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May December (2023)
A Strangely Missed Opportunity
It may be that this film is best understood as being a film about performance and film-making itself; which is fine. If that is the case, it does so reasonably effectively. But it could be a little problematic that this is a loosely truth based story about a woman who groomed and manipulated a 13-year old boy she was teaching in school into a sexual relationship, and can see none of the wrong in what she had done even years later, after a spell in prison. They are married to each other, and when Natalie Portman, playing an actress who will play Julianne Moore's character's role in a film, comes to research her part, difficult things are awakened. Things start to be questioned despite the woman resolute refusal to see anything she has done as wrong.
It's perhaps aiming to be darkly comedic, and bar a handful of occasions that didn't work for me. It seems strange that a story about sexual abuse of a young boy can be used as a metaphor for something else, or as a satire on suburban comfort. It seems to lack an awareness, like Julianne Moore's character herself, of the seriousness of what's happened. I feel uncomfortable suggesting that if genders were flipped here, that wouldn't be the case; but discomfort aside, that's probably the case. There's excellence in Portman's oddly physical performance, but this is all told a missed opportunity to tell a story that needs to be taken first at face value before it's allowed to become a metaphor for anything else.
Inside Out 2 (2024)
A Sequel That More Than Earns Its Right To Exist
A lot of films that don't need them get sequels; Inside Out is that rare film that not only has the probability of a sequel written into its DNA, but with the deft execution of its idea genuinely earned a second outing. This second installment sees the centra character Riley hit adolescence, and with a raft of new emotions to add to the cast. The bones of the plot follow a similar structure to the first film - learning to assimilate and use 'difficult' emotions well. And whilst you can see that coming quite a long way off, it bears all the strengths of the first film - hitting its marks with open-hearted compassion, wit, and intelligence. It's genuinely laugh-out loud funny, much of what it says about adolescence is poignantly truthful - and applicable to much of the rest of life. Quite how far this franchise is an interesting question - young adulthood? Middle age? Old age? Are we heading for an animated Malone Dies style internal monologue for the final film? We'll find out - but for now, this is every bit as good as you hope it will be, more than earning its place in continuing to be an important source of thought provocation and conversation starting, not to mention as a general resource for coping well with life. We need these films.
The Batman (2022)
Batman By Way Of Se7en Mixed With The Crow
One of the many things this take on Batman gets right is eschewing the need for an origin story. At this point we've seen how Bruce Wayne becomes Batman so many times that we just don't need to see it again; so here we arrive with Batman already into his second year in the dual identity. What we get is a serial killer thriller which crosses The Crow (original) with Se7en, to great effect. If it lacks the really compelling antagonist of Nolan's films, te rest of the supporting cast are good - especially Jeffrey Wright and Zoe Kravitz, the latter of whom is really well used until the last 45 minutes or so, when she goes missing somewhat - a shame given how well the character is drawn and how good the performance has been to that point. Robert Pattinson is fine, if a little lacking in something, but it's testament to the writing and direction that the three-hour run time never drags. It's the Batman film that's most openly cynical about the super rich, in keeping with the times in which we live; and perhaps it gets even close to critiquing this (excessive wealth) as the title character's only true superpower than any other incarnation. There's more than enough going on here to justify more.
The Last Duel (2021)
A Film That Gets Better As It Goes On, Undermined By A Poor Script
Ridley Scott is showing no signs of slowing down or mellowing out, and though this will probably not stand the test of time as one of his major, influential films, neither is it one of his weaker efforts. Scott's proven world-building skills take us to medieval France, and spins a story of Jodie Comer, married to Matt Damon, accusing Adam Driver of raping her whilst her husband is away. The film tells the story of the central events three times, each with chapter headings defining each chapter as coming from the point of view of one of the three protagonists. Matt Damon's is first, Comer's third - and that includes a fading of text in the chapter heading to emphasise the words 'the truth'.
If memory serves, Matt Damon & Ben Affleck wrote the first section; if they did, they'd be well advised to think again about what they were up to. The dialogue in that section is a mess, and Damon's portrayal is all over the place. Thankfully it picks up significantly for the rest of the film; Driver's section is interesting, and his performance carries it well. Comer's section is gripping and disturbing, culminating in a portrayal of the rape that is genuinely upsetting without being exploitative or prurient. It all culminates in a duel between the two men; if Damon wins and kills Driver, Comer is proved right; if the reverse happens, Comer will be adjudged to be lying and subjected to a cruel, humiliating public death. That climax is savage and gripping - it's the sort of thing that Scott directs brilliantly, and leaves us emotionally engaged as well as viscerally thrilled - uncomfortably so.
