The Best of 2025

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Posted on January 8, 2026 by badblokebob

The whole point of these year-in-review posts is to reflect on the year just gone, of course, but this time round it’s made me think about more than just what films I watched, what films I missed, the various trends they contributed to or failed at, and which of them were better than which others. I’m not about to get too philosophical, but…

While it hasn’t been a great year for my blog (what with the total and entire lack of any new reviews whatsoever), my 100 Films in a Year Challenge has been important on a personal level to a degree it hasn’t been since perhaps even 2007, the year I first attempted the challenge. Back then, the whole point was to get me to watch more films. From about 2012 onwards, I got into such a groove that it was less “can I watch 100 films?” and more “how quickly can I watch 100 films? And how many more after that?” Recently, though, my attention has wandered to other forms of entertainment (even before I felt compelled to include comparative graphs in the statistics post). That’s no bad thing — for years I’ve mentioned how my focus on film viewing arguably detracts from other things I want to do — but, as I’ve finally cracked that (to an extent), the Challenge has resumed its old role of being a force to drag me back to movies. Without the “need” it provides to keep my progress ticking over and complete the goal, I’m certain I would’ve watched even fewer films than I did this past year.

That said, it hasn’t been a great movie year in another respect: quality. Indeed, as the statistics have already revealed, it was my second-lowest scoring year ever, a fact that bears out how I’ve felt about it all along. It’s not got so bad that I wanted to bring back my ‘worst of’ list (which I ditched in 2022 because we don’t need to celebrate negativity), but, truth be told, there aren’t many “all-time favourite”-level films in the list below. Nor was it a hotly-contested battle for the top spot (unlike some years, when half the list could have taken #1 if I’d been in a different mood). That doesn’t mean these are bad films by any means — I didn’t consider ditching the list entirely! — so it’s time for me to stop being such a downer on them and switch into praiseful mode.

The Twelve Best Films I Watched for the First Time in 2025

It’s ten years this year since I made a significant permanent change to my ‘best of’ list, but I still feel the need to clarify this every year. Maybe that’s unnecessary, but hey, it never hurts to be clear. So, what used to be a “top 10” is nowadays a “top 10%” — I watched 116 movies for the first time in 2025, which comes out as 12 films in this year’s top ‘ten’.

And another point I’ll continue to clarify year after year is that all 116 of those movies are eligible for this list, not just brand-new releases. Nonetheless, I have sometimes included a ranking for the current year; but as I only watched 17 films that had their UK release in 2025 and (no spoilers) very few of them have made the top ten, I haven’t bothered to note their ‘2025 rank’ this time.

Now, without any further caveats…

12 Anna Karenina

Joe Wright’s Tolstoy adaptation boasts phenomenal stylised production design and cinematography; enough that the characters and story are almost incidental — whatever their quality, the visuals would be worth it. I have no idea whether it’s a faithful or accurate adaptation, but as an overall work of art, it’s enchanting.

11 The Power of the Dog

I sort of avoided this for a while, because I’ve not always got on with Jane Campion’s work and thought it might be a bit too abstruse for my taste. Indeed, it’s not always clear why you’re watching what you’re watching as it goes along, but it all clicks into place by the end; which, further, makes me think it might be even better on a rewatch.

10 Juggernaut

Considered dispassionately, Juggernaut deploys most of the familiar beats and clichés of any bomb-disposal-based thriller. But I overlooked all that when actually watching it thanks to the touch of director Richard Lester, who brings a kind of absurd mundanity to the “keep calm and carry on” attitude of the passengers even as bombs are going off beneath them. The silliness and tension work in harmony to make the latter hit home, clichés or no; and the star-studded cast give weight to even small scenes and moments, such that the manhunt on dry land feels as vital as the action at sea.

9 Predator: Killer of Killers

This first of two Predator movies released in 2025 (I haven’t yet seen the second), this was a direct-to-streaming animated anthology that could have been little more than a promo for the later film (a big-budget theatrical release). Perhaps that’s how it was conceived (I don’t know), but what we got was nothing so vacuous. As it barrels from one thrillingly-realised action sequence to another, you’d think it would become monotonous, yet it’s all so well done that instead it’s a non-stop adrenaline rush. It seems like Dan Trachtenberg (who was also responsible for Prey) just gets what a Predator movie should be.

8 The Untouchables

Quite a few films in this year’s list are great showcases for cinematic flair, and while some of them are very overt in that, others might not scream it in quite the same way, but it’s unmissable when you watch the whole thing. The Untouchables is, naturally, an example of the latter. The Battleship Potemkin-referencing stairway shootout is the most famous example (and, even now, it lives up to expectations as one of cinema’s greatest gunfights), but there are many more superb sequences scattered across the film, and Ennio Morricone’s score is an all-time selection of bangers to boot. No one should come to this film for a history lesson, but it is pure cinema.

7 The City of Lost Children

Jeunet & Caro’s steampunk fairytale boasts all the darkness and grotesquery you would expect of the latter’s traditional form, alongside production design so exquisite and cinematography so striking that they render it a contender for the best-looking film ever made. Three decades on, you can see where its influence has bled into various other films, but its off-kilter otherworldliness means it nonetheless feels totally unique.

6 Lifeforce

Lifeforce is probably best known for featuring Mathilda May naked and, yeah, there’s certainly plenty of that and, yeah, if you’re so inclined it’s certainly a highlight. It’s sort of gratuitous, but sort of justified because the film is then about how she’s so sexy it kills people and might end the world. That aside, it’s kind of like an updated Quatermass: a British-set sci-fi/horror about gruesome terrors arriving from outer space and potentially threatening us all. The way it escalates as it goes on is absolutely barmy and kinda inspired. They should make more films like this. Frankly, this is exactly the sort of stuff stereotypical 13-year-old boys should want to watch, not more Marvel slop.

5 I Saw the TV Glow

This does for the ’90s what Donnie Darko did for the ’80s, albeit even more obliquely. It’s a suburban sci-fi / fantasy / horror for anyone who grew up watching shows like Twin Peaks or Buffy the Vampire Slayer — so, me! As that, the vibes are immaculate and the cinematography is gorgeous, of the kind that really shines when augmented with HDR; but it’s certainly not style over substance, choosing to foreground some deeper themes (some would say at the expense of a story, but I thought they were just intertwined).

4 Wake Up Dead Man

The third in Rian Johnson’s ~~Knives Out~~ Benoit Blanc series furthers the impression that the writer-director is a natural heir to Agatha Christie in terms of crafting compelling murder mysteries that also have something to say about people and/or society. The tone here swings darker than the caricatured satire of Glass Onion, but the eye for comedy is not totally lost even alongside weightier religious themes and some well-deserved poking of the American right. Plus, while it’s not as overtly stylised as several other films on this list, it looks gorgeous — like its predecessor, Knives Out, it manages to make digital photography look convincingly film-like and thus outclasses almost everyone else using the medium today.

3 Rebel Without a Cause

When choosing what to include in this list, there’s always a tension between “films I thought were examples of great cinema” and “films I personally enjoyed, for potentially esoteric reasons”. The latter usually wins out on balance — and I think some of the films we’ve already passed on this list speak to that, as will the films still to come — but the former is not unimportant. Rebel Without a Cause is definitely a case of the former. Not because I didn’t enjoy it (I’m happy to exclude films that are widely acclaimed but I didn’t like), but it didn’t give me that zing you get from a movie you love whatever its flaws. That said, it still surprised me (it wasn’t wholly what I thought it was going to be), and… well, I don’t want to turn this into a whole review, so I’ll sum up thus: all round, I think it’s an example of great cinema.

2 Tenebrae

If I based this ranking solely on style, Dario Argento’s 1982 giallo would win hands down (though a couple of films from earlier in the list would give it a run for its money, to be fair). The camera moves, the colours, the editing, the banging soundtrack… the vibes are perfection. I’m not convinced the plot completely hangs together (which is not to say it’s not entertaining, I’m just not sure it fully adds up), but when everything else is firing on all cylinders like this, I can let that slide.

1 The Wild Robot

The genre of “animated movies about an emotive robot in an (initially) human-free world” may be small — as far as I’m aware, it’s just this and WALL•E (and, depending how you define “human-free”, Robot Dreams) — but I think this one is my favourite. In keeping with so many entries on this year’s list, it’s beautifully visualised; but it also features characters and a story that tug your heartstrings in multiple different ways, and it even manages to surprise occasionally in where it chooses to go and when. Incidentally, this is the first animated film to top my ‘best of’ list in 19 years of producing them, so that’s cool too.

My process for putting together this best-of is to create a long-list throughout the year of films that might end up in contention. I do occasionally look over it and remove things, so I can’t say how many were long-listed overall, but by December 31st it was at 54. Some of these are eliminated quickly — I take a broad view of “might end up in contention”, because an opinion can shift after a film sits with you a while, so I’ll long-list a title I’m only somewhat enamoured with if I feel I might settle into liking it more. Sometimes I do; often, I don’t. Others end up almost getting in to my final ranking, but don’t quite make it — so, as usual, I’d just like to highlight a few of them.

