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."
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.
Romeo and Juliet in present-day North Macedonia, facilitated by the universal solvent of EDM. It doesn't get as bogged in the scene as Sirât (2025): this is more adolescent, sweet rather than rueful. Both also involve a young woman fleeing the leash of tradition and familial binds. Written and directed by Georgi M. Unkovski. Alen Sinkauz and Nenad Sinkauz do some interesting soundtrack work.
Ahmet (Arif Jakup) gets yanked out of school by his irascible father and can see a lifetime of shepherding open up in front of him. His younger brother Naim (Agush Agushev) is mute. Gorgeous, sophisticated Aya (Dora Akan Zlatanova) returns from Germany for an arranged marriage but her temperament and/or time away has rendered her unwilling and even incapable. For further reasons underexplained the leads have a tenuous encounter at an open-air rave not too far from their parents' farms. We learn some but not enough of their backstories during other events, including a festival where some American-style dancing causes a moral panic, before things are driven off a cliff by the local villagers, I think Christian, taking out their frustrations on a mosque. The ending is unsatisfying. There's some funny stuff with a technologically inept Muezzin.
The cinematography is often beautiful. I wish they'd shown us the clothing better. It put me in mind of The Monk and the Gun (2023): a hilly, exotic location with some ethnography. If I understood the dialogue right the events took place in and near the town of Radoviš. Reference is also made to Konche and the big smoke of Strumica.
A Critic's Pick by Chris Azzopardi at the New York Times. Cath Clarke was less impressed. More details at Wikipedia.
An idle bit of James Caan completism. IMDB trivia: his first project after The Godfather (1972) and so clearly a money job. "Hot Lips" Sally Kellerman went without a bra throughout; her brand of zany clashed with Caan's unimaginative, car-thieving football hero fresh out of gaol. Notionally he's tracking down a big pile of dosh with some assistance from Swing-loving Peter Boyle (more in tune with Kellerman) and his wife/Caan fangirl Louise Lasser but that was as irrelevant as everything else. Directed by Howard Zieff from a script by W.D. Richter.
Roger Ebert: three stars. Goofy. Vincent Canby. Mountains of illogic. Caan as Candide in "a comedy-melodrama about America going to the madhouse in mobile homes."
A jag from Rabbit, Run (1970) via director Jack Smight who showed here what that could have been there: it's pretty well shot (by Jack Priestley) and assembled (by Archie Marshek). The tone wobbles (some of that is misdirection) which I put down to the adaptation by John Gay of William Goldman's dodgy source material.
The premise is not so far from The Silence of the Lambs (1991) with Rod Steiger as a strangler of women and George Segal the cop who is foisted with a relationship with him. Giving this the farcical treatment is intrinsically busted; the heavy stuff detracts from the fine domestic comedy work of Segal's mother Eileen Heckart who is by far the best thing on the screen. He hooks up with improbably single Lee Remick, a Marlboro-smoking clothes horse who is obviously going to be the last girl despite not being Steiger's type. She does OK. Murray Hamilton (Brubaker (1980)) has a minor role as a police inspector. Michael Dunn is fine in a random scene. The ending is neat and tidy and lame. Once again we visit the Pan Am building in NYC as well as the Lincoln Centre and under-construction Julliard.
I don't doubt Steiger enjoyed his performance, hamming it up to the max, but it's not so great for us. I came away thinking that Mel Brooks struck a better balance in Young Frankenstein (1974).
Vincen Canby. Oedipean. "Mr. Gay has written an exposition-free, gag-filled cartoon, which is the manner in which Jack Smight directs it."
The rapidly diminishing returns of Clint Eastwood completism. He plays a cowboy cop from Arizona. Also a Melodie Johnson jag from Rabbit, Run (1970). She's married but home alone in some dusty ranch in the middle of nowhere. Her task (in short-and-blonde mode) is to keep him entertained for an hour or two before he heads off to NYC for some more hunting and tracking. Directed by Don Siegel from a screenplay by Herman Miller, Dean Riesner and Howard Rodman. It's something of a Cro-Magnon Dirty Harry (1971). Lee J. Cobb, squandered as a proforma police lieutenant. Seymour Cassel got some fondling in. Don Stroud (Django Unchained (2012)) brought some genuine menace.
The plot is very dodgy but sort-of works as a time capsule for the sybaritic demimonde of NYC with some semi-decent footage of a big open-air party/discotheque that our man has to traverse to locate double-crossing tramp Tisha Sterling who knows where their man is. Clint's methods offend his ostensible brand-new lady-love, social worker/shrink Susan Clark but she gets over his lack of exclusivity before he gets back into that helicopter on the roof of the Pan Am building. All the women are savvy in their own ways but go weak-kneed at the mere prospect of being treated as sex objects.
Given a choice Eastwood himself went with filming the far more genteel jazz concert in Monterey, California (retaining the crazy women) in Play Misty for Me (1971).
