Disappointing... yet brilliant

Director Roger Avary Stars James Van Der Beek, Shannyn Sossamon,  Ian Somerhalder USA 2002 Language English 1hr 50mins Colour

Privileged, amoral college students turn out to be bored and boring

A couple of years ago, I watched Less Than Zero and concluded two things that I think are largely independent of each other:

1) Less Than Zero is a lousy movie

2) Less Than Zero, the film, is a poor representation of the ideas and style of the author of the source novel

And I contrasted it with Mary Harron’s American Psycho, which I think is:

1) An excellent film

2) And one that brings out what I think are the strengths of Bret Easton Ellis’ work and trims off many of the weaknesses

Helpfully putting an entry in a third quadrant of this imaginary Ellis adaption graph is 2002’s The Rules Of Attraction, a not-very-good picture that is, to the best of my memory of a novel I think I last glanced at three and a half decades ago* and certainly haven’t read in full since then, pretty faithful to the author’s intention. Indeed, there’s a short burst in which TROA contains what I think might even be the best screen translation of the Bret Easton Ellis vibe – unfortunately, it comes and goes pretty swiftly.

The Rules Of Attraction was the less successful novel that came out between Ellis’ most famous books, Less Than Zero and American Psycho. All three have a shared universe – TROA takes place at Camden**, the East Coast college that LTZ’s narrator Clay is on vacation from (Clay is a minor character in TROA-the-novel but is not in the movie); one of the three central characters in TROA is Sean Bateman, the brother of Patrick from American Psycho.

The main, fairly logical decision that writer-director Roger Avary made with the movie was to set it in the present day (ie 2002) rather than in the ‘80s. That obviously avoids all the  effort that comes with a period drama, plus, in retrospect, it makes sense with a cast that is so precisely early 2000s: James Van Der Beek (RIP), Shannyn Sossamon (her out of A Knight’s Tale), Ian Somerhalder (the bloke from Lost, no longer acting), Kate Bosworth, Jessica Biel…

The film has three main. very unreliable narrators: Sean (Van Der Beek) is egotistical, not-very bright, does some drug dealing. Lauren (Sossamon) is fixated on a guy named Victor but he’s off in Europe so she transfers her crush to Sean – she’s holding out to lose her virginity to the right guy but getting desperate. Paul (Somerhalder) was Lauren’s boyfriend sometime before the film starts but has since very emphatically come out. If you believe Paul, he and Sean sometimes hook up. If you believe Sean, he’s 100% straight. Meanwhile, Sean and Lauren have a series of missed connections.

And that’s mostly it – it’s just college kids going to parties and hanging out, apart from maybe one frantic sequence that serves as a clue that Avary is best known as a Quentin Tarantino collaborator/sidekick (although at this time, they were feuding). And it’s just not very good – these people are all kind of boring and Avary mostly doesn’t make sitting in dorm rooms with them entertaining. The depiction of Paul is pretty iffy, too.

Avary, predictably, chucks a bunch of directorial gimmicks at the movie to liven it up, including running footage backwards. But it doesn't help and feels fairly sub-Danny Boyle.

I say ‘mostly’, though, because there is the one chunk where the film suddenly gets good. This is the breathless, fuzzy video, proto-YouTube travelogue by Victor (Kip Pardue***) as he zips round Europe’s tourist spots, taking drugs, getting laid, repeatedly bumping into DJ Paul Oakenfeld. It’s got the addictive, accurate, funny quality of the best of Bret Easton Ellis’ writing and properly captures the essence of these people who do all the stuff that should be exciting and memorable but flatten it all with their inherent blankness.

I’m sceptical that you could sustain that style over a whole feature film, but its acuteness makes the rest of the movie look blunt, clumsy and dull.

Director Emma-Kate Croghan Stars Frances O’Connor, Alice Garner, Matt Dyktynski, Matt Day, Radha Mitchell Australia 1996 Language English 1hr 16mins Colour

Likeable Aussie ‘90s indie

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine brought round a bag of stuff she had found after a move and that she reckoned most likely belonged to me. Considering that most of the items were VHS tapes (along with a T-shirt, one DVD and a graphic novel), it looks she probably borrowed them circa 2000. 

Some of the movies I had rewatched in the intervening years, at least one I have no interest in now, but Love And Other Catastrophes I had fond memories of and haven’t seen in a while, so I popped it in the VCR (yes, I have one and it’s still connected to the TV) and watched it, complete with trailer for Palookaville*, ever-present timecode and the occasional warnings that this is not for sale (it was a review copy).

LATC is your classic second-tier mid-1990s indie, a perky sort-of romcom that is a debut movie, ultra-low-budget, very much write-what-you-know (assorted characters are film students), takes place over a couple of days, has a handful of locations (it’s a campus pic) and ends(ish) with a party. And it has chapter headings with epigrams. 

Even one of the obvious points of differentiation – it’s Australian – is underplayed, not least because of the autumnal jackets, coats and sweaters that are exactly what you’d have expected if this had been set in New England or Long Island. As far as I noticed, all of the many filmmakers namechecked are American.

The reason I said it’s only sort-of a romcom is that although we end up with more couples than we started with and there is a fair amount of philosophising about love, not much of the plot is driven by romantic urges. No, most of the action is prompted by one of the characters trying to switch departments from Film to Cultural Studies and encountering infuriating bureaucracy and territorial pissing.

It’s an ensemble piece but there are two clear central characters – a pair of women in search of a third housemate. Mia (Frances O’Connor) is the one getting pinballed around the university as she tries to get her transfer approved before a deadline. She’s also being so neglectful that her long-suffering girlfriend Danni (Radha Mitchell) might be reaching breaking point. Meanwhile, Alice (Alice Garner), who works in a coffee shop on campus, is hiding from her tutor even though her thesis about Doris Day is complete – she just has no faith in it. 

Then we have Ari (Matt Dyktynski) – the ‘Warren Beatty’ of the university, as Mia describes him. He’s overstocked with self-confidence, does a bit of high-end sex work to enable him to live more comfortably, shares his musings into a dictaphone and is sceptical about love. Michael (Matt Day) is the kind of ineffectual bloke who I suspect might have been the lead had this been directed by a man – he’s a med student who hates med students and has a crush on Alice even  though they’ve never met. Danni gets a fair amount of screentime, but only ever in relation to Mia.

And there’s Danni’s constant sidekick, and a guy keeps trying to get advice about ‘a friend’ who has promised to get circumcised to please his Jewish girlfriend and a couple of other passing eccentrics.

It’s definitely scrappy – there’s a scene where Alice is driving, it cuts to Mia, it cuts back and suddenly Alice is wearing glasses. And there’s a long, wordless final scene that presumably is just there to get LATC to something approaching feature film length. (Like a lot of indies in those days, the budget for post-production – picked up after the film had been sold – was far bigger than the shooting budget. Which presumably accounts for presence of the Velvet Underground’s Sunday Morning, the rights for which must have accounted for a huge chunk of the total spent.)

But I think it has lots of charm. There are obvious story beats – for instance, Michael ringing up people who advertising that they have a room available and each place is even more alarming than the previous one – but it does them well. 

A few years later, O’Connor and Mitchell (who was still in Neighbours around the time of Love And Other Catastrophes) both got a shot at being leads in Hollywood films. (There’s a lot of Woody Allen mentions in this film, and Mitchell was the twos leads in his not-often-remembered 2005 movie Melinda And Melinda.) But the whole gang are pretty likeable.

And if you weren’t around and want to get a feel of a certain kind of mid-into-late 1990s, this is a good place to start. O’Connor has a hairstyle, a kind of complicated wavy bob, that I’m not sure still exists but was the one Janeane Garofalo had in The Truth About Cats & Dogs and Christina Ricci had either side of her arrival in non-kids movies (as in, both in That Darn Cat and John Waters’ Pecker). For those of us who remember, it places you right then. 

While the film leans away from being obviously Australian, there a few musical moments that reinforce where it comes from. One that I’m pretty sure I didn’t catch in 1997 is when Mia is by herself, has a Walkman on and is singing along. The song is Shivers by The Boys Next Door, aka Nick Cave’s first band (it was written by the Rowland S Howard**, not Cave, I should note), which I think of as a bit of an Aussie standard or possibly, specifically, a Melbourne standard), but maybe that’s just because Courtney Barnett has covered it.

I’m not arguing that this is superior to better remembered, roughly similar movies such as Before Sunrise or Kicking And Screaming. But it’s short, sweet, pretty smart and has a lot going for it.

Director Robert Quine Stars Natalie Wood, Tony Curtis, Lauren Bacall, Henry Fonda USA 1964 Language English 1hr 50mins Colour

Faux hip, actually very square and sluggish mid-‘60s comedy half-saved by dizzying ending

There’s a strange thing that happens about an hour and 25 into this film – it feels like it's had a cup of coffee and suddenly everything picks up pace. The rest of the film has a strong sense that it wants to be a 1930s/40s screwball comedy – particularly (considering this is about a thoroughly unscrupulous journalist) Libeled Lady, Nothing Sacred and His Girl Friday – but is utterly lacking in the necessary zip. Until it just sparks into life and we’re off to a breathless climax, during which I laughed consistently having barely managed a chuckle before that. It’s odd, and because it’s the end that’s good, what had previously seemed like a completely misbegotten movie leaves a relatively pleasant taste…

S&TSG belongs to a weird subset of movies that have fully fictional stories but are derived from non-fiction books: How To Blow Up A Pipeline, Mean Girls, He’s Not That Into You (ie, not something like The Blind Side, that takes real events and distorts them grotesquely, but instead something that grafts a fully made-up narrative onto the title and supposedly the themes of a book).

So Sex And The Single Girl (the book) was written by Helen Gurley Brown, a (married, in her late thirties) advertising copywriter, as a how-to for single women to succeed in and out of the bedroom. It was published in 1962 and was both a massive success and a huge scandal.*

In S&TSG the movie, Helen Brown is a single psychologist played by 25-year-old Natalie Wood, whose shocking new book is being read by practically every female character (it's HGB’s real book that's shown on screen.) This makes her a target of the proudly unethical Stop magazine. After the success of a cover story about Brown, managing editor Bob Weston (Tony Curtis) decides he’s going to write an even more vicious follow-up, hinged on the win-win that either she’s writing from experience, in which case she’s a slut, or she’s actually a virgin, in which case she’s a fraud. Which is not really the most appetising set-up for a film…

To do this, Weston becomes Dr Brown’s patient, borrowing the name and problems of his neighbour Frank (Henry Fonda), who is chased out of his apartment every evening by his jealous, crockery-smashing wife Sylvia (Lauren Bacall). Let’s just pause at the indignity of Bacall and Fonda as the stereotype-riddled middle-aged support here. There’s certainly no talent shortage here – we also get the great Edward Everett Horton** as the owner of Stop, Mel Ferrer as Brown’s colleague/pursuer and Stubby Kaye as a cabbie. Joseph Heller – let’s repeat that – Joseph Heller! is one of the two credited screenwriters.

But S&TSG belongs to an awkward moment in Hollywood history. The era of heavy censorship, the production code, was clearly dying but not yet dead. You could release a film with a title like Sex And The Single Girl, you could have Natalie Wood lying on her front with her naked back on show, and that was OK, but it’s clearly working within strict limits.*** So we have neither the freedom that was to come half a decade later nor the invention-under-restriction than directors like Preston Sturges or Hitchcock used to sneak all manner of sauciness into their films while ostensibly playing by the rules.

And that, I’m guessing, is what leads to the almost-fatal decision to make Wood’s character incredibly naive. Sure, two equals firing zingers at each other isn’t the only option for a romcom (eg, as we have Henry Fonda here, con-artist and clueless mark works wonderfully in The Lady Eve), but it is the most reliable one.