These are not #13–18 on my list (that would be cheating — if I wanted to do a longer list, I could), just a few of the films that came close and I had something to say about (for context, there were at least four or five more in a similar situation that I’m not bothering to touch on).

In no particular order…

A Real Pain almost made it onto the list thanks to just one scene that made the whole film click for me (which I quoted/summarised on Letterboxd), but that perspective wasn’t quite enough to squeeze it into a top 12 (top 15 or 20, maybe).
The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog is not one of Hitchcock’s very best works, but you can see the early signs of where he’s going to go. It feels like the product of a talented semi-amateur rather than the fully-fledged auteur he’d become.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning was too bloated and reminiscent of previous instalments (story-wise, the climax was just a do-over of the film-before-last) to reach the highs of the franchise’s very best entries, but I still enjoyed it overall, and the action was as impressive as ever (the aforementioned climax is also a jaw-dropping stunt showcase).
In 2023, one of my Challenge categories centred on film noir, and it ended with them dominating my best-of list. The same has not happened with poliziotteschi this year. (In fairness, it didn’t happen with gialli in 2023 or noir in 2022, and only one martial arts film made it last year.) My favourites — which were some of the last films to be pushed out of the final version of this year’s list — were The Italian Connection, Slap the Monster on Page One, and Street Law.

Now, let’s recap the 12 films that won the Arbie for my Favourite Film of the Month. Some of them have already been mentioned in this post, some haven’t, but either way, in chronological order (with links to the relevant awards), they were Milano Calibro 9, Macbeth, Lifeforce, The King of Kings, I Saw the TV Glow, The Untouchables, Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man, The Wild Robot, Rebel Without a Cause, Tenebrae, Le Samouraï, and Wake Up Dead Man.

Finally, I’ve always ended this section by listing every film that earned a 5-star rating during the year. It seems right to acknowledge the films that scored top marks, and there’s normally far too many to include in my main list (even if it weren’t for the fact 4-star films usually sneak in too). But, as you’ll already know if you’ve read the statistics, this year there were only four films I scored so highly. It’s no real surprise that, with such a select list, for once all of them made it into the top 10%… but I’ve not actually said which they were anywhere yet, so they bear listing nonetheless: Rebel Without a Cause, Tenebrae, Wake Up Dead Man, and The Wild Robot.

For the last few years, I’ve done very poorly at keeping up with new releases… and 2025 was no exception: as noted earlier, I watched just 17 films that had their UK release during the year. For comparison, it was 57 in 2020; and even if you allow for that being a year when more than usual had home premieres, it was 50 in 2018.

That means this year’s “50 Unseen” list — my annual pick of 50 films designated as being from 2025 that I haven’t yet seen — features plenty of famous flicks, though I’ve also popped in a few smaller-but-acclaimed titles, as well as some that might become more prominent as awards season drags on. I will inevitably have forgotten or misjudged something noteworthy, but — as always — this list has been narrowed down from a much, much longer one based on a variety of factors, from box office success to critical acclaim via simple notoriety, and aims to represent a spread of styles and genres, successes and failures (though I still couldn’t bring myself to include the new War of the Worlds).

28 Years Later
Avatar: Fire and Ash
The Ballad of Wallis Island
Ballerina
Black Bag
Blue Moon
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy
Bugonia
Captain America: Brave New World
Caught Stealing
Drop
Eddington
The Electric State
Elio
Eternity
F1
The Fantastic Four: First Steps
Final Destination Bloodlines
Good Boy
Hamnet
How to Train Your Dragon
It Was Just an Accident
Jurassic World Rebirth
Karate Kid: Legends
The Life of Chuck
Lilo & Stitch
The Long Walk
Marty Supreme
Materialists
Mickey 17
A Minecraft Movie
The Naked Gun
Now You See Me: Now You Don’t
One Battle After Another
The Phoenician Scheme
Predator: Badlands
The Roses
The Running Man
The Salt Path
Sentimental Value
Sinners
Snow White
Spinal Tap II: The End Continues
Thunderbolts*
Train Dreams
TRON: Ares
Weapons
Wicked: For Good
Wolf Man
Zootropolis 2

And with that, another year is over. It’s been a bit of an odd one in some ways, and I feel less confident than ever in predicting what the next year will bring blog-wise… except that I do plan to do it all over again, for the 20th time.

20 years! You know, I was only 20 myself when I started all this. Makes you think… but I’ll save what it makes me think for some future musing.

The Best of 2024

Posted on January 6, 2025 by badblokebob

It’s time to finally let go of last year with my annual summation of what I liked best about it. Well, some of that, anyway. And then some more of that. And then a bunch of stuff I missed and so I don’t know if they were any good or not. Confused? Each bit will make sense when we get to it, I’m sure.

Anyway, before we get stuck in, my usual reminders. All the movies I watched for the first time in 2024 are eligible for this list, not just brand-new releases. And this is a ‘top ten’ in the sense that it’s the top 10% of my 2024 viewing. I watched 131 films for the first time last year, which means this time it’s a top thirteen.

The Thirteen Best Films I Watched for the First Time in 2024

I’ve called this “best films” because I always have, but this year I’ve definitely leant more into “favourites” in my decision-making. Maybe I always do, but when compiling this list, I was particularly conscious of choosing 4-star or borderline 5-star films I’d really enjoyed over 5-star films that I’d strongly admired.

13 The Swordsman of All Swordsmen

I love a good sword fight, and this packs seven superb ones into a tight 85 minutes, while still finding room for some honour-based moral conflict. [Full review.]

12 The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert

The perspective on drag- and trans-related issues feels ridiculously pertinent for something made 30 years ago, but it’s really the inherent joy, humour, and a degree of iconoclasm that makes this enduringly enjoyable.

11 The Menu

Some reviewers focused on the unsubtle social commentary, though I’d argue it’s only a significant problem if you disagree with it. Either way, set that aside and this is clearly an accessible edge-of-your-seat slow-burn thriller.

10 Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves

In my Letterboxd review I commented that it’s “the kind of film I give 4 stars then put on my end-of-year top ten anyway” and, well, lookee here. I also said “it’s a stonkingly fun fantasy action-adventure flick whether you know the lore / rules [of D&D] or not”, and that’s also true.

9 Barbie

By all rights a live-action Barbie movie should be kiddie-aimed toy-advertisement slop, but put it in the hands of genuine auteurs (i.e. producer Margot Robbie and cowriter/director Greta Gerwig) and you end up with a movie that actually has something to say about women’s (and men’s) place in our world and how the toys we give to children have a role in reflecting and shaping — or perhaps distracting from — that reality. Lest that makes it sound like a lecture, it’s still a witty brightly-coloured entertainment. [Full review.]

8 Look Back

The only 2024 film to make my list this year is an hour-long anime about the evolving friendship between two girls as they develop from drawing manga for their school newsletter to producing it professionally… which is also kinda beside the point, but to say too much about where the story goes and what it’s really about would lessen its impact. It also serves a reminder that films don’t need an epic length to be powerful — let movies be as long as they need to be (and sometimes, that means let them be short).

7 The Best Years of Our Lives

This won seven Oscars and sits on both the IMDb and Letterboxd Top 250s, and yet I’d argue it’s underrated; by which I guess I really mean you never hear anyone talk about it, which lessens its significance. It’s one of the last films from the IMDb list that I’ve watched for that reason: it was never a movie others made me feel I had to see. But I’m so glad I got there in the end, because it might just be a masterpiece, which depicts the fallout for American servicemen and their families in the wake of World War 2, via a trio of compelling storylines and across-the-board quality performances.

6 The Good, the Bad, the Weird

This self-described “Oriental Western” remixes Sergio Leone (the title is no coincidence) with a dash of Tarantino-esque modernism and a sprinkling of Mad Max dynamism, powered by whatever incredible energy has made South Korea a breeding ground for remarkable cult-hit movies over the past… well, quarter-century, now. It might technically be derivative (as I said, the Leone allusion is deliberate, as are other obvious homages), but the result still feels fresh, exciting, and boundlessly fun.

5 Army of Shadows

My list almost swings from one extreme to another now, as the next couple of films are Very Serious. First, Jean-Pierre Melville’s truth-based thriller about the French Resistance. Time has perhaps diluted the Anglosphere’s view of France in World War 2, thanks to comedies like ‘Allo ‘Allo! and that one oft-repeated Simpsons joke about “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” (if you doubt the significance of one gag, it has a Wikipedia entry which summarises its impact), but Army of Shadows is a brutal reminder of the dangers faced and sacrifices made by the Resistance. It’s a fittingly tense and uncompromising film, at times even uncomfortable, but the cumulative effect is an unparalleled thriller.

4 Incendies

Similarly to Army of Shadows, Denis Villeneuve’s breakthrough film takes a real-life conflict (although here it’s anonymised into a fictional country) to examine the fallout of horrendous acts of violence, but in the cinematic form of an engrossing mystery thriller. Wanting those answers helps pull the viewer through the film’s bleaker sequences, including a bus-based centrepiece that is hellish, heartrending, and incredibly produced. And when we finally get the answers, they’re no less surprising and shocking than the rest. [Full review.]

