Iâll confess iâm skipping past a lot of Christmas films for this recap, because iâd seen most of them before and those memories are blanketed in a thick fog of advocaat and chocolate. Nevertheless: hereâs â if not all â most of the things iâve watched over the past couple of months.
Perhaps iâm being unfair to a film thatâs a rounding error away from a century old, but this was nightmarish in the literal sense. A terrifying parade of disconnected events where things just happen without rhyme or reason. By the end of it, i just wanted to wake up. (2/10)
âIf there was only certainty and no doubt, there would be no mystery. And therefore no need for faith. Let us pray that God will grant us a Pope who doubts.â
Perfectly hits that Twelve Angry Men nerve in my brain. What i love about this, apart from the truly devious vape hits, is that rather than some grandiose, ancient, mysterious cabal, the Catholic Church is treated as exactly what it is: the worldâs oldest bureaucracy.1 (10/10)
âI have seen things in this world that would make Isaac Newton crawl back into his mother's womb!â
Iâm playing a dangerous game here, because i watched this on the first of January, 2025 â meaning that, once again, thereâs a good chance that my âfavourite film of 2025â will have come out in 2024. Not that iâm complaining.
Robert Eggers hits it out of the park again in this incredible adaptation of an adaptation of Dracula. Visually, itâs immaculate, drenched in chiaroscuro, the Count himself heralded by a sudden desaturation to bluish silver. The actors bring their A-game all around: Nicholas Hoult, perpetually an up-and-comer, seems finally to be breaking out, and having long forgotten the trailers, the midway appearance of Willem Dafoe was a most welcome surprise. Plus, despite owing her career to a surname, Lily-Rose Depp brings it all to a role that in a lesser actorâs hands could have been yet another generic traumatised wife.
I have such a loveâhate relationship with Terry Gilliam. His films are so inventive, so wonderful, in theory, everything i love. But theyâre always coated in this layer of grime and ugliness that brings them down for me. Here, he finally puts it to good use, building a horrifyingly relatable surreal dystopia thatâll make any Brit whoâs ever had to deal with the welfare system cry-laugh in how true it all is. Have you got a 27B/6? Iâm a bit of a stickler for paperwork⌠(8/10)
Talk about wasted potential. Heretic starts out brilliant â two Mormon missionaries are trapped in the house of a Reddit atheist, played marvellously by Hugh Grant, who knows how to make every conversation drip with tension. If it was just two hours of uncomfortable theological arguments, iâd be strapped in.
But, nope! The third act starts, they go into his eeeeevil basement, and thereâs a creeeepy emaciated woman talking in cryptic breathy half-sentences!!! Are you scared yet??? (4/10)
I forgot i saw this and had to quickly retract the blog post and edit it back in, which says just about all you need to know. Itâs pretty good, and the monkey gimmickâs fun, but iâm not itching to rewatch it any time soon. (5ž/10)
We are so fucking back. Ben Stiller and company havenât missed a single step in the three-year-long gap. Iâm tearing my hair out trying to figure out the mysteries over here!
The main message i got from this was reinforcement that the mediĂŚval era is, indeed, the least interesting (to me) of the three broad ages of history. Still, thereâs stuff to like here: Sean Connery is always great, and there are so many weird-ass little guys in the monastery that you have to begrudgingly love the energy. (5/10)
âI wasn't really paying attention⌠I was too busy thinking how i would gas everyone in the room.â
Behold, the antiâSchindlerâs List: a quiet family drama where the head of the family just so happens to be the KZ-Kommandant of Auschwitz.
The magicâs in the sound. We never get to see what goes on behind the walls of the camp, but the implication is enough. Stacks of smoke. The noise of industry. Yelling of orders. Screams of pain. Itâs enough to make anyone throw up. The musicâs no respite: John Williams this ainât; what little there is is harsh, discordant, pained.
Sandra HĂźller is incredible as the commandantâs wife, a woman who cares much more about the stability of their marriage and financial security than anything her husband might be doing for a living. Thereâs a chilling conversation where her and her friends, gathered round for tea, chat idly about the clothes of liquidated Jews they won at auction.
Still, itâs a little disjointed; some fragments and branches never quite meet back up with the main trunk of the film. Itâs a hard thing to rate⌠but letâs say (7/10).
Thereâs been a terrible glitch in the system. See, last year, i designated Avatar: The Way of Water â a film which by all possible standards was released in 2022 â as my favourite film of 2023. I figured that this was alright, since i had first seen it in January of â23, during its original release, and it was unlikely to happen again in 2024.
It happened again in 2024.1 Even more egregiously, it was, to my knowledge, long after the film in questionâs original 2023 run; my local arthouse cinema just happened to be showing it. Alright then, i thought â iâll make a new category for my favourite film of last last year, and give the actual award to the second place.
The second place was also a 2023 film â but, in my defence, one which didnât see a British release until 2024. Itâs not until you get to the bronze-medal spot that you get an undisputable, certifiable 2024 release.
As such, not wanting to deprive any of the three of recognition, i, acting in my role as the governor of the Satyrsâ Forestâs Board of Archons (est. time immemorial, number of members: 1), have elected to split the award three ways. Please try to enjoy each movie equally.
I caught up with Justine Trietâs Anatomy of a Fall in late March, in what must have been a repertory showing at the Tyneside Cinema, and on paper, this should in no way be my film of the year. Iâm a maximalist at heart: i think, generally, that more is more, and the best art is that which stops just short of total sensory abuse. So whatâs this quiet legal drama2 about an accident in the French Alps doing on here?
Autobiographical reasons, mostly. I worry about disclosing too much, but i saw so much of myself in the character of Daniel â a shy, mildly disabled kid torn between two cultures who has to deal with the sudden absence of his father â that by the end i was sobbing and sobbing and sobbing and i didnât even know why.