For the route taken here – Curtis’ scheming hack is just playing with his prey until a long way into the film – Dr Brown needs to be much more of an otherworldly academic studying sex but not getting people. But a) that doesn’t really match what the book was about and b) the film doesn’t want to de-glam Natalie Wood. So Dr Brown has a slinky wardrobe and a booming professional practice that seem at odds with how hapless + helpless she is in Weston’s presence.

(I know that in reality, there are plenty of conventionally attractive people who are insecure about their looks, but there’s something hugely unconvincing here when Brown mutters in disbelief to Weston, ‘You think I’m… pretty?!’ Girl, you’re Natalie Wood!)

What maybe makes that worse is that Tony Curtis is both the most obvious and best casting as a sleazy, womanising journalist who is still kind of likeable.

Perhaps the neither here nor thereness of the movie is best summed up by the character of Gretchen (Fran Jeffries), a hip modern chick frequently seen with a bare midriff. Gretchen is a singer – so far so good – with the Count Basie and His Orchestra. Basie was great and all, but he’d been at his peak of cultural relevance a quarter of a century earlier. In essence, this is a film pitching itself as all about now! (as in, 1964) and constantly revealing itself as profoundly old-fashioned.

Almost everyone involved had done better work – Richard Quine made at least one movie I like a lot, likewise Wood, obviously Fonda, Bacall and Curtis are in a bunch of the greatest movies ever made (there’s a fun running gag in S&TSG about Some Like It Hot) and Heller wrote Catch-22****, easily in the top five best novels I’ve read. This is a long way from the sum of its parts – but, as I said at the top, just when it feels like its grinding to a unsatisfactory ending, it transcends into a blissful delirium of high-speed action*****, gags piling up on each other, excellent minor characters – and the previous long trudge is if not forgotten, at least partly forgiven.

*Brown went on to become the editor of Cosmopolitan and when I was doing shifts at the UK edition of Cosmo in the late 2000s, there was a Sex & The Single Girl column, which always seemed a bit of an imposition on the poor woman writing it, a professional obligation to go on dates with lots of inevitably terrible men. **Who, among lots of other notable comedies of the ‘30s and ‘40s, was in the original movie version of The Front Page (which was then gender-tweaked for His Girl Friday). ***See also The Pleasure Seekers, made the same year – a remake of Three Coins In The Fountain, with the yearning for romance of the previous film supposedly updated to sexual hedonism – but, you know, not really.

****It turns out Richard Quine directed a 1973 TV movie version of Catch-22, starring Richard Dreyfuss, which I had never heard of.

Welcome to my now traditional films of the year list. The rules are simple: these are movies that I liked best that got an official UK release – in cinemas or on some kind of streaming – in 2025. As it happens, I saw all but one of these on the big screen. I should say I haven’t seen Marty Supreme, which is getting the ‘which year does it belong to?’ post-Christmas release. Other than that, I feel I have seen pretty much everything that I had an active interest in but I am sure that, as ever, there were plenty of good things I missed. There are three films with early 2026 releases I wanted to mention: No Other Choice, just a terrific movie, and then two that I enjoyed a lot but know are quite niche: Peter Hujar’s Day, which is a recreation of a low-key interview a not-famous photographer gave in the 1970s(!), and Nouvelle Vague, Richard Linklater’s comedy about the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s A bout de Souffle/Breathless in 1959. Both are beautifully made immersions in cooler times+places.

I’ve also written about many more movies I have seen this year: here’s the More or Less Mainstream batch and here are the Arthouse/indie/docs (the distinction is totally arbitrary.) Some honourable mentions from those two lists: Roofman, a likeable, grounded, movie-star-led comedy-drama that would have been a hit 20 years ago; Companion, a nasty, funny sci-fi/horror/comedy that would have been the perfect video store rental at university; Sister Midnight, a strongly Jarmusch-flavoured, Mumbai-set story that eventually becomes a horror flick but that’s not really its main mood; Freaky Tales, another one that seems aimed at the no-longer-existent neighbourhood video store – it’s an often goofy but fairly violent anthology set in 1987 Oakland, dipping into the hardcore punk and hip-hop scenes; Tornado, whose titular character is a teenage girl with samurai training in late 18th-century Scotland, the cast includes Tim Roth, Jack Lowden and Joanne Whalley, not sure it always works but it’s stuck with me; and just the sheer energy and force of personality conveyed by Jennifer Lawrence in Die My Love. 

Right, on with the show….

1 Nickel Boys

The reason I read The Nickel Boys was because I’m big fan of Colson Whitehead’s writing and he’d proved with Underground Railroad that he could take on traumatic subjects in a way that offered something more intriguing than someone just shouting, ‘LOOK, SOMETHING REALLY HORRIBLE IS HAPPENING! DON’T YOU DARE AVERT YOUR EYES!’  I read the book about two black kids in a brutal reform school in Florida in the 1960s, and it is good but indeed extremely harrowing. 

So I was reluctant to watch RaMell Ross’s adaptation of the novel, but heard enough about it to be tempted into seeing it in a cinema. And am so glad I did. To be clear, it’s also bleak but never rests on showing atrocities for its power. Instead, it’s an astonishing act of radical filmmaking, one that takes the shards-of-memory approach of Moonlight and Aftersun right to its limits. Much of it is shot from the point-of-view of the characters, cut together with bits of an old movie, found footage and almost abstract sequences. In other words, the form is as you can go from the conventional way to present this kind of content. (I guess a recent comparison might be The Zone Of Interest, but whereas that took an oblique angle to the tragedy that was just off screen, Nickel Boys is directly about boys suffering from institutional racism –  just in a way that puts huge trust in the audience.)

Hard to describe, then, but emphatically one of the best films of the last 10 years or so.

2 Good One

A girl in her late teens, her dad and her dad’s best mate go for a three-day hike in the woods. That’s it. Not a horror film (just in case the mere mention of a movie set in a forest had set you off), instead an excellent collection of closely observed moments and a subtle but razor-sharp dissection of the awfulness of the middle-aged men. Low-key, beautifully acted, clearly not unfamiliar in what it is but definitely exceptional in how well it does what it does.

Full review here

3 One Battle After Another

It’s a fact that most people have not even heard of One Battle After Another (it's going to end the year somewhere between 22nd and 24th on the global box office) – a sizeable hit* but not a phenomenon. But if you read what I read, listen to what I listen to, talk to the people I talk to, it’s the movie that dominated the year. Your basic facts: directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Chase Infiniti (who only has one previous acting credit) with Teyana Taylor, Benicio Del Toro (so great!), Sean Penn and Regina Hall, and is very loosely/distantly derived from Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland.**

The main part of the movie is about a burnt-out leftist ex-terrorist (Leo) and his teenage daughter (Infiniti) on the run from a weird and sinister paramilitary cop (Sean Penn). It’s propulsive and funny and audacious and political. I, predictably, loved it, but I think it’s only fair to steer you towards my estimable former colleague Ellen E Jones’ Guardian article about what she found objectionable about the movie.

*Although, as many have been quick to point out, it still lost a chunk of money

**I know someone who thinks that they massively oversold the Pynchon connection to lure people into seeing this film. Global takings for Inherent Vice, PTA’s fairly faithful Pynchon adaptation: $15m; for One Battle…: $205m – not sure that theory holds up.

Full review here

4 The Phoenician Scheme

After the multiple framing devices and packed casts of The French Dispatch and Asteroid City, Wes Anderson’s latest is something of a change of pace in that it has two clear central characters and no framing device, unless you’re counting some initial news reports. That said, in every other way (the design, the tone, the cast, etc), this is very much a Wes Anderson film.

It’s the 1950s, and Zsa-Zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro) is a notorious tycoon who has survived many assignation attempts. As he tries to finalise the deal for his most wildly ambitious project yet, he summons his only daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton), a novice nun, and tells her he’s making her his heir. Along with his tutor/assistant (Michael Cera), Zsa-Zsa and Liesl set off to visit Korda’s partners to try to get them each to stump up more cash to keep this absurd scheme on track. 

This being a Wes Anderson flick, the actors playing those partners include Riz Ahmed, Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson and Benedict Cumberbatch. Elsewhere, Richard Ayoade continues his welcome move away from nerdy characters by playing a charismatic Marxist guerrilla leader, and yes, Bill Murray and Willem Dafoe do pop by, if very briefly. 

In the middle of all of this is a sweet-in-its-way story about a truly terrible but compelling man trying to connect with his estranged kid (whose mother he’s rumoured to have killed.) It’s the human element that I’d argue Anderson’s films always have underneath all the amazing design work – but don’t ignore that design. As ever, this looks incredible – even the open credits run over a brilliantly intricate overhead shot. And it’s very funny – each running gag used precisely the right amount of times so that gains from repetition but doesn’t become annoying. 

5 The Mastermind

A film that very carefully drip-feeds us information about its main character, and so I really don’t want to say too much about it. I will say I liked it a lot. Takes place in Massachusetts in 1970, it involves an art heist, is directed by the always-excellent Kelly Reichardt, stars Josh O’Connor, Alana Haim (guess she’s properly an actress at this point), John Magaro (great value for not much screen time).

Full review here

(MUBI)

6 One Of Them Days

Something I’ve realised: thrillers in which a character gets into ever-escalating problems with money (eg Uncut Gems) – usually not for me. Comedies in which the same thing happens? I’m happy to be here. 

Dreux (Keke Palmer) seems to be getting her life together. Her flatmate Alyssa (SZA), an artist who doesn’t sell any art and gets suckered by unsuitable boyfriends, less so. One of those guys runs off with their rent money, which is bad timing because their landlord (Rizi Timane) is aiming to get his long-standing tenants out of his LA apartment complex and some white hipsters in.

So over the course of a day and night, Dreux and Alyssa try to figure out how to raise cash  quickly and end up in assorted scrapes, testing their friendship. There’s a clear, acknowledged debt to the 1995 Ice Cube/Chris Tucker comedy Friday, but One Of Them Days is much more than just a gender-flipped update. A film like this relies totally on its stars, and Palmer and SZA (in her movie debut) are just terrific. I’ve seen Palmer in a number of films and TV shows and also know that she sings, podcasts etc (she works a lot), but none of that (for some reason) had really fixed her in my mind before – but she’s so sharp and funny and charming in this that I fully know who she is now.

7 Hard Truths

It’s been a decade and a half since Mike Leigh made a film set in contemporary London. This is a great return, built around an astonishing performance by Marianne Jean-Baptiste as a woman raging against pretty much everything, making life very tough for those around her. That sounds like it could be a gruelling watch, but it’s funny, relatable and always watchable. 

Full review here

8 Sentimental Value 

This is a hearty meal of a movie: in what is largely a contemporary character study of four people over the course of a few months, director Joachim Trier sneaks in the history of a house and the saga of the family that lived in it, how global events intersect with the lives of ordinary people and lots of stuff about acting and cinema and those who give over their existence to the arts.

We start with the wake for the mother of historian Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) and actor Nora (Renate Reinsve) and ex-wife of respected film director Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård). Gustav makes an unexpected appearance at the wake, and we learn that Nora has never forgiven him for abandoning the family. Gustav is trying to make his first film in at least a decade and maybe the world has moved on; Nora’s career is going well but she’s got horrendous stage fright and depressive tendencies; and Agnes? She has to deal with everyone else’s shit. Oh, and Elle Fanning pops up as a young Hollywood star in search of credibility. 

The style is distinct, individual sequences, which end with a fade to black, and occasional we restart in a new setting that then turns out to be a play or a movie. That might annoy some people but I was OK with it.

