif more significant than twee.

The homepage for Ellis Park Wildlife Sanctuary suggests that Nick Cave is also putting in some cash (personally and via their Goliath Enterprises vehicle). Cave himself appears but only in archival footage. No other musician speaks except Ellis's father; Ellis tells us that his father wrote songs by opening a book of poetry and singing it to whatever chords he was playing, a process that is clearly inapplicable to Ellis's wordless music. At some point Ellis says to the prime motive force for the Park, Femke den Haas, that he doesn't want to be "that person" (elsewhere: Bono) but it struck me that throughout the whole movie, he is that person. This indulgence is smothered by worthiness and redeemed by Ellis's ability and willingness to trust and muddle forward, and be increasingly open about himself. Even so I was looking at my watch after the first hour.

I avoided the coverage before I saw it. Luke Buckmaster saw it at MIFF 2024. He seems to get (but doesn't spell out) the Heart of Darkness aspect of the journey to Sumatra. Indigo Bailey talked with Ellis recently. He might be right that cynicism doesn't get you anywhere. Andy Hazel was on the shoot (?) and I'd've preferred to have seen what he wrote about. Andrew Dominik on Ellis: "He appears to be letting it all hang out, but he’s not really telling you anything about himself." Kirsten Krauth: the through line is trauma. It could've should've been Fitzcarraldo (1982) but Kurzel is not Herzog either. The filmmaking process was somewhat therapeutic for Ellis but did not prevent a year-long breakdown between initial shooting and completion. An incomplete portrait. Jason Di Rosso interviewed Kurzel as did many others. And so on.

Max Max: Fury Road (2015)

I always enjoy listening to George Miller chatting about his life philosophy (he's regularly on the ABC) but am generally less enthused by his movies (Mad Max (1979), the premise of Lorenzo's Oil (1992), Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022), etc). Apparently I saw this one before but I don't remember.

This time around I felt like Roger Ebert must have felt when he finally understood David Lynch via Mulholland Drive (2001): the relentless action of the first movement is all too much and yet when things slowed down I felt that every moment spent on the plot was wasted. The reason is that Miller does a huge amount of character development through interaction and not dialogue. And fashion, let's not forget that. This must be Nicholas Hoult's finest performance. Shot by John Seale. #182 on the IMDB top-250 list. What a blast.

Thunderbolts* (2025)

The dreck that Florence Pugh makes me watch. The main problem here is that she's so much better than everything else on the screen; perhaps it is time she took a leaf from Clint Eastwood's playbook and sunk her MCU winnings into her own production company.

This movie's purpose is to get a team together, much like earlier MCU instalments, Suicide Squad (2016), Justice League (2017), etc. Getting in the way is the need to acknowledge general eye-rolling exhaustion with this stale property. The writing room's solution was to smoodge Pixar's Inside Out (2015) with a Cube (1997) multiverse into something very emo. The superman thing initially put me in mind of Matthew Goode's Ozymandias in Watchmen (2009) but really it's a humourless reheat of Iron Man 3 (2013) or Age of Ultron (2015) with a dash of that Guardians (2014) zaniness. So, not entirely fan service, just mostly fan service.

On the civilian side we get Geraldine Viswanathan (same-same as she was in Drive Away Dolls (2024): a relatable Gen-Z/Gen-Alpha everywoman type?) playing baddie Julia Louis-Dreyfus's personal assistant. The Kierkegaard regurgitation is cringey, and there's way too much "exposition" with "finger quotes". Were these scenes from an aborted Seinfeld reboot?

It took me a while to recognise Lewis Pullman; he has the same eyes and sheepish grin as his dad Bill. Perhaps he'll be President one day! (Later I found out he was in Bad Times at the El Royale (2018)). The homage to The Matrix was lame. Settling his personal (brain chemical) issues with violence was lame. Not being asked to factor huge numbers was lame. So much lame.

Manohla Dargis. I did not enjoy David Harbour's showboating. Flo's doing her own stunts, just like Tom Cruise ... therefore Mission Impossible beckons? Brian Tallerico at Roger Ebert's venue. Hannah John-Kamen really did get a numpty of a character.

Spirited Away (2001)

I've seen a few of Miyazaki's movies (Howl's Moving Castle (2004), The Wind Rises (2013)) but somehow not this, his masterwork. The art is gorgeous. I can't say I grasped the whole mythos; I think it's a Japan-ified Wizard of Oz. There's a small homage to it and to Pixar as the young girl makes her way up a path. The humour is fantastic. #31 in the IMDB top-250.

Roger Ebert: four stars at the time and another four stars as a "great movie" in 2012. Alice in Wonderland. Kamaji is a great invention. (It was the hopping light pole that I took as a homage to Pixar.) This "ma", the emptiness between actions, is exactly what George Miller omitted. Elvis Mitchell made it a Critic's Pick. Apparently now a stage production.

Y tu mamá también (2001)

I dodged this movie at the time but just now got suckered by the New York Times placing it at #18 on their list of the best movies of this century. I am not a fan of the director/co-writer Alfonso Cuarón (Children of Men (2006), Gravity (2013), Roma (2018)) which made it hard to indulge. The other co-writer was his brother Carlos Cuarón.

This is adolescent male fantasy stuff though I grant that the pervy camera ecumenically reduces everyone to sex objects. It's a pile of cliches: the mateship of two horny young blokes from Mexico City is put to the test by an older, marginally more mature but similarly oversexed woman from Madrid who has her reasons to get loose and enjoin them to a road trip to a paradisaical beach. The narration aims for the quirkiness of contemporaneous Amelie (2001) but adds little. There's not one but two lame Fight Club (1999)-esque manifestos. The only thing anyone ever thinks about or discusses is sex, so much so that they're getting it on in public.

Roger Ebert: four stars and a lengthy summary. There's a semi-serious critique of Mexican culture/politics/etc. bubbling along underneath! — what I saw I dismissed as mere colour. His main point was it goes where American movies could not. Elvis Mitchell.

The Survival of Kindness (2022)

Written and directed by Rolf de Heer. It took many goes to get through, mostly because there's nothing of interest here unlike some of his previous features like Ten Canoes (2006) and Charlie's Country (2013).

The lack of dialogue and the overly-photographed locations (the Flinders Ranges and (IMDB tells me) Tasmania) means the experience degenerates to parsing visual cliches. The obviously-bad guys mumble in something vaguely Germanic, wear World War I-era gas masks like an old episode of Doctor Who and wield bolt-action rifles of a similar vintage. Obviously bad guys are white and racist and so they strand Mwajemi Hussein (credited as BlackWoman) in a cage on a trailer in a salt pan in the middle of nowhere for reasons unknown. She breaks out and walks to an industrial area, having a few unkind encounters along the way, where she is enslaved (I think), again in a Doctor Who sort of way. Breaking free she returns to her country with an injured young Indian woman (Deepthi Sharma credited as BrownGirl) only to expire in the locked cage on the trailer as if it was all a dream.

I guess you could consider it a theatrical take on the great cycle of life, the karmic wheel, the alienation of humanity from both nature and industry, the survival of a woman named Kindness, I don't know. Nothing much is made of the fact that she is Black but not Australian Indigenous. It reaches for District 9 (2009) at times but lacks the humour of that and The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (1971). The best bit was Sharma doing tai chi in a graveyard with a mountain backdrop. The cake at the start reminded me of the The Missing Picture (2013).

Surprisingly widely reviewed. The mainstream reviewers tried to boost: Luke Buckmaster (cryptic, meditative, burrows in deep), Paul Byrnes, and less so Peter Bradshaw (dreamlike, floatingly indeterminate). Those less reflexive about pumping the local product were unenthusiastic: Norah Masige (essentialises coloured people, trauma porn), Nadine Whitney (unsubtle).

The Phoenician Scheme (2025)

Wes Anderson's latest. He's been in linear decline since The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) and this continues that trend. The repeated verbal tics (Benicio Del Toro's "Myself, I feel very safe" and "Help yourself to a hand grenade") echoed those in Jim Jarmusch's similarly unsuccessful The Limits of Control (2009). The holes in the plot are observed (in a scene with Jeffrey Wright) then brushed off. By then, or perhaps it was when Scarlett Johansson contemplated marriage, or when I realised Mia Threapleton was going to deliver everything flat, I had stopped trying to follow anything. Visually it's OK but he's done better.

Dana Stevens: "Wes Anderson’s New Movie May Be His Worst Yet." Peter Sobczynski: is it or is it not "another odd and idiosyncratic trifle from Anderson"? And so on.

Suzume (2022)

Visually lush animation. Written and directed by Makoto Shinkai. I wasn't so enthralled that I didn't feel the echoes of American teenage classics Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986) and Catcher in the Rye (1951). The synthetic mythos was probably mostly of a piece with Japanese lore (like Godzilla (1954)) but the literal doors between realms is a tired trope that doesn't hold up too well in the action sequences.

The plot has the teenage heroine somehow unplugging a god in cat form from a node that prevents earthquakes. She then traverses Japan (how much I do not know) in pursuit of the incoherent animal with a bloke who has been transformed into a chair; the chair put me in mind of Wall-E (2008). Along the way she has a few funny vignettes about Japanese life, which, like the rest of the movie, hint at dangers that we know will not matter. The conclusion is all schmaltzy love like Interstellar (2014). This mother-daughter (and/or self) love stands in stark contrast to the rest of the movie where (as far I could be bothered to remember) nobody is coupled up.

I don't think I've ever met a cat that wouldn't prefer to help destroy (at least parts of) the human realm. The theme of doors that need closing, the ancestor worship, the evocation of the firebombing of Tokyo (? — or Hiroshima or Nagasaki) suggest the auteur is pining for historically insular Japan.

Maya Phillips: leans on Miyazaki's Spirited Away (2001) and Howl's Moving Castle (2004). Brian Tallerico at Roger Ebert's venue: three stars. A Japanese movie that was big in China.

The Name of the Rose (1986)

Apparently before Dan Brown there was Umberto Eco. Directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud (Seven Years in Tibet (1997)). Apparently this revived Sean Connery's career sufficiently for him to go on to greater heights in Highlander (also 1986)... or was it the other way around? A very young Christian Slater. Michael Lonsdale does his usual.

Rationalist Franciscan monk Connery arrives at an austere knowledge-preserving Benedictine monastery in wintry northern Italy in 1327 as bad stuff is happening. Supernatural or just a side effect of things having to change to stay the same? Or a foreshadowing of a debate about how much property Jesus had? Or perhaps merely an excuse for the Inquisition (in the form of F. Murray Abraham) to intervene? Slater is Connery's pupil, notionally recounting the events from old age. Without his entanglement with "the girl" (Valentina Vargas) I doubt it was all that memorable. So much effort was poured into something so humourless.

Roger Ebert: two-and-a-half stars. Connery as "the first modern man"; shades of Zardoz (1974) therefore. It could have been something. (And that was a barrel of pig's blood not wine!) Vincent Canby. Obviously Holmes and Watson.

All or Nothing (2002)

Second time around with another vintage Mike Leigh. Since High Hopes (1988) the working class has been evicted from their townhouses and corralled into the projects. Ruth Sheen works at the supermarket with Lesley Manville. Both are fantastic though Manville sometimes gets too close to Blenda Blethyn's performance in Secrets and Lies (1996) for my comfort. She has two children with the very stable cab-driving Timothy Spall who mumbles his way to greatness; he shares a fantastic slow-burning scene with notional-Frenchwoman Kathryn Hunter (one of a montage of cab riders) and a tragicomic fundraising round with his family. Sally Hawkins is so young here. Mostly it's a bunch of character studies — Spall and Manville picking up where Sheen and Phil Davis left off in 1988 — until a crisis brings the stakes into sharp relief.

I have a feeling that Leigh pushed the winning formula a bit too far this time and perhaps he felt the same way; his next effort was Vera Drake (2004).

