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The world is a film and you cannot escape

A film with god inside

And all the time one hears the human crowd swirling and thundering around one in the whirlwind of life, one hears, one sees how people live—that they live in reality, that for them life is not something forbidden, that their lives are not scattered for the winds like dreams or visions but are forever in the process of renewal, forever young, and that no two moments in them are ever the same

Karan Kandhari’s debut feature, Sister Midnight, unfolds as a strange, horrifying mythology. What stands out most, besides a careful style that at times recalls Wes Anderson, is that the protagonist, Uma (Radhika Apte), undergoes two opposing character arcs at the same time. To a Western audience, she becomes a vampire at the end of the film, descending from human to demonic underworld entity. However, a Hindu audience actually sees her ascend, ending the film not as a vampire, but as a goddess. Kandhari creates this dual effect by positioning Sister Midnight as a series of vignettes chock-full of subtle references.

Sister Midnight begins on Uma’s wedding night as she rides the train with her new husband, Gopal (Ashok Pathak). Presumably, her new home—a tiny shack in the slums of Mumbai—is far from her own village, but we don’t know where that is. Her story starts after she’s married, and we learn nothing of her life before Mumbai. We’re only able to piece together her past from the information gleaned about Gopal. [Full review via Spectrum Culture] 

Caught by the Tides is Jia Zhangke’s first film in six years. It’s his follow up to 2018’s Ash Is Purest White, a film that literally (and visually) spans 17 years and intercuts footage recorded during his previous films. Caught by the Tides expands on that film’s formal experimentation; however, Jia’s new feature includes much more old footage than Ash Is Purest White; in fact, two thirds of the film are entirely composed of old footage remixed and set to a new soundtrack.

Part of Caught by the Tides evolved out of pure necessity – with pandemic regulations in place, it was impossible to shoot a full film in China as recently as a couple years ago – but Caught by the Tides is interesting foremost in that it doesn’t feel born out of that necessity, out of the pandemic restrictions. It seems like a strange experiment and the natural next step of Jia’s filmmaking after Ash Is Purest White, as Jia takes some of the themes that have obsessed him throughout his career, namely the upheaval and displacement caused by China’s rapid historical development, creates memories out of them instead of a narrative and uses those memories to propel the bare bones of Caught by the Tides’s actual plot. [Full review via Spectrum Culture]

I love hanging out with my friends and watching taiwanese new wave

sorry to joaquin phoenix but if i had a polyamorous robot girlfriend things would turn out a bit different

the bottom line is, we’re all prisoners of the universe 

The Surfer’s title card reads “Nicolas Cage is THE SURFER.” The film, in all its nightmarish surrealism, could not have existed without Cage’s presence in the central role. That’s not to say Cage is let loose on the viewers from the onset of the film; he’s actually pretty dialed back at the start, but there’s an expectation when it comes to Cage – we’re on the lookout for sequences that would fit right into those “Nicolas Cage moments” YouTube compilations, and we’re already able to anticipate his character’s descent into insanity.

This expectation heightens the film – Cage’s surfer teeters on the edge of madness for so long, we’re waiting for him to snap; we want to see him snap. [Full review via Spectrum Culture]

there’s so much potential here. Shame it’s being wasted

I need to buy a car

ah the building taking off like a rocket…

The “freeze” is astonishingly good. so funny also that he’s asked for a copy of Platform

The Shrouds is David Cronenberg’s most personal film yet. The camera cuts to Vincent Cassel in the opening scene, playing Karsh, and for a second, we believe he’s Cronenberg himself. The two are identical down to the hair, which is metallic gray, combed back and tapered at the sides. Cassel is barely recognizable under the character he’s playing – everything about him recalls Cronenberg, from the dark outfits to the posture, to the long, thin face. Even for a viewer with little knowledge of Cronenberg’s personal life, it’s obvious the film is autobiographical.