Sentimental Value is on shot film and looks gorgeous – if you’re wondering what all the critics mean when they complain about ugly Netflix lighting and want a comparison, try this. The cast are really good – particularly (and I’m not the first person to say this) Lilleaas. It's a satisfying, human story. (It probably gains from being seen not long after Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, which covers a lot of the same ground less well). If there is a sticking point, it’s that as he did with The Worst Person In The World, Trier makes a largely female-centred film that ultimately goes a little soft on an arrogant-creative-bloke character in the end, somewhat against the grain of the rest of the story.

9 Volvereís (The Other Way Around)

Talky, arty people reaching a crisis point in their long-term relationship – thnk Before Midnight, Bergman Island and probably also Marriage Story. The couple are Ale (Itsaso Arana) and Alex (Vito Sanz), and their plan is to mark their break-up with a big party. This is generally not regarded as a great idea by their friends and family. Volvereís (which, incidentally, in this context means ‘You’ll get back together’) is a movie in no rush – these are folks who like to talk, to think, to debate and debate again. Crucially, all that talk is well-written and frequently funny. This is the third film I’ve seen by director Jonas Trueba, and I’ve liked them all.

Full review here

10 Islands

There’s every reason to be suspicious of a German film with British stars (one of whom is technically French) set in the Canaries. Won’t the result feel compromised, the script in English and occasionally Spanish feel a bit a second/third language? As it happens, not at all. Sam Riley plays Tom (aka Ace), a tennis instructor at a past-its-best all-inclusive hotel in Fuerteventura. As we meet him, he’s waking up face down in a sand dune. He drinks too much, is often late for work, his catchphrase appears to be ‘Can you do me a favour?’, but everyone seems to like him. 

Then a young British family arrives for the week. The kid (Dylan Torrell) is a decent tennis player. The husband (Jack Farthing) is a bit of a disaster, the wife (Stacy Martin*) very good-looking, a little mysterious and maybe flirting with Tom. Tom starts to neglect work and max out those favours to hang out with all three of them – is he just after a shag or does he have delusions about somehow become part of this family? 

The score tells us from the start that this will be a mystery or maybe a psychological thriller, one Tom seems to stumbling into despite the clear warning signs. The film makes some interesting choices towards the end, ones which I liked, but I think it’s fair to warn anyone who likes all loose ends tied up that you would find this film frustrating. I thought it was nicely atmospheric and tense, making good use of the location, and the cast are all excellent. *Martin is French by nationality but with a British mother and she went to university in London, so she’s effectively native when acting in English. You’re most likely to have seen her in The Brutalist, where she plays Guy Pearce’s daughter.

11 Flow

As a two-line plot description, Flow sounds like nothing special, not too different from either a 1970s animated film or indeed (apart from the era) the Ice Age movies. Essentially, a small group of animals (a cat, a dog, a capybara, a bird) are trying to escape a huge flood and come to realise they need to work together. So why did this low-budget Latvian/Belgium/French film become such a big deal? Making it wordless is the big choice that takes it away from the wisecracking animals of much* American animation. Which is not to say that these animals act exactly like animals, but certainly more than we’re used to. The cat and its companions are simply rendered but the landscape they move through is rather beautiful. Tense, captivating, lovely.

*Not all, obv.

12 Highest 2 Lowest

I think this is a terrific film, one that for about an hour 50, I enjoyed as much as any movie I have seen this year. It’s a beautiful, sweeping, stately thriller (I know, I know, that sounds contradictory), a superb slice of late-era Spike Lee, all enticing spaces, the camera floating past Basquiats and classic fight posters and subway station signs, the New Yorkness of New York, prime Denzel Washington, Jeffrey Wright… It’s adapted/updated from Akira Kurosawa’s noir High To Low plus the Ed McBain novel that that movie was based on, with Denzel effectively playing a non-rapping Jay-Z (nasty dyed hair, which is clearly a choice), trying to buy back the label he founded when he gets a call telling him his son has been kidnapped…

But I did say it’s splendid for an hour 50 – this movie runs to 2:13. It feels like they had a bunch of ideas about what the final scene should be, couldn’t decide, and then opted to use them all, including ‘70s TV show-style (characters gathered in a hospital room and then all laughing at something that isn’t that funny), and then the final one, which is pure, unnecessary indulgence.

But the rest of it? I really dug it.

(Apple TV +) Films of 2024

The 2023 list

The 2022 list

The 2021 list

The 2020 list

This the section of my 2025 round-up featuring broadly mainstream movies – for my films of the year, go here, and for the more arthouse/indie-leaning ones, go here (the distinction is, it should be said, fairly arbitrary.) (Where known, UK streaming services are listed – other than with the Netflix films, you can generally also watch these on video-on-demand.)

Roofman

Ex-military guy, struggling to earn enough money to feel like he’s the kind of dad he wants to be, starts breaking into branches of McDonalds through the roof, gets caught, goes to prison, escapes, ends up living in a Toys “R” Us. This, you maybe could guess, is a based-on-a-true-story movie because who would believe that set-up otherwise? Anyway, director Derek Cianfrance’s previous movies (his most famous is probably The Place Beyond The Pines) have had moments of light and a whole truck of bleakness. Roofman is much cheerier, even though there’s the constant feeling – remember, based on a true story – that he can’t keep getting away with this. 

The film rests a lot on Channing Tatum’s combination of charm and physicality (this guy you very much believe can lift himself up onto roofs.) Kirsten Dunst is also excellent as the divorced mother-of-two he meets. Considering this all happens in quite real-feeling suburban settings, the supporting cast sometimes feels a bit overpowered: we get Peter Dinklage as the Toys “R” Us manager, Ben Mendelsohn as a non-judgemental pastor, LaKeith Stanfield as the streetwise best mate, Juno Temple as the best mate’s girlfriend. Still, I really enjoyed this – if you see, make sure you hang around for the credits when we get to see interviews (both from the time and more recent) with many of the real people, which are excellent value.

Sinners

Sinners was the great movie business story of the year: an expensive ($90 million) original (ie, not based on a book, movie, video game. whatever) film with a black director (Black Panther’s Ryan Coogler) and mainly black cast that lots of industry experts thought was going to lose money and instead was a big, big hit, at least in the US. And that was an excellent thing – but is it an excellent movie?

The story goes like this: we’re in the Mississippi delta, it’s the early 1930s, and twins Smoke and Stack (Michael B Jordan x2) return from Chicago with lots of cash, lots of booze and a plan to open the biggest and best juke joint (nightclub) around. They’re aided by their guitar-playing cousin (Miles Caton), a veteran local bluesman (Delroy Lindo – as often, excellent), Smoke’s sometime girlfriend (Wunmi Mosaku) and the local Chinese grocers (Li Jun Li, Yao). And it all seems to building up to a great night, until we realise something else has also arrived in the area…

Sinners has generally been classed as a horror movie but it takes a very long time to get to that stuff – Coogler seems more interested in showing us this world, its textures and its tensions: between religion and the desire to have a good time, between personal ambition and community, and more. I think he does a good job of all of that. 

I saw Sinners a couple of times, and can tell you (rather uselessly unless you live in a handful of cities) that it looks by far its best projected on 70mm film. That second viewing made most of what had seemed like bumps in the story disappear, although I’m still not sold on the idea that Michael B Jordan gives fully distinct performances as each twin. There’s a lot to like, just not enough to make it one of my favourite films of the year as opposed to one of the ones I gave most thought to.

Materialists

Materialists made a decent sum at the box office, which – according to the trade media –  was because the marketing campaign successfully persuaded people that they were going to see a conventional romcom. That got them through the door but left many aggrieved. To which I say: the movie is called Materialists, which should be fair warning that this isn’t 27 Dresses or Maid In Manhattan. 

What Materialists is is a very talky comedy debating the existence of romantic love (and whether that has any connection to marriage) in 21st-century New York and in a context where someone who earns $80k + bonuses is considered a pauper. (If you’re curious, as I was, that’s around the median household income for the city.)

Anyway, so Lucy (Dakota Johnson) is a professional matchmaker whose clients have expectations that are reasonable considering quite how much they are paying but otherwise insane. She is finely tuned to the formulas (taking in income, conventional attractiveness, age and, in the case of men, height) that govern couple formation in these circles. 

Of course, this matchmaker has an emotional life of her own. Attending the wedding of a client, she meets the groom’s very eligible brother Harry (Pedro Pascal) and bumps into her ex (Chris Evans), a struggling actor working as a waiter at the reception. 

In Lucy’s world, there should be zero equivalence between these men: one owns a $12m pad, the other lives in a small (like actually small, not movie small) rental with two other dudes and it feels like a stretch to believe he can manage even that.

Materialists is a film that left a lot of people dissatisfied. As mentioned, there were the ‘I was expecting a romcom’ bunch. There were folks excited to see what the director of Past Lives – the film from the last few years I have felt most confident recommending to people I know – did next, and what they were anticipating was something less schematic.*

I’ll concede that the framing device is a dud. And as comedies go, it would be fair to ask for a few more laughs. Also, the soundtrack was almost uncannily packed with songs I've always liked, so maybe that swayed me too much. But I think this is a smart, deft and enjoyable film. (One of the performances that some people were baffled by makes more sense, I think, once you get to the end.)

*There’s apparently a different social media gripe but a) that can’t be explained without spoilers and b) what 26-year-olds on Insta or TikTok think is absolutely no business of mine.

Thunderbolts*

For a while there, Marvel could chuck out any old rubbish featuring superheroes no non-comics-fanperson had ever heard of (thinking of you, Doctor Strange) and still get a huge audience. That time has passed – all three of their 2025 movies failed to meet even reduced expectations and the worst performance of the bunch came from Thunderbolts*. A film, indeed, that I didn’t see on the big screen because I’m bored shitless of superhero movies but that turns out to be the MCU movie I’ve liked most since 2017’s Spider-Man: Homecoming. 

The key here is Florence Pugh as depressed operative-for-hire Yelena Belova, previously seen in Black Widow. Despite the grating Russian accent,  she’s funny and likeable. When scheming CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) tries to cover her tracks by eliminating assorted people who had done dirty deeds for her, Yelena and some colleagues/rivals reluctantly team up. 

The plot itself is blah, but film stays focused on the characters, and those characters are pretty good, apart from the rubbish-as-ever Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan, apparently good in a couple of non-action films last year but I didn’t see them. Still terrible in these ones). And just as it looks like we’re going to end with another crappy CGI battle, the switches to a climax that’s got more in common with recent horror movies than anything superhero-flavoured. 

The cast is excellent value: along with Louis-Dreyfus we get Wendell Pierce, Geraldine Viswanathan and Wyatt Russell as a disgruntled failed next Captain America. (Because apparently you can never have too many nepo babies, alongside yes-he’s-Kurt-&-Goldie’s-son Wyatt we have Lewis yes-he’s-Bill’s-kid Pullman). 

Like, an actual functional, decently made film that happens to be comic book-derived. Which in 2025 is something of a feat.  (Disney +)

A Real Pain

Will you enjoy this film? It consists almost entirely of Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin doing what we know they can do. If you normally like that, do join them as (in the guise of once close, recently somewhat estranged cousins) they head to Poland for a Jewish heritage tour vacation. Eisenberg wrote and directed this, and keeps the movie moving along, getting the most from the interplay of the two dudes and a good supporting cast (notably Jennifer Grey and Will Sharpe). I laughed a bunch and was fully absorbed watching it, then felt a bit less well disposed to it after a couple of days digesting it. But on balance: recommended. 

Full review here

(Disney +)

Weapons

Director Zach Cregger makes horror movies that are all but impossible to describe without massive spoilers. His last film was the wild and wildly entertaining Barbarian, a picture that effectively restarts at least twice as a completely different type of movie. Weapons is similarly structurally playful, with each segment told from the perspective of a different character, each advancing the plot but also giving us a very different take on events.

