Complex thoughts on AFTER THE HUNT***** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 6

Director Luca Guadagnino redeems himself after a run of mid films, not least QUEER and CHALLENGERS, with the adult, nuanced, tricksy and provocatively brilliant AFTER THE HUNT.  It’s based on a script by Nora Garrett and deals in shades of grey and ambiguity. It reminded me of the best of those ethical dilemma dramas that Woody Allen made in the mid to late 80s, not least because Guadagnino pays homage to Woody with the style of his credits.  It also reminded me of the iconic ALL ABOUT EVE in its depiction of a rather spiky marriage and the disruptive interloping of a young rival.

It is far from a perfect film. I felt that Andrew Garfield's performance went from depicting an obnoxious character to just being obnoxious. Whenever he's faced with a choice he always tends to go too big.  I also didn't feel the epilogue was necessary or additive. So why have I given the film five stars?  Because I have spent much of the hours following the screening discussing its choices and themes and debating what was actually happening. I love it when films provoke debate and withhold easy answers.  I also think that Nora Garrett has pulled off a rare feat in so evenly balancing the accusations that Gen Z and Gen X have of each other. 

The movie is essentially a four-hander battle of the wits between two generations.  In the older cohort we have Julia Roberts’ Alma, a Yale University Philosophy Professor who specialises in teaching virtue ethics.  Alma is cool and calm, perhaps too well-put together and unflappable. Her sense of style is assured and unique and easily aped.  Early on we discover that she has some kind of secret from her youth, and that she withholds a lot from her husband.  We feel that it must be traumatic and yet she seems to regard its artefacts with fondness. The deepest level of the film is concerned with uncovering her attitude to this event. 

In contemporary life, Alma seems to attract acolytes, and has a dangerously unboundaried relationship with her star students and her younger colleague Hank.  She somehow holds this all in a fragile equilibrium that the movie will shake. The fascinating and unresolved side-issue that we get no clear answers on is whether Alma has a problem with drug addiction or if she really is just treating excruciating pain. Did the drugs cause the ulcers or the other way around?  What we do know is that Alma is a career woman and deeply ambitious. She wants tenure. She has battled her way through the misogynistic world of academia and wants her just desserts.  

This may well be the role of Julia Roberts’ life, and certainly it’s her greatest role and performance of her later career.  She is on screen for almost every scene and she carries the film. Alma is enigmatic, infuriating, arrogant, makes terrible choices, and yet I found her to be real and sympathetic. 

Alma is married to a psychiatrist called Frederick, played by the always wonderful Michael Stuhlbarg.  It's a small role, even a cameo, but as in CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, in some ways it's Stuhlbarg's character that carries the emotional heart of the film. Frederick can be theatrical and immature and petulant. But he truly loves his wife and understands something profound about her childhood trauma that she cannot see. He also understands something profound about her relationships with Hank and Maggie.  He is flawed but wise.

In the younger cohort we have adjunct professor Hank who is also battling for tenure.  His students love him, he flirts with everyone, and he is an obnoxiously large character, played to the limits of largeness by Andrew Garfield. I suspect some of this is a necessary choice. His career will be ruined by a graduate student, Maggie, who accuses him of sexual assault right after he accuses her of plagiarism. We will not know if he did it, but we have to see his largeness, his physical presence, his lack of self-control, to feel that he might have done.  It's a slippery role. His first reaction is hurt and entitled and arrogant. That does not mean he did it, of course. 

And finally, in real opposition to Alma, we have The Bear's Ayo Edibiri as Maggie, her young PHD student, acolyte, and mentee.  She is a young black female philosopher at Yale, so one might imagine she is already on the back foot. But screenwriter Nora Garrett complicates Maggie by making her incredibly wealthy: the daughter of major donors.  Does Alma suspect she is a plagiarist? Is she? Yes she does dress like Alma.  Did she steal her mother's Bulgari ring to wear as a pendant, copying Alma? Is her accusation of trauma replicative of Alma's?  Is the accusation an attempt to discredit Hank? Is she dating a trans man for the optics?  It's a good performance from Edibiri, every now and then hinting at satisfaction at getting a certain reaction from Alma, but I felt that of the four actors she was the weakest. Perhaps because this is by far the largest and more complex dramatic role she has been given.

