Film Criticism

5/5

It is with some hesitation that I proclaim this film a ‘cinematic masterpiece’ so early in my movie-reviewing career (even the word ‘career’ may be a tad premature)… For one, because the weightiness with which I intend to arm this declaration is yet to be earned; and two, because I haven’t yet acquired the craft necessary to both soberly critique and do justice to this all-time favourite. But alas, this is our job as wet-eared cinephiles, to liberally shoehorn semicolons into our pieces and provide the people with what they’ve shown no lack for; so march on I shall!

But first let’s clarify a few things: there are only a dozen-or-so movies I’d accredit with the ‘cinematic masterpiece’ classification. And a film’s residency in my canon means that it has passed both an subjective and objective examination—that is to say, has been lauded by both the pubescent fan-boy and the snooty, chin-stroking critic in me.

So while I’m not alone in the temple of Synecdoche, New York worship, our people are few, our halls echoey and our doors regularly pounded upon. So without further ado, let’s dig into the hodgepodge of stodgy wonderment that is Synecdoche, New York…

Caden and Adele’s marriage has fallen into the irretrievable depths of tedium. Caden (the late Phillip Seymour-Hoffman) is a neurotic, self-absorbed theatre director, whose Death of a Salesman production will soon earn him a McArthur Grant (often colloquially tagged as a ‘genius grant’, as he casually points out). Adele (Catherine Keener) is also an artist, one who paints microscopic portraits which grow progressively tinier throughout the film.

However, regardless of Caden’s artistic triumphs, Adele’s heart remains unaroused: “this whole romantic-love-thing is just a projection.” For Caden, it seems love is only truly felt when out of reach, or when it has receded to memory. This skepticism, to put it lightly, towards the ‘whole romantic-love-thing’ is evident all throughout Kaufman’s oeuvre (Adaptation, Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), but never has it seemed so bleak or rung as true as it does here.

When Adele opts to take her daughter (without Caden) to her Berlin exhibition, halfway through the film, we never see her again.

Meanwhile, with his grant money, Caden sets out to create an all-encompassing theatre production, which rebuilds a set of New York in a warehouse. The actors play out characters, both present and peripheral, in Caden’s life. Yet over time, while his project expands in scope, it becomes less focused, just as a balloon swells with emptiness. So much so that after forty years of constant rehearsal, his production is never realised and his entire cast is dead.

The story feels like a Marquez novel: whimsical, ambitious, heart-achey, hilarious and all poignantly shapeless. Time passes hastily for some, while not at all for others. Family members vanish quietly and in poetic ways, like Caden’s father: “there was so little left of him, they had to fill the coffin with cotton balls to keep him from rattling around.” (So, so Marquez.)

So hot tip for the audience: you’re not trying to keep afloat in this gravy-bowl of a narrative, you’re meant to submit to it, drown in it. Here Charlie Kaufman is saying, consciously or not: ‘this is what dying feels like’.

Towards the end of the film, the character playing Caden in the play kills himself (something the real Caden failed to do). A woman who auditions to replace him describes the ‘character’ of Caden as: “a man already dead. He lives in a half-world between stasis and anti-stasis, time is concentrated, chronology confused, yet up until recently, he’s strived valiantly to make sense of his situation, but now he’s turned to stone”.

In Synecdoche, New York, Jon Brion if not trumps matches the feat of his Punch Drunk Love score. More than any other composer, I find his scores to be endlessly revisitable as stand-alone albums. Here, the composition carries the last 20 minutes of the film, which feel like you’re being swept up and raised heavenward in a cyclone of melancholy confusion.

When he was drafted by the Sydney Swans in 1998, he thought he was on the path to greatness. Within two years he had graduated from suburban footy to the SANFL, then from the SANFL to the Swans. Continuing on this trajectory, he’d have his own footy card within a year and within three his own mural in Paddington.

When he kicked 5 on debut in 2000, everything seemed to be going to plan. But within four years Fitzy had suffered three season-ending surgeries; and by 2002, a ruptured ACL saw him call it quits on footy. It was naturally devastating: ‘footy was the only thing I ever thought I was good at’.

But Fitzy wasted no time wallowing in his failures. In fact, he cashed in on them, sending an audition tape to Big Brother, where he made a joke of his proclivity to fail. With an ambition to eventually make it in the media, appearing on reality TV was something of a career strategy, albeit an unconventional one in the early 2000s.

When Barnaby and Fitzy were at the Swans together, they played with a cousin of a former B.B. winner. He advised Fitzy on how to stay low and keep out of trouble. And he made a good crack of it, making it into the final four, ultimately losing out to a tradie with plans to propose to his wife—an irresistible story to voters.

The whole experience was a strange one. People would audition as a personality that often didn’t correspond to their own. The result being a show that presents a warped, manipulated reality. And yet, the cameras are everywhere, and the audience are not as stupid as may they seem, as they have no trouble distinguishing between the frank and the fraudulent.

So while Fitzy didn’t win the comp (or the $1 million prize) in many ways he was the real winner. His new stardom launched him to the top of celebrity firmament. And eager not to let his fame be a fleeting one, he was quick to accept a role as sports reporter at Nova, in the radio station's inaugural year.

After establishing himself in Adelaide on the morning show, he was poached by Nova Sydney where he’d host the much cosier 4-6pm window—the second most coveted radio slot in Australia*.* Overjoyed to put the 4am starts behind him, he moved to the Emerald City and swore to never work binman hours again.

But within 8 months of the Fitzy and Wippa Show, they were asked to take the most coveted slot in the country—the morning drive at Nova. And after a bit of negotiating, Fitzy assumed the role of Australia’s vaccine for the morning crankies.

However, it won’t come as a surprise to long-time listeners that Fitzy doesn’t measure success in followers or triumphant contract negotiations at his job. Rather, Fitzy’s gold-strike comes in the form of his wife and kids—a corny, throw-away line that invariably produces scepticism, but which, in the case of Ryan Fitzgerald, we know to be sincere.

4.5/5

In the city where you age twice as fast, you gotta live twice as fast. Not only do the creases and crevices in every character’s face reflect this, but by the end of the film your depleted emotions and that stabbing ache in your gut do too.

Uncut Gems is the story of a New York gem-dealer with a crippling habit for parlaying his way through life; as while weaselling out of the clutches of relentless debt collectors, Howard juggles family duties, an extra-marital affair and obscenely ambitious punts on the Celtics, all with one hand tied behind his back.

Gems is foreign in the specificity of its world yet, like all Safdie films, familiar in its place in time. No filmmakers today capture the tumult of modernity quite like they do, as their films exist in this void between the real world and a hyperreality which only they seem able to access. Daniel Lopatin’s score is just as elusive, equal parts baroque, cosmic, tribal and New-York sax; and by some inexplicable genius, it all works.

Sandler’s Howard Rattner, like the Safdie’s, is also a creature of his epoch. Over time, New York City has metamorphosed him into a gnat, one inexplicably drawn to LED, but no longer in possession of the faculties to know why. He’s feebly bug-like in his inability to deny impulses, or to meet them with any form of review. But what the Safdie’s and Sandler so deftly communicate is that Howard’s appetite for material comes not from greed, but a biting insecurity.

Yes, Howard is incorrigible, and while unpalatable to many, I find it telling when audiences label him as ‘unwatchable’. Enslaved by the patterns of electro-chemical activity in his brain, of which he has no control over, all of Howard’s urges are met with submission--any triumph parlayed. Hence why Uncut Gems not only stands as such a powerfully vivid illustration of an addict, but also why it can be difficult for modern audiences to confront.

When Howard stands in front of his wife, with whom he is soon to separate, he delivers a line that epitomises the biggest limitation of his character: ‘look in my eyes and they’ll tell you what I’m feeling’. These are the pleading words of a fast-talking man whose words have lost all power. It is a blind shot in the dark to win his wife’s forgiveness, an attempt to humanely connect by showing vulnerability, an art he has long neglected. As he tries to feign innocence with a look, the shallowness of his gaze is revealed, and his wife erupts in a fit of laughter. Howard has been completely dehumanised by his vices.

The mastery of the Safdie’s is most evident in the way they can provoke empathy for the most distasteful characters with such precision, so succinctly; through a boy’s glance into his cheating father’s apartment, or a middle-aged man in his button-up-shirt standing awkwardly in a club.

They‘ve well and truly dismounted the high-horse which so many of their contemporaries sit upon, and stand bare-foot on the grimy New York sidewalk, where materialism isn’t scorned as being superficial, but is a fact of urbanity.

They say that a great ending should be both surprising and inevitable. At the climax of Gems, we’re presented with an intersection collision between three drivers, and most impressively, we sincerely believe that each driver was granted the green light of their own bug-like instincts.

4.5/5

Some of Uxbal’s (Javier Bardem) hustles include overseeing sweatshops that counterfeit designer bags, trafficking illegal immigrants to worksites, and communing with the recently deceased to ensure their smooth transition into the afterlife (for a handsome fee, of course). But his work doesn’t define him. So what does?

Uxbal is terminally ill. So while he’s a tortured husband to an estranged wife, a forgiving brother to a seedy brother, he is above all a scared-shitless dad.

He lives in a shoebox apartment with his two kids on the outskirts of Barcelona, a cesspool of poverty and all that comes with it: disease, death, greed, depression, corruption, racism and so on… And while, on the surface, Uxbal’s ventures may seem dishonest, the manner in which he conducts them are both noble and necessary.

There is something biblical in the amount of suffering he absorbs for others. He trudges his way through this film with the beaten posture of an ox, yoked by the countless commitments he has made to the ones he loves.

Yes, the film is a dreary watch and while I can understand complaints over its lack of  compromise in this regard, I’d gently remind you that we’re watching a man’s descent into oblivion here, and that weighty subjects such as mass homicide, irredeemable paternal guilt and prostate cancer are hardly fit for any other approach.

That being said, what Iñárritu does so well is supply faint glimpses of startling beauty through the suffocating gloom that is Uxbal’s dilemma. Whether that be a flurry of birds that stop him dead in his tracks, as they dance in synchrony overhead, or simply meeting the smiling gaze of his daughter’s eyes at the dinner table. Even before his terminal diagnosis, we see opportunistic ants and giant moths colonise his bedroom, as though even they can sense its impending departure.

This central performance earned Bardem the Best Actor award at Cannes back in 2010, and rightly so. The burden of his condition is visible in every step, as we can sense death trailing in his wake, sniffing at his heels as he tries to escape his fate.

At the beginning of the film, Uxbal is told that ‘only the stupid fight’. And thus Biutiful is a story of a man who must learn to let go, despite the fact that his legacy will be all but a series of petty misdemeanours, and that his children will barely be old enough to remember him

Not an easy watch, but an endlessly rewarding one.

4.5/5

La Grande Bellezza is the tale of a high-society journalist (of-sorts) who in his twilight years starts to reflect on his lavish, depraved and predominantly nocturnal existence to date.

When young and inspired, Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo) wrote a critical darling entitled The Human Apparatus, a novel which he never (in the 40-something years since) bothered to consolidate with a sophomore effort. Why didn’t you ever write another novel? is the question posed sincerely by admirers and tauntingly by foes, and consequently, is the query which reverberates in both his and our subconscious for the entirety of the film.

Jep is a highly-regarded reviewer of modern art (in all its ludicrous forms), which makes him somewhat of an authority, even a gatekeeper-of-sorts, on the topic of beauty. We wander with him through Rome as he pursues encounters with beauty with the tenacity of a sunbather rolling onto their front. He is unmoved by the attempts of some, while spiritually transported by others. However, these transcendent moments never come from the art-world, but rather creep up on him (and us too, for that matter) around the most unexpected corners.

There are simple, fleeting moments of beauty, like the exchanged glances between two men, one strolling along the banks of the Tiber, the other passing by on an empty cruise boat; or whimsical ones, a flock of migrating flamingos taking a pit-stop in front of a dawn-lit Coliseum; or the earthbound wonders, like the ancient saint climbing the stairs of St. John's Basilica on all fours.

The magic of this film is that we’re never underwhelmed by what the director presents as beautiful, that amidst all the vulgarity, our moments of wonder are in perfect synchrony with Jep’s.

This is what I call cinema of moments. Most of the characters and storylines contribute nothing to the ‘narrative’, but only assist in twisting this ever-shifting kaleidoscope of Rome.

By the end, in a moment of weakness (or triumph), Jep finally gives his first straight answer to the earlier question. But by then, it doesn’t seem to matter, because we understand it is a film as much about Jep’s journey as it is about Rome, or religion, or any one of the transient characters who depart as quietly as they came.

By that token, I’m not even sure that La Grande Bellezza knows what it’s about. But like its protagonist, this film takes pleasure in idly wandering through sleeping Rome, hands in its pockets, pursuing accidental encounters with beauty…

A final note: as some of you might’ve gathered, it’s impossible to not see this film as an offspring of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1967). And while the inseverable link at times works to the film’s detriment, it certainly bears enough idiosyncrasy to merit appreciation of its own. That said, there are some themes which feel like pure transplants: Rome’s enchanting yet depraved allure, the promising-writer-turned-journalist who has fallen under her very spell, the carnivalesque taste in characters, and even the frolicsome way in which the camera negotiates spaces, often feel like a borrowed sensibility.

For that, I deduct half a mark.

5/5

La Dolce Vita presents a Rome of rife debauchery, cultish worship of celebrity, yet utter irresistibility. Sound familiar?

The film plays as a series of disparate episodes, each chapter a snapshot into the alluring pizzazz of 60s Rome, yet each with its own undercurrent of depravity.

One unconfirmed yet compelling theory is that these segments each represent a day of the week. But one of the many feats of this film is that our temporal bearings (usually essential to storytelling) are completely unnecessary.

Each episode follows our hero, Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni), an intellectual whose gig as an access-all-areas tabloid journo – or chronicler of ‘the sweet life’ – has earned him some standing among Roman socialites. And yet, the work, he knows, is well and truly below him.