The film starts with all but one child in a primary school class vanishing from their homes at 2:17am and plunges us into the anger and confusion of the community. Like Sinners, Weapons spends a fair amount of time not actively being a horror movie, although there is plenty of lurking menace. We get Julia Garner (who I’m still a little unsold on) as the teacher, Josh Brolin as a parent willing to chase the smallest hint about what might have happened, Alden Ehrenreich as a short-fused cop and a very funny Benedict Wong as the principal. 

That’s about all I’m willing to say, other than it’s a film of many tones but most of them work and overall it’s satisfying.

Mickey 17 

Bong Joon Ho’s first film since Parasite seemed to go straight from long-awaited to quickly forgotten. Which seems a little unfair – I think there’s lots to enjoy about this satirically minded sci-fi adventure. Maybe part of the issue was that the hefty number of people who weren’t that familiar with Bong’s work before the shock Oscar success might have been a bit puzzled by the fact that Mickey 17 is in English and set in space*, but this is not the director’s first sci-fi in English movie.

We’re on an interplanetary colonialist mission led by a sleazy preacher/politician (Mark Ruffalo, conceivably his worst performance, just a lousy Trump impersonation) and scheming wife (Toni Colette). To do all dangerous/unpleasant tasks, the ship has Mickey (Robert Pattinson), an ‘expendable’ who, each time he dies, is resurrected by 3D-printing using organic material and implanted with stored memories. As the film starts, the mission has reached its target planet and the 17th generation of Mickeys. 

This is Pattinson at his goofiest, and I think he’s in right mode for the movie. He’s well matched by Naomi Ackie as the all-action, super-competent crew member who has surprisingly chosen the low-status Mickey as the person to ignore the ship’s sex ban with, and Steven Yeun as his untrustworthy old friend. (You can guess this was shot in the Home Counties by the presence of eg, Tim Key and Holliday Grainger in supporting roles.) Apart from Ruffalo, in fact, I have few quibbles with this movie – it’s a lot of fun.

*Arguably, the current film by a big-name Korean director that serves the ‘if you liked Parasite, you’ll like this…’ better is Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice.

Companion

Satirically minded sci-fi horror comedy, I guess, at a sharp and effective 1 hour 37 (you absolutely don’t want this kind of thing to run any longer). If you’ve heard about the film, you probably know the set-up, but I won’t give it away. Sophie Thatcher – who you could describe as the Gen Z Christina Ricci (if Jenna Ortega hasn't grabbed that title) – plays the over-perfect and eager-to-please girlfriend of uninspiring bloke Jack Quaid, off for a weekend with friends in a lakeside house deep in the countryside. The friends seem a bit snooty about Thatcher’s character, and then shit spirals pretty rapidly. Neither the nuts and bolts of the story nor the points it’s making are particularly novel, but it is slickly and economically made, nasty and funny. 

The Naked Gun

Did I laugh? I did, quite often, and a few times quite a lot. Did I laugh anywhere near as much as my mother and I did when we saw The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! in a cinema in Milan in the spring of 1989? No, not remotely. 

So it’s doing a few things: one is a partial reproduction of the humour of Police Squad/the original Naked Gun movies. Another is playing around a bit with the action-movie persona Liam Neeson has built for himself over the last 17 years. The third seems to be a parody of the work of McG, a director who was big in 2000 but maybe fairly forgotten now? This also seems to hook in with a series of late 90s/early 00s pop cultural references Neeson’s Frank Drebin Jr makes, which seem a bit strange considering the actor would have been 47 at the start of the century. Either that’s the joke, which I’m not really getting, or the script was written with the idea of a somewhat younger star. 

Regardless, this does the job.

Zootropolis 2/Zootopia 2

Zippy, likeable sequel to Disney’s animated 2016 hit about Judy Hopps, a rookie cop bunny (voiced by Gennifer Goodwin) and Nick Wilde, a streetwise fox (Jason Bateman) teaming up to solve mysteries in a bustling city inhabited solely by anthropomorphic animals. In this one, Judy has convinced Nick to join the police but between her overenthusiam and his distain for the rules, they are constantly in trouble with their chief (Idris Elba), because, hey, this is a classic buddy cop movie. The case they involve themselves in (against orders) is about the city’s foundational document and the suspected presence of a reptile – who are banned – in the Zootropolis. It’s funny, it’s nicely animated and absolutely teaming with detail, and the central characters are strong. [Despite the fact that a big deal is made of the stars they get to do the voices in the big studio animated movies, I often get to the credits and go, ‘Oh! That was who that was.’ But in this one, the three voices I got pretty swiftly were Elba (as the years go on, it becomes more and more mysterious that he nailed an accent for The Wire because I’m not sure he’s managed it since), Patrick Warburton (as the mayor, a preening horse) and Danny Trejo (as Jésus, a Jesus lizard).]

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery

Knives Out was a bit of a surprise, a contemporary take on the all-star murder mystery that had enough of a contemporary and political edge to feel new and just cosily enjoyable enough without being kitschy. The sequel, Glass Onion, got pretty good reviews but most people I know found it annoying, maybe trying a bit too hard with the satire and the gimmicky setting. 

Wake Up Dead Man (feels like there’s a missing comma? Or maybe that’s part of the twist I’m not getting?) goes back to a more trad setting – a gothic church (it’s set in New England but filmed in old England). Actor-of-the-moment Josh O’Connor plays Father Jud Duplenticy, a boxer-turned-priest who is given the unwelcome task of being the number two to Monseigneur Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin), who has built up a cult of personality in his small parish. We learn of the build-up to a murder through Duplenticy’s not-necessarily-trustworthy narration – it’s a fair way into the film before Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) turns up. In the devoted congregation we have Andrew Scott, Glenn Close, Kerry Washington, Thomas Haden Church, Jeremy Renner…

As pretty much everyone discussing it has said, Wake Up Dead Man takes the spiritual debate its characters are conducting seriously. Writer-director Rian Johnson isn’t here to just go ‘ha! sleazy priest!’ and use the creepiness of gothic churches – these films are all debate-laden and this one most of all. And it works – O’Connor is very good, Brolin enjoyable, Craig feels like he’s toned down a bit. Reasonably satisfying.

(Netflix)

A Complete Unknown

‘It’s good, just not an actual feature film,’ is what I found myself saying a lot when discussing this film. As I was sure would be the case, James Mangold does a terrific job of recreating early 1960s New York. Timmy Chalamet is genuinely very good as the young Bobby Dylan, grabbing everything he can from the folk scene and then leaving it all behind when he no longer has any use for it. Monica Barbaro and Ed Norton are fab as Joan Baez and Pete Seeger and there’s lots of scenes of people playing music and those scenes work. 

The stumbling block for me, and for some other people, was that it feels like a conventional movie but doesn’t function like one. There are no stakes, no tension, no doubt about whether wheezy Bob is going to steamroller women and the besotted folkies in his rise to the top. It’s a series of tableaux, a jukebox musical without even the contrivance of a storyline. It lacks the this-is-a-reason-to-care energy that Reese Witherspoon brought to Walk The Line. But if you're somewhat interested in this stuff, you should probably see it.

Full review here`

(Disney +)

Black Bag

Michael Fassbender (in stonefaced mode) and Cate Blanchett play a married couple of British intelligence operatives in Steven Soderbergh’s jaunty espionage mystery. It’s a tidy 93 minutes, you get Tom Burke, Naomie Harris, Industry’s Marisa Abela and Pierce Brosnan – who appears to share a tailor with the current monarch – along for the ride. It’s slick and smart, but for me it only really kicked into gear in the final 15 minutes or so.

Final Destination: Bloodlines

In a year when a lot of movies disappointed at the box office, there were a few surprise hits. Notably, the unexpected return of an enjoyable but resolutely B-list post-Scream horror franchise – there had been six movies between 2000 and 2011 and then nothing… until now. In case you’ve never seen one, the idea is this: early on, one of the characters has a premonition which allows them and others to avoid their fated death in a disaster. Their payback for having briefly cheated death is to be killed a series of wildly elaborate and absurd ways during the rest of movie. Bloodlines adds the spin that if death (Death?) was too busy to clean up near the time, that curse will pass down the generations. The film starts with the collapse in the 1960s of what’s essentially the Seattle Space Needle with the gory deaths of hundreds of people on one of its first evenings open… only that never happened because a young woman foresaw what was going to happen and saved everyone. In 2025, her granddaughter (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) is plagued by dreams of what should have taken place, and yes, her family members start dying in grotesque ways. It’s daft, grisly and fun. 

Jay Kelly/The Surfer

Two extremely different movies, yet both could reasonably be summed up as: affluent guy in his early sixties misguidedly attempts grand gesture to convince his semi-estranged kids that he’s not a bad father and over the course of a couple of days is stripped of the symbols of his status. 

The Surfer is low-budget, Australian, trippy, 1970s-vibed. It takes place in one/two locations – a beach and the car park serving the beach. It stars Nicolas Cage, but more than that, I would say that the genre could be described as late Nic Cage. He plays a guy aiming to buy back his clifftop family home who drifts into conflict with a manosphere-tinged surfer cult and becomes unhinged (or his underlying problems are made manifest) very quickly. From the title on down, it has an acknowledged debt to the archetypal symbolism-heavy late middle-aged man loses it movie, 1968’s The Swimmer. 

Jay Kelly is more indulgent affair, directed by Noah Baumbach, co-written by Emily Mortimer and starring George Clooney as a big Hollywood star who is feeling unmoored: his mentor (Jim Broadbent) has just died, his older daughter (Riley Keough) is angry with him, his younger daughter (Grace Edwards) is about to head off to college and he has a bruising encounter with an old friend (Billy Crudup).

In crisis, he ends up travelling across Europe by train, shedding his entourage as he goes. The big, juicy supporting/practically co-lead role goes to Adam Sandler as Kelly’s manager, and there’s a packed cast, including Laura Dern, Greta Gerwig, Stacy Keach… Patrick Wilson plays Sandler’s second-best client, a TV star not on Kelly’s level – and that’s how they read on screen, but quietly, Wilson has been the star of many more box office hits than Clooney over the past decade. Jay Kelly is a sprawling movie that occasionally clicks for me, maybe mostly in the train section, but Noah Baumbach’s made a lot of better films than this.  (Jay Kelly is on Netflix)

Nosferatu

Big, handsome remake (and it is firmly a remake rather than a reworking or reimagining) of the German silent horror classic. We’re in the mid 19th century and an estate agent (Nicholas Hoult) is sent off to complete a deal with a mysterious count (Bill Skarsgård) in his remote castle. Meanwhile back at home, weird stuff is happening the estate agent’s wife (Lily Rose Depp). Willem Dafoe turns up as an expert in the occult. It’s all very stylishly done – I just didn’t feel engaged with what was happening at any point. 

F1

Very much from the people who brought you Top Gun: Maverick, this is another movie in which a man of certain age (in this case, Brad Pitt) gets to show the young folk a thing or two about piloting an obscenely overpriced machine that goes fast. In this one, a never-quite-made-it American (Pitt) is recruited by his old teammate (Javier Bardem) to drive for his struggling Formula 1 team. (So the answer to the inevitable question is: Pitt is 62, F1’s current oldest driver is Fernando Alonso, 44. The oldest ever driver in a Grand Prix, as mentioned in the film, was 58-year-old Louis Chiron back in 1958).

Arguably, the film’s strength and weakness come from the same thing: the film had the full cooperation of the sport and chunks of footage come from the races, and we see Alonso and Louis Hamilton etc around the place (fortunately, none of those guys are asked to act). So: in some ways feels authentic. But then Pitt’s Sonny Hayes and his teammate Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris) are competing against real drivers like Max Verstappen and Charles Leclerc, and the film can’t figure out a way to build rivalries beyond the the two main characters. 