3 My Darling Clementine

Westerns have never been a particular favourite genre of mine. I don’t think I even saw one until I studied them for an A level module (Back to the Future Part III excepted). When I do watch them, I assume my taste will err more towards the revisionism of Spaghetti Westerns or more modern takes. Perhaps it does overall, but that doesn’t mean a classic Western can’t still hit the spot — and John Ford’s My Darling Clementine most certainly does that. As one of the earliest cinematic depictions of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, it may not be historically accurate, but that scarcely matters when the entire film is so on-point otherwise. Heck, even the day-for-night photography looks good. Day-for-night never looks good! Remarkable.

2 RRR

If all you’ve seen of RRR is the Oscar-winning Naatu Naatu sequence, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s about Indian bros overcoming colonial bullies with the power of dance. And, well, you’d be correct, partly. Loosely (oh so loosely) based on the life of two real revolutionaries, RRR is also an action movie with sequences of unleashed imagination — the kind of over-the-top reality-defying CGI-aided fun Western filmmakers seem to be incapable of conjuring. It’s also a first-rate bromance, full of big emotion in its undulations of friendship and betrayal. Emotion so big it can only be conveyed through song, because of course it’s a musical too. Is there anything RRR isn’t? Yeah: subtle. But who needs subtlety when you’re this badass?

1 Bottoms

Regular readers may be aware that I don’t rewatch films all that often (that’s why I’ve had various strategies over the past few years to prompt rewatches) and I certainly don’t rewatch things quickly — if I watch a film twice within about five years, it feels like a fairly quick revisit (for a somewhat-timely example: I feel I watched Home Alone on a recent Christmas. I checked: it was 2017). This background is to help you understand the significance of the fact that, after I finished watching Bottoms for the first time, I immediately put it on again. I can remember one other occasion in my life when I’ve watched the same film twice back-to-back (my third and fourth viewings of Serenity, when it was screened by my university film society). Is that reason enough to declare Bottoms my favourite first-time watch of 2024? Not really (any number of factors could influence such a decision, not just “that was so perfect I must break the habit of a lifetime and watch it again immediately”), and I did pause to consider if I was letting that one aspect influence my decision (I concluded not). But it does help indicate how much I enjoyed it, and that’s why it’s #1.

As usual, I’ll take a moment to highlight a few other films.

Traditionally I don’t list “some more films I almost put in my top list” in this section, because if I’m going to do that, why not make the main list longer and rank them properly? That said, ranking is an imprecise art — on a different day, I might’ve erred a different way and my top 13 would be in a different order and/or include some different films. So, with that in mind, the films that survived my long list of 46 to be among the final considerations were (in strictly alphabetical order) American Fiction, The Cranes Are Flying, Dune: Part Two, The Holdovers, Rosemary’s Baby, and Scenes from a Marriage.

Now, to recap the 12 films that won the Arbie for my Favourite Film of the Month. Some of them have already been mentioned in this post, some haven’t; either way, in chronological order (with links to the relevant awards), they were Bottoms, RRR, My Darling Clementine, American Fiction, Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves, Yi Yi, Army of Shadows, The Swordsman of All Swordsmen, Incendies, Rosemary’s Baby, The Cranes Are Flying, and The Good, the Bad, the Weird. (The first three being my eventual top three of the year is a whopping coincidence, not some kind of bizarre conspiracy, I promise.)

Finally, as always, a mention for the 14 films that earned 5-star ratings this year. (In my stats post I said it was 13, because I slipped up. None of these ratings are truly locked until I post a review, anyway (sometimes the process of writing the review causes me to reassess), so I’ll leave it as it is.) Nine of them made it into the top ten, including The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Army of Shadows, The Best Years of Our Lives, Bottoms, The Good, the Bad, the Weird, Incendies, Look Back, My Darling Clementine, and RRR. The other five were American Fiction, The Cranes Are Flying, The Holdovers, Rosemary’s Baby, and Scenes from a Marriage.

Here’s an alphabetical list of 50 films from 2024 that I haven’t yet seen. They’ve been chosen for a variety of reasons, from box office success to critical acclaim via simple notoriety, representing a spread of styles and genres, successes and failures — with the caveat that I’ve almost certainly forgotten or misjudged something really noteworthy.

Abigail
Alien: Romulus
Anora
Back to Black
Bad Boys: Ride or Die
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
Better Man
The Brutalist
Carry-On
Challengers
Civil War
Conclave
Deadpool & Wolverine
Despicable Me 4
Drive-Away Dolls
Emilia Pérez
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
Gladiator II
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire
Here
Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1
I Saw the TV Glow
It Ends with Us
Joker: Folie à Deux
Juror #2
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
Kraven the Hunter
Kung Fu Panda 4
Longlegs
The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim
Love Lies Bleeding
Madame Web
Mean Girls
Megalopolis
Moana 2
Monkey Man
Mufasa: The Lion King
Nosferatu
Paddington in Peru
Queer
Rebel Ridge
Red One
The Substance
Transformers One
Trap
Twisters
Venom: The Last Dance
Wicked: Part I
The Wild Robot

Good golly, that’s another year over! In terms of the history of this blog, 2024 will be remembered as the year I completed my new-style Challenge for the first time. But I can’t rest there: it’s time to try to do it all over again for 2025.

The Cranes Are Flying (1957)

Posted on December 16, 2024 by badblokebob

aka Letyat zhuravli

The Russians seem to excel at making a certain kind of war movie; one that befits our stereotype of their national temperament. It might be most succinctly described as “grim as fuck”. The Cranes Are Flying is no Come and See in that regard, but it’s also a million miles away from the gung-ho, celebratory kind of World War II pictures being produced by the US and UK during the same era. No exciting commemorations of the heroic deeds of our brave boys here. Instead, this is a clear-eyed condemnation of the futility of sending the young off to war, and the devastation wreaked on those back at home.

Yet, for all of that, the film is underpinned by what feels like a broadly standard “wartime romance” storyline. Veronika (Tatiana Samoilova) and Boris (Aleksey Batalov) are young and in love, in that all-consuming do-or-die way only young people can be, when war is declared. He does some kind of important job so should be safe from the draft, but — spoiler alert! — he volunteers anyway. Will they survive the war so and be reunited? What other calamities will fate throw at them to prevent happiness? Yes, as if war weren’t enough, other Bad Shit goes down too. I suppose that’s part of what helps the film overcome what could have been a boilerplate plot: that it’s not just about Veronika pining away at home while Boris tries not to get killed on the front line. Indeed, the film is more focused on Veronika’s struggles than on Boris fighting the actual war, and it benefits immensely from a strong performance by Samoilova as Veronika navigates her own personal battles.

Nonetheless, what really elevates and defines the film is the truly remarkable camerawork by cinematographer Sergey Urusevskiy. Appropriately, his then-groundbreaking use of handheld cameras was a filming technique he had learned as a military cameraman during the war. But its effectiveness goes far beyond the mere fact the camera isn’t mounted. ‘Handheld’ tends to conjure an idea of rough, on-the-fly, documentary-esque filmmaking, but that’s not the impression you get here. The shots are still carefully composed, it’s just that they’re also often extraordinarily and innovatively designed, in a way that remains striking seven decades later. The very way the camera moves is sometimes part of the storytelling itself; at others, it cleverly imparts new information mid-shot, or reveals the scale of events. As an inherently visual success, there’s little point in trying to describe it — “just watch it” has rarely been more apt. (That said, Chris Fujiwara’s essay for the Criterion Collection neatly describes several of the film’s most memorable shots.)

The Cranes Are Flying was a huge success on its release, both at home in the Soviet Union — where it was a breath of fresh air for a nation used to positive propaganda pictures — and abroad, becoming the first (and last) Soviet film to win the Palme d’Or. (For our part, it was nominated for two BAFTAs, although it won neither: it was one of several still-acclaimed movies that lost Best Film from Any Source to a British film (Room at the Top) that also won Best British Film (do I smell bias?), and Samoilova lost Best Foreign Actress to the lead from that same film (hmm…) Next time someone tries to claim awards have become meaningless, maybe suggest they always have been.) They also don’t really matter, this many years later, when we can easily appreciate this film’s successes — both for the impact it had at the time, and the one it continues to have today.

The Cranes Are Flying is the 91st film in my 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2024. It was viewed as part of Blindspot 2024. It was my Favourite Film of the Month in November 2024.

Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

Posted on November 7, 2024 by badblokebob

If you came to Rosemary’s Baby without any kind of context about its place in film history, you might well conclude it had been made in the last few years. Well, if you learnt about it on paper — visually, it’s obviously a film of the’60s thanks to its cinematography and production design (not a criticism; indeed, if anything, that’s praise). But in terms of its plot, its themes, its characters and their relationships, and what they might be signifying, that all feels quite ‘of the moment’. Maybe it did in the ’60s too. Maybe it has in every time period since — maybe that’s why the film has endured so well for over 50 years. (Plenty of other films have endured just as long — and longer — without feeling pressingly relevant to the present day, so I don’t want to overemphasise that point too much.) If it had been made more recently, the usual blowhards would be decrying it as “woke” and that it debases the traditional family unit, or something. The fact you can apply such ‘arguments’ as readily to something made over half a century ago as you can to something produced today is just one reason they’re absolute bollocks. But I digress.