If you believe the hubbub, this is a mystery film. Whoâs really responsible for the dadâs death? Was it Sandra HĂźller? Did he kill himself? But Ms Triet has an answer, one that sheâs sworn not to reveal for decades â and, if we all saw the same film, i think i know what it is. It was an accident. Always, we see these deliberate shots of the dogâs ball precariously on the stairs, or the son nearly slipping off of snowy ground. The prosecutor even says as much: accidents happen, but they donât make for a flashy story. So, as humans, we make up intrigue where none exists â because itâs easier to accept evil than that the universe is sometimes a cruel and arbitrary thing.
Poor Things! Released in 2023 in the U.S., but took until January of 2024 to arrive on this side of the pond. Last year already had a whole awards cycle with it in contention, everyone knows about it, so iâll be brief. This film would give the average puritanical zoomer a heart attack with the amount of fucking in it, the average puritanical boomer a heart attack at about the point where Emma Stone joins the communist party, and the average modern sadsack a heart attack with how wonderfully optimistic Ms Stoneâs character is despite the dour circumstances of her creation. Quality flick.
Finally, we come to the only awardee unambiguously released in 2024, and the goopiest film of the year: The Substance. If last year Avatar was a warm bath for the senses, then this is a kick to the face. From the moment the pounding techno score kicks in, every little smack and crinkle of sound is perfectly calibrated to be disgusting in the best possible way, even if itâs just Dennis Quaid eating a bowl of shrimp. Every shot is cranked up to eleven, like you just guzzled down ten Potions of Swiftness and forgot to turn off Quake Pro. Itâs fucking glorious.
At some point, you think, ah, okay, iâve got a handle on the idea here. The movie then slaps you right on the cheek and reminds you that this is The Substance, bitch, and we are going to take this to its logical conclusion whether you like it or not. Weâre making it even goopier. Even grosser. Even weirder. And youâre going to either like it or throw up in your popcorn bucket and we donât care which.
I watched a lot of great old films for the first time last year. Some Like It Hot is a fantastic queer comedy thatâs aged far more gracefully than it has any right to (a bit like Dick van Dyke). Schindlerâs List3 is a masterpiece that should, by all rights, be this yearâs recipient â but iâd be hard-pressed to say i âenjoyedâ it, per se. Thatâs a one-and-done watch.
So, being the certified world #1 Gremlins 2 enjoyer that i am, it falls to 1986âs Little Shop of Horrors to take the crown. I just love this little slice of musical puppet madness. Steve Martin proves that the D in BDSM stands for âdentistâ.
Oh, Ryan Gosling. I put my trust in you, and this is how you repay me? The Fall Guy had everything teed up for a hole-in-one and whacked itself in the face with a golf club instead.
The problem is in the edit. Dialogue scenes go overlong. Every shot lingers just a second or so too long. The jokes (in this comedy film) are atrocious â but they could have been salvaged with a tighter edit! The setpieces are fun and Mr Gosling is as magnetic as always; the ingredients are there, but itâs just too scattershot to make it work.
I am convinced that Charli XCXâs Brat, where hyperpop grows up and gets a job, is music from the future that only wound up back in 2024 via some horrible spatiotemporal accident that killed two scientists and irradiated the entire Australian Capital Territory. Best song: âSympathy Is a Knifeâ.
I found out about the Levellers after a Discord acquaintance put the lyrics to âSell Outâ, off the album Levelling the Land, as their status. I then off-handedly played said song to my mother at a family get-together, who, unbeknownst to me, was a Levellers super-fan in her youth, and informed me that they were going to be in Newcastle this summer and would you like a ticket?
Some months later, and i can comfortably say that yes, they may all be geriatric now, but by the Gods, can they still play. (Iâm very glad i found a nice balcony to stand on, because the pit looked like an earthquake was hitting it!) It was a much younger crowd than iâd anticipated, too â lots of old crusty punks, but a decent number of teens and twentysomethings, so the kids (iâm including myself in this) are all right. Best song: âSell Outâ.
Well it can hardly be anything other than the game that got me off my arse to make a whole dedicated page for it, no? Sonic Robo Blast 2, the longest-developed and most storied Sonic fan game in a community positively choked with them, successfully reactivated the dormant fan neurons in my brain that hadnât been used since i was twelve. (#SilvazeForLife.)
The controls take some getting used to (if youâre a mouse-and-keyboard type of guy, i suggest in the strongest of terms that you should go into the options and set the control scheme to âManualâ) if youâre used to how other 3DSonic games control, but you can hardly blame them given that when they started making it Adventure wasnât even out yet in North America. Once that wee hurdleâs over with, youâre in for a proper joyous adventure.
Oh, and since itâs open source, the modding support is excellent to boot, with tonnes of level packs, tweaks, and nearly every playable character4 from the games you could care to name. So what are you waiting for? Go and download it today!
âFake newsâ was the defining term of the twenty-tens, and the introduction of easily accessible generative machine-learning tools has only sped up the slop production line. Itâs a rough landscape out there â as they say, the truth is paywalled, but the lies are free.
This yearâs winner turns the whole tripe-conomy on its head by going more retro than you could possibly imagine. Enter Tidings.potato.horse Ââ a self-described âmediĂŚval content farmâ, where four robot bards sum up the weekâs news in absurd lyrical form. Iâm always on the hunt for people doing interesting things with generative ML, so much of it being just plain tacky or a cheap imitation of humanity, and this hits the spot, because no human except a proper mark would ever put in the effort to do this. (Moreover, a human would probably raise some ethical qualms at around the fourth stanza on mass slaughter in Gaza.) So come on up, ye bards, and grasp your award with all six-and-a-half fingers.
As a card-carrying transhumanist, i long for the day when we defeat aging â and though weâre not there quite yet, the field of longevity is abuzz with both scientists doing their best, and⌠uh⌠other people. Ordinary Thingsâ âHow to Live Foreverâ takes an empathetic look at the other people, like the meme-infamous Bryan Johnson, and sees what theyâre all about, from clinics on private Caribbean islands to limited-edition paperback manifestos.
Language generally trends in the direction of politeness and euphemism. We replace the impolite with something less direct, which then becomes generally accepted, which then becomes impolite, and the cycle starts all over. This is how we got from idiot to mentally retarded to special needs to SEND.