Roger Ebert: three stars. Vincent Canby: "The screenplay is so predictable in situation and so arch in its supposedly tough, blunt, wise talk that it turns into a joke told by someone with no sense of humour."
An Anjanette Comer jag from The Loved One (1965). I hadn't seen her in anything else. Also some James Caan completism. An embarrassment for all involved.
I haven't read anything by John Updike and having seen this have even less interest. Some of the dialogue sounded like it was lifted directly from the source book he got published in 1960, and similarly for many of the scenes. The entirety is very clunky: poorly edited for sure but the raw material is rubbish too, so blame all of director Jack Smight, adaptor Howard B. Kreitsek, cinematographer Philip H. Lathrop and editor Archie Marshek.
Briefly Updike wrote about the chafing of the American husband at his domestication, which was possibly transgressive or at least a bit naughty at the time. On screen it is overly reductive soap opera: Carrie Snodgress (Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970)), in her first outing, plays a dipso, pregnant housewife who just sits around smoking, drinking and watching Looney Tunes cartoons all day. Caan, who peaked in high school, wants to feel his oats again and so heads out into what passes as the demimonde of Reading, Pennsylvania with his old basketball coach who brings along part-time call girl Comer. The characters are so poorly drawn it is not clear why she's hard up for a man or what it is she sees in Caan. There's also golf-mad Christian minister Arthur Hill, sticking his oar in, married to foxy and dissatisfied Melodie Johnson. Things proceed as you'd expect with a putatively shocking accidental infanticide thrown in just for the frisson. Nobody asks what the women might want except a husband.
Apparently it did not get much of a release at the time and hence was not reviewed by the usual venues. I guess nobody got what they wanted.
Third time around with this thing adapted by Terry Southern and Christopher Isherwood from Evelyn Waugh's novel. Directed by Tony Richardson (Look Back in Anger (1959)).
The cast is top shelf. Southern does bring some of the Dr. Strangelove (1964) out of the source material and I found it often hilarious. Unsubtle yes, but at this remove how could anyone be offended? It is let down by some clunky editing.
Bosley Crowther. "It is when Terry Southern and Christopher Isherwood move this absurd conceit beyond the morbid adventures of their hero in the land of Whispering Glades and go in for a lot of raucous kidding of real estate development, senior homes, junior geniuses in the space age and a plan to launch bodies into space that the whole thing goes into an orbit of witless inanity."
A Dylan O'Brien jag from Send Help (2026). He's a bit more lively here but still not great. Directed by Graham Moore (his first time) from a script he co-wrote with Johnathan McClain. Apparently Moore got an Oscar for his adaptation for The Imitation Game (2015).
Actually the draw was Mark Rylance who I remember was quite good in Bridge of Spies (2015), a performance for which he won an Oscar. As a snooty English tailor in gangland Chicago in 1956 he puts the rest of the cast firmly in the shade, excepting perhaps Irish mob boss Simon Russell Beale (The Death of Stalin (2017)). The plot is quite trashy: Rylance and receptionist/gamine Zoey Deutch ostensibly get on with their bespoke-clothes business while the gangsters get on with theirs but of course things veer off course in a way that would be unimaginable in the Phantom Thread (2017) universe.
It mostly goes agreeably but every so often drops its pseudo-realism with unlikely exposition dumps; Hitchcock did a far better job with that aspect in Rope (1948) and as with Jimmy Stewart it is inconceivable that Rylance is harmless. Conversely his main interlocutor, scarface Johnny Flynn (who wants to be James Wood when he grows up), may plausibly have thought so, partly because England does snobbery like no other culture. The holes in the plot — just why do they not even start torturing Deutch? — ruined it for me, as did the self-congratulatory conclusion that slid towards a zombie flick. Given the very limited sets I wondered if it may have worked better as a stage show. Dick Pope did the cinematography.
Manohla Dargis: "a moderately amusing gangster flick that doesn’t make a great deal of sense." It is a relief when glamour puss Nikki Amuka-Bird enters the story. Stephanie Zacharek. Calling Rylance's tailor "humble" illustrates the culture gap.
Inevitable once I realised Lukas Moodysson was still active. This is apparently the first thing he's done since the TV series Gösta (2019) and his first feature after Vi är bäst! (2013). The latest in a long line of uncalled-for sequels. It seems he managed to convince almost all of the original cast to reunite; notably missing are Michael Nyqvist who passed in 2017 and Ola Norell/Rapace; the latter's Lasse was recast. In a few sittings due to a failure to grip.
It doesn't function as a standalone film but if you've just rewatched the original it also mostly just doesn't work as you can see everything coming a long way off. Some of it is just plain sad, not poignant or effective, and other bits are outright boring. There's a sense of gutlessness, of punching down. Moodysson should have just left things be.
Thinly reviewed. Cath Clarke at the Guardian. Moodysson is becoming misanthropic. Henric Brandt: stagnancy.
