Indie-stilted drama with amazing music. A world of screens with Superjail pencil tests on every one of them. Suicidal Star bonds with counselor An. He passes his citizenship test.

Per Adam Nayman in Cinema Scope, “These characters feel unique to Canadian cinema, contemporary, micro-budget, or otherwise, and the actors inhabit them to the point where they don’t really seem to be acting at all … the slightly surrealist weave of images is heightened by the tour-de-force soundscaping of Andreas Mandritzki, who interlaces Autechre-ish electronica with musique concrete and stylized foley work.”

The director:

With my shorts and with Werewolf I was really inspired by my environment, its working-class history and textures. The logical representation of that was a social-realist film made in a verité style. That style fit my other movies well, and made a lot of practical sense too, but I did start to feel like it was limiting the way I thought about crafting characters, building scenes, and writing dialogue. Then Star and An started to emerge as complex, vibrant, and talkative creatures, and naturalism couldn’t contain them: their creative ways of conceptualizing and expressing themselves necessitated that I find new ways to engage. The entire movie is a sort of experiment in burrowing into their brains and vibing on their frequency.

Pairs well with Mad Fate – another potentially insane lead character, this time Lau Ching-wan, playing another Mad Detective. He’s now an ex-detective, living on the street but still solving crimes, pissed at the employed cop (Raymond Lam of P Storm) botching the cases, drawing interest from pregnant cop Charlene Choi (The Goldfinger). Things get convoluted as a young group called The Sleuths – Lau’s daughter and the children of crime victims and the wrongly-accused – uses Lau’s research for a revenge campaign, killing off criminals. Some traitor sleuth cops are pulling the strings, getting cops and sleuths killed. After a covid-delayed open, this got nominated for every HK award, so hopefully we’ll get a sequel.

Flora (Eve Hewson of Tesla) raises her shithead son Max with little help from his dad Jack Reynor. She tries to get the kid a hobby, fixes up an abandoned acoustic guitar, but he’s more interested in rapping over laptop beats so she takes online lessons herself with teacher Joey Gordo-Levitt. The movie’s trick of teleporting him out of the laptop and into the room during a camera move is a good one. The power of music brings everyone together yet again… if Carney keeps making these things, we’ll keep watching them. Once > Sing St. > Flora > Begin Again.

Speaking of John Woo… it would appear that he’s back. Slick transitions between scenes, locations, time periods as he sets up the dialogue-free story of Joel “kill-a-man” Kinnaman getting revenge for the death of his son. Half the movie is a training montage, as the sweater-wearing family man practices shooting and stunt driving and knives, and he’s still unprepared, as the first guy he kidnaps proves to be dangerously tough. Joel finds time for some normal vigilante work, gets his first couple of kills. Then he starts a Christmastime gang war and assaults the HQ of the head-tattooed supervillain. Gets very videogamey in the final assault, and Joel is belatedly joined by cop Kid Cudi. Tattooed guy was in a Liam Neeson disabled-guy revenge movie the year before, and Kinnaman played Neeson’s endangered son in Run All Night, so Neeson is the godfather of all revenge films now.

Shot (digitally) with major grain, in Savannah/Tybee. Natalie Portman comes to visit the scandal-couple to prep for a role, portraying criminal wife/mom Julianne Moore. Portman learns how to wear the makeup and do the lisping voice, and seduce Charles Melton, and that might be all she learned.

Catching up… I shouldn’t have watched this within a couple weeks of Detective vs. Sleuths. Johnnie To may be retired but his particular way of lighting street scenes lives on – writer, editor, and DP are all from Drug War, Blind Detective, and Romancing in Thin Air.

Bo from Sparrow is a twitchy guy trying to help people change their fates. His latest client leaves and is immediately murdered, witnessed by a pervert delivery boy whose hobby is killing CG cats, always pursued by a mustache cop. According to fate, Bo will go insane and the delivery guy will do a murder, so they team up to change the future. Then a bad-luck prostitute moves into the apartment building, looking like an excellent victim to both the delivery boy and the real killer whose bag of knives keeps changing hands. My second HK movie lately with scenes in a morgue, as Bo tries some spirit-transfer business, but tragically he ends up becoming an MPD psycho and getting locked up, as the cop retires young and the delivery boy learns to be kind to CG animals.

DNF

High-school girl’s metaverse (in the facebook sense, not the spider-verse sense) avatar Belle is an instant-hit pop star, but the real girl is bitter and withdrawn, determined to use her internet fame to doxx other users. Belle runs into an infamous dragon-thing who is probably also a damaged high-schooler, maybe even someone she knows in real life. I don’t know because we put off watching the second half for so long that now neither of us feels like finishing it. Practically a sequel to Hosoda’s cool Summer Wars, but just too… high school.

Kind of a rambling movie. I waited until I had a comfy 3-hour night but should’ve broken it into two 90-minute screenings. Or chopped off the first hour, or the middle, or the last, who would notice. I’ve never much liked an Albert Serra movie, but every few years I get suckered by my beloved film critics into watching another one. At least there’s great color and precise framing, a new era for Serra.

White-jacketed De Roller runs a Polynesian club – this is Benoît Magimel from The Piano Teacher, having a big year, also starring in The Taste of Things and sporting an electric penis in Incredible but True. He’s trying to promote a casino, goes to an islander church and says he’ll destroy them if they don’t allow the locals to gamble. Usually he’s much more sedate, hanging with the scantily-clad club servers to unwind, chatting about the upside of genocide, concern about nuclear testing rumors. At least Neil Bahadur got it.

De Roller with (I think) writer Romane Attie:

Youth organizer Matahi:

I dunno what De Roller and Sergi López (Happy as Lazzaro, Pan’s Labyrinth) did to this Portuguese guy: