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Barry Keoghan didn’t even know he was in a movie.

Everyone on that submarine is fucking.

Odd remix of The Swimmer (I assume intentional, given the title), Australian New Wave and something like The Wicker Man, shot through the lens of cheap, plasticky wannabe-cult festival fare.

Can't deny I wasn't entertained for most of this, but the pacing is just way off. Couldn't believe how fast it got started (good), how quickly it lost that momentum (bad), and how many punches it had pulled by the end (worse). Surprisingly amateurish, also, in many technical respects for a film made by a guy who's already made 2 other reasonably big films.

Here's a hint, guys: in the 1970's, when they were making those cult films that you seem to love so much, they were doing something new. You can't just buy (genuine, non-neckbeard) cult success by repackaging and aping something that already exists, and adding Nicholas Cage. Sometimes, you have to come up with your own ideas.

This review may contain spoilers.

Ok but why were they in such a rush to kill all those children?

Watched on Friday April 25, 2025.

Distinctive work - casually absurdist and oneiric underneath a naturalistic autumnal surface. At almost all times, its characters are saying one thing whilst their eyes are saying another. You can imagine how an American indie studio might have handled the same material, but the thought might make you want to throw up.

Far more eerie, enigmatic and just plain sad than I had anticipated. Less a story about the necessity of coming together to face common challenges than a parable about our inability to effectively communicate in the face of existential threat, but maybe my glass is just half empty. A riveting, emotional watch. Shame that the artstyle looks like an Oculus Rift demo.

They don’t make ‘em like this any more.

In 15/70mm (for the record, used to better effect here than in Oppenheimer) kept having to remind myself that this here is a movie actually released in the year of our lord 2025. Risky. Risqué. Weird. Critically adored. Loved by general audiences. Sure to make a shit ton of money. Who else in Hollywood is currently able to achieve that?

Just manages to evade all-timer status, though certain scenes are still able to remind you that cinema isn’t quite dead, yet.

Classic Wuxia - some of the best, wackiest, most intense and creative martial arts sequences committed to film interspersed with long stretches of pantomime tedium.

Supremely odd film. 2h37m of people talking in rooms that plays like a Douyin Tommy Shelby compilation. An hour of it appears to consist of overhead corridor drone shots.

Mostly an amusing game of 4D chess with OTT twists and turns, but a cruel and at times misogynistic one that, in the end, bizarrely tries to pivot into full-blown jingoism. It doesn't work, for a number of reasons, but I did find it amusing that it was decided to sow the seeds of emotional nationalistic fervour in such misanthropic, cynical and cheap-viral Netflix-coded Aliexpress soil.

The tone and purpose of the film appear from Letterboxd at least to have been completely lost on a Western audience.

Surprisingly Bressonian. Preceded by a Q&A where Garland, Harrington and Jarvis labelled themselves ‘technicians’ as opposed to ‘artists’. I think Bresson would have bristled at the distinction, but then again I can’t imagine him hyperfixating on the sound an M249 makes as it rips through drywall. More leg than I was expecting.

The worst person you know either loves or hates Mickey 17.

You’re laughing. There is mystery in this world, and you’re laughing?

In some ways, a PTA-aping nothing burger of a Rorsach test. All things to all people and nothing much to anybody. Kept thinking to myself ‘what is this about?’ and ‘who is this for?’ Not that movies need to be about anything, but this one so transparently appears to broadcast its own importance that one is compelled to search for a deeper meaning that never really materialises. 

Interesting, though, that this increasingly turns into Vox Lux as it goes on until, at its epilogue - which for what it’s worth is the one truly Tar-level point in this thing - it actually does. Bold to cap your 3.5h best picture nominee with something as oblique and nasty as this, and maybe a bit of a folly given that it’s bound to be (and clearly has been) deeply misunderstood by half of its audience.

But if otherwise The Brutalist is basically an empty shell of a film, what a shell it is. Vistavision! That score! Those performances! Comedy! Entertainment! A concocted lie about the budget! Weirdly eerie for no apparent reason! Intermission! Title cards! Depression!

More movies like this and less like Kraven the Hunter please. But also more movies like Tar and Hundreds of Beavers that aren’t just 20th anniversary commemorative facsimiles of There Will be Blood.

That’s not how a corkscrew works.

February 2025: I am forgotten

Chinese takeaway rewatch - convinced that salt and pepper chips and a pint of John Smiths are key to understanding what Lynch was going for here.