Roger Ebert: four stars. The final scene brings that dominant positive emotion of the twenty-first century, relief. A Critic's Pick by A. O. Scott. Lots of swearing. Four stars from Peter Bradshaw and a ranking of the caricatures.

Pawno (2015)

#70 on David Stratton's list of marvellous movies. Directed by Paul Ireland from a script by Damian Hill who also starred. Astronomy Class provided the opening track (Four Barang In A Tuk-Tuk) but lead John Brumpton (Romper Stomper (1992)) prefers talkback radio on his commute to his pawnshop in Footscray.

This is a series of vignettes about some people centred on that shop. The suburb felt tiny, that everyone knows everyone, but without a justification like the house sharing of John Birmingham's He Died With a Felafel in His Hand (2001) or a life event as in Erskineville Kings (1999). (The bookshop here is a clanger, a built-yesterday outpost of inner-city clean living whereas Gould's there was a decades-long grimy landmark.) Or the hermetic asociality of boarding-house Brisbane and Sacha Horler in Praise (1998). The vibe is 1990s, a time when you could idle on the street all day, live on the kindness of rollies begged from strangers, bet on the dogs at all hours. The audience were all young smokers then and probably noticed the absence of pubs in this scenario.

The script is generally weak. I did not enjoy the time spent with the two blokes evoking Jay and Silent Bob; Malcolm Kennard aims for Spiteri but he's no David Wenham while Mark Coles Smith is saddled with a numpty of a character that prevents him using the skills he showed in Last Cab to Darwin (2015). Ngoc Phan, essentialised, WTF. Naomi Rukavina, WTF. The dialogue is often cringe worthy and I could often predict it, especially as the romance between pawnshop-employee Hill and bookshop-employee Maeve Dermody warmed up with seconds to go. (She seemed a bit lost so far from Mosman.) Many of the storylines dangled — Kerry Armstrong beamed in from another movie for a bit, one closer to Lantana (2001) — while suicide and sundry heaviness descended without much thought or motivation. (I read Hill committed suicide in 2018; he radiates unhappiness throughout. See Wikipedia for a link to The Rooster (2023).) It doesn't even function as a time capsule of the place or era.

Heavily pumped by Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz at the time. Luke Buckmaster: two stars. Russell Marks at brutal and tenderising length. Mike Leigh-adjacent, poorly executed. (I'm not sure I agree but this is obviously not The Pawnbroker (1964).) Marketed multiculturalism, nostalgia for the mythic monoculture. Ruther Scouller also got the Bryan Brown vibes from Brumpton. Rod Quinn: "I never thought that hanging out in a pawnshop all day would be all that interesting, and I think that this film proves that."

Vampire's Kiss (1988)

A pointer from Peter Sobczynski's review of The Surfer (2025) to a less hinged performance by Nicolas Cage. Directed by Robert Bierman from a script by Joseph Minion who also wrote the similar After Hours (1985). In two sittings. I should have known better.

As everyone knows NYC is full of office jobs but really it's about the nightlife. For unclear reasons literary agent Cage is going nuts and imagines he has a mutually-satisfying thing going with vampire Jenifer Beals (Devil in a Blue Dress (1995) etc.). Maria Conchita Alonso (The Running Man (1987)) plays his secretary, Elizabeth Ashley (Happiness (1998)) gamely and gravelly his shrink. Throughout I felt I was laughing at more than with when I wasn't bored. The misogynistic violence is misguided, uninspired, tasteless. There is no point.

Caryn James. Peter Travers. IMDB trivia: a source book for Christian Bale's performance in American Psycho (2000).

Fortress (1985)

Another ozploitation pointer from Harry Windsor. Directed by Arch Nicholson from a script by Everett De Roche (Long Weekend (1978), Road Games (1981), etc.) derived from Gabrielle Lord's novel from 1980 which drew inspiration from the actual Faraday School kidnapping of 1972. And obviously Lord of the Flies.

There's not a lot to it. Somewhere out near the Grampians and/or Gippsland (the Buchan Caves) we meet Rachel Ward in a farmer's homestead, implausibly sleeping alone. She's the teacher at the local one-room all-grades school. After the customary horsing about by the kids four masked blokes get the action started with their sawnoff shotguns, hustling the cast into a rusty old Ford van. Things go as they must from there, incorporating enough gore and wildlife shots to meet expectations for the genre. Ward struggles with fractions but knows her high science. A very young Asher Keddie appears as one of the younger kids. Robin Gray's soundtrack is generally obtrusive. Essentially TV.

John J. O'Connor at the New York Times at the time: "Throughout, Miss Ward has the good sense to look as if she would rather be back in the mini-series The Thorn Birds." All the details at Ozmovies. "Mutton Dressed as Rambo." Ward lacks the conviction and dramatic range to pull it off. The novel has her character contemplating an abortion; "Without exploring, or perhaps suspecting, all the implications of its story, Fortress presents the most disturbing, pre-emptive strike of children against the older generation that Australian fiction has to show." But various aspects of it have many precursors. And a link to Mondo Exploito in 2013.

The Amateur (2025)

Prompted by vague curiosity about what Rami Malek has been up to since Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) and Oppenheimer (2023). I think this proves that unless he's playing Freddie Mercury he's not leading man material. Also for Larry Fishburne who, despite being deep-sixed in the credits is on the IMDB poster. Directed by James Hawes (mostly TV) off a script by Ken Nolan (Black Hawk Down (2001) then downhill) and Gary Spinelli. Robert Littell wrote the source novel in 1981.

Much is lifted from The Odessa File (1974), though the international market destroying politics has been removed. Where Voigt got trained up to lethality by Mossad, Malek proves his incompetency with firearms to CIA dark op Fishburne and proceeds to rely on his epic IQ (170 genius points so recently in the service of the agency) to settle the score with some terrorists who have killed his wife in London for reasons. Those guys are Russians (or at least Eastern Europeans) and everyone in the target markets knows they are born bad. Where things deviate from the stock are the creative kills, perhaps echoing the Final Destination franchise that Di Rosso enjoys so much, with a geek standing in for Death. On the other hand all the office scenes are as dead as doornails, and there's far too much script kiddie and witless stuff like a burnt CD-ROM; I mean, who even has the hardware to read optical media in 2025?

The closing scenes intimate sequels, maybe even a franchise that replaces Jason Statham's notion of what the everyman can do with an office worker's or perhaps that of the last man on campus, now busy switching off lights; Matt Damon in his Good Will Hunting (1997) persona rather than Bourne, Malek as Ben Affleck's accountant without the build. (Incidentally Jon Bernthal appears for reasons unknown; he is squandered alongside those fabulous ancient cafes ala The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2012).) There's a dash of Reality (2023) in trying to mine the chasm between what the agency knows and what the media says which is remarkable for its touching faith in people still caring. Perhaps this is a red state, blue state thing too.

The cast is quite good. Holt McCallany is either having a moment or has debts no honest man can pay. Fishburne does what he can, as does Michael Stuhlbarg. I did not enjoy Rachel Brosnahan's vacuity as the wife of Malek. However the movie becomes something else when Irishwoman Caitríona Balfe steps out of a vintage John le Carré adaptation with a performance of heft and ballast. With her up front it could maybe have been something. The cinematography is rubbish.

Brian Tallerico: one-and-a-half stars at Roger Ebert's venue: "go watch Spy Game instead." Alissa Wilkinson: tries for 1970s paranoid thriller, misses. A remake of a 1981 film featuring Christopher Plummer. Peter Sobcynski.

The Odessa File (1974)

Prompted by author Frederick Forsyth's recent passing. This was director Ronald Neame's followup to The Poseidon Adventure (1972). Kenneth Ross and George Markstein adapted Forsyth's book from 1972 which I haven't read. Ross did better with the earlier The Day of the Jackal (1973) and that is the better movie. Andrew Lloyd Weber provided the soundtrack.

Jon Voigt, two years after Deliverance (1972), played a German journo freelancing in Hamburg who, on the night of Kennedy's murder (1963), chances upon a suicide that suggests members of the SS are still present in the area. Devoted but underdrawn squeeze Mary Tamm (memorably the first Romana in Tom Baker-era Doctor Who) works in a cabaret that is only shown from the street. In flashback we're shown the activities of "Butcher of Riga" Eduard Roschmann (Maximilian Schell, name changed to protect the guilty) so all that remains is the timing of his comeuppance. Too much of the plot depends on coincidence; this is not a well-made plan unfolding like clockwork. There's a framing story of Israel's conflict with Egypt and Mossad's activities in Europe.

Nora Sayre at the time: being the only star, Jon Voigt must be invincible.

The Surfer (2024)

Prompted by some curiosity about what Nicolas Cage could do for ozploitation, how-bad-can-it-be and Jason Di Rosso's interview with the director, Irishman Lorcan Finnegan. He worked off a script by fellow Irishman Thomas Martin.

The template is Wake in Fright (1971) but less motivated. Cage arrives at the beach/bay of his youth only to find it has become locals-only to a clutch of neo-pagan menchildren who appropriate his surfboard. They write "sanctuary" on it and hang it above the door to their redoubt then claim it has been there for at least seven summers. Julian McMahon (offspring of Billy and Sonia McMahon) tries to locate his inner hardarse as the leader-guru. He spouts random platitudes (selected unoriginal cliches of toxic masculinity) mixed with degraded Christian tropes into a witless literalism that is supposed to degrade Cage's heavily financialised character into acceptance/acceptability/geekdom. A hobo living in a car! A handgun! — uncommon in Australia so it must go off. Some cute wildlife shots. All the blokes are childish and asinine and none of the actors come out looking good. The major flaw, edging out many others, is that it is never adequately established why Cage returns to the beach/bay after dropping his son off somewhere. Why does he never leave, even just to get some food or clothes? I was mostly waiting for Cage to go psycho but he never properly does. For all that they got the stakes right: Cage does it all for a house.

I can't see this film being made anywhere other than Australia; obviously it riffs on the Bra Boys and the (illegal/semi-formal) enclosure of the commons. That doesn't explain why Screenwest would fund it: why make your awesome beaches look so unfriendly? Is the great state of Western Australia full now, like Sydney was back in 2000? I guess they did also fund Last Train to Freo (2006) — this one should've been called Last Lexus to Margaret River.

Peter Sobczynski: two stars at Roger Ebert's venue, "resembl[es] a feature-length meme." Jamie Tram: the sermons regurgitate those of Fight Club. Glenn Kenny avoids assessment/judgement.

The Accountant 2 (2025)

A week or two after a sneaky rewatch of The Accountant (2016) which proved unnecessary; there is no essential continuity with the first one. Once again directed by Gavin O'Connor from a script by Bill Dubuque. Once again Ben Affleck plays a man with autism who has the movie-trope mental gifts as well as being bulletproof and ultraviolent. There's no kink this time; it's a strictly linear buddy flick with Jon Bernthal once again playing the normie/less lethal/more vulnerable buddy-brother.

The opening scene has Affleck attending a dating meetup that he's hacked, and like most of the other comic relief it does not land. There's an extended sequence where Affleck's people (the children at this universe's equivalent of the X Mansion) engage in Bladerunner-ish enhancement of surveillance images that suggest the USA has cameras everywhere now, just like the U.K., but Hollywood has yet to move on from the Sneakers (1992) (etc) conception of or consistency in what computers can do.

After all the necessary buildup, where the law is found to be inadequately effectual (just like Dirty Harry did in 1971), things get Rambo-esque (or perhaps just generically action-McJackson) over some human trafficking from Mexico; the last 30 minutes is almost pure video game violence. Yes, having American men saving Latin American children with machine guns is served up straight. Alongside this we see Daniella Pineda discharge a few contracts (evoking the ultra capable femme of Logan (2017)). J.K. Simmons reprises his earlier role as an investigator and Cynthia Addai-Robinson is again the G-woman-in-distress, much like Emily Blunt in Sicario (2016/2018). There's very little to recommend it.

