Sunday, February 16, 2025
SLY LIVES! AKA THE BURDEN OF BLACK GENIUS*****
BRIDGET JONES: MAD ABOUT THE BOY****
Friday, February 14, 2025
ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT*****
ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT has a running time of 118 minutes. It played Cannes, Toronto, Telluride and London 2024. It is available to stream.
Sunday, February 09, 2025
SEPTEMBER 5*****
As the film opens we are in the dark, claustrophobic ABC sports-room recreated by director Tim Fehlbaum in precise detail. The journalists hear shots fired and suddenly realise they are in the midst of an attack. They have to figure out how to wheel heavy camera equipment out to the village to shoot footage of the apartments where the Olympians are being held. And they have to wrestle satellite slots to broadcast what they have. In a powerful and pivotal performance, Leonie Benesch (THE WHITE RIBBON) plays a young German journalist who has to become an impromptu translator, listening in to police radio and local news reports. Meanwhile, the always brilliant Peter Sarsgaard plays the Sports-journo boss who has to wrestle with his home news team who argue that mere sports reporters are out of their depth, and retain control of "his" story.
There are two iconic and notorious moments. The first is when the journalists realise that the terrorists are actually watching their footage, and can see German cops attempting a rescue operation, because no-one switched off the TV feed to the apartment block. It's then that we get that iconic image of the hooded terrorist looking out of the apartment window and straight down the barrel of the TV camera. The second iconic and notorious moment is when an ABC journalist (played brilliantly here by John Magaro) chooses to relay an unconfirmed report that all the sportsmen have been released alive and well. He wants the scoop. Simple as.
Kudos to Fehlbaum, his production team and in particular his editor Hansjoerg Weissbrich, for creating a film of such taut, spare, suspense and high stakes. The look and feel of it take you right into 1972 and into the fast-paced need for judgment. It gives you sympathy for real people making tough choices in uncharted territory. Most of all, I loved the way in which the real footage of on-air broadcasts was seamlessly woven into the fictional recreation. So you can see Magaro's character speaking apparently to an on-air presenter and that presenter relaying the information he has been given. It's a masterclass of editorial brilliance.
SEPTEMBER 5 is rated R and has a running time of 95 minutes. It played Venice, Toronto and Telluride 2024. It was released in the USA on January 17th and in the UK on February 6th.
THE ORDER****
We are in early 80s small-town mid-western America and this film is based on a real-life story. The Feds are on the trail of a young charismatic neo-Nazi who is orchestrating a series of bank robberies to fund his war on America. His foundational text is the same one that inspired the Jan 6 insurrection. Nicholas Hoult is the cult-leader Bob Mathews - handsome and convincing. Mathews is sinister in how low-key he is but also how swiftly he can whip up a mob. Jude Law continues to give career-best performances in his middle-career - following his turn as a truly sinister Henry VIII in FIREBRAND - with this self-effacing performance as a decent but scarred and often ill-judged Fed called Terry Husk.
Screenwriter Zach Baylin (CREED III) crafts a spare and slowly-ratcheting anxiety-inducing script. The pivotal relationship is between Husk and Mathews who contain enough humanity to somehow not be able to take that pre-emptive shot. But I also loved the scenes between Hoult's Mathews an his father, a David Duke type figure played convincingly by Victor Slezak.
THE ORDER plays like an old-fashioned police procedural, much as the recent JUROR NO 2 (also starring Hoult) played like an old-fashioned courtroom drama. I am here for it. I love the feeling of being in a handsomely-made, well-played, slow-burn, patient, unflashy, grown-up thriller. There is nothing not to like about this film.
THE ORDER played Venice and Toronto 2024 and is available to stream on Amazon Prime. It is rated R and has a running time of 116 minutes.
Saturday, January 18, 2025
A COMPLETE UNKNOWN**
A COMPLETE UNKNOWN is rated R and has a running time of 141 minutes. It was released in the USA on December 14th and opens in the UK on January 17th 2025.
Monday, January 13, 2025
Sunday, January 12, 2025
Spoiler-filled thoughts on THE BRUTALIST*****
There is so much to love in this film - the audacity of its length, its thematic scope, its incredible performances.... On that last topic the only slightly false note for me was Felicity Jones somewhat inconsistent Hungarian accent as Erzsebet. I even wondered if they inserted the line about Erzsebet studying at Oxford to explain the occasional middle-class English lilt breaking through. Counter-balancing this we have the breakthrough performance of a lifetime by Joe Alwyn as Harry Jr and the deeply moving potrayal of Zsofia by Raffey Cassidy.
Behind the lens, the production is flawless. Cinematographer Lol Crawley (WHITE NOISE) films in close focus Vistavision, a technique contemporaneous to the story and worth seeking out in 70mm prints. This gives the film a kind of visceral feel of intensity, with saturated colour. I also cannot speak highly enough of Daniel Blumberg's stunning score, that goes from orchestral classical to jazz to electronica.
Overall, I feel that what Brady Corbet has done in this film is of equal importance to what Paul Thomas Anderson did with THERE WILL BE BLOOD. It's a movie that does something that you have not seen before, that moves you, provokes you, envelopes you in a unique vision, aurally, visually. It's so far above the run of the mill film that if feels as though it's from another universe.
THE BRUTALIST is rated R and has a running time of 215 minutes. It opened in the USA on December 20th 2024 and opens in the UK on January 24th 2025.
Thoughts on NOSFERATU (2024)***
NOSFERATU is rated R and has a running time of 135 minutes. It was released on Christmas Day 2024 in the USA and New Year's Day 2025 in the UK.
CHASING CHASING AMY***
CHASING CHASING AMY is a wonderful and raw and vulnerable documentary about what the 1990s Kevin Smith dramedy CHASING AMY meant to those making it and those who watched it.
The film is one that I loved when it came out: I was a deep-cut Kevin Smith fan, and even loved his critically panned second film MALLRATS. CHASING AMY was a film that was meant to revive his career after that failure and it did. It starred Ben Affleck as an earnest but insecure comic book writer called Holden who falls in love with a fellow artist called Alyssa (Joey Lauren Adams) who is both way more sexually experienced and bisexual.
The narrative arc centres Holden and his journey to emotional maturity. The comedy, as in all of Kevin Smith, is crude and blunt and politically incorrect and brilliant. Both Holden's best friend Banky (Jason Lee) and Alyssa's gay friends find it hard to understand their sexual relationship. There's a lot of casually homophobic and biphobic language. And worst of all to modern sensibilities, the film was written and directed by a straight white man centring his own journey. So as much as the film was loved at the time of its release, it has since been condemned as tone-deaf and problematic and largely forgotten.
That's when trans male film-maker Sav Rodgers entered the story. He was a teenager being bullied in school for being queer. Watching CHASING AMY was a lifeline. He saw Alyssa and her friends - proudly out, incredibly smart, sex-positive - as role model. Sav asserts that the film literally saved his life. Fast forward through a virally popular Ted Talk on the subject and Sav connects with Kevin Smith, is welcomed into the director's home, and makes this documentary.
What we get is a strange but compelling doc with three strands. The first is Sav's own story as geeky bullied lesbian woman who finds the courage to become a married trans man and film director thanks to the love of his amazing wife Riley, his amazing mum, and maybe also the friendship and mentorship of Kevin Smith.
The second is the story of Kevin Smith and his evident joy and finding someone who appreciates his art and is deeply moved by it.
But it's the final strand that is the most compelling and it's the story of the women who have a far more complex relationship with the film.
The first woman is Joey Lauren Adams, who never found the stardom she might have expected, maybe because Harvey Weinstein didn't like her and maybe because she was playing these unconventional roles. The movie was based on her real-life relationship with Smith and while she's glad the movie exists, she finds it really difficult to see their two-year painful relationship relived on screen. That real life Kevin or fictional Holden emotionally grow is great, but it came at her real-life expense. She is also far more damning of the idea that you can enjoy the success of the film at Sundance when you now know what Harvey Weinstein was doing to Rose McGowan at that very festival. Smith mentions it and acknowledges it but it's Adams who really feels it.
The second woman who got ripped off is film writer, director and actor Guinevere Turner - the real-life lesbian who inspired Alyssa. She describes seeing her real conversations with Smith transcribed in CHASING AMY, and her horror as her own female-centred, lesbian-authored film GO FISH faded into the background as Smith's more mainstream appealing CHASING AMY got all the plaudits.
This is all really complicated stuff and it's not clear that the young film-maker Sav Rodgers has the emotional maturity or film-making maturity to deal with the issues he stirs up with his interviews. He does not go back to Smith to try to hold him to account or to pierce his rather earnestly complacent attitude toward the film. He does not know what to say to Adams when she lays the reality down on him. That's not Sav's fault - he's so young and dealing with his own stuff. But it makes for a frustrating viewing experience.
CHASING CHASING AMY played Tribeca and London 2023. It has a running time of 93 minutes and is available to rent and own.
THE BIBI FILES*****
THE BIBI FILES has a running time of 115 minutes. It played Toronto 2024 and was released in the USA and UK last December.