by ·Comments Off on Education (2020, Steve McQueen)

Kingsley loves outer space, wants to be an astronaut but can’t read, gets in trouble in school and is busted down to a kindergarten-level special school. A bit upsetting that the night after watching Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii I’m subjected to a fake schoolteacher singing “House of the Rising Sun” in its entirety. Nice little story with crazy end credits music. Naomi Ackie plays an activist exposing the new school for being completely useless, and it ends (ironically I assume) with them putting their hope in an up-and-coming politician named Margaret Thatcher.

Sicinski called this and Wheatle the weakest episodes: “Still, even understood as fundamentally educational efforts, these films are much more adept than the work of Loach and [Paul] Laverty when it comes to articulating the complexities of systematic oppression.”

by ·Comments Off on Walk Up (2022, Hong Sang-soo)

Male filmmaker (gasp) Byungsoo (Kwon Hae-hyo, of everything) takes his daughter Jungsoo to visit interior designer Ms. Kim (Lee Hye-young, dying actress of In Front of Your Face), hoping she’ll take the girl on as an apprentice.

Next visit, the daughter is gone, having quit the interior design business after a month, and Ms. Kim introduces the guy to a big fan of his films. They drink quite a bit, of course. Later, he’s living with the fan Sunhee (Song Sun-mi, who usually plays Kim Min-hee’s friend) in Ms. Kim’s upstairs apartment.

Later still, he’s living there alone even though Ms. Kim is a crappy landlord, and seeing a realtor (the main kid’s mom in Introduction). He goes down to the street and runs into his daughter and… I can’t remember if anything else happens. I enjoyed myself though.

by ·Comments Off on Sly Lives! aka the Burden of Black Genius (2025, Questlove)

Mostly standard talking-heads rise-and-fall music doc. Sometimes the interviewees address the subtitle topic, sometimes they use a deep-1980s Sly interview, sometimes there’s concert footage, and all those things are very good. Surprisingly given all the past-tense involved, Sly really does live (update: RIP Sly).

by ·Comments Off on Nosferatu (2024, Robert Eggers)

Dickensian intro in “Germany” with Warboy “Steve” Hoult as a green realtor sent to the Count’s castle. Sure are a lot of dream sequences in this. It’s got more narrative than the other versions, at least, and definitely more dream sequences, and references to Possession and The Exorcist. The music is very “Mica Levi but bad.” It must not feel great to have made the longest and worst Nosferatu movie, but if you rank it with all the Draculas it’s probably somewhere in the middle – I recall Dracula 2000 being quite painful.

Willem Dafoe plays an alchemist who knows the VVitch Dad. Lily-Rose sacrifices herself to free the town from a plague. At least the vampire’s death scene was good.

by ·Comments Off on Cloud (2024, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)

Ryosuke and Akiko are a young couple driven by money (he’s new, she starred in Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy). He quits his factory job to get rich buying junk (like pricey Sailor Moon snowglobes) and reselling it online, guided by schoolmate Muraoka (the First Love guy) and with help from very loyal assistant Sano.

But somebody is after him from the beginning, laying tripwires in his bike path and throwing car parts through his window, and soon his online identity gets doxxed and a gang of aggrieved customers who got ripped off by his fake designer handbags are after him, breaking into his house and Serpent’s Path-ing him for revenge. I’m not sure what all this double-crossing gun intrigue adds up to, besides the dreamlike final scene which spells out that unchecked greed will lead you to hell.

The Arkanoid Conspiracy:

Vadim Rizov in Filmmaker:

The sound mix elevates the humming of Yoshii’s computer monitor, as if the digitally transmitted virus of Pulse were still going strong years later. The inexplicable proliferation of evil is often Kurosawa’s beat, which can help explain the derangement exhibited by Yoshii’s enemies, a portrayal of capitalism’s deleterious effects as ethics-overriding brainworms. Maintaining a surface tonal grimness while turning the screws on Yoshii, Cloud is nonetheless one of Kurosawa’s goofier outings, full of manic outbursts and violence whose extravagance borders on comic.

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.