Manohla Dargis: don't think too hard, it works! Brian Tallerico at Roger Ebert's venue: two circumspect stars.

Sinners (2025)

Ryan Coogler's latest; apparently the only other thing I've seen from him is Black Panther (2018). He wrote and directed. Long-term collaborator Michael B. Jordan led as gangster twins, just like Tom Hardy in Legend (2015) and Robert De Niro just now in The Alto Knights (2025).

The template is essentially From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) transplanted from dangerous present-day Mexico to lethal Mississippi in 1932. There's a cracker soundtrack that fuels a virtuoso bridging scene in the middle, encompassing Black music culture in the USA, warming up the jukes of all times. More of this would've been very welcome (c.f. Small Axe (2020)). Beyond that it's just what was widely telegraphed/spoiled: tired vampire tropes leavened by symbolism and gestures to history that, if you don't recognise them, are meaningless. For instance there's a staging scene where master vampire/Irishman Jack O'Connell is hunted by members of a Choctaw tribe only to be rescued by some people we later understand to be Klanspeople. O'Connell later engages in some mad craic just like a gospel meeting, suggesting that it wasn't just the Blues (at least as played by Miles Caton) that was the devil's music. I didn't try to unpick the commentary on Christianity. I was very happy to see Delroy Lindo (as always). And there's nothing to complain about in Jordan's performance, excepting perhaps that it lacks the humour and vulnerability of a Jamie Foxx.

A Critic's Pick by Manohla Dargis. Coogler is feted at least partly because he survived/elevated the MCU and Rocky. That opening scene, of Caton bursting into his father's church, echoed Kill Bill (2003/2004). Romance yielding to violence, the vampire's promise of taking the pain away. Wendy Ide: the threads of story get messy. Dana Stevens: Caton's "true power as a performer [is] to bring together musical spirits from the past and future in a delirious alchemy that transcends time and space." — and having summoned them, what a waste not to put them to more use. She was reminded of Jordan Peele's Us (2019) and Nope (2022), which I found far more opaque. Peter Sobcynski: "suggestive of one of the big-canvas works of Robert Altman." Lindo MVP!

Later the romance, doomerism and reliance on the soundtrack put me in mind of Crazy Heart (2009).

Dead End Drive-In (1986)

More ozploitation. Directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith (The Man from Hong Kong (1975)) using a script Peter Smalley derived from Peter Carey's short Crabs (circa 1974). The concept is that the state (?) turned drive-in cinemas into concentration camps for the economically useless. Really it's an excuse to update Mad Max to the mid-1980s conception of the apocalypse, one now decidedly urban.

The set is mostly cars, mostly 1970s classic wrecks (Holden shaggers, humongous Ford utes) excepting lead Ned Manning's brother Ollie Hall's 1956 Cadillac which is ridiculously pristine. (Actually the entire camp is remarkably clean.) Manning uses it to take squeeze Natalie McCurry to the drive-in but fails to realise the consequences of buying an "unemployed" concession ticket from Peter Whitford. He's keen to bust out but she prefers the hairstyles available in sheltered community life.

The strong themes (a white nationalism meeting seemed to get a 99.9% turnout) and weak plot prefigure Ben Mendelsohn's breakouts The Big Steal (1990) and Return Home (1990). This film's central flaw is that it lacks a star of his or Gibson's calibre. The early scenes are quite funny and a little cute as Manning jogs around a recognisable Port Botany while people take outre angle grinders to all sorts of things. The drive-in itself was apparently in Matraville. It looks like it was a fun and good-natured shoot.

Loads of details at Ozmovies. Tarantino's favourite of Trenchard-Smith's efforts.

Money Movers (1978)

A pointer from Harry Windsor's take on recent ozploitation movies, which is more retrospective than prospective. Also some minor Bruce Beresford completism; he directed his own script from a (semi-auto-fic?) novel by Devon Minchin (father of erstwhile Senator for South Australia Nick Minchin).

A bunch of blokes who work for Darcy's security company, headed by Frank Wilson (the same as always), get it into their minds that it'd be better to rob the place. It's murky as to who's working with or for whom for most of the runtime; clearly lead Terence Donovan is in cahoots with brother Bryan Brown, and the Tony Bonner/ex-cop Ed Devereaux pairing soon firms up, but toff Charles 'Bud' Tingwell's role is murky, as is detective Alan Cassell's (the canonical Gerry in The Club (1980)). The women are auxiliary: Jeanie Drynan was lumped with a reprise of her shrewish housewife from Don's Party (1976), while Candy Raymond is again reduced to little more than a sex object and handed some very trite dialogue. Stuart Littlemore was credited as the TV presenter in the graveyard.

The film was financed by the South Australian Film Corporation which meant that Adelaide had to stand in for much of Sydney. Near as I could tell they only got some shots of the money trucks on the Cahill Expressway and the vertiginous drop of the Gladesville Bridge; A proper NSW production would never have passed up the opportunity to shoot in Waverley Cemetery (cf Noyce's Newsfront of the same year). The aesthetic evokes prisons by contrasting lots of concrete, steel, grime and harsh artificial light with the airiness of the great outdoors and Australian suburbia of the era. Overall the cinematography by John Seale (Witness (1985), Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022)) is not flash. A classic instance of the fundamental flaw in many Australian films: essentially just television.

All the details and more at Ozmovies. Stobie poles! Oops. "The sexual politics and the alleged flaws now have the patina of a quaint period glow." Paul Byrnes at some later date. Ahead of its time, or at least Blue Murder (1995), Wildside (1997-1999), etc.

Self/less (2015)

... and that'll about do me for Tarsem Singh movies. He kept me guessing all the way through: is this Robocop? Or perhaps Universal Soldier (1992)? I knew it wasn't Face/Off (1997) — he only hired one action star and there's nothing much in the way of effects. The mechanism is, once again, two minds in one body.

The plot has Trumpian NYC real estate developer Ben Kingsley realising that he has so much more to give when he receives a terminal cancer diagnosis. (His vocal performance is all Al Pacino.) His character notionally lives on in the body of Ryan Reynolds but there is no continuity in personality, mannerism, etc. Derek Luke climbed down from Antwone Fisher (2002) to play some basketball as a pseudo buddy. Matthew Goode deploys his trademark smooth psychopath to far less effect that in his signature efforts (Watchmen (2009), Stoker (2013)). Dean Norris! There's nothing of visual interest here, having been shot mostly in the realist mode.

Singh likes the high concept but has no faith in his audience; things are as telegraphed as advertisements. One of his ticks is the triple up (one up on Christopher Koch, one down on Christopher Nolan). The stakes are always a child's. He likes to cover faces with gauze or ornately framed masks.

A. O. Scott: "All of it unfolds in the atmosphere of gaudy, portentous vacuity that is Mr. Singh’s trademark." Ouch.

The Cell (2000)

I was curious about what else Tarsem Singh made apart from his labour of love The Fall (2006). This seems to be his feature debut as well as for writer Mark Protosevich (partially responsible for the story for Thor (2011) and the script of the remake of Oldboy (2013)). The cast is a bit interesting: Dylan Baker (Happiness (1998)) and Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Secrets and Lies (1996)) got lumped with the scientific mumbo jumbo about the brain-sharing device that gives us excess access to the mind of dissociated serial killer Vincent D'Onofrio (Private Pyle in Full Metal Jacket (1987)). Out front though are Jennifer Lopez as an implausible shrink / neuronaut who seems to fall for Vince Vaughn's FBI agent. But the movie ends first.

Obviously this is a riff on (or homage to, or ripoff of) The Silence of the Lambs (1991) (dolls not butterflies!) and, to a lesser extent, Twin Peaks: there's something fatal in the pipe and the only solution is for Lopez to visit D'Onofrio's brain. Things go wrong before they go right. That's it. The best bits are, once again, visual; Singh's lurid colours really deserved oversaturated, glorious Technicolor. Somehow it reminded me of The Well (1997).

Roger Ebert: four stars. How did he give this 4 stars and not appreciate David Lynch? Se7en. 2001. Not a cop out like Hollowman. Elvis Mitchell at the New York Times: Spellbound (1945), Manhunter (1986). Evokes a Nine Inch Nails music video. Quake. No there there, just too many antecedents.

Nightmare Alley (2021)

After watching The Fall I wondered what Guillermo del Toro had done recently (apart from remaking Pinocchio in 2022). Also I'd totally forgotten about the original. del Toro re-adapted the novel by William Lindsay Gresham with help from Kim Morgan.

The vast cast looks great on paper but was given nothing to work with. What is it with Bradley Cooper and remakes? Against a backdrop of World War II he con(vince)s an inert Rooney Mara to join him in a dated-at-the-time mentalist routine only to be unmade in an entirely predictable and forewarned way by Cate Blanchett's shrink. (Mara's face is as blank as Kidman's, and Cooper's angsty performance only exacerbates her limitations.) Willem Dafoe tried to put some life into it, as did David Strathairn and Holt McCallany (memorable in Mindhunter and Fight Club, squandered here). Ron Perlman looked so worn out. Richard Jenkins, pro forma. Toni Colette did what she can. And so on. There's little of del Toro's signature, inventive grotesquery. Absolutely unnecessary.

Manohla Dargis: "[Blanchett's character] steps out of a different, less engaging movie." Stephanie Zacharek summarised it so you can give it a miss.

Viet and Nam (2024)

Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's insightful interview with director Minh Quý Trương and some curiosity about the state of Vietnamese film making. There's a huge slate of production company credits so I guess raising means is still a chore. Over two nights due to a failure to enthral.

The focus is on two gay coal miners in an industrial town somewhere Việt Nam in 2001. (I can't find the filming location but am guessing from the director's bio, jungle warfare, etc. that it's somewhere in the Central Highlands, not so far from his hometown of Buôn Ma Thuột. Upon reflection the industrialism, urban scenes and some themes echo parts of The Deer Hunter.) The topics are the traditional ones deployed in Vietnamese films looking for international audiences: war remnants, lingering superstitions, long held secrets and guilt, people smuggling, exotic forms of intimacy, generalised poignant inconsequence. The narrative and characterisation are thin with loads of gesture and little critique or analysis.

Some of the imagery is very striking: the coal seam is shot to look like the night sky, an erstwhile battleground covered with flags (marking UXO or bodies?) and soldiers in frozen poses. This is countervailed by so many distended scenes of percussive banality.

A Critic's Pick by Lisa Kennedy at the New York Times. Her brief review is right to focus on the visual.

The Fall (2006)

Some fantastic visual composition from co-writer/director Tarsem Singh, who clearly learnt all the right things from directing music videos. (This is presented by David Fincher and Spike Jonze.) The model is a two-track adult fairytale in the magical realism that Guillermo del Toro mines: somewhat romantic, like The Shape of Water, a little graphic like Pan's Labyrinth (also from 2006) and sharing the latter's juxtaposition of childish innocence and worldliness against learned hopelessness.

The main flaw is that neither story is particularly satisfying. Putting that aside the acting from lead Lee Pace and child/foil Catinca Untaru serves the movie well. Her grasp of English is shaky as one might expect of a child of Mexican migrants to California in the 1920s, and this mostly helps with her engagement with Lee's fatalistic silent-era stunt man as they both recuperate in hospital. His stories draw on the deep well of classic lore but it would seem that the visual imaginarium is hers, the scenes being populated with people he has not met. (She has no experience of Native Americans and so the "Indian" in the troupe is an actual Indian.) Both stories are uneven and neither has much of a moral; the stunt man survives it all and walks away, the child rejoins her kin in the orange groves. But the stakes weren't this low.

Roger Ebert: four stars. No CGI! (So that really was an elephant swimming? Amazing.) Dave Kehr on the making of. Less forgivingly, Nathan Lee at the New York Times: a remake of the Bulgarian Yo ho ho. Excess details at Wikipedia.