Every so often, though, something opposite will happen: a magical dysphemism, where, the realm of polite speech not being enough, someone will reach into the taboo for description. Such is the case with 2024âs word of the year:
rawdog
verb. To have sex without a condom, or, latterly, to undertake something without the usual comforts and conveniences.
The most prominent new usage of rawdog has been in the case of rawdogging flights: no books, no films, no games; just you, the window, and the back of the seat. One might also rawdog an illness by forgoing medication, or rawdog a hike by going ultra-light. Itâs a tremendously useful addition to English vocabulary, and one i expect will stick around for many years to come.
I recently moved from Northumberland to County Durham, and, in the process, had to reload my mental map of all the nice places and interesting things to do, to which Birkheads Secret Gardens has been a most wonderful addition. After decades of mining and intensive farming, two gardeners bought this wee plot of land and have transformed it into fourteen luscious themed gardens overlooking the Durham countryside. I never got around to writing a full post on the place (my procrastination having got the better of me), but i hope this award is hearty enough a recommendation to make up for it.
Though things, as always, kept on ticking in the background, 2024 lacked big bombastic breakthroughs in science like 2022âs fusion ignition or 2023âs semaglutide revolution. The good news of the year was quieter, overtaken by the political shouting of the busiest electoral calendar in world history.
One item on the docket that slipped under the global radar was an important milestone on Britainâs route to net zero. With coal already dipping to a mere intermittent blip on the National Gridâs supply, it was time for the last supplier to close, and in late September, Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station officially shut its doors, ending 142 years of coal power in the UK. We still have a ways to go, but slowly, surely, this green and pleasant land is getting greener.
Watched as a double feature for the Halloweâen season â Evil Dead 2 is as funny as ever, and all you need to know about Army of Darkness is that itâs a film where a stop-motion skeleton explodes, and if that doesnât sell you, itâs not for you. (I did find myself wishing iâd watched the theatrical cut, rather than the directorâs cut â the studio-mandated happy ending has so many iconic bits i didnât realise i was missing!) (7/10)
In honour of Megalopolis2, Tyneside Cinema were doing a season of films with dizzying ambitions and variable results, from Southland Tales to Synecdoche. I jumped at the chance to finally see my favourite film on the big screen â and, yep, still a certified 11/10 masterpiece.
Steven Spielberg did not technically direct this, but come on now, we all know this is as spiritually Spielberg as it gets. Some fun stuff, especially the motley crew of paranormal investigators, but itâs weighed down by the jarring tonal mish-mash and a glued-on fourth act where they seem to have suddenly realised they forgot a â0â in their special effects budget. (5½/10)
I knew absolutely nowt about this going in, so when Robin Williams showed up, it took some time for me to mentally adjust to the combination of his zaniness, Jeff Bridgesâ shock-jock sleaze, and the trademark layer of Gilliam grime coating it all. All of it comes together beautifully in a surprisingly good-hearted fantasy tale of big-city redemption. (8/10)
I had bought the tickets and everything for Clint Eastwoodâs final film â but it was the day after the U.S. election, and fifteen minutes in, i thought, cripes, do i really want to be sitting through a drama about the dysfunction of the American legal system right now? (N/A/10)
Thereâs nothing i love more than a big, ambitious, messy film, and this hits all three. You can see the joins between the Kubrickian rigour and Spielbergian spectacle, but i donât care. Viva the mess.
Haley Joel Osment is incredible in this. You can totally see why Kubrick thought no child actor could ever pull off the script.
All the tech has this glorious early-noughties Orionâs Arm-style shimmer and sheen to it, and let me tell you, i live for that shit. (9/10)
This is some kind of primordial film, one that youâd find washed up at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, and six months later, radiocarbon dating would show it to be older than civilisation itself. (Very glad i had subtitles â those old-timey wickie accents donât mess about.)
Also, Robert Pattinson is really, really hot in this. No man has ever been this Fucked Up. (10/10)
I didnât know Hollywood still had it in it to pull out all the stops for a big, colourful show-stopping musical like this. Ariana Grande stole the show, but the goat stole my heart. (9/10)
Alex Garlandâs Annihilation is nominally a horror film.1 Team of scientists goes into an evil forest, gets picked off one by one with cool body horror effects, blonde final girl makes it out and is irreversibly traumatised, movie ends, many such cases.2 But iâve never seen it that way.
Might i just be a contrarian? Certainly, the biosphere our characters enter is cruel, but i think itâs a useful exercise to consider the situation from its perspective. The government is on their Gods-know-how-manyth expedition into the Shimmer at this point, and up until now, itâs all been military men. Cripes, if i were a sentient self-regulating ecosystem and all these feds started probing around my internals because they want to kill me, iâd develop an immune response too.
The world beyond the Shimmer is beautiful beyond description. It is a place where the sky glistens in iridescent3 waves, where every sort of plant grows from every sort of bush and beast, and where death is just one step in a beautiful cycle of life and rebirth.4 It blurs the line between not just the species but kingdoms of life â flora, fauna, and funga all mingling and merging together equally under one roof. Barring the terrifying humanâbear hybrids, thatâs a world iâd like to live in.
Plus, it seems willing to learn. In the ending âfightâ (cue the noise), allegorical for the obvious as the visuals may be, the alien throws not a single punch. Itâs learning by doing, mimicking every move Lena makes, enough to turn into a rudimentary facsimile of her â and even after its destruction, the ending glimmer in her and her husbandâs eyes makes clear a part of the Shimmerâs essence is here to say. I say thatâs for the better.
P.S. Hereâs some stuff iâve been listening to recently (sorted from âbleep bloopâ to âstrum strumâ):
I reviewed this one in full back in August, so go check that out if you want more detail. A stylish sequel (sevenquel?) that makes the world of Alien more believable than ever and introduces some great new talent. (7/10)
Seeing Christopher Lloyd in this was like seeing Jeff Goldblum in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Like, hey, youâre not meant to be famous yet!