To dig deeper into what the film is saying about such things, and how and why, necessitates some spoilers. I know some people think it’s ridiculous to consider spoilers in the context of a film as old as this, but there are always new generations and more people coming afresh to any film decades later — heck, I’ve only just watched it; that’s the whole point of this. That said, Rosemary’s Baby is sort of a self-spoiling film. We all know it’s a horror movie, so when it starts out like a pleasant slice-of-life domestic drama about a young couple moving into a new apartment building, making friends with their quirky neighbours, and deciding to start a family… well, we already know that’s not all it’s going to be, and the hints at more sinister goings-on are easy to spot.

This is another way one might argue it feels modern, as it’s close to the “elevated horror” sub-genre that’s sprung up in the past few years. Again, the fact works like this have existed since at least the ’60s — and I’m sure there are other horror movies that could be similarly classified — shows that so many “new” things have actually been around before, we’ve just forgotten them, or not bothered to label them. Basically, rather than being an outright schlocky genre movie, it’s restrained and dramatic and realistic (in tone, at least). There’s not even an early fake-out jump scare to reassure you you’re watching a genre piece, a trick employed by so many films where the real frights only come in later. There’s a conceivable version of this film where the big reveal is that everyone’s normal, Rosemary was paranoid, and you’ve been watching a mental health drama, and literally all you’d have to change for that to work is the events of the final few minutes.

Indeed, it’s interesting to sort of take a step back and almost-objectively consider this as “a horror movie”. There are very few (if any) scares, and it doesn’t create the same kind of uneasy irrepressible mood as something like The Shining; although I would wager it can have a different effect on women, especially women of childbearing age, than it does on me, because the horrors are that much closer to home. I don’t think it’s failing in those respects — it’s not setting out to terrify you and then failing to achieve it — I just think it’s going for a different kind of horror. It’s the slow realisation that something is not just ‘not right’ but definitely very wrong; and by the time you grasp the scale of it, it’s too late to do anything; and too insidious to convince anyone else that it’s real. In that sense, it really is a good analogy for things like toxic relationships that look fine to the outside world.

And that’s the way in which the film is most modern, as I was saying at the start. Its central concerns seem to be issues of women’s bodily autonomy, controlling relationships, the way they isolate their victims and lead to abuse. If you want to close your senses to such unmissable subtext, I guess you could still see the film as no more than a genre piece about (spoilers!) a cult trying to birth the Antichrist, but I think you’d be burying your head in the sand to do so. Sure, the film doesn’t expressly call those elements out — doesn’t underscore them, or bluntly explain that’s what’s going on in modern terminology — but they’re inescapably in the mix. I do think that’s a difference between the film having been made in the late ’60s vs today: now, it would be hard to resist thoroughly leaning into those themes and making them more overt, because they’re things we’re much more aware of as a society, and much more concerned with combating. Again, it’s not that they’re exactly subtle here, but you get the sense some of the psychology involved was still not widely understood; that there perhaps wasn’t yet the agreed-upon terminology to explicitly call it out, other than to present it and show how negative it was.

All of which said, the timeliness or otherwise of the film’s concerns is irrelevant to its overall quality. As much as it would be a key point of interest to some, I’m sure it’s of no matter to others. Either way, though, Rosemary’s Baby remains a compelling story because of how it grounds its supernatural goings-on in day-to-day life. Without playing the “is it or isn’t it” angle, it nonetheless renders them almost mundane — these devil-worshippers aren’t wearing robes, enacting elaborate arcane rituals in ancient stone circles in the British countryside: they’re modern-day Americans, living pretty typical lives in a New York apartment block. Horror can exist everywhere and anywhere; it is everyday. Oops, maybe we’ve come back round to making a sociological point again…

Rosemary’s Baby is the 82nd film in my 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2024. It was viewed as part of Blindspot 2024. It was my Favourite Film of the Month in October 2024.

Incendies (2010)

Posted on October 10, 2024 by badblokebob

The Best Foreign Language Film category at the 2011 Oscars is, in retrospect, a pretty impressive year. Alejandro González Iñárritu was already well established before his nominated film, Biutiful, but his fellow nominees included Yorgos Lanthimos for only his third feature, Dogtooth, and Denis Villeneuve for this, his second after his career re-start. And yet the winner was In a Better World. Remember that? Me neither. (I don’t even recall it ever being mentioned in the last near-decade-and-a-half; although its director was Susanne Bier, who’s gone on to the likes of The Night Manager and Bird Box, so that’s something). It seems like an odd choice for victor with the power of hindsight, but that’s hindsight for you. On the other hand, watching Incendies, it’s hard to see how anyone could ever have missed its incredible power. (Or maybe In a Better World is even better. I struggle to believe that possibility, but you never know… and probably never will, because who’s still watching it nowadays? It’s certainly not getting a Collector’s Edition-style 4K UHD release from a boutique label — unlike, say, Incendies.)

Incendies is, on the surface, one of those films that can sound off-puttingly heavy: it’s about generational trauma caused by a long-running war in the Middle East. Sure, that kind of thing can be Worthy and Great filmmaking, but egads, hard going. But while Incendies is all those things, it’s also a compelling mystery, which leads to twists worthy of a great thriller. The first of those comes in the film’s setup: Nawal, the mother of a pair of grownup twins has died, and it’s only from her will they learn, first, that their thought-dead father is still alive and, second, that they have an older brother they didn’t know existed. They are tasked with finding both men, and only then will they receive the final letter she has left for them. To do this, they must travel to their mother’s homeland, an unnamed Middle Eastern country (heavily inspired by Lebanon) where the aforementioned war is over, but the scars still linger. As they investigate their mother’s previous life, we see it play out in flashbacks.

While the film at first seems to be about the twins, it’s really most about Nawal. That’s in part thanks to the incredible performance by Lubna Azabal. She has to portray this woman across decades, from a relative innocent to someone changed and hardened by all she’s been through, and charting every step of that journey, too. Plus, she’s left to convey almost all of that silently. Not that she’s mute, but she’s rarely allowed the shortcut of dialogue that discusses or exposes her emotions and motivations. That we still gain so much understanding of the how and why of Nawal is remarkable, really; a performance that, under different circumstances (let’s be honest: if it were in English) would surely have contended for every major award going.

The film is not about a specific conflict — that’s part of the reason playwright Wajdi Mouawad didn’t explicitly set his original work in Lebanon, and why Villeneuve ultimately didn’t change that when adapting it. Rather, as Villeneuve says, it’s “about the cycle of anger, the heritage of anger in a family, where in a conscious and subconscious way anger is traveling among family members, and among a society”. The point is not “what happened in Lebanon”, but what happens when families are torn apart, emotionally just as much as physically; what the fallout from that is, and how healing can be found — if, indeed, it can.

Oh dear, it’s all sounding a bit heavy again, isn’t it? And yes, there is an element of Incendies that is like that. It’s the kind of film that uses Radiohead on its soundtrack multiple times. (That said, this is how I feel that band’s dirge-like ambient-noise style of music functions best: as background mood-creating film score, rather than as, y’know, songs.) But, as I said before, this is also a film that plays as an effective mystery. What, exactly, happened to Nawal? Who and where is their father? Who and where is their older brother? Why was this a secret Nawal took to her grave? Why did she feel the need to reveal it posthumously? Any and all of these are questions your stereotypical “art house” movie would leave unanswered, providing vague prompts for you to consider after the film ends — or, inevitably, provoke you to Google “Incendies ending explained”. But Incendies isn’t actually like that — all of those questions are answered, because they’re essential to what the film is about. That they can also be gasp-inducing all-timer reveals is another bonus.

Within that, Villeneuve also shows off the expert filmmaking that has since elevated him to Christopher Nolan-adjacent levels of big-budget auteurist blockbuster-making. There’s a sequence on a bus in the middle of the film that is as tense as any suspense movie, as scary as any horror movie, and as emotionally devastating as any hard-hitting drama. There’s a reason it’s the inspiration for almost every poster and key art piece related to the film. (The exception is the original American theatrical poster, which shows… a woman standing by some sand. Great marketing, folks. Maybe that’s why it didn’t win the Oscar.) It’s an event of such horror that — especially when combined with the shocking revelations later in the film (which, obviously, I’m not going to spoil) — I imagine this is the kind of movie some people swear off ever watching again, like Requiem for a Dream; a big comparison, maybe, but one Incendies is up to.

Incendies is the 68th film in my 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2024. It was viewed as part of “What Do You Mean You Haven’t Seen All of the IMDb Top 250?”. At time of posting, it was ranked 101st on that list. It was my Favourite Film of the Month in September 2024. It placed 4th on my list of The Best Films I Saw in 2024.

Archive 5, Vol.10

Posted on March 27, 2024 by badblokebob

I have a backlog of 520 unreviewed feature films from my 2018 to 2023 viewing. This is where I give those films their day, five at a time, selected by a random number generator.

