An accidental rewatch; I saw this at a cinema in Chicago in 2014 and forgot almost all of it. Written and directed by David Michôd after a spitballing with Joel Edgerton. No greater love has a man for his dog. Colin Stetson on the soundtrack!
A. O. Scott: "much of what happens seems arbitrary."
Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, and therefore inevitable. Apparently a loose adaption of Thomas Pynchon's Vineland (1990) which I'm even less likely to read now. As with its predecessor Licorice Pizza (2021) it is so nostalgic that maybe you had to have been there (or are there now). The appropriation of Gil Scott Heron made me wonder what he would have made of these revolutionaries being filmed. It leans into gynephilia with mouth-breathing gusto. There's nothing much on the logic or philosophy of revolution, or even history beyond a stray comment from Benicio Del Toro about Mexico and a mention of the Philippines. Some of it dragged, like "gringo Zapata" Leonardo DiCaprio's password fails that were played for stale laughs. Teyana Taylor (A Thousand and One (2023)) does the heavy lifting early on; she departs with all the cabin pressure. Sean Penn as a Terminator-ish soldier doing domestic immigration police work. I did not get much of a grip on Eric Schweig's (The Last of the Mohicans (1992)) character. Alana Haim has a small role. Overlong. Jonny Greenwood's score is obtrusive. The humour felt downhill from the Coen brothers.
Widely feted as more-or-less the movie of the year; the competition is so thin I doubt it will be challenged. Dana Stevens: long in the oven. So many subcultures get their closeups. Oodles of cinematic debt: Leonardo's "wake-and-bake weed smoker and bathrobe-clad layabout" is (obviously) a direct lift from The Big Lebowski (1998), Penn nods to Sterling Hayden in Dr. Strangelove. What is Anderson actually saying here? Peter Sobczynski. Nashville! The firing of heavy machine guns by pregnant women/nuns ... I guess you just have to be American. Jonathan Lethem at the New York Review of Books: The Weather Underground (2002). Jason Di Rosso interviewed Anderson. And so on.
Directed and co-written by Derek Cianfrance (Blue Valentine (2010), The Place Beyond the Pines (2012), The Light Between Oceans (2016), Sound of Metal (2019)). For Kirsten Dunst, Ben Mendelsohn, Peter Dinklage — one could be forgiven for having expectations! Channing Tatum leads. Kirt Gunn was the other co-writer.
This is tabloid fare, more (based on) true crime from 2004. The story has many all-American trimmings, some cute: the mode of robbing a number of McDonald's (etc), living in a Toys'R'Us box store, meeting the love of a life at a Presbyterian church, being impoverished and at a loose end after military service, unable to keep up with the Joneses or wifely expectations of material plenitude, the Southern accents. The setup in the first half chugs along agreeably but after that things really drag. Dinklage probably does the best as a store manager; at least I found his acting (facial work) the funniest in an Office Space (1999) sort of way. I'm not sure what Mendelsohn was thinking as the church leader. Dunst does what she can as a woman who'd like to be saved in this world and the next.
There's a reality version over the credits which shows that about five minutes is enough to do the story justice.
Natalia Winkelman at the New York Times. Marya E. Gates at Roger Ebert's venue: two stars, "a slick but incurious film". Jason Di Rosso interviewed Cianfrance. The latter two both remark on some very good acting from Tatum and Dunst.
Directed by Robert Wise (The Set-Up (1949)) from a script by Abraham Polonsky and Nelson Gidding adapting William P. McGivern's novel.
Harry Belafonte led and was successful in a series of set-piece scenes, especially the jazzy ones in a nightclub where he memorably played the vibraphone and sabotaged Mae Barnes's performance of All Men Are Evil. Robert Ryan's (also The Set-Up (1949)) hard boiled racist is boring. Home-alone housewife Gloria Grahame had just enough screentime to ask "what’s going on in there? an orgy?" at his door (while his regular squeeze Shelley Winters is out working) but I couldn't believe Grahame would ever have been that hard up. Mastermind Ed Begley rounded out the trio of desperadoes from NYC who tried it on upstate, much as Linda Fiorentino did a few decades later. Unfortunately the plot is pedestrian and went as the production code required. Notionally noir but the best bits are jazz.