Itâs one of those films thatâs been talked about so much that i have very little new to add, but i will say that i wasnât expecting this to be as funny as it was.1(7/10)
Ugh. Once the plot gets moving two thirds of the way through itâs pretty good, but that first hour is ĂŚsthetically revolting in the most perplexing way. The Spanish countryside has never looked so grimy and clammy. I hate all of these people. (3½/10)
I didnât know Steven Spielberg had the capacity to be so⌠cryptic? I love how the film builds up the mystery of whatâs going on, with an ending that leaves you wondering in both senses of the word. Contactâs better, yeah, but Contact wouldnât exist without Close Encounters as a base to work off. (9/10)
Douglas Trumbull, 2001âs special-effects man, gets into directing with this sickeningly seventies environmentalist sci-fi fable. Thereâs a lot to like here, but i canât help the feeling that this would have worked a lot better if youâd cut it up into five twenty-minute TV episodes and had Tom Baker show up midway through. (5/10)
Went to the cinema for this, for⌠some reason? Tim Burton is back, baby, having finally freed himself from Disneyâs offputting computer-generated tendrils, and while Beetlejuice²: Beetlejuice Harder is ultimately inessential, itâs a fun legasequel thatâs better than anyone was reasonably expecting, keeping up the same manic energy as the original. Michael Keaton, Catherine OâHara, and Winona Ryder havenât missed a step since 1988. Willem Dafoe is great too, though like most of the new cast, his character doesnât have much to do in the story, which struggles to commit to any of its three plot threads.
Also, the lead girl falls in love with a socially awkward zoomer who listens to Sigur RĂłs, which means thereâs still a chance for me. So thatâs⌠thatâs good. Thatâs reassuring. (6/10)
Come on. Itâs Casablanca. What do you want me to say? Every five minutes thereâs a line that made me point at the screen like Leonardo DiCaprio. âWeâll always have Paris.â(10/10)
Unnerving to see Dev Patel before his ongoing âsexiest man aliveâ era, but you can never go wrong with Danny Boyle, whose kinetic, saturated style elevates a simple feel-good rags-to-riches story. (6/10)
I cannot fucking believe i roped my mum into coming to the cinema with me.2 Greatest decision of my life. Her fucking face!
The Substance is the goopiest [sic] movie iâve ever seen, and thatâs ignoring all the body horror. Demi Moore digs through wet rubbish to pick up a sticky USB drive and splatters eggs everywhere. Dennis Quaid eats a bowl of shrimp that makes the worldâs most viscerally disgusting noise. Margaret Qualleyâs teeth fall out.3
My one complaint is i wish it had gone further. Everyone on the internet thinks it went too far. No. They are fools. That blood-sprayed audience should have started melting into The Thing, and we all know that deep inside our hearts. (9½/10)
Long live the new flesh! A film starring a Betamaxussy and a man who exists exclusively through semi-sentient VHS tapes. So many ideas, so little time (the Cronenberg special). Watching this is like trying to remember a nightmare you just woke up from.
Iâm filing this in the same folder as Rear Window, a film with a surprising amount to say about an internet that it couldnât have reasonably foreseen. What are we if not, like Brian OâBlivion4, ghosts of all our past transmissions? Is the online avatar not the new flesh? Existenz tackles the internet more head-on, but suffers from the fact that David Cronenberg doesnât know what a video game is. Videodrome is unburdened by the future facts, and so can say whatever it wants. (10/10)
Francis Ford Coppolaâs final fart is why Hollywood canât have nice things, an incomprehensible schmaltzy mess about how Adam Driver is a Very Special Boy who is always right. I donât know where the money went â everything looks like Spy Kids. What an embarrassing way to go out. (2/10)
Francis Ford Coppola shoots for the moon and misses with Megalopolis, his long-gestating passion project that shows why studio interference isnât always the worst thing. Sometimes you need someone in the room to say ânoâ. Every creative decision made here is baffling: Adam Driverâs character can stop time, and this never comes up. Our main character can stop time, and this does not play a role in the filmâs story! His political rival leaks a video of him having sex with an underage pop star, and within about five minutes, it turns out it was fake and she was 23 anyway, so that plotlineâs resolved and never comes back up. Every conflict is like this. I donât know whatâs going on. (4/10)
Francis Ford Coppolaâs Megalopolis: A Fable defies your puny human notions of âgoodâ or âbadâ in an ambitious sci-fi drama thatâs like if Hillary Clinton wrote a Neil Breen film.5 You can neatly split the cast into âknew what kind of movie they were inâ and âdidnâtâ. Shia LeBeouf knew â he chews the scenery with every line as if the sets were made of cotton candy. Aubrey Plaza knew, because thereâs no way not to know what kind of movie youâre in when your character is called âWow Platinumâ and makes Mr LeBeouf give her head. Adam Driver probably knew? He can get pretty hammy, but heâs kind of trying to keep a straight face. Nathalie Emmanuel didnât know â sheâs the female lead, but her performance is so wooden i was genuinely shocked to find out she wasnât a nepotism hire. Giancarlo Esposito is insulated enough from the properly weird stuff that i donât think he knew. (6/10)
Francis Ford Coppolaâs Francis Ford Coppolaâs Megalopolis: A Fable is so sincere i canât help but love it. Itâs a man who built his fame on films about the criminal underworld and the hell of war going: âI refuse to let this be my legacyâ. Megalopolis is about a man with a vision for a better future and the power to make it happen. (His vision for a better future mostly involves those moving walkways they have at airports. I never said it was perfect.) And, yeah, itâs a little undercooked. Yeah, itâs as subtle as a brick.6 But itâs the film the man wanted to make, and itâs a film that proudly stands against the cynical doom and gloom that has infested popular culture since the nineties. I canât help but respect that. (8/10)
âWhaddaya think of this boner i got?â âJon Voight, 2024 (10/10)
Super props to the trailer people, honestly â if it wasnât for seeing that chilling first trailer in cinemas, iâd never have even considered watching the seventh film in a franchise i didnât particularly care for.
