The Kings of the World is like a Cormac McCarthy novel, a man in a bad situation travels to a place where he thinks things will be better, but over the course of the journey, things get much worse.
Ra is a young man who lives on the city streets with his friends, Nano, Sere and Winny, occasionally clashing with their fractious frenemy Culebro. Ra receives a letter from the government saying his grandmother’s petition to get her land back has been granted. As she left it to him in her will upon her passing, Ra sets off to reclaim his birthright.
This is a road trip movie, about youth and friendship in world of racism, violence, where the poor and powerless are routinely trampled on. Tenderness, care, generosity and humanity often come from those deemed least likely, those on the absolute margins of society. They are washed, fed and shown kindness and respect by prostitutes, and given a roof over their head for the night in the home of someone who has been cast aside as a madman, people with almost nothing share what they have with them.
The cinematography is just amazing. Colombia is such a gorgeous country, in The Kings of the World, the landscapes are just stunning. I wanted to dip my hands into the screen to cup these beautiful shots like water.
Not an easy watch, The Kings of the World contrasts the beauty of the world with the ugliness perpetuated in it.
In Plan 75, the Japanese government introduces a scheme to deal with the aging population, the titular Plan 75, which will allow citizens over the age of 75 to elect to die. The incentive is complete control of your end of life circumstances, top healthcare in a comfortable state-of-the-art hospital, full funeral costs covered, including disposable of your remains, and ¥1000 stipend to use as you see fit in your last days. Despite being speculative fiction, the film is done like social realism. Most of the scenes are muted, everyday, with the crash of the emotions hidden in the ordinariness of it all.
First, let’s just get our feet planted. There is no such thing as an aging problem, only a money problem. Getting older and being of reduced productivity is a problem for capitalism, not for people. People talk about generation divides, but the only divide that matters is the class divide. As much as I love boomer jokes like anyone else, working class people a few years older than you are not the enemy. And the whole notions that this film deals with – feeling like a burden, struggling to work, being estranged from family who have either gone abroad for better jobs or knock their pan in with work so much they are too exhausted to maintain familial bonds – all revolve around a lack of money, in a world where there it is a small number of parasitical people hoarding it.
Plan 75 seems conscious of this. At one point a Plan 75 employee is working to help implement hostile design on the park benches to stop the homeless sleeping there. Then at night, in the same place, he sets up a trestle table where people can sign up to die. At all stages, the film underlines that these people are being pushed out of society. Michi, the main character, starts the film working and living independently. But when her housing is marked for demolition, and the company she works for changes its policy to no longer hire the elderly, she is forced onto social support services which are underfunded and inadequate. It is only after being backed into a corner that she considers Plan 75.
Loneliness is also a major theme of the film. While this issue is treated with particular sensitivity because Japan has a long tradition of valuing elders, I feel people can talk about the breakdown of the extended family unit in societies outside of ours in a way that is very Othering. This is an issue across the globe for very similar reasons. I grew up in the west coast of Scotland, where folk moved in two doors down from their mammy. I grew up knowing all my grandparents, my great-grandfather, my great-aunts, and even met my great-great-aunt and -uncle. The notion of loneliness in old age was entirely alien to my experience, which was of older people having folk in their house every day, family, friends and neighbours. But again, all the changes to that are economic – the factory that employed three generations of my family closed down, people my age have had to work part-time jobs over and above full-time employment just make ends meet as rent soars and affordable housing depletes, the lack money means delaying starting a family, reducing the number of children to have or having none at all. All these things mean there is no one with the time, money or energy to maintain and support those family bonds with the older generation, and fewer and fewer people to do it.
The older people in Plan 75 have family, but they are just estranged for exactly these sorts of reasons. And they are not necessarily even needing care, as I say Michi is perfectly healthy, capable of working and living on her own. But the lack of place for her in society, the constant narrative that she is a burden, is what drives her to make that decision. It is the social attitude towards the elderly that is the problem, not them themselves.