It's not the searing critique institutionalised of misogyny it wants to be and should be, however. Damon's performance, and that whole first section, needed to do far more work to set that up, and though the rest of the film does a good job at trying to make up the ground lost in that opening, it never fully recovers. Comer's skills deserve more to work with too, and though the era portrayed require of her a certain passivity, even the section that focuses on her experience needs to do a bit better at emphasising the complexity and injustice of her situation.
All told, Scott's skills do end up taking the reins here, and there's much to admire, enjoy and provoke thought. With a better script, however this could have been a late career high-point.
Barbie (2023)
A Heart Big Enough To Embrace Anyone Who'll Allow Themselves To Be Embraced
The genius of this film lies in it's willingness to set itself up for failure. That it allows itself to be self-referential, metatextual ... and joyfully funny - to set its goals so high and meet them with such confident aplomb whilst being willing to be criticised for some wish it had been but was never trying to be. Brilliantly cast, superbly written and directed, with great songs and performances and a heart big enough to embrace anyone who'll allow themselves to be embraced whilst being challenged.
P. S. My daughter requested me to add that she loved it, and learned that men think they run everything, but they don't.
U2: Zoo TV Live from Sydney (1994)
A Brillaint Document Of A Key Moment In Rock History
It's impossible to fully capture the bone-shaking, epoch-shaping, life-altering experience of this tour in person. But this film comes pretty damn close. It's on YouTube in its entirety if you've never experienced it for yourself. The musical high points are many - Running To Stand Still has never sounded as bleakly beautiful as it does here, and the segue from that to Where The Streets Have No Name is spine-chilling. The opening barrage of songs from Achtung Baby is stunning, and what the whole film manages to capture so brilliantly is the overwhelming experience the tour was when you actually attended. Yes, other bands had tried aspects of it this before; but none were doing so at U2's planet-bestriding size, with quite as much on the line as they had after the confusing mishmash of Rattle and Hum. That it celebrated living inside post-modernism whilst also critiquing is a trick that few, in any medium, have managed since. Other tours may have been more ecstatic, but little else has been as revolutionary as this was. As such, this is an excellent document of a moment in rock history.
Wicked Little Letters (2023)
Terrific Performances In An Enjoyable Light Comedic Crime Story
Cosy crime is a publishing boom at the moment - the sort of crime stories that you'd read with a cup of tea on the sofa on a slow Sunday afternoon. They're fun, laced with gentle humour, and a plot that's just intriguing enough to keep you reading but nothing too taxing. That may sound like damning with faint praise, but I don't mean it that way - doing this well is hard.
Wicked Little Letters is a film version of that. It's 1920s England, and in a small seaside town scandalous, sweary, poison pen letters are being received by a variety of the town's great and good. It seems clear who did it - the Irish migrant Rose, played by Jessie Buckley. Whilst the central crime mystery is not exactly hard to predict, it's a total pleasure getting there - the comedy is beautifully played, Olivia Colman and Buckley leading a strong cast with deft and sensitive performances. If you want to see it, there's more there too - some social commentary on how societies recovered from the collective trauma of global conflict. In the war, a generation of men had gone to fight, and a generation of women held the homeland together. What happens when the surviving men come back, trying to re-find themselves in the light of the inexpressibly horrible; and how do women, who had taken up roles they had previously been excluded from, respond when they're expected to step back aside once again? All that is there, alongside interesting portraits on what damage gossip does, what happens when we suppress parts of ourselves, and how we work out who we want to be,
All that is there - but ultimately this is a fun, engaging, beautifully constructed light crime comedy that it's hard to dislike.