The wonder of this script and film is that both Maggie and Alma are right. Maggie is right to say that Alma has let her down, both in her reaction to the assault but more broadly.  Maggie is right that first-wave feminists did not adequately support the struggle of women of colour, and too often tried to get what they could within the existing patriarchal structure rather than challenging it. Alma's life has been one of not compromising her ambition by upsetting the apple-cart. Maggie wants to destroy it.  But Alma is also right in how she skewers Maggie's generation for its virtue-signalling progressive illiberalism: its need for the safety of a lukewarm bath when university in general, and a philosophy class in particular, should be all about debating uncomfortable subjects. 

Like I said, this is far from a perfect film. But it is an ambitious and provocative film. I love that it centres a middle-aged complex woman and is willing to confront and interrogate shifting inter-generational attitudes to difficult issues. The running time is long but I was not bored for a minute.  This is grown-up cinema at its best.

AFTER THE HUNT has a running time of 139 minutes and is rated R. It played Venice and London. It opens in the USA on October 10th.

QUEER** - BFI London Film Festival 2024 - Day 10

This is a long film for little plot or interiority.  It proceeds as follows:  ageing disheveled junkie called Lee hooks up with younger man called Eugene who may or may not actually be queer in 1950s Mexico.  They travel to a tropical jungle to take ayahuasca, have a trippy experience, then part. Decades later the older guy is apparently still in love with the boy. And even this overdoes the level of narrative propulsion which is basically nil. I never felt as though I had a handle on whether Lee was actually in love or in lust until the final five minutes of the film. I didn't feel invested in the relationship or the intricacies of whether Lee was a trick or a love interest for Eugene.  There's a limit to how far you can watch Daniel Craig drink tequila in a linen suit.

Still, there are a few redeeming features to this film.  The needle drops featuring Nirvana and Prince are anachronistic but effective.  There's a wonderfully unexpected and bonkers and against type cameo from Lesley Manville (Disclaimer).  Director Luca Guadagnino and his leads, Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey, are admirably brave in depicting gay sex. And as I said before, the final five minutes were genuinely moving. But boy there was a lot of self-indulgent, handsomely produced, but utterly dull chaff to wade through to get to the grain.

QUEER has a running time of 135 minutes. It played Venice, Toronto and London 2024. It goes on release in the USA on November 27th and in the UK on December 13th.

CHALLENGERS**

I am giving CHALLENGERS one star for Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross' occasionally superb electronic soundtrack and a further star for cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom's cheeky tennis ball POV shot. Otherwise CHALLENGERS is a damp squib of an attempt at a sexy adult relationship drama, replete with hammy dialogue and superficial characaterisation.

All of which is a shame for the multi-talented star Zendaya, who was using the film to rebadge herself from being a Disney child star to a serious actor.  The weird thing is that I am not sure anyone apart from Zendaya thinks she's pigeonholed in that way.  A brave, vulnerable performance in Euphoria put paid to peppy, pretty Zendaya the teen star.  And Sam Levinson's MALCOLM & MARIE gave her a role in an actually fully fleshed out proper adult relationship, playing opposite John David Washington.  Now that was a toxic relationship shown in all its gnarly and credible glory!

So back to CHALLENGERS.  The person responsible for this ludicrously melodramatic film is debut feature screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes.  No-one in a real relationship has ever spoken in the way that his characters speak.  Watching this felt like watching a Bollywood movie or 1980s soap opera. As a result, the relationships aren't credible and the characters struggle to capture one's attention or sympathy.  To be sure, the film tries hard to camouflage its superficiality with tricksy camera shots and a non-linear narrative. But unpick the flash and there's nothing there.

Zendaya "stars" as junior Tennis ace Tashi whose career is cruelly ended with a brutal knee injury.  She vicariously lives her career by coaching her successful husband Art (Mike Faist) but they have little sexual chemistry.  He hits a bump in confidence and she enters him in a challenger tournament to get some court time, at which point they both run into Patrick (Josh O'Connor - MOTHERING SUNDAY) - a washed-up former peer and lover of Tashi and potentially Art.