In each chapter he’s sidetracked from himself by a string of seductresses who each seem too good to be true. With all of Marcello’s romantic escapades, we never ascertain whether his hard work is rewarded with the elusive kiss or roll-in-the-hay that he so doggedly pursues. This emphasises one of the film's primary ideas: that any triumphs in life are illusory, and vanish as quickly as plots of dreams upon waking.

This sense of detachment is scattered all throughout La Dolce Vita, as Marcello is never able to truly connect with those he desires. Whether that be the insurmountable language barrier with the bewitching Swedish beauty, Sylvia (Anita Ekberg); the indifference of an elusive father; or the honest charm of a country blond in the famous final scene: the life he has left behind.

To label Marcello simply as a ‘player’ would be criminally reductive, as much like Fellini’s Guido (also Mastroianni) in 8 1/2, Marcello’s infidelities in La Dolce Vita come across as necessary and desperate searches for something more.

Across all mediums, masterful storytellers, the truly great chroniclers of the human condition, are able to somehow justify the seemingly unjustifiable, or at the very least extract our sympathies for even the most unsympathetic. In La Dolce Vita, its the countless examples of Marcello’s duplicity; or the paparazzi flocking to a grieving widow, like ants to a sugary spill; or even the horrific act of infanticide, one of the great cinematic mysteries which rocks both the audience and Marcello to the core.

The mosaic of Rome we are left with is equal parts repugnant and seductive, like Paris’ Belle Epoque or LA of today.

At the core of this film, like Fellini’s opus (8 ½), La Dolce Vita is the tragic story of a man searching for more, but settling for less.

4/5

DISCLAIMER: I am a subscriber to the school of thought that profound films generally trigger profound responses in the critic (or at least, noble attempts...); and by the same token, lazily conceived films provoke uninspired writing. Going with this logic, I blame a structureless, irrational film such as this one for an equally senseless review...

Charlie Kaufman’s i’m thinking of ending things truly is a film which can make you feel like a chin-stroking academic one minute and a muttonhead the next.

Let’s start with what I know for sure: a nameless young woman (Jessie Buckley) road-trips deep into the blizzardous countryside to meet her boyfriend’s (Jesse Plemons) parents. Also, it just so happens that this young woman is thinking of ending things… Now, it should be noted, however, that in the case of this film, what I know for sure, isn’t necessarily what is ‘real’, while what is real, can’t really be known for sure…

In his 2015 feature, Anomalisa, Kaufman explores the idea of the Fregoli delusion: a rare mental illness where the victim believes that different people in their life are being counterfeited and ‘performed’ by a single person. Most literally, this theme was tackled in his debut, Being John Malkovich, through ventriloquism and body-snatching; but upon a closer look, it has been a ubiquitous concept throughout his oeuvre.

Here, Kaufman maintains this fascination for overlapping and intertwining identities, but seemingly on his most subconscious level yet. Here, time is treated with the same structurelessness as when one mentally reorganises memories; here, individuals seemingly merge into one another, like pregnancies in reverse. To clarify, a character might exit one room to retrieve something then return moments later bearing a slightly different cardigan, a whiter head of hair and early signs of dementia.

It serves no purpose contextualising this film within the realms of contemporary cinema, as there is no other film (that I can think of) remotely similar. My frame of reference is limited to my accumulative learnings from Kaufman, through his films, screenplays and interviews. For me, this is a film about Charlie Kaufman and absolutely nothing else—and I must say, I don’t really have a problem with that.

Here, Kaufman still exhibits all his familiar preoccupations, or obsessions: his bitterness towards the warped reality induced by an overconsumption of Zemeckisesque films; the coexistence of the subconscious and reality; the rueful misery when envisaging the life unlived; the futile search for individuality (the list of depressing ideas is boundless in the case of CK). And yet, while all of Kaufman’s films both welcome and can survive the most fastidious, interrogative, scholarly dissections, his movies never seeming cerebral in themselves. This I find mighty impressive.

For that reason, this is not a departure from his earlier works, but rather a termitic tunnelling further into these pre-examined themes—and if anything, it makes his earlier (and personally, more adored) works, such as Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine and, a mutual favourite here at NFC, Synecdoche, New York, seem somewhat superficial in comparison.

i’m thinking of ending things is funny, captivating, thought-provoking, original, ambitious, and even transcendent at times; but simultaneously presents itself as an impenetrable fort of Kaufman’s psyche—a bit like listening to music while queueing for a club: you may be able to recognise the song playing inside but you haven’t yet been granted access to its enjoyment.

It is for that same very reason, however, that this is one of those films that renders any criticism utterly redundant, as I’m sure Kaufman has executed what he set out to, and while I mightn’t completely understand it, who am I to dismiss it? It’d be like dismissing Kaufman himself, something I haven’t the stones to do.

Thus, this score is pretty well meaningless (as I feel everything is after seeing this movie), as I know for certain, that when I eventually do revisit this film, my score won’t be the same. But I suspect, as always with Kaufman, it can only get better...

So, my suggestion: just skip ahead to the second viewing.

4/5

An emotionally comatose husband is resurrected from his midlife torpor when he becomes fixated on his daughter’s best-friend. While the story is told via posthumous narration, courtesy of Lester Burnham (said deceased husband, played by Kevin Spacey), it is very much an ensemble piece, intertwining six suburban characters of varying degrees of sanity, each with their own understanding of beauty.

It begins with an overhead shot zeroing in on Lester’s suburb, street and then house. Each home as indistinguishable as the next, much like those who inhabit them—or so we’re led to believe. We’re introduced to his wife, Carolyn (Annette Bening), an unhappy, materialist obsessed by not only the yield of her roses but also how she looks while pruning them; his homosexual neighbours, Jim and Jim; and then his daughter Jane, who is making online enquiries re breast augmentation and is ‘described as a pretty typical teenager: angry, insecure, confused’.

When Lester attends his daughters halftime cheerleading performance, his attention fixes on an 18 year old girl named Angela. After the show, when his daughter introduces him to Angela, Lester shows neither the deftness nor courtesy to conceal his new infatuation. Meanwhile the Burnham’s new next-door neighbours provide a romantic opportunity for Jane, as well as a fierce example of good ol’ fashion, patriarchal values in the form of Chris Cooper’s Colonel Fitts.

It was on this viewing, I garnered new appreciation for the title itself, as the notion of having one’s perception of beauty Americanised is a theme which pins every character on the same lance, as well as its contemporary audience.

For Lester and Carlyon, it is the sedation of marriage, mindless employment and an image-obsessed existence which have enslaved them and ultimately distorted their lens on reality. In the case of Jane, her ideals have been somewhat contaminated by her sex-obsessed peers, but are not beyond rescue; while for Angela, the object of our protagonist’s obsession, the way in which she presents herself reveals how she sees her place in the world: she welcomes the objectifying gazes of men.

The film also emphasises that true happiness hardly ever corresponds with financial stability, but is bound to the degree of autonomy one enjoys within their captivity to the American dream. It is Ricky (Jane’s suitor) who is the personification of this, as his sense of beauty is the only one which is at once authentically his own and presented as truly beautiful. I mean, who doesn’t find the footage of the plastic bag dancing about utterly majestic?

That said, my main criticisms is that the film seems to have suffered somewhat from this inescapable Americanisation. Some scenes (the first office scene, for instance) seem so economised, so pre-packaged and condensed, that a pre-talkie title card reading: Lester works a dehumanising job, and his boss, Brad, is a bit of a knob, would’ve been an equally deft way of communicating the point—while carrying the added benefit of saving time (and rhyming).

Further, while the insecurities which drive the characters, particularly the women, still bear glimmers of truth, they most feel less examined.

I find that, the more I write these reviews, almost any criticism of a half-decent film can be refuted with the lazy yet ever-applicable: yeh, but, that’s the point, mannnn! In the case of American Beauty, the rebuttal is that these characters have been Americanised, just as everything else has. And while this may be the case, the result is that some characters seem, simply put, boring. I have seen the Janes, Carolyns and Angelas (again, I stress the point of weaker females in this film) time and time again on the silver screen, and while they might be saved by strong performances (chiefly Annette Bening), at the end of the day, I felt a bit less because of it.

2.5/5

Christopher Nolan’s new film follows a nameless agent along a temporal labyrinth, wherein he tries to make sense of the murmurings of a new (bitterly) cold war, equipped with just one word: Tenet.

In many ways Tenet is an impressive film: it is daring both narratively and technically, it places trust in the faculties of its audience, and its practical effects are a mark of Nolan’s craftsmanship.

That said, while the film has been lauded as a masterful fusion of all of Nolan’s long-explored themes and obsessions, it feels more like an exhausting torrent of every recurrent flaw that Nolan continues to let define him.

Firstly, Tenet is an exclusive work, not only on an intellectual level, but on an emotional one too, as we aren’t given any access into the minds and hearts of characters. We’re consequently given little reason to care for them. That said, as always with Nolan, he manages to inject a dash of seductiveness into his characters’ immodest lifestyles, which I am not immune to, but which over time start to resemble affluence-porn (not too distant from the tactics employed by shows like Entourage, or even, dare I say, The Real Housewives of… franchise [okay, maybe a tad harsh]).

The protagonist is called The Protagonist (John David Washington)—and while I’m sure there’s a clever reason as to why this is, it is one of the countless examples of Nolan opting to keep things at an impersonal distance from the audience. Further, both the protagonist and his sidekick, Neil (Robert Pattinson), are given no back-stories. And while, like ‘The Protagonist’, this is elusiveness played for effect, it again keeps us at bay.

Now, these are relatively minor issues and aren’t necessarily the causes to the film’s failure, but they’re nonetheless epitomic of Nolan’s enduring attitude towards his audience. These are choices which could’ve been easily redeemed, had the film not moved with such unapologetic rapidity and been, on so many occasions, inaudible (another ‘choice’ Nolan refuses to apologise for).

Continuing on that point, I never thought I’d see the day when, ‘I can’t hear anything they’re saying*’*, would be a valid criticism for a film of this scale, but let it be said, my earlier reference to people making sense of murmurings was no accident. Either way, very little dialogue in Tenet isn’t exposition, which is yet another issue Christopher Nolan refuses to address in his films. And yet, while Tenet’s talking bears all the clunkiness of exposition, it explains very little…

Continuing in this vein, despite a fine performance, the thread of Cat (Elizabeth Debicki) feels on so many occasions like a mere device, an attempt to provoke emotion in a film where it simply doesn’t fit. When she talks about her son, or the chastisement of her marriage, they sound like monologues from other stories, as do the sappy scores that these moments unfailingly cue. This isn’t the first time Nolan’s female characters have landed this way for me—feeling more like appeasements of studio requisites to ultimately distract from Nolan’s blokey, Bondish predilections. (To mention a few: Rebecca Hall’s Sarah in The Prestige; Katie Holmes’ Rachel in Batman Begins; and **Anne Hathaway’s characters in The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar.)

So what does all this tell us? In short, Christopher Nolan is an intellectual filmmaker. And that’s okay. That said, the intellectual filmmakers (often misclassified as aloof, or cold, as is often the case with ya Kubrick’s, Tarkovsky’s, Lanthimos’) can still make works of philosophical and emotional depth. But in the case of Tenet, the ‘ideas’ are so deeply buried and Nolan doesn’t even provide a shovel.

Directors like Christopher Nolan, once they’ve earned this level of authority—where they continually attract enormous sums of money, the best actors in the business, as well as the license to crash 747’s and film high-speed sailboat scenes (there really is no better example in Nolan’s oeuvre of prioritising spectacle over story than this ridiculous scene…),a distance can develop between them and their audience, and more importantly, them and their craft as a storyteller.

And that, in sum, is the fundamental problem here: narratively unfollowable and emotionally impenetrable.

5/5

There Will Be Blood is a film of an almost monstrous authority, evident not only in the brutality of its protagonist and the landscape he inhabits, but the film’s epic scale that its filmmaker handles with seemingly so little strain.

Fittingly, the narrative is as straightforward as its hero’s monomaniacal ambition. It follows Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), an oil prospector driven by a primal competition. Mirroring our protagonist, the first 20 minutes are humble and honest, as Plainview, without an utterance, drags himself out of the pits of poverty with nothing but a pickaxe and a savage tolerance for solitude. We watch as Plainview steadily accumulates both wealth and animosity, gradually unfastening himself the world, maybe as he always intended.

However, when Plainview’s path is blocked by Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), an evangelical priest in the small town of his most profitable mine, we are presented with two opposing pillars of faith: capitalism and religion. And from this meeting spawns one of the great cinematic rivalries…

Both Plainview and Sunday recognise the fraudulence in each other’s preachings. While Sunday sees through Plainview’s ‘family-man’ act, Plainview also sees Sunday’s pious zeal for what it is: a performance. But how each operates in their realm of worship forewarns us of the fate of their rivalry: while Sunday has his head fixed in a submissive bow of servility, Plainview harbours a wrath of unexplained origin.

We watch Plainview simultaneously prosper and rot away due the narrowness of his vision, speaking to a universal law: the man who wants only one thing will probably get it, but he will only have one thing.

I’m not sure how to twist this into a compliment: but There Will Be Blood feels like a film made without an audience in mind (rendering any criticism unmerited). It takes its time in presenting such an unapologetic examination of a man’s life.

In spite of the weightiness of its themes, Johnny Greenwood’s score adopts such a delightfully unexpected tone, as it feels both alien in its enjoyment of the onscreen brutality, while completely earthbound in its coarseness.

We’re left with an epic of biblical proportion, in both its originality and allegorical truth.

4/5

In the opening shot, we watch who we presume to be the titular Gulpilil walk down a featureless dirt road, his beanpole legs carrying him away from us at an entrancingly slow pace… Then suddenly, out from behind him, and to our mystification, emerges an emu who walks at a similarly leisurely cadence to Gulpilil, and whose mode of transport also happens to be a pair of pencil-thin legs. It is an image of nature’s inevitable divergence from the path of man, but one which also reminds us of their inseverable bond—a bond never more profound and complex than in the life of Gulpilil.