Karsh (Vincent Cassel), like Cronenberg, has made a living off bodies. He’s a businessman who organizes high-tech funeral arrangements for wealthy clients. Specifically, he’s patented GraveTech: a series of shrouds for the dead, fitted with 360-degree cameras, through which his clients can watch the bodies of their loved ones decay in the highest resolution possible. Within one of these shrouds lies the body of Karsh’s wife, Becca (Diane Kruger), who died from cancer years ago – now only bones remain inside her casket. [Full review via Spectrum Culture] 

for the longest time I didn’t realize T. E. Lawrence was T. E. Shaw

That They May Face the Rising Sun is an adaptation – and perhaps an oversimplification – of John McGahern’s final novel, which describes a year in the Irish countryside, circling slowly and methodically through its rural cast of characters. Director and co-writer Pat Collins lacks the time in a two-hour feature to preserve both the novel’s narrative and pace, and thus has to make some tough choices in his attempt to bring the book’s themes to screen. However, the choices Collin ends up making are entirely the wrong ones. That They May Face the Rising Sun has a muddled narrative, with dialogue moments full to the brim with exposition. Any conflicts these characters face occur off-screen. Naturally, the shots of the Irish countryside that saturate the film are beautiful, but the landscape does all the work in holding the film together – the remainder of That They May Face the Rising Sun totes nothing but surface-level, clichéd ideas. [Full review via Spectrum Culture] 

Wake Up is so close to being a fun romp of a slasher film. Our protagonists wear animal masks and carry spray-paint guns that look like rifles. Our killer is a deranged security guard whose hobbies include brutalizing animals for fun, making primitive weapons and deg violent traps. The team behind the film, directors François Simard, Anouk Whissell and Yoann-Karl Whissell of the Canadian filmmaking team Roadkill Superstars (RKSS), never take their genre films too seriously and have had cult success with the nostalgic Summer of 84 and Turbo Kid. Their films are labors of love, and super fun too — everyone’s usually having a good time: actors, directors and the audience — but where RKSS’s past films have succeeded, their move toward a contemporary setting and conceit (Gen Z’s TikTok activism), results in a film that — apart from a couple of really great kills — is boring. [Full review via Spectrum Culture] 

It’s samurai time

Artur Aristakisian did not intend to make a film. He simply felt he had to record footage, wandering around his native Kishinev (now Chișinău) with a camera during the strange and fractured time of perestroika. He might have gone on filming endlessly: the disabled and people living with mental health issues. Eventually, though, this footage became a film, and this film made a sudden splash, winning in Berlin and at the Nika Awards, heralding Aristakisian as a brilliant new filmmaker to watch.

After causing a scene in 1994 with his debut, Palms (Ladoni in Russian), Aristakisian did not make another film for years. In 2001, he released A Place on Earth, but he hasn’t made anything since. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the structure of film production changed drastically, and Aristakisian couldn’t find his way back into the scene—or perhaps he didn’t want to. Instead, he’s spent his time teaching students, not how to direct but rather the art of looking at images and the thought processes born from photography and film.

Palms can be considered a glance into these thought processes, though we’re not talking about Aristakisian’s personal thoughts. The film is a look at the general action arising from the image and the conversation that develops between a human being and the visual language captured by a camera. [Full review via Spectrum Culture]

Viet and Nam has been banned in Vietnam. Vietnam’s Cinema Department claims the film’s portrayals of the country and its people are too negative, a decision that doesn’t come as a shock – Viet and Nam is far from the first Vietnamese film to be banned by its home country. Even so, the rationale given for this decision is quite surprising, considering how Vietnam is shown quite beautifully on film, and that the film’s most surface level themes involve the resiliency of the Vietnamese people – that they’re able to endure and love each other despite the lasting effects of war and Western influence. Above all else, Truong Minh Quy’s film is a love story, and the two protagonists, named Nam and Viet – perhaps the most obvious symbols for Vietnam you can get – are unrelentingly optimistic and captured with gentle hands. [Full review via Spectrum Culture] 

The Taking of Pelham 123 is almost exclusively discussed side by side with Scott’s other late work – usually Déjà Vu and Man on Fire – as examples that explain the vision behind Scott’s images and techniques. On the rare occasions the film is looked at on its own, it’s considered to be flawed. Most agree it’s a lesser version of the 1974 The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, especially when it comes to the train hijacking — which, as critics claim, is constructed rather roughly in Scott’s remake. It’s true, The Taking of Pelham 123 is not very interested in the supposed subject of its plot, but that’s exactly what makes the film so special – Tony Scott is more interested in the form of a hijacking than the physical act of hijacking a train.