Vale Lee Tamahori (The Convert (2023)). Perhaps my third time around with his classic take on what it meant to be Māori in the latter half of the twentieth century. Riwia Brown adapted Alan Duff's novel of the same name from 1990. The cast is perfect. It now also functions as a time capsule of Auckland and surrounds.
Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. He didn't grasp any cultural specifities or comment on the cinematic aspects. Janet Maslin: she grasped more of the details but still produced some clangers. I guess international audiences latch onto the universals — the dispossession, the love and domestic violence, the alcoholism, the wayward children, etc. — and miss the carefully constructed nuances. For instance we're shown at least five versions of the overhang of traditional Māori cultural practice, of which one seems to endorse the removal of children from families and another the impossibility of social and economic mobility. Strangely absent were the All Blacks.
Greek director Costa-Gavras was unknown to me. He adapted Vassilis Vassilikos's novel of the same name with help from Jorge Semprún and Ben Barzman. It rates highly at IMDB on the paranoid/political thriller scoreboards, and indeed in general. Somewhat timely I guess, or perhaps it is always timely.
Yves Montand leads, at least for the setup, as a leftist politician who is in town to deliver a speech and rile up the masses. (Perhaps this is how George McGovern presented.) The local powers-that-be want to plausibly-deniably obstruct the gathering and just maybe put a stop to this socialist nonsense. But some go further than that, and then a magistrate ("Le juge d'instruction", an enjoyably ice-cold and chic Jean-Louis Trintignant) drives the whole show off a cliff.
It is incredibly well made and entirely engrossing. We're shown how everything goes down with scenes that are fluently sliced up in ways that exhibit the internal states and histories of the characters while leaving us solidly anchored in time and perspective. (Lone Star (1996) tried for a similar effect but was nowhere as ambitious.) The cast is solid, the pacing excellent, the telling well-humoured. It doubles as a post-war time capsule for Algiers. There's some good work on the soundtrack (by Mikis Theodorakis), especially in the scene where a bloke is cheating at pinball.
I was a bit mystified why this Greek director made this actual Greek story (from 1963) in French with French actors (excepting Irene Papas who mostly facially emotes) in Algeria. It got the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar for 1970 (submitted by Algeria!). Françoise Bonnot also deservedly won for Best Film Editing. I see that Costa-Gavras and Montand established a partnership similar to that of Melville and Delon (Le Samouraï (1967), etc.) and now have a new vein to mine.
Roger Ebert at the time: four stars, universal, Chicago and Sài Gòn. Armond White in 2009: it's not about the ideology... I'm not sure I can buy that. IMDB trivia: "The three-wheeled delivery vehicle that is referred to as 'kamikaze' is a 1965 Innocenti Lambretta Lambro 450."
More noir. Directed by Charles Vidor. Rita Hayworth (Only Angels Have Wings (1939), The Lady from Shanghai (1947)) leads, mostly desperately trying to catch Glenn Ford's attention after something unexplained went direly wrong with their previous romance. Inexplicably she turns up married to George Macready (a steely, Germanic performance not far from his turn as the General in Paths of Glory (1957)) who is running an illicit casino in Buenos Aires and has hired Ford as his number-two man. Steven Geray (Spellbound (1945), In a Lonely Place (1950), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953, etc. etc.)) as the bloke in the gents who does more than you want is somehow omniscient.
Schematically the plot is not terrible (it's not so far from Casablanca (1942)) but the script (IMDB says it was heavily doctored) was. The characters are generally inscrutable, the timeline doesn't really work, and who really cares about the international tungsten trade anyway? It's all a bit frustrating as there's enough there for it to have been something.
Bosley Crowther at the time: crude and nonsensical.
Something of the complement of Kubrick's Killer's Kiss (1955): a boxer (Robert Ryan) is expected to throw a fight but his manager got greedy and didn't tell him. His wife (Audrey Totter (Alias Nick Beal (1949)) wants him to retire and has a restless evening strolling the demimonde while he's in the ring.
Directed by Robert Wise (who went on to collect two Oscars each for West Side Story (1961) and The Sound of Music (1965); he edited The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) and Citizen Kane (1942)!) from a script by Art Cohn. Brief, completely linear, very well constructed; the crowd shots are telling and often horrible-hilarious against the tension of what's happening in the ring. One of those things people did before T.V.