In 1969, David Gulpilil’s hunting skills, tribal dancing and undeniable charisma caught the eye of British director Nicholas Roeg, who was scouting a lead actor for his upcoming film, Walkabout (1969). Following Roeg’s masterful capturing of said charisma, and the film’s consequent success, Gulpilil rose to international stardom. From that point on, he was a man of two realms: Hollywood and the tribal.

Here, director Molly Reynolds shows us the final chapter of Gulpilil’s life: he has been diagnosed with stage four  lung cancer and the doctors’ forecasts are far from promising. Reynolds (like us, like Roeg, and like so many subsequent casting agents) appreciates the magnetic virtue of her subject. On countless occasions she gifts us with these unhurried and intimate holds on Gulpilil’s face, whose indecipherable expression we never tire of.

As the film wades through the gloomy stints at hospital wards, we concurrently skate through his life in flashback, from his rapid rise to celebrity to his twilight years when he succumbed to his vices. In this way, the film magically works as one might expect a mind would when confronted with its own mortality, reminiscing on the happier years, while ruing over those irretrievable. This is all ties together with a masterful sound design, which is able to melt these seemingly infusible phases together, altogether forming a rich yet endlessly complex character.

Right throughout, Reynolds exhibits a noble devotion to the truth, just as a documentarian should, as the film shows the necessary restraint for such a modest farewell as this. His fight against cancer isn’t dramatised, his past misdemeanours are neither defended nor absolved, and his enfeebled body and mind is presented with little subterfuge—whittled by it vices.

While the film centres around a man who throughout his adult life has been torn between two worlds, the story is more focused on his preparations to depart from both realms, and to do so with redeeming humbleness.

A well-assembled, fascinating and pleasant watch.

4/5

Authority in a director is a wonderful thing. It seizes an audience and commands their patience, attention and faith in the tale at hand. It demands them to embrace the new and asks them to interrogate what otherwise might’ve been dismissed as, well, dismissible.

The Nest wins this authority in the opening few shots and sustains its command until the last. Credit where due: I went into this screening cold—I wasn’t familiar with the director (Sean Durkin), nor had I any ideas of the critical reception—but it nonetheless captivated me from go to whoa.

In spite of its self-assurance, The Nest is a slow-burning, modest drama, one which follows a seemingly content, nuclear family’s transatlantic move from New York to London, post the 80s recession.

Husband Rory (Jude Law) is somewhat of an entrepreneurial broker, who convinces his wife to uproot the family and move back to his native land, so as to capitalise on a mouth-watering financial opportunity. The wife Allison (Carrie Coon) is a trainer of show horses and is reluctant to abandon the cosy arrangement they have in New York: a swank family home, steady employment, and a well-struck balance between distance and proximity to her parents.

In any event, they move, and Allison’s reluctance disintegrates somewhat after feasting her eyes upon the palatial Surrey residence Rory has acquired for them. She and the kids are momentarily seduced by this new dream...

That said, slowly, we’re drip-fed clues that subtly undermine this image of splendour. For one, we learn that Rory and Allison have a pattern of uprooting and starting afresh—a restlessness one often finds in the perpetually unsated. Two, Rory wasn’t scouted for his new position (as he told Allison), but rather he himself requested the move to London. Three, in the society of Londonites, Rory has a tendency to exaggerate his successes back in New York.

We’re never entirely certain whether it’s the leap across the pond or simply the shoddiness of their marriage that causes their love to deteriorate, but with time, the relationship between husband and wife becomes increasingly irreconcilable. Thus, the film is a slow-burn (although only running at 107 minutes) for good reason: dysfunctionality leaks through the ceiling for months before finally bringing the roof down.

It was refreshing to see a wife played with an austerity which Hollywood rarely permits of its women; while Jude Law’s charm is so familiar to audiences that we, like the characters, just as easily fall under the spell of it.

My reservations for the film are scarce, but one bothersome aspect was that the psychologies of the children that were introduced so assertively ultimately went unpursued. Further, while the last few scenes maintained the subtle notes that so gripped us throughout, we weren’t revealed anything new about our two leads. And thus, the ending suffered slightly.

In sum, knowing that compliments such as mature and balanced will hardly draw a crowd, I should add that the film both gripped me for its entire duration and continues to visit me regularly, with all its ambiguities, even days after seeing it.

3/5

In Gunda we follow a family of pigs, a milk-crate of chickens and a paddock of cows, as they pass the time in their respective confines.

Watching this film (as a human), the long (sometimes tedious) shots of animals ask us to try and decipher those glazed gazes of the hen, or penetrate the inner-musings of the cow. Does he experience boredom? Is he peeved by the incessancy of the flies? Does he have any sense of the cruelty of his enslavement? Does he feel joy? Sadness? Or does he just get a mooooove on? Sorry.

We try so very hard not to dismiss their existence as merely an intolerably tedious imprisonment, a magazine-less waiting room before the abattoir. We try desperately to fight off sleep, and to penetrate some higher truths through the inexpressiveness of the cow’s eyes—but ultimately the film lets us down.

Most people are wise enough to know that farm life, for any animal, is a miserable sentence. And so I wonder, did Gunda offer us any alternate or more profound views on that? I’d say no.

But maybe I’m being too harsh. Maybe I’m judging the film on something it wasn’t trying to achieve.

So while the connections established between the audience and its characters (the animals) was tenuous, and while, at times, I felt the film leaned into the infallibility of cute-porn a bit too much, Gunda should be applauded for the sheer fact that it makes us look—doing so in such uncompromising fashion.

There are shots which last for what feels like 10 minutes. We watch a sow lying on her side, being milked by her thirsty piglets; or cows swatting flies with their tales.

I think this is why the film needs to be watched in a cinema (whether it needs to be watched at all is up for debate). In a cinema, you’re unlikely to walk out. And seeing as you’ve paid for a ticket, you invest more energy into these interrogations…

And yet, while these shots have some meditative value, and exhibit great craft in camera movement, sound design and general photography, the film is so restrained in that it imposes no story upon us whatsoever.

It is after the truth. And it seeks it uncompromisingly. And for that, I must tilt my hat!

4/5

Mother and father, Hoaggie (Erik Thomson) and Jill (Miriama McDowell), take their two bickering, feather-bedded boys out of town, away from their phones, in an escape to nature. Apart from the eery score which hints at some impending doom, we feel safe among the wholesome company and amidst the gorgeous landscape, worthy of an NZ tourist advert: serene, lush and totally dislocated from the urban bustle.

The family is joined by two unexpected guests, two strapping men: one a loquacious, charming type (Mandrake, Daniel Gillies); the other, by all appearances, an obedient mute (Tubs, Matthias Luafutu)—the sidekick, for sure. Neither arrive bearing any camping equipment, nor does their attire look suitable for the imminent drop in temperature as the sun slinks behind the hills.

And as Mandrake prizes a shotgun out from under his trench-coat, and is quick to exhibit not only his proficiency with said weapon but his indifference to life and death altogether, we are forced to readjust our expectations.

The beginning bears many resemblances to Haneke’s Funny Games (in fact, the 90s Land Rover may well be a nod), wherein the source of the horror is so familiar and authentic. Their faces are not concealed, they possess no supernatural aptitudes, nor any discernible motives, so that the horror spawns from their unpredictability.

But gradually Coming Home in the Dark drifts from this course, unfurling itself as something of a revenge thriller. We’re only drip-fed clues, but we learn that as a young teacher, Hoaggie had some kind of contact with Tub and Mandrake as students, and that the school they attended was so inhuman it’d make Oliver Twist’s orphanage look like a McDonald’s playground.

At first, I sensed a dip in suspense, as the unpredictability was compromised as the film started to humanise our villains. But the direction, performance (especially the charismatic antagonist, Daniel Gillies) and photography (huge props to the lighting department), kept me invested at every turn. And so, while the writing wasn’t without the occasional pot-hole (classic horror questions like why didn’t he run when he had the chance?! or why didn’t she call out to the policewoman?!), the purpose with which information was revealed meant that we were always hanging on every word.

As the film progresses, revealing more and more clues, our attention never deviates. However, the ending, while maintaining a sense of ambiguity (always better than neatly wrapping things up), packs less of a blow than it could’ve. If surprise and inevitability are the sole criteria for a great ending, Coming home in the Dark provides us only with the latter.

3/5

When widowed, Manhattan socialite, Frances (Michelle Pfeiffer), learns her finances are utterly exhausted, her response goes something along these lines: ‘damn… I was hoping to die before the money ran out...’

In response to this recent condition of pennilessness, Frances decides to move to Paris, indefinitely; while her 20-something-year-old son, Malcolm (Lucas Hedges), agrees to accompany her, leaving behind his intended spouse in an unforgivably heartless manner.

The film sets itself up as a frittering story, happily bobbing along with its sails down, as one might expect from a film about an impromptu relocation to Paris.

That said, the film is pleasant in its aimlessness: it is witty, surprising, eccentric and its characters - because so much is being withheld - are quite intriguing.

In the second half of the film, however, one can sense the film scramble for a story: we dig into our character’s pasts, revealing Malcolm’s daddy-problems and learning how Frances came to find herself in this state of widowhood and perpetual apathy. And as a result, we lose that charming idleness that was winning us over early on…

At its heart (which becomes increasingly difficult to locate, mind, as it is constantly uprooting and subdividing), French Exit is a film about a mother and son. The mother’s schtick, or appeal, is her unwaning indifference—and it works, both on a comedic and narrative level, as we’re intrigued as to where this sensibility comes from. The son’s shtick, however, is that he’s deadpan. And, well, that’s it really.

You get the sense that the film was constructed as an assembly of funny moments or ideas, but lacked the episodic or uninhibited style to complement it: setting fire to flowers in a restaurant when the waiter is being rude (one moment). Malcolm’s one night stand with a clairvoyant on a cruise ship (another moment).

On a less critical note, Pfeiffer was wonderful. But nevertheless, a bonafide fizzler!

4.5/5

A Ghost Story says: ‘this is what an eternity feels like’. To some this will be endlessly tedious and to others a series of poignant vignettes.

While I found myself in the latter camp, and am no stranger to some cathartic row-z sobbing, this film didn’t reduce me to a puddly mess as many have self-reported. Rather, post-screening I found myself caught in an existential dispute with my significant other, for which I consider A Ghost Story wholly responsible.

The story is of a modern couple, whose love for one another is neither breaking nor blossoming, but has settled like dust on a sill. Rooney Mara’s ‘M’ wants to transition into their next home, while Casey Affleck’s ‘C’ feels inexplicably bonded to their current lodging.

Long shots linger and hover well after the action has left the frame, so that we’re given the sense of a spectral presence in the house. Not only that, there are creaks and bangs that spring our couple out of bed in the middle of the night, while rainbow prisms dance gaily across the walls. All of this may sound a tad facile, but on screen its power lies in its familiarity.

When ‘C’ dies in a car accident, he rejects the option of passing into his next phase and proceeds to haunt their house for eternity in ghost form (a sheet with two holes cut out). While tempting, the film doesn’t become a meditation on grief, love or regret. And for that, I tilt my hat.

Eventually M leaves, while C must remain, as what was a stepping stone of a home for her is an infinite bond for him. This is where most films would end, but A Ghost Story has barely begun…

Avoiding details, once ‘M’ exits the narrative, the film ditches its mournfully slow tempo and skates through time with cool indifference; all the while remaining in the same house, where it's history has a pulse and serves as an atmospheric ingredient to the present.

The film is aptly ethereal, and leaves you without much to grasp, but plenty to reach for.

Like a haiku, A Ghost Story is serene in its simplicity and ever submissive to the confines of its medium. In fact, this obedience is felt in its 90 minute length, its lack of showy FX and most notably its costume design. However, the feat of A Ghost Story is that the end-product doesn’t feel cutely humble or unambitious, but rather an utterly transcendent work of cinema.

4.5/5

VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA, PAGE 1: Cutesy Catalan guitar; split-screen close-ups of two women (one blonde, one brunette), both striking in their own way; narrated descriptions of said women travelling to Barcelona together; shots of street signage confirming that we are in fact in Barcelona…

This script mightn’t have made it past the secretary’s paper-bin if they’d missed the name ‘WOODY ALLEN’ printed on the cover. While this opening screams of scriptwriting lifeboats for the incompetent, this film plays more like an art-house porno; not in its content (though it is both undeniably seductive and a salute to fantasy), but in its utter disregard for suspense and no-bullshit approach to get us to the meat of the story (a strategy I shall now adopt for this review)…

We meet Vicky (Rebecca Hall), a tightly-wound academic completing her masters on Catalan identity, and Cristina (Scarlett Johansen), a dreamy, ‘at-liberty’ artist who has just completed an underwhelming short film about love. The audience settle into their seats as they’re designated their ally (mine was an embarrassingly straightforward choice).

We literally cross-fade our way through the smalltalk, then after a montage of some token sightseeing, we meet Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem), a local painter who, like our film so far, is unapologetically candid and with no subterfuge presents his best offer to our two leads: ‘we fly to Oviedo, we eat well, drink good wine and make love’.

As expected Vicky is reluctant, bordering on being repulsed by the forthright Spaniard, while Cristina is swooning (my ally has been confirmed at this point). However, in keeping with the no-beating-around-the-bush approach, Vicky has barely voiced her ambivalence when we cut to a shot of a plane flying through a storm, on its way to Oviedo—and thus, our love-triangle is formed.

And yet, just as each side of said triangle seem to have settled into place, Juan’s troubled and tempestuous ex-wife, Maria Elena (Penelope Cruz), returns to Barcelona, contorting our triangle into more of a love-rhombus of sorts…

As he so often does, Allen somehow manages to inject a dash of existentialism into what on the surface seems just a frolicsome rom-com, in such a way that nobody else can without seeming like a knock-off Woody Allen imitator.