Gentleman Jim (1942)

More Errol Flynn. I hadn't realised how funny and deft he was; his performance here as the heavyweight boxer James J. Corbett is timeless. The accent is pure Hobart throughout, and the hair is always on his mind. In glorious black-and-white. Directed by Raoul Walsh.

The story is about the rise of professional boxing in the last decades of the nineteenth century in San Francisco. There are some great scenes of the underground fights of the time and also the cultural strata. Later we even get a training montage! Overall there are a few moments but mostly it's formulaic hagiography, from the Irish fondness for spirits, the duffer of a Dad, the mother's concern, the biffing brothers, right on down to the bloke getting the girl (Alexis Smith) who puts up a fight as she was taught to do.

Thomas M. Pryor at the time.

The Way Things Go (Der Lauf der Dinge) (1987)

Perhaps prompted by Daniel Soar's retrospective on Jean Tinguely which lead to the rabbit hole of useless kinematic machines. Lovingly constructed by Peter Fischli and David Weiss. A brief, strangely fascinating and kinda fun assembly of things causing other things to move, burn, explode, amuse.

The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)

More Olivia de Havilland completism, lazily responding to Amor Towles's prompting. Classic matinee fare in glorious Technicolor. Once again Errol Flynn delivered a very enjoyable performance in the lead. Things get a bit epic at times but her entrancement by him is too abrupt. I never realised that Claude Rains was once young. Directed by Michael Curtiz and William Keighley.

Roger Ebert: four stars as a "great movie" in 2003 and a lengthy retrospective. de Havilland's enrapture is gradual! Frank S. Nugent at the time.

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021)

The things Tony Leung makes me watch. I'm not totally surprised to see him pop up the in MCU, rueful and bemused, especially in what is basically a smoodgery of things he's done before: obviously there's some In the Mood for Love and The Grandmaster but co-writer/director Destin Daniel Cretton also needed to mash in Michelle Yeoh's back catalogue, specifically Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Everything Everywhere All At Once, squashing the lot into some distant realm of a Star Wars-adjacent universe. Oh, and lethal daughter Meng'er Zhang gets her own private Fight Club.

The plot goes in the traditional way: a bloke who has lived too long encounters a femme fatale (Fala Chen) and decides to become mortal. Things go well until they don't, and when they don't there's way too much CGI and pointless twirling from the big friendly dragon, much like the women in many of Terrence Malick's features. The mythos is more ridiculous than Highlander and so much less fun. Awkwafina has some moments driving a bus in San Francisco, reheating those classic SF street scenes. Things are sometimes a little entertaining but always entirely formulaic.

Maya Phillips: Simu Liu is totally squandered in the lead.

Life is Sweet (1990)

Second time around with this third (cinematically-released) feature from Mike Leigh. The cast is again great. The story is diffuse, touching on a few too many aspects of late Thatcherite London for the runtime. Alison Steadman works hard in the lead, married to Jim Broadbent, mothering apprentice plumber Claire Skinner and off-the-rails Jane Horrocks. So weird to see David Thewlis so young as Horrocks's boy toy. Timothy Spall got the zany character (c.f. Heather Tobias in High Hopes (1988)), not the centred bloke (c.f. Secrets and Lies (1996)). Stephen Rea, generic drunken shyster.

Roger Ebert: four stars (and a few clangers!). A Critic's Pick by Vincent Canby.

High Hopes (1988)

Second time around with what IMDB says is Mike Leigh's second feature to get a cinematic release. Not so much class warfare, though there is some of that, but more class dislocation in Thatcher's London. Ruth Sheen is excellent as Phil Davis's squeeze; they are a working-class pair of the sort that was probably out of time in the 1970s. He rides a Honda CB 400 NC Superdream (twin). Lesley Manville has the most fun as the Princess Di half of a toff couple who have bought and renovated a council row house. She's far more sophisticated than her paramour David Bamber. Heather Tobias's artificial performance is a clanger in context: it's not credible that her histrionics would be so thoroughly ignored by husband Philip Jackson and family ... or is it? Everyone is childless.

Roger Ebert: four stars. Hooray Henries! ... and I missed the markers that Jason Watkins's Wayne was mentally unwell (and not just thick). The passivity of the once-were revolutionaries. A Critic's Pick by Janet Maslin.

California Split (1974)

Second time around with this Altman after a sneaky rewatch of The Long Goodbye (1973). This was ill advised as Elliot Gould's running at the mouth is so much better in the other movie, perhaps because he's on a shorter leash. Written by Joseph Walsh; IMDB says this is his only writing credit.

Gould's a winner even though he's second on the bill after George Segal who somehow becomes a winner. Who ever said gambling could be problematic! There are scams, including a proforma basketball scam that was better cooked in White Men Can't Jump (1992); indeed the latter movie has a more expansive take on the world than mere gambling debts and sad ladies who can't get no satisfaction.

Roger Ebert: four stars. Vincent Canby.

Small Things Like These (2024)

The second adaptation of a Claire Keegan short I've seen, the first being The Quiet Girl (2022). Directed by Belgian Tim Mielants.

The story runs adjacent to the Magdalene asylums scandal that apparently came to a head in the 1990s; here it looks like it's the 1970s or perhaps early 1980s when Irish omertà was experiencing its first cracks. Cillian Murphy works hard in the lead as a father of five girls in New Ross (southeast Ireland) whose softheartedness seems to be beyond the understanding of wife Eileen Walsh. She and publican Helen Behan operate on the basis of there but for the grace of God and cannot fathom why they would ever sacrifice their prosperity. Murphy counts his blessings a different way and we know he's a gonna when he discovers a young woman (Zara Devlin) locked in the convent's coal shed that he's being paid to refill, especially after an encounter with sinister Mother Superior Emily Watson.

One of the pleasures of this movie is that there's a lot of showing and not much telling, as if its makers trust their audience in a way that is entirely out of fashion now. The focus is always on the kids; the brokenness of Murphy's character is explored mostly in flashback, though his deep reservoirs of strength go unexplained. It is suggested that he is falling apart now after an extended period of robustness.

On the other hand I didn't enjoy much of the camerawork (by Frank van den Eeden) as I often struggled to understand if one character was looking at another, challenging or evading, and the layout of the buildings. The editing (by Alain Dessauvage) is often overly abrupt. The story itself is told with much fine detail but is not subtle; it is mostly a portrait of the man.

Luke Goodsell. He got the press pack: it's Christmas 1985. Murphy's "performance is a study in compassion and survival, in the ways one's own traumatic experience might lead to empathy instead of cyclical abuse." A Critic's Pick by Alissa Wilkinson. Both observe it's a gangster/mafia flick. Xan Brooks. Philippa Hawker.

Mickey 17 (2025)

Bong Joon-Ho's latest, and first feature since Parasite (2019). Adapted by Bong from a novel by Edward Ashton.

Near as I could tell Bong watched Moon (2009) and figured he could do it better, or at least more existentially, than Duncan Jones. Or perhaps he wanted to one-up Neill Blomkamp. To that end he mixed his CGI-creature fascination from Okja (2017) with a significant number of A-list American actors and a few British ones. And Toni Collette, cast to what now seems to be her type: an upper class wife, transparently repulsive.

The first thirty minutes was pretty amusing as we get to know Robert Pattinson's character, an expendable in a self-knowing emo mode. (He's great. There's an undertow of Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go in his narration.) Squeeze Naomi Ackie (Lady Macbeth (2016), Small Axe (2020)) is an enduring mystery to him and us. Mate Steven Yeun is stuck with thinly drawn venality; he had a lot more to work with in Minari (2020). They and many others are on a settler spacecraft more-or-less run as a personal fief by Mark Ruffalo and Collette, headed for the white purity of the planet Niflheim. After arrival things devolve to some pro forma conflict and species-ism that put me in mind of Peter Singer.

Ruffalo is more-or-less a hammy Trump and is as disappointing as he was in Poor Things (2023); it's beyond him to be as farcically presidential as Bill Pullman was in Independence Day. Thomas Turgoose has a disposable auxiliary role; he's making a habit of mediocrity. Anamaria Vartolomei ultimately does no more than bat her eyelashes at Pattinson.

The cinematography is generally OK, the CGI not too annoying.

Very widely anticipated and reviewed to wide disappointment. A Critic's Pick by Manohla Dargis. No 17 "has a distinct nasal whine (shades of Adam Sandler)." Dana Stevens: harks back to Snowpiercer (2013). Feels foreshortened.

Black Bag (2025)

Steven Soderbergh's latest. He directed a script by David Koepp (Carlito's Way, Jurassic Park, Panic Room, many blockbusters).

This is not a heist but an old-fashioned spy thriller. Robotic lead Michael Fassbender pays homage to Alec Guinness's George Smiley (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy). His wife Cate Blanchett is also a spy who has her eyes on (Trump-tanned) Pierce Brosnan's job. The plot is notionally about stopping the use of a Stuxnet variant, engineered by these clowns, by a Russian. The whole thing is twentieth century: the McGuffin is a physical thing but everything else is computerised, though accessing anything requires being in the right room, having the right gizmo, shagging or having other leverage over the operator. (Everyone is suitably compatible on that score.) There's an experimental AI lipreader on a dongle. Naomie Harris, the in-house industrial shrink, has some truly terrible scenes.

The chief problem, more so than the risible dialogue, tedious and sterile high-end consumption, lack of motivation, suspense and stakes, general unsexyness and so on is that the first two-thirds give you no idea whatsoever how things will be resolved. The second dinner party is so purely revelatory that you're left wanting the butler to have done it.

A Critic's Pick by Manohla Dargis. "It’s nonsense." Peter Bradshaw: three stars of five. Luke Goodsell.

Bleak Moments (1971)

Mike Leigh's feature-film directorial debut. Pretty much what it says on the tin: late-20s accounting-firm secretary Anne Raitt (excellent) goes looking for connection with all the wrong people; the blokes are just too uptight to give her what she wants on a Saturday evening, especially notional boyfriend Eric Allan. One is left wondering how the English breed.

The vibe is a bit Pinter-ish — lots of stilted dialogue and pauses — which I guess was the mode of the day. There are some great visual compositions, especially the last scene where Raitt is presented as indistinguishable from the furniture. Leigh masterfully implies the culture, imperative but always just beyond the frame, a longing for the possible. Mike Bradwell embodies that as the bloke from Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire with a guitar, singing about drugs. It was so brave of him to write and perform. He rejects her offer of a binge (disappointing us as she lights up on the booze) because he's off to Les Cousins, placing this close to Pentangle and therefore Christopher Koch. Why didn't he invite her?

Leigh's treatment of mental disability (in the form of Raitt's older sister Sarah Stephenson) is excellent; she doesn't manifestly impair Raitt but instead illuminates her life and the lives of related characters (fellow secretary Joolia Cappleman and her mother Liz Smith).

Roger Ebert with amazing foresight: four stars and a lengthy review at the time. The emergence of realism. "This film is a masterpiece, plain and simple, and that is a statement I doubt I will ever have cause to revise." Janet Maslin was unimpressed in 1980. Bradwell "plays wretched renditions of American blues songs on his guitar." Leigh's self-review in 2013. Excess detail at Wikipedia.

Secrets and Lies (1996)

Second time around with Mike Leigh's mid-1990s masterwork.

Roger Ebert: four stars at the time and another four stars as a "great movie" in 2009. Race might only flit through anyone's mind but class signifiers are forever. A Critic's Pick by Janet Maslin. These reviews (by Americans) fail to observe much of the fine detail. Alan Riding's interview with Leigh was more considered.

Io Capitano (2023)

Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with director/co-writer Matteo Garrone (Gomorrah (2008)). It took me a few goes to get into.