Gave this one a few months of reflection and a rewatch before logging because, on the initial viewing, couldn't figure out whether this was 'very good' or, like, 'a world-ending masterpiece'.

In the end, I've settled for the former. The film weirdly combines sequences so far along on the avant-garde spectrum that I legitimately have no clue what RaMell Ross is even going for (this is a compliment), with some too on-the-nose dialogue and clichéd Oscar moments. It feels, at times, like the script (generic, crowd-pleasing, awards fodder) is rubbing awkwardly against Ross' artistic sensibilities, which were better served by something like Hale County This Morning, This Evening. It's not that I don't think Ross is suited to fiction, because quite plainly he is, but maybe it would be better if the fiction he made reflected his own sensibilities and not those of a Best Picture winner.

Still, an endlessly interesting experiment with a unique and poetic visual voice, and probably the only BP nominee I can think of that could comfortably be called 'experimental'.

Nimbytectonisqatsi

Ironically watching this at the Southbank Centre to own Victor Kossakovsky.

> Going to watch le epic new elevated horror slow burn A24-coded masterpiece.

> Jumpscare within the first minute.

> mfw.

Avoids the late-Godardian urge to obfuscate, academicise and lord itself over its audience and instead, filled with laugh-out-loud gags, warm charm and quiet wit, breezes by even as a 163 minute art movie.

ittedly lacks the pathos and sheer brilliance of Bad Luck Banging's transcendent second segment, but for that matter eschews the basic, Reddit-like dialectic of its third. Overall, I think Jude benefits here from less of a focus on structuralism, or at least from embedding his structuralist tendencies inside a film that still functions as a single continuous narrative.

Together with The Beast and I Saw the TV Glow, makes one hell of a year for cameos.

Releasing your most alienating and experimental work a few months after your crowdpleasing victory lap is one hell of a power move.

I think this is the point at which I would start referring to Luca Guadagnino as one of the best directors currently working.

Kraven the sweet release of death.

Surprisingly... Actually pretty good? About three times better than Emilia Pérez.

Ridley Scott's best film in over a decade!

Eh. Some of this is fine I guess. Some of the script is competent. Some of the acting is good. An impressive tonal balance is, indeed, struck. The plot (note: not the film) is, for want of a better word, original.

Some of it is... less-fine, too. The way the film is structured is so front-heavy that the back 2/3 of its runtime feel bloated, pointless and inert. Unsurprisingly coming from Audiard, noted middlebrow hack, the whole ordeal can feel at times like a cheap, generic telenovela. The film is also filled with nonsensical, tone-deaf screeching "THIS IS ABOUT SOMETHING - GIVE ME AN OSCAR!" when, really, it's about nothing. A lot of nothing.

But the biggest problem, it has to be said, is the music. These are some of the worst musical numbers I have ever seen in my life. The conception is awful. The execution is awful. The performances are uniformly awful. And the cinematography and editing in these scenes! Holy shit, they should run classes on how NOT to film musical numbers based on the musical numbers in this film. I wanted to close my eyes out of embarrassment. At absolutely no point does it feel natural for any of these characters to burst into song - rather, it feels like the whole thing is a cheap, gimmicky tack-on to add a veneer of the renegade to what is otherwise generic Netflix dross.

I would say that, in the end, I could see this film being re-evaluated in the near future as a misfire a la Crash, Driving Miss Daisy or Green Book. The only thing stopping me is that I get the sense that re-evaluation may have already started...

Safdie brothers: *make Uncut Gems*

Shaun Baker: hold my beer

*drops beer on your shoes*

"Filthy Frank if he went to art school" - Emily

File alongside Mark Leckey's O'Magic Power of Bleakness for a transcendent urban legend / rite of age double bill. Shades of Anger and Lynch, but also Tsukamoto and a little Grandrieux.

I don’t believe that very many people who saw Joker emerged thinking that Joker – a comic book movie released by Warner Brothers in 2019 - was an inspirational rallying call to revolutionary violence. That’s not to say that people didn’t see Arthur Fleck as a tragic figure, or one deserving of at least a modicum of sympathy. He is, and he does, but this is a different kind of sentiment than the kind of sentiment that would drive a person to open fire on a packed movie theatre.

Nevertheless, from the moment the curtains closed in Venice, certain critics and cultural voices (often those who were not, in fact, in Venice and had not, in fact, seen Joker) clamoured to insist that, yes, the unwashed and unfucked masses were dangerously about to unite around this comic book movie, to… to do what exactly?