While seemingly archetypical, there is truth, charm and tragedy in every character on screen, which scotches any accusations of lazy writing, as each character is victim to the rueful fact: ‘only unfulfilled love can be romantic’.

This film is a witty, sexy, summery delight and is a mark of not only a master’s maturity and command of their craft, but of his audience too.

5/5

The White Balloon is the tale of 7 year-old Razieh set on buy a goldfish in the lead-up to the New Year’s celebrations. Razieh comes from a modest family and despite her mother’s insistence that another goldfish is an unnecessary expense, Razieh is inflexible. She had seen one on the way home from school, ‘chubby’, ’white as a bride’ and a bargain at just 100 tomans. Now she is utterly obsessed by the prospect, to the irrational degree that children often are.

After 15 or so minutes of begging (none of which are we spared [the entire story is told in real-time, you see]), the exasperated mother eventually submits to her daughter’. She gives her 500 tomans with the expectation that the daughter will return in 10 minutes bearing one goldfish (of ample size), as well as 400 tomans. A simple task, no?

Even amidst the tiresome pleadings of our young protagonist, I found myself totally invested in her yearnings—granted, only to the extent an adult can when surrendering to the irrational world of a child: you can sit on the floor with them, envisage the horrific traffic accidents they play out with toy trucks and their own salivary sound-design, but ultimately your back will start to ache or you’ll remember that you’re out of eggs. Surely, you can’t stay in that world for much longer, can you?

On her way to the fish-salesman she is sidetracked by a pair of snake charmers, who’ve attracted a crowd of 50-or-so men. She had been warned to stay away from these types… The dervish performers are 'working the crowd' and requesting money with little-to-no subterfuge when young Razieh pushes her way through the legs of the audience to observe the spectacle. One of the charmers snags her cash and thanks her graciously for her charity.

The rest of the film continues on in this odyssey-like fashion: losing the money, finding the money, losing it again, along the way encountering new people (predominantly men) of varying integrities. While this film can work as a parable on capitalism, or America’s exploitation of the Middle East (I’m sure many other intellectual meanings can be extracted), it also works simply as an earthbound fairytale set in the buzzing streets of Tehran.

It works as an old fable in both its transparency and accessibility, consequently making for an enduring child’s-eye tale that slowly enraptures you with its honest charm. It is because of this precision and haiku-like simplicity that it makes labyrinthine works like those of, say, Chris Nolan, seem totally overworked and misguided (do note, I like Nolan—the point is, this film is merely his diametric opposite).

It’s also worth mentioning, this is a great example of what a film title can do. No white balloons actually appear in the film until the last 10 or so minutes, and even then, when you’re introduced to the white balloon, it arrives accompanied by other, non-white balloons. How does this colourless balloon warrant becoming the title of the whole film? is a question that quietly lingers in your head for the remainder of the story. It is a title which draws your attention towards a detail you would’ve otherwise dismissed or completely overlooked (other examples of this may include Babytooth, Bottle Rocket, Moonlight, Dogtooth), but one which redeems itself ten-times-over in the final shot of the film.

… Now, it has been said that I give away 5’s too easily. But to that I say, how can you not for a film that is so unapologetically itself? Or a film which has so absolutely executed what it originally intended to? Not every story must aspire to eventually be bound and encased in leather, nor dissected as a part of a film-school syllabus. Some work just as well around a campfire; some are best told to kids before they sleep; and some are best shot in real-time, on hand-held cameras, without trained actors, without street permits, without make-up, without any gimmickry or financial expense perceptible in the frame. And funnily enough, you will find that it is often those of the latter camp that resonate the most enduringly, and penetrate most deeply…

2.5/5

Few films were better critically received in the 2010s than Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread. But before I reveal my reservations about this darling, (potentially losing what little authority I have gained over the last couple months) it should be noted that few people anticipated PTA’s 8th feature with as much eagerness as I.

As a general rule, PTA films both warrant and reward second viewings, but I’ve now seen Phantom Thread four times, and after each screening I’ve asked myself the same question: is there something I’m missing?

Phantom Thread is the story of Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day Lewis), a persnickety, high-end 1950s London dressmaker, who discovers his new muse in a country BnB: a fumbling, swan-necked waitress named Alma. Woodcock is difficult in every regard and we learn from an earlier interaction that he has a history of disposing of his muses with indiscreet indifference. But when the flame of Alma’s inspiration begins to flicker, unlike her predecessors, she assumes responsibility for her own fate, and in turn, the fate of their twisted romance.

I will end the summarising there, as from here the plot seems to develop entirely in a subtextual realm, through a series of glances and glares, which is a feat on its own, but speaks volume of the film's obsession with inaction.

It should be said that the craftsmanship on display here is undeniable. The world of 50s London dressmaking feels fastidiously researched and equally well realised; and the Oscar-winning costume design should be enough alone to keep any fashionistas in their seats. But it’s Johnny Greenwood’s (Radiohead) score which is the supreme element, so spot-on that it reveals everything the film intends on being: hauntingly romantic, devilishly acerbic and harrowingly poignant.

The links between Woodcock and Count Dracula too strong to ignore, as everything from the dress, manner and enigma of this ‘certified bachelor’ seems vampiric. Yet while I enjoy the gothic themes, along with the folkloric superstition and fairytale undertones, these are all aspects which feel like nothing more than meaningless hat-tilts which are of little contribution to the story.

Paul Thomas Anderson has a history of pulling off the most unorthodox romances, whether that be Barry and Lena from Punch Drunk Love, or Freddie and Lancaster from The Master (both of which I praise without restraint), but **the incompatibility of Reynolds and Alma consistently seems too much of a stretch. It becomes increasingly difficult to believe in the endurance of this relationship: I can’t accept the headstrong Alma resigning herself to a life subservience, irregardless of the genius Woodcock possesses.

My primary issue with the film is that once we establish and unpack the twisted nature of this romance – which, granted, feels wholly original – does the film really go beyond being a detailed portrait of a peculiar power dynamic? I don’t think so. It builds upon it by repeating itself.

The end result is a film which leaves too much of its storytelling in the hands of its score, and too cutely avoids any tangible drama.

Gives me no pleasure, but back to the basics please, Paul.

4.25/5

A reticent, soon-to-retire homicide detective (Det. Somerset, Morgan Freeman) reluctantly partners up with volatile youngster (Det. Mills, Brad Pitt) when a string of gruesome murders are committed in the theme of the seven deadly sins…

This character dynamic is a long-proven recipe of the cop movie: the impetuosity of youth clashing with the prudence of experience, yet ultimately bound by their love for justice. But in the case of Se7en, it is the nature of these sins, both their grisliness and philosophical weight, that transcends the superficiality of the buddy-cop formula and ventures into the incomprehensible abyss of the underworld, Dante’s Inferno.

This struggle between good and evil (which in itself is a cloudy concept in the case of Se7en) takes place in a nameless city of perpetual rain—a city where homicides are so common that they’re rarely deemed newsworthy. Consequently, the seasoned Det. Somerset sees his job as comparable to leaving buckets along the sidewalk so as to catch some of this unremitting drizzle. And so, whether we interpret these unvaryingly inclement conditions as God’s tears or a sign of His abandonment, either way, the city seems primed for a cattle-prod shock into action.

Which is where John Doe (Kevin Spacey) comes into play, a religious fanatic whose preachings (in this case, a series of horrifying executions) are grounded in deep erudition. He draws from the Canterbury Tales, Dante’s Inferno and the works of Thomas Aquinas to justify his murders, and like the best villains in film (Anton Chigurh, The Joker, Hans Landa etc.), an audience can appreciate the motivation behind his actions, and even be slightly convinced by them.

In sum, Se7en is a detective thriller with only a few minor flaws that hold it back from joining the other truly air-tight Fincher films. For starters, Mills’ character is impulsive to such an extent that any claims of competency on the film’s part seems a stretch at best. While it is this recklessness that forges his path, ultimately all the way to its inevitable and powerful conclusion, his lack of emotional restraint present is closer akin to that of an angsty teen who has misplaced his pouch of kush, as opposed to a trained detective who has supposedly been solving crimes for five years.

Further, one gets the sense this is a film directed by someone totally in command of your attention: you see both everything and only what he wants you to see. Which brings me to the visual choices (which I do not doubt [knowing Fincher {though not personally}] are ‘choices’ grounded in reason, and not merely mindless effects)… Through a chemical process called ‘bleach bypass’, the blacks in this film are not only jet black but in abundance, consuming every frame in an oppressive shadow, giving the film an aptly broody and dreadful feel. While this might make for some great screen-grabs and befits the sense that you only see what you are permitted to, it is nonetheless something I continue to find (after four or so viewings) altogether tiresome, as I find myself constantly straining to make out the action. (Ultimately, it is a choice held up by the improbability that every character has an aversion to adequate lighting in their homes.)

Nit-picks aside, this is a near-flawless film, and well-worth your time.

2/5

American Psycho is a character study of Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale), a narcissistic and materialistic Wall St banker.

However, Bateman’s narcissism is framed to be semi-justifiable when considering the undeniable seductiveness of his lifestyle: his inordinate salary, deluxe Central Park apartment, immaculate physique, perpetual tan and lavish tastes in seemingly all things: fashion, music, fine-dining, skincare ointments and of course, women!... Oh yes, and Patrick Bateman also has an irrepressible tendency to anatomically reorganise people (a slayer in every sense!)

It quickly becomes apparent that his whole character is an extreme yet satirical critique of the 80s Wall St yuppie; and when seen in that light, it is hard to find the film as offensive or misogynistic as its protagonist (as many still do). In fact, if anything, its blatant and unrelenting critique of masculinity deems American Psycho somewhat of a feminist film (people are often surprised to learn it is a film written and directed by two women).

And so while I don’t find the film morally repugnant, or too gory, or too brutal an assessment of us lousy men, the whole thing is just way too intellectual (yes, I get the irony of deploying the ‘intellectual’ insult being somewhat of an ‘intellectual’ criticism in itself… But I’m allowed to be a bit la-di-da [it’s expected], whereas the film cannot).

So first things first, American Psycho does not work as a dramatic narrative. For one, its smarmy, satirical approach ultimately works to its own detriment; as by the time we reach the third act, the film has lost all dramatic appeal. We simply don’t care for Patrick Bateman.

His descent into lunacy, while brilliantly performed, is so laughably unsubstantiated. We’re somehow meant to accept that his narcissism, materialism and chauvinism justify his leap into a life of serial butchery; or that these attributes are psychologically related. What the film fails to understand is just because Patrick recognises his own shallowness, it doesn’t mean that the film can be equally dismissive of Patrick.

While the seductiveness of Patrick Bateman’s identity is one of the more compelling aspects of the film, his fate (the film’s last 20 minutes) is so cheaply and clumsily tied together.

We’re given two potential answers: either, the film has amateurishly deployed the ‘it was all in his head!’ twist—in which case, can someone please explain the point of the film beyond Bateman being both totally deranged and really, really, really, ridiculously good looking.

Or alternatively, the entire film hinges on a case of mistaken identity... In that case the film reads more so as one big, fat joke. And not the sort of timeless gag about Catholic priests or sneaker-wearing penguins, but the sort told by pocket-squared academics who follow its delivery with elbow-nudges and unsubtle winks that more closely resemble signs of clinical nervousness.

The film is so intent on protecting itself from the prospective criticism it knows it warrants, using quotes like: ‘there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman… but there is no real me’ or ‘this confession meant nothing’—both of which aim to acknowledge the shortcomings of character and story alike.

What we’re left with is a profound and contemporary, yet totally cerebral and non-cinematic IDEA—one which is played on full volume. For that, I can applaud the film for being ambitious and brave, but it all amounts to a film as shallow as its narration.

Again, I’m coming to find that almost any insult you give can be refuted with the inarguable, ‘yeh but, dude! That’s the whole point!’  And for that, I shall leave it there...

This review meant nothing...

2/5

In the 1930s, Bronx export, Bobby (Jesse Eisenberg), moves to Hollywood with the ambition of landing himself a job, courtesy of his uncle, Phil Stern, magnate film producer (Steve Carrell).

The latter subsequently introduces Bobby to his secretary, Vonnie (Kristen Stewart), so she can ‘show him ‘round town’. Naturally, and as one anticipates in a Woody Allen film, Bobby becomes infatuated by his chaperone and she, with glacial (both in slowness and Stewart’s typical, vampiric frostiness) reluctance, eventually becomes quite taken by him too.

It isn’t long before we learn that Uncle Phil is engaging in some extra-marital tomfoolery with the aforementioned Vonnie, and just like that, our love triangle is formed…

It seems to me that Woody Allen has gotten to the point in his career where he generates films with the enthusiasm with which one performs a bodily function. That said, I wouldn’t say Cafe Society is an awful film, but it lacks the care and attention necessary to seduce an audience.

For starters, Jesse Eisenberg’s Bobby is a pallid, quirkless character, with whom I found very little to empathise. He seeks undefined employment in Hollywood and we’re given no clues as to why he becomes so quickly disillusioned with that ambition—other than his verbal assertion that he’s a ‘through-n-through New Yorker’.

Truly dismal casting is a problem one rarely confronts in Hollywood films, and therefore it is hard to ascertain whether the fault was that elusive myth they call ‘chemistry’ or the casting agent’s severe misjudgement of ‘types’. I’m inclined toward the latter…

Kristen Stewart is a brilliant yet notably austere actress, and so, what I’d like to know is how her icy aloofness was ever deemed appropriate for a Woody Allen romcom? Or, take the equally talented Jesse Eisenberg, aka captain smarm and oozer of insincerity—could he really be as charming and adorable as his lovers claimed?

True chemistry, I believe, is a myth: it’s the right casting, competent acting and, above all, well-drawn characters that deserve the credit. It is for those reasons that I can believe in the unlikeliest of pairings (Fear Eats the Soul, or Ashby’s Harold and Maude). However, in the case of Cafe Society, no sides of this love rhombus were convincing to me.