It starts off decently, becomes pretty dull fairly quickly and makes a desperate and woeful attempt to have an actual plot right at the end. The team is called APX GP and their logic is truly hideous but maybe appropriate for a sport that targets itself at repressive, money-focused shitholes like Abu Dhabi. Plus points go to Kerry Condon, way better than she needs to be as the team’s technical director who, despite herself, is inevitably interested in a bit of Brad.

Friendship

Ostensibly a comedy about the awkwardness of trying to make friends in middle-age – Tim Robinson plays a guy who very deliberately buys clothes in shades of beige who is thrilled when his cool new neighbour (Paul Rudd) invites him to hang out. I know Robinson is a big comedy deal but I don’t think I’ve seen his work before, and since it’s usually described as ‘cringe comedy’, probably not for me. And although the situations in this film are indeed, well, cringey, Robinson’s character is so obviously a complete psycho I wasn’t squirming because I felt no empathy. Not sure I laughed once. 

Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning

This is part of my round-up of 2025 movie releases – you'll find my favourite films of the year here and the mainstream etc bunch here (there's no science to what's gone in which of the two everything else lists). By rights, The Surfer should be here but you can find my thoughts on that over in Mainstream because I wanted to compare/contrast it with Jay Kelly.

(Where known, UK streaming services are listed – other than with the Netflix films, you can generally also watch these on video-on-demand.)

Freaky Tales

Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck were in the group of indie directors improbably picked by Marvel Studios to take charge of mega-budget superhero movies, in their case the OKish but profitable Captain Marvel. So after that, do you a) try to stay on the blockbuster gravy train or b) go back to the gritty, politically aware films (Half Nelson, Sugar) that made your reputation? 

Boden & Fleck have chosen c) an original movie that feels like it could have been based on a comic, but is firmly local and very indie. It’s made up of four interconnected stories taking place in Oakland in 1987, where we’re told a mysterious mystical force is influencing events.

Chapter 1 is about punk kids defending their venue from Nazi skins. Chapter 2 follows two female rappers (Dominique Thorne, Normani) getting the chance to battle Oakland hip-hop legend Too $hort (Demario "Symba" Driver – yer actual Too $hort, meanwhile, narrates and has a cameo). In 3 we have an enforcer (the ubiquitous Pedro Pascal) trying to go straight and in the last segment, a basketball star (Jay Ellis) is on a revenge mission. 

While there’s some extreme – but cartoonish – violence in the first segment, there’s a shift in the last two with a couple of quite grim things happening. It doesn’t fully shift the tone, which remains fairly goofy, but I found it a bit unsettling.

A lot of movies are namechecked in Freaky Tales – two of the chapters start with characters coming out of a cinema after seeing The Lost Boys – and the one that offers the best clue to what you’re seeing is John Carpenter’s Big Trouble In Little China.

There’s no depth here – when you’re giving the chunkiest role to Pascal that’s a sign to me that the directors aren’t super fussed about emotional stuff – but it is entertaining and pleasingly specific.

Blue Moon

This is a big star-turn movie for Ethan Hawke, who plays the great Broadway lyricist Loreanz Hart confronting his professional eclipse – it’s the night that Oklahoma!, the first of the Rodgers  & Hammerstein musicals has opened. Larry is holding court in Sardi’s, knowing that soon the Oklahoma! gang will be there to celebrate and he’ll be confirmed as yesterday’s man. It’s not quite happening in real time, maybe, but it feels like it. The supporting cast – and they are definitely the supporting cast – has some fairly big names (Margaret Qualley, Andrew Scott, Bobby Cannavale) but equally good work comes from the lesser-known (at least to me) Patrick Kennedy and Jonah Lees. And it’s directed by Hawke’s old buddy Richard Linklater.

Some people really love this movie – I like it but maybe it aims too much for a big emotional payoff for my taste.

Full review here

Sister Midnight

Filmed and set in Mumbai, dialogue in Hindi, but not a product of the Indian film industry, Sister Midnight introduces itself with its main character arriving on a train filmed in saturated colours to the sound of Howlin’ Wolf. In other words, as if this were a Jim Jarmusch film. 

It’s an eccentric story about a pair of misfits who don’t know each other well and have got married. Eventually, Uma (Radhika Apte) realises that she can’t expect much from her useless husband and starts building a life of her own. It’s been described as a horror film, but the horror elements arrive fairly late in the day and don’t really define the film. It’s more a comedy, although there wasn’t a lot of laughter in a fairly packed cinema when I saw it. The vibe is established by the look and the soundtrack, including The Stooges and Motörhead – this is film that wants to wear a leather jacket. It might even be as cool as it wants to be and I definitely enjoyed it…

Tornado

Just when you least expect it, a Scottish samurai movie. That is, a samurai film that takes place in Scotland rather than one about a ronin who is Scottish. It’s the 1790s and in a wind-blasted landscape, we have assorted travelling showfolk, including Japanese father-daughter puppeteers, and a pack of nasty but none-too-bright bandits led by Tim Roth. The dad is played by Takehiro Hira, who was the main bad guy in Shōgun*, and the daughter – Tornado – by Kōki. Jack Lowden and Joanne Whalley are also kicking about. Bad stuff, of course, happens and eventually – and it is eventually – some pleasing Japanese sword-wielding takes place. 

This curious little film was directed by John Maclean, formerly of The Beta Band, whose only previous movie was the accurately titled Slow West. I liked Tornado quite a lot – it shares an effective low-budget evocation of the past with something like A Field In England and I bought into the world it creates.

*I mean, arguably almost all the guys in Shōgun are bad guys but…

The Ballad Of Wallis Island 

The set-up screams either horror or mystery: singer arrives on remote island to play a festival, finds there is no festival, just one obsessive fan. But TBOWI is, it turns out, a low-key character comedy.

First thing to say, considering that this is a movie largely made by British TV veterans, it looks great, making full use of the island location. Second, I guess, should be praise for Tim Key, co-writer and the one who plays the host. I have a limited tolerance for comedy characters who won’t shut up – that Key makes this guy sympathetic is quite a feat. 

The film also makes good use of Carey Mulligan.

Inevitability, my mind did wander into pondering whether an introspective retro-folk act (as opposed to Mumford & Sons) could have made it onto the cover of the NME in the early 2010s. (And also, how did they have time to make so many records?) Laura Marling is the best comp.

As I have a heart of flint, the funnier first half of the film worked better for me than the more emotional later part. But it’s a much better film than I was expecting – the fact that I was reminded of Powell & Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going without immediately wishing that I was watching that film instead is a big compliment.

Die My Love

This is very much a movie that you watch for its lead performance: Jennifer Lawrence as a woman not having a great time in the early months of motherhood. If you think that’s going to look like someone sitting around being miserable and inert, you’d be wrong. Lawrence’s Grace ranges from stroppy to volcanic – her scorn for anyone attempting to be sympathetic is ferocious.

The situation is not helped by the fact that she and boyfriend/hubby Jackson (Robert Pattinson) have moved to a crumbling house in the country where his uncle killed himself. I think the film is telling me all I need to know about Jackson when he fails to understand why his girlfriend hates Cream’s bombastic guitar wankfest Crossroads and loves David Bowie’s sweet new-parenthood song Kooks as to him they are both ‘classic rock’. Essentially, he loves his wife but has zero insight. 

Die My Love is a curious film. It’s not a conventional fun watch – you’re always primed for bad shit that might and likely will happen, although not on the level of Lynne Ramsey’s previous film You Were Never Really Here, which I found wilfully and indigestibly unpleasant – but it’s powered by so much energy and lifeforce from Lawrence that the lingering effect from the movie is weirdly invigorating. Don’t expect at any point to be sure what is or isn’t really happening, but as long as that doesn’t bother you, this is memorable and cool.

Sorry, Baby

Sorry, Baby is a good film, just not one that clicked for me. Writer-director Eva Victor stars as Agnes, a young academic living in a small college town to whom a very bad thing (not one she ever manages to say the name of, I think) has happened. The movie shifts back to the time before the trauma and the years after. I’m guessing what VIctor’s aiming for is a film that shows you can still celebrate the power of friendship and enjoy an offbeat sense of humour without diminishing the awfulness of what happens to Agnes. Naomi Ackie is terrifc as the bestie who has moved onwards and upwards, there’s a lovely one-scene performance from John Carroll Lynch and there are definitely funny moments. But I kept feeling I wasn’t on the same wavelength as the film and the final scene definitely lost me.

Les Femmes au Balcon (The Balconettes)

Essentially a very 1990s-style ‘we’ve got a body to dispose of’ black comedy, complete with the obligatory trip to the hardware store to buy all sorts of stuff you wouldn’t want to explain away in court, but with a hefty dose of 2020s feminism added in. It’s directed by and stars Noémie Merlant, best known outside France as the painter in Portrait Of A Lady On Fire (you might also recognise her from Tár), who co-wrote the script with POALOF director Céline Sciamma. It takes place in Marseilles during a heatwave (strong echoes of Do The Right Thing in its early scenes), during which a group of female friends (Sanda Codreanu, Souheila Yacoub and Merlant) are spending time out on the balcony and ogling the hot bloke in an apartment across the street (add Rear Window to the list of references). Eventually, stuff happens and they end up in a bit of a fix. If you remember this subgenre from back in the day, you’ll know that managing the tone is tricky, that for every Shallow Grave there were at least two Very Bad Things. And Merlant doesn’t quite get it right, especially as the movie works towards what’s meant to be an uplifting ending. Shame, because the cast is great and it has an excellent vibe and some good, early Almodóvar-flavoured moments. 

Bugonia

Yorgos Lanthimos has reached a point where he is playing by his own rules: he releases utterly batshit movies and they are treated as mainstream cultural products. And here we are again… 

We’re in rural Georgia and our main character is Teddy (Jesse Plemons). He keeps bees, works in a distribution depot, and has developed his own, uh, view of the world. He convinces his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) to take part in his plan to kidnap a biotech CEO (Emma Stone, this being a Lanthimos movie) on the grounds she’s an alien and that they can use her to negotiate for Earth’s liberation from its secret rulers. 

This is all taking place in a broadly realist 2025 setting, and Teddy is clearly unhinged so your standard assumption would be to assume that Stone’s character is right when she argues that these dudes have swallowed too much online nonsense. But as this is a Lanthimos film, then – and the conversations I overheard leaving the cinema confirmed this  – the audience knows there’s some possibility that she really is from Andromeda. 

At the heart of the story is a traditional two-hander between a previously powerless kidnapper and a captive trying to make sense of the situation, constantly switching tactics from threats to compliance and back. It’s an impressive acting showcase and a chance to run through a series of big current topical debates, although seemingly more because the film finds them interesting than anything useful is being said.

YL’s movies have the capability of being silly and bleak at the same time, and that’s very much the case here. It’s closer to Kinds Of Kindness or The Lobster than to The Favourite or Poor Things, and I found it more impressive than engaging.

Train Dreams

Terrence Malick/David Lowery-flavoured (ie, lots of landscape & magic hour footage etc, not much talking) account of the life of a logger in the US northwest in the first half of the 20th century. Plus points: the camerawork and the 20 minutes or so we get of William H Macy as a veteran explosives guy. Minus points: the narration and montages towards the end of the movie, which tip it towards twee and even cloying despite the austere subject matter. Full review here

(Netflix)

It Was Just An Accident

The second-best feature film of the year, according to Metacritic’s averaging out of critics' scores. I (as surely anyone sane would) appreciate that Jafar Panahi is risking life and limb making films like this in Iran. And I like the fact that his film about people encountering someone who is maybe the bastard who tortured them in prison is roughly comedic shaggy-dog story with a bunch of oddballs squeezed into a van, two of them in increasingly grimy wedding outfits. It’s Death And The Maiden by way of The Daytrippers, rather than a film that only wants to tell you that torture sucks, that living under a repressive theocratic regime sucks, that having to pay bribes to get almost anything to happen sucks. But do I think this is a great film, judged as a film? Honestly, no.