The Taking of Pelham 123 is also unique in that it’s not only not interested in plot, it’s also not interested in image, which is what makes so much of the revisionist critical analysis hoisted upon Scott’s late work so inapplicable to this particular film – critics are primarily focused on his style, and The Taking of Pelham 123 is not driven by style; it’s not driven by image. Man of Fire, on the other hand, a film with which The Taking of Pelham 123 is often compared, is driven by the image. Man of Fire is born from Tony Scott’s style and would not exist without it.

So, what exactly is happening in The Taking of Pelham 123 if it employs Scott’s style but does not seem to be that interested in it? [Full review via Spectrum Culture] 

Before David Yarovesky’s Locked came 4×4, a 2019 Argentine film directed by Mariano Cohn. 4×4 was a spectacular failure. It had a great premise: a scumbag thief tries to steal a car, but ends up locked inside, unable to escape – the car’s owner turns out to be a psychopath exacting some twisted revenge. However, 4×4 peters out after the first 15 minutes, during which it lays out all the stakes and then forgets to escalate the plot any further, resorting instead to repetitive, boring dialogue and hamfisted themes, ending up as more of a car commercial than a psychological thriller. It’s pretty easy to see where 4×4 went wrong, and Yarovesky, upon watching 4×4, should have taken note of these pitfalls and avoided them in his remake. Writer Michael Arlen Ross should have imbued the new script with energy, made the characters compelling and Yarovesky should have added some nuance to his direction. Unfortunately, for some reason, Yarovesky takes everything that fails in 4×4, adds it to Locked, and then somehow makes it worse. Even with stellar performances from Skarsgård and Hopkins, Yarovesky achieves the feat of making 95 minutes seem like four hours. Locked, in all aspects bar acting, is a worse film than its Argentine predecessor, which didn’t exactly set a high standard to begin with. [full review via Spectrum Culture] 

Who by Fire is a direct homage to the Leonard Cohen song. However, if you’re expecting the Unetanneh Tokef, a visit to the synagogue or even a single Jewish character on screen, you’re out of luck. After the film wrapped, the Cohen reference was suggested by a friend of director Philippe Lesage, as a more interesting translation of the French title, Comme le Feu.

The Cohen-inspired title does offer us a hint regarding the film’s themes. Who by Fire is full of ing name-drops and shallow references in the same vein as the title: Aliocha (Aurelia Arandi-Longpré) mentions that she’s named after Alyosha from The Brothers Karamazov – the Dostoevsky reference has little to do with her character; she’s an aspiring novelist, and she wants to make it clear to the room that she makes high art, that she’s the type to have read – and understood – The Brothers Karamazov as a teenager. Aliocha’s father, Albert (Paul Ahmarani), is working on an animated TV show titled Rock Lobster (the B-52’s song plays later in the film, and has nothing to do with Albert’s character arc). These references, like the title of Who by Fire, are surface-level on purpose, because Who by Fire is a film about the surface-level engagement the characters have with each other, about their shallow and easily changing focus, about their conflicting egos. The brief name-dropped references that are grabbed and then discarded serve as a map for the viewer, a point of orientation, a foothold on the film’s rocky cliff. [Full review via Spectrum Culture]

