Film Review 173 – Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace

Watched: 3rd May 2024

Rating: 3/5 stars

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   Yes, it’s not a very good film, but it’s also weirdly so entrancing. I think it’s a massive case of style over substance – the CGI is visually incredibly impressive, for the time, but what I find most beguiling is the physical sets. Naboo is gloriously lush, and that’s to say nothing of Padmé’s wardrobe. Honestly, I think a whole star in this rating just comes from how well-dressed Natalie Portman is every time she’s on my screen, and I don’t even blame her acting skills for how stuffy the character is. The Neimoidians are a bit sus nowadays, yes, but there is just something so, so, so slay about how ludicrous Nute Gunray is, the camp little diva. Overall, The Phantom Menace suffers from being so breakneck that it leaves little time to generate emotions, and is just fundamentally missing a soul – but the trappings of the body certainly look good.

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Originally posted on Letterboxd on 12th May 2024: https://boxd.it/6oVgcZ

Film Review 172 – Consequences

Watched: 1st May 2024

Rating: 3.5/5 stars

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   This is a pretty brutal film, but one I’m glad I watched. I confess that, even with how monstrous Zele’s behaviour is, Timon Šturbej has a magnetising performance – he perfectly embodies the dangerous allure of a wild animal lording around its enclosure, the ferocity and strength and power that is simultaneously repelling and compelling. No wonder Andrej finds himself drawn to this unstoppable force with such intensity, like a moth ready to throw itself into the fire. Like many modern European films, I think Consequences tries very hard to make it seem like what it’s depicting is solely real life, with lots of silence and lots of glances, but in a film about hidden longing, the silence and glances work. I think Matej Zemljič is tremendous – he shows us the cruelty Andrej is more than capable of, but also the capacity for love. You feel like the character has always had an edge to him, but one that’s been sharpened by the trappings of the society he lives in, though you have to wonder where the blame really does start.

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Originally posted on Letterboxd on 12th May 2024: https://boxd.it/6o5mnF

Film Review 171 – Crew

Watched: 26th April 2024

Rating: 3.5/5 stars

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   This is the first modern Bollywood film I’ve ever seen, and watching it in the cinema was such an amazing experience. The comedy, the acting, the visuals, the setting, everything is so over-the-top without ever veering, in my opinion, into ridiculousness. The plot of Crew is nothing that amazing – it’s your typical kind of screwball comedy, with a dash of crime caper mixed in – but I think it’s really solidified by some pretty grounding and comedic performances from its three leading ladies. It’s certainly whetted my appetite to see more Bollywood films in the future, that’s for sure.

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Originally posted on Letterboxd on 6th May 2024: https://boxd.it/6lRXJH

Film Review 170 – Mad Max: Fury Road

Watched: 22nd April 2024

Rating: 3.5/5 stars

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   I remember how obsessed Tumblr was with this back in the day when it first came out. You couldn’t move for posts about it – treatises on the meaning of the Five Wives, close up shots of Furiosa looking suitably furious, gifs-a-plenty of the war machines rampaging across the desert. It took me long enough to watch Mad Max: Fury Road, and I’m glad I saw it for the first time in a cinema. It really helped to emphasise the scale of everything – the vast expanses of desert, that terrible storm they drive through, the thrilling carnage of the motorcade hellbent on pursuing its target. This is an action film that brings the action, high octane included, but I did feel like I would probably have enjoyed it more had I seen it a decade ago. I found it hard to connect with on an emotional level, at times, and I really am not sure why – maybe it’s the curse of years of high expectations feeling like they weren’t met. It was all just very grim, and I get that’s the point of a post-apocalyptic hellscape, but I just found myself searching in vain for a foothold I could jump on to, a chink in the armour of scowls and shouts that would have let me inside too. In any case, Charlize Theron is incredible as Furiosa, so that wasn’t a disappointment at least.

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Originally posted on Letterboxd on 6th May 2024: https://boxd.it/6krDJ7

Film Review 169 – Speed

Watched: 6th April 2024

Rating: 3.5/5 stars

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   Sandra Bullock is amazing in this. So funny and genuinely brilliant to watch – she captures the anxiety of her situation as if she were a real person literally going through it. Keanu Reeves feels as wooden as ever, but it feels like less of a drawback here since he spends most of the movie shouting or in action sequences anyway. To be fair, there is a genuine chemistry between him and Bullock – I found myself believing their romance way more than I believed Neo and Trinity’s in The Matrix, for example. The movie itself is pretty good at being what it sets out to be – an edge-of-the-seat, popcorn crunching thriller – and sometimes that’s all you want to watch.

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Originally posted on Letterboxd on 1st May 2024: https://letterboxd.com/luxxyb/film/speed/

Film Review 168 – Monkey Man

Watched: 5th April 2024

Rating: 3.5/5 stars

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   Hurtling through things at a breakneck pace, Monkey Man is, in all honesty, a pretty impressive directorial debut for Dev Patel. As the titular character, he’s also not bad – he captures Kid’s haunted, hunted soul with a lot of gusto, balancing the character’s trauma and how it manifests (such as in that very good bathroom scene) with the fire constantly burning in him, the rage that keeps him going when everything else is gone. As a work of social commentary, the film is also quite insightful, even though it took me a while to figure out exactly what side of the conflict Kid was on (not a fault, it’s one of the film’s better instances of show don’t tell). The action sequences are well-choreographed, and I was frequently either on the edge of my seat or – when it was bloodier – looking away.

   What I would say is that the film, overall, did feel pretty familiar. I didn’t like the ‘remember who you are’ section, purely because I feel like that’s something you see in every single revenge thriller of this ilk and it felt so cliched here particularly. Nevertheless, minor quibbles aside, if this is Patel’s first foray into filmmaking then I think his craft will only get more refined the more he tries.

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Originally posted on Letterboxd on 27th April 2024: https://boxd.it/6dyand

Film Review 167 – Perfect Days

Watched: 22nd March 2024

Rating: 4/5 stars

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   Perfect Days is more akin to slice-of-life than any kind of big, evolving drama, but it’s mesmerising. We wake up with Hirayama, watch him go about his business, feel the rhythms of his life and work as they ebb and flow away from and back to his normality. Of course there are disruptions, little forks in the river that take us away from the familiarity of the shore, but we never lose sight of it. Much of the film, when Hirayama does not have these disruptions, is spent in silence, but it’s the comfortable silence you have with a long-time friend, a silence that is not a symptom of a lack, but which in itself communicates something. I found myself wanting to watch Hirayama clean toilets forever, because he does it with such attention to detail and such genuine pride in his work. In a way, it reminded me somewhat of what I liked about The Taste of Things, another release I saw this year where much of the focus was on manual tasks – there is a pleasure to be found in a job well done, especially when you are watching someone else do it.

   What makes me vastly prefer Perfect Days, though, is the emotional weight anchoring it.  Kōji Yakusho is phenomenal as Hirayama. Like I’ve said, I could watch him work for days on end, but what I also appreciated was the subtleties of his performance, along with the subtleties of Wim Wenders’ script. There is a trail of breadcrumbs to follow through the urban jungle of Tokyo, and as the film progresses we realise that there is something in Hirayama’s past, a cloud that – like Travis in Paris, Texas – hangs over the sunshine of today. It’s never quite addressed, though enough hints are given that we can hazard a guess, but Wenders does not want us to linger in the past. We’re confronted with the here and now, the healing power of relationships, music, rediscovering your inner child and the little joys of life. Perfect Days is a beautiful work of art that takes life slowly, but takes it seriously at the same time.

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Originally posted on Letterboxd on 11th April 2024: https://boxd.it/66TImx

Fil Review 166 – Drive-Away Dolls

Watched: 20th March 2024

Rating: 3/5 stars

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   Started off strong, but like a car speeding off into the distance, it left its better qualities in its wake. Surprisingly I actually quite enjoyed Margaret Qualley’s accent, and thought she and Geraldine Viswanathan balanced each other out pretty nicely – but the decision to have them get together just felt very contrived. I didn’t really see much romantic chemistry between them, so not sure why they went down that route. There were a fair few funny moments in the film, some of them a bit too ludicrous to land, but I found my patience wearing thinner by the end – and when it’s barely over 80 minutes long, I don’t think that’s the best result you want. Just a lot of promise that I don’t feel quite delivered.

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Originally posted on Letterboxd on 11th April 2024: https://boxd.it/667PfH

Film Review 165 – Anatomy of a Fall

Watched: 14th March 2024

Rating: 4.5/5 stars

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   Did Sandra do it? Did she do it? Who knows! Who even cares (that much) when the mystery of trying to figure it out is so compelling? Anatomy of a Fall leaves just enough breadcrumbs to follow along, but still, does it lead you the destination that is factually true, or just your favoured interpretation? We are given just enough of the outline to feel confident in colouring in its interior, but even still, there’s always the nagging suspicion that something has been missed, that something has been misunderstood. Sandra Hüller, in her third performance of the year for me, is the outstanding central piece of this puzzle – there is an unflappable sense of calm to her, and yet you’re never quite sure if it’s really who she is or if she is just a consummate actress. The scrutiny placed on her is unbearable – the court scenes alone, while compelling viewing, are equally as stressful, and watching her navigating this minefield, trying desperately to not fall into its pitfalls, is riveting. The supporting cast are fantastic as well, and a special shout-out must go to Antoine Reinartz as the prosecutor (so slay that you can’t help but appreciate him even if he is going after Sandra with the appetite of a hellhound). This was absolutely one of the best watches of the year so far that had every cog in my head turning frantically trying to figure things out, and I loved every second of it.

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Originally posted on Letterboxd on 11th April 2024: https://boxd.it/63iseh

Film Review 164 – Monster

Watched: 11th March 2024

Rating: 4/5 stars

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   I didn’t expect Monster to be as queer as it was, so you can imagine my delight when I saw the pieces falling into place and began to realise exactly what was going on. The perspective of each act shifting so suddenly is a very interesting narrative conceit – you initially think this is the story of a mother looking for justice for her son in a society that has lots of biases against her, then you think it’s the story of a teacher who goes from being a heartless villain to someone falsely accused of cruelty. Then it transpires that all this time, there’s been a story going on just under the surface, the relationship between two young boys trying to find themselves in a society that is so quick to judge, so quick to point out what it thinks is wrong.

   Our three leading actors – Sakura Ando, Eita Nagayama, and especially Soya Kurokawa (for whom I predict big things in the future) – play each of their parts with perfection. Ando brings the sensitive fire of a mother to Saori, and the scenes of her in the schoolroom pleading for the teachers to do something about what she thinks is a teacher abusing her son are the most gripping of the film. It highlights the inhumanity of a system dedicated to trying to maintain a clean image, to sweeping things under the rug so that image won’t be tarnished, all while Ando tries to appeal from the opposite, human side. Nagayama is our uncaring villain, cold and brash, and then we see him as a genuinely empathetic and supportive teacher, see how a narrative over which he has no control begins to rip his life apart piece by piece. With Kurokawa, any queer person must recognise Minato’s struggle. How do you process those feelings of first love, when you begin to realise that your life is not just your own to lead, and that the path you need to walk will never be the path that society expects you to? Throughout each character’s emotional journey, we have a sombre, powerful score by Ryuichi Sakamoto, one that charts the very recognisable human drama unfolding before our eyes.

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Originally posted on Letterboxd on 25th March 2024: https://boxd.it/621Txd