Today, we’ve got quite the variety, from Oscar nominees to straightforward action entertainment; from super-timely recent documentaries to pioneering animation from almost a century ago. But they’re all connected by… the fact I wrote some notes after I watched them. Thank goodness, otherwise reviewing some of them years later would be bloomin’ impossible. (That’s not much of a connection, I know, but it was on my mind after In the Mood for Love last time.)

This week’s Archive 5 are…

A Star Is Born (2018)

Boss Level (2021)

Coded Bias (2020)

Shadow of a Doubt (1943)

The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926)

A Star Is Born

(2018)

This is the fourth version of A Star is Born, for whatever reason, but I’ve not seen any of the others so I won’t be making comparisons. I’m sure the story has been modernised (the last version was made in the ’70s, with the previous two in the ’50s and ’30s) without losing its fundamental essence: successful musician (here, Bradley Cooper) uncovers a new talent (Lady Gaga) who comes to outshine him. I guess it’s a timeless tale in the age of celebrity.

Singers-turned-actors have a mixed history, though casting one in a story such as this is fitting, given how you need to believe they’re a top-drawer musical artist. Fortunately, Gaga actually can act as well as sing, so she’s an unqualified success here. The headline song, Shallow — a duet between the two leads, which attracted even more attention for how they performed it at the Oscars — is… perfectly fine. People went a little too crazy for it at the time, I feel. But it’s given weight by how well it’s used in the film, so I guess that could sway you.

Also pulling double duty (well, triple if you count the singing) is Cooper, directing for the first time. (With all the talk this past awards season about how desperate Cooper is for an Oscar, it’s easy to forget that Maestro was only his second time behind the camera.) I seem to remember there being some complaints when he wasn’t nominated for direction for this one, but I think that was a fair omission. It’s not bad, but his directorial choices are a little too wavering. Like, in the early scenes, when the camerawork is all a bit documentary-ish, is effective — it undercuts the “glamorous story”, the almost-inherent fakeness of Musical as a genre, by making it feel Real. But later he gives in to glossy stylings too often; and too many of the song performances are captured with a lazily floating camera, lacking focus or decisiveness. It’s how they often shoot musical performances on TV: just kind of nothingy, moving the camera back and forth and side to side for the sake of making it ‘dynamic’. But, when you remember this is his first film, that’s fine — there’s a lot more good than bad about his work behind the camera.

A Star Is Born was #18 in my 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2020.

Boss Level

(2021)

For a long time, there was Groundhog Day. And then someone had the bright idea, “what if Groundhog Day but mixed with another genre?” So now we’ve had the sci-fi version (Edge of Tomorrow), and the horror version (Happy Death Day), and the YA version (The Map of Tiny Perfect Things), and the “what if there were two people” version (Palm Springs), and the TV series version (Russian Doll)… Here, we get the action movie version. And it’s pretty much exactly what you’d expect and hope “Groundhog Day as an action movie” would be. That’s praise, not criticism.

Interestingly, considering the context I’ve chosen to place this in, the film itself acknowledges — you might even say relies on — the fact we’ve all seen time loop movies before. Rather than begin at the obvious beginning (i.e. the hero’s first loop), the story starts dozens of loops in, then fills in the backstory with flashbacks later on. It’s somewhere between a sensible choice (who hasn’t seen Groundhog Day?) and a bold move (what about people who haven’t seen Groundhog Day?) That said, I imagine people in the latter group can still follow it, it just might be what’s going on is mysterious for longer (most of us will instantly get “he’s in a day-long time loop”, they’ll just have to wait for that information to become clear).

In fact, it’s a pretty economical movie across the board, hitting the ground running and rarely letting up. There’s very little repetition of “the same stuff every day”, instead taking our hero off in different directions. It does lean on voiceover quite a lot to get through some of the exposition, which won’t be to everyone’s taste, but it means it can hurry through the technicalities and get to what we came for — action and gags — so I can let it slide. On the basis of the kind of entertainment it’s designed to deliver, Boss Level succeeds admirably.

Boss Level was #160 in my 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2021.

Coded Bias

(2020)

Given the precipitous rise of AI in the past couple of years, I don’t know how relevant this documentary from 2020 still is. Back then, it was ultra-timely, but tech evolves so fast, I have to wonder if it’s already dated. Well, if you want to find out for yourself, it’s on Netflix.

Not that it’s just about AI. It touches on a lot of interesting tech-related topics, like how facial recognition struggles with non-white people, or how algorithms were increasingly being allowed to control… pretty much everything. It makes a lot of broadly scary declarations about these things, but often lacks the detail to back them up. Not that it’s necessarily wrong, but it doesn’t prove its point; doesn’t clarify what’s scary beyond the gut reaction that this all sounds scary. This is partly because there’s so much to cover — it keeps jumping around between topics in short vignettes — which at least makes clear what a big field this is. There are also signs of hope, with the film offering some solutions (primarily: regulation in law) and highlighting fantastic people (almost all women, incidentally) doing great work to combat these things.

Ultimately, the areas the film explores are interesting and it’s sometimes informative about them, but it’s also unfocused and disorganised in its structure, which is a shame.

Coded Bias was #243 in my 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2020.

Shadow of a Doubt

(1943)

I feel like Shadow of a Doubt sits in a certain tier of Hitchcock film; one where it’s not one of his very best known (Psycho, Vertigo, The Birds, etc), but regarded well enough that it definitely has its fans, for some of whom it probably is Hitchcock’s best film. Hitch himself repeatedly said it was his favourite of his own work, chiefly because he enjoyed how it brought menace into the surface-level perfection of small-town America. One critic has even described it as Hitchcock’s “first indisputable masterpiece”, which I would certainly dispute considering its predated by the likes of The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes, and Rebecca. Well, taste is relative.

Personally, while Shadow of a Doubt definitely has a neat premise and strong moments, overall I felt it lacked any of the truly exceptional elements that mark out Hitch’s real classics. Sure, if most other filmmakers had made it, it’d probably be one of their best; but you’re competing with an incredibly strong body of work if you’re a Hitchcock film and, for me, this one is definitely second-tier. Of course, as I just intimated, being a second-tier Hitchcock film is still some achievement. It’s a shame the relative hype for this one is leading me to focus on the negative. Heck, maybe I’ll like it even more when I rewatch it someday. Until then, I feel it missed the mark of my expectations in places. I even thought it was the kind of movie someone could remake and possibly get something really great out of. (Blasphemy!)

Shadow of a Doubt was #90 in my 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2023. It was viewed as part of “What Do You Mean You Haven’t Seen…?” 2023.

The Adventures of Prince Achmed

(1926)

aka Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed

The earliest (surviving) animated feature film is an ‘Arabian Nights’ fairytale about… well, the short version is in the title.

But story schmory, because the real star here is the medium itself: Lotte Reiniger’s animation. There are so many wonderful little bits of work, it’s impossible to list. Consistent throughout, it’s remarkable how much character and personality Reiniger manages to convey through her ‘simple’ cutout silhouette puppets. Then there’s little naturalistic details, like boats bobbing on the water. Some of it even feels surprisingly modern. Not massively so, perhaps, but it doesn’t have that staid, stilted formality you might expect from a hundred-year-old rendition of a fairytale. And that’s not to mention the homosexual subplot. Plus, there’s so much more to the style than just silhouettes on plain backgrounds. There are shades and effects, to add depth or style: the wavy lines of a river; a mountain range fading into the distance; and subtler and clever things, too. It’s a visual feast.

The restoration could be better, mind. There are a lot of dirt and scratches, which I can live with (there are so many of these, it would have to be manually patched up frame by frame, which would cost a fortune), but more egregious are stability and alignment issues. For example, during one scene, the top part of the next frame keeps appearing at the bottom. Surely that could’ve been fixed?

Better is the soundtrack. The BFI Blu-ray offers a choice: the original 1926 score by Wolfgang Zeller (recorded in 1999) or an English narration (with effects), based on Reiniger’s own translation of her German text (recorded in 2013). Having watched the film with both, I’d say the narration adds nothing of value to the experience, especially as it sounds like narration from a preschool storybook. Just stick to the original music.

But however you watch it, minor technical issues can’t distract from the artistry on display. This is truly the work of a master of her craft. Magnificent.

The Adventures of Prince Achmed was #35 in my 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2021.

Archive 5, Vol.9

Posted on March 15, 2024 by badblokebob

I have a backlog of 525 unreviewed feature films from my 2018 to 2023 viewing. This is where I give those films their day, five at a time, selected by a random number generator.

Today, a couple of Agatha Christie adaptations from very different eras; plus a heist, a horror, and a Hong Kong love story for the ages.