Anatomie d'une chute (2023)
A Masterful Examination Of Human Relationships Wrapped In Absorbing Crime Drama
What stories do we tell - about ourselves, or others? That is the question that haunts this exceptional crime drama. A man falls to his death, and the rest of the film is the story of the investigation into his death, placing his wife at the heart of the investigation. It's a riveting crime story in itself. The solution the film presents is elegant - but the film is cleverly shot, brilliantly written and directed, with some outstanding performances which all combine to make this a film that asks big questions about the way we see ourselves and our relationships - and how these are interpreted by those around us. There's a terrific performance from Milo Machado-Graner as the son of the marriage at the heart of the film, and every part is beautifully drawn and portrayed. A brilliantly intelligent, compassionate and absorbing film.
Reality (2023)
Deserves And Demands To Be Seen
Bizarre, chilling, gripping, and deeply disturbing, this drama relies solely on FB recordings for its dialogue as it tells the true story of the arrest of a young woman (a former servicewoman) for leaking classified material to the press. The material she released alluded to Russian interference in the American democratic process - a fact which the authorities and the Trump government routinely publicly denied. Her sentence was the longest received for such a crime - and it's a crime that her story isn't better known. This film - itself based on the director's play - goes a part of the way to righting that, and Sydney Sweeney's performance is low-key and remarkable. That this was only the beginning of her plight is the most chilling thing; this is a film that deserves and demands to be seen.
Hit Man (2023)
One Of Linklater's Most Outright Enjoyable Films
A breezily entertaining, dark, comedic thriller from Richard Linkalter with a superb leading performance from Glenn Powell as the titular fake hit man working for the police to catch the people who want to take out a contract on somebody. Based on truth, it's never less than fun and often a lot more than that. It zips by, and is likely to bear rewatching. It's not the director's most substantial film, but it is one of his most enjoyable. It's hard to believe that this really is based on true events, but Netflix's disclaimer suggests they've actually learned from the Baby Reindeer debacle. Sadly, the man who this film is based on died before the film was completed.
Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour (2023)
Just Enjoy It
I have cried at concerts. There's something about seeing your favourite artists in the flesh, breathing the same air as them, and hearing the music with which you deeply connect, that touches deep places in many of us. Like many others before me and countless to come, I have on several occasions found myself openly crying amid thousands of others; it's a sense that these are your people, and knowing now that you're not the only one who feels these things. The concert film of Taylor Swift's Eras Tour has a plentiful supply of shots of audience members in tears, but watching it in my living room on an unremarkable weekday morning, one moment made me cry too. Swift is singing 22, a deliriously fun song about being 22 years old; she is heading to the edge of the satellite stage that forms the end of the runway from the main stage. A young girl has been plucked from the audience, and is standing off-stage, near to where Swift is heading, with a rapturous look on her face. As Swift arrives within reach of the girl, she takes her hat from her head and places it on the little girl and continues to sing, directly at her.
Taylor Swift during the Eras Concert Film. Photo from IndieWire
Picking out individual audience members in a gig is nothing new; it's a way of saying to the person at the back of the stadium ... this is you! The one person selected represents all of us there. What moved me here a sense of anointing a younger generation the bestowing of the hat seemed to represent; one day you'll be 22 too. Don't worry; you've got this. One successful young woman was saying to a generation of women to be ... it's hard to grow up, but you'll be able to do it.
I thought of this after seeing a social media post where someone I know asked what the big deal is about Taylor Swift. I've no problem with that question; when you get older you can't keep up with everything. It's OK to not get something, to not like something a lot of others seem to never stop talking about. That's life. What got to me was a couple of the responses. People talked about someone with a 'whiny American voice' and complained that the songs only used the same three notes. It's that sort of snarky, almost always male, response that sits so uneasily when you listen to Swift's music and watch the tour film. Her voice can't be described as whiny by anyone who's listening, and the three-note thing is just bizarre. The concept of the Eras tour is an unusual one for a major artist; she takes the audience on a non-chronological snapshot of each of her eleven career studio albums to date, complete with costume and set changes for each album. As you watch you find an artist confidently shifting between several different types of music, who has consistently and skillfully evolved over the eighteen years of her career to date. Very few artists shift musical styles as adroitly as she; that she's done so and become such a cultural force in the process is remarkable. The show clocks in at over three hours, and never flags for energy or interest; to my knowledge, only Springsteen performs three-hour shows these days. No shade on Bruce - I love his music - but he doesn't shift musical styles in the same way as Swift does.
