Written and directed by Anders Thomas Jensen (Riders of Justice (2020)). For Mads Mikkelsen.
Nikolaj Lie Kaas (The Kingdom (2022)) goes down for a bank robbery and is released a decade-and-a-half later. Brother Mikkelsen, missing or perhaps possessing a few extra mental screws, was charged with hiding the loot but now wants to present as John Lennon. Much forced humour ensues, interspersed with cliched, repressed childhood trauma in a stock, tired format. Strangely the violence against women (Sofie Gråbøl and Bodil Jørgensen) is served up cold. Søren Malling (A Hijacking (2012)) gets lumped with the straight dipso role. The framing cartoon story is better than what it bracketed.
Calum Marsh at the New York Times: indeed Mikkelsen may have delivered a career-best performance but the movie is a long way from the best he's been in.
For reasons I did not totally grasp Captain John Mills (Hobson's Choice (1954), Oscared for Ryan's Daughter (1971), The Big Sleep (1978), etc.) and Mechanist Sergeant-Major Harry Andrews had to drive "Katy" the ambulance with two nurses (Sylvia Syms and Diane Clare) from Tobruk to Alexandria as the Germans closed in for another round of siege-laying during World War II. Along the way they picked up Afrikaner Captain Anthony Quayle for frisson. Things got a bit The Wages of Fear (1953) but nowhere as engrossing. Directed by J. Lee Thompson from a screenplay T.J. Morrison helped Christopher Landon derived from the latter's novel.
A cinematic take on Greek-Armenian/Russian mystic Gurdjieff's (unreliable) autobiography of the same name. Adapted by chief disciple/gatekeeper Jeanne de Salzmann with director Peter Brook. There's some good material, like the ceremony shot in Afghanistan that opens proceedings, but it's poorly assembled. Prompted by having bought a copy of The Moon of Hoa Binh (1994) from New Age/explorer providors Bennett Books in 2015. Also some Terence Stamp completism: he plays Russian Prince Lubovedsky with solemn leaden gravitas. Dragan Maksimovic leads as Gurdjieff. The soundtrack is intriguing.
As always with these things it's hard to get too excited by the gnomic mysticism on show; it's unclear what was sought, what was found and what was confected. As near as we get to a philosophy involves generic transcendentalism alloyed with some received wisdom about movement from the possibly-existing Sarmoung Brotherhood of Sufis. (These guys are supposed to reside in Kafiristan, the same setting as Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King (1975).) But surely the journey is the point, the intriguing esotericism merely the vehicle; conspiracy theories from a more spiritually-expansive time. Notionally there's some science in there but I did not recognise any; perhaps someone meant the enneagram and associated numerology.
I won't attempt to read the source book (Goodreads) but I strongly suspect that T. E. Lawrence's roughly contemporaneous autobiography (~1922) has more worthwhile things to say. The supplemental literature (abidingly written!) appears to be similarly opaque and often plays like soap opera and yak shaving.
Janet Maslin: Brook has no interest in continuity. Lifeless until the sacred dances towards the end. (I get the impression that learning these movements is pay-to-play.) Wikipedia. The young Gurdjieff (Mikica Dimitrijevic) does radiate that spiritual thirst but it's so hard now to discern it from the omnipresent existential angst.
A Tahar Rahim jag from A Prophet (2009). Written and directed by Asghar Farhadi who was responsible for the widely feted A Separation (2011) which I never got around to seeing and won't now.
A kitchen-sink soap opera set amongst the Iranian community in Paris. Ali Mosaffa returns from Tehran after four years at the request of separated (notionally French?) wife Bérénice Bejo who is shacking up with dry-cleaning Rahim and wants to formalise a divorce. There he acts the wise man to her and him and the kids, so obviously the role of the kid strung between separating parents. Some unprocessed stuff gets partially processed. Nobody has anything else going on in life except this mess. All of the characters are more-or-less repellent for one reason or another. The histrionics are trying, especially from leading lady Bejo. Forgiveness just happens. Not enough is asked of Rahim.
The revelatory/iterative-deepening narrative strategy was trying and flawed: I did not ever understand the motivation of the elder daughter (Pauline Burlet) to sabotage her mother, and while I can't say I was paying enough attention to everything, the daughter's meeting with the dry cleaning employee (Sabrina Ouazani) for an account of a minor event that much is made of made no sense when it is later strongly implied that the very same woman gave her the email address of Rahim's wife.