I watched Fede Ălvarezâs turn at the Alien franchiseâs helm with, i sense, the ideal amount of knowledge. Online reviews are split â and the more Alien films the reviewerâs seen, the less they like it. Me? Iâd sat down for the first and second, once, a while ago, and that was it. No slogging through assembly cuts or failed comebacks or stealth prequels or anything of the sort. Where they saw the gasping regurgitations of a dying and overexerted setting, i saw a darn good film.
The opening credits start rolling and weâre immediately in the future. Yesterdayâs future. Everythingâs clicks and clacks and yellowing walls, just as James Cameron left it when he turned off the lights. What theyâve done is turn what could be an embarrassing anachronism â haha, look at what those quaint twentieth-century fools thought today would look like â into a believable path that, with a nudge and a push, technology might have otherwise taken. Certainly, the bulky CRTs and Vectrex video games arenât better than the technology of even ten years ago IRL⌠but theyâre cheaper, exactly the sort of thing a fledgling colony would use to save money, and one gets the sense that the predilection for tactile tools and fuzzy screens is the result of ĂŚsthetics cycling back to where they were a hundred years ago, not everyone collectively forgetting how to make a liquid-crystal display.
Two sci-fi pet peeves of mine are nicely resolved, too. In the role of the astronomer-aggravating âââasteroid fieldâââ we instead have the ring of an icy planet; the shipâs artificial gravity system is no mere cost-saving cop-out, but a structual Jenga block in the filmâs action scenes, which mine the flip between 0 and 1 g for all itâs worth. Objectively speaking, Alien: Romulus just wouldnât work on a hard sci-fi rotating spaceship, which is a rare thing!
Seven films into a franchise, it would be easy to bog oneself down in continuity and lock out any viewers who havenât melted into their couch for a twelve-hour marathon. (This is the predicament which Marvel films have found themselves in as of late.) Equally, it would be easy to go too far in the quest to âbreathe new lifeâ⢠into the world and leave us wondering why they put the Alien name on it at all. Romulus finds a sensible middle path. Its connection with the Alien brand is chiefly a matter of economy. We know, for example, that xenomorphs are bad, that they have acid blood, and that they get you boypreggers. We know Weyland-Yutani is an unscrupulous corporation in the business of space colonisation that wants to use xenomorph DNA for its own gain. We know that androids are made of milk for some reason. And so Mr Ălvarez neednât waste any time explaining that to us. Equally, nobody ever says the name âEllen Ripleyâ. Thereâs no mention of the ancient progenitors of mankind or whatever those prequel films were about. Our story is set in the world of Alien, not the wiki.* (Please ignore that Asterisk of Doom. Iâm sure itâs fine.)
*The Asterisk of Doom, or, the dead CG elephant in the room
This was an exceedingly minor thing to my overall enjoyment and i didnât want to give it more space than it deserved, so iâm shunting it down here where noĂśne will see it. So. That, uh⌠that Ian Holm deepfake, huh?
There has always been spirited debate over the ethical quandaries of reviving old actors with effects, even before the current wave of machine learning â Crispin Glover sued Universal for flipping his character upside down in Back to the Future: Part II, remember! I actually donât mind it, particularly when the character themself, like Ian Holmâs Ash/Rook, is meant to be artificial. (And as before, the same way we already know xenomorphs are bad news, we already know Mr Holmâs face wonât belong to someone with our crewâs best interests at heart.)
My annoyance is strictly technical. To understand the problem, letâs flash back fourteen years to Tron: Legacy, the first blockbuster to bring back an old face with the power of the computer:
Š Disney, 2010. Iâm using this clip for the purpose of criticism, as is my right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Bastids.
Here Joseph Kosinskiâs legasequel flashes back to the original filmâs time period, so faces the task of bringing back Jeff Bridges as he looked in 1982. It starts with just his voice. Perfect: faces and bodies change drastically in oneâs life, but at worst, a voice will get a little huskier.
Then, as we pan into his sonâs room, we see him first from the back, then a side profile, in the dark. Again, perfect. Hiding shoddy CGI in the dark has been a go-to in the filmmakerâs bag of tricks since Spielberg did it in Jurassic Park. This is going great. We have a believable fake Jeff Bridges. Weâre hitting our audience right in the nostalgia zone, which, as we all know, is the most profitable zone of the body. And then⌠oh. Ohhh no. Ohhh no no no.
Mr Bridgesâs doppelganger turns around directly into the bright light and opens his mouth. Every weakness in early-tens computer graphics comes out at once. The plastic skin. The dead eyes. The mouth that never moves the same way as the rest of the face. This is not Jeff Bridges. This is a changeling who has stolen his name and skydived into the uncanny valley. The illusion is shattered, because the filmmakers couldnât help themselves from giving the game away.
I bring this example up because Alien: Romulus has the exact opposite problem. The crew, exploring a dank, dark ship, finds Rook face down on the messy ground, having barely survived a close encounter of the third kind. They plug him in, and⌠a heretofore unknown bright light turns to shine directly onto his face, on which not a jot of blood or waste is to be found. (Itâs harder to deepfake someone if thereâs muck in the facial area, you understand.) This is everything youâre not meant to do, and though technology has advanced tremendously in the fourteen years since Rubbery Bridges Syndrome, a cluster of neurons in the back of your head knows that something is deeply wrong. There is no light in his eyes. I kept looking at his eyebrows, wondering if the problem was there, but no. Every bit of his face looks perfect â but all put together in motion⌠one shudders at the sight.
But the further the film goes on, the smarter it gets. After our scavengers leave the lab where they found him, they interact with him chiefly through fuzzy CRT screens, smoothing out the imperfections. Unable to move, assorted gunk and alien goo piles up on his increasingly ravaged face, and when we do properly cut back to him, heâs shot in a side profile with chiaroscuro alarm lights. I kept thinking: why the fuck are you only doing this nowâ˝ You donât put the bad effects first, for Godsâ sakes!
Anyway, the rubbery robot face didnât actually bother me that much â weâve come to the point where weâre closer to the top of the uncanny valley than the bottom. I just needed some time to explain.