This week’s Archive 5 are…

Evil Under the Sun (1982)

Sneakers (1992)

Us (2019)

Crooked House (2017)

In the Mood for Love (2000)

Evil Under the Sun

(1982)

The third in the run of Poirot adaptations that began with Murder on the Orient Express and continued with Death on the Nile — no, not the recent Branagh ones: this is the first time they did exactly that. But, funnily enough, both third films in their respective series (i.e. this and Branagh’s A Haunting in Venice) take a UK-set Christie and relocate it somewhere more exotic, to fit with the style of the rest of the series. So, rather than a small island off the north Devon coast (which likely stretches the definition of “under the sun”, based on my experience of Devon), here the action is located to the Adriatic Sea, although actually filmed on Mallorca.

All of which is incidental when the rest of the movie is, at best, fine. It doesn’t help that the storyline is ultimately very similar to Death on the Nile, making the whole affair feel like more of a rehash than it needs to. Guy Hamilton’s direction underwhelms, giving a TV movie-ish feel, which is only exacerbated by the less-starry cast — there are recognisable names and faces here (James Mason, Diana Rigg, Maggie Smith), but, in totality, it’s not in the same league as the previous two films. It rather prefigures where Ustinov’s Poirot would appear next: literally, TV movies.

Evil Under the Sun was #2 in my 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2020.

Sneakers

(1992)

I never paid Sneakers any attention (not that it came up often) — I think, because it’s an American movie called Sneakers, I assumed it was about shoes — until indie magazine Film Stories announced a Blu-ray release (long since sold out, I’m afraid). I’m always keen to support small/new labels doing interesting things. And thank goodness for that, because, turns out, it’s actually very much my kind of film and good fun.

So, turns out, in this context, “sneakers” are not an Americanism for trainers, but good-guy hackers who test security systems. When the team are hired to steal a code breaking device, they get suspicious about the setup and, of course, it turns out they’re right to be. Thus unfurls a tech-based heist thriller with a strong vein of humour, but without tipping over into being an outright comedy. Stylistically and tonally, that’s right up my street — I love a heist movie, and that kind of tone (funny without being silly; what I think of as a ‘real world’ awareness of humour) often works for me. It’s the kind of film that’s just a lot of fun to watch. I can imagine it being highly rewatchable; a go-to favourite for people who do that kind of thing.

Sneakers was #132 in my 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2021.

Us

(2019)

Part of what made Jordan Peele’s debut feature, Get Out, such a success was the way it chimed perfectly with the cultural zeitgeist of 2017; indeed, of the whole decade (time may yet add “of the whole century”). This immediate followup doesn’t benefit from a similar boost, but it’s a strong work of horror cinema in its own right.

Us follows a family who are attacked by a group of doppelgängers. That’s the most basic version, anyway — Peele seems to have a lot of ideas he wants to mix in here; almost too many. It seems to operate on the level of a home invasion/slasher kind of movie much of the time, but having more on its mind means it’s a bit too slow to satisfy as something so viscerally straightforward. Thus, all the Meaningful stuff ends up crammed into the third act, which perhaps leaves it feeling back-heavy. There’s also a big twist, naturally. On one hand, it seems really obvious, pretty much from the beginning; but on the other, it does cast the rest of the movie in a different light, which is quite interesting.

If all that sounds rather negative… I blame my notes (I’m writing this review over four years later based solely on what little I wrote down at the time). Us is imperfect, but it’s also great in places, and is at least passably interesting to reflect on in light of the final reveal.

Us was #23 in my 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2020.

Crooked House

(2017)

Despite a moderately starry cast (Glenn Close, Terence Stamp, Gillian Anderson, Christina Hendricks fresh from Mad Men; plus Brits of varying degrees of recognisableness) and a screenplay by Julian “Downton Abbey” Fellowes, this Agatha Christie adaptation was virtually dumped straight to TV here in the UK (apparently it did have a theatrical release, but the TV premiere was less than a month later — and on lowly Channel 5 at that). Of course, some of the best Christie adaptations have been made for TV; but when something’s designed for theatrical and ends up skipping it, it’s never a good sign.

Fortunately, Crooked House isn’t a disaster, though it’s far from a resounding success. Quite what attracted the big names I don’t know — it’s a reasonable setup (big dysfunctional family), but the screenplay isn’t exactly sparkling, aside from one or two moments or scenes. There is, at least, one helluva resolution. It also feels disjointed thanks to poor editing and/or direction. If the aim was to keep the pace up, it failed, because it begins to drag after a while. All of this is only partially masked by decent cinematography from Sebastian Winterø, which is the only thing that saves it from looking very TV-ish. Maybe it found its rightful home after all.

Crooked House was #1 in my 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2020.

In the Mood for Love

(2000)

aka Fa yeung nin wah

If my four-years-late review of Us was hampered by largely-negative notes, my four-years-late review of In the Mood for Love is in even worse shape: no notes at all. Some trivia? I can do that! An interesting quote from the director? Got it saved! But anything on my own thoughts beyond settling on a five-star rating? Nope. I would try to repurpose my Letterboxd review, but all I wrote was: “I mean nothing but respect when I pithily describe this as Brief Encounter in Hong Kong.” Accurate but, indeed, pithy.

On the bright side, this is a widely-acclaimed film, so if you’re after in-depth writing I’m certain you’ll find some somewhere else. Indeed, even if I did have more fulsome notes, I doubt I’d contribute anything more insightful. This is a subtle, almost delicate work, and that’s the kind of thing I feel I often struggle to properly get to grips with in my short, usually spoiler-averse reviews. Suffice to say, I concur that this is a very good film indeed; although, as with any understated work, some might prefer if the feelings and emotions were more overt. Each to their own.

In the Mood for Love was #200 in my 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2020. It was viewed as part of Blindspot 2020.

Dune: Part One (2021)

Posted on February 29, 2024 by badblokebob

aka Dune

Trying to write about a film like Dune in a critical context over two years after it was released feels a bit… pointless. I mean, the film was a hit (albeit by mid-pandemic standards); and if you did miss it first time round, the hype around the sequel has surely already piqued your interest and/or left you cold, in which case what I say isn’t likely to be a deciding factor. Of course, yay/nay recommendations are not the only reason for critical writing — far from it — but, if you’re looking to do more than that, you better have something to say. So I confess here and now, for the sake of any readers looking for that kind of article, that I don’t think I have a unique or revelatory or even particularly insightful take on Dune — or Dune: Part One, as I’ve insisted on calling it ever since the wonderful surprise of seeing its opening title card (and sites like IMDb have finally got on board with too). All I can offer is how the film struck me personally, from my particular perspective; which is not nothing, but is what it is.

So what is my perspective? Well, I’m far from a newbie to the world of Arrakis, though I can’t now remember in what order I first encountered the various texts related to it that I’ve experienced. So, going chronologically, I have read Frank Herbert’s original novel. Famously, it’s a doorstop of a tome, so I must have been relatively young because, for whatever reason, I’ve struggled to get through long books for the past couple of decades (I’ve tried Lord of the Rings two or three times and never got much further than Tom Bombadil; I started Shogun over four years ago and my bookmark still sits about halfway through it — and I did enjoy both of those! I just don’t have the staying power to get to the end). But I can’t have been that young, given the book’s subject matter and style, and the fact I enjoyed it. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say it’s one of my favourite novels. I’ve never read the sequels. I’ve long intended to (see: previous comments about lack of staying power when reading).

I’ve also seen the 1984 David Lynch film, naturally — an interesting but fundamentally flawed endeavour — and the 2000 miniseries (and its 2003 sequel), which I remember being widely acclaimed — and I would have agreed with that sentiment — but it does look rather dated now, and so I’m somewhat wary of rewatching it (though I recently bought an expensive Blu-ray edition imported from Australia, so I certainly intend to at some point). The point of listing all that is this: I do not approach Dune free of expectation. Quite the opposite. And yet, I also didn’t have a specific vision in mind. And when you’ve got a director like Denis Villeneuve in charge — a director with a very definite and particular style — you know you’re going to get his interpretation of the material, so the more open-minded and receptive you are to that, the better. I mean, unless you’re on his exact wavelength, your imaginings are not likely to be the same as his, especially if you’ve allowed them to be shaped by one of the previous films, or even the concepts from unmade versions, like the one so interestingly documented in Jodorowsky’s Dune.

All of this a very long-winded and self-centred way of arriving at my point that, on first viewing, Villeneuve’s Dune took some adjusting to, because it wasn’t quite… right. Having said I went in with no expectations, clearly I had some, buried somewhere in my mind. And yet, the film also felt like exactly what one should have expected from Villeneuve if you’d seen his previous work, not least the sci-fi film he made immediately before this, Blade Runner 2049. The worlds of Blade Runner and Dune are very different, but, as filtered through the mind of Denis Villeneuve, there are distinct aesthetic similarities, most apparent in the brutalist influence in much of the world design. That starkness is quite at odds with the fanciful, sometimes even downright weird, takes on the material that came from the minds of creatives like David Lynch and Alejandro Jodorowsky; or even the miniseries, which, while I little more staid and constrained by a TV budget, is seemingly as influenced by fantasy TV of the period as by its science-fiction stablemates. With most previous visualisations of Dune leaning into such fantastical choices, Villeneuve’s (for want of a better word) realist take was, initially, a shock to the system.