What I liked best about this film is that everyone is nice. The young man who sets up that trestle table in the park is lovely and kind to everyone he meets, hoping to help them with their problems. The young woman who takes items from the dead bodies of the elderly for her own needs, is dedicated to their care and has nothing but respect for them. The young woman who works as a call-handler and talks Michi through her decision to die, loves listening to her stories about her life and wishes she wouldn’t go through with it. No one wants this situation, but once Plan 75 has been established as a solution to a ‘problem’, it is quickly seen as the only solution to a variety of social issues. When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
One thing I will say, the opening scene before the title card almost looks like it belongs in a different movie. Like someone said, “Your film is gonna be really steady and understated, have something shocking to grip people up top.” But it’s unnecessary, and out of keeping with the rest of the film.
Honestly, Plan 75 is less of a What If, and more of ‘exactly how we talk about the elderly now’. Government policy is already made as though elderly lives are of lesser or no value, just look at what happened during Covid. But this film does its best work not in justifying the worth of the lives of the elderly, because they don’t need to be justified, but showing what the rest of us lose when we diminish their value.
Rose moves from the Ivory Coast to France with her sons Jean and Ernest. In some ways, this is a coming-of-age film for all three of them.
Rose is very young when the family arrive in France in the late 80s. She moves in with her sister and her husband in a small flat in Paris. Rose thinks the world is opening up for her, she is now in a land of possibilities. And it’s clear from the fact that she already has 4 sons, the older two of which are back in the Ivory Coast, that she has lived a life up until now where a lot of the choices were made for her. When her sister introduces her to Julius, she clearly has this man set up to be Rose’s next husband. Determined to live her own life, Rose pursues her own romances, and refuses to just be a drudge made for work and endless domestic labour.
The second part of the film is about Jean, taking place when he is a teenager in the 90s. Imperceptibly Rose’s defiance has hardened, and her refusal to be shamed for wanting more from her life has led to a lack of self-reflection on how she is raising her children. She is content to let Jean raise Ernest in her absence. She works in Paris much of the time, while the boys live in a flat in Rouen, the hometown of the man who keeps Rose as his mistress. He has no interest in her kids, so it all falls on Jean’s shoulders. As a small boy, he set his sights on becoming a pilot, for which he needed very good grades. On top of this, when asked when his older brothers would join them in France, Rose, knowing they were never coming, made a comment about how it would happen once they were all successful here, and used it as a opportunity to emphasise sticking in at school and getting to the top of the class. It’s clearly a comment that she made off the cuff to deflect from a painful topic, but which buried itself in Jean’s mind. He puts enormous pressure on himself to do well, clearly feeling like all his brothers’ futures depend on him. He resents Rose’s lack of concern when he is carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. It can only be a matter of time before something has to give.
Mother and Son is about how, seemingly by degree, unwatched and unknowingly, our choices change the direction of our whole lives. It’s only at the end, when you look back at the road travelled, you wonder how the hell you got here. The film starts with Rose clutching tightly to her boys, her boys burying themselves in her sides. Over the course of the film, you watch those bonds grow in distance, strain and snap.
A really well done film full of sympathetic and moving performances.
I’m gonna have to use spoilers in this review because otherwise you won’t have any idea what I’m going on about.
Stone Turtle is a rape-revenge horror with a time-loop structure. Be aware this film opens with an honour killing in its first scene, and gender-based violence is a theme throughout. Know that going in.
A woman and girl live on an island inhabited only by women, and perhaps ghosts. A man appears unexpectedly, says he’s interested in the island’s turtles, and asks the woman to help him in his research. He seems very congenial until they are drawn into a confrontation, whereupon both show a ruthless brutality.
The film has a lot of commendable elements, but for me it is too slow. A time-loop structure works on repetition, giving the audience shorthand for repeated events, so that deviations in pattern can be explored. So much time is spent on the first run-through of the day, it’s done at a soporific pace, when you need the first time to establish the main beats. It’s just baggy and full of dead air.