Allen manages to shoehorn his token existential character into the film, one who serves no narrative purpose, but we welcome him for the same reason we come to a Woody Allen film in the first place: to see the profundities of life uttered by the most unassuming kinds, while in wonderfully comedic situations. It is a skill of his we’ve admired for an awfully long time, but here, it doesn’t work.

In a way, this is a film that works better if you’re already aware of Allen’s preoccupations. That said, your experience suffers, knowing how great Allen can be.

So, my tip? While we’re given a few laughs, and an interesting (enough) narrative, overall, it’s just not worth the trouble.

4/5

Our protagonist is a 20-something year old ‘stud’ who travels from Texas to New York with the ambition of becoming a high-end gigolo. His cowboy get-up and childish idolisation of Jon Wayne, who by ‘69 had already become a hackneyed knock-off of himself, epitomises the severity of his naivety.

Let it be said: Joe Buck (Jon Voight) suffers from the unfortunate and seemingly incurable condition of being a nitwit. While this may sound like an all-too dismissive and unscholarly take, watch the film and I’m sure you’d be hard pressed for a counter position. Moreover, I wouldn’t even say that Joe Buck is a loveable protagonist. That said, you can’t knock him for his dogged tenacity to fulfil his dreams, however misguided they may be.

With that in mind, as a general rule (applicable to life and film), there is only so long an adult can endure the company of children that aren’t their own (and yes, Joe Buck is a child). So how is it that Midnight Cowboy still holds up?

On the page, it is the simple story of a naive man becoming a less naive man through his experiences as an in-over-his-head male escort in New York City. As I mentioned, while the main character isn’t all that complex (nor are his companions), the film still endures and survives multiple viewings.

On the Greyhound to New York, we’re given dreamlike insights into Joe’s childhood which we understand as flashbacks, though they are presented with the corrupted and biased logic of memory. Now, these flashbacks don’t align with Freudian psychology (or at least Hollywood’s version of it [the only version I can claim to be schooled in]), but for mine, this works in the film’s favour.

I’m tired of the elementary, Hollywood, psychological equations we so often see applied to characters in film: ‘a sensitive child’ + ‘a macho environment’= ‘a creature of suppression’, for example. Often these equations are true to reality, however their deployment in film only over-simplifies the complexities of a character (I understand that in this time-pressed medium, such shorthand is often necessary in communicating the essence of a character, but some variation would not go astray).

It is for that reason that I find the murkiness of Joe Buck’s past all the more fascinating. He is a simpleton on the surface, but there are 20-something years of experience which contribute to his being, almost none of which we can claim to know or understand.

The reason Midnight Cowboy endures is that I’m not too sure how I feel about any of it. It is at once both  repulsive and charming, depressing and funny, bleak and light-hearted, disorderly and simple. It’s an abject portrait of late-60s New York, one where you expect to find the characters of a Lou Reed song right around the corner. It’s a film about homosexuality, and even sex as a whole—how it, like everything in New York (even the cowboy caricature, Joe Buck himself), can and will be monetised.

And of course, Jon Barry’s theme (just maybe the greatest film theme ever written! Just maybe!) is at once uplifting and deeply poignant. (Some needless trivia: Bob Dylan’s Lay, Lady, Lay was originally intended to be the theme, but wasn’t finished in time…. So unlike Bob!)

Can’t say I know how you’ll feel about this one, but you’re sure to feel something…

3.5/5

There’ll be a little smok-eeo in Tokyo, hooray hooray hooray, sings the cheery, whistling ditty, as US WW2 fighter-pilots sprinkle firebombs on Japanese cities. At 3,000 ft - in black and white original film - we neither see nor hear the bombs land. We see only their being distributed from the bellies of the planes, like candy from piñatas.

It’s only when we cut to a blotch of ink falling on a piece of paper, and watch the ink bleed steadily outwards, that we can intuitively appreciate the level of destruction. It’s an incredible metaphor and it won’t be the last in Paper City.

We are then introduced to a series of survivors from these attacks: they are all in their mid-80s, early-90s. They talk about their memories of the attacks—the not-so-cheery experience from the ground. And as they relay these horrors, they do so without visible sadness. In fact, in some cases, we can even perceive a steady gleam, as though they’re just happy to be on camera. Or maybe they’ve told the story a thousand times?

In these early encounters, the camera is rapacious in its appetite for character clues: it thoroughly inspects the creases in one’s face, the way a mouth (and only the mouth) describes the experience, the manner in which a hand holds a bag, a foot rests upon a stool… This searching curiosity works much like the eye might upon encountering a new face. And yet, the subjects seem so at ease: speaking without insecurity, despite the camera being so intimate that it borders on intrusive.

The story is slow to unfurl. These forgotten survivors are campaigning to gain government acknowledgement (for the latter’s faults in WW2) and for families to receive financial aid for their troubles. But their campaigns fall upon deaf ears; upon a Japan unwilling to accept themselves as culprits, or at least accomplices in the immeasurable suffering.

Some, however, merely seek recognition for the loss of lives, ‘Japan never did anything to investigate the number or names of the dead.’ In one city, a community (unaided by the government) did exactly this. On a ten-ft long scroll of parchment, a procession of Japanese names fill the page. An octogenarian pores over it, then begins to point out individual characters: ‘my sister, my brother, my mother…’ and so on.

We quickly learn that their fight is hopeless. The world looks upon the elderly in a way in which the young are often guilty of: relics of an irretrievable past. In other words, they’re ignored. The grainy film stock emphasises this, by giving the impression that the elderly campaigners have already been relegated to the past—have been forgotten.

Somewhat to the film's detriment, it's a story about stagnancy: a fight against an incorrigible opposition, waged by a group who themselves are dry on ideas when it comes to enforcing change. It must be said, it’s hard to make these films captivating all the way through.

Unfortunately we’re given little insight into what this lifelong rejection does to one’s spirit or sense of worth. That said, I’m sure we can guess with a fair degree of accuracy.

5/5

My Dinner With Andre is as simple as it sounds. On a wintery New York night, a man (Wallace Shawn) reluctantly heads out to dinner with an old friend, (Andre Gregory), with whom he has successfully avoided contact for several years.

On his way Wally provides us with some narrated insight into his life. He’s a playwright of wavering success and his daily affairs are as unremarkable as any’s: a series of trivial errands and returning to the typewriter whenever inspiration resurfaces.

We’re also given background into his estranged friend, Andre, a once triumphant theatre director who for the last 5 or so years is reported to have been talking to trees in Poland or sojourning through Tibet.

Of course, these accounts unsettle the conservative Andre, however once they find their table at a sumptuous restaurant, their history, titles and rumours fall away as they begin to chew the fat…

For close to an hour, Andre entrances Wally with tales of levitating monks in Tibet, Scottish botanists cultivating giant cauliflowers, or feverish summer nights in the Sahara, while Wally, mouth agape, listens with childlike curiosity.

It isn’t until the last 20 or so minutes that Wally actually weighs in and voices his objections to a few of Andre’s contentions, which the latter welcomes humbly. They then indulge in gentlemanly debate about love, electric blankets, conspiracies, friendship, and many other essential aspects of the human condition.

While Andre’s stories are fantastical, the film is firmly grounded in reality, and never opts to cut from the restaurant so as to accompany Andre’s anecdotes with the imagery to match. Not only is this an economically sound decision, but it’s an understatedly bold creative choice by the writers (again, Shawn and Gregory) and Malle alike, ultimately asking us to conjure up the imagery ourselves.

Malle’s directorial deftness elevates the film from being a profound interview to a humble masterpiece. My Dinner With Andre earns that title through the simplicity of its form and its ingenious means of crystallising the human experience.

5/5

Paul Thomas Anderson aptly described his sixth feature as ‘low on story, high on character’, and while this may make for a taxing watch for the uninitiated, if you enjoy seeing things you’ve never seen before, then this may be your cup of moonshine…

We follow Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), a troubled naval veteran struggling to reintegrate into society. Freddie’s a crafty mixologist who can concoct moonshines using anything from paint thinner to aeroplane engine oil. While numerous interviews with psychologists were insightful glimpses into Freddie’s defects, one look at Phoenix’s crippled posture and warped expression render these interviews hardly necessary.

Freddie jumps from job to job, losing work due to unforgivable outbursts or irresponsible service of liquor.  Freddie’s vagabondish ways eventually lead him to the cruise ship of Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour-Hoffman), a self-proclaimed (and self-certified) ‘writer, doctor, nuclear physicist, theoretical philosopher’. And it is here that our love story begins…

If Lancaster is seduced by Freddie’s cocktails, Freddie is beguiled by Lancaster’s undeniable charm and self-possession—attributes Freddie certainly lacks. It doesn’t take long for us to understand that Lancaster is the head of a scientology-like cult, and while his methods of curing (or enlightening) his followers are questionable, we come to recognise their remedial qualities for Freddie.

Lancaster identifies an innocence that few can see in Freddie. And while Freddie’s unpredictability often clashes with Lancaster’s performative streak, we fall under the spell of their mutual magnetism: we come to understand that the inexplicability of human connection to be as nonsensical as what Lancaster preaches.

Greenwood’s  entrancingly mystifying score heightens this sense of inexplicability and cultish fever. Like Rota’s role in a Fellini film, Greenwood’s hand in Paul Thomas Anderson’s last four films cannot be overstated.

The Master will endure and forever be known as PTA’s most enigmatic work, as well as one his very best.

4.5/5

The documentary, Honeyland, takes place in a remote Macedonian village, abandoned by people and progress. It is a simple story of a bee-hunter (Hatidze), the last of her practice, who lives with and provides for her incapacitated mother.

Hatidze exists in absolute harmony with her environment, which is to say her presence doesn’t disturb the peace, and when she departs, nor will her absence.

She hunts bees, she tends to them and she sells their produce at the market, always in-keeping with her mantra ‘half for them, half for me’. Her domestic holdings are as scarce as can be, but Hatidze and her half-blind, half-deaf mother, Nazife, manage to get by.

When a rowdy family of Turks move in next door, this harmony is disrupted. They bring with them a band of six children, a hundred-strong drove of livestock and a clutch of several chickens. But most controversially they come bearing a mass of modern beekeeping equipment, so that now their arrival provides the token conflict that one may expect from a drama, but never does the story feel contrived or manipulated.

While the two camps clash at times, there is still evidence of a neighbourly alliance, as Hatidze becomes a sort of eccentric-aunt to the children. She shares fires and meals with them, and even offers guidance to the hapless father in his beekeeping enterprises. However, as anticipated, a rivalry arises.

That being said, only a lazy audience member could reduce the patriarch of the Turk family to a villain. He too, like Hatidze, is on his own quest for survival, the only difference is that he is enslaved by the commerce of his trade, whereas Hatidze (spiritually and physically) stays removed as possible from the spheres of capitalism.

Eventually, it becomes evident the Turk family bit off more than they can chew. They become dysfunctional, they cannot keep up with the demands of their honey investor, and their diseased livestock start dropping like flies.

They leave the village without a word, worse off than they found it. Yet while we may take a breath of relief, we do not celebrate their departure, as we recognise that they are nothing more than helpless victims to the indifference of nature, and captive to the merciless clutches of capitalism.

In one of the more touching moments, towards the end of the film, Hatidze asks her mother why she was never ‘married off’ (this term alone speaks to their cultural and temporal displacement). The perfunctory manner with which she asks this makes it feel somewhat performative, as it reminds us that there must be a camera crew crowded into the corner of the room. Yet somehow this doesn’t break the cinematic spell. We understand that these two must’ve spoken of this matter one hundred times before, that Hatidze has made a habit of returning to the missed opportunities of her past, and like all of us, is haunted by the fact that she lost something in her youth she can never get back.

It is one of many subtle, human moments in a film which manages to all at once be an ode to modesty, yet so deftly touch upon weighty themes such as the cruelty of nature, the function of religion, obligatory family love, patriarchy, capitalism and so on.

There is something earthly and timeless about Hatidze, as she serves as a modest yet seemingly irreplaceable cog in her ecosystem; a cog which would’ve functioned no differently 1,000 years ago, to how it does now.

Had these documentarians never captured her incomparably humble lifestyle, and her remarkably unique features on the silver-screen, her existence on this earth would’ve seemed as quiet and fleeting as the life of a bee.

4.5/5

Paul Thomas Anderson said that he wanted Inherent Vice to feel like a Neil Young song. In this case, I’d imagine this’d mean a little hippyish, innocently romantic, suspicious of the-powers-that-be, and of course, dripping with nostalgia. Young’s Ambulance Blues would be my best comparison for its ticking all of the above boxes, namely its happy structurelessness and considerable length.

Inherent Vice takes place in early 1970s L.A., the epicentre of a social reform movement and a period of rife distrust in The Man. **We follow stoner P.I., Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix), as he looks for his “ex-ol’ lady”, who has become tangled up in a hazy conspiracy involving a black-power group, a fellatio-specialising, money-laundering brothel, a Jewish real estate mogul with a neo-nazi security team, a resurrected surf-saxist, a pedophiliac dentist, a maritime lawyer, a gov-funded loony-bin, Indochinese drug traffickers, a communist-sympathising movie star, crooked cops, plenty of heroin, that is all tied together with horoscopic logic: a catalogue of absurdity only comparable to one of its closest ancestors, The Big Lebowski.

Like Lebowski, it has all the tropes of a film noir: a conspiracy plot which grows vaster and more perilous the deeper it is pursued; a femme fatale (of sorts) of unclear allegiance; and an in-over-his-head P.I. who seems to stumble into this mess by accident.

Rest assured, this incoherence isn’t an accident. The plot is purposefully labyrinthine yet appropriately silly too. (I cannot understate how damn funny this film is, namely Josh Brolin’s performance.) We find ourselves constantly macheteing our way through a dense thicket of misinformation and preposterous circumstances, and just as Doc does, we feel similarly baffled by it all—but that’s, like, the whole point, man.