Unschooled in the critics’ esteemed diet of A24 elevated horror and Sundance schmaltz, they would be unequipped with the high-brow entertainment literacy necessary to properly interpret such a complex work of art, and presumably go on to commit some sort of incel 9/11, Manhattan dirty-bomb, AMC-Waco Siege subway Shinjuku sarin attack that would shake the West to its very foundations. Plainly, the critics said, the West in its present and volatile state, so reminiscent of the Weimar Republic or of the dying embers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, could not cope with an R-rated comic book movie, released by Warner Brothers and directed by the guy that did the Hangover. All movies should be children's films directed by the Russo Brothers and consist solely of US imperialist propaganda.

In the end, Joker was released and nothing happened, aside from making a lot of money and being considered quite good. But instead of itting that their hysteria was hysteria - a by-product of their poor political education, their poor grasp of current affairs, their (gasp) poor cine-literacy, and their overwhelming paranoid neurosis amplified tenfold by critical groupthink, those same cultural voices have spent the years since insisting that the fact Joker didn’t spur societal breakdown was, in fact, luck, as if divine intervention had spared us the Book of Revelation and had decided Green Book would be the tone of the day instead. One weird consequence of this is that people seem to have been Mandela-effected into believing that there was, in fact, some sort of incel threat in 2019, and not that this threat was completely concocted by people who had pre-emptively decided they did not like a comic book movie.

I’m rehashing all of this, because I think Todd Phillips wages an odd war in Folie à Deux. In this war, he decides to pit the (real) critical class he despises, on one hand, against the (imagined) violent incel fanbase he also despises on the other. The issue is that this leaves the rest of us (i.e. the entire paying audience, who have no stake in this war) sitting on the sidelines, scratching our heads.

Very funny at points, and makes a cinematic case for Los Santos (Phil Solomon does a better job), but this "documentary" has a huge problem in that it's totally, and obviously, staged. To greater or lesser extents, of course, all documentaries are exercises in fiction, but there are limits, and all the emotional insights in this feel forced and scripted. Unfortunately, they also tend to feel forced and scripted by a first year drama student.

The idea of Grand Theft Hamlet should have been enough in itself to sustain a feature, without the need for a surrounding documentary, and a load of self-indulgent Hackney faux-profundity about covid, theatre and midlife crisis. I went into this thinking I was going to see some sort of gonzo outsider art, but instead was given a textbook case of middlebrow middle-class appropriation and approximation of outsider culture. Sad!

A couple of moments do stand out in this - usually uncanny footage of NPCs, or of the flora and fauna of the game. And there is definitely room for some sort of experimental documentary or feature, possibly with an encyclopaedic or ethnographic lens, to consider the environment of this game more than 10 years on. This ain't it, but it's entertaining enough.

Compliance meets Barbarian meets Hereditary, but also the reverse of its influences in that, as it goes on, it becomes increasingly tiresome and more generic.

Not really sure what we're supposed to take from this as far as religion goes, whether most of it makes much sense when viewed in the round, or whether even the discourse-y bits are actually saying anything at all, but there are some fun bits. It's surprisingly nasty and tense. Hugh Grant is legitimately amazing.

Does anyone really believe that A24 isnt creatively bankrupt at this point? Other companies have stepped in to take the place it occupied a decade ago, leaving it trapped in a dementia spiral of short-term nostalgia, churning out imitations of imitations of the films that once made it famous.

Transportive, dreamy, and at least on a pure entertainment level, sublime. It's a joy to switch off and float through this thing, even though it's essentially nothing more than an empty, emotionless husk of a film painted in beautiful colours. In the end, Chris Marker without the essay, when the essay was always the most important part. Won't bother with the chat about orientalism, which has been covered elsewhere on here with the requisite detail.

Better live cinema elements than Megalopolis.

Turns out Francis Ford Coppola's big dream for the future is nothing more than the sludgy, undefined CGI-slop of a NEOM render.

The problem with auteur theory is that it leads people to give credence to shit like this for no other reason than a rich, deluded man sold a portion of his winery (his winery!) to finance it. It's an absolute joke that some so-called critics (you know who you are) give a to something so obscenely regressive, so painfully incompetent, so horrifically plastic and incoherent and just plain embarrassing because it was personally financed by the lead gatekeeper of the Hollywood mafia.

Like, I get it, Francis stands to lose out personally if (when) this flops, but guess what, nobody wanted to finance it in the first place because it's a piece of shit! Imagine the arrogance of thinking you can just... pay to force-feed the entire planet an incompetent 2-hour diatribe on your own genius. And guess what? When this flops, do you think Francis will, like, somehow be reduced to poverty? No! It's disposable cash! This is a vanity project!