The reviews were generally dire but I was curious to see what Benny Safdie could do without his brother Josh (Uncut Gems (2019)). The obvious referent is Aronofsky's The Wrestler (2008) and, like Mickey Rourke there, you cannot fault Dwayne Johnson's commitment. Apparently some parts are shot-for-shot remakes of The Smashing Machine (2002) and it is never clear why anyone would want that. (That earlier doco about early MMA fighter Mark Kerr was directed by John Hyams, making this an improbable jag from Capricorn One (1978).)
Fatally none of the characters have any depth. Emily Blunt's is the most annoying as she never found the right register; I felt she was miscast as there are plenty of American actresses who know how. In mitigation they did equip her with a beautiful cat. Nala Sinephro (having a moment?) mangled The Star Spangled Banner, and there's a scene that proves that some things even Bruce Springsteen cannot elevate. Perhaps they should have cast Adam Sandler.
Dana Stevens: superficial. Peter Sobczynski: quite flawed. Both struggled to discern what the Safdie(s) are trying to say and why anyone should care. Jason Di Rosso interviewed the cinematographer Maceo Bishop.
They may or may not have faked the Moon landings but they definitely faked the Mars landings! — and the reasons were uninspired. Written and directed by Peter Hyams who seemed to want to make something encompassing all the genres; bits and pieces sorta work but the whole thing is busted, ending up like the dog that caught the car. There are some vintage 1970s touches like two helicopters chasing a biplane cop duster. Shades of Firefox (1982). Elliott Gould! Karen Black! O.J. Simpson! (As you might expect from this 1990s performances he was always a poor actor.) David Huddleston! In two sittings as it's pretty tedious.
I'm always tempted to see what people make out of Henrik Ibsen's plays; a while ago I saw fantastic stage productions of A Doll's House and Ghosts, and even another bowdlerised version of Hedda at NIDA so long ago. This one took two nights to get through; it's airless and no fun. Directed by Nia DaCosta from her own adaptation of Hedda Gabler (~ 1891); she made the derided The Marvels (2023).
The scenario has Hedda (Tessa Thompson) swanning around a huge country mansion that she's convinced her new husband (Tom Bateman) is the prix d'amour. This night she hosts a party of academicians who will or won't grant him the role that could finance her lifestyle. (The house, the adults-behaving-as-kids, the psychologising, the substance abuse put me in mind of Steve (2025).) The whole edifice does not make a tonne of sense: so many scenes do not work, all of the characters are frenemies, and whyever would you bring your McGuffin to a party like that one? Imogen Poots, Nina Hoss, neither great. Hildur Guðnadóttir's score is often obtrusive.
A Critic's Pick by Natalia Winkelman at the New York Times: sure, Hedda just wants to have fun but what's in it for us? — and I definitely miss my appendix. "They say that lying is the second most fun a girl can have." Marya E. Gates at Roger Ebert's venue: two-and-a-half stars and an even-handed diagnostic. Peter Bradshaw: literally Chekhovian, as if there was any doubt. Peter Sobczynski.
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.
Prompted by wonderment about what else Kathryn Bigelow has done beyond fluffing the military (The Hurt Locker (2008), A House of Dynamite (2025)). Mostly written by James Cameron (tidied by Jay Cocks) as a high-concept scifi riffing on the Rodney King incident in Los Angeles... and still leaning heavily on a lot of hardware. The brain hacking/virtual reality angle, the Bladerunner badlanding of L.A., the Roboocop police brutality are pure 1980s cyberpunk. The dinky TDK CDs that carry the damning recorded experiences, the millenarianism, the grungy, exclusive nightclubs and soundtrack (Tricky's reworking of Karmacoma, Skunk Anansie), the Total Recall are pure 1990s. Ralph Fiennes, looking so young and winning and much like Bradley Cooper, leads as a sort-of Johnny Mnemonic vendor of experiences with a fatal obsession with Juliette Lewis who has run off with Michael Wincott. (Her acting is perhaps in line with the conceit but not with that of the other actors.) Angela Bassett (looking fabulous) and Tom Sizemore (what was with that hair) play his supportive buddies, rusted on, handy in a fight. Bizarrely Vincent D'Onofrio and William Fichtner have almost no lines, squandered as Terminator cops who commit the original plot point.
I didn't enjoy the restless, giddy camera very much. The soundtrack is obtrusive but works well as a time capsule. The maximalist set-piece scenes are effective in themselves. There's a relentlessness to most of it that is its own kind of tedium. Expertly assembled.