I felt myself longing for the remake

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl opens like a horror film. Driving herself home from a costume party, Shula (Susan Chardy) finds her uncle’s (Roy Chisha) dead body in the middle of the road. She doesn’t scream, she doesn’t look upset, she just calls her father (Henry B.J. Phiri). He tells her to lock herself in the car. It’s a strange, surreal scene. There’s a palpable separation between Shula—locked in the car, stoic and perhaps afraid but definitely not upset over her uncle’s death—and the empty road stretching out before her. Something feels off about the whole situation, but we’re not exactly sure what. The scene gets even odder as Shula’s drunk cousin, Nsansa (Elizabeth Chisela), ambles down the road dressed in varying shades of neon—a startling contrast to the black night and Shula’s dark clothes. Nsansa appears out of nowhere, shining like some ghost or hallucination, and bangs on Shula’s car window after she sees the corpse, too. Shula doesn’t let her in, and Nsansa, also not upset over her uncle’s death, dances in the headlights of Shula’s car, lit up like an apparition, a strange unreal thing. Something supernatural hovers over the scene: Shula and Nsansa appear to exist on different planes of reality. We’re not upset about the death of Uncle Fred. We’re afraid.

From this strange opening scene, director Rungano Nyoni makes astounding use of space and sound. An energy thrums beneath the scenes and images seems to vibrate as a result. Ghosts appear and disappear, flickering in and out of frame. Uncle Fred’s ghost haunts the remainder of the film, although not literally, as you might expect from the off-putting opening. [Full review via Spectrum Culture] 

I’ve forgotten the sound of pattinson’s real voice

From the director of cultural landmarks like Con Air and the “Never Gonna Give You Up” music video comes Old Guy, a movie that could have been a well-constructed, campy romp à la the above. It has all the ingredients: Christoph Waltz is super charismatic, Lucy Liu owns a nightclub and Cooper Hoffman is possessed by the spirit of a TikTok e-boy. What could go wrong?

A lot, in fact. For one, the script of Old Guy is bad – not so bad it’s good, but so bad it’s bad. Simon West doesn’t even try to save the nonsensical script; his choices as director often clash directly with the development of his characters and the trajectory of his film.

The premise of Old Guy is fine and perhaps even ripe for a good old-fashioned ridiculous action movie. The Old Guy is Danny Dolinski (Waltz), a famous hitman contracted by an agency in London. He’s great at his job, but he has arthritis; he can’t shoot a gun without t pain, and he can’t move as nimbly as before. His bosses know they can’t keep relying on Dolinski, so they’re transitioning out the older generation of hitmen in favor of new, fresh, younger assassins, but unfortunately, the younger assassins keep mes on their assignments. [full review via Spectrum Culture] 

The trailer of Batman Begins dropped in late 2004 to a ton of skepticism. Even die-hard DC fans weren’t that excited. After all, Batman was dead; Batman was a joke; Batman & Robin had been such a disaster Bruce Wayne’s very name was tainted for eternity. Warner Bros. had been trying to resurrect the franchise for years, but Batman was deemed a career-killer — it had tanked Schumacher, and no director wanted a repeat. Except, apparently, some young indie director in his early 30s.

Christopher Nolan was hired on the spot for Batman Begins based on a 45-minute pitch, no treatment or script ready. He was fresh off Memento and Insomnia and nothing else (except Following, if you count that). Did Warner Bros. anticipate the phenomenon that would be The Dark Knight? Could they foresee the trajectory of Nolan’s career? Probably not. More likely, Warner Bros. was just desperate, seeing Spider-Man and X-Men garnering Sony and 20th Century Fox tons of money, and wanted in on the pie.

In 2005, Warner Bros. got some of that pie. Batman Begins did decently in theaters. Sure, it wasn’t an instant king-making event; the release had nowhere near the craze of Batman ‘89, but Batman Begins does what it’s supposed to do. It’s a success, the critic reviews are glowing and it wipes the slate clean. Batman is cool again.