The Brutalist

The Brutalist is this (or last, if you’re in the US) year’s Tár, a big, brooding movie about artists and art, one with a noisy fanbase and a final third or so that invites assorted readings. Unlike Tár, the focus is not on the artist-as-monster (although Adrian Brody’s Laszlo Toth does have his moments). Rather, it’s artist v patron. 

Toth, a distinguished modernist architect, survives concentration camp and arrives penniless in the US. A couple of twists of fate put him in a situation where he has the opportunity to bring his most grandiose vision to life but is entirely at the mercy of a self-important mogul (Guy Pearce) and his spoilt son (Joe Alwyn). 

This is very explicitly a film of two halves: it comes with a welcome intermission if you see it in cinemas. The first half is the more trad account of an immigrant encountering America with its generosity and cruelty. The second is rather weirder, with one of the odder metaphors-made-literal in film history. 

The second half worked less well for me – like a lot of recent critical faves, it’s somewhat fuzzy with the narrative but quite shouty with the message. Impressive but not wholly satisfying.

Honey Don’t!

This is the second of Tricia Cooke and Ethan Coen’s comedy-thrillers led by Margaret Qualley as a sexually voracious/anti-romance lesbian. This time she plays a private eye named Honey O’Donohue, operating in a dusty town (I think it’s meant to be inland California but it was filmed in New Mexico) and trying to unravel three possibly connected crimes. There’s a friendly male cop who can’t quite grasp her repeated explanation of why she’s not interested, a female cop (Aubrey Plaza) in whom she's definitely interested and a sleazy evangelist (Chris Evans) up to all sorts of bad things. 

There’s a lot to like – Qualley, Plaza, the rest of the cast, great opening credit sequence, the look of film. It’s set now but Honey basically lives as if it were the 1970s – in that and the general vibe it reminded me quite a lot of the recent Natasha Lyonne/Rian Johnson TV show Poker Face. 

But while I’m in the small but increasingly vocal minority who defended the first Cooke/Coen film Drive-Away Dolls, I ended up less keen on this one. That’s basically a tone thing – D-AD is joyously trashy and silly, while this sometimes edges into Fargo or Blood Simple territory and some pretty nasty stuff happens, usually with a comic tinge, but a violently slapstick one. It’s a tricky one to get right – dozens of post-Tarantino/post-Coens comedy thrillers go astray, and Honey Don’t! sometimes ends up toppling off the tightrope.

Hot Milk

Moody young half-Irish, half-Greek, English-raised Sofia (I started off guessing she’s meant to be a teenager but it turns out she’s 26) (Emma Mackey) goes to the south of Spain* with her overbearing mother Rose (Fiona Shaw). Rose, who declaims rather than chatting, uses a wheelchair and has chronic pain, is here for a last-throw-of-the-dice radical/bullshit medical treatment. While she’s in the clinic with her creepy doctor (Vincent Perez), Sofia meets German bohemian Ingrid (Vicky Krieps) and becomes pretty keen on her. But while Ingrid does the big emotional connection thing, that’s not going to stop her also sleeping with dudes. I was fully absorbed while watching this – nice setting, it’s pretty vibey – but it’s one of those films that just evaporates when it’s over and the flaws ended up as all I could remember.

*It’s filmed in Greece, though.

(MUBI)

The documentaries (well, sort of)

Pavements 

Director Alex Ross Perry knows there’s precious little of note in the career of 1990s indie rockers Pavement*. So he’s gone above & beyond to keep us entertained: staging an exhibition and an off-Broadway jukebox musical and filming chunks of an emotionally overwrought biopic, plus behind-the-scenes stuff for all three. You might find this massive in-joke off-putting – I really like it. The problem is that woven in with all of this is an actual documentary about Stephen Malkmus and co, and that stuff is crashingly dull.

*What about the middle-aged drummer, you ask? There’s a whole separate documentary about him.

Full review here

Sly Lives (aka The Burden Of Black Genius)

Conventional but well-made documentary following the rise and fall of the prodigiously talented but addiction-prone Sly Stone, raising – as the subtitle tells us – the underlying question of whether life becomes near-impossible for geniuses who are black (or at least black in the US). This is second feature-length documentary directed by drummer/producer/DJ/podcast host/cookery writer etc etc etc Amir ‘Questlove’ Thompson – his first, Summer Of Soul, won an Oscar. 

As often with both music docs and biopics, it’s the pre-fame stuff that’s the most interesting – Sylverster Stewart made a gospel record with his siblings when he was 13, had local hits with a multi-racial doo-wop group in his late teens, became a radio DJ and produced a bunch of records, including the first version of Somebody To Love. 

Director Joel Alfonso Vargas Stars Juan Collado, Destiny Checo, Nathaly Navarro, Yohanna Florentino USA 2025 Language English, Spanish (English subtitles) 1hr 41mins Colour

Very much a debut movie, but there’s good stuff going on here

Rico (Juan Collado) is 19 and lives in the Bronx with his mother (Yohanna Florentino) and sister Sally (Nathaly Navarro). He earns some money selling homemade alcopops (‘nutties’) on the beach, which in New York City can’t be a year-round gig. He’s not, as far as we can see, in education. In other words, his life seems fine for now but it’s not obvious where it’s going from here.

Then he gets his 16-year-old girlfriend Destiny (Destiny Checo) pregnant, convinces her not to get an abortion and promises to support her and the baby. Which, as his mother points out, seems wildly ambitious considering he’s never been close to supporting himself. In the meantime, she moves into their already crowded apartment.

Collado is fine as Rico but what makes the film work is the female characters. Navarro as Sally brings spark and humour whenever she is on screen. Meanwhile, the first time we see Destiny, she seems inert, but that’s very deceptive. It’s just that she’s overwhelmed by the situation and suddenly living in a strange home with a family that isn’t hers. As the film progresses, she starts to assert herself and grows as a presence. Which raises the question of why the story doesn’t focus on one of the compelling female characters rather than the somewhat clueless bloke?

The film looks good, all credit to Rufai Ajala whose first feature-length gig as a director of photography this is. In particular, there’s a rare moment of pause where the camera just takes a drift around the neighbourhood, and that’s excellent. That’s welcome in a movie that has a lot of scenes with people shouting in them. It’s often quality shouting*, but it does get a bit relentless.

Director Richard Linklater Stars Guillaume Marbeck, Zoey Deutch, Aubry Dullin, Matthieu Penchinat, Benjamin Clery France/USA 2025 Language French (with English subtitles), English 1hr 46mins Black & white

More punk rock than you will ever be

This feels like a fairly niche pleasure: acclaimed American movie director goes to France and makes a film about the making of a film in 1959, doing his best to get his picture to look as if it was made at the same time as its subject matter. And in case that sounds too accessible, large chunks of what is said in this film comes in the form of aphorisms/pronouncements.*

JLG gets some advice from the mighty Jean-Pierre Meville (Tom Novembre) I am the niche audience for this niche movie. I realised that at previous London Film Festivals I had seen a comedy about Jean-Luc Godard in the late ‘60s and a drama about Jean Seberg set in the same period. So of course I am on-board for a film about the making of A Bout De Souffle (Breathless) the movie that launched Godard’s career and secured Seberg a place in cinema history.

Although A Bout De Souffle always seemed to me like the entry point into the nouvelle vague**, at the start of this film, obnoxious young cinema critic Jean-Luc Godard (Guillaume Marbeck, looking a lot like the man himself) is worried that he’s missed the wave entirely. Several of his mates have already had the chance to direct a feature film, but not him. At 28, he feels he’s getting old. But after his chum François Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard) gets a rapturous reception at Cannes for his debut Les Quatre Cents Coups, there’s a bit of money available for a thriller conceived by Truffaut and directed by JLG. 

Despite the fact that there’s no actual script, but aided by the fact that during his time as a writer for Cahiers du Cinema he’s inveigled his way into many corners of the French film industry, Godard manages to sign on fast-rising Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin) and actual Hollywood starlet Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch). Then he heads out into the streets of Paris and attempts to trash all known rules of filmmaking, with production only kept possible by the resourcefulness of cinematographer Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat) and the patience of assistant director Pierre Rissient (Benjamin Clery).

This is a comedy, with much of the humour coming from Godard’s utter wilfulness – given three weeks to shoot a full-length film, he decides to scrap whole days if he’s just not feeling it. He seems deluded and at times the antics start to resemble something like Bowfinger… only, if you are watching this, you almost certainly know that not only did he somehow make it to the end of the production of A Bout De Souffle without getting fired, on IMDB he has 138 credits as a director.

The more serious stuff centres on Jean Seberg, who had won a talent contest as a teenager to star in Saint Joan, directed by Otto Preminger, and then had been brutally bullied by Preminger during the making of her first two films. Suddenly, with A Bout De Souffle, instead of being in huge but oppressive productions, she’s out running around Paris with a bunch of apparent reckless amateurs, feeling a mixture of liberation and panic. 

Given the sheer number of characters he wants to show us in passing, Richard Linklater makes the trad but sensible decision of using captions to identify who were seeing, reaching a peak in a scene where Roberto Rossellini goes to the Cahiers du Cinema office and speaks to a packed room with dozens of writers and directors. 

It looks absolutely perfect and bounces along with all the energy that a film about people just starting out in the movie business should have. Linklater is 65 and it's now 35 years since he made his own influential, low-budget, making-it-up-as-we-go-along film, Slacker, but he seems to have no trouble tapping into the excitement of getting that first chance.

*Inevitable if you are making a film about Godard? I made a similar comment about Le Redoutable. **Wondering if these days maybe Cléo de 5 à 7 is considered a better starting point?

I saw Nouvelle Vague at the London Film Festival 2025

Lots more Linklater:

Blue Moon Hit Man

Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood

Last Flag Flying Everybody Wants Some!!

Director Jim Jarmusch Stars Tom Waits, Mayim Bialik, Adam Driver, Vicky Krieps, Cate Blanchett, Charlotte Rampling, Indya Moore, Luka Sabbat USA/Ireland/France/Italy/Japan 2025 Language English, a little French (with English subtitles) 1hr 50mins Colour

Cinema’s most beloved hipster encounters Battenberg cake – will all be well?

The films of Jim Jarmusch generally take place in a world that resembles ours but is not quite the same, a world where everyone is gently eccentric and somewhat fetishistic about certain kinds of retro clothing, furniture, music etc. To use an appropriately anachronistic term improbably spoken by young folk in Father Mother Sister Brother, Jarmusch doesn’t usually make movies about ‘squares’.* 

Which makes Father Mother Sister Brother a bit different. Not, to be clear, in the style of the storytelling or the humour. And in case you were wondering if you'd wandered into the wrong cinema, there’s a series of shots of hot drinks seen from above echoing those from Coffee And Cigarettes. Like that film – and more specifically Night On Earth**, FMSB is made up of separate segments with something in common: in this case, they are about adult siblings making a rare visit to (a) parent(s).

Coffee And Cigarettes (top) vs Father Mother Sister Brother (above) Father takes place in rural New Jersey and is the funniest of the three stories. The dad is played by Jarmusch’s old buddy Tom Waits and is unmistakably Waitsian. The novelty comes from the fact that we largely see the encounter from the point of view of the very conventional offspring*** (Mayim Bialik and Adam Driver), so for once we’re on the outside of Jarmuschworld looking in.