This film is not being critically re-evaluated in the future. It will not be discussed. It will not be culturally relevant. Being waterboarded by 2 hours of the French fucking plantation would be preferable.

Jurassic Park?

Four hundred BILLION stars

Fun, but I can't shake the feeling that Saulnier has lost his edge. Corporate, Nexflix-atised S. Craig Zahler for people who don't actually Green Room or Blue Ruin.

Ketamine (2)

Toughest watch in cinema since Irreversible, but also completely hilarious. No notes.

Truly terrifying to see a Russian without makeup

The kind of film I fully expect to be informed in 2044 was actually an example of the Mandela Effect.

Why on earth is the font design on this film's poster giving, like, straight-to-DVD crackhead British children's TV Charlie and the Chocolate Factory knock-off?

Brendan Fraser is unrecognisable.

> "Brits Out"
> Opens with BFI logo

This actually fucks. You guys need to grow up and stop expecting movies to make sense.

JUMP 👏 CUTS 👏 ARE 👏 NOT 👏 A 👏 SUBSTITUTE 👏 FOR 👏 STYLE

Imagine if Fede had given us a whole movie's worth of whatever the fuck is going on in the last 10 minutes of this one, instead of just wasting 110 minutes AI LARPing Alien and Aliens.

This review may contain spoilers.

“In an urban society, everything connects. Each person's needs are fed by the skills of many others. Our lives are woven together in a fabric. But the connections that make society strong also make it vulnerable.”

- Threads, 1984

As a formal experiment, this is at least somewhat interesting. The visuals are also quite pretty in their own way. Thematically, it’s not exactly original, but it’s decent. The act of juxtaposing the personal against the cosmic is a tried and tested approach, and it works (sometimes). The idea that humans would rip the universe apart in order to save their loved ones is somewhat clumsily expressed, but resonant.

The problem is that the dialogue is just SO fucking cartoonish and melodramatic. Every episode loads its 10-20 mins chock full of emotional trauma porn – and generic emotional trauma porn at that. Pregnancy, infidelity (lots of infidelity!), death (lots of death!), murder (involving death! Involving infidelity!), dysfunctional family relationships, a LOT of coincidences. There are some extreme tonal inconsistencies as well – like why did episode 3 have to read like a bad Tarantino/Coens knockoff by a film student - and some, uh, dubious choices. Like, they called the guy killed by police Floyd. Uhhhhhhh….

A lot of the content is also just so heavy on the exposition, its ridiculous. Like, in episode 2 the first thing Mark’s mother says to him after 5 years is “Mark when I last called you, 5 years ago today, which was the last time anybody spoke to you”. Like, what? Who wrote this shit? Oh yeah, it was Fede Alvarez. In episode 6, Sam starts reciting a fucking Wikipedia page from his prison cell. It’s not worth getting into, but if you think about the logic of any of this, it makes absolutely no sense.

Was intrigued by the project, but ultimately it’s not really worth the time it takes to watch/listen, even on 2x speed. Have noticed some people on here talking about how much it scared them, but aside from the first episode, this doesn't even scan as a horror series.

now kith

Saw this the other week but couldn't be fucked logging it

• Sinners
• Baby Invasion
• Misericordia
• Warfare
• The Brutalist
• Nosferatu
• Nickel Boys
• Flow
• Babygirl
• Companion

...plus 5 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Poor Things
• The Beast
• Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus
• AGGRO DR1FT
• Menus-Plaisirs, les Troisgros
• El Conde
• Ferrari
• The Promised Land
• The Killer
• An Endless Sunday

...plus 22 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• TÁR
• Blonde
• The Eternal Daughter
• The Whale
• The Banshees of Inisherin
• The Kingdom: Exodus
• Copenhagen Cowboy
• Saint Omer
• All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
• Music for Black Pigeons

...plus 13 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Spencer
• Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon
• Full Time
• Parallel Mothers
• Dune
• Atlantide
• Inu-Oh
• The Hand of God
• Sundown
• Happening

...plus 34 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• All About My Mother
• Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
• Volver
• The Bad Batch
• The Piano
• The Distinguished Citizen
• Living Stars
• The Four Times
• Trees
• New Order

...plus 35 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Lucifer Rising
• The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome
• Scorpio Rising
• Invocation of My Demon Brother
• Eaux d'artifice
• Fireworks
• Puce Moment
• Rabbit's Moon
• Kustom Kar Kommandos
• Rabbit's Moon