Almost two decades later, The Dark Knight has been so embedded in our collective consciousness that it’s hard to imagine a world without Heath Ledger’s Joker, without the over-quoted lines and references. The Dark Knight is a cornerstone of pop culture, and ever since 2008, Batman Begins has been living in its shadow. By all objective metrics, the sequel is the better movie, but Batman Begins is the catalyst, the turning point — much more so than The Dark Knight, it changed the course of superhero films and left Christopher Nolan the freedom to develop his style. [Full review via Spectrum Culture] 

pattinson’s interpretation is fantastic but the script is totally empty. feels like gotham only exists once the camera is pointed. every bit of the city that’s out of frame doesn’t exist. reeves does not hold the world of batman in his hands. 

shame that there are a couple thought out images but with nothing stringing them together. watching this made me realize that for all nolan’s faults, at least he’s able to hold a world in his hands. it took batman 2 hours to understand what the viewer understands the moment the riddler says “el rata alada” and you don’t feel smart for solving the puzzle you’re just mad as hell that batman is stupid as fuck like just give me the mask atp. This is what happens to a guy when he listens to too much nirvana

Yayyyyyyyyyyyyy batman :D

You don’t need to watch The Priests to understand Dark Nuns. Apart from references made to Father Kim (Kim Yoon-seok) and a brief appearance from Deacon Choi (Gang Dong-won), Dark Nuns deals with a whole new cast of characters. Sister Junia (Song Hye-kyo), a disciple of the aforementioned Father Kim, bands together with fellow nun Sister Michaela (Jeon Yeo-been) to perform an illegal exorcism on a young boy, Hee-joon (Moon Woo-jin), who is possessed by a demon. The first half of Dark Nuns is spent introducing the possessed victim, establishing our main characters and the inter-church conflicts they must navigate, and the second hour of the film is spent performing a drawn-out exorcism. This pacing is an exact mirror of The Priests, and to viewers who have watched Jang Jae-hyun’s film, the plot of Dark Nuns feels repetitive and predictable.

Even those tackling Dark Nuns as a standalone film will find the narrative to be devoid of tension. Kwon Hyeok-jae intentionally minimizes the number of jump scares, attempting to build suspense through dialogue, editing and cinematography, much like a drama rather than a horror film. It’s a neat approach for an occult flick, but executed badly. [Full review via Spectrum Culture] 

The Fishing Place is split into three parts. The first part contains the bulk of the narrative and the runtime – it’s the most traditional part of the film. This first section seems to take place at the tail end of World War II, inside a Norway occupied by Nazi soldiers in conflict with local resistance movements. Anna (Ellen Dorrit Petersen) is being released from Nazi imprisonment on one condition: she must infiltrate the small town of Notodden, spend three days shadowing the local priest (Andreas Lust) and determine his level of involvement with Norwegian resistance groups. As Nazi Officer Hansen (Frode Winther) bathes the town in his threatening presence, Anna has to confront the reality that her survival will condemn the priest to death.

Each character in The Fishing Place is inhabited by multiple roles – Anna plays the role of the priest’s maid, while also playing the primary role of spy for Officer Hansen. Officer Hansen plays the role of dominant Nazi Officer as he postures around town, but also plays the role of a man who has lost control over his wife, his son and the resistance. The priest plays the role of consoling minister to the townspeople, while also playing the role of a man losing faith in his religion. Notodden – the land itself – is inhabited at the same time by the Nazis and the resistance force.

Tregenza makes a point to center role-playing (or role-possession) as the driving force of his film: in our first introduction to many of the characters, they appear to be wax statues in a museum or tokens in a board game; they only move once the camera focuses on them, as if they’re being given their roles – or suddenly possessed by their roles. This sequence also sees Anna willed into being as she’s given her double role as maid and spy, thoroughly establishing the theme of role-possession from the outset. [Full review via Spectrum Culture]

one of the most arresting opening shots i’ve seen in my life

Yamada’s distinct style allows her to create very beautiful images. The characters of The Colors Within are made up of loose lines – the brushes used to limn each figure have a toothy, textured quality, and the edges feel less concrete. In comparison with the typically opaque line art of anime, Yamada’s world is quite fluid, running like water, and this fluidity helps soften the transitions between the objective “reality” of her animated world and Totsuko’s synesthetic perspective. Totsuko sees mostly in lineless watercolors, and her way of seeing, although strange, seems like a natural extension of the real world around her. Her eyes view the same fundamental material through a slightly different filter – there’s no jarring difference between Totsuko’s watercolored sight and Yamada’s flowing world, and this result takes skill to pull off.