My other big criticism is that I have no idea what it’s saying or am even sure it knows what it’s saying. Most rape-revenge stories are spartanly straight-forward, they do exactly what it says on the tin. If by being slower and more beautiful, Stone Turtle is meant to be more ponderous, I have no idea what it’s pondering. I’m not sure if the time-loop is meant to represent the futility of revenge, but since it’s based on this island of women’s pain and injustice, that would be a really bleak message about striving to redress those wrongs. It’s about gendered violence, but I wouldn’t call it a feminist film.
Magical realism from France. Vicky is a wee girl living in a small town in the mountains. She adores her mother, but is disturbed when her father’s sister comes to stay, shattering their peace and reopening old wounds. What no one realises is Vicky has the ability to see the past, and in doing so learns secrets long hidden.
I liked how the film is from Vicky’s perspective, and as such, her ability is just taken for a fact, without needing any supernatural explanation. It also means that no one else is privy to what she’s discovering, or understands her weird behaviour. And even as the plot grows more serious, she still has a child’s priorities.
The format of sliding back and forth between the past and the present is handled really well, and it’s all really clear and easy to follow. Plus the mystery element never overshadows the fact it is at heart a kitchen sink drama. The Five Devils is about family strain, romance, friendship and betrayal.
I’ve seen Mia Goth in a bunch of horror films where she seemed good but the film was gash. Finally she gets a chance to shine in Pearl.
Pearl is the prequel to X, which I wanted to see but haven’t yet seen, but since it comes first chronologically in the series, you can start with Pearl without needing to see X. Set in 1918, Pearl is a young farmgirl in Texas who dreams of leaving home to become a star. There’s also something wrong with her, like really wrong.
Pearl is shot as a big Technicolour spectacular, everything rich reds and greens, with an ostentatious score. This is Pearl’s story, and she is the star of her own glorious epic. The thing it’s most evocative of is The Wizard of Oz – during hard times in rural America, a young girl with big dreams is in the prelude to an amazing adventure.
But what Pearl doesn’t realise yet, she’s not in some feel-good showstopper, she’s in a horror. She is the horror. Because Pearl isn’t right. She kills a goose and feeds it to an alligator during the opening credits. And her daydreaming about cinema stardom frequently tilts into the unhinged, until finally careening into monomania.
What’s quite the feat is the film manages to keep Pearl sympathetic, long after her actions no longer warrant it, helped greatly by Mia Goth’s tender but frantic performance. She has a long monologue just before the film closes, and despite everything she’s done, everything you know she’s almost certainly about to do, she seems so small, so vulnerable, and lost, and you still feel for her. It’s just really well done.
A small group is led by their patriarch to an island in search good hunting grounds, only to find it bare. Hanging on by a thread, their tiny campfire flickering in the vast sea of darkness, something begins to move in the shadows.
What I really liked about this film was the interesting choices that went into it. Like, yeah, it’s standard ‘There’s Something In The Woods” kinda fare, but it really tries to flesh out a world from 45,000 years ago. Sometimes with period stuff, it’s just set dressing, and it ends up just Hollyoaks in stupid clothes. But with this, it’s entirely spoken in its own language, one created out of Basque, Arabic and Sanskrit to sound ancient. Which is almost a weird level of effort to go to for a small budget horror. Not many people elect to make a horror movie completely in a fictional language that requires English subtitles.
And the costume is designed off of Inuit clothing, because where it’s set is clearly freezing (it’s shot here in the Highlands). There’s clearly been thought put into what kind of culture these people have, and you get little glimpses of that through the jewellery they wear or the carvings on their spears or the markings on their faces. There is a sense of a world here. And you really appreciate it when watching the film, because this could so easily have been low-budget shakycam with your pals in the woods, running around in Ugg boots, but The Origin really feels like it’s taken you somewhere.
Strong addition to the genre, has that pressed in on all sides by an unknown foe feeling you get in things like The Ritual and Bone Tomahawk.
I so wanted to like that. Joseph Bologne’s life is so interesting, it would make such a good movie. It still would.
