by ·Comments Off on No Other Choice (2025, Park Chan-wook)

That’s it, the final nail – capitalism is finished. Tired of getting mixed up with the Parasite guy, Park decided to make his own Parasite and win Best Picture himself – which he should. Dad (Lee Byung-hun, lead cop in I Saw the Devil, Storm Shadow in the GI Joe movies) was laid off from the paper factory, is having a bad time on the job market. He stages fake job interviews to find all the candidates in similar positions and eliminate them, so next time there’s an opening he’ll be the only candidate.

by ·Comments Off on Reflection in a Dead Diamond (2025, Cattet & Forzani)

If I’m following the story (lol), Young Mr. Diman (Yannick “brother of Jeremie” Renier) played Superspy John in a movie series, got recast after his movie vs. diamond Serpentik failed. Now older Connery-looking Mr. Diman (Fabio Testi of a Zulawski movie) is getting kicked out of his hotel after trying to pay with fake diamonds, and thinks Older Serpentik (Maria de Medeiros) might be living next door.

But really it’s just a fragmented romp of distilled genre pleasure. Maybe half dreamed/imagined (there’s a character who hypnotizes victims into believing they’re in a film). A surprisingly high number of Hellraiser-reminiscent scenes, what with the fishhook-haired woman raking people’s faces off, all the skin-cutting in closeup (sometimes with hooks), and fragments of victims’ exploded faces on the ground. Sicinski liked it.

by ·Comments Off on Grand Tour (2024, Miguel Gomes)

On the run from his fiancee Molly, our guy Edward goes from Burma to Singapore to a train derailment to a farming village to Bangkok to Saigon to Manila. He gets feverish and so does the movie. On to Osaka to a temple in the north mountains, deported to Shanghai, hop a boat up the Yangtze, to Chengdu. This is 90% b/w with unexplained color segments, set in 1917 but with modern vehicles plainly visible and sometimes anachronistic clothes. Edward hanging out while his guide stops to smoke opium, the movie suddenly switches to Molly.

Molly loves Burma, soon runs into Diogo Doria. In Saigon, Ngoc says her master Mr. Sanders wants to marry Molly, so the girls run away from him together. The movie does a good job of making me want to visit Vietnam. In China they visit the same giant Buddha we saw. Molly gets sick, pushes hard but dies along the way.

by ·Comments Off on It Was Just an Accident (2025, Jafar Panahi)

Original title A Simple Accident was more elegant, presumably referring to the inciting car crash. A mechanic thinks he recognizes the wrecked driver as his government tormentor, kidnaps him and shops him around to other formerly-imprisoned people (photographer, about-to-be-wed couple, unhinged guy) to get identity confirmation and a decision on further action. But the more people become involved, the cloudier the plan of action, until they end up helping the guy instead of murdering and burying him. Chilling ending, just the back of the mechanic’s head and the sound of the man with the artificial leg walking up behind him.

“This film is made for a time for which there is no history yet.” Inspired by a post-Offside adaptation of Death and the Maiden, per a contentious Vulture interview:

It’s sneakily funny and thrillingly paced, a story about vigilante justice punctuated by long one-take shots in which the characters debate the ethics of violence and what’s worth fighting for … Better than any director working today, Panahi understands how detention can change a person on an atomic level, chipping away at their humanity.

Won the top prize at Cannes versus Die My Love (which I saw the previous day), The Phoenician Scheme, and a bunch I have yet to watch: Sentimental Value, Resurrection, The Mastermind, Sirat, Sound of Falling, The Secret Agent, Eddington, Alpha, Nouvelle Vague.

by ·Comments Off on Train Dreams (2025, Clint Bentley)

Joel Edgerton (very good in those two Jeff Nichols movies a decade ago) hits new heights here as a capable logger, quiet and gentle, who finds love (Felicity Jones of Taymor’s Tempest) and loses his family to a wildfire. This is an ambitious movie that tries to poetically represent our country, society, and history by following one man with hardly any friends, and somehow it succeeds. Met an old friend of the director’s at the screening, didn’t yell at him but was thinking “your buddy made this movie AND cowrote its theme song with Nick Cave?!” I must read more Denis Johnson. However, people who know the book are very upset about this movie online – some writers I respect think it’s a bad adaptation, and some are defending the changes it makes. Brian Tallerico for Roger Ebert.

by ·Comments Off on Die My Love (2025, Lynne Ramsay)

Young mother Jennifer Lawrence is behaving oddly. It’s implied that she’s a threat to others when we watch her cat-stalk though the grasses with a knife in hand, or when she borrow/steals Sissy Spacek’s gun to shoot their injured dog. She keeps smashing herself through glass things, or raking the walls till her fingers bleed, or trying to ladybird herself out a moving car, finally walks into a previously unseen (except in the opening titles) forest fire, a Petzold move but without any aftermath, so we can wonder whether it’s a metaphorical fire. Lot of odd-looking day-for-night shots. Ramsay be like: protagonist crazy, so movie crazy – I’m used to her being hit-or-miss, but this one is more almost-hit. Robert Pattinson very good as her befuddled husband. I would not be surprised if LaKeith Stanfield and Nick Nolte didn’t know what the movie is about or why they appeared in it. Thoughts from Josh Lewis, Lena Frances, Adam Nayman, Katie Kadue.

by ·Comments Off on Devo (2024, Chris Smith)

Kind of a sad retrospective, a series of “here’s what we meant to say/do, but nobody got it” stories. Lot of good pop culture garbage in the visuals. Curious not to mention the reunions and box sets, but to act like the name Devo was retired in 1985 and everybody moved on. I liked the story of Brian Eno’s and David Bowie’s contributions to the debut album being removed by the band during mixing, and reports of the very early shows.

by ·Comments Off on The Naked Gun (2025, Akiva Schaffer)

Not a remake – Liam Neeson is Leslie Nielsen’s son, so this is part four (or part ten if we count the TV series). A good joke every minute, can’t ask for more. Made by the same gang that did the Rescue Rangers reboot, weird. Muskian baddie is Danny Huston of Birth, his head thug is Kevin Durand of Resident Evil 5.

by ·Comments Off on Hard Truths (2024, Mike Leigh)

Finally watching this after I meant to have a Mike Leigh double-feature in March but Secrets & Lies knocked me for such a loop I had to postpone this one. Marianne Jean-Baptiste is completely different here, an utterly miserable suburbanite, making life difficult for her family and everyone she comes across. “Cheerful grinning people, can’t stand them” brings to mind Harry Dean in Repo Man, or perhaps the opposite of Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky.

Her son Moses is quiet, bullied, an overgrown kid, gets a happy ending in the movie meeting another human who is respectful to him. Husband Curtley (David Webber of The Avengers) gets a terrible ending, throwing out his back at work then coming home to find her trying to kick him out of the house. Movie centers around a get-together with Marianne’s sister Michele Austin (also her sister in Lies?), whose two daughters have their own work problems but know how to behave pleasantly around family, unlike some people.

Bilge Ebiri in Vulture:

Hard Truths might be Leigh’s funniest film in a long time, but as always, it’s the kind of laughter that comes with an unnerving feeling that something is going horribly wrong … Even at their bleakest, Leigh’s pictures and his people explode with life. Some filmmakers make movies that feel like you could use them to reconstitute cinema if the art form ever vanished. Mike Leigh makes movies that feel like you could use them to reconstitute humanity if we ever vanished.