The worlds Yamada creates on screen are certainly pretty, but they feel just pretty; the animation feels like decoration. She takes no interest in Totsuko’s world and way of seeing beyond a relatively conventional display of synesthesia as lineless colors and shapes. Conventionality is never in itself a detriment, but Yamada’s derivative interpretation doesn’t seem purposeful – it seems like a mistake, like a lack of imagination or experimentation with her medium.
[Full review via Spectrum Culture]

I’m Still Here tells the story of the Paivas, roughly following the autobiography by Marcelo Rubens Paiva, who was 11 when his father disappeared – Salles uses his own memory, from age 14, to invigorate the facts. Both Marcelo and Salles were children when Rubens was arrested, and I’m Still Here is painted like a childhood memory; the past is flattened by the weight of time into sequences of pure emotion. The first 40 minutes of the film are blurred, full of montages of the Paiva family playing at the beach or dancing during a birthday party; the house is bright and loud, with the doors open for children of all ages to stream in and out. These images introduce us to the Paivas, labeling them as a happy family, but we’re told nothing about them as individuals – they could be any wealthy Brazilian family living in that time period. [Full review via Spectrum Culture]

The odessa staircase always makes me lose my mind. Unbelievably good

Donnie Yen turns 62 this year, but he’s still kicking. And punching, and jumping, and doing everything expected of him in The Prosecutor, his new kung fu film slash legal drama. Obviously Yen no longer has the physical prowess of his youth – the sheer power he displays in earlier installments of the Ip Man series has long since faded away – and he’s aided here (at least partially) by CGI during his leaps and flips. In his dual role as director and lead, Yen seems to be using The Prosecutor to test his current capacity for martial arts, attempting to figure out just how much fight he has left in him. With this experimentation as its primary purpose, Yen’s film is forced to waffle between its two genres, not quite sure where it falls, with too few fight scenes to carry an action flick, and too many to build a compelling courtroom drama. [Full review via Spectrum Culture]

On paper, Maura Delpero’s sophomore film feels like something we’ve seen before. Vermiglio is a sprawling family melodrama set during the last gasps of World War II that follows an array of characters as they deal with the typical daily constraints: patriarchy, religion, family and finances. Vermiglio’s construction is not new or compelling—the individual subplots are the most ordinary of puzzle pieces—yet, somehow, the completed image is striking and tangible, willed into existence and emerging like the sweeping sky from stock blue pixels. Vermiglio is a glimpse into something human, something universal: the strange yet unavoidable experience we all have in society, and the petty repeated wars we fight in the endless and indifferent natural world.

While the characters of Vermiglio live out their lives, the mountains watch from above, towering and indifferent to the family affairs. Delpero frames her characters with long, still shots of nature—not just to create a physical scale, but to create a sense of temporality. A thousand generations of Cesare’s family will live and die and experience the same situations, all under the snowy Alps and their unchanging gaze.
[Full review via Spectrum Culture]

Because The Odyssey needs a German director. Everybody knows that a German discovered Troy.

lea seydoux acting opposite austin butler oh denis I want you

some astounding images but other than that just an empty movie. chalamet getting outacted by half the cast is kind of funny to see, but none of the performances were really that stunning. maybe oscar isaac was the only totally consistent one. i consider villeneuve a close friend so giving this a low rating is painful for me but i can’t change how my heart feels :(

Has the same thing never happened to you, have you never felt that you were so close that, at any moment, you were going to achieve a long-postponed and eternally pursued ambition, the project that is both your despair and your hope, have you never, with a feeling of uncontrollable joy, reached out to grasp that thing only to fall flat on your back, your fingers closed around nothing, while the ambition or the project or whatever trotted calmly and indifferently away, without so much as a backward glance? But perhaps you’ve never experienced that horrific sense of defeat, perhaps for you metaphysics is merely an inconvenience as ephemeral as a ing itch, perhaps you possess the gleeful lightness of a moored boat, bobbing slowly about like some autonomously rocking cradle. 