Two young blokes from Senegal want to make it as pop stars in Europe and pay some people smugglers to make it happen. The journey is predictably rough initially but the latter half is somehow smoother, perhaps because it becomes more of a collective endeavour with manifestly real stakes and lead Seydou Sarr grows into it. The dashes of magic realism are welcome but insufficient. The final scene off the coast of Sicily is euphoric but surely what follows would be nasty. IMDB tells me that Casablanca stood in for Tripoli.

Katie Rife at Roger Ebert's venue: two-and-a-half stars. Oscar bait. A Critic's Pick by Manohla Dargis.

Interview (2007)

More Steve Buscemi completism. He co-wrote, directed and starred. Apparently this was about paying homage to Theo van Gogh by remaking his original.

The scenario has failing serious journalist Buscemi charged with interviewing soap star Sienna Miller (Live By Night (2016)), initially at a restaurant near her NYC loft but mostly at the loft for spurious reasons. A scandal is brewing in Washington, but isn't it always? The result is very uneven with an excess of unmotivated switchbacks; the structure is too rigid and the stakes too low for success.

I enjoyed Buscemi's directorial feature debut Trees Lounge (1996) but that was perhaps him at his most inspired. The best part of this was his clowning when he finally exited.

Roger Ebert: three stars. He hadn't seen the original. Peter Bradshaw: one star of five and the briefest review he's ever done (?). He did see the original. Manohla Dargis: "Vaporous and chilled to freezing, Interview lacks a single honest moment, but it does have plenty of diverting ones."

A Real Pain (2024)

Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with writer/director/star Jesse Eisenberg. Two Jewish American cousins go to Poland to honour their grandmother who survived a concentration camp there. Kieran Culkin won an Oscar for his performance as the more unstable of the pair. Eisenberg himself plays a neurotic. Billed as comedic/cathartic. Not for me.

In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon (2023)

Lengthy at 3h 39min. Has some moments, mostly in the historical footage. I wasn't aware of Simon's foray into movies with One-Trick Pony in 1980; that was indeed Lou Reed. Accusing Graceland of "cultural slumming" seems so quaint; surely he'd be accused of cultural appropriation now. Simon is very, very NYC. It's not especially sympathetic to Art Garfunkel. Director Alex Gibney has form for these sort of retrospectives. Overall Simon is presented as an innocent songwriter-savant.

Robert Ito at the New York Times. Clint Worthington at Roger Ebert's venue: it's not much of a biopic. Peter Bradshaw. Shelley Duvall was there in a still.

Tin Men (1987)

Written and directed by Barry Levinson. Did he see Glengarry Glen Ross (on stage, in 1983) and think he could do better?

Baltimore, 1963. Richard Dreyfuss and Danny DeVito are selling aluminium siding (cladding obsolete for houses now but still used for caravans, Google suggests). It's a time of Cadillacs, high emotions and scams. Lots of scams, none particularly interesting. Barbara Hershey starts as DeVito's wife but he's not sorry to see her go. J.T. Walsh has a minor role, as does Seymour Cassel (Minnie and Moskowitz). The initial tepid comedy evaporates leaving a weak, misogynistic romance that yields to scenes of great insincerity between work buddies. The dialogue often malfunctions.

Fine Young Cannibals played live in one of the bars the salesmen frequent; the soundtrack is otherwise a period-appropriate collection of tunes. It was a bit jarring to recognise Insensatez by Antônio Carlos Jobim from Lost Highway.

Roger Ebert: three stars too many. Janet Maslin: nostalgic.

I'm Still Here (2024)

Prompted by some recent Oscar noise; it came away with Best International Feature Film. Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) directed a script by Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega from the memoir/book by son Marcelo Rubens Paiva. With a soundtrack by Warren Ellis! In two sittings.

The first half-hour or so is an advertisement for upper-middle class 1970s Rio de Janeiro, shot in the over-saturated colours of the day. The beach isn't that busy and one could just wander across the road to an abode sufficiently spacious for five children. It starts to lose momentum once the patriarch is arrested by the military regime, and the final third is a narrowly focused, dutiful and self-absorbed portrait of the matriarch (an all-in Fernanda Torres, Oscar nominated).

Clearly this is a worthy biopic that is an important story to many people; it's highly rated at IMDB and already sits at #146 in their top-250. This might all be a civilised facade on the anger now omnipresent. It was unclear to me why the patriarch was disappeared but not the other members of their small clandestine operation.

Five stars of five from Wendy Ide, but only three of five from colleague Xan Brooks and the same from Peter Bradshaw. Michael Wood. Later I realised it's similar to Roma (2018).

A Complete Unknown (2024)

Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's great interview with Ed Norton. Norton somehow always exceeds my expectations. I was less impressed by the preceding one with co-writer/director James Mangold. Jay Cocks helped him adapt a book by Elijah Wald. The eight Oscar noms received zero gongs.

As someone whose curiosity about Bob Dylan has never evolved into fandom I felt the story, tracking his arrival in NYC to famously going electric at a folk festival (Newport in 1965), was tepid accompaniment to those cracker songs of his early years. (I've always been partial to Roy Harper's take on Girl from the North Country which gets a few goes-around here.) Many events were meaningless in the provided context; I don't care what style he's playing or how the anonymous crowds of the day felt about it, and Mangold couldn't make me. Dylan is presented as magnetic but unreachably enigmatic.

The movie itself is as well-made as any of the industrial blockbusters Mangold has rolled out before. Timothée Chalamet does a solid Dylan impersonation, good enough to not bother me. Norton is fine as Pete Seeger. Monica Barbaro glowers as Joan Baez, simmering as she's entranced and eclipsed by the new kid. Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash, better than he was in The Bikeriders. I can't imagine why anyone wants to see Elle Fanning so sad.

Manohla Dargis. Gets a bit Forrest Gump with its facts.

The Brutalist (2024)

The things Guy Pearce makes me watch. Before this I would've said I'd be up for anything, even a Matt Damon or Brad Pitt impression. Now I'm not so sure.

Co-written and directed by Brady Corbet. He acted in Melancholia but there's no sign he learnt much from Lars von Trier. Mona Fastvold shared responsibility for the script. I was happy to recognise Isaach De Bankolé from The Limits of Control. Adrien Brody (Oscared) lead as (fictional) Jewish Hungarian Bauhaus-educated architect László Tóth transplanted by way of a concentration camp to Pennsylvania. (I wonder if the Hungarian-born Australian geologist of the same name is enjoying his new fame.) There he meets industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr. (Pearce) while waiting for his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) to join him. When great talent met vast piles of American money in the post-WWII years, brutalism was apparently inevitable.

I didn't understand what the point of it all was, and at 3hr 30min it had plenty of opportunity to make a case. (Some of it reached for There Will Be Blood (2007) but neither of the leads got anywhere close to what Daniel Day Lewis and Paul Dano achieved.) Brody is very good and quite amusing at times. There's far too much talking and not enough showing. Heroin is used without glamour or judgement. I did not like any of the characters. I did not enjoy Lol Crawley's cinematography (Oscared).

Why this guy? Why architecture? They could've gone for any number of other Hungarian geniuses, for instance by rounding out Oppenheimer (2023) with a portrait of von Neumann.

A Critic's Pick by Manohla Dargis. She just summarised the plot. Dana Stevens sounded bereft, at length. The ending somewhat fits with the interstitial advertisements for the great state of Pennsylvania but does not add to what came before. Glenn Kenny at Venice: "the most exciting consideration of non-atomic American mutation and madness since Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master (2012)". Stephanie Zacharek. Peter Sobcynski. And so on.

The Poseidon Adventure (1972)

And still more Gene Hackman completism. Directed by Ronald Neame from a script by Stirling Silliphant and Wendell Mayes that adapted Paul Gallico's novel. Ben Stiller recently named it as his favourite of Hackman's performances — was the simple truth "money job"? — making it something of a jag from Permanent Midnight.

The scenario is very simple: some passengers are taking the final voyage of the passenger ship Poseidon from NYC to Athens. Something happens near Crete to generate a large wave that capsizes the vessel. The rest of the movie is about escaping the sinking ship, and that mostly boils down to traversing set-piece obstacles, somewhat like The Rock (1996). Things go as they have to. There's a dash of Terminator 2: Judgement Day at the end.

The cast is stellar. Ernest Borgnine is less effective than he was in Marty (1955) as his staginess clashes with the realism of the others, leaving aside wife Stella Stevens I guess. Their histrionics are entirely cliched. Shelley Winters (The Night of the Hunter, Oscar nom'd here) plays a saintly Jewish grandmother. Carol Lynley does a special kind of hippy vacancy. Leslie Nielsen as the captain! But Hackman owns it as a reverend with distinctly American ideas of how God helps those who help themselves. He nevertheless often selflessly helps others.

The (practical) special effects are good. It's not terrible.

Roger Ebert: two-and-a-half stars and the harshest review I've read by him. Formulaic. Where was the token Black person? He's right that the motivation for heading for the stern is weak. A. H. Weiler.

Heist (2001)

For Gene Hackman, who passed recently. Written and directed by David Mamet. The cast had potential — Hackman is joined by Delroy Lindo, Danny DeVito, Sam Rockwell, Ricky Jay, and of course Mamet's squeeze-muse Rebecca Pigeon. There's more realism here than in The Spanish Prisoner (1997), perhaps reflecting the shift to summery but sombre Boston. (Pigeon is the only woman in Boston, in contrast with The Town.) The mechanics of the heist were rapidly obsoleted by 9/11. (I did not try to track all the details; I took it for granted that we were getting drip fed only some of the salients.) The dialogue is tame and relatively sparse. Many scenes do not work; take the shootout on the dock for instance. Rockwell is ill-used. The ending is quite poor. The dire IMDB rating is well-deserved.

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. "Close attention may reveal a couple of loopholes in the plot." — say it ain't so. A Critic's Pick by A. O. Scott. Mamet is erratic.

Permanent Midnight (1998)

David Veloz directed his own adaptation of Jerry Stahl's memoir of writing scripts in TV in L.A. Veloz doctored the script for Natural Born Killers. Notionally deemed a Critic's Pick by Janet Maslin but I'm losing faith in that list.

We meet the sexually-irresistible Ben Stiller (as Stahl) working in a fast food joint somewhere far from the prime time. There Mario Bello is the first (or latest) lady to decide she's gotta have that ("You're too darn sad-looking to just be another retard in a pink visor") and we're off to a motel room for tales of T.V. production, drugs and other ladies who we similarly learn almost nothing about. Owen Wilson plays his bestie, pretty much as Owen Wilson must present in real life to his real life besties. Peter Greene has fun dealing to the recovering. Jerry Stahl plays his own doctor, sardonically. The women include, with varying levels of involvement and commitment, Connie Nielsen (Dagmar from Deutschland with the best gear), Elizabeth Hurley (in need of a green card), Liz Torres (in need of a junk buddy), Janeane Garofalo (in need of a man, any man), Cheryl Ladd (in need of a scriptwriter). And probably others. He's shooting up on anything and tomorrow's never there.

The vibe is Trainspotting-adjacent, comedic but not very funny, definitely not fun, funny or philosophical about drug use, milking a 1990s soundtrack. Stiller appears to be all-in, at one point shooting into his neck. Many scenes are way too long and the last movement really drags. Was there a point?

Roger Ebert: three stars. He knew that addiction is heavy stuff but I don't see why that makes it sacred. The Man With the Golden Arm. Janet Maslin: a cautionary tale!

The Year of Living Dangerously (1982)

Second or third time around. Peter Weir directed a script originally by Christopher Koch that was bent out of shape by Weir and David Williamson; they elided too many of the meaningful bits while retaining all the obscurity. Maurice Jarre did the soundtrack to which Vangelis contributed the somewhat incongruous theme song L'Enfant.

The movie flits from event to event and feels rushed after the languor of the book; Koch did pace that right. Mel Gibson's Guy Hamilton is not the giant counterpart to Billy Kwan as played by Lind Hunt (Dune (1984)). (She's excellent in a mediocre movie.) Casting the tall Sigourney Weaver as an English rose only served to emphasise that. Neither are particularly effective as romantic leads — she giggling like a schoolgirl, he staring like he's been poleaxed. Did either ever try again? Bill Kerr's Colonel Henderson is undignified. Paul Sonkkila's dial is very familiar from Australian cinema.

The increased emphasis on the romance made it even more difficult to fathom the stakes; things get asserted from time-to-time but no reasons are ever given. (Koch provided at least some background in prose: what taking a bungalow signified, what Billy means by saying "Anglo-Saxons are better in the tropics", and so on.) At times the goal seemed to be to remake Mad Max.

Again I'd say Weir's direction is unsuccessful.

Roger Ebert: four stars. Saint Jack. Vincent Canby: "This film should be some kind of epic." Ozmovies (snapshot): retrospectively perhaps Weir's best! Wikipedia. IMDB trivia: shot in Sydney and the Philippines. The non-English dialogue is in Tagalog, not Bahasa. Oops.

The Last Showgirl (2024)

Somewhat prompted by Manohla Dargis making it a Critic's Pick, and otherwise slim pickings amongst the new movies. Directed by Gia Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola's granddaughter, new to me. Written by Kate Gersten who has done a lot of TV.

To me this is obviously a female counterpart to Aronofsky's The Wrestler (2008): take a 1980s/1990s star (here Pamela Anderson) and show them now glammed up and down, still in a job that they've aged well out of. It's a genre that I suspect Diane Keaton of milking, perhaps right back to The Godfather: Part III, but I wouldn't know.

The scenario has Anderson showgirling in Le Razzle Dazzle, purportedly the last of its kind in Las Vegas. Its 30 year run is coming to an end and she needs to find a new gig. The first half has enough fun bits to suggest a black comedy but by halfway, as Jamie Lee Curtis's cocktail waitress is eclipsed by cliche, things are deadly serious. There's a daughter plot involving miscast Billie Lourd and a fair slab of generic confected conflict. By the credits nothing has been resolved but we're still shown scenes of redemption/empathy/reconnection.

Pamela Anderson has her moments. Her best acting here is when she reaches for the extremely synthetic but her efforts are never matched by the rest of the cast, excepting her rapport with Curtis. (Curtis is far better here than in Everything Everywhere All At Once — a career-best performance even?) Stage manager/erstwhile lover Dave Bautista delivers some drecky dialogue during his big dinner scene in the mode of the emotionally incompetent character he's spent too long playing. I feel he's been better than that but perhaps I'm wrong. Jason Schwartzman is flat and brutal, just doing a favour for a cousin (?).

I did not enjoy the cinematography much.

Sheila O'Malley. I think she forgets just how artificial Anderson's beauty always was. Sandra Hall: a family production. Luke Goodsell. Peter Bradshaw: so much nepo, and so much more. The commentariat generally holds that Anderson is good in a bad movie. But Jason Di Rosso really dug it.

Bhowani Junction (1956)

Prompted by the claim in the IMDB trivia for Giant that Ava Gardner was too busy filming this in Pakistan to star in that in Texas. Directed by George Cukor (The Philadelphia Story) from the adaptation of John Masters's novel by Sonya Levien and Ivan Moffat.

It's so late in the British Raj (ballpark 1946) that even the whitest of Brits just want to leave; it's even getting too late to found a kingdom. But before departure the powers-that-still-be have to thwart terrorist plots that would have delayed the mail train and killed Gandhi while, of course, falling in love with Anglo-Indian Gardner. Notionally the focus is on the problems of her ethnicity — where will her kind fit after the quit? will they continue to be privileged employees in the Indian railway hierarchy? — but really it's about there being only one eligible woman in the whole of the fictional town. It's therefore a bit Doctor Zhivago. The story is framed as a recounting to a superior officer by Colonel Stewart Granger in the safety of a train carriage. There are vague echoes of the fair-superior The Train (1964). It could've been called A Passage to England.

I feel Gardner was miscast; she's a lot better in The Night of the Iguana (1964). She is clearly working hard to show the requisite interest in her three (serial) suitors but only really warms up when the locals draw her into an all-male dance (which that movie echoes). Most fatally her accent wanders from British-ish to east-coast U.S.A. when the script calls for histrionics. Many actors (e.g. Patrick Taylor, Freda Jackson, Peter Illing) appear in brownface.

Bosley Crowther: the ending is a bit childish for such an adult movie. IMDB trivia: needed the epic treatment that Cukor could not provide. More details at Wikipedia.

Anora (2024)

Prompted by the noise associated with it winning the Palme d'Or at Cannes last year, the heavy Oscar interest and Jason Di Rosso's interview with director Sean Baker. The last reminded me that I'd passed up on Baker's Red Rocket a few years ago. In short: childish and drecky.

The movie is in three distinct sections. The first establishes lead Ani/Anora (Mikey Madison) as a full-service stripper at a Manhattan club whose knowledge of Russian comes in handy with the really high rollers. She's from a Jewish part of NYC, somewhat like Adam Sandler in Uncut Gems. She encounters and gets hitched to Russian scion Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn, a shoo-in for a Prince biopic?) in Las Vegas. The second part begins with him doing a runner from the local operatives of his absent parents who are all shitting bricks about the marriage. The grand tour of NYC really dragged. Coney Island is having a moment. The third has Ivan delivered to his parents who are obviously keen to disentangle him from Ani/Anora.

The whole show is not exactly zany or unfunny. Many scenes are overlong and do not progress character or plot. There's a fair bit of sex but it's not salacious; as Di Rosso and Baker observed it attempts to get away from the male gaze. (Actually none of it is sexy, especially not the commercial sex; in line with recent movies it tends to emphasise the accompanying issues (divergent libidos, selfishness, emotional investment, exclusivity, prophylaxis, transactionalism, ... everything) rather than go in for the titillation that used to get Roger Ebert excited. This is not an erotic thriller.) The central flaw is that I never got a grasp on what makes Ani/Anora tick beyond the obvious hedonism — and geez it looks like hard boring work. Is she in it just for the money? Does she have other prospects or ambitions? Throughout it's unclear if she's as credulous and vacuous as she presents: all posturing and underbaked threats, like the crass hiphop that floods the zone, spouting F-bombs, handy at lashing out with her feet but otherwise without leverage. Is this what passes for street smarts now? With thirty minutes to go Ivan, standing on the steps of his parents' plane, asks her the obvious question: is she stupid? I couldn't understand why she hung on so hard. The Assistant did a far more plausible treatment of aspirational girlish naivete.

The acting and cinematography are fine. The fault lies in the scenario and the impoverished characterisation.

Dana Stevens saw something different to me. Anora doesn't reassure her customers at the strip club, she just gives them the hard sell. (Many are clearly vulnerable which is not to say they're victims.) Ivan's "24 hour security guards" did not notice the day or two in Las Vegas though they were at the New Year's party. And so on. Stephanie Zacharek. Risky Business! "[Madison] plays Ani as a woman in charge" ... — but Ani/Anori is always so obviously deluded on that score. Both seemed to work the info pack hard, as hard as Baker milked that ending. Nobody points to Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience (etc) and I can't because I haven't seen it.

Giant (1956)

Produced and directed by George Stevens (Gunga Din) from a script that Fred Guiol and Ivan Moffat (nom'd) adapted from Edna Ferber's novel. Over many sittings as it is lengthy (3hr 21min), initially unpromising and regularly flags. It is often funny, perhaps unintentionally. Heavily nominated for Oscars but only Stevens came away with Best Director.

Circa 1920s, Texan cattleman Rock Hudson (nom'd) finds himself in Maryland, aiming to buy a horse off some Eastern gentry, but comes away with a wife in the form of Elizabeth Taylor (not nom'd) too. She's as strong willed as her horse which for the convenience of the plot soon improves her domestic situation by offing sister-in-law/fellow hard lady Mercedes McCambridge. Over two generations we're shown the horrors of Texas society and why these clans found it necessary to have so much land separating them. A second schism opens with the arrival of oil money, personified by enriched, aspirational white trash James Dean (nom'd).

Hudson is actually decent here, far better than he was in Written on the Wind (also 1956) and Seconds (1966), working mostly as raw material for Taylor to drag into modernity. She has some fun with every argument leading to frisky business; she gets up the morning after a spat all energised while he's totally shagged out. Son Dennis Hopper is restrained in his portrayal of his generation going its own way with more moral fibre than earlier members of the lineage. Carroll Baker pines for the old days of straightforward social climbing. Dean does well with what he's given but the final movement drags out the grindingly predictable. Those fatuous good old boys always know the score.

Bosley Crowther: aimed to be bigger than Texas... and succeeded! IMDB trivia: inspired Orson Welles's The Other Side of the Wind. And surely There Will Be Blood, which was also shot in Marfa, Texas. It's sort of like Gone with the Wind without the maudlin nostalgia for the Old South. Did anyone ever make an epic about the North?

The Linguini Incident (1991)

Prompted by the arrival of a director's cut reported by Jason Bailey in the New York Times. Directed and co-written by Richard Shepard. Tamar Brott was the other co-writer. Also notionally for David Bowie. Over many sittings as it is every bit as bad as the reviews say.

The scenario has waitress Rosanna Arquette working in some upscale restaurant in NYC while she explores her fixation with Madame Houdini. Her bestie Eszter Balint designs killer lingerie. Bowie plays a new bartender who has pressing reasons for obtaining a green card via the marriage route. The joint is owned (or at least operated) by Andre Gregory (My Dinner with Andre) and Buck Henry whose witless repartee is excruciating. The only actor who emerges with dignity preserved is cashier Marlee Matlin, working the door and cashbox under a pretzel hairpiece.

I hadn't realised Arquette had had such a big 1980s; to me she's just a minor player in Pulp Fiction. Bowie's acting is the worst I've seen by him, but the real problem is that too many other things are busted. So many scenes just do not work. The plot is absolutely standard NYC: some people have too much money, most not enough, everyone is on the grift and all the forced pretence looks so joyless. Winning looks so tedious.

Janet Maslin at the time, uncriticially shilling the local product.

The Thing from Another World (1951)

A jag from a Roger Ebert retro-review of Alien. Also an idle bit of Howard Hawks completism. Charles Lederer (responsible with Hawks for His Girl Friday) adapted it from a book by John W. Campbell Jr. Directed by Christian Nyby (in his first outing?) but IMDB suggests (credited producer) Hawks had to do a lot of heavy lifting.

As you'd expect from the auteurs it's very talky, even talkier than a modern sci-fi/action flick. Some of the dialogue is racy for the times (captain Kenneth Tobey rags secretary Margaret Sheridan for departing his bed without saying goodbye, she likens him to an octopus) and attempts to draw attention away from the minimal amount of action. There are a few fun bits I guess. The creature is Frankenstein's without the bolts.

Bosley Crother.

The Informer (1935)

A Victor McLaglen jag from Gunga Din. He got his Oscar for leading this. A somewhat early John Ford directorial effort. He also got Oscared. Adapted by Dudley Nichols (who declined his Oscar) from a story by Liam O'Flaherty. The music also got Oscared.

The story is simple and told linearly in a tiresome, twistless manner. It's 1922 in Dublin. Poverty is rife, the revolution is incomplete, America beckons and all a bloke needs is 20 pounds to get there with the squeeze of his life. McLaglen plays Gypo Nolan as a bull of a man, absent any brains. Somehow forgiveness is not only possible but inevitable, even for a Judas but not for the Black-and-Tans.

Andre Sennwald at the New York Times.