Roger Ebert: four stars. Vintage 1940s noir. The plot has a few issues. Janet Maslin: "explores [...] corruption so avidly that it happens to illustrate the same runaway sensationalism it condemns" — much like Natural Born Killers (1994). IMDB trivia.
More Matthew McConaughey completism after a sneaky rewatch of The Lincoln Lawyer (2011). He has a very small role here; Chris Cooper leads. John Sayles wrote and directed.
This struck me as some kind of Texan version of Tracy Letts's August: Osage County (2007) (Cooper is in the movie of that). It's got a dash of the Touch of Evil (1958) borderlands: whose land is it anyway, when the indigenous, Latinos and whites have all lived in Rio County, Texas for 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.
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.
Matthew McConaughey completism. I'd been putting this off for a long time as it seemed unappetising, and so it proved. Written and directed by Jeff Nichols (The Bikeriders (2023)).
We're somewhere in Arkansas on a river. Leads, the young boys Tye Sheridan and mate "Neckbone" Jacob Lofland, discover a boat in a tree on an island (I think; it may have been a remote unsettled elbow) which happens to be McConaughey's idea of a good time. The latter has his reasons to hang around but not for too long. Conversely the boys really should be doing other things, like going to school or helping with the fishing, but find ample time to aid the plot.
The remainder of the cast have minor roles. Sam Shepherd looks perpetually constipated as a former Marine sharpshooter. Michael Shannon is a young, apparently single uncle who collects shellfish for a living. Reese Witherspoon is the girl of youthful dreams. Lurv here does not function as it did in Interstellar (2012); father Ray McKinnon reckons it's not a load-bearing concept. A soft-focus misogyny permeates the whole script as marriages and lifelong infatuations dissolve due to the actions of the underdrawn women. Somewhat jarring are the odd grabs of some vintage Dirty Three tunes.
Directed by David Lowery (A Ghost Story (2017)) from his adaptation of a New Yorker article by David Grann. What a cast! — everyone must've wanted in on Robert Redford's final feature. Danny Glover and Tom Waits play his offsiders, all in avuncular mode. Sissy Spacek as the age-appropriate squeeze. Casey Affleck doesn't mumble! A John David Washington jag from a sneaky rewatch of Tenet (2020) (which made more sense on a rewatch, convincing me that it isn't worth a rewatch). He has a very brief scene in the middle somewhere that added nothing, as does Isiah Whitlock Jr. Elisabeth Moss is not plausibly Southern.
There's not much in the way of a story. It's about 1980. Redford plays a charming, aged gentleman bank robber (Forrest Tucker) who doesn't want to retire but wouldn't mind riding Spacek's horses in between the operations. He's escaped gaol 16 times so far. That's about it and it's not enough to carry a feature.
A. O. Scott: does you a kindness by taking your money. Dana Stevens.
Second time around. Matthew McConaughey as a space grandpa. Still hokum; it's all about the boomers wanting to be younger than their kids.
It seems likely that Mike Judge never got back to the heights of Office Space (1999) but I had to give this one a try. Luke Wilson leads. It starts out in a somewhat inspired but derivative mode but slides into dross. The epic-oversleep mechanic is identical to (one of?) the ending(s) of Army of Darkness (1992) which knew the limits of the lark. It may've worked better if it was bolted onto some other thing; the aesthetic is a somewhat less brutal Total Recall (1990), a movie that had a different idea about time travel.
... and in any case reality has now far outstripped anyone's imaginary.
Time travel, Seattle-style. For Aubrey Plaza who made hay with very dodgy dialogue in a perfectly deadpan performance. Some of it is very amusing though the humour falls away as the conceit — an advertisement for "someone to go back in time with me" — gives way to the needs of plot, which are of the unimaginative rom-com kind. Karan Soni's character would probably not have made it into a post-#metoo production. Jake Johnson does well as a vacuous writer for a magazine who knows what interns are for. Mark Duplass is also effective as the adwriter.
Directed by Colin Trevorrow from a script by Derek Connolly. These guys look they went on to mostly work on reboots (more's the pity).
Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. "How to make a time-travel movie containing no apparent paradoxes." Dana Stevens provides context. "[A]n unconvincingly Spielbergian happy ending." Stephen Holden.