That’s a slightly disorientating feeling to be dealing with when watching a film for the first time. Thanks to the story and characters and scenes being so familiar, the mind is freed up to focus more on the surrounding decisions. Even when trying to be open-minded about them, there’s then some kind of disjunct between things that are very recognisable being presented in a very unrecognisable way. There’s also a kind of tug-of-war going on between the feeling that Villeneuve has been allowed to interpret the text exactly as he sees fit, and that’s a good thing because we’re getting his vision across the project, and the sense that it’s something of a shame to miss out on the craziness present in previous interpretations. After all, Dune is set 20,000 years in the future (you may recall it’s set in the year 10,191, but that’s not AD, it’s numbered from an in-universe event — look, let’s not get into the backstory here; but when you see articles mindlessly parrot “Dune is set 20,000 years in the future in the year 10,191”, know that the article writer is mindless because they haven’t bothered to query the maths, not because they’ve done the maths dramatically wrong) — think how different technology has made our world from three or four thousand years ago, so how much wilder and weirder could things get if you multiply that by a factor of five or six? None of which is to say Villeneuve’s choices are wrong, or even that I don’t like them, but they took some getting used to. On my recent second viewing, with the benefit of awareness of what I was about to see, I was able to enjoy the overall experience much more; it settled the qualms I had from my initial viewing and made it easier for me to appreciate the magnificence of the achievement.

Another point of contention (if we can go as far as calling it that) was where the film broke off. I’ve read some retrospective reviews recently that expressed their disappointment when the film suddenly ended mid-story, which I guess goes to show how not all marketing and information reaches all people — I thought it was well-known that this was to be Part One, and that a followup conclusion was dependent on its box office success (hence my pleasant surprise when the film so brazenly declared it was just Part One on its opening title card, not even saving that fact for a ‘surprise’ reveal on a closing title card, a la It), but there were definitely people who went in not knowing that and found it frustrating. Should it have been made even clearer? Should the film have formally been titled Part One in its marketing? Well, the reaction to various “Part Ones” released this year (like Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Fast X, and Across the Spider-Verse) suggests that audiences don’t really like only getting “Part One” ever; but, conversely, their acceptance of it depends on how it’s handled — how satisfying the movie leading up to the break is, and how the moment it stops is handled. But this is a whole side debate that I’ve stumbled into without adequate preparation (I’ve not even seen two of the three films I just mentioned), so I’m going to swiftly redirect us to Dune.

Where Dune: Part One ends is, frankly, where I always thought it would. Other fans were more surprised by its choice, so perhaps it’s just too long since I’ve read the novel or watched another version and I just couldn’t remember a better break-point at approximately the halfway mark. The screenwriters could, though, because apparently the film originally carried on a little further in the story, before the endpoint was moved in the edit. It’s not the most dramatic place to pause the story or end a film — it doesn’t come after some big action sequence or major plot twist, nor on a cliffhanger of any kind — but I think it largely works. It reminded me of The Fellowship of the Ring, possibly the greatest “Part One” film of all time, in that in no way whatsoever does it feel like the end of the story — we’re definitely only in the middle somewhere, and there’s clearly a whole lot more to come — but it feels like a solid place to pause; like we’ve experienced the whole of a part, if that makes sense.

There was some minor brouhaha the other day during the press for Part Two when someone asked Villeneuve about telling the story over two films — I didn’t pay it too much heed and it didn’t really blow up, so I forget the precise question and answer — but, as many pointed out, adapting Dune in a single film has been attempted before and famously didn’t work out, so doing it in two on this re-attempt shouldn’t really come as a surprise. Certainly, as a fan, I’d rather a two-part adaptation that gives the story the necessary screen time, even if that means a somewhat limp end to Part One, rather than have the whole book in a rushed three-hour single shot. And if early reviews of Part Two are to be believed, it’s paid off overall.

But more on that ‘next time’, when I see Part Two myself and offer my verdict — hopefully in a more timely fashion than this, rather than waiting several years until the hoped-for Dune: Part Three, aka Dune Messiah (I’m not sure which title I’d rather they go with if/when it happens…)

Dune: Part One was #176 in my 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2021. It placed 5th on my list of The Best Films I Saw in 2021.

Dune: Part Two is in cinemas worldwide from tomorrow and will be reviewed in due course.

The Kid Detective (2020)

Posted on February 22, 2024 by badblokebob

Sometimes a movie (or a book, or a series, or whatever) comes along with a premise that you wonder why someone hasn’t thought of sooner (with the inevitable caveat that, sometimes, someone has and you’re just not aware of it). The Kid Detective is one of those occasions (or was for me, at any rate) — what would a ‘kid detective’ (you know, like the Hardy Boys or the Famous Five or whatever) be like when they grew up?

There’s a few different ways you could spin a setup like that, and here writer-director Evan Morgan takes a fairly realist approach: the “kid detective” in question, Abe Applebaum, was a quirky story for the local paper when he was a child, investigating “mysteries” of the schoolyard variety; but when a real crime takes place and he (unsurprisingly) fails to solve it, that’s the end of the fun and games. Nonetheless, as a 32-year-old adult (played by Adam Brody), Abe has tried to keep his childhood fantasy going, running a real detective agency. Except there’s not much to actually investigate in a small town, and the fact he’s never grown up leads to derision from all around, rendering him a miserable washed-up has-been. So when a high schooler (Sophie Nélisse) asks him to investigate the murder of her boyfriend, Abe sees a chance to finally prove himself.

When I say “a premise you wonder why someone hasn’t thought of sooner”, I suppose what I also implicitly mean is “something I am interested in”; something that scratches an itch I didn’t even know I had. Of course, that automatically creates expectations — even if you can’t state them exactly, you now have a notion of what you want out of this thing; of the itch that needs to be scratched. Fortunately, The Kid Detective was everything I expected it to be and more. It’s a successfully amusing extrapolation of its premise. It kind of has to be a comedy, because the basic idea is too silly to take seriously in the ‘real world’, and it manages that without tipping over into farce. But, somewhat remarkably, it’s also a solid mystery in its own right, with a surprisingly moving conclusion. It’s a balancing act that shows the validity of comedy-drama (aka dramedy) as a tone. It’s a mode that’s sometimes dismissed as “not funny enough to be a comedy, not affecting enough to be a drama”, but when it works, it’s arguably more like real life than either of those extremes.

It also doesn’t mean the film has to play broad. Take Brody’s performance, for example: he balances the sardonic humour and introspection just right, rendering Abe believable as someone who is actually pretty darn clever but has lost his way and self-belief. Or there’s the ‘big denouement’, which is just two characters sat at a table talking. It’s both relatively understated and means the finale arrived at a point where I (at least) wasn’t quite expecting it, making it all the more effective and powerful. With hindsight, maybe I should have seen where it was going, and so maybe you could argue the film suckered me. But, you know what, I’m glad it did. It’s nice to be surprised by a mystery’s resolution. It happens too rarely as you get older and become narrative-savvy and everything’s predictable. One moment even gave me goosebumps, and you’ve got to love anything that can elicit such a physical reaction.

Clearly, I was the target audience for this. I couldn’t have told you I wanted it, but when I heard about it I was eager to see it. As I said, that has both pros and cons: to the former, I’m ready to be won over; to the latter, raised expectations can lead to disappointment. Fortunately, The Kid Detective aces it and I loved it.

The UK TV premiere of The Kid Detective is on Film4 tonight at 9pm, and available to stream on Channel 4’s catchup service for 30 days afterwards.

It was #147 in my 100 Films in a Year Challenge 2021, and placed 4th on my list of The Best Films I Saw in 2021.

The Best of 2023

Posted on January 7, 2024 by badblokebob

My review of the year reaches its end in the way it always does: with the best films I watched for the first time in 2023, plus a few honourable mentions, and a list of notable new releases I missed.

For almost a decade now, my annual “top ten” has actually been my “top 10%”, the final total of entries taking its cue from how many first-time watches there were that year. Well, this year there were 103, and 10% of 103 is 10.3, which rounds down to 10 — so, for the first time since 2014, my top ten is actually a top ten. Huh.

The Ten Best Films I Watched for the First Time in 2023

As alluded to in the previous paragraph (but I’ll spell it out again), all the movies I watched for the first time in 2023 are eligible for this list, not just brand-new releases. In the past I’ve also provided a yearly rank for the films that were released during the previous year, but in 2023 I only saw 17 such films, and less than half of them were what you’d call “major” releases. More to the point, only one of them appears in my top ten, so there’s not much point providing a “2023 ranking”.

So, let’s crack on…

10 Confess, Fletch

Once played by Chevy Chase in a couple of ’80s films I’ve never seen, here Jon Hamm takes over the role of Fletch, a journalist who seems to have a habit of getting embroiled in mysteries. Hamm is one of those guys that Classic Hollywood loved but we don’t see enough of anymore: typically handsome fellas who can also be hilariously funny. That makes him perfect to lead this comedy thriller, which manages to be consistently bouncy fun while also unspooling a pretty decent mystery storyline. We deserve a whole pile of sequels, but I suspect we won’t get any. I guess I’ll have to see if those two earlier flicks measure up, or maybe even read the books.