While we’re given the token paranoia and loss of innocence that we come to expect from 70s period films, Inherent Vice delivers so much more. The corrupt class structure that is still present today, yet needed 70s hysteria to shine a light on it, is so deftly realised here: on one side, the inordinately wealthy and powerful, and on the other, the rest of us fumbling around in the dark.

The film’s aptly soundtracked by the unintelligible babbling of a few tracks from CAN’s classic, Ege Bamyasi, while **accompanied by yet another knock-out, yet more understated than usual Greenwood score. The casting is so full of delightful surprises too.

Unrelentingly goofy, yet achingly poignant, and like so many of his films, Inherent Vice demands and rewards revisits.

4.5/5

Having not seen Boogie Nights in five or so years, I recalled the film to be a wonderfully indulgent and craftily assembled Scorsese homage, a herald of the filmmaker PTA would later become. However, upon revisiting, I have somewhat changed my tune.

Never in doubt was the overall ambition of the film, nor its execution. But I had mistakenly remembered Boogie Nights as a free-falling amusement ride, full of all the youthful exuberance you’d expect from a 26-year-old writer-director with the likes of Reynolds, Wahlberg, Moore, Macy, Cheadle (and so on) at his disposal.

What my memory failed to appreciate was the command with which these elements are organised. Amidst all the glitzy madness and show-stopper moments, Boogie Nights is a film with something to say, and while I can’t tell you exactly what that message is (I’m not withholding it but am not sure of it myself), the film is a grand reveal of America’s glitter-shrouded flaws.

So yes, while Boogie Nights is indulgent in seemingly every regard, the film never sinks into hedonism. Rather, the indulgence seems completely appropriate for a 3-hour rise-and-fall film about a 70s pornstar named Dirk Diggler.

The Diggler (Wahlberg) narrative is at the centre of Boogie Nights, chronicling the misadventures of Dirk in the porn industry: his meteoric rise to riches and his rampant plummet to poverty. But the film is a juggling act of 10-or-so offspringing characters, each a colleague of Dirk’s and each imbedded in the fabric of the late 70s/early 80s L.A. porn scene.

Here, much like his follow-up film, Magnolia (1999), PTA displays this wondrous capacity to juggle a handful of exclusive storylines, each of which, rather than converge, progressively diverge further and further apart from one another. In spite of this, PTA is somehow able to develop each storyline in perfect synchrony, advancing at the same velocity and at the mercy of the same peculiar laws that dictate the 70s porn industry.

What we’re left with is a collage of idiosyncratic yet unified stories which as a whole give a (presumably) truthful portrait of the world of porn.

Like so many of his films, Boogie Nights is set between two distinct phases of history. In this case, the transition from the 70s to the 80s marks a loss of innocence in porn, as the art-form becomes commercialised by VHS, consequently turning into the siliconised, violent and oh, so terribly sad porn of the 2000s.

Much like There Will Be Blood, released a decade later, Boogie Nights unapologetically examines the corruptive qualities of monomania. Just by linking these two films, or by linking Diggler and Plainview, we’re given a peculiar insight into the history of LA. In the 1900s, 1980s and 2020s, status (in its various forms) proves the town’s most sought-after commodity.

4.5/5

Set in 1950s Dijon, Murmur of the Heart is a coming of age story unlike any other (this I can guarantee).

Laurent Chevalier is a precocious yet sex-obsessed adolescent. He reads the dreary philosophy of Camus and is top of his class at his catholic lycée. His brothers serve as his chaperones into the world of depravity, while his father is a wealthy physician who seems oblivious to this debaucherous realm which his three sons roam, right under his nose.

It's Laurent’s mother, however, who he is closest to, in both mind and spirit, and who is subject of his all-absorbing love. Mother Clara (the bewitching Lea Massari) is 15 years younger than her husband, and is a head-turner for boys, girls, men and women.

She is a Florentine export and a fervent proponent of freedom of romantic expression, conducting her extra-marital affairs with little subterfuge, which Laurent totally approves of.

When Laurent suffers from a minor heart condition, or a ‘murmur of the heart’ (a contender for my favourite ever movie titles), he and his mother head to a health resort for his recovery. It is here their relationship develops and Laurent’s feelings for his mother are exposed.

Much like Nabokov achieves with Humbert Humbert’s fancies in Lolita, Malle frames this incestuous love as completely natural and an honest expression of pubescent curiosity—doing so with Nabakovian wit and lyricism too.

Here, Malle imagines a world of two kinds of people. One: the oblivious, those who can’t see the world for the playground of debauchery that it is. Two: those who recognise, and capitalise on, the moral ambiguity of post-war Europe. It is those who belong to the latter camp who can express the perverse truths of their soul, even just as a murmur, never again unrepeated.

4/5

Agnes Varda’s Le Bonheur serves as a portrait of an idealised couple living in the daisy-clad town of Fontenay-aux-Roses, so idyllic as to be in perpetual bloom. The plot centres on François: a carpenter whose marriage is so blissful it seems a gov-funded, postwar endorsement of the French nuclear family.

François is the sole breadwinner, while his wife stays at home, tending to the children, ironing clothes, preparing meals, rearranging flowers and fanning through fashion mags when the chance permits. It should be noted that this patriarchal dynamic is presented to us uncritically.

Nonetheless, François and Thérèse’s existence seems so drama-free, and is presented with almost an infomercial-optimism, that for a while the film teeters on the cusp of tedium. Until, despite seeming totally satisfied with this life and wife, François guiltlessly engages in an extra-marital affair with a sprightly newcomer in town.

‘A summer pear with a worm in it’ was the phrase the late Varda used to describe the film—the sort of image that one might think would appeal to David Lynch. That said, unlike a Lynch film, we’re never exposed to this feasting worm, rather it is only once we bite into the fruit that we can taste its rotten insides.

It is hard to talk about this film without revealing the plot, because the entire crux of the film isn’t revealed until the last 10 or so minutes, well after the worm has done its dash. Very little of what is said between characters in Le Bonheur matters at all, and for that reason accusations of vapidity in both design and writing could bear some merit.

And yet, underneath so many of her fictional works is this belly-jab of irony, wherein Varda critiques aren’t always aligned with the fates she gives her characters.

That said, while Varda’s oeuvre has long experienced the acclaim of feminist groups, Le Bonheur remains a problematic work due to its dismissive treatment of women, while rewarding the patriarch at the centre of it all. It isn’t just the fate of the female lead but the utter disinterest in her psychology that causes objection.

But isn’t Varda entitled to some deeper analysis than this purely aesthetic reading? Especially following her previous release, Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962). Granted, in that film, the irony is a lot easier to discern, while nonetheless, is far from being readily available:

‘the eponymous Cleo is presented as unbearably bratty and ungrateful, and therefore the audience initially finds little empathy for this tall, blonde, universally-adored, white woman who has struck gold in showbiz and leads a lavish, epicurean life. That said, eventually the subtle tragedy of Cleo shines through her glamor-clad facade, as the audience can start to appreciate the vacuity of her existence through the irony of her condition as ‘the voiceless vocalist’’.

In the case of Le Bonheur, this ‘reveal’ isn’t spoonfed to audiences—you have to make your mind up yourself.

4/5

Moneyball chronicles the true story of Oakland A’s general manager, Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), in his endeavour to win a world series on a shoestring budget.

Despite another commendable season under Beane, the A’s are on the cusp of defaulting to their rightful place in baseball: mediocrity. Why? They are losing players to clubs that can pay them more. The poor stay poor, the rich get richer…

Moneyball is a film which quietly dodges around the potholes of a typical sports movie. The performances are subdued; neither its photography, design or direction calls any attention to itself; and its character arc, while almost indiscernible, is monumentally powerful, despite being one of only incremental change.

Further, the ‘Balboa’ montages one might expect from a sports flick are nowhere to be found—but if they do appear, take the form of negotiations in offices or arguments besides vending machines; while the uplifting montages consist of shots at excel spreadsheets, strike-zone diagrams and foul-ball charts.

In short, the idealism of baseball is dismissed as heartlessly as the players in the film are traded. And thus, the rare occasions where the film does provide us with a token sports-movie platitude just so happened to coincide with my lapses in engagement.

That said, Moneyball is not merely a sophisticated reworking of the age-old tale of the isolated innovater, but rather, is a deceptively idiosyncratic work. It is important to read this film not as a sporting-movie, but a biographical drama about a man whose conflicts are dealt with quietly, internally and on his own.

With that in mind, give Moneyball a go—or, as in my case, a second chance—you won’t be disappointed.

4/5

Though it’d be clinically ill-advised to pair Uncut Gems (2019) and Good Time (2017) in a double-billing, the films are companion pieces in more ways than one. Thus, in the wake of the Uncut Gems ballyhoo, and my own personal praise, it seemed fitting to trace Gems’ lineage back to its forebears, the adrenalising storm of neon pulp that is Good Time.

The story follows a pair of brothers, one a harebrained schemer and the other mentally handicapped, whose two-man bank job backfires completely, resulting in the arrest and subsequent hospitalisation of the latter. The film centres around Connie Nikas (Robert Pattinson), whose mission to rescue his defenceless brother from incarceration is executed in the murkiest manner.

As Connie embarks on a grungy, night-long odyssey involving a hospital abduction, feverish coitus with a minor and a quest for a Sprite bottle of liquid acid, we are totally immersed in the fizzy underworld of sleepy New York.

Connie is devious, stormy and totally reckless, yet while unambiguous in that regard, he’s elusive in the sense that we never really know whether he’s motivated by guilt, loyalty or trying to save his own buns from burning. Neither do we ever ascertain why he includes his brother in his crackpot plot in the first place. Yet despite his methods being unsportsmanlike, to say the very least, it is Connie’s dogged (or dog-like) approach that ultimately wins us over.

The throbbing techno score is aptly frenetic and serves as the lifeblood of the film. There’s an undercurrent of those familiar crackles and hisses of static we’ve come to associate with the Safdie’s, which forge the film’s gritty, electric texture.

Both story and design are so artfully merged, as that ‘Safdian’ palette is realised through the ultraviolet lights of a dormant theme-park or Connie’s DIY-peroxide hair applied as disguise (one of his not-so-bright ideas).

While purposefully pulpy on the surface, the film never feels familiar, as it strikes a unique balance of grit, heart and even a dash of comedy for our sadists out there. By the end of the film, there is a sense of order restored in the Safdie cosmos, yet a fiendish appetite for more!

5/5

The film opens with an overhead shot of a tarot reading. A pair of jangling, gypsy hands flip cards and interpret the fortunes of our eponymous Cleo, whose forecast is gloomy.

This scene is the only coloured footage in the film and was described by the director (the late Agnes Varda) as the ‘fiction before entering reality’. Of course, the superstitious hypochondriac, Cléo, takes these predictions as gospel and for the rest of the film we follow her (from 5 to 7) as she meanders through Paris, awaiting confirmation of this prophecy from her physician.

This notion of the remainder of the film being the ‘reality’ is reflected not only in the minimalist lighting, camera movement, natural performance, dialogue, sound design (so on and so forth…), but also the air of spontaneity which Varda breathes into every frame—makes sense, considering the bevy of documentaries she’d later put out.

At its heart, however, the film is a character study of the somewhat tragic Cléo. We casually stumble across character clues as she roams through the ‘Paris-end’ of Paris: she’s a household-name singer; she sits comfortably in the uppermost tax bracket; and her maid seems to take care of all the banalities of daily life.

Cléo boasts a bratty streak. And thus, most (myself included, initially) struggle to find sympathy (or empathy) for this tall, blonde, universally-adored woman who has struck gold in showbiz and leads a lavish, epicurean existence.

However, eventually the tragedy of Cléo shines through her glamour-clad facade, as we begin to appreciate the vacuity of her life through the irony of her condition: ‘the voiceless vocalist.’ Cléo is infantilised by her maid, objectified by her lover and exploited by her ghostwriters. It’s not so much that she has nothing to say, but rather nobody around her cares to listen.

While lauded for its French New Wave tendencies (meandering plot, real-time narrative etc.), Cleo 5 to 7 still bears the necessary arcs and epiphanies of any great story. While her dour prophecy is somewhat confirmed, through a chance encounter with love, we leave Cleo optimistic about her fate—just as she is.

This is the sorta film you can see being misappropriated for tumblr or pinterest, because it’s a chic, black-n-white, French 60s film, seasoned with a handful of off-handed yet poignant one-liners—but it is so much more. Cleo 5 to 7 is a film made by a woman, about women but for all, one that seemingly grows in relevance with age.

A great intro into FNW too… enjoy!

4/5

This is the final film of PTA’s apprenticeship under the tutelage of Scorsese and Altman, to whom he owes so much of his early style and tendencies. In Magnolia, you can feel PTA respectfully departing from their ports and forging his own path as an auteur.

The film itself is preambled with three short tales of urban lore, stories of inconceivable coincidence. These mini-fables give us the expectation that the characters we meet in the subsequent scenes will, at some point over the next 3 hours, come into contact with one other by preposterous means. But while the trajectories of these 10 or so protagonists do overlap and intertwine on occasion, they do so tenuously and without the sense of celestial fortune that we anticipate.

Much like his previous film, Boogie Nights, Magnolia sees each thread develop in perfect synchrony with each other, in terms of mood and rhythm, making for an operatic rollercoaster of dives and redemptions.

There’s the child trivia genius (Jeremy Blackman) and his overbearing father (Michael Bowen); the sleazy gameshow host (Philip Baker-Hall), his neglected wife (Melinda Dillon), estranged daughter (Melora Walters) and her suitor, the public-spirited cop (John C. Reilly); then there’s the subject of his pursuits, ex-children’s trivia wiz, now-adult (Bill Macy) — pause for a breath — then the dying TV mogul (Jason Robards), the mogul’s prescription-abusing trophy-wife (Julianne Moore), and his long-lost son, the Andrew Tate of 90s LA (Tom Cruise), and the mogul’s nurse (Philip Seymour-Hoffman), and so on...