Since my daughter made me start paying closer attention to Taylor Swift about seven or eight years ago, I've fallen for her music. She's a deft songwriter - if you're able to watch the concert film, do so with the subtitles on. There are some brilliantly written songs there, expressing truths with economy, wit, and insight. The way she's taken control of her own career as a woman in an industry so often the preserve of male guardians of taste is something to note. If she was a flash in the pan, she wouldn't be this popular after eleven albums. In every city she's played a concert on this tour she's made significant donations to local food banks and community kitchens. She's not perfect, but she is, I think, a good news story. A generation of young women are connecting with someone who's helping them discover a different way of doing things and being in the world. And, of course, she hasn't reached this level of success without reaching into many other demographics.
The role art plays in our lives is unique. If we can bear to remember the Covid lockdown, so many of us found the strength to keep going by going back to the art that sustains us each the most - be it music or books or tv or film or much else; both as people enjoying consuming the art and practicing it in whatever ways were open to us. Imagine a life without the soulful connection that our favourite arts bring us; is it something we even dare contemplate? The arts are a God-given gift to enhance and enliven our lives, to build connections, to form community, and to bring joy. Life is hard enough as it is; if people are finding joy and meaning in art which to us means little, so be it. I know I used to be the person who snarkily looked down on the 'wrong' type of music, books or films. I hope I'm learning to change that. We can justifiably be bored of saturation media coverage and hype; we can not understand the appeal of many things. But let's not complain and patronise and speak down, especially to people just learning to make their way in the world and in the process discovering something that helps do that with a little more confidence. Somewhere there's a child, lingering at stage's edge or singing along alone in their room, discovering that they're not alone. Surely that is all that we really need to know.
Gojira -1.0 (2023)
Moving, Powerful, And Thrilling
In the aftermath of Japan's unique World War Two trauma, the national government talked about the country being back in 'Year Zero'. It meant many things, and many other people are better placed than me to unpack those. But that fact alone sheds illuminating light on Godzilla Minus One, a film that has deservedly won praise as one of the very best of its type. It takes Godzilla back to what it was meant to be in the first place - a way for Japan to talk about that trauma. In this film, Godzilla takes Japan back before Year Zero, almost as if offering the traumatised and guilt-laden survivors of the war to do it all again, but this time with selflessness and service. It's a beautifully shot film, with excellence in pretty much every department; not least the score and the simply brilliant visual effects. There more than a couple of moments that are deeply moving, and also a handful of occasions where sound is cut completely, to powerful effect. This is a special film, to be cherished and enjoyed and revisited.
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)
Spectacular, But Plotless
There's an argument to be made that the Mission Impossible is the most consistently enjoyable franchise of its era, the second film notwithstanding. That having been said, this film does show signs of weariness despite the spectacle. The plot is scarcely worth bothering with, which is admittedly not the point fo these films; and it's trying to be of the moment with a focus on A. I., and allusions to post-truth politics. That the A. I. is imbued with what is close to quasi-mystical powers shows just how little we understand one of the big issues of our age; that the film doesn't understand either doesn't seem to matter. It's directed with a degree of flourish, and there's no doubt that the action sequences are viscerally thrilling and spectacular. But without any real stakes that we can relate to, it can feel a bit like Marvel's jeopardy-free excursions into the multiverse. The director said that when he and Cruise met to plan the film, they did so by deciding on the two biggest stunt sequences, and stiched the film around them - and it shows, in the film's lack of structure and genuine tension. But all that matters little when it looks so good and thrills so much. It's a blast, despite the faults.
All of Us Strangers (2023)
Beautifully Crafted, Tender Reflections On Love And Loss
If there's such a thing as an uncanny valley for the era a film is set in, then All Of Us Strangers plunges you into it for much of its running time. Andrew Scott meets Paul Mescal in his otherwise empty London apartment complex, whilst also finding his parents who he told Mescal's character were killed in a car-crash. For much of the film there's a strange sense of dislocation that - assuming it's deliberate - is masterfully evoked. It is deliberate, the film's resolution makes clear; and though the unwinding of what the film-makers have so skillfully constructed is artfully and sensitively done, it does feel to me a little too easy, and maybe just a tad on the naive side. Without spoilers, it presents a scenario around death and loss many of us would love to be able to experience, and it does so to discuss and portray the different ways we navigate those losses. I just can't help but feel that ultimately it's more convenient wish-fulfillment than it is genuine depth. Maybe a second viewing will change my mind. The two central performances from Mescal and Scott are superb, as are Jamie Bell and Claire Foy; the music is skilfully used, the cinematograpy gorgeous, and the courage to use long periods of silence refreshing. It just didn't quite make that final step to move me the way I wanted it to.