The Negotiator (1998)

Looking for entertainment in all the wrong places. I guess this was a platform for Samuel L. Jackson to show us what he could do as a dramatic lead in a realist mode without Tarantino. He really only succeeds with the high-energy running-at-the-mouth that he's famous for; his scenes with wife Regina Taylor are generally poor. Directed by F. Gary Gray from a proforma script by James DeMonaco and Kevin Fox.

Notionally Jackson is a police negotiator in Chicago. Through some flimsy plot moves and too many scenes that make no sense he holes up in a Federal building with internal affairs investigator J.T. Walsh who does what he can. He insists on fellow negotiator Kevin Spacey helping him untangle his situation. Getting that lined up takes about an hour of runtime. Spacey is flat and declamatory here, putting me in mind of Kevin Rudd at his most fatuous. David Morse works his villainous-Englishman features just so and does not miss an opportunity to take a shot. Ron Rifkin and/or John Spencer play dicey senior cops in stereotypical fashion. Also Paul Giamatti and Dean Norris as hostages. I don't think we ever learn who the informant was; the information dumps are arbitrary. And I didn't get why the scammers didn't just find a proper patsy and point Jackson at that person.

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. He got right into it until he stopped to think, so don't ever stop to think. A pile of genre tropes, "a triumph of style over story, and of acting over characters." Janet Maslin, blandly. Stephanie Zacharek: a 2hr 20min thrill-free, humourless slog. "Gray appears to know nothing about directing actors or clarifying characters' motives." Slightly too clever to be entertainingly dumb. Die Hard. IMDB trivia: J.T. Walsh died before this was released.

Once Upon A Time In America (1984)

Still #87 in the IMDB top-250, at least until the next round of the MCU.

Roger Ebert: four stars, some time after the full version was released on video. Vincent Canby savaged the 2hr 15min version released to American theatres but it's unclear he would have been any happier with the 3hr 47min Cannes edition.

The Order (2024)

I felt that this was the first of director Justin Kurzel's features I've seen but it's not; his Macbeth was solid, Assassin's Creed not so much. There was also a segment of The Turning. It's the first of his signature psychologicals for me though. The script is by Zach Baylin based loosely on a book by Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt about the white supremacist group The Order which was active in 1983 and 1984 on the northwest coast of the USA.

The frame echoes Oliver Stone's version of Eric Bogosian's Talk Radio: as in that movie Jewish talk back host Alan Berg (Marc Maron) cops blowback for his combative universalist views. From there we meet charismatic, dead-eyed leader Bob Mathews (Nicholas Hoult in his most effective non-MCU role yet) and his eventual opponents but not quite nemeses FBI agents Terry Husk (nominatively-determined Jude Law, bloated) and Joanne Carney (Jurnee Smollett). There are some bombings and robberies, the odd minor bout of ideology but nothing as challenging as some of its predecessors (e.g. The Believer, Ted K). The organisation has no interesting structure, no cells, no isolation. The movie is structurally similar to Wind River: a steady drip of arbitrarily withheld information.

Despite it being intrinsically worthless I'd say this movie is well-made except that some of the cinematography is very murky and that I got lost at times; for instance I had no idea why Tony Torres (Matias Lucas) got picked up by the cops. The climactic shootout is a mess — it's poorly shot but could’ve been awesome in its disorganisation. I did enjoy watching Law lose his shit over the incompetency of the local cops. Deputy Tye Sheridan has perhaps his best scene ever where he loses his at the FBI.

Ben Kenigsberg at the New York Times. He points to January 6. Glenn Kenny at Venice: a relief after Babygirl. John Sutherland summarised the actualities in 1997 during the trial of Timothy McVeigh.

Wind River (2017)

A Jeremy Renner jag from The Hurt Locker. Written and directed by Taylor Sheridan who has form for these neo-Westerns (Sicario, Sicario 2, etc.).

It's eventually established that the Indian Reservation that Renner works on (as a hunter of wild predators) is in frosty Wyoming. We get this info after Elizabeth Olsen (not her best work) arrives from Las Vegas, representing the FBI in a pale and witless echo of Twin Peaks. The absolutely stock action sequences are cut up with excessive and predictable exposition dumps that come too late. You can see the Mexican standoff of a climax from the minute the leads discuss security blokes at a mine site; the whole thing is as unsubtle as Waco. The jittery cinematography is really trying. So many scenes just don't work. The deracination of indigenous Americans is observed, passively.

This solid endorsement of vigilantism is probably aimed at filling the hole vacated by Eastwood when he retired Dirty Harry so long ago.

A Critic's Pick by Glenn Kenny at the New York Times. The opening scene is mystifying, suggesting we in for a mystical, poetic experience. That standoff scene is nowhere close to Michael Mann's efforts.

Living in Oblivion (1995)

I got it into my head that Steve Buscemi directed this but in fact he directs the movie within the movie. Tom DiCillo actually wrote and directed; apparently he worked with Jarmusch in his early days. A very NYC film shoot, a bit Season on the Line, a bit The Producers (with less overt begging), even a bit Opening Night. Buscemi's task of recording a few scenes for a low-budget feature involves every problem, from issues with his demential mother to the insecurities and backbiting of the actors and the technical staff. The structure is fun though the content of each bout/episode gets a bit too stale a bit too fast. Catherine Keener does well. Peter Dinklage is flat until he gets his dummy spit. Dermot Mulroney mostly poses. The stakes are so low except for those making this damn movie.

A Critic's Pick by Janet Maslin (?). Siskel and Ebert: thumbs down from both. Wears out its conceit well before the movie ends.

The Hurt Locker (2008)

Kathryn Bigelow's big directorial splash. She got Oscared for best picture and best director. Mark Boal wrote the script and also got Oscared. The other three Oscars were for the sound and editing. Notionally because I discovered Guy Pearce was in it.

Between the setting — Baghdad in 2004 — and the heavy Oscaring I wasn't expecting more than an exercise in flag waving. The jittery handheld camerawork of the first half hour or so was also a real turnoff, but as things settled down I did get mildly interested (but not invested) in Jeremy Renner's Oscar-nom'd bomb disposal expert. Against this was Anthony Mackie's inert performance as his support and Brian Geraghty's over-egged junior, and a general lack of context about what Renner is looking to achieve at any given incident. (In the first scene he removes detonators while in later ones he's looking for controllers.) There's a scene where these three Americans show Ralph Fiennes's British contractors how things are done, which was, just maybe, historically plausible. Being a name actor does not ensure longevity here.

At some point the switch is flicked from character development to plot and the decision making becomes stupid. The japes between gigs are humourless, the whole show leaden, even more so than Black Hawk Down. And overall there's nothing much novel here; the concluding movement goes as it must, right down to plenty being incarnated as a supermarket aisle, just like Oliver Stone/Le Ly Harslip's Heaven and Earth. Just too damn serious. I won't be rushing to see Zero Dark Thirty (2012).

Roger Ebert: four stars. A Critic's Pick by A.O. Scott: Bigelow kept it tight, evading the wider (political, box-office bombing) issues of that war. Stephanie Zacharek: "feels unformed and somewhat unfinished." Paul Mazursky had the same supermarket scene in Moscow on the Hudson (1984). Loads of street cats, goats and a few donkeys.

Dead Man Walking (1995)

Tim Robbins directed a script he adapted from Helen Prejean's book. He got an Oscar nom but no gong, riding his The Shawshank Redemption (1994) wave. Lead and his partner-at-the time Susan Sarandon plays a nun and got Oscared. She does work hard here. Second bean Sean Penn got a nom but no gong; does he do his best work in the penn? Fellow jailbird Clancy Brown puts in a effective cameo as a state trooper. Robert Prosky (Thief (1983), Broadcast News (1987)) does what he can as a talky lawyer. R. Lee Ermey! Jack Black! IMDB trivia suggests that the entire Robbins clan was in there somewhere.

Penn is on death row somewhere not too far from Slidell in Louisiana for the rape and murder of a young couple. For reasons I didn't perceive he writes to nun Sarandon and she responds in a witness/soul-saving sort of way. There are some auxiliary legal efforts to get his execution commuted that are shown to be ineffectual. She spends some time with the parents of the victims. It loses momentum in the final act as the redemption-in-Christ parts are interspersed with flashbacks of the crime.

Robbins is well-known to have liberal views and this made me feel that he was often trying to have it both ways; others may read this as even-handedness but his gestures at the Bible (essentially the New Testament against the Old) and the politics of capital punishment are shallow, manipulative cop outs. The music gets rough at times: Eddie Vedder over the opening credits, indecipherably, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and possibly Peter Gabriel in the middle, and an Oscar nom for Bruce Springsteen for the song over the closing credits.

For all that it is far better than Eastwood's later True Crime (1999).

Roger Ebert: four stars. Despite his denials option 3 (religious conversion) is roughly what we get. A Critic's Pick by Janet Maslin. Both were hugely impressed with Penn's performance.

Body Heat (1981)

A neo-noir starring William Hurt opposite Kathleen Turner on debut. She's wooden at times, perhaps intentionally, but the staginess makes for some creaky and unpersuasive moments when she's reeling him in and it's obvious any sane man would be calculating the odds. Written and directed by Lawrence Kasdan.

The setup is simple: he's a mediocre lawyer somewhere in hot-and-sticky Florida, not too far from Miami, and she's in the market for a man more satisfying than her dodgy husband. (We never get shown how dangerous or dodgy he and his associates are, or are we supposed to infer that she's the associate?) After she puts up a proforma fight his ego gets the better of him and we're off to something adjacent to The Talented Mr Ripley. Mickey Rourke does OK as an arsonist with a sound life philosophy (mostly just don't do it). All there is to know is that you should never let your co-conspirator out of your sight.

Roger Ebert: four stars as a "great movie". Double Indemnity... but original. A Critic's Pick by Janet Maslin? — her review is scathing, especially of Turner's performance. "Skillfully, though slavishly, derived" from "1940's film noir classics". The Postman Always Rings Twice. Vincent Canby was far more impressed a few months later. Witness for the Prosecution.

Nora Prentiss (1947)

Directed by Vincent Sherman. A warning about glamorous post war consumption: go out and live, boys of San Francisco, but be wary of trading up to that nightclub singer! Ann Sheridan plays it amazingly straight to Kent Smith's incredibly square middle-aged doctor; who knew these hot-stuff types were looking for slow times with dull men! The first hour is entirely boring setup and the remainder hinges on nonsense and NYC. I thought I was getting a noir but the twist just didn't come. Something in the vein of Sirk's Written on the Wind (1956).

Bosley Crowther: dire.

Shoshana (2023)

Produced, co-written and directed by Michael Winterbottom. He takes us to mandate Palestine (circa 1938 to 1944) for a history lesson about one of Britain's more obviously less successful colonial projects. It seems that as the nation declines her filmmakers spend more effort burnishing those days of greatness, c.f. Steve McQueen's latest, even if they can't suppress their ruefulness.

The focus is on two colonial policemen. Thomas Wilkin (Douglas Booth) tries to support the non (or at least less) violent Jewish groups who are agitating for a state in collaboration with the (sympathetic) British forces. He does this by enforcing the arms ban only on Arabs and the Jewish groups engaged in direct action, and romancing journalist/kibbutznik Shoshana Borochov (Irina Starshenbaum). Geoffrey Morton (Harry Melling, looking like he'll be playing George Orwell some day soon) has more inflexibly universalist ideas which of course lead to monumental cockups, culminating in what might now be called the extrajudicial killing of all-methods-on-the-table Avraham Stern (Aury Alby).

As usual with Winterbottom this is fabulously shot (here by Giles Nuttgens). At some point I realised I was enjoying baby-faced Booth's performance mostly because he sounds like Richard Burton. There's the faintest of echoes of Graham Greene's A Quiet American — love and clandestine operations during wartime but without the contest for the woman — and more of Zwartboek but less sexy. The longer any scene goes on the more certain that something will explode; this terrorism stuff is not very functional film making. It could've been called many funerals and no wedding.