Particularly iâd like to single out the cast, none of whom i had heard of before barring a passing recollection of the name Cailee Spaeny, but all of whom do great jobs. Mr Ălvarez has aged down the cast from the seriesâ usual monster fodder, not burnt-out truckers but wide-eyed twentysomething pirates looking to steal some cryo pods to blast off after a better life. (Outside the lead two theyâre pretty thin, but hey, itâs a monster movie.) Our lead is the orphaned Rain Carradine, a serviceable Sigourneyalike played by Ms Spaeny, who reluctantly goes with the scavengers after she finds out sheâs been assigned another six years on a black-skied mining colony⌠and because they require the services of her android guardian Andy (heh), the only one who can interface with the systems on the derelict space station they have their eyes on. David Jonsson, who plays Andy, would deserve an âand introducingâ had he not been in Rye Lane just last year, but this alone already proves heâs going on to do even greater things. Heâs given the task, without spoilers, of playing what amounts to two different (but similar!) characters in the same body, and shows off his naturalistic chops in every little micro-movement.
A certain scene with his character early on will be etched in my brain forever. Itâs the big reveal of the Alienâ˘, facehuggers jumping out from every corner in a room flooded by molten ice and red lights⌠and he stands there, rebooting, the same pose he was two minutes ago, his arms wide, as if nothing happens. Two seconds later, he takes total command of the situation, going from timid to Terminator in five seconds flat. If anything from this film is passed into the annals of pop culture (other than the Asterisk) itâll either be that scene or the insane body-horror third act that i darenât even mention for fear of ruining the experience. (Annihilation would be proud.)
Iâll be straight with you: itâs not as good as Alien. Itâs not as good as Aliens. But nothing ever will be. Donât go in with sky-high expectations â go in for a rollicking sci-fi-action-horror, xenomorph or no xenomorph, and youâll have a great time.
First up is Enemy (2013), a movie somebody peed on. Summarising the plot it sounds a bit thin â Jake Gyllenhaal meets his evil twin Jake Evyllenhaal and not much else happens â but Denis Villeneuve does a fantastic job of building up tension and dread around a slow-burning premise which, in itself, isnât necessarily the scariest thing. 6/10.
Took a trip to the cinema to see Longlegs (2024), starring the greatest living actor himself, Nic Cage. I say âstarringâ; heâs not in it so much, as itâs more about the internal tensions of our mildly psychic, mildly autistic Clarice Starling stand-in, played wonderfully by Maika Monroe. Again, the plotâs a bit thin, falling apart with a whimper in the third act, but the style and execution more than makes up for it. There are so many looming shots of doors and windows just at the edge of frame, snippets of interspersed terror, ominous rumbling soundscapes⌠pretty good! 7/10.
Green Room (2015) is a solid little low-budget thriller where a punk band get trapped in a nazi bar. Not much to say other than 6/10.
Watched Schindlerâs List (1993) for the first time. Cue several hours of inelegant blubbering from me. (âI could have got moreâŚâ) I would like to apologise for calling John Williams a hack. I was not familiar with your game, sir. 10/10, but it feels wrong to give it a numbered score in the first place.
In Bruges (2008)! The online hype for this is ravenous and iâm not quite sure it lives up, but i was suitably entertained. Colin Farrell has very kind eyes. 6½/10.
The Olympics were as uplifting as always. A Discord friend of mine put it best: âThe Olympics makes me feel patriotic for the human raceâ. For a few glorious weeks, it doesnât matter that the IOC is the third most corrupt organisation on the planet behind Fifa and the Mafia. It doesnât matter that there are wars raging across the old world. All that matters is that the most fit people on the planet have come to show what the human body can really do when pushed to its limits.
After years of putting it off, i finally got around to The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), all 3½ hours of it. Itâs hard to review just the first part of the trilogy, but if the rest is as good as this, itâs on track for an easy 9.
Iâve been getting into the Eighth Doctor audio dramas recently and âThe Chimes of Midnightâ might be among the best things to come out of Doctor Who. Very dark. Very weird. It builds up this offputting atmosphere perfectly, Paul McGann and India Fisher making you wish theyâd gotten a proper series, with the traditional timey-wimey twist. 9/10.
Hyped up to me as one of the best horror films in history, iâm convinced itâs actually an incredible comedy. There is so much Gremlins energy oozing out of this whole film; every scene, you can just imagine George Romero sitting back and going ââŚcan i, like, put that in a movie?â and then putting that in a movie. A zombie gets pied in the face. 8/10.
Mad Max: Fury Road is not the greatest film ever made, but it feels like the greatest film ever made while youâre watching it. Iâve never seen a film edited like this: a two-hour-long sugar rush where every shot is overcranked till it breaks and nothing ever stops moving. 9/10, with one point added solely because of the guy in the post-apocalyptic convoy whose job it is to play the guitar.
Stepdadâs pick, in honour of Donald Sutherlandâs death. Great stuff, with a fascinating eerie soundscape, creepily good practical effects, and, hang on, is that Jeff Goldblum? 7/10.
Well, that sure was a Russell T. Davies Doctor Who finale, wasnât it? Part oneâs always great, and then, as always, he canât write an ending for the life of him.
Now the seasonâs over, itâs clear that it needed more room to breathe. Eight episodes of forty minutes just isnât enough for a show to do both monster-of-the-week and a longer arc; with two episodes taken up by the finale, two Doctor-lite episodes, and one where sheâs unconscious for half of it, weâve barely gotten to know the relationship between Ruby and the Doctor, which is a shame, because what we do get is brilliant! They play off each other so well, and i wish we could have seen more of them together.
Seen on a whim. A nice little drama about a motorbike club, starring Elvis and Jodie Comer, whoâs doing a⌠fascinating⌠Midwestern-type accent. 6/10.
âItâs like Rear Window, but on a lorry.â This scrappy Australian flick delivers just what it says on the tin, with an early turn by Jamie Lee Curtis as a hitchhiker who gets picked up in the second half. 6/10.