We can try to extract themes out of this melodramatic hodgepodge, such as father-son relationships (an area PTA is always returning to), drug addiction, or toxic-masculinity—but that’s not really the point. Rather, these people are unified by nothing more than their very residency in rainy LA, on this particular **day—a day of biblical significance.

I have no issue with the length, as I don’t feel the film carries any fat or lags in any areas, which can be said of very few films clocking in over three hours. But here, the multiple storylines feels like a trick PTA has already become bored with, and now must defy and subvert in order to amuse himself, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but at times feels too clever for his own good. For instance, the intention to ‘mislead’ us in the beginning, after seeing the film a handful of times, now seems to teeter on the border of gimmickry, and you’d think today’s PTA would find a more artful way to pull this off.

All that said, despite his influences still being unmistakable, this film is unlike anything you’ve ever seen before, and for that reason alone it’s worth your time.

4/5

In the 17th century, Japan introduced a foreign policy of isolationism - or sakoku - which sought to **greatly limit contact with the colonial powers of Europe (chiefly Portugal and Spain), in the hope of preserving Japanese culture, while banishing western influence from its shores—chiefly that of the Catholic church.

Scorsese’s Silence follows two Jesuit priests from Portugal - Father Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Father Guarupe (Adam Driver) - who have been sent to Japan to find their mentor,  Father Ferreira (Liam Neeson) who is rumoured to have renounced his faith and embraced the Japanese way of life.

Because of Japan’s isolationist policy, the mission of the priests is fraught with many perils and must be executed stealthily so as to evade the ubiquitous eye of the regime.

The priests travel from one village to the next, cautiously trying to obtain intel on the whereabouts of Ferreira. Much to their surprise, Christianity is still blossoming among the rural communities of Japan, which for all must remain a secret practice.

Interestingly, the fanaticism of these peasants is often followed to their own deprivation, as it promises dramatically improved circumstances in the afterlife, which, to some, renders their present existence hardly worth enduring.

Eventually, when the presence of the priests is discovered by the regime, Rodrigues and Guarape must go their separate ways, from which point we’re left with our (not-so) humble narrator, Rodrigues.

When Rodrigues is discovered, we are exposed to the brutality of the regime. Surprisingly, however, it is more intent on stripping Rodrigues of his faith, rather than simply slaughtering him, as they do to countless peasants—as though exposing his hypocrisies would be a greater victory than claiming his scalp.

They give him countless opportunities to apostatise - as Ferreira has supposedly done - so as to save the lives of the peasants. But he consistently refuses. Here, themes of pride and self-importance are introduced, as Rodrigues compares his struggles to those of Christ himself.

In the second half we come to appreciate the writing, especially when Neeson’s Ferreira is reintroduced, as we’re given intriguing debates on Christ vs Buddha, coloniser vs colonised, western vs eastern philosophies.

While I wasn’t overly sold on the casting of Garfield (it’d be dishonest not to mention the fact that whenever Driver and Garfield shared the frame, my attention was invariably drawn towards the gaunt Driver), the Japanese cast were awesome, particularly Yôsuke Kubozuka as the morally-elastic Kichijiro, whose Falstaffian cowardice saves his buns on countless occasions, and who somehow adds a folkloric element to the story, as his performance is so stylised, yet nevertheless remains earthbound in its tragic turns. Moreover, Tadanobu Asano as the interpreter - who seems the best at debunking the claims of Christianity and provoking the most riveting debates from Rodrigues - walks this fine line of compassion and disdain for the priests, while wholly epitomising the unpredictability of the regime.

All in all, Silence is worth your time (I say that knowing it’s just shy of 3 hours), but is certainly not without its lulls…

4/5

When I purchased my ticket to The Personal History of David Copperfield, I genuinely thought I was seeing a film about a world-famous Vegas magician (‘Illusionist!’ I hear Gob Bluth blast). My best guess was a trials-and-tribs biopic of an enigmatic showman, unknowable to even those closest to him. Or, the abandoned son of a roguish father, whose vagabondish ways left him with an appetite to rematerialise things lost. Or maybe the tale of a lowly street-urchin who mastered the craft of deception through sleights of hand at his local milk-bar, where he’d pocket the bare necessities that his triple-shift mama couldn’t afford...

Obviously, I hadn’t seen the trailer, poster nor heard a peep about the film, which, like so many of the movies (and people too, I suppose) resurfacing now, had spent its last four months floating like space-junk in the indefinite oblivion of a world on pause.

The film begins whimsically with the titular David Copperfield (Dev Patel) walking out onto stage, and introducing himself before vanishing into the backdrop of his childhood home: Yep, just as I thought. Vegas magician... But after two minutes, the persistence of Victorian dress and that unmistakable way-of-speak revealed my error: Ahhhhh, Dickens. Of course. What larks!

I’ve never read David Copperfield but I am somewhat of a devotee to Dickens’ work (hell, I paid 10 quid to roam the halls of his house in London). And while this makes my initial folly all the more embarrassing, I do feel I’m well trained for the absurd world in which I have landed.

We’re given a series of delightful vignettes of Copperfield’s family, friends and enemies, as our protagonist pinballs from fortune to poverty and back again, grounding those of us even vaguely versed in the wonderful ways of Dickens.

At first I’m concerned by this, and maybe even a little peeved, as the film displays an utter reliance on Dickens’ ingenious prose, which to me suggests a lazy transfer of the words to screen. But the film wins me over as it persists with this faithfulness to this inimitable style and tone, and I find myself at the mercy of the film’s silly, poignant and unexpected turns.

The film is funny, tragic and at the same time a compelling social drama which artfully illuminates the hypocrisies in the Victorian class system.

At heart, this is an ensemble piece, as Copperfield’s journey is a quest of establishing himself amidst the circus of eccentrics that surround him: the humble and outlandish, the rich and poor, the daft and erudite. He constantly teeters on the precipice of two social classes, engendering a perpetual state of identity crisis, as both he and the film recognise the fraudulence of his existence.

While the narrative seems directionless at times, it seems befitting of a film whose protagonist is as confused. His soulmate chops and changes, his purpose is ever-redefined and his ideas on the world are in constant flux.

A pleasant return to the movies.

4/5

Jasmine (Cate Blanchett) is a New York socialite who, when left widowed and stripped of her wealth (as well as the status and validation that comes with it), is forced to descend a few rungs on the social ladder by moving to San Fran with her sister (Sally Hawkins).

Deserted and penniless, the Fendi clad Jasmine is prone to the odd bout of delirium, which usually takes the form of monologic muttering about her past life and late husband, both of which she still describes favourably. In spite of her declining faculties, Jasmine is still able to deceive a few of her suitors into thinking she’s fit to reenter the romantic arena.

Ultimately however Jasmine is unable to conceal her instability from those close to her, an instability which is never diagnosed but is regularly confirmed by the rattle of her pillbox which soundtracks her every step like a mournful maraca.

When released Blanchett was the talking point of the film and rightly so, as I can’t recall another performance as tragic as this still feeling at home in a comedy. While she is no doubt the dominant force, this still feels like an ensemble piece: Hawkins’ versatility is again on display as a San-Fran bag-clerk with a penchant for ‘losers’; while Andrew Dice Clay, Louis CK, Alec Baldwin and most notably Bobby Cannavale each give their own interpretation of the ‘loser’ boyfriend, a theme Allen returns to multiple times here.

Throughout the film we’re given insights into Jasmine’s marriage thanks to a series of flashbacks through which we gradually learn how she came to find herself in this state of disrepair.

It should be noted that the central plot is based on the real-life, riches-to-rags Bernie Madoff, a Wall Street who executed a Ponzi scheme of monstrous scale. Much of the public debate surrounding the Madoff story is focused on whether Ruth (the wife) or the kids were aware of Bernie’s shady dealings, a theme which Allen pursues in this film.

Jasmine’s biggest pitfall – which those around her show no hesitation in asserting – is her tendency to ‘look the other way’ in the face of unethical behaviour, whether that be her husband’s innumerable infidelities or his slippery business. The tragedy is that when she finally does stand up for herself, she does so at the cost of not only her livelihood, status and familial unity, but ultimately her sanity too.

This is one of Allen’s best 2000s films (along with Vicky, Cristina, Barcelona and Midnight in Paris) and worth your time for the performance alone.

1.5/5

As I said a few weeks back in my i’m thinking of ending things review (ready yourselves, I’m about to quote myself… ), ‘I am a subscriber to the reasoning that profound films trigger comparably profound responses in the critic; while lazily conceived films will provoke uninspired writing…’ In that case, I blamed Kaufman’s structureless fever dream for my equally wayward review. (Mind you, it was a favourable review, but nonetheless, as graspable as a cat’s fart.) By the same logic this formulaic, hackneyed and generally craftless attempt at a dramedy will bring out some didacticism in me, as though I’m addressing the writer/director himself, from a lectern which, if I’m honest, I haven’t quite yet earned the authority to stand behind. But alas, unwarranted authority is the lifeblood of this business, so press on I shall…

You see, the most important question when watching any film is do I believe what I’m seeing? Without the suspension of disbelief, it’s terribly difficult to produce emotional responses in an audience. Moreover, if a film fails to cast its dramatic spell over its audience, then it’s message, no matter how important or topical it may be, could just as well be written on a pamphlet which sits in a GP waiting room. While a clinical leaflet might be an unfair comparison, to me Ruben Guthrie felt more like a Good Weekend magazine feature than a feature film.

The film itself is the story of the eponymous Ruben Guthrie (Patrick Brammal), a 30-something year old advertising guru, who is framed as the Leo DiCaprio of the ad industry. He has a Czech supermodel as a girlfriend and a house on the harbour in Sydney. Ruben also had the tendency to get black-out drunk. And so, when he decides to jump from his roof into his pool at his own party, his life is flipped on its head... No, he doesn’t metamorphose into a beetle, nor does he emerge from the pool linguistically adept in Sanskrit (alternatives that should’ve been considered), but rather, his girlfriend leaves him and he somehow (I still don’t really get how or why, but in case the departure of his girlfriend wasn’t reason enough for him to turn his life around…) breaks his arm.

Now you may guess from my generally sarcastic tone, that I didn’t like this film. But I would like to point out that this film is by no means deplorable, but rather, and less forgivably, it’s sheer mediocrity coming from a seemingly competent source. The actors too, are all more than competent (special mentions to Abbey Lee and Alex Dimitriades), but their talents are helped none by the clunky writing.

Back to the issue of believability: the reason I didn’t believe anything is because the mechanics of the film and Cowell’s subscription to screenwriting formula are too damn evident. The character’s inner conflicts are revealed through hammy dialogue. Everything Ruben supposedly feels is revealed to us via running updates from Ruben himself. ‘I’m so sad and lonely!’ and ‘But I’m happy, dad!’

There are countless instances where the writing feels like a band-aid applied over a gaping and gushing gash and every element starts to seem like a lazily employed device. Not enough reason for Ruben to be an alcoholic? Insert a college trauma here. A side character seeming too one-dimensional? Just give ‘em an illness, or maybe a childhood of abuse, or maybe make ‘em sexually confused. Do we need two characters to have a fight? Well just let one descend into a fit irrationality...

The reason these things happen is because the characters aren’t well-drawn enough to have their own ideas and therefore all conflict feels contrived.

Now, while I’m at it, I have another gripe: drone shots. I’m sorry, but why? Just why? In the case of Ruben Guthrie, they’re used as filler, markers of time, and are about as meaningful as the empty page between chapters in a book.

There were some great moments: I thought every minute of Alex Dimitriades was utterly delightful. His character calling Virginia ‘vagina’ was one of the silliest (in the best way possible) jokes I’ve seen in a while (and works because it is totally in-keeping with the character). There are other moments where the film strikes a nice balance between comedy and drama, but overall, it is a film devoid of surprise.

While I can commend the film on its efforts to say something worthwhile, it was one of those films that didn’t really wanna get its hands dirty. It tries to address important issues (namely, alcoholism and the pernicious Australian drinking culture), but its intentions are all I can applaud it for in that regard. The film shows a desperate endeavour to say something of weight and worth, but ultimately has nothing more insightful to say than: there’s a drinking culture in Australia, and, ahhh, it’s not very good…

The film is somewhat saved by an ending of ambiguity, but by then all was lost anyway, and given my general mistrust towards the film by that point, even this felt more like a decision from a playbook rather than one of any deep thought and consideration.

4/5

The film opens with text saying something along the lines of: In the depths of the Scandinavian winter, when the world is so white that you can hardly distinguish the sky from the earth, the dead walk among the living… I must confess, I am enjoying these films that emerge from the depths of Covid and suddenly appear, unpromoted and butt-naked.

Going off the opening title card, I thought I might be in for a Nordic zombie-flick. But I was quickly course-corrected by the opening shot: 90-or-so seconds of tracking (or trailing) behind an anonymous green Volvo as it threads its way through the ubiquitous white which I just described. Crawling along a tortuous highway, where the cold is as solid and perceptible as the road upon which the car manoeuvres, the Volvo suddenly screeches and shoots through the guardrails and into the chalky abyss…

While the film mightn’t have any paranormal elements, it could just as well be read as a ghost story, though one firmly grounded in the bitter reality of rural Iceland. The film slowly takes shape as a psychological drama but it  constantly shifts onto other terrains: dark comedy, Scandy art-house, pulpy revenge thriller and a feel-good, familial-love allegory.

It was not only this sense of ‘conventionlessness’ (that is to say, the film’s ability to elude classification) but also the camera placement and treatment of performance that I found very reminiscent of Haneke: we share the room with our characters, but they have no sense of us (an impression which is harder to communicate than one may think), things unfold at a natural pace, and performance is dialled back to the point where the characters are expressionless as the world by which they’re surrounded.