Mass (2021)
A Remarkable, Honest, And Deeply Compassionate Film That Deserves More Attention
When we say a film, or any work of art, is raw we usually think that it's loud in some way - angry too. Mass is certainly raw and angry, but loud it is not. In many ways a simple film, it gives us a deeply truthful and complex insight into what it means to try and live in the wake of the unexplainable.
It's about two couples who come together in a room in a church to talk. One couple lost their son in a mass shooting at school; the other also lost their son in the same mass shooting, of which he was the perpetrator. Written and directed by first-time director Fran Kranz it's immaculate in almost every regard, portraying the nuances of uncomfortable silences and the silly little words and deeds we undertake to fill such gaps. It uncovers aspects of what has led the couples to this point over the past years with delicate, unhurried ease; each individual and each relationship is drawn with sensitivity and grace. The nuances of guilt and the quest for understanding ring true; the quiet risks taken by those who undertake such processes of reconciliation portrayed with a just kind of honesty. It's a remarkable, brave film that deserves much more attention than it has had, and one which will reward thoughtful rewatching.
I'm aware that it's a hard film to get hold of. At the time of writing this, it was available in full on YouTube.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)
A Worthy, If Slightly Undisciplined Follow-Up To Fury Road
Fury Road took us by surprise; none of us expected a film from a long-neglected franchise by a director at that stage of his career to be as kinetic, risky, vital, and exciting as it was. So Furiosa faces an uphill struggle to honour the film's legacy and chooses to attack the challenge by telling the story of how Furiosa becomes the woman we meet in Fury Road. The result has only a little more dialogue than that film and a more swollen running time, and if the plot does feel disjointed at times that's more than made up for by some brilliantly staged action sequences. Anya Taylor-Joy proves herself more than up to the challenge of carrying the weight of a film of this size, and she's well supported by the increasingly busy Tom Burke in a key role - I rather suspect he is not far away from leading a tentpole film of his own sometime soon. I'm still not persuaded by Chris Hemsworth, but he just about gets away with it. Inevitably suffering in comparison with its blistering forerunner, Furiosa could have done with some more disciplined, focussed cutting and a firmer hand on the plot. But it's still the sort of singular vision of a blockbuster that we need - and as long as Miller can make films like this, he should be empowered to do so.
X (2022)
Effective And Well Crafted
A film about people making a film is always going to run a risk of being tiresomely meta and self-referential. This flirts with that, but never goes the distance up itself. A group of young filmmakers go to an out-of-the-way house in Texas to make a porn film and find their elderly hosts to be more than they bargained for. The result is a genre-literate, expertly crafted slasher film with an eye for the gruesome. You can't help but feel the film-makers are having their cake and eating it in the way they depict the making of the adult film, but this is has a brilliantly evoked setting and some excellent performances from Mia Goth and Jenna Ortega. It's no surprise that it's spawned a couple of prequels.
Queen Rock Montreal (2024)
Hugely Enjoyable, Even On Your TV
A terrific document of the band at the height of their powers - inevitably I'd have preferred to have seen it in the cinema, on an IMAX screen. But even on my own TV it's spirit-lifing, life-improving stuff. Freddie really is at the top of his game here as a front man, and he exhibits his soaring voice to beautiful effect ... also showing off the benefits of his opera training by repeatedly fitting more words intelligibly into one breath than should be humanly possible. The only down side is that directors of these films really should remember in the edit that I, like most other concert-goers, never left a gig thinking 'Gee, those drum solos should have been longer.' See also a couple of other noodly instrumental passages. Otherwise, highly enjoyable.
Do the Right Thing (1989)
Essential, And Essentially Perfect
I was sure I'd seen it, but I can't point to proof - so it has to go down as a first watch. Either way, does the world really need another white guy's take on this? Essentially perfect, deftly illustrating everything about Spike Lee at his best: urgent, effortlessly shifting between comedy and drama or tragedy, shocking, daring, musical, shot with verve. If there's one thing that feels like it hasn't aged quite as well as it could have done it's that at times the first half of the film feels a bit like an adaptation of a stage play - but even that is really just that this a more focussed disciplined film then others of Lee's. That was so of the moment, and so prescient is the film's ultimate tragedy - and the proof that it remains essential viewing.