Sister Brother is the warmest segment and (maybe not coincidentally) free of squares and their unappealing objects. For instance, there’s a lot of driving in this film, much of which in the first two parts happens in the charmless form of SUVs. In Sister Brother, though, we squeeze through the streets of Paris in a Volvo P1800, a beautiful piece of 1960s engineering from a long-lost time when cars could still be stylish. Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat play the siblings confronting the absence of their recent dead parents via their spaces and stuff. 

Which leaves the middle part, Mother, one that seems furthest from the director’s comfort zone. We’re in genteel Dublin, where Charlotte Rampling once a year has her daughters (Vicky Krieps, Cate Blanchett) round for tea. As in an actual tea party, with formal china and a barrage of fondant-plastered cakes in unnerving colours. Who would have imagined that in a Jarmusch film the camera would spend so much time on slices of Battenberg?

The issue here is with the casting: Krieps plays the daughter with pink hair, Blanchett her more uptight sister. 1) Apparently there is a line explaining away Vicky Krieps' unmistakably considerably east-of-Dover accent – I missed it, and found her voice somewhat distracting. I know there are plenty of siblings with accents from different countries but I feel that in a film focused on family and with not that much dialogue, you ideally wouldn’t want to have to account for stuff like that. 2) If you see Cate Blanchett in the cast of a movie, you expect her to do things. She’s not really a hang-out-on-the-edge-of-the-action-adding-to-the-vibes kind of actor. But here she has nish, absolutely nish, to do. And that’s confusing.

For all that, I think Mother does ultimately work, there’s something there in the relationships, the quiet alliance of the two daughters who seem to have little in common but care about each other. And in think Father Mother Sister Brother as a whole works, too. 

One of Jarmusch’s heroes (and he’s definitely a guy with heroes) is the great Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu. And the relationship, sometimes loving, sometimes quietly destructive, between parents and offspring, is the core theme of Ozu’s most famous films. At the age of 72, this is the first time that Jarmusch has ventured into that territory. I’ll admit, particularly as we arrive in bay-windowed Dublin, that I wasn’t always sure that this was a good idea, but in retrospect I think it was. Watching the film, I felt pleasantly immersed in it; a day later, the little quibbles were playing on my mind; a few days on, I keep coming back to the many good things about it.

*It’s a long time since I’ve seen it, but I feel like Broken Flowers is the one where the characters are least likely to own, say, Train Kept A-Rollin by Johnny Burnette And The Rock and Roll Trio on 45 and/or Brilliant Corners by Thelonious Monk on original 33. (Not including, obv, Dead Man, which takes place in the 19th century.)

**As opposed to Mystery Train, which has three parts but that takes place in the same city and the stories intersect.

***One of the companies that helped pay for the film was Saint Laurent. There's a fair chance that Bialik and Driver being overdressed for the occasion of a visit to their boho dad and also Blanchett’s secretly high-fashion look (not really matching her character or her hairstyle) are because the Saint Laurent clothes had to be crowbarred in. I saw Father Mother Sister Brother at the London Film Festival 2025 Reviews of other Jarmusch movies:

The Dead Don't Die

Paterson

Only Lovers Left Alive

Director Richard Linklater Stars Ethan Hawke, Bobby Cannavale, Andrew Scott, Margaret Qualley USA 2025 Language English 1hr 40mins Colour

Songwriting genius bears witness to his own eclipse

There’s a very particular subset of films that you would swear blind were adapted from a play but turn out not to be. Or maybe we should regard them as plays not yet staged.

I saw Blue Moon a few days after I watched Peter Hujar’s Day. Both cover a short span of time (in this case, an evening) in the life of a notable real person, both consist entirely of people talking, both take place more or less in a single setting. But because of the way it’s structured and shot, the way the characters talk and interact, Peter Hujar’s Day is by its nature a film while Blue Moon is at heart a play. (No slight intended.)

It’s 1943, the opening night of Oklahoma!, music by Richard Rodgers and words by Oscar Hammerstein II. We experience that triumph, though, from the point of view of Lorenz ‘Larry’ Hart (Ethan Hawke), the lyricist who had been Dick Rodgers’ writing partner up to that point. We go into Sardi’s with Larry before the Oklahoma! party arrives. It’s closed, so the only people around are the barman (Bobby Cannavale), a young piano player in military uniform (Jonah Lees) and a quiet guy in the corner who turns out to be the great New Yorker writer EB White (Patrick Kennedy.) 

So at this point, the stage is Larry’s, and he expounds on his philosophy of life, the difference between his approach and Hammerstein’s, and talks about his infatuation with a beautiful student called Elizabeth, a topic that produces both prurience and surprise based on Hart’s reputation. He contests the assumption that prefers men by avowing that he’s omnisexual. An alcoholic who had been in and out of treatment, he flirts with having a drink (or more likely, many drinks).

And that sets us up for when the melancholy peace of the restaurant is broken by the crowd arriving to celebrate a great opening night, particularly Dick Rodgers (Andrew Scott) and, yes, Elizabeth (Margaret Qualley), whose existence the characters and audience were maybe doubting. 

It’s easy to imagine this as the story of the cruel betrayal of a talented but difficult man. But the film – and other accounts – tell us that everyone loved Larry. Rodgers and Hammerstein say time and time again that their partnership is in addition to, not replacing Rodgers’ work with Hart. And Hart is clear that Oklahoma! and some of the other similarly openly sentimental projects Rodgers was interested in were not his cup of tea.

There are at least three (almost Back To The Future-level) nod-to-things-to-come in-jokes here. I think if you're going to do this, three is better than one – it’s the film acknowledging that this is a game it’s playing with the audience.  Cannavale, Scott, Lees and Kennedy are all excellent. Hawke holds the camera for the whole of the running time, and makes the most of a juicy part.

(Lorenz Hart was very short. Ethan Hawke is not. I’m guessing a combination of practical and digital effects were used to make Hawke seem diminutive. However they did it, it’s not distracting.)

I was fully absorbed by the film throughout but maybe didn’t feel the full emotional sock that’s intended. That could just be my cold, cold heart rather than a failing of the movie, though.

Director Park Chan-wook Stars Lee Byung-hun, Son Ye-jin, Lee Sung-min South Korea 2025 Language Korean (with English subtitles) 2hrs 19mins Colour

Utterly engrossing, perfectly made dark comedy

The words translated as ‘no other choice’ are spoken many times in this film. From both corporations and individuals, it’s a denial of responsibility, an insistence that there were no alternatives, a pretty transparent attempt at justifying bad behaviour. 

As the film starts, Man-soo (Lee Byung-hun) has a perfect-seeming life. A really cool house with a garden, greenhouse and terraces for his many plants, an attractive wife (Son Ye-jin) who seems really into him, two kids, two dogs, a job he’s good at.

Then a US company buys the paper manufacturer he’s always worked for, he’s made redundant and, in a brutal job market for people with very niche skills, everything he has is at risk. This being a Park Chan-wook film, he comes up with a ruthless scheme to restore his fortunes. The question is, though, does he actually have any of the talents needed for the task? 

No Other Choice is a comedy – sometimes a pretty nasty one, with some excellent slapstick and some classic bits of farce. There’s a reasonable amount of violence, and other stuff that’s fairly unpleasant. But it’s to serve the story, not just to create set pieces. 

Park has always been a visually inventive film-maker, going right back to 2000’s Joint Security Area. But there’s a combination of lushness and multiple layers of images incorporated into a shot here that picks up and amplifies elements from The Handmaiden, The Little Drummer Girl and Decision To Leave. There’s a not at all subtle point being made with characters who enjoy being surrounded by foliage but who work(ed) in an industry that uses trees as raw material. But the homes we see are also fascinating spaces.

There are lots of great little riffs, and plenty of detail built up showing what this family feels is at stake and how that leads to act the way that they do, however batshit that might turn out to be. 

As well as other Park films, I also thought of Hitchcock at his finest, the way that this is a beautiful and beautifully propulsive story with a fairly sadistic core. It’s well over two hours but I don’t think it has an excess minute. Easily one of the best things I’ve seen in a cinema this year. 

Director Fernando Eimbcke Stars Aivan Uttapa, Diego Olmedo, Gustavo Sánchez Parra, Rosa Armendariz USA/Mexico 2025 Language English, Spanish (with English subtitles) 1hr 24mins Colour

What if Superbad were also a tender family drama

Olmo opens with a Fast Times At Ridgemont High-style airbrushed masturbatory fantasy in which a Ford Mustang is arguably as important as the girl. It’s a movie about a 14-year-old kid and his best mate desperately scheming to get to a party they’ve been reluctantly invited to by the girl they fancy from across the road.

You could, however, with equal truthfulness, describe Olmo as a story about a Mexican family living in the US and just hanging in there, the mother taking every shift she can because the dad has MS, leaving the burden of care on her two kids, who desperately want to be normal teenagers. 

Somehow, brilliantly, almost miraculously, it works. And it works not so much by selling us on the tonal leaps as by not seeming to be making tonal leaps. 

The action takes place over about 24 hours. We’re somewhere in the American southwest and it’s the late 1970s or maybe the early '80s*. Cecilia (Andrea Suarez Paz) has been offered an extra shift at work and can’t turn it down because the family is overdue on the rent. Ana (Rosa Armendariz) wants to go to the roller disco with her friends. Olmo (Aivan Uttapa) – along with his bestie Miguel (Diego Olmedo) – has the unexpected, can’t-quite-believe chance to go to a party where Nina (Melanie Frometa) will be. But someone has to be at home in case Nestor (Gustavo Sánchez Parra) needs something. 

We see all this, though, from Olmo’s perspective, presented in classic teen comedy style as obstacles in the way of him getting a chance, however improbable, with Nina. So there’s a desperate series of barters to be done, half and full lies to be told, and stuff to try somehow to ignore.

Because, meanwhile, these are people with pain and rage. Nestor is furious because he needs help just to take a piss; Ana because she thinks all the other kids are treating her as an outcast because she can’t hang out because she’s too busy being a carer; Olmo – at a guess – because the stress of being in their small house with all this is going on just as hormones would be sending him nuts anyway; Cecilia because she’s the one who has to earn money and this wasn’t the way life was meant to turn out, right?

Director Kelly Reichardt Stars Josh O’Connor, Alana Haim, Sterling Thompson, Jasper Thompson, Hope Davis, John Magaro USA 2025 Language English 1hr 50mins Colour 

The queen of slow cinema makes a heist movie, of sorts

[As few spoilers as I can reasonably manage and still write about the film]

We’re in an art gallery. There’s a guy looking at some paintings and he’s played by Josh O’Connor, so we know he’s going to matter. But our attention is dragged away by a kid who is loudly recounting one of those puzzles where you encounter three beings and know that one of them always tells the truth and another always lies. Is he connected to the Josh O’Connor character? What about the woman played by Alana Haim? Based on this scene and the one thing I knew going in, I made an entirely wrong but plausible guess about what was going to happen in the movie.

Writer-director Kelly Reichardt gives us a slow drip of information throughout, so much so that when James (O’Connor) says something important and true about halfway through the film, I wasn’t sure if he was bluffing.

I don’t think Reichardt is trying to be tricksy; I think she’s giving the audience room to follow social norms and cinematic conventions and end up on the wrong path.

OK, here are some details from the film: James and Terri (Haim), are it turns out, married. We’re in Massachusetts and it’s 1970. An art heist happens, but this is much more of a character study than an action movie.

Although Reichardt is in some ways the definitive not-much-occurs US indie director, she does like to dabble in film genres. The most obvious comp among her movies for The Mastermind is her 2013 eco-terrorism sort-of thriller Night Moves. The Mastermind leans more towards humour than that film, particularly in its first half, but both show that Reichardt can do set-ups and tension well. 