It’s American, so you know it’s gonna obvious and heavy-handed as fuck, but Jesus, some of that was unwatchable.
I’m gonna try and be fair and say what was good as well as bad about that film. The good is a short list, the start middle and end of which is Kelvin Harrison who fights the paint-by-numbers script to give a genuinely dedicated performance.
As for the bad… Phfffffft. The dialogue is definitely the worst. Just painful. Characters don’t speak, they narrate. And it’s all the time, from the tiniest interaction, of bullies beating Joseph as a schoolboy and feeling the need to proclaim, “Hit him! Hit him!” to having Marie Antionette say, “I am the queen”. Like we have eyes, it’s not radio, you’re adding nothing by just saying what you see out loud.
Every choice in this is the most obvious choice. The film starts with basically 3 scenes of pseudo dick-measuring contests back-to-back. We get to see smarmy and arrogant racists go up against Joseph, then he beats them at their own game, while being just as smarmy and arrogant. This is supposed to make us like him. It’s juvenile. And you just lurch from one scene hammering you over the head with a self-evident point to the next.
And it’s a real shame, because it seems to have a lot of the right pieces. It’s important that this Black man’s story is told by a Black director and Black writer, but more than that, incredibly talented people in their field. It’s written by Stefani Robinson, who writes for the What We Do In The Shadows tv show, which I love, and has received multiple Emmy Award nominations for that work. And directed by Stephen Williams, who is a solid pair of hands. But none of that seems to come together successfully.
If it was even just bad, I’d say good story, not well executed. But I actually sat with my head in my hands, trying to go somewhere else, during some of these scenes. It wasn’t just cringingly bad, it was bail on the whole endeavour level of bad. And having forced myself to stay and see it all, in order to not just judge it by its first 5 minutes, which were frankly enough to know what kinda time I was in for, I have to say I regret it, coz I could have been outside eating a sandwich.
Just once I would love to see kink in film bare any resemblance to kink in real life. The plot is a hotel mogul fires his dominatrix. It does not go well.
It hits all the tired out and egregious tropes, including:
Kink relationships are abusive relationships
Kink relationships are boundaryless and safewords mean nothing
Kink is a cry for help
Powerful women are just crazy bitches
Women make false rape allegations out of spite
Violence against sex workers
Sex workers are genuinely enthralled by their johns
It’s basically Gone Girl in a hotel room. And I know a lot of people like that movie, but it took me the first half hour to realise it wasn’t meant to be funny and I wasn’t meant to be laughing, and it only seemed more ridiculous when I had to hold the laughter in, so that is not a compliment.
Christopher Abbott is in this, and he seems like a safe pair of hands you hire to get the job done, but he’s woefully miscast. The character is meant to be a shlub, and instead you have Abbott stripping down to his perfect six pack.
I resent the time I spent watching it, and resent the time spent writing even a review this short.
Skin Deep is a body swap romantic drama. Leyla and Tristan attend a sort of hippy dippy retreat on an island in hopes of gaining more insight into their relationship by swapping bodies with another couple. There they ask is love possible beyond the body, beyond gender, beyond the self? But not really, this is just a glorified swingers party with a lot of gorgeous people getting off with each other. The real story here is about depression.
The crux of the dynamic is that Leyla is desperately depressed and Tristan, while caring for her with utter devotion, is in denial about the depths of her despair. And that’s the part about the whole body swap drama that resonates most clearly. The idea of cracking open your skin and escaping that sense of drowning, of being pulled through the floor. God, who wouldn’t want that? Who wouldn’t do anything for that?
And I like that the film doesn’t just shrug and say, “Everywhere you go, there you are”, it doesn’t cop out. Leyla’s depression is portrayed as bodily, part of her biochemical makeup, and inhabiting her skin means experiencing that agony. When she is liberated, she is given a whole new lease on life.
Tristan tries everything to support her but he can’t truly understand. Skin Deep is really about how letting someone truly love you means letting them carry your pain.