American Fiction (2023)
A Funny, Meta-Textual Skewering of White Liberal Racism
Genre labels for books, films and the like are useful; if you're parting with hard-earned money then you need to have some idea of what you're going to get in exchange. But they can also be problematic, and can easily become a coded system for judging and separating 'high' art from 'low' or 'popular' art. Witness the idea of literary fiction in books - the implication being that it's not something crassly popular like horror or a thriller. God forbid anything people enjoy be good.
But how do you classify a film like this, which is itself at least about how we classify art? Forgive me if that's a bit meta, but that's in keeping with the film itself. Jeffrey Wright is an author who has grown cynical and jaded about the way a largely white literary elite profits from Black entertainment, and he writes a novel under a pen name that unwittingly puts him right in the cross-hairs of what he despises. It's a film that takes on, and skewers, white liberal racism in the way that Get Out does; not as a horror movie, but as an indictment of what so many people like me (and like I do, probably) look for and celebrate without any understanding or experience. British people of my vintage will think of Pulp's 'Common People' as a musical analogue.
When a film is this layered and meta-textual, you find yourself wary of having a take on it in case you inadvertently fall into one of the traps its laughing at; but that's the point, of course. The script is very, very funny; the comedy played to perfection and perhaps only some of the family drama subplots not quite striking the right note. The performances are wonderful, led by Jeffrey Wright - but special mention should also go to Tracee Eliss Ross as the central character's sister, and Erika Alexander as the neighbour he strikes up a relationship with.
Justly praised, this will inevitably make you laugh and think, and no doubt you'll be second guessing your takes on the issues it raises for weeks after.
Girls State (2024)
Another Chilling Insight
Boys State was - to me at least - a little terrifying. It doesn't help that I'm not American, and that for some years I've been of the view that patriotism is usually dangerous. Whilst the film wasn't without some boys who made me a little hopeful, it wasn't a film that has left me feeling hopeful.
Coming to Girls State, it's hard to shake the feeling of a little tokenism, a little that this was a project riding the coattails of the former film's success. I don't know how much of that is true, and it's hard not to see this in the shadow of Boys State. The film itself actively encourages that - much of the first act sees the girls complaining that they don't spend much time talking politics on the programme and complaining about inequities between the boys' and girls' events (in the year this was filmed, taking place for the first time on the same campus, at the same time). Whilst the first film spent much of the time focusing on the boys bidding to be elected Governor, the equivalent here is a relatively small part of the story; as much, or more, time is given to the assembly's Supreme Court, and to the young woman writing an article for the newsletter about the inequities. It's all given context by the uncomfortable reality that over the week of the assembly news was breaking in the 'real' world of the leaked Supreme Court decision that would go on to overturn Roe vs Wade.
Parts of it scared me once again. The unaccompanied girls singing a patriotic song might be inspiring to many Americans, but to me felt chillingly cultlike. I'd have loved both films to have critiqued this more; and how the apparent majority of girls who disagreed with that infamous Supreme Court ruling felt they could sing that song with a clear conscience. And whilst all the words of empowerment and envisioning are present and correct, it's hard to shake the feeling that whilst Boys State prepares boys to govern, Girls State exists to give girls a cruel glimpse of something that will be shut off to many of them - or at least much harder for them to reach.
The closing credits play out to Taylor Swift's 'The Man, which under the circumstances feels apposite. I'm not clear what story the film-makers are wanting to tell here, but that may be the film's most important point. As a pair, these films are quite the double-bill.
Slender Man (2018)
Artless Snoozefest
My teenage daughter wanted to watch "a scary movie" with me; scrolling through the options she alighted on Jaws. I really couldn't have been happier, anticipating a fulfilling father-daughter time introducing her to one of the greatest films ever made, expanding her sense of what films can be and do. Then she had a last minute change of mind, picking Slender Man instead. What a come down; an artistry-free bore-fest that tries to make a teenage slasher flick out of an internet urban myth, and churns out something so non-sensical and uninteresting that its biggest achievement is an overuse of expositional dialogue when there's almost nothing for said dialogue to deposit. Do not waste your time on this.