• Sans Soleil
• La Flor
• In the Realm of the Senses
• Wild Strawberries
• The Color of Pomegranates
• La Dolce Vita
• Last and First Men
• A Brighter Summer Day
• Mind Game
• Tokyo Story

...plus 90 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

UK releases

• Ema
• Uncut Gems
• DAU. Degeneration
• Last and First Men
• Lovers Rock
• Portrait of a Lady on Fire
• The Lighthouse
• DAU. Natasha
• Bacurau
• Another Round

...plus 44 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

In 2020 (and 2021 seeing as this list is so fucking long), I've decided to try and polish off the plethora of 'Top 250' films I've not seen. The lists I'm using are the Letterboxd Top 250, the Sight and Sound 250, They Shoot Pictures, Don't They top 250, and the IMDB top 250. I made this list in mid-February when I decided to do this, I haven't decided how I will track my progress yet.

I removed some films, like A Dogs Will from LB and a bunch of recent Bollywood from IMDB as its clear they dont belong here.

• Harakiri
• 12 Angry Men
• Come and See
• A Brighter Summer Day
• High and Low
• The Human Condition III: A Soldier's Prayer
• Schindler's List
• Satantango
• Yi Yi
• Ikiru

...plus 375 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Roughly ranked list of 2019s kino - UK release dates.

1. Long Day's Journey into Night
2. Burning
3. Dragged Across Concrete
4. High Life
5. Under the Silver Lake
6. Sunset
7. Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood
8. The Beach Bum
9. Too Old to Die Young
10. The Favourite

...plus 48 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Half of these I saw at other fests so there's a bit of temporal fuckery going on and that may have influenced my rankings.

• Ema
• Uncut Gems
• Marriage Story
• The Lighthouse
• Monos
• Portrait of a Lady on Fire
• Bacurau
• Color Out of Space
• Dogs Don't Wear Pants
• Cold Case Hammarskjöld

...plus 41 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Joker
• Ema
• Marriage Story
• Saturday Fiction
• Ad Astra
• No. 7 Cherry Lane
• Giants Being Lonely
• Irreversible
• The Burnt Orange Heresy
• They Say Nothing Stays the Same

...plus 22 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Miami Vice
2. Heat
3. The Holy Mountain
4. Persona
5. The Master
6. Tetsuo: The Iron Man
7. Thief
8. Rosemary's Baby
9. Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion
10. Aguirre, the Wrath of God

...plus 177 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Stuff I'll try to watch before August 28th

• Shoplifters
• Still Walking
• A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence
• Carlos
• Irma Vep
• Clouds of Sils Maria
• Demonlover
• Suzhou River
• No
• The Club

...plus 40 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Blue Velvet
• Thesis
• Timecrimes
• The Hidden City
• Bait
• The Vast of Night
• Alice
• The Last Circus
• Rapture
• Aniara

...plus 33 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Apollo 11
• The Nightingale
• Hail Satan?
• Corporate Animals
• The Death of Dick Long
• The Farewell
• The Brink
• Late Night
• Animals

• Lux Æterna
• The Lighthouse
• Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood
• Parasite
• Portrait of a Lady on Fire
• Bacurau
• The Wild Goose Lake
• Little Joe
• First Love
• Too Old to Die Young

...plus 16 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Tell me why I'm wrong.

• Beau Travail
• Friday Night
• The Intruder
• 35 Shots of Rum
• Chocolat
• Bastards
• White Material
• Trouble Every Day
• Nenette and Boni
• U.S. Go Home

...plus 1 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

^^^^

• Blade Runner 2049
• Mandy
• Drive
• Django Unchained
• Long Day's Journey into Night
• mother!
• Evil Dead
• You Were Never Really Here
• The Cabin in the Woods
• Hereditary

...plus 44 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• The Master
• Raw
• Carlos
• Animal Kingdom
• Carol

What it says on the tin

• You Were Never Really Here
• In Bruges
• T2 Trainspotting
• Kill List
• In the Loop
• The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover
• A Field in England
• Possum
• Trainspotting
• Under the Skin

...plus 53 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Mandy
2. Long Day's Journey into Night
3. Birds of age
4. Happy New Year, Colin Burstead
5. Suspiria
6. Dragged Across Concrete
7. Knife+Heart
8. Roma
9. Sorry to Bother You
10. The Sisters Brothers

...plus 23 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.