Iâm out of touch with music these days, but listening to Charli XCXâs pulse-pounding new hyperpop record, i canât help but think this is what pop music must sound like in the next universe over. I was sleep-deprived after staying up for election night and that definitely helped the vibe⌠8/10.
Tombstone (1993). I have this pathological aversion to westerns, so i wasnât expecting much â but once i turned off the part of me that was waiting for Richard Pryor to show up i realised that this the ââemâ in âthey just donât make âem like they used taâ: just a solid, well-made flick, regardless of my thoughts on the genre! I cried manly man tears at the end. 7/10.
The Thirteenth Floor, everyoneâs fourth favourite film about a simulated world from 1999. I found it surprisingly interesting whenever it didnât remind me too much of The Matrix, and a bit pathetic whenever it did. (Donât try to do action, simulated world movie from 1999. Youâll never measure up.) 6/10.
As a bonus, since nobody cares about this movie, you can just watch it on Youtube if you want.
Little Shop of Horors (1986). My pick for family movie night. Utterly charming from leaf to toe â the best example since Gremlins 2 of a film where you can see the craft that went into making every frame. Incredible effects, wonderful music, magnetic comedic performances from the whole cast⌠10/10!
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), the impromptu double feature to the above. My brain has been completely frazzled by watching this. I went from loving it to hating it to complete bafflement to examining it like a scientist would a new species of frog. This film may very well have invented homosexuality. Defies numerical rating/10.
Late Night with the Devil (2023). Always nice to see David Dastmalchian, even if itâs nothing that hasnât been done before â 6/10.
The Fall Guy (2024). Ryan Goslingâs a brilliant comedic actor, but him and some great setpieces struggle to save this film from a shoddy script and baffling editing choices. The jokes arenât funny, the dialogue scenes linger for far too long, half the stuff from the trailer is gone from the movie⌠the whole thing desperately needs a trimming down to a tight ninety minutes. 4/10.
Eurovision 2024. Bullet-pointed, as per tradition:
I went in totally blind this year, having missed the semi-finals while building a new PC. Oops!
Sweden appear to have trapped the Backstreet Boys in the Matrix.
There is no country named the Netherlands and never has been. Doesnât exist. Not real. We begin bombing in five minutes.
Big fan of Spainâs bizarre campy cougar energy, even if the audience and juries werenât!
Estonia are frankly embarrassing.
Completely maxed out my scorecard for Ireland, who have sent in Xanthe-bait of the highest order. Yes⌠hahaha⌠yes!!!
Greeceâs song is the most annoying thing since Crazy Frog and it baffles me how highly it scored.
I think the UK is just cursed at this point. We send a legitimate star with the worldâs gayest performance (admittedly more in the âgetting sucked off in a dingy bathroomâ way than the âcampy drag queenâ way) and not a single point from the audience?
God bless Finland. I usually hate it when acts try deliberately to be funny but i died laughing at a pantsless man in a censored Windows 95 T-shirt emerging from an egg while pyrotechnics go off.
Switzerland have taken Sam Ryderâs mantle as this yearâs designated golden retriever⌠a great performance from someone whoâs clearly happy beyond words to be there. A deserving winner if there ever was one.
Croatiaâs catchy pirate dance is great but i cannot forgive that abominable stage name. I donât care how many records you sell; there is no excuse to call yourself Baby Lasagna. Go back to the drawing board. Now.
T2 Trainspotting (2017). Mamaâs pick for family movie night. I wasnât so hot on the idea going in⌠and then it was, to my surprise, pretty great! It uses the idea of the legacy sequel to its advantage â itâs a film about nostalgia, the good and bad of it all. It really does feel like youâre catching up with these characters twenty years later, all wondering where their lives have gone. Some beautiful shots, too â a film from 2017 that bothered hiring a gaffer?? What a concept! 8/10.
127 Hours (2010), continuing the Danny Boyle theme. Probably the best film a film about a guy whose hand is stuck next to a rock could ever be, it convinced me of the occasional merit of a good biopic over a documentary â this would not and could not work if you only had access to the original crummy camera footage and talking-head interviews. Also perhaps the only movie in history to contain an inflatable Scooby-Doo jumpscare. I was going to give it an 8, but then they played Sigur RĂłs in the triumphant ending scene, so sod it, itâs a 9/10.
Chris Chibnall is dead and Doctor Who is alive! I thought Ncuti Gatwa was playing the role too young at first, but the season proper has me totally convinced. His Doctor, the first Doctor to Fuckâ˘, has this infectious energy and zest for life thatâs totally new to the character, and a great rapoport with his companion â even when the new series is bad, itâs unhinged in a fun way, rather than the forgettable doldrums of the Chibnall era.
Aniara (2018). I actually watched this one back in February, but forgot to mention it at the time â a Swedish hard(ish) sci-fi tragedy, where a colony ship on its way to Mars gets knocked off course with no fuel left to turn back. This is unrelentingly bleak, sometimes to the point where my brain would shut off and stopped caring, but thereâs a lot to like.
I love the idea of the Mima as a character/narrative device/whatever: a living AI that uses peopleâs memories to bring them back visions of Earth as it was, then gets depressed because too many people are using it and flooding it with memories of the apocalypse. Giving the holodeck a soul? Genius.
Unfortunately it doesnât so much end as it just fizzles out â i guess you could make a case that thatâs on purpose, since thatâs how these situations go in the real world, but i found the whole dĂŠnouement deeply unsatisfying excepting the veeeery final shots (if you know, you know). 6/10.
Anatomy of a Fall (2023). Caught this one at the Tyneside, where it happened to be the next film on at the time i got in. This spoke to me not just because of the powerhouse performances from Sandra HĂźller, a dog named Messi (how did they get him to do that?), and the fifteen-year-old(!!!) Milo Machado-Graner, who i wish nothing but the best in his future, but because it matches up with events in my life to a frankly concerning autobiographical extent. This would never, ever be in my wheelhouse were it not for random chance, but i teared up thrice over. 10/10, and iâm annoyed i couldnât make it my best of last year.