Peter Bradshaw: what David Lean would've done with the romance. Later: Ben Kenigsberg at the New York Times.

He Ain't Heavy (2024)

Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with writer/director David Vincent Smith a while back. Both are Perth locals. I guess this might be Greta Scacchi doing her bit to revive the Australian film industry.

There's not a lot (not enough) to it. Mother Scacchi's actual daughter Leila George leads as a strong sister who is sick of having her life ruined by brother Sam Corlett's illicit drug use. The show starts in suburban Perth with the killing of a car and moves to the main set on what I took to be her grandparent's bush block (in Gosnells according to IMDB) where she imprisons him and us. (The location somewhat resonates with Tim Winton's stories. The house is full of cheesy childhood tchotchkes.) Later on we learn that his desire for druggy oblivion is due to mental unwellness. Her lifelong bestie Alexandra Nell is never shown to be much of a friend. Things go entirely predictably at excessive length; at its heart is the fusing of the getting-off-the-junk Trainspotting scene with the coercive control/intervention of Alexandra's Project into a sweary episode of an Australian soap opera. Surely getting off the meth has never been so humourless.

The internet suggests this might be autofiction.

Blitz (2024)

Steve McQueen's latest feature, his first since Widows (2018), leaving aside the doco Occupied City (2023). A day and a night in London, 1940, where the children are evacuated to the countryside and the bombs fall. We mostly follow the adventures of the young boy Elliott Heffernan, son of Saoirse Ronan and present-day absent CJ Beckford. He'll be a ladykiller soon enough. Grandfather Paul Weller drenches him in music while we get drowned by Hans Zimmer's heavy score.

The best parts are 1940s versions of Small Axe, the scenes of extreme self-abandonment in a high-energy jazz club in particular. There's a dash of Naked in how the city is traversed, and more obviously a direct lift from Dickens on the topic of child exploitation. I enjoyed Benjamin Clémentine's robust warden the most; he's even more striking here than he was as Herald of the Change in Dune (2021). The cinematography and editing are as good as you'd expect, and the jumping around in time is handled well enough.

On the less satisfying front McQueen spends less effort exploring the schisms in class exposed by the Blitz, just showing the working class against the constabulary and gatekeepers of the BBC, than he does on his preferred topic of racial tensions. On his account there were significant numbers of people from the West Indies in London in 1940, and that made me wish he'd spent more time with that community than the generic love-in-wartime woefulness involving Harris Dickinson he does show us. I was astonished that Weller's valve radio came up instantly; mine takes a good thirty seconds for any sound to emerge. Disappointing was Stephen Graham's unmodulated performance; we know he can do that but we're even more certain that he can do better. This was not Ronan's finest outing. The CGI was off-putting.

Afterwards I remembered Francis Spufford's Light Perpetual.

Dana Stevens: a dud. Luke Goodsell.

The Return (2024)

Prompted by Jeannette Catsoulis's Critic's Pick. She's one of the few decent reviewers left at the New York Times.

People of a certain age learnt the essentials of Homer's Odyssey from the fabulous-in-memory French/Japanese space-age Ulysses 31 cartoon. Against this the opening scenes made me fear I was in for another witless, overly literal adaptation: those slow shots of the island, the boat wreckage, a heavily damaged naked man washed up on a beach, a trying realism. But after a while things settle down and the survivor's-guilt inertness of Ralph Fiennes's Odysseus is shown to be cunning circumspection and not world-weariness. Juliette Binoche lights up every scene, especially in a central one where she looses two decades of rage against the beggarly Fiennes. (She rides the ambiguity of her knowing right to the end.) Against that is the miscasting of Charlie Plummer as Telemachus which is almost fatal at times. Marwan Kenzari and Claudio Santamaria are able in support. Co-produced, co-adapted and directed by Uberto Pasolini. John Collee and Edward Bond helped him with the screenplay.

The dire rating at IMDB reflects the unevenness of the production, and perhaps an expectation that this does or should treat more of the story than it does. See, for instance, Radheyan Simonpillai.

New Jack City (1991)

More Wesley Snipes completism. He does what he can in the Tony Montana role of Mario Van Peebles's gangsta reheat of Scarface. Opposing him are NYC undercover coppers Ice-T and Judd Nelson with semi-reformed crackhead Chris Rock stuck in the middle. It's all set pieces and pitched battles in the ghetto. Nobody covers themselves in glory. The U.S. legal system is shown to be ineffective in dealing with drug kingpins; it takes a neighbourhood religious vigilante to dispense justice. Written by Thomas Lee Wright and Barry Michael Cooper.

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. More original than it looks! I wasn't overly convinced by Ice-T's acting but that may've been due to the dubious dialogue and editing. Janet Maslin. Ah yes, the plot is about the cops trying to entrap Snipes and co via their computerised financial records. And there's a mafia subplot. How could I forget. IMDB trivia: Van Peebles was enabled by Clint Eastwood. Based on real life in Detroit. Boyz n the Hood. King of New York. Goodfellas.

Stormy Monday (1988)

Sting runs a jazz nightclub in cold and rainy neo-noir Newcastle upon Tyne, England. Apparently he's from up that way. He hires down-and-out-but-still-living-OK Sean Bean (making this a jag from Ronin) notionally to clean the place but really as a motor for the plot. Bean in turn meets-cute waitress and escort (?) Melanie Griffith. She's somehow attached to generic shady American businessman Tommy Lee Jones who is in town for America week. He proves incapable of making Sting an offer he cannot refuse but they come to terms anyway. Some comic and musical relief is provided by a Polish jazz band. There's an undertow of Irish-style violence; of course the Poles cop it in the neck when the US and UK go at it.

Mike Figgis wrote and directed. Apparently this was his first feature. The first half is a bit dreamy, a bit daft and somewhat fun. The second half gets serious and violent, retaining the style but souring the mood. Some wanton sexy filler destroys momentum as things move toward the inevitable. Everyone does OK and the cinematography is sound. I liked the editing. The music is often more interesting than the images. There's some vintage make-Britain-great-again rhetoric in the middle from the blonded mayor.

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. A Critic's Pick by Janet Maslin. It's OK but their praise is over the top.

The Spanish Prisoner (1997)

Written and directed by David Mamet. A heist flick! I guess people were more gullible before 9/11 and omnipresent internet scams but really, come on, Campbell Scott plays a sap. This is difficult to accept as he's developed "The Process" to extract untold gazillions from somewhere for the generic office space company in NYC headed by Ben Gazarra, and any such money funnel that I've ever had awareness of requires at least some minimal rat cunning. But Mamet is surrounded by cupidity and that's all he can think about.

Rebecca Pidgeon (Mamet's wife) is tasked with capturing Scott's sexual interest with some vintage repetitive Mamet dialogue. I admired her commitment and wish she'd succeeded, and at something more worthwhile. Steve Martin plays a rich man, dramatically, humorlessly and ultimately ineffectually. P.T. Anderson regular Ricky Jay has all the weariness in the world. The ending left me hanging: was Gazzara in on it too? Was it turtles all the way down or did Takeo Matsushita really work for the FBI? If only Mamet had been as all-in as his wife.

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. I guess he felt this was a rug honestly pulled whereas I felt the misdirection was clunky and dated. A Critic's Pick by Janet Maslin. Mametese indeed. Hitchcockian. It put me in mind of Hal Hartley's far more successful artificiality.

The Gingerbread Man (1998)

An idle bit of Robert Altman completism. Clyde Hayes adapted raw material provided by John Grisham. Kenneth Branagh leads as an invincible attorney/pants man in Georgia who has separated from Famke Janssen. His office factotum Daryl Hannah is still putting up a fight. Private dick Robert Downey Jr. just marks time in various bars, waiting for the MCU.

For prima facie spurious reasons (fishnets!) Embeth Davidtz drives Branagh into maximal lust which causes him to get stupid in having her father Robert Duvall committed. All of this is so dumb — I regularly wanted to throw the movie across the room — that I mostly just waited for the twist. Tom Berenger's minor role as Davidtz's husband provides some early hints, and if he'd made any use of his boat's Chekhovian device we could have all finished up sooner. I did not understand the climax at all: surely everybody has their trust issues by then and yet they're still credulous and playing some other game.

Overall it was as if Altman had forgotten how to make a movie. There is little to no overlapping dialogue and we just follow Branagh around in a very linear manner. The soundtrack by Mark Isham is very obtrusive and often more intense than the action. The juxtaposition with Hurricane Geraldo is farcical.

Roger Ebert: three stars. A Critic's Pick by Janet Maslin. Not based on a novel. "Describing himself as 'a little toasted,' the actor [Downey Jr] is seen drinking heavily and even nodding out from time to time, with art mirroring life all too noticeably."

Ronin (1998)

Directed by John Frankenheimer from a story by J.D. Zeik that was bent into shape by David Mamet trading as Richard Weisz (says IMDB). And what a mess it is.

We're dropped into a meetup at a bar somewhere (Paris?) that gets the principals together. It is unclear what Robert De Niro is good for; initially he acts like a boss then later as a producer and even later the operator with all the skills. Jean Reno is similar but French. Stellan Skarsgård is the Russian computer genius, and we all know you can't trust those ex-KGB blokes so why do these people? Perhaps we're supposed to think that Natasha McElhone is torn between De Niro's manliness and her revolutionary Irish cause. (She's wide eyed and flat and looks too much like Meryl Streep but is of course irresistible). Sean Bean's role is perplexing: initially strong he's shown to be a faker of no consequence. Skipp Sudduth is their driver.

The setup is essentially a heist but the bulk of the runtime is in two car chases: one in Paris and the other in or near Nice. I had no idea what was supposed to be going on until things got somewhat retconned in the final minutes. That may have been due to not having subtitles for the French bits but I'm pretty sure those did not matter. There are just too many plot holes and general incoherencies along the way. I never gave a damn about what was in the case.

Roger Ebert: three stars. "The movie is essentially bereft of a plot." And more fatally: "'I never walk into a place I don't know how to walk out of,' says De Niro, who spends most of the rest of the movie walking into places he doesn’t know how to walk out of." A Critic's Pick by Janet Maslin. She seems to have forgotten about Mann's Heat of 1995.

Birdman of Alcatraz (1962)

And yet more Burt Lancaster completism. Directed by John Frankenheimer from an adaptation by Guy Trosper of Thomas E. Gaddis's bowderlized biography/hagiography of "Birdman of Alcatraz" Robert Stroud. Oscar noms but no gongs went to Lancaster, fellow jailbird Telly Savalas, mother Thelma Ritter and cinematographer Burnett Guffrey.

We meet Lancaster imprisoned in Leavenworth, Kansas for killing a man. Soon enough he kills a screw on the possibly that a small infraction would deny him a visit from his mother. The man did not like uncertainty! Ending up in solitary forevermore (on a technicality after a publicity campaign helped him evade execution) he gets into birding: sparrows and canaries. With plenty of time on his hands in a mind-bogglingly lax Federal Penitentiary, he does some apparently valuable research on avians and rattles off a few amusing lines ("You're all got, you little runt." to his new bestie sparrow) as he is caught in some semi-catch-22 prison regulations: the Bolshevik prison operators try to appropriate the profits of his bird remedies! The horror. But he's having none of that and his cell remains impeccably clean throughout.

While the first half is a bit amusing the second is solemn, almost humourless, and leans into far too much exposition. Lancaster's engagements with nemesis warden Karl Malden are all very humanistic and civil, at least until we get to a pitched (but entirely stock) battle against D block on Alcatraz.

Overall Lancaster needed to heighten the distinction between the young psycho and the aged, mellow intellectual; he's fine with the latter but couldn't locate an inner Dennis Hopper. So while he is better here than in the first part of his career I don't bracket this with the vastly better works that started with The Leopard (1963).

A. H. Weiler at the New York Times. All the details at Wikipedia.