by ·Comments Off on The Shrouds (2024, David Cronenberg)

Making up Vincent Cassel as Cronenberg and having him mourn his late wife could’ve gone so hard into self-indulgent territory but instead this soft dialogue drama (with Crimes lighting and lots of handheld images-on-screens) gradually careens into paranoid techno-thriller territory with plenty of sex and hardly any murder. Ends with nothing resolved, in the middle of a dream sequence. Short but powerful bursts of Howard Shore music which have either introduced new sounds to his toolkit, or else the Movieland’s speakers have blown out. Diane Kruger plays the dead wife (missing an arm in dream/flashback), and her conspiracy-horny sister, and the AI built/puppeted by the sister’s ex-husband Guy Pearce. Choice lines about sex and flesh and surgery, and Vince (a supposed visionary who outsourced everything and takes no real action here) is told he’s made his career out of bodies. Japan and China and Korea and Iceland and Hungary all figure in. Need to watch this two or three more times.

by ·Comments Off on Mickey 17 (2025, Bong Joon-ho)

Pattison is an idiot, fleeing into space pursued by loansharks after he and Steven Yeun lost a fortune on their macaroon business. Turns out he signed up to be an expendable, now he’s always being sent on deadly missions then getting resurrected in the 3D printer. Movie starts in the middle, when 17 has fallen in a hole surrounded by beasties who rescue him instead of eating him like everyone assumed, while they go ahead and print up 18. Now his girlfriend Naomi Ackie (a friendly interloper in Education) enjoys having two Mickeys while rat spy Kai (Jane from The Empire, a specialist in awkward uneven scifi movies) wants to turn them in.

Bong remains the least subtle dude around, as the ship is led by Trumpian Hulk Ruffalo and Toni Collette, shithead politicians who aim to create “a pure white planet full of superior people.” 17’s narration is funny at least, but it’s no Starship Troopers.

by ·Comments Off on Babygirl (2024, Halina Reijn)

Kidman is married to Vanilla Antonio Banderas but is intrigued by Triangle of Sadness Harris Dickinson. “It’s a positive to be vulnerable, not a negative.” Has script weaknesses, which are more glaring when you just finished watching Heat. I was a quarter of the way through this and I paused to check what else the director had made… BodiesX3 and a Carice van Houten movie… oh, Carice, I’ve thought about Black Book every day since it came out, I should be watching that instead… so I did.

I saw Black Book twice in 2007, both times before it “opened” (probably playing for one sad week at the Landmark in April), but if we run with its NYC/festival date of 2006, the first year of the blog, I can still live with that year’s top ten (incl. honorable mentions). Three of these ten (Scanner, Slither, Fountain) are due a rewatch, some others (Prairie, Promise, all the HMs) possibly as well, and I’ll drop everything the moment Princess Raccoon (or Pistol Opera) gets remastered.

Besides Black Book, great 2006 movies I watched in ’07 after the year-end list deadline included Volver, The Host, Old Joy, The Namesake, Miami Vice, The War Tapes, Dry Season, Offside, Bamako, Ten Canoes, Screwfly Solution – a whole alternate top-ten here.

Watched even later: Manufactured Landscapes, The Brand Upon the Brain, Coeurs, Bug, Opera Jawa, Big Bang Love, Exiled, Syndromes and a Century, Inland Empire, Colossal Youth, Election 2, and Deja Vu.

Oh shoot, it turns out I’ve already done this before, reassessing 2006 movies based on their awards-qualifying release dates instead of their real dates – a silly enterprise since I’m not an awards voter – with a sort of must-see list at the bottom. What would I add to that now… Half Moon, Woman on the Beach, La-Bas, Blood Tea and Red String… the Holy Modal Rounders doc… The Guatemalan Handshake?

What were we talking about? Oh, Babygirl, I came back and watched the last 15 minutes a couple weeks later, got to see Harris fight Antonio. I guess Nicole learns to be happy with her husband, asserts herself at work, and Harris gets himself a dog.

by ·Comments Off on Universal Language (2024, Matthew Rankin)

“Isn’t this the same movie you watched last night,” said K when I put on Where Is The Friend’s House the night after this. Besides a couple of distinct Friend’s House references (the dickhead teacher in the opening scene, the guy inside a tree) I’m pretty sure there was some White Balloon (finding tools to retrieve money from under the street). An extremely specific kind of weird thing, in which the director plays “himself” as both a Canadian and Iranian, and his selves and cities swap and merge. Of course I love it.

Mouseover for the reverse angle:
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by ·Comments Off on Broken Rage (2024, Takeshi Kitano)

Very good concept, two-part movie combining various Beat/Kitano personas. In each half he’s an elite hitman who gets recognized during a job, so the cops enlist him as a mole to take down a drug dealer. But it’s a typical crime movie for the first half and a silly-assed comedy in the second. Feels long for a one-hour movie, after remembering that zany Japanese comedies are rarely funny to me.

by ·Comments Off on Gaucho Gaucho (2024, Dweck & Kershaw)

From Long Island car people to Italian dog people to Argentine horse people, Dweck gets around. Real beauty in every moment of this, and I’m not just saying that because my cinephile senses are stimulated by the black-and-white photography, but maybe just a little bit. The gauchos try to keep juvenile cows safe from the hated condors, teach their kids the skills, excel at rodeo competitions, fight against the school dress code, and reflect on their cool lives.

by ·Comments Off on Scorched Earth (2024, Thomas Arslan)

Our man Trojan is back, still doing clean, efficient jobs, and still getting screwed over afterwards when the client decides to kill his team instead of paying.

Smooth-haired hitman Viktor kills Computer Chris first, then old buddy Luca, while museum lawyer Rebecca is working both sides trying to recover the stolen painting.

Computer Chris is apparently old enough to have been in Petzold’s The State I Am In, Luca had parts in Head-On and the latest Guy Ritchie joint, new girl Marie Leuenberger does a lotta TV and hopefully has a bright future.

by ·Comments Off on The Empire (2024, Bruno Dumont)

The mythology of warring intergalactic races (the evil Zeroes and noble Ones) battling for control of the hearts of humanity is cheesy even for Dumont, but his French countryside weirdos-getting-exponentially-weirder schtick is on point. Both sides are pretty ramshackle, the antichrist kid Freddy is pretty easily kidnapped then re-kidnapped. If you follow the characters and story, it’s all deflated and lame – the long pauses and awkwardness and mismatched performances are the whole show. The space forces collide, forming a black hole over Earth which annihilates all of them and the police car belonging to Team Quinquin – Carpentier gets all the dialogue, the Captain now too twitchy to handle anything else. Elsewhere, the cellphone demon was in the latest Three Musketeers reboot, angel Jane in the latest Count of Monte Cristo.