— (Antunes; Os Cús de Judas)

.

like someone took an eraser to new york and sort of etched out dylan’s outline. which is kind of fitting since bob has been haunting my life like a photonegative since, i don’t know, ten years at least. and every year that es i get into a new situation—all the threads and symbols glow dark, soaked through with bob’s presence. or his absence, i guess, to be more accurate, that white eraser-outline of him, the lack of charcoal on the page. I don’t know if my feelings on the biopic have been properly cleaved from my feelings on bob dylan, from my feelings on Like a Rolling Stone, a song i couldn’t listen to for years.

Marat, the name sounds jewish to me

Spectrum Culture’s Best Films of 2024:

Close Your Eyes (Victor Erice; Film Movement)

Victor Erice made The Spirit of the Beehive in 1973, El Sur in 1983, and The Quince Tree Sun in 1992; all three highly regarded as works of art. Now he’s back with Close Your Eyes, his first feature-length film in over 30 years that delivers a sprawling three-hour reflection on his own career, which was waylaid by producer whims. His projects often got scrapped left and right to become undistributed and abandoned, rotting away in the dark.

Close Your Eyes is a triumph in more ways than one. Aging director Miguel (Manolo Solo) who is meant to mirror Erice himself, couldn’t finish his second film because his lead actor Julio (José Coronado), walked off the set one day, never to return. 20 years later, a Spanish TV show à la Unsolved Mysteries approaches Miguel to discuss Julio’s disappearance. What follows is a meditation on cinema. Erice untangles celluloid and memory to realize the two are one and the same—open your eyes in a theater and you’ll see a film; close your eyes and you’ll see yourself, the back of your eyelids, the back of your own mind.

“What is a film?” Erice asks and then attempts to answer. Film is not something to hold on to, to clutch to your chest like a teddy bear. It’s a foothold, a piece of rock jutting from a mountain, a step forward. Close Your Eyes is in love with every part of cinema, and you’ll fall in love with it too, again and again and again. As the camera moves slowly—wondrously—from beat to beat, the miracle of cinema seems a lot like the miracle of life itself. Erice has finally returned to us, another masterpiece in hand.

Spectrum Culture’s Best Film Performances of 2024:

Josh O’Connor in La Chimera

Josh O’Connor might be well-known for his ing role in Challengers, but his better performance came one month earlier, in Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera. O’Connor plays Arthur, an ex-archeologist turned grave robber, and he learned to speak Italian just for this role. His command of the language is irable, but since Arthur rarely speaks, the heart of his performance is physical. O’Connor establishes Arthur’s character through physical language, with hunched shoulders, eyebrows knit together, arms crossed and eyes darting, and that’s all the exposition we need to know that Arthur’s an Englishman lost in Italy, alone and directionless.

This stance is modified depending on the characters Arthur interacts with – when he’s with his friends, the other grave robbers, there’s a weight behind O’Connor’s movements: Arthur’s closer to the Etruscan grave goods he covets, and there’s a heaviness and security in his body. When Arthur’s with Italia (Carol Duarte) and Flora (Isabella Rossellini), O’Connor’s posture is the same, but his movements are looser, like he’s dancing through space – he’s untethered, almost invisible, lost, floating away. These physical movements drive La Chimera, adding momentum from shot to shot, and even O’Connor’s facial expressions are so precise: the slightest twitch of his lips or widening of his eyes is gut-wrenching. He’s acting at such a high level that when he’s with the ing cast, Arthur feels like the only human character – the others merely ghosts or animals, an effect required by the film during the third act as Arthur is further isolated, ravaged by choices between the real world and the world of souls, between Italia and Beniamina (Yle Vianello), between the beauty of life and the beauty of death.

O’Connor’s especially fantastic when he’s dowsing, trying to find the grave goods underground: he holds the dowsing rod before him with shaking hands; you can feel the weight in his feet, and from the curve of his spine you can feel a magnet pulling him down, pulling him beneath the dirt, toward whatever objects lie below. Arthur’s the most grounded while dowsing, and the way O’Connor moves and varies those movements makes La Chimera a captivating, beautiful film.

The Sorrows of Young Werther, Goethe’s ultra-famous epistolary novel, begins with a preface. In this preface, an unnamed editor introduces young Werther, discusses his suicide, and presents the ensuing novel: a collection of one-sided letters put together to chart the factors leading up to Werther’s death. Goethe’s fictional editor is there for one purpose: to investigate the question why did a man like Werther kill himself?

Young Werther, José Lourenço’s romantic comedy, also begins with an editor’s note. The “preface” to Young Werther is in the form of an extended title card discussing the popularity of Goethe’s original novel. “Sort of like a Beatlemania? But for books,” says the intertitle, which is true – The Sorrows of Young Werther was a very popular novel, catapulting Goethe into fame; thousands of young men and women began wearing Werther’s famous outfit: a yellow waistcoat under a blue jacket. The framing device of Young Werther is not attempting to determine the reasons behind Werther’s suicide, because no one commits suicide in the movie. Lourenço’s fictional editor is instead present for a different purpose: to determine the reasons behind Werthermania, the reasons behind the heights of popularity this book in particular has reached.

[Full review via Spectrum Culture] 

Homestead is essentially one long pilot episode. It’s designed to promote an TV series by the same name, a marketing strategy that isn’t all that new – Star Wars: The Clone Wars released a film in 2008 as a precursor to season 1, and Battlestar Galactica released its first episode in theaters to recoup production costs back in 1978 – but it’s a tricky maneuver to execute well. Not only must the film work on its own, with a complete narrative, it also needs to effectively set up a TV season by establishing an exciting world with compelling characters, luring the audience toward the show. Unfortunately, Homestead fails on both fronts: it succeeds neither as a film nor as a pilot episode.

Based on the best-selling Black Autumn novels, Homestead begins with a bang: a nuclear bomb is detonated off the coast of California, throwing the American population into chaos as further attacks follow. [full review via Spectrum Culture]

jonah nolan being credited as the “grip” oh man I just can’t take this shit seriously anymore. we are in prisons of our own design

I’d crash out too if I was in the hospital in a coma and some butch lesbian started cozying up to my pregnant girlfriend

Director Magnus von Horn created The Girl with the Needle as a “fairy tale for grownups.” To von Horn, “for grownups” apparently means taking the Brothers Grimm and removing the extra m; his film is grim, a dark and horrifying meditation on the monsters of society, building tension with a score that never seems to let up. The titular girl, Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne), is on the verge of poverty, living in Copenhagen at the end of World War I. She’s evicted from her apartment due to her meager textile worker salary, plus her husband hasn’t yet returned from war; her life sucks in all kinds of ways von Horn is eager to spell out for us on screen. Karoline has barely enough money to keep herself off the streets, so she applies for a raise and stumbles into an affair with the factory owner (Joachim Fjelstrup), who impregnates her, refuses to marry her and then fires her from her job. The needle in question is a long knitting needle Karoline uses to perform an at-home abortion on herself in the bathhouse.

Karoline is a character invented by von Horn to tell the true story of Dagmar Overbye, an infamous Danish serial killer, who would take in children born outside wedlock and murder them. Every moment of the film is sickening to watch, from the nausea-inducing abortion scene to the sight of Karoline’s husband (Besir Zeciri), who returns from war with his face now a monstrous, destroyed, barely human thing. (Full review via Spectrum Culture)