The irony is that this is meant to be Zendaya's first headline film, and she has been the star of the red carpet promoting it.  But when you watch the film you realise that she's just the tennis ball that Art and Patrick are playing with. The film is ACTUALLY one about homosocial and potentially homosexual love. The climax thus has actually nothing to do with Tashi at all, but both players falling into each other over the tennis net. Poor Zendaya. She isn't even centred in her own film.

I am coming to the slow realisation that I do not like director Luca Guadagnino's films. But they appear to be critical darlings, certainly since he came to global recognition with CALL ME BY YOUR NAME. I just don't get the hype.

CHALLENGERS is rated R and has a 131 minute running time. It is on global release.

THE KILLER***** - BFI London Film Festival 2023 - Day 3

David Fincher returns to our screens with his mordantly funny, coolly stylish, impressively spare hitman procedural, THE KILLER.  The film is based on Alexis' Nolent's cult graphic novel, adapted for the screen by Andrew Kevin Walker who also penned SE7EN.  We spend the film inside the mind of a ruthlessly pragmatic hitman played by Michael Fassbender (SHAME).  We watch him narrate and then fuck up a hit on a French businessman, and then spend the rest of the film taking revenge on the people who tried to wipe out the chain of evidence leading to the fiasco. There isn't much on-screen dialogue, but flashes of deliciously dark humour and social satire from our deadpan narrator as he deftly takes down German tourists, New Orleans restaurants and Floridian ex-cons. As for Fincher, his social satire extends to self-absorbed beanie-wearing billionaire tech-bros, as superbly exemplified in Arliss Howard's cameo.

There is nothing not love about a film this well-made. It's just so stylish and handsome in its execution, so dark in its humour, so brilliantly scored by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, so pure in its focus....  All I want to know is whether Fincher is taking the piss out of Morrissey or legitimately using his songs in his score. Do please try to see this on a big screen and not at home on Netflix. This deserves a proper screen and audio setup.

THE KILLER is rated R and has a running time of 118 minutes. It played Venice and London 2023 and will be released on Netflix on November 10th.

TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: MUTANT MAYHEM*****

TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: MUTANT MAYHEM blew me away with its wonderfully grungy, plasticine-y, incredibly dynamic animation style; its hilariously funny script; its ridiculously impressive voice cast; its 90s nostalgia; and its heart-felt debate about whether mutants can ever be accepted by humans (echoes of X-MEN). Kudos to debut directors Kyler Spears and Jeff Rowe, and screenwriters Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, for creating something so genuinely compelling, that deserves to spoken of in the same breath as SPIDERVERSE. Five stars FTW!

The movie starts with our teenange mutant protagonists living in hiding in New York, under the tutelage of their ninja rat daddy voiced by JACKIE CHAN!!!! He suffered rejection from humans and just wants to keep his kids safe. So they are left pining for real High School life, absurdly informed by watching FERRIS BUELLER at a drive-thru, and wondering whether if they came out of hiding to help people with their mad skills, humans would accept them.

Lucky for us they get a chance to test out their theory.  They meet April O'Neill, their wannabe journalist ally, here recast as a young African-American teenager with glasses, smarts, and a penchant for chundering on air. Together they realise that the person terrorising New York is an evil scientist (Maya Rudolph) who wants to take their Precious Bodily Fluids and create even more mutants. She and her  evil henchman (Ice-T) will then assert mutant dominance over humans for good.

I absolutely loved the knowing pop-culture references, the funny dialogue, and the genuine feeling of camaraderie I felt among the turtles. I genuinely felt that Jackie Chan's rat was their surrogate dad and that they loved each other.  The whole thing was clever, knowing but also just wonderfully uplifting.  Honestly, I wouldn't change a frame and really hope this is the first in a franchise.

TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: MUTANT MAYHEM has a running time of 99 minutes and is rated PG. It was released in early August.

EMPIRE OF LIGHT - BFI London Film Festival 2022 - Day 8

I'm not going to waste too much time on this review: I've already lost two hours of my life to this horrendously misjudged and borderline offensive film.  I believe writer-director Sam Mendes had earnest good intentions to make a film that explored mental health, racism and the healing power of the arts but he fails comprehensively.  This may be because he'd bitten off too much, or just because he has a tendency to the banal and twee in all his films.

On the mental health front we have Olivia Colman playing a middle-aged woman in a British seaside town in the early 80s. She works in a cinema, and the action of the film will take place among the people who work there. We soon discover that she has just come out of residential care for schizophrenia, and that she's in a pretty exploitative relationship with the cinema's manager (Colin Firth). All of this is good fodder for serious drama, but I can't emphasise how unreal, fake and performed Colman's character feels.  It's a rare mis-step, and maybe it's the writing because we know Colman is a great actor. But this feels to superficial and mishandled. To quote my husband, "do NOT get me started on the mental illness, which appeared to come and go entirely for the convenience of "the plot"."

On racism, we have the displeasure of Sam Mendes trying to tell us what it was like to be a young black man during the rise of the National Front in the character of Stephen (Micheal Ward).  And to add insult to weak writing, Mendes then proceeds to photograph Stephen as an object of desire (fair play I guess, it's from Colman's character's perspective), but the way in which we have a really extended shot of him naked, running into the ocean, made me feel uncomfortable with just how he was being objectified. To quote my husband once more, Mendes' handling of racism was "crass, simplistic and condescending and worse than GREEN BOOK by a long way."

Okay, so to the healing power of the arts, something that descriptions of this film make a big deal of.  The film may be set in a cinema, but it's no CINEMA PARADISO.  The films seem pretty incidental to the action, and the "healing power" consists of Colman's character asking to finally see a film in the final 10 minutes of the movie. It feels so cheap and tacked on and lazy. If you're going to use BEING THERE, then truly use it. And if you're going to cast Toby Jones as the projectionist, then give him something to do worthy of his talent.

In the words of my husband, EMPIRE OF LIGHT ends up as a "half-baked, pretty-looking mess. Deakins made it all look lovely though, and Mendes seemingly going for lots of Kubrickian symmetical framing with slow camera pushes. Edit to the right scenes (without people or dialogue) and you have a nice screensaver."  

EMPIRE OF LIGHT is rated R and has a running time of 119 minutes. It played Toronto and Telluride 2022 and is playing the BFI London Film Festival. It will be released in the USA on December 9th and in the UK on January 13th 2023. 

MANK

When I first became serious about film, it was taken as given that CITIZEN KANE was the greatest film ever made and that Orson Welles was its single-handed auteur.  Great directors made great films. As I grew older and wiser, and thanks mostly to a second hand copy of Pauline Kael's Raising Kane, I realised that movies are the product of many diverse talents and that auteur theory is largely there to puff up the director's ego. In Kael's seminal essay, published orignally in the New Yorker in 1971 - link here - she explored the making of Kane and restored credit principally to its screenwriter, the legendary Herman Mankiewicz.  

Mank was one of the bright smart young jounros lured to Hollywood by the phat cash on offer. (Kael quotes the iconic telegram he was sent by the equally gifted screenwriter Ben Hecht.) Like Hecht, Mank held the industry that lauded him in no little contempt, always feeling novel writing or pure journalism were the higher forms of his craft. In particular, Mank was too smart not to see through the hypocrisy and cyncism of the studio system and hated himself for loving the luxury it brought him.  And this is why we find him, in 1933, in the first tiemline of this film, sitting in the palatial Xanadu of that nasty, jingoistic punblisher William Randolph Hearst, playing court jester. Mank knew full well what Hearst was, and how he and the studio system were undermining (yet another!) iconic writer - Upton Sinclair's - progressive bid for the California governorship. And he knew just what was going on between Hearst and his squeeze, actress Marion Davis.  And before long, his inability to keep on being court jester, to shut up and keep on cashing the cheques, got him into trouble. He became a nasty alcoholic, and sabotaged his career, coming up with the final act of revenge, a script for the thinly veiled attack on Hearst that was Kane. Hearst tried his best to keep it from being made, and went after Mank in the gossip columns. And that's how we find Mank in the second tieline of this film in 1940, drunk, cared for by a secretary, tussling with a credit-hogging Welles, being begged not to anger Hearst by his brother.

MANK is a cinematic tour de force and passion project for its director, David Fincher (FIGHT CLUB) based on the screenplay written by his sadly deceased father Jack.  Shot in sparkling, expressionistic Black and White by Erik Messerschmidt (TV's Fargo), Fincher gives us the movie version of Kael's essay, restoring Mank to co-credit for making Kane, but also as a hero to all of those on the progressive left who refuse to be bought. The film features another superb performance from Gary Oldman in the title role, a kind of grown-up self-righteous scabrous rogue halfway between Oldman's Sid Vicious and Churchill.  But there's a chillingly sinister cameo from Charles Dance, perfectly cast as Hearst and a wonderfully sympathetic performance from Amanda Seyfried as a remarkably self-aware Marion Davis to enjoy too. In smaller roles, I also liked Tuppence Middleton as Mank's wife Sara.  The result is a film that is in love with the golden era of Hollywood but has no illusions as to what it truly was - a film both cynical and nostalgic - dazzling and glamourous - but seedy and sinister. I found every frame ravishing and entertaining but worry it will not appeal beyond cineastes. Mank isn't the kind of activist hero we look for nowadays. He was too mean, too mired in the studio system, too ego-centric. But by god, what a man he was. 

MANK is rated R and has a running time 131 minutes. It was released on Netflix on December 4th.

SOUL

SOUL is a deeply affecting and visually ravishing film from Pixar. It stars Jamie Foxx as a mild-mannered, warm-hearted jazz musician called Joe who never quite got that big break and has ended up teaching band class.  A grateful former pupil finally hooks him up with a big break but Joe has an accident and dies. He ends up quite literally on a staircase to heaven but fights to come back and play his big gig, meeting a little unborn soul called 22 on the way. So they get back to New York but end up in the wrong bodies - 22 in Joe, and Joe in a cat! And what ensues is your classic body mix-up comedy, along the lines of Freaky Friday or Big. The different perspective allows 22 to find joy in music and simply living, and allows Joe to realise that Jazz isn't what gives him purpose after all - it's acts of kindness and living each day. 

What elevates this film beyond the classic body mix-up comedy is its heart and its imagination. Speaking to its heart, I don't think I've ever seen a film portray the joy of playing music so beautifully, or the awe and joy that hearing someone lost in the moment can inspire. I'm not even talking about Joe here. The best moment is seeing a young girl called Chloe sit on Joe's staircase playing her trombone, and 22, in Joe's body, look on in awe. There's also something really wonderfully touching and joyful in how Moonwind (Graham Norton) is portrayed. Normally, hippies and kooks are portrayed as Goopy idiots, but here they are treated with affection. They also have a kind of wisdom and a part to play.

As to the imagination, this film pushes animation beyond anything I've ever seen before.  The beautifully re-created contemporary New York is sunlit and sepia toned and captures both its beauty and rambunctiousness - from the crazy soundscape of a New York pavement to the crowded jangling of a subway train. This would be achievement enough but it contrasts to brilliantly with the ethereal dreamworlds of the The Great Before, a strange in-between, and The Great Beyond. The Great Beyond is a stunning black and white abstract moving walkway with a strange electronic soundtrack that feels both odd and reassuring. The in between world is again monochromatic but drawn in 2-D and the most starkly abstract. And then we land in The Great Before which is all luminous pastels and fuzzy edges. I particularly liked the design of the wire-frame 2-D characters that shepherd the little souls. It's just amazing how much character and expression the animators managed to get into these simple abstract figures. 

The resulting film is a tour de force of visual imagination with a score as varied and wonderful. This is the best that Pixar has yet produced. 

SOUL is rated PG and has a running time of 100 minutes. It is streaming on Disney+.