The narrative follows widower Ingimundur (Ingvar Sigurdsson) as he accidentally stumbles across some clues which indicate that his late wife had been unfaithful to him during their marriage (we suspect that his wife was the driver of the green Volvo). His investigation is as extensive as one’s examination of a crumpet prior to consumption – which is to say almost nonexistent – as Ingimundur is a man who goes off the rumbles and grumbles of his gut (after all, he is a policeman), which in the end prove reliable.

Ingimundur ticks all the boxes of the archetypical, grieving, Icelandic widower (I didn’t know that was an archetype?…): cynical; reticent; crafty with hammer ’n' nail; little-to-no patience for technology nor son-in-law; an inordinate tolerance for physical (and emotional) pain; always adorned in nautical knits and his seafarer’s beard; and facial features carved by the icy arctic winds… However in the case of A White, White Day, ‘archetypical’ is not an insult, but rather, it’s kinda the point…

In an early dialogue with a psychologist, which as you’d imagine moves with the fluidity of mud travelling uphill, the shrink asks Ingimundur to describe himself, to which Ingimundur categorises himself as ‘a man… a father… a grandfather… a policeman…’ (Note that, in this case, these ellipses indicate interminable pauses of reluctance from Ingimundur, and irritating prods for elaboration from the shrink…) The point is that Ingimundur’s description has a timeless primitivity to it: the same sort of answer (language barriers aside) that you might get from a Viking 1,000 years ago.

I realise I haven’t even gotten to the crux of the film, which is a testament to how much this film does in 100 minutes (and how proficient a blatherer I am). Above all Ingimundur is a grandfather, and in that session he identifies his daughter as the only thing which makes him happy. Their relationship is his only redeeming quality and Lord knows what would’ve happened if she wasn’t in his life.

While the film feels like it over-reaches at times in pursuit of art-house wonderment, there are about 10 utterly transcendent, truly unshakable moments—which is 10 more than 99% of films can boast.

Go see this one, people!

2/5

When investigative journalist and general skeptic, Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys), is assigned to write a ‘puff piece’ on nationally beloved TV icon, Fred Rogers (Tom Hanks), he’s intent on unearthing some unpleasant truths of Rogers’ too-good-to-be-true character. But when confronted by Rogers’ overwhelming virtue, seasoned excavator Vogel is forced to make peace with a few unpleasant truths of his own.

The redemptive plot of the cynic-turned-believer in the face of an incorruptible good is hardly new territory.

And the result is a film that so desperately, yet so plainly, wants to avoid cliche that it forgets why these elements have earned hackneyed-status in the first place. Initially, this endeavour to defy orthodoxy seems somewhat exciting as the intentionally contrived story-within-a-story approach (wherein our protagonist Vogel stars in his own A.B.D.I.T.N. episode) feels fresh and ambitious, as the reimagined original credit sequence of Mr Rogers’ ‘neighbourhood’ serves as establishing shots for our real-world action.

This strategy is reinforced as the film adopts the same shooting style and aesthetic as its prototype, which again seems inventive at first, but as this tune is tenuously followed the drama sours into a puff-piece tale of morality that truly does belong on a kids show.

The film is far too clever for its own good, as it thinks by acknowledging its hokeyness it is pardoned for its threadbare characters and trite narrative. The vapidity of the story is acknowledged through winks to the critics that say ‘we know the plot may be trite, but would a trite film do this! or that! or this!’

These ‘this’ and ‘that’s’ refer to the quirky score at moments of emotional crescendo or a dream sequence shoehorned into the middle of the film, showing the restraint of a film-school freshman. Even Matthew Rhys’ performance, overplaying (by underplaying) the most everyman of everymen (beside the king of the ‘everymen’ in Tom Hanks), feels like yet another misguided act of defiance that quickly falls into tedium.

One of the fundamental flaws of the narrative is that the entire film hinges on the idea that you are as mesmerised by the virtue of Fred Rogers as Lloyd Vogel is. But when a character is left as underdeveloped and unchallenged as Fred Rogers, Vogel’s admiration for Rogers goes unshared by the audience.

To make matters worse, when we are given the slightest peak behind the curtains of Mr Rogers’ public persona, piquing our curiosity for the first time in the film, this area is left unprobed by our hard-bitten investigative journo.

All of the above results in a film where story and direction are at such a disconnect that it befogs our idea of who is truly at fault here, the writers or director?

As it so desperately desires, the film succeeds in feeling new, but ultimately falls down as an unmoving potpourri of unjustified rebellion mixed with poorly disguised cliches.

4/5

When a middle-aged divorcee purchases an ‘artery red’ dress for a blind date, she becomes subject to the cursed garment’s sadistic designs… Unlike our haunted department store, this film upholds its end of the deal by providing all the thrills and gags a possessed-dress horror-com should. And in the end we’re gifted so much more than we bargained for.

From the outset, the film’s feverish score and manic yet lush imagery together give the impression we’re being swathed into a polyester-red, raunchy nightmare. Even for the skeptics of the premise, of which there no doubt will be many, the cinematic craft on display here is undeniable. Every frame pulses with a technicolor red, linking everything from a fetishistic sales-clerk’s nails in one scene to the menstrual discharge of a mannequin in the next.

If one typically hasn’t the stomach for such depravities, or fails to see the comedy in an ancient store manager self-gratifying with the aid of a bleeding mannequin, then this mightn’t be your poison. But I dare say, Strickland’s artful comedy broadens this film’s appeal beyond the cultish.

The film’s most impressive feat, much like a Buñuel piece, is that it never intellectualises or asks you to extract meaning from the narrative, as you appreciate the film’s political/social sentiments (whatever you decide they are) on a more visceral level. The perversity of consumerism rings true in the hypnotic commercials, as it does through the exotic-retailer/sorceress with an appetite for her doll’s monthly-emissions, or even the hyper-persnickety management of the hotel where our protagonist works.

The way the film half-way through discards of one hero and starts anew with another, or how it demonstrates an utter disregard for plot altogether by leaving countless loose-ends, emphasises its overarching thesis that its characters are all mere subjects to the machine of consumerism.

While in lesser hands a nightmare-logic storyline may have led to head-scratching, it seems fitting that in a film which is out to lampoon materialism is a film of unapologetic excess. Hilarious, sadistic and although its influences are clear (most obviously Argento’s Suspiria, but I find Roeg’s Don’t Look Now to be its closest ancestor and a fitting candidate for a double-feature pairing), we’re given an entirely original cinematic experience.

4/5

‘On paper’, Judas and the Black Messiah seems somewhat familiar: an FBI informant, Bill O’Neal (LaKeith Stanfield), infiltrates a political group (The Black Panther Party) so as to gain intel on its enigmatic commander, Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya).

While these narrative and character dynamics may seem slightly platitudinous — the on-edge snitch, the charismatic leader, and the reprehensible powers-that-be — fortunately for us, films aren’t produced ‘on paper’, and every element in Judas and the Black Messiah is craftily employed to ensure the film steers clear of any predictable terrain.

From early on, this film asserts itself as a fresh and adventurous voice: the score weaves in and out at unlikely moments; the movement and placement of camera is daring; and many narrative choices turn their back on convention, particularly on those of the biopic. And it all works.

On the latter point, while Bill is positioned as our lead (and Stanfield is nominated for various awards accordingly), the film devotes equal attention to Fred (Kaluuya too is anticipated to clean up come awards season), who we also follow with similar intrigue. At times the film becomes distracted by peripheral characters, which somehow feels integral, instead of confused or ill-disciplined.

One of the reasons we never lose interest when the film deviates from the central plot is the supporting performances, chiefly those of Kaluuya and Dominique Fishback. The latter plays Hampton’s intimate partner and is able to penetrate the otherwise impenetrable realms of Hampton’s psyche, for which the audience is truly grateful.

Further, the narrative’s tendency to follow its whims also means that we’re granted peaks into the otherwise forgotten aspects of the Black Panther story: the conflict of being pregnant while committing to a revolution, for instance, or a mother’s grief over a son whose legacy’s been forever besmirched by his Party-associated crimes. As a result we’re given a vast spectrum of drama within the movement: unsung tales presented alongside those forever epitaphed in America’s long history of racism.

Often when a film touches upon such enduring issues, we hear comments on how topical or timely its release is, comments which ultimately distract us from the fact that Judas and the Black Messiah is a good movie now, just as it would’ve been 20 years ago, and 20 years before that. Not only does it expose the ugliest side of America’s DNA - which endures still to this day - but it relies little on the glorification or Hollywoodisation to tell that story.

It should be said that I refrain from using the word ‘great’ above for a number of reasons. One being, while I can laud so many of the collaborative elements (sound, camera, editing, performance and so on), I still left feeling short-changed on character, as both Judas and the Messiah ultimately go under-examined here. Apart from rambunctious tirades, Fred’s inner turmoils aren’t truly expressed and rely heavily on performance to magnetise the audience. For Stanfield’s Bill, the issues are much the same: a functional character slightly over-performed (a criticism for the director more so than Stanfield), often coming across as heavy-handed.

That said, well worth your time this one…

2/5

Ever Since his firefighting father died, 24 year-old pot-smoking, wastrel, Scott (Saturday Night Live export, Pete Davidson), has meandered through life with little-to-no direction. He is a mediocre tattoo-artist at best (a profession which allows little room for mediocrity) who aspires to open up his own parlour one day, however these ambitions have been severely blunted by his vices.

After a somewhat listless first act, the narrative is kicked into gear when Pete opts to tattoo a nine year-old boy in the woods—recognised by his mother in the screechiest of falsettos as ‘the second worst thing you can do to a nine year-old boy in the woods!’.

When the enraged father (of the branded boy), a gingery handle-barred Bill Burr, comes seeking retribution, he instead finds love in the form of Scott’s mother (Marisa Tomei). Once the disagreement is settled, their love flourishes in secret.

When Scott’s mother (Marisa Tomei) finally announces that she has re-entered the dating arena, Scott embraces it. However, once he finds out that she’s dating a fire-fighter, Scott must finally grapple with the grief of losing his father.

For not the first time in his career, Judd Apatow’s obsession with striking the balance between comedy and drama proves to be pursued to his own detriment. So often the comedy comes at a compromise to the drama (or narrative) and vice versa.

I have no issue with this hybrid-genre, but once drama is infused into comedy, it can shed unwanted light on the comedic logic. In other words, you can’t get away with as much. The audience scrutinises plot points which otherwise would have been ignored: Would he really tattoo a nine year-old boy? Would his friends really let him tattoo them given his dreadful portfolio? Was he really justified to hate Bill Burr’s character as fervently as he did?

Which brings me to my main qualm with the film… The ‘stand-up’ turned ‘dramatic actor’ recipe has been proven to work time and time again, and while I’m even somewhat of a subscriber to the school of thought that ‘there are no bad performances, only bad casting’, here, Pete Davidson still seems too emotionally immature to meet the needs of the emotional crescendos of the film.

The character and Davidson do seem to share a nihilistic streak, but this was one of the few aspects of the character that was accounted for. Early in the film, we hear Scott explain that he has a short fuse but this aspect of his character is left undemonstrated; and, I assume, purely for performance reasons, these scenes were left on the cutting room floor (just quietly, I think it could’ve lost a few more scenes).

I later learnt that Davidson’s real-life father was one of the many heroes who died bravely fighting the 9-11 fires, and maybe asking Davidson to translate that pain into a Hollywood performance was a bit too much of an ask? With that in mind, I can imagine that this is a script that would’ve pitched brilliantly, read well on paper, but fell down in the execution due to a short-falling central performance and a gutless editor.

Essentially what we have here is a delayed coming of age film--at times funny, but not as poignant or as clever as it thinks it is. This is the heaviest subject matter that Apatow has tackled since Funny People--a film which shares many of the same flaws (one being length), but has way more talent at its disposal and a bit more heart too.

1.5/5

Deary, deary me… I’m so very tired of kookiness for the sake of kookiness…

Here we have a story of a young woman whose flimflamming parents recruit her to assist with their constant scamming. As a family, their ploys are generally fruitless (but hey, they sure are kooky!), yet are conducted with a level of devotion which cannot be knocked. One such example is stealing massage coupons in the hope of trading them for cash—where, again, the spoils of these ploys rarely amount to anything more than silky neckties and, well, massage coupons…

The daughter’s name is Old Dolio (Evan Rachel Wood), because her parents thought that if they named their daughter after a homeless man who’d just won the lottery, then said vagrant might leave his namesake some of his fortune when he dies. This says everything you need to know about Old Dolio’s parents (the daughter/protagonist’s parents, not the bum’s); they’re selfish, kooky and altogether inhuman (this last one in particular is a real issue when trying to inspire empathy in an audience).

When Melanie (Gina Rodriguez), a young optometrist’s-assistant, encounters the family mid-scam, naturally, she becomes intrigued. However, her subsequent recruitment into the trio of grifters is made on the basis that she likes Oceans 11 and that these parents are refreshingly less overbearing than her own… And here the film begins to unravel.

I have read some other reviews of this film wherein July is lauded for her aversion to plot, as though any thread of story would be a problem in this film of half-mumblecore, half-absurdist, half-tragicomedy (my maths here replicates the logic of the film). But let’s clarify this point, this film doesn’t exhibit the bold subversion of conventional story structures, like The Great Beauty for instance (a recent review here), but rather this film is awash with a salad of kooky ideas which on their own may be funny, but when all thrown in the same bowl resemble a most unappealing salad.

While I can accept that some of these characters could exist in real life, the thought of these people existing side-by-side is too much of a stretch. In fact, the entire ensemble seems to exist in this extra-dimensional world which looks staggeringly similar to L.A., but where initiatives such as government support and children welfare are yet to be introduced, and people with zero in common have adult sleep-overs together… But Will, you square! It need not make sense! It’s kooky!

There are glimmers of hope scattered throughout: the score is wonderful, there are funny moments, the design is pleasant-enough and the performers are more than competent—all of which leads me to the conclusion that this is a poorly written/directed film.

Disorganised, ill-disciplined and wildly confused—an exhausting watch.