Damsel (2024)
Millie Bobbie Brown Excellent In Decent Fantasy Action
In which Millie Bobbie Brown is a young woman married to a prince to avert a crisis in a her homeland, and finds herself being unwittingly sacrificed to a dragon to pay off an ancient debt. The result is an enjoyable action-fantasy romp as she battles for survival.
You can't tell a story like this without invoking Alien, and this film does so on several occasions. Millie Bobbie Brown is a convincingly bad-ass action heroine who deserves an even bigger vehicle than this one. And whilst the homages to Alien are clear, it has other connective tissue to the superior Ready Or Not, a film which is elevated above Damsel by managing to find more than a dash of wit when this is just a bit too po-faced to really sing.
The dragon is beautifully realised (and voiced - when the dragon started to speak I wasn't sure it was going to well, but it's carried off well). The film sits squarely in the young adult space, and light enough on gore to be appropriate for the intended audience; there is a world where we see more of the gore, and the film becomes more of a horror story. But what we have is what we have; we already knew from Stranger Things and the Enola Holmes films that Millie Bobbie Brown has the capacity to carry to a big franchise. Damsel is another feather to that bow; I'm intrigued to see where her career carries her.
Napoleon (2023)
Agreeably Undemanding Historical Epic
Ridley Scott's Napoleon biopic is an agreeable Easter Day afternoon watch; an engaging blend of high camp, bloody spectacle, and pretension puncturing humour. Phoenix is well cast for this take on Napoleon; whilst his Emperor lacks a sort of predatory danger that the script hints at, his performances lances pomposity and is devoid of po-faced seriousness. Vanessa Kirby is the one who really shines as Josephine, however; every minute she's not on screen feels a little less than it could be.
The wit and the action are all welcome and enjoyable, and it slips down nicely; but it's hard to shake the feeling that it ends up being neither one thing nor the other. I'm tempted to think what a Director's Cut of this might reveal; which of the constitute elements would it bring out more of, suggesting what the film really could have been.
It's undemanding, enjoyable fare that leaves you sated but with that slight sense of what could have been.
Insomnia (2002)
A Neglected Nolan Film Well Worth Revisiting
We all know that it's our real or perceived weaknesses, mistakes and transgressions that keep us awake at night; left to themselves they can run riot. Unable to rest, we lose perspective, our memory plays tricks on us and guilt - justified or not - can become overwhelming. Soon we're caught in a circular trap, from which we can only be freed by sleep or the morning.
It's precisely this insomnia that haunt's Nolan's third film; Dormer (Pacino) is haunted throughout by an assortment of vulnerabilities. Some of these are a simple fact of the passage of time and humanity - the threat of a turned ankle after a jump, slipping under the logs giving chase, an inability to sleep in bright light. Others are real guilt, an increasing doubt of his own motives, or the temptations of being away from home and whatever his more 'normal' family life might be. This is all given force by the parallelisms between Dormer and Robin Williams's character, and the Internal Affairs investigation with the central murder.
These are all strengths of a script that, unusually for a Nolan film, isn't written by the director. I haven't seen the film it's a remake of, but certainly it's a film that unlike many of Nolan's other films (which he at least co-writes), its main female characters are complex, interesting creations with genuine agency. Photographed by long-term collaborator Wally Pfister, the film is soaked in cold, almost metallic shades (amongst others) of blue, lending a sense of the eerie to a film which, driven by a Pacino performance that for the most part avoids his latter-day tendency to self-parody, brilliantly evokes the way an inability to sleep feels all the day round. Unlike many Nolan films, the story is entirely linear; but it retains his obsessions with how our past informs our present, and the film plays with that as the flashes of visons that haunt that Dormer suggests a suppression of his past that threatens to overwhelm in - and by the end, does.
This is often seen as a minor Nolan film, on the way to the more successful and lauded films that lay in his future. But it deserves attention for all these reasons, not to mention the much missed Robin Williams's haunting and controlled performance. If Inception would take the cinema of dreams to somewhere new, this asks uncomfortable questions about what makes us unable to sleep ... and therefore to also dream. Showcasing as it does a deft thriller plot, his customary technical excellence and female characters who are better drawn than his usual, this is a corner of the Nolan filmography ripe for a revisiting.