And it is a film with two distinct acts, the second less comedic and more 1970s, both in style and in the awareness of what was happening in the country at that moment. With that, the character of James comes into clearer focus.

I think Josh O’Connor now is roughly where Adam Driver was a decade back,  minus the Star Wars angle. In other words, like him or not, he’s going to be ubiquitous in movies made by critics’ faves for the next few years. Fortunately, he’s been an asset to all the films I’ve seen him in.

Reichardt regular John Magaro is excellent in a relatively short but pivotal role. Then again, everyone is good – you don’t often get duff performances in Reichardt movies.

This is Reichardt’s most mainstream movie so far*, but I still think it will baffle anyone expecting an actual Hollywood comedy-thriller. But I think it’s a perfectly pitched, hugely enjoyable, insightful film. *The British TV channel Great Action has, much to my amusement, run Meek’s Cutoff at least a couple of times, complete with a plot description to make it sound like a standard western and not even listing Michelle Williams (who dominates the film) as one of the stars. 

I saw The Mastermind at the London Film Festival 2025

Reviews of other Reichardt movies: Old Joy

Director Clint Bentley Stars Joel Edgerton, Felicity Jones, Nathaniel Arcand, William H Macy, Will Patton USA 2025 Language English 1hr 42mins Colour

Beautiful places, hard lives

If you say your problem with a movie is the narration, there’s a bunch of people who would regard that as obvious because all narration should be unnecessary in visual storytelling. That’s not my take – there are films as different as (to pick just a tiny number of examples) Apocalypse Now and Kind Hearts And Coronets, Two Or Three Things That I Know About Her and The Royal Tenenbaums that make great use of voiceover.

And it’s hard to see how this particular movie could work without a narrator. Adapted from a novella by Denis Johnson*, it spans the life of a logger (Joel Edgerton) in the US north-west in the early 20th century, dipping into a day or a couple of weeks here and there. He’s a taciturn and fairly passive guy; the narration is an efficient way of telling the story and also nudging us towards stuff that the characters maybe don’t grasp. It’s not, I’m arguing, an inherently bad idea.

But ultimately, it pushes too hard, making what is – if you go by what happens on screen – a tale of a tough (but not joyless) life in a beautiful but unforgiving landscape feel kind of gloopy and trite. 

It looks lovely, all towering trees and blooming meadows and candlelit log cabins. Critics have inevitably referenced Terrance Malick and David Lowery, who gets a thank you. In particular, people have compared it to Lowery’s Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, but the film of his it made me think about more is A Ghost Story, a movie trying to do some of the same things but (for me) succeeding where Train Dreams eventually stumbles.

Edgerton, who I’m generally agnostic about, is well cast, as is Felicity Jones as the love of his life. My favourite performance in the film, though, comes from William H Macy as the explosives guy on logging sites. 

As I often moan about the length of films, full credit to director Clint Bentley for bringing this in a tidy 1hr 42, when he could have easily used the span of time covered in the film to justify a sprawling movie. Instead, this is economically told. 

Train Dreams is a film I had high expectations for, and it certainly has great moments. But in the end, I felt it was trying too hard to determine the audience’s emotional reaction, and I bristled against that.

*For my money, the best Johnson movie adaptation is 1999’s Jesus’ Son. 

Director Ira Sachs Stars Ben Whishaw, Rebecca Hall USA/Germany/UK/Spain 2025 Language English 1hr 15mins Colour

Two people chat. In an apartment. That’s it. It’s great

It’s important to be clear about exactly what manner of film this is. It consists entirely of two people talking. Specifically, Linda (Rebecca Hall) is interviewing Peter (Ben Whishaw) about what he did (I think) the previous day, which was just an average working day for him. No flashbacks, no visualisations of what’s being said, just a man and a woman in an apartment. And since the dialogue is based (fairly closely, I gather) on an actual interview transcript, you’re not going to get the emotional peaks and troughs you’d expect with other two-handers. 

In other words, this a film that makes, say, Before Sunset seem like Boogie Nights. In order to enjoy it, you need to meet the film on its own terms. Did I enjoy it? I loved it. 

OK, so Peter Hujar was a photographer who worked in New York from the 1960s to the 1980s. He wasn’t famous but he was well-connected. Linda Rosenkrantz is a writer and Hujar’s mate and in 1974 she had the idea of doing a book about how artists spend their days. So she started off with Hujar, and the film recreates that interview. 

Not, it should be said, as it actually would have happened – we get the whole of Peter describing his day over the course of the hour-and-a-quarter running time but in the movie, a whole day passes. Linda and Peter are in different rooms, up on the roof, outside the window, with layers of clothing on and off – as much variety as director Ira Sachs can manage within the constraints he’s set himself. 

It looks so good. It’s shot on 16mm film (one of my favourite formats) and is just the most loving recreation of low-key fashionable 1970s New York you could imagine. (They have a mild disagreement at some point about the style of a place he approving suggests looks ‘affluent’ and she immediately dismisses as ‘tacky’. During the film, they are in Linda’s apartment, not Peter’s somewhat notorious loft.) And so little is happening, you really have time to take it all in, being absorbed by it, to feel you’re there. 

The conversational tone is gently gossipy, about some people I know about and some I don’t think I’ve ever heard of. The main work Peter did on the day he’s talking about was a shoot with Allen Ginsberg, who was apparently a bit of a twat towards Hujar. There's a chunk of discussion about the skills involved with developing photographic prints, and another chunk about the anxiety of being a freelancer and making sure you get paid (that bit was all-too-relatable for me). I don’t think familiarity with the New York art/music/gay/publishing scenes of the mid-1970s are strictly necessary to get into this film, but let me know.

Two part thought: a) I did spend the first few minutes thinking of ‘why, oh why, oh why is there this insistence on casting Brits to play Americans, especially when all they are doing is talking and you so you’re focused on how they sound and the actingness is so apparent' but b) yeah, Whishaw is, in fact, really good here. (Hall is half-American anyway so gets a pass.)

So, to be clear: Peter Hujar’s Day is a very particular cinematic experience. The young women sitting directly in front of us spent much of its short running time on their phones. And I get why. But me? I’m all in. 

Director Rebecca Zlotowski Stars Jodie Foster, Daniel Auteuil, Virginie Efira France 2025 Language French (with English subtitles), a tiny bit of English 1hr 43m Colour

Chic Parisian mystery, sort of

Vie Privée hovers between a cosy Only Murders In The Building amateur detective tale and something weirder and darker. Somewhere in the mix are guilt, the repression of pain, bad parenting, psychoanalysis and even maybe the collective historical trauma of France’s Jewish population. In other words, the kind of film you can either regard as boldly breaking out of genre boxes or a bit of a tonal muddle.

Jodie Foster – speaking flawless French – plays Lilian Steiner, a professionally very successful Paris-based psychoanalyst with a rather less settled personal life. As the film somewhat teasingly points out, the business advantage of the Freudian model is that since patients will never reach a point at which all their neuroses are history, they can spend decades working with the same shrink.

It’s two of her long-term patients who put the plot in motion. Lilian receives bad news about one of them while the other arrives unannounced to say he’s done with her because a hypnotist has fixed his problems in a single session. Pitched into a personal and professional crisis, Lilian visits the hypnotist and begins an investigation, neither of which seems a good idea. She recruits the help of one of the few people she trusts and who doesn’t think she’s fully lost the plot, her ex-husband Gaby (Daniel Auteuil).

This is a very pretty film, full of autumn leaves, spiral staircases and cute Parisian restaurants. It has a heavyweight cast – along with Auteuil and Foster you get Virginie Efira* and Mathieu Amalric, and cameos from Irène Jacob and legendary documentary director Frederick Wiseman.** Which is to say, there’s a pleasing sense of quality around the production.

Vie Privée is a film that works better while you’re watching it than when you’re thinking about it afterwards. It’s enjoyable, has funny moments, looks great and here’s to movies delving into the emotional lives of people nudging pension age. But the tone swerves around a bit too much and there’s a whole plot strand that ends up somewhat ‘huh?’

*Not a name you know? You are probably neither French/Belgian nor a MUBI subscriber. 

Director Paul Thomas Anderson Stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Chase Infiniti, Sean Penn, Teyana Taylor USA 2025 Language English, Spanish (no subtitles!*) 2hrs 41mins Colour

PTA goes big – it works

[Warning: broad spoilers about the structure of the film]

Here’s what I knew about One Battle After Another before I saw it: directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, stars Leonardo DiCaprio, cost a ton of money ($100m+) and loosely derived from a Thomas Pynchon novel, probably Vineland. I had heard the names of a couple of other actors, but they hadn’t stuck.

My experience with this film was similar to the one I had with Licorice Pizza: Anderson drops us straight into the story, there’s a lot going on and (despite 27 years of watching and enjoying PTA movies), I’m a little uncertain about what we’re doing here. And then at some point, it clicks for me, really clicks. 

So here’s the sort of spoiler: the first (sizeable) chunk of the movie, about a left-wing terrorist group operating in LA, turns out to essentially be a prologue. Some of these people we won’t see again. I say sort-of spoiler because this is what you see first, but the official description of the film is about where we are after the prologue.

So, for the rest of the film, our main characters are Bob (DiCaprio), single dad, former bomb maker, who by his own description has ‘fried his mind’ with drugs and alcohol over many years; Willa (Chase Infiniti), his teenage daughter; Sergio (Benicio Del Toro), Willa’s martial arts instructor; and Colonel Steve Lockjaw (Sean Penn), obsessive military man trying to track down Bob and Willa as a consequence of stuff that happened in the first act. 

At some point, One Battle After Another becomes a series of chases, the most thrilling of which takes us into, out of, under, through and above buildings in a city where a law-enforcement crackdown has (deliberately) triggered a riot. The relentless, kinetic nature of those chases has led to comparisons to the Mad Max movies, which is to say, you’ll rarely see better. 

I’ve not read Vineland but I have read other Pynchon books and seen PTA’s previous Pynchon-based movie, Inherent Vice. I’m not sure I can imagine what OBAA feels like without that context: you think you’re watching a serious political thriller, only to be repeatedly jarred by eg, nuns who grow pot, fairly broad sexual gags etc. This stuff can and does feel pretty goofy at times, and yet that doesn’t make the rest of it any less sincere.

The film’s success rests on DiCaprio’s ability to play a well-meaning fuck-up. Fortunately, he’s very good at that. I’ve realised I generally only enjoy his work when he’s being funny (this, Wolf Of Wall Street, Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, Catch Me If You Can). Much the same applies to Sean Penn, who I find tough to watch when he’s being earnest, but has a sneakily good record in comedy. 

The rest of the cast are excellent, there’s some great songs on the soundtrack plus a Jonny Greenwood score that to my non-jazz-trained ears sounds Thelonious Monk-indebted, and it looks great. (I saw it in standard digital projection on a decent sized screen – I’ve heard it’s extraordinary in the various speciality formats.**)

I’m surprised, to say the least, that a major film studio in 2025 was willing to put so much money into such a weird movie. Sure, there have been more obviously oddball hits in recent times (Everything Everywhere All At Once, Poor Things), but those cost a fraction of One Battle After Another’s budget, and lacked its political angle, which has ended up being rather more topical than it was when the film was greenlit. 

But the result of that baffling decision is a movie that’s hugely exciting, funny, strange and kind of touching in places.  *Honestly, I don't think anything is said that you can't broadly understand from the context. **I subsequently saw it on film in VistaVision, a format that you could only see it in (at least initially) in LA, Boston, NYC and London. It looked lovely but I don't think it could claim it made a significant difference. More PTA reviews:

Phantom Thread Punch-Drunk Love