Ten seconds after watching⌠Wait, people online think she killed the husband? Are they fucking stupid? What? Itâs obviously an accident. Did we watch the same film? Did the cut they saw not have all those carefully-inserted moments where people almost fall off of ledges or get hit by cars to hammer home that accidents can, in fact, just happen? What?? I â am i just projecting my own experiences here and not wanting to believe that my mum would kill someone? And then if they donât think she killed the husband, theyâre like, oh, well the husband deserved it, he was so awful in that argument, and like, no!!! The mum in the film near enough turns to the camera and says âthe worst moments in someoneâs life are unfairly cherry-picked as evidence for a trail and do not represent them as a wholeâ; again, did we watch the same bloody film? Are people stupid? Am i stupid? Is Justine Triet stupid? Am i dying?
Reservoir Dogs (1992). Mamaâs pick for family movie night. Every time i watch a Tarantino film i really get the sense that heâs jacking off to how clever he is writing the script and this is that tendency at its worst. I get why it caught on, i really do, but this is absolutely insufferable from start to finish any time someone whoâs not a cop is on screen. I do not care about your thoughts on Madonnaâs âLike a Virginâ, Quentin! 3ž/10.
Monkey Man (2024). I have been hyped as shit for this ever since the first trailer came out. You can tell this is Sexiest Man Alive Dev Patelâs first time in the directorâs chair (looooots of shaky-cam close-ups), but itâs damn stylish, and he shows a lot of promise. I can also see why Netflix did not want to touch this with a barge pole given that the plot is essentially âDev Patel kills the BJPâ. (It has some, ah, terroristic overtones that would be a little concerning if it were even 10% less shlocky.)
That aside, i really enjoyed the film, and thought it got better as it went along â early on, i wasnât super clear on the character motivations at play, but then the most me-bait thing since The Northman happens: Mr Patelâs character has a near-death-experience flashback and wakes up having been rescued by a hijra priest at a secret temple to Ardhanarishvara, a half-male, half-female incarnation of Shiva. Into! my! fucking! veins! 6½/10.
De dolende god (2018), as seen previously on The Garden. This is pretty much designed to appeal to me specifically, and yeah, itâs really good. Itâs sweet, heartfelt, absolutely gorgeous, and of course, extremely European. Itâs the odd one out in this list, being a comic book rather than a film â a medium i donât have much experience with, so itâs hard to give it a numerical rating in the absence of comparisons⌠but letâs say 8/10.
Star Trek: The Next Generation, season three. How did i let myself not get around to this earlierâ˝ This is soft sci-fi running at peak performance â a crew of hyper-competent and endearing1 people on a starship, sometimes just going on wacky space adventures, other times using science fiction as a lens through which to view our own world. 10/10. My three favourite episodes so far:
âTin Manâ. Our character actor of the week, Harry Groener, plays a member of a mildly telepathic species who has a small problem: he has Space Autism, thus canât turn said telepathy off. Man, does this episode get it. Every little thing about him is painfully relatable, the ending reduced me to tears, and i would like seven seasons of a buddy cop spinoff show starring him and Data right now, please and thank you.
âThe Survivorsâ. The third episode in the season, this is the one that made me sit up and go: God damn, thatâs good television. Our character of the week, John Anderson, is the man of the house for an elderly couple who are the only ones left after the decimation of their planet. I canât reveal anything more than that, but he sells it like noĂśne else could.
âDeja Qâ. This oneâs just funny.
The Revenant (2015). Stepdadâs pick for family movie night. When the credits rolled, i thought it one of the best films iâd ever seen⌠but a few weeks on, iâm not so sure. The cinematography is epic, and Tom Hardyâs brilliant, no doubt, but i really feel more could have been mined from the premise. Leonardo DiCaprioâs half-Pawnee son in particular is the heart of the film, and the key role through which to interpret the conflict between the three warring groups, but he gets unceremoniously killed off halfway through, for no other reason than to bolster Mr Hardyâs villain cred and, i am left to infer, because the writers had no idea what to do with his character for the rest of the story. Mr DiCaprio himself goes completely overboard and could really take Lawrence Olivierâs advice to heart: âMy dear boy, have you tried just acting?â 6½/10.
True Stories (1986). My pick for family movie night. This sweet and mild-mannered musical comedy is David Byrneâs only director credit, and thatâs a damned shame. Most places call it a satire, and i canât help but think theyâre projecting. This is a genuine ode to small-town American life, whatever its pros and whatever its cons, and next time iâm sick, i know exactly what iâll be putting on. 8/10.2
The Wicker Man (1973). Figured iâd watch a whimsical musical from the seventies in preparation for the next one on the list. Great vibes, great music, great ending, great showing from the legendary Christopher Lee3, but good heavens, is our main character ever an unsympathetic, bigoted prick. Heâs stumbled on a conspiracy to murder, and he just wonât let go of the fact that he saw some NEKKID WIMMEN prancing around a henge! 7/10.
Wonka (2024). Mamaâs pick for family movie night. This is a bad idea for a movie and they should not have made it. Thatâs fine, though: lots of good films make poor ideas on paper. This isnât one of them. TimothĂŠe Chalamet is terrible! You never once buy him as anything other than TimothĂŠe Chalamet in a hat. Heâs far too much of a goody two-shoes â not a droplet of the sinister nature of Gene Wilder and Johnny Deppâs4 WonkĂŚ is anywhere to be found. 3/10.
An American Werewolf in London (1981). Stepdadâs pick for family movie night. A bit of a throwaway, but thereâs some good stuff in here, especially the titular American Werewolf (Who Went Hiking In The North But For Some Reason Is Taken To A Hospital) In Londonâs zombified friend. 6/10.
Iâm Thinking of Ending Things (2020). Shades of Tenet and Asteroid City here: itâs not Charlie Kaufman at his best, but it is Charlie Kaufman at his most, and he may have finally metatexted too close to the sun. Some really interesting stuff spread out over a turgidly paced first and second acts and a completely nonsensical third. I presume Jesse Plemonsâs directions were just âpretend to be