There are some beautifully constructed shots but it's really all talk with a little bit of walk.
Prompted by Andy Hazel's coverage of this year's Cannes where a 4K restoration was shown. Written and directed by Ken Russell (new to me) who worked off a play that John Whiting derived from Aldous Huxley's novel The Devils of Loudon (1952). In two sittings. Highly rated at IMDB due to infamy.
Notionally it's about some power plays over the small town of Loudon, France in 1634 but really it just sinks into the mire at the crossroads of sex, violence, Catholicism, witchcraft, possession, hysteria and so on. Vanessa Redgrave (Howard's End (1992)) leads as a hunchbacked sexually-repressed Mother Superior in a cloistered order of Ursuline nuns. She gets a bit fruity like Peter O'Toole in The Ruling Class (1972). The main plot point has her accuse Jesuit-educated town/religious leader/straight man Oliver Reed (The Big Sleep (1978), Lion of the Desert (1980)) of supernaturally seducing her. This suits the agents of Cardinal Richelieu (Christopher Logue), mostly embodied by Dudley Sutton and Michael Gothard, just fine. Iconoclastically and against his better judgement Reed marries Gemma Jones after impregnating the daughter (Georgina Hale) of the town magistrate/prosecutor (John Woodvine).
But really the plot comes in small bursts in between many cracked, demented scenes of debauchery of one kind or other. The style and choppy editing reminded me of John Boorman's overheated efforts (Zardoz (1974), Excalibur (1981)) though the cinematography is a lot poorer with lots of overexposure. (I can't imagine a restored version would be much better.) The overlong outro presaged Braveheart (1995).
Roger Ebert: zero stars and a supercilious review; it must have been the only time he didn't cut a movie with this much nudity some slack. He saw it at Cinema Theater in Chicago. Vincent Canby: of little substance. Wikipedia has all the details.
A Ha Jung-woo jag from a sneaky rewatch of The Handmaiden (2016), and also Oh Dal-su (No Other Choice (2025), etc.). They're fine as is the rest of the cast but all are working well within their abilities. Director/co-writer Choi Dong-hoon is new to me, as was the other co-writer Lee Ki-cheol. In two sittings due to length and a pro forma script.
The setting is occupied Korea/Manchuria in the early 1930s. Korean nationalists aim to kill some Japanese and collaborators in Shanghai and/or Seoul. The exact details do not matter too much as it's all about set pieces in a lush department store and upmarket Japanese-style house and so on. Thematically it's a shallow reheat of Lust, Caution (2007). There's too much implausible shooting. Somewhat annoyingly lead actress Jun Ji-hyun is far better in the sophisticated urban beauty role than the North Korean (?) peasant worker one that she spends most of her time as.
The cinematography is fine but nothing special given what we're accustomed to now.
Seongyong Cho: two-and-a-half stars. Paul Bramhall at City on Fire.
Alejandro G. Iñárritu completism. I remember enjoying Birdman (2014) but not so much 21 Grams (2003), Babel (2006) or The Revenant (2015). This was his debut feature. It was on the pile for ages but only became inevitable after I recently saw the other Gael García Bernal vehicle of the day, Y tu mamá también (2001). Lengthy. In two sittings as I wasn't that engaged. I lost track of a few threads therefore.
Things are structured around a car crash in present-day Mexico City where three storylines intersect which are are otherwise causally independent. The timelines are somewhat chopped up but again inconsequentially so beyond some wasted screen time. The first has García Bernal involved with dog fighting and his sister-in-law. The second is about a supermodel, her dog and her man after the accident. The final part focuses on "El Chivo" ("the goat") who is supposed to have some form as an intellectual guerilla. He comports with a pack of mongrels and pines for his lost family while doing some dirty deeds, notionally with the wisdom of Solomon.
I felt much of it was witless and leant too heavily on Tarantino. None of the characters are more than a millimetre deep or deviate much from familiar stereotypes. All engage in predictable histrionics. Things generally go as you'd expect. The cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto is often too frenetic to enjoy. Written by Guillermo Arriaga.
Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. A Critic's Pick by Elvis Mitchell.
Woeful David Lean completism. Over three nights due to extreme tedium. Ann Todd (freshly minted as Mrs Lean at the time) leads as a young woman madly in love with an unsuitable Frenchman (Ivan Desny) in 1850s Glasgow. Stuff happens and he dies of arsenic poisoning. Did she or did she not do it?
