A horror film about a teacher who snaps and finally decides to teach his lesson in the only language his pupils understand. A bleeding-heart lefty’s rage fantasy, implicating the audience in their own desire to see the unpleasant main characters brought to heel.
Kinda reminiscent of Funny Games, Clockwork Orange, Misery and (also by Stephen King) Rage.
A musical biopic focusing on Miles Davis’s nadir, after his spoiled wean attitude has driven away everyone close to him and he has insulted, humiliated, beat and degraded his wife in every way imaginable until she leaves him to his self-indulgent shitpile of fuck-up. Ewan McGregor plays the journalist who is pulled into the swirling nightmare of his life for a weekend which at times verges on comedy crime caper in this loud, colourful, firework burst of a movie.
Just saw No Home Movie which I loved!
It a narrative-less peephole view of the director’s mother and their relationship. It radiated love.
As anyone who knows me will know, despite my pretensions, I actually get bored during long shots of “nothing happening”; after thinking, “Yes, pretty”, I think about where I’m itchy, how full my bladder is, what I’m going to eat after the film. By all rights I shouldn’t have liked this movie, which features almost ten-minute long landscape shots of a car journey through Oklahoma or the sun on her mother’s rug in her Brussels flat. But I fell in love with her mother.
This movie is about how we love, what our love is composed of. I loved her mother, not because of huge dramatic plot-points, but because I loved the sound of her shuffling feet on the floor, the small hums and gasps her mother made to herself pottering about the flat alone, her multiple abortive attempts to finish phone conversations. I saw her mother just as she was, imbued with the love the director had for her, and it was beautiful.
A really, really good film. A biopic of the work of Nise de Silviera, a Brazilian psychiatrist and mental health care reformer. A heartbreaking but ultimately uplifting film about how seeing the humanity in others is profoundly healing.
Fucking love Goodnight Mommy, it’s great to watch it surrounded by Glaswegians wincing, gasping and muttering, “Aw fuck!”
A delightfully over-the-top Arabic crime noir/Western in which an Arabic Tom Waits is trapped in a cell when a psycho killer disguised a cop takes over the precinct. The killer cop’s manic depiction reminded me of Andrew Scott’s Moriarty in Sherlock, i.e. bonkers.
A movie about a refugee family-of-circumstance swapping a life of violence in Sri Lanka for a life of violence in the French slums. Despite the subject, it had a surprising amount of warmth and humour.
A movie about the wife of an Argentinian military man who begins to suspect that her adopted daughter was one of the generation of children stolen from dissidents. A big issue told in a tight and personal microcosm.
Labyrinth of Lies, an absolutely excellent film about a turning point in German history, where the prosecution of former Auschwitz guards marked a decisive cultural change about whether Germany chose to forget the crimes of the past as simply part and parcel of the nature of war, or as an atrocity to be remembered lest it ever be repeated. Highly recommend you go see this if you get the chance.
High-Rise is awesome! A weird, kaleidoscopic, psychedelic, nightmarish, modern fairytale. Also, THE HIDDLESTON!
So many nude scenes, so definitely getting it on DVD for slow-mo.
I have, sadly, lost this pair of leggings.