by ·Comments Off on The Hyperboreans (2024, Joaquín Cociña & Cristóbal León)

Actress is on a soundstage recreating a lost film with Cociña and León, in which everyone but her is replaced by puppets. She ends up entering a spreadsheet cheat code, entering the hollow earth, and arguing with the Hitler-worshipping filmmakers. I don’t know what it all meant for Chile or for cinema, but I enjoyed every scene. After The Wolf House and Los Huesos, dudes are on a roll – and I’ve just learned that they did effects for Beau Is Afraid.

Antonia Giesen and her rock & roll patient:

Shooting a flower-creature shadow with a camera-laser:

The “directors”:

by ·Comments Off on The Piano Accident (2025, Quentin Dupieux)

Pampered internet-famous masochist flies into a murder-suicide rampage after discovering that she might suffer a consequence for past actions. However, the makeup woman knew what was going on, and shouldn’t have stood under that piano. Adele Exarchopoulos is up for anything, as usual – her little speech mannerisms are the whole movie, more or less. Her long-suffering assistant is comedian Jerome Commandeur, and their blackmailer is Sandrine Kiberlain, who just wants an interview with the press-averse star, who would rather die than participate. Happy ending for the bird, at least! Nothing inventive here from Dupieux, just a misanthropic little comedy.

by ·Comments Off on Sirat (2025, Oliver Laxe)

End-times movie, as our characters drive through the desert of Morocco from one rave to another while WWIII appears to be starting offscreen. The main Spanish guy (from Pacifiction and Pan’s Labyrinth) loses his son while searching for his daughter, movie randomly ends up in a minefield where we lose half the remaining characters. Filipe calls it stupid and evil, I rather liked it but couldn’t figure out its point.

by ·Comments Off on Nouvelle Vague (2025, Richard Linklater)

Mostly it’s a casting triumph – they take inventory of the new-wavers with onscreen labels whenever somebody shows up. I could say that this doesn’t have much value if you’re not already a Godard/Breathless fan, but I suppose in that case why would you be watching movies at all? It’s not the first Linklater movie that’ll mess you up with its postscript text. Everyone looks like they had fun – that’s what is important.

by ·Comments Off on Blue Moon (2025, Richard Linklater)

Ethan Hawke showcase, playing a songwriter whose partner has found success with a different partner. He flails around his favorite bar, chatting with bartender Bobby Cannavale and random patron EB White, waiting for Margaret Qualley to show up (script is based on letters they wrote each other), but she mostly wants to meet ex-partner Rodgers, the man of the hour. Feels more filmed-theater than Nouvelle Vague, besides whatever effect they used to shrink Hawke so everybody will dwarf him, but I had a better time with this one.

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.