Film Review 174 – Challengers

Watched: 4th May 2024

Rating: 4/5 stars

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   I had concerns that this would not live up to the hype, but I loved every second of Challengers. To be fair, the only other film of Luca Guadagnino’s that I have seen is Call Me By Your Name, so there was a long shadow to escape, but both films feel quite different to me. Challengers especially feels much more intense, in terms of both what is at stake and how its emotions are portrayed. It almost made me sad, seeing how Tashi, Patrick, and Art go from happy-go-lucky teenagers with little real cares in the world to these three adults so intrinsically defined by their relationship with their sport that they all just veer between robotic focus and bouts of wild, unrestrained indulgence. They are a trio whose connection ultimately doesn’t seem healthy for any of them, but who cannot escape the bonds that bind them together. What makes the drama so compelling is how different they each are – Tashi with her hyper-focus, embodied so well by Zendaya, Art’s laissez-faire swagger (Josh O’Connor did a really good job of making me dislike him), and Patrick pulled from pillar to post between them. This was a very sexy film, made all the more impactful by how incredible the soundtrack was. I found myself on tenterhooks while watching the match scenes, as if I were watching a tennis game in real life. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross should commend themselves for a job very well done.

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Originally posted on Letterboxd on 15th May 2024: https://boxd.it/6pqm6b

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 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

Film Review 163 – Notes on a Scandal

Watched: 9th March 2024

Rating: 4/5 stars

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   Judi Dench as Barbara is one of the most hilariously sinister characters I’ve ever seen. The opening sequence of her looking menacingly out at a bunch of school pupils coming in while her voiceover labels them future terrorists is one of the most darkly comedic introductions to a film I’ve ever seen – and one that sets the tone perfectly. This is a grim film, make no mistake about it, one whose story is quite serious for all the humour one may find circling around it. That it confronts it so head on – for example, by actually showing the naked torso of the student with whom Cate Blanchett is having her sordid affair – makes for quite unsettling viewing, but when you have two actresses a strong as Dench and Blanchett going head-to-toe, you can’t look away. To watch Dench mechanically and methodically put her traps into place around Blanchett, to watch it all come crumbling down at the end, is delicious.

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Originally posted on Letterboxd on 24th March 2024: https://boxd.it/60Z5Jv

Film Review 162 – Dune: Part Two

Watched: 8th March 2024

Rating: 5/5 stars

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   The spectacle of watching this in IMAX format was frankly incomparable. I watched the first one in a normal cinema when it came out, and still found myself blown away by the effects and sounds – but last night took the biscuit. Dune 2 is nearly three hours’ worth of unrelenting spectacle, a tour-de-force that ducks and weaves, charges and feints, pushes through everything in its path without ever losing a single second of its own momentum. I hate sand as well, but it’s never looked so good on the silver screen, those wide shots of desolate dunes (see what I did there) haunting in their beauty beneath the pre-dawn sky, or else the blistering open desert at high noon, where earth and sky seem to melt into one. And then you contrast this with Giedi Prime, the unsettling glamour of its fighting pits, everything in a monochromatic, otherworldly glow that only highlights the inhumanity of its inhabitants, their almost-human faces and expressions. Dune 2 is a feast for not just the eyes, but all the senses.

   What of its story though? A problem I found with the initial Dune, that it sacrificed some of its heart in order to build its world (a necessary evil, to be sure), is all but gone in its sequel. Timothée Chalamet’s descent from hero to anti-hero, as Paul Atreides begins to resign himself to the destiny he has long tried to resist, is sobering to watch, but what is equally as gripping is the effect it has on his relationship with Chani – and how Zendaya captures the character’s natural sharpness and softness, the love she has for Paul tempered with the fear she has of him becoming someone unrecognisable. Meanwhile you have Rebecca Ferguson giving another scintillating turn as Lady Jessica, all notions of Bene Gesserit planning and plotting cranked up to 100 as she endeavours to make a messiah of her son. Dune is a space opera whose story rests not on grand, intrinsic moral notions of good versus evil, but instead on the dynamics of power, family, prophecy and truth. Is Paul really the long-awaited saviour? Does that even matter, when so many around him – and he himself – believe it? This is a parable against the dangers of extremism, of religious fervour and how imperialism do nothing except to decimate cultures with centuries of history. Watching Zendaya standing alone – quite literally – against this oncoming storm is almost sad, though I can’t wait to see how it turns out in Dune Messiah.

   Likewise, now that the story is fully on its way, the closing chapter of this trilogy has a lot to live up to. Florence Pugh hints at moments of Irulan’s iron will, but I’m still waiting to see her blade fully brandished. Likewise, if I could ask for something of this film, it would have been slightly more of the imperial court, slightly more of the Bene Gesserit. When you’re adapting something so dense, changes are necessary though, and Denis Villeneuve shows that his hands are more than capable at holding this delicate balance.

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Originally posted on Letterboxd on 21st March 2024: https://boxd.it/60pvWj

Film Review 157 – All of Us Strangers

Watched: 3rd February 2024

Rating: 4.5/5 stars

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   I went into All of Us Strangers apparently having seriously misread the brief, because the film’s premise was not what I had anticipated at all. Claire Foy as Andrew Scott’s dead mother was the biggest surprise of all, but she was one of the stars of the show – the kind of mother that is instantly recognisable to so many queer people, the little boys who grew up knowing that there must have been suspicions lingering in the back of the mind, suspicions whose roots grow deeper and deeper until they are trees casting their shadows over everything, but don’t look up, you mustn’t look up. But while this is a film about a queer experience, the loneliness that it causes for so many decades ago, I think that All of Us Strangers is more a film about grief in general, about not having your place in the world, about being unable to move on and learning how to cope with the torments raging in your soul. Andrew Scott gives a frankly phenomenal performance, one of the most moving I’ve seen all year. In turn he is the middle-aged man, hardened by that life of solitude and inability to connect, and then seconds later you see the boy again, the boy who wants his parents to accept him, the boy who just wants to grow up in a world where it’s okay to be himself, where he doesn’t have to spend years hiding who he is. The boy who wants to be able to show his soul in its entirety to his parents – and what queer person cannot, on some level, relate to that? In many ways this film is a reminder of how far we’ve come, but in many ways, it also shows that the trees cast long shadows, even when the leaves have fallen and all we have left are gnarled trunks and withered branches.

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Originally posted on Letterboxd on 18th February 2024: https://boxd.it/5KGle7

Film Review 155 – The Zone of Interest

Watched: 27th January 2024

Rating: 4/5 stars

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   The opening to this film is one of the most memorable I think I’ve ever seen in a cinema. The title, its letter stark white against a completely dark background. The Silent Hill-esque drone, the booming echoes as the title fades and you’re left there in total darkness, senses on the precipice of being overwhelmed. That’s what this whole film feels like – hanging over some kind of edge, faced with nothing but the yawning void below you. It’s always there in the background, both literally and metaphorically, the wails of human misery and the nightmare of industry while characters with neat, sterile hair and neat, sterile outfits discuss the pleasantries of dinner, their plans for the garden, or how to gas a chamber full of people (high ceilings make it difficult, apparently). Sandra Hüller plays Hedwig with an almost childish indifference to what is going on around her, and it’s this banality that renders such indifference truly revolting. However, it’s Christian Friedel whose performance perfectly captures the evils of Nazism – love for his children, the devoted father reading them bedtime stories, all while thinking of ways to make death more efficient. The film’s pace is slow, meandering, often taking its time with these characters in their daily domestic life, but like I say, that backdrop is always there, and it makes for such sobering, uncomfortable viewing.

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Originally posted on Letterboxd on 7th February 2024: https://boxd.it/5HpAcf

Film Review 153 – Scrapper

Watched: 24th January 2024

Rating: 4/5 stars

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   What a surprisingly lovely and disarming little film. I didn’t think that I would find myself quite so moved by it, and yet I was. Scrapper is not really a film where a huge amount happens – lots of silence, meditative pauses, things unsaid in the vein of many other modern dramas. Yet there is just something about it that I found genuinely absorbing. Lola Campbell is the vibrating heart of it, but Harris Dickinson gives a great turn as her dad, and watching them navigate the hurt and discomfort between them – old as aching bones and yet as sore as a fresh wound – is more dramatic than you’d think for a story about a dad and his daughter. But sometimes, the most basic of tales can be the most moving, and Charlotte Regan tells it in a delightful yet still emotionally resonant way.

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Originally posted on Letterboxd on 2nd February 2024: https://boxd.it/5FX9LH

Film Review 146 – Tokyo Godfathers

Watched: 18th December 2023

Rating: 4.5/5 stars

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   This is the third film that I’ve seen which was made by Satoshi Kon, and what has astounded me about each film is how different they all feel. I’d say Tokyo Godfathers has more in common with Millennium Actress than with Perfect Blue, but out of the three, it is easily the funniest, the most irreverent. It is perfectly content to sit with the hardships of the three protagonists it presents, without shying away from the reality that life on the street can be tough as hell, yet its sense of humour shines through at almost every moment it can. It doesn’t make Gin, Hana, or Miyuki into objects of pity – no, it shows them as actors in their own stories, even with their tragic turns, in all their humanity, their strengths and flaws. I found myself alternating between bouts of laughter at how ridiculous things sometimes got, and then feeling warm-eyed as we see a little bit more into each character’s past. I can often find ‘chosen family’ a bit cloying if I feel it isn’t done well, but I think this is the best way I’ve ever seen it done. Tokyo Godfathers is truly a marvel of a film.

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Originally posted on Letterboxd on 2nd January 2024: https://boxd.it/5lJ69d

Film Review 133 – Fremont

Watched: 20th September 2023

Rating: 4/5 stars

tl;dr – Anaita Wali Zada you will always be famous.

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Fremont completely blew me away. It’s one of the weirdly funniest films I’ve seen all year, genuinely laugh-out loud guffawing, but its comedy is hardly normal. It’s almost surreal, the behaviour of its characters, the juxtaposition of their situations (every scene with the therapist had me almost melting into my seat). But while it’s funny, there’s also a soul-piercing melancholy that hangs over Fremont like a constant shadow. It’s not necessarily a negative shadow, but its weight is constantly there, and it chooses the most unexpected moments to overwhelm us. There’s a scene where the therapist is talking about White Fang, and the way he describes it is genuinely heart-breaking, how this poor dog has to relearn everything he thought he once knew just to make it in a strange land, and you realise this is exactly the story of Donya too, that like this poor dog she’s had to leave behind everything she knows and try to make it by in a strange new world. Perhaps that’s why everything about this film seems so surreally funny – we are seeing America through un-American eyes, seeing its idiosyncrasies and foibles that just get accepted instead put under a spotlight.

But there are also moments of heart wrenching beauty. When Joanna is singing karaoke, it completely caught me off guard. It’s such an unexpected scene, and there is still an element of humour to it, but there’s also an earnest humanity, something about someone pouring their heart out without any pretentions or guard. Fremont is a film of contradictions that make perfect sense, and I think it’s also a film about learning to be at peace with where you are, with what hand life has dealt you, with appreciating the small moments of beauty, and there’s a lesson in that for all of us.

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Originally posted on Letterboxd on 21st October 2023: https://boxd.it/4SkOG5