9 Night and the City

The basic plot — small-time hustler with big ambitions gets in over his head — feels familiar from many a noir, but the devil’s in the details, which here include an absolutely superb performance from Richard Widmark as wannabe-somebody Fabian and first-rate direction by Jules Dassin, plus a post-war London setting that brings a different flavour than the genre’s usual LA/NY locales. Fabian may have only been “so close” to greatness, but Dassin certainly achieved it.

8 Elevator to the Gallows

Louis Malle’s debut tells a film noir narrative with a dose of French Nouvelle Vague style, which results in an unpredictable thriller with a kind of tragic beauty and casual existentialism you don’t often get from the genre’s hard-boiled American counterparts.

7 The Killers

The first screen adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s short story covers the original work in its opening sequence — and what a sequence it is — before spinning off into an entirely original narrative to explain the backstory to that opening. Following an insurance investigator as he pieces together one man’s life, it’s like noir’s answer to Citizen Kane; and, at its best, that’s a comparison it stands up to. Burt Lancaster’s swagger belies this being his screen debut; screenwriter Anthony Veiller juggles a nonlinear storyline to revealing effect; and director Robert Siodmak gets to show off with scenes like a single-take heist — and that opening, of course, which was so good, the two hitmen characters who briefly star in it earnt their own (radio) spin-off.

6 In a Lonely Place

One of the great things about film noir being a trend that was observed retrospectively, as opposed to a genre that had been codified and its makers were aware of, is that you can come across well-established and widely-agreed noir films that don’t feel much like anything you’d expect of the ‘genre’. That’s true of these next three entries in my top ten (yes, from #9 to #4 is a straight run of noir). In a Lonely Place starts out like a Hollywood-insider screwball comedy, with wry observations of the industry and amusing rat-a-tat dialogue. But then there’s a murder — suddenly, oh so noir. But kinda not really, because what follows is more of a character study. To say too much would be spoilersome, other than to add that Humphrey Bogart’s performance starts out as fairly standard fare for the star, but develops into something incredible.

5 Mildred Pierce

Even more so than In a Lonely Place, here’s a noir that’s almost (almost) one in technicality only. James M. Cain’s novel about a housewife struggling to make her way, while contending with a self-absorbed and demanding daughter, has been described as a psychological thriller, but plays on screen as a familial melodrama — except screenwriter Ranald MacDougall’s adaptation adds a murder investigation framing device, sliding it sideways into noir. The end result runs all three simultaneously, to magnificent effect.

4 Sweet Smell of Success

At first blush, this might not look like your typical noir: it’s centred on a grifting New York talent agent (Tony Curtis, in what feels like the role he was born to play) and an influential newspaper columnist (Burt Lancaster, also excellent), the former desperate for the attention of the latter to promote his clients. Hardly the world of private dicks and gangsters and femme fatales that you’d expect of the genre. But, really, noir is about the dark side of the American dream, and that can play out as well in the cutthroat world of Broadway as anywhere. Like every great dystopia, it’s made to seem so appealing you want to be part of it, even as we’re shown that to actually live it would be horrid.

3 Oppenheimer

There’s been a sense from some quarters that Oppenheimer represents writer-director Christopher Nolan finally realising his potential as a Serious Filmmaker, making this clearly his best film. I don’t know about that (I love Bond-type films at least as much as Nolan himself, so my taste still errs toward The Dark Knight and Inception and maybe even Tenet, and we can’t disregard The Prestige or Interstellar either), but there’s no doubting this is his most “mature” work to date. It is, to be clear, a stunning achievement — a three-hour partially-black-and-white character-driven drama, mostly told through scenes of men (and occasionally women) sitting in rooms talking, that is gripping throughout. But even that description is reductive, because there’s so much more going on in the way Nolan tells this story — the juggling of time; the use of montage. He’s always done that kind of thing to an extent (Memento, Inception, and Dunkirk foreground it), but here it feels less formalised, more intuitive, and that pays dividends.

2 Everything Everywhere All at Once

It took me a long time to get round to this, meaning it had been through multiple praise/backlash cycles, so I approached it with an odd mix of hype and trepidation. As it turned out, it’s very much My Kinda Thing: science fiction with big ideas; character drama with big emotions; action with a sense of fun; all cut with enough comedy and bizarreness to take the edge off any earnestness, but without undermining the heart. And when I say “bizarreness”, I truly mean it — it’s not just “ooh, a little quirky”, but tossed through with crazy, random concepts. I’m sure some people find that kind of thing off-putting, but for me, it just makes it all that much more fun.

1 Glass Onion

If Knives Out felt zeitgeisty in its pillorying of rich people, Glass Onion is full-on prophetic: the character the plot revolves around is a thinly-veiled spot-on parody of idiot-billionaire Elon Musk, but the film was only released as the depths of his stupidity were beginning to be publicly exposed. His disastrous reign at ~~Twitter~~ X has only further clarified the parallels. If Glass Onion has a problem, that may be it: its cast of influencers and wannabes are sometimes more caricatures than characters. Or maybe that’s just the fault of the vapidity of the modern world. Either way, it offers a murder mystery narrative full of clever reveals and reversals, rewarding both if you try to second-guess it (good luck) or just allow yourself to be swept along. [Full review.]

As usual, getting the 103 new films I watched in 2023 down to a top ten proved a challenge. Indeed, as the statistics ultimately revealed, this was a year of high quality, so it follows naturally that it would be hard to narrow it down to just a small number of favourites. Now, while I always include some “honourable mentions” at this point in my “best of” post, I don’t normally just list films that almost made it in to my top ten. I figure if I’m going to do that, I may as well just expand the list. But I’m making something of an exception this year, simply because the final list ended up so dominated by noir that I watched for WDYMYHS. Maybe that was inevitable when I put specific effort into watching a pile of highly-acclaimed movies from a genre I love, but it also feels kinda unfair.

So, other films that made it as far as my “top 20” list, but didn’t quite go all the way, included (in alphabetical order) The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Cléo from 5 to 7, John Wick: Chapter 4, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, The Pied Piper, Remember the Night, Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical, and Shiva Baby. There were also a couple more noirs that didn’t quite make it: Nightmare Alley and Scarlet Street. All great films, but there’s only so much room.

Indeed, if my top ten was based on films’ best individual sequences rather than, y’know, the entire movie, there are some “almost made it”s that would actually top the chart — films like Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical (for Revolting Children, a proper anthem of a song by Tim Minchin that Matthew Warchus directs the hell out of) and Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (for the whole train climax… or the Rome car chase… or even just the absolutely perfect cut into the opening titles) and John Wick: Chapter Four (for… oh God, I can’t even decide: it’s wall-to-wall extravagantly fantastic action set pieces). Some films from the actual top ten would feature in such a list too, like the opening diner sequence from The Killers, or the finale of Oppenheimer (so good, even the Linkin Park meme version is a banger).

Moving away from the top ten itself, let’s recap the 12 films that won the Arbie for my Favourite Film of the Month — some of which have already been mentioned in this post, but some of which haven’t. In chronological order (with links to the relevant awards), they were Glass Onion, Ace in the Hole (another great noir!), Everything Everywhere All at Once, Scarlet Street, The Shiver of the Vampires, In a Lonely Place, Night and the City, All the Old Knives, The Pied Piper, Alien Love Triangle, The Killers, and Mildred Pierce.

Finally, as always, a mention for the 17 films that earned a 5-star rating this year. All ten of my top ten made the grade this year, but the other seven were (again, in alphabetical order) Ace in the Hole, The Banshees of Inisherin, Cléo from 5 to 7, John Wick: Chapter 4, The Pied Piper, Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical, and Scarlet Street.

With the caveat that I’ve inevitably forgotten or misjudged something really noteworthy, here’s an alphabetical list of 50 films designated as being from 2023 that I haven’t yet seen. They’ve been chosen for a variety of reasons, from box office success to critical acclaim via simple notoriety, representing a spread of styles and genres, successes and failures.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes

Anatomy of a Fall
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.
Asteroid City
Barbie
Bottoms
The Boy and the Heron
Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget
Cocaine Bear
The Creator
Creed III
Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves
Elemental
Evil Dead Rise
The Exorcist: Believer
Expend4bles
Extraction 2
Fast X
Ferrari
Five Nights at Freddy’s
The Flash
Godzilla Minus One
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
Hunger Games: Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes
The Killer
Killers of the Flower Moon
Knock at the Cabin
The Last Voyage of the Demeter
The Little Mermaid
Maestro
The Marvels
May December
Meg 2: The Trench
Napoleon
No Hard Feelings
Past Lives
Plane
Poor Things
Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire
Saltburn
Saw X
Scream VI
Silent Night
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
The Super Mario Bros. Movie
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan
Wish
Wonka

So, that’s it for 2023. All wrapped up within the first week, same as last year. I feel like I’ve got this down to some kind of science. (Oops — fate: tempted. Next year I’ll probably wind up having to post this stuff throughout the whole of January.)

And with a new week — the second of the year, already — beginning tomorrow, I feel like there’s no time to waste: onwards to 2024!