Regrettable Al Pacino completism. Also for Holly Hunter who has the thankless task of going on a date with this self-absorbed geriatric misanthrope. She acquits herself just fine. Director David Gordon Green (Joe (2013)) seems to have since shifted into Halloween reboots. Written by Paul Logan. In two sittings due to the tedium.
Texan locksmith Pacino lives by himself with a cat and unfortunately the cat, while gorgeous, does not elevate proceedings. (There is a wantonly explicit scene of veterinary surgery.) He's somewhat estranged from his investment-making son in what's probably supposed to be a critique of honest toil versus fast money. He spends a lot of time pining for a lost love who we later learn found him as confusing as he is boring. Things go quirky-predictably right up to the magic of the mime at the end. The date with Hunter reaches for the classic cringe of Happiness (1998) but is so relentlessly brutal you only come away wondering what is wrong with people.
A pointer from Sam Roggeveen (I think episode 11). A sketch of the Cuban missile crisis from the perspective of special assistant to JFK (and later LBJ!) Kenny O'Donnell (Kevin Costner with a shocker of a Boston Irish accent). That link suggests it is not historically accurate: it points to McNamara's take in 2001. It's not great cinema either: the chronology is often unclear and motivations murky, especially as to why the USSR moved missiles into Cuba at that time. (They must have known the blowback would be epic.) Perhaps the best observation is how the upper reaches of the command-and-control structures of the US military work; JFK's experience was apparently not so different to Trump's (for better and worse). And the lack of direct or reliable communication between the USA and the USSR. But really it's just another love letter from the Boomers to their parents, the Greatest Generation.
The huge cast mostly does OK (Bruce Greenwood as JFK, Steven Culp as RFK, Dylan Baker as McNamara). Directed by Roger Donaldson (Cocktail (1988), No Way Out (1987), Species (1995), etc.) from a script written by David Self (Road to Perdition (2002)) who drew on the book The Kennedy Tapes - Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis by Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow.
Roger Ebert: three stars and a personal memoir. Elvis Mitchell, scathing at the New York Times.
And yet more Costa-Gavras completism. This was his followup to State of Siege (1972). Once again Jorge Semprún helped him the adaptation, this time of a book by Hervé Villeré.
A heavy-handed legal legal/courtroom farce. It's World War II (1941) yet again and Vichy needs some victims to placate the occupying Germans after some enterprising young French Communists assassinate a Wehrmacht naval officer. If they fail a hundred of Vichy's finest law operatives will be killed at the Place de la Concorde. People of substance! For reasons underexplained those operatives require a legal fig leaf to identify and impose capital sentences on these victims. They are most horrified when the best that could be done is a statute creating special courts with retroactive powers and framing up some petty criminals. This point gets hammered to death amongst other bits of padding.
Michael Lonsdale had the thankless task of playing "normalien" Pierre Pucheu, le ministre de l'Intérieur, apparently most responsible. His life story was probably more interesting than what Costa-Gavras showed us. Even so what he did got him the Best Director award at Cannes 1975. Pétain is heard but not seen.
Roger Ebert: three stars. Janet Maslin at the Boston Phoenix (!). The gymnasium is indeed a Meccano fan's paradise.
Costa-Gavras's second feature. He directed his own adaptation of a novel by Jean-Pierre Chabrol.
The film tracks a maquis (World War 2 French resistance rural guerilla group) as it frees some death-row inmates from a gaol, robs a bank of a million francs and is tasked with blowing up a pass in the hills which gets a bit The Wages of Fear (1953). Frisson is notionally added by them accidentally liberating a thirteenth man from the gaol (Michel Piccoli) who professes to be nonpartisan despite wearing German boots. The pace is frenetic, relentless, the opposite of The Confession (1970). We learn that Frenchman can only think and talk about war and sex, and only think about war when they have to. (What about food?)
The film concludes with a bravura shot of Piccoli hanging off a bridge that looks like a scaled-up Meccano set, Nazis overhead shooting down at him; a more eloquent expression of what Europa (1991) reached for.
The cinematography by Jean Tournier (The Train (1964), The Sleeping Car Murder (1965), The Day of the Jackal (1973)) is good.
Howard Thompson at the New York Times: frenzied vitality. Costa-Gavras "should have whittled his pacifist down to size."
More Robert Redford completism, and my first go around with Barbra Streisand. Directed by Sydney Pollack from a script credited to Arthur Laurents (author of the source novel) that IMDB tells me was bashed into shape by some heavy-duty doctors: Paddy Chayefsky, Francis Ford Coppola, Herb Gardner and Dalton Trumbo. In two sittings as I came to realise it didn't have a lot of shape.
This is something like American Doctor Zhivago (1965): a soap-operatic love letter from the Boomers to the Greatest Generation who were young once, before they were wearied by World War 2 and their kids. A difference may be that here the revolution fails, as does the romance, and there's not enough cinematic magic to distract us.
I enjoyed Barbra's performance for first half or so, up to some point when I realised that her character gets older but does not develop; she learns to swear, drink and smoke but continues to rant in cookie-cutter fashion all the way through. She's supposed to be a bit of a Jewish everywoman, strong willed, unforgiving, self absorbed, doing all the work (even rowing the boat!) while vanilla WASP demigod Redford just basks in her adulation that is rightfully his due. He has his moments, like when he realises what a prize she is, but is mostly not allowed to do much. They never seem to get married. The latter half fails to show us many of the critical events referred to. IMDB says this is James Woods's first feature and I can't remember him ever being so tame.
Roger Ebert: three stars. Vincent Canby: "looks like a 747 built around an elephant" — the latter being "the Streisand talent" which "is huge, eccentric and intractable." Redford in the thankless role as the weak-man foil to furiously-determined Streisand.
An extremely well-made French prison drama by co-writer/director Jacques Audiard. Thomas Bidegain, Abdel Raouf Dafri and Nicolas Peufaillit also got writing credits. Lead Tahar Rahim as a new inmate is mesmerising, the camera often holding his bruised, scarred and often bleeding face in tight for agonisingly long periods. The plot is straightforward: a Corsican gang led by Niels Arestrup rules the gaol but is eclipsed by a Muslim collective as our man rises. Some scenes are very amusing amongst the heavy stuff. Somehow both very graphic and not especially violent. The surrealism is served up cold alongside everything else; there is no hand holding here.
The cinematography by Stéphane Fontaine (Captain Fantastic (2016)) is excellent. The connection between Rahim and Adel Bencherif (who teaches him to read) is superbly drawn. Rahim's performance won him Césars for Best Actor (Meilleur acteur) and Most Promising Actor (Meilleur espoir masculin) and the cast is uniformly great. It won Audiard the Grand Prize of the Jury at Cannes.
Roger Ebert: four stars. A Critic's Pick by Manohla Dargis. All those little details make the movie. Peter Bradshaw: five stars. Powerful, intentional.
Misconceived Riz Ahmed completism. Woeful TV. The writing is very poor which is a shame as the premise — Ahmed as the next James Bond — is solid and the cast is capable of much more than they're asked to do. Pure self absorption.
On the pile for a very long time. Written and directed by Australian-from-South Africa Dee McLachlan. Hard yakka.
The topic is human trafficking/coerced prostitution in Sydney-but-mostly-Melbourne in the mid-1990s, those dying days of neon and payphones and Kings Cross. This is shown from various angles, the most effective being some very short scenes with a variety of johns. The overarching plot has the mother (Amanda Ma) of one of the trafficked women (Sun Park) come to Melbourne from Shanghai to find her, involving an insurance something-or-other office worker (Veronica Sywak) who develops a saviour complex with presumptive and oversimplifying tendencies that have fatal consequences. Emma Lung (Peaches (2004)) got lumped with the heavier coercive events. Third-wheel Saskia Burmeister did what she could. The male characters were totally ancillary: essentially corrupt or impotently inert.
The film does function as something of a time capsule, as many Australian movies do, but suffered from relentless heaviness, genericity and an inability to take any of the plausible offramps when offered. It's not Lilja 4-Ever (2002) in craft, deftness or willingness to really go there.
It later struck me that the immigration detention/deportation process Lung undergoes looked a lot like the trafficking that opened proceedings.
More a movie to read about than see, I posit. Luke Buckmaster rewatched it in 2015. David Stratton reviewed it in his Australia at the Movies (2024): Crossfire (1947). His summary is erroneous: Sunee does know people in Melbourne. Four stars from each of Margaret and David.
Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with writer/director Hasan Hadi who won the Caméra d'Or at Cannes 2025 (for best first feature).
A young girl (Baneen Ahmed Nayyef) is required by her school to make a cake for Saddam Hussein's birthday in 1990, a task that is beyond the means of her impoverished and unwell grandmother (Waheed Thabet Khreibat). The often spectacular cinematography by Tudor Vladimir Panduru shows us her lifestyle on the fabled Mesopotamian Marshes. The MacGuffin hunt for ingredients takes them and rooster Hindi to the nearby city. There they encounter some supportive people and some exploitation and a bit too much happens.
It's a well-made film. The acting is good. I found it effective in the way The Secret Agent (2025) wasn't.
Matt Zoller Seitz at Roger Ebert's venue: three-and-a-half stars. Ben Kenigsberg made it a Critic's Pick at the New York Times.
Lars von Trier completism. He directed and co-wrote it with Niels Vørsel. Somewhat gripping due to the intriguing cinematography and Max von Sydow's narration. The use of the sets pointed the way to Dogville (2003). Over two nights.
We're told that post-war Germany is in need of a little comfort. This drew ingenue deserter Jean-Marc Barr from the USA into the orbit of a railway-owning family via irresistible heiress Barbara Sukowa and his train conductor-uncle Ernst-Hugo Järegård. For some the war did not end but really the whole show boils down to the idea that not choosing a side is the biggest crime of all, a position diametrically opposed to South-East Asian values.
Roger Ebert: three stars. Stephen Holden: "[P]erhaps the eeriest is a scene in which [Barr] attends a midnight Christmas Mass in the shell of a bombed-out cathedral in the falling snow. The atmosphere of the scene suggests a a Wagnerian ceremony of zombies."
Directed by François Ozon who adapted Albert Camus's absurdist novel with some help with the writing from Philippe Piazzo. In lush black-and-white with many an overstuffed frame.
Colonial Algiers, 1940s. A dissolute young Pied-noir moves through his days with vast ennui. Somehow he's still buff despite that and having a desk job which he appears to execute with efficiency; no tang ping here! His mother passes and he does the customary without a flicker of emotion. A former work colleague decides he is irresistible after all even as he weirdly insists on clinging to and expressing only his personal truth. Perhaps she mistook his ennui for aloof cool. There is swimming, cinema, shagging and coming to the aid of neighbours before the pivotal capricious event that cleaves the movie in two. The ensuing court scenes got tedious and the climactic monologue with a priest overdid it.
Lead Benjamin Voisin is mostly as facially inert as Alan Delon was in Le Samouraï (1967) but lacked Delon's physical grace and hat. That he might be neurodivergent was not considered; the religious and psychological stuff seems dated now, or at least takes aim at a more rigid society than presently exists. I met his ennui mostly with disinterest.
It reminded me most of Roma (2018) both in style and staleness.
Glenn Kenny: four stars at Roger Ebert's venue. A horror movie. Peter Bradshaw: five stars. Many divergences from the source material. "Ozon shows that it is [the lead character's] martyrdom which is absurd." Jeannette Catsoulis was less impressed than the boys. "Existential ennui is not exactly fun to watch (or, one assumes, easy to perform), yet a meaningless life has rarely looked this beautiful." Later, Michael Wood also compared it with the novel.
Some idle Clint Eastwood completism. Also a Carrie Snodgress jag from Rabbit, Run (1970). An anachronistic venture for the time: Eastwood directed a script by Michael Butler and Dennis Shryack — the same trio who made The Gauntlet (1977). Here Clint demonstrates what he did and did not learn or recall about Westerns from his work with Sergio Leone. His own performance is not great but the rest of the cast does OK.
It's Idaho in the latter half of the nineteenth century and everyone's mining alluvial gold in the snowy Sierra. An encampment gets overrun by some local ferals on the orders of town founder Richard Dysart. Clint turns up after the fact and proves his chops by bashing the bashers as a favour to bashee Michael Moriarty. All (that is, both of) the ladies go ga ga for Clint, especially when he pulls out the dog collar and adopts the persona of "preacher". We never see him preach except when he tells the people to stick together but goes alone himself (of course). There's some fancy shooting and an anticlimax.
The characters are annoyingly underdeveloped. For instance giant Richard Kiel seems to learn the moral aspects of violence from Clint but his main opportunity to demonstrate this is interrupted (by Clint). The negative space portraits, the dynamite, the awesome shooting are all twenty years stale; the best cinematography is of the distant mountains. There is no soundtrack. At best it's a dry run for Unforgiven (1992).
Roger Ebert: four stars. "One of the subtlest things in the movie is the way it plays with the possibility that Eastwood’s character may be a ghost, or at least something other than an ordinary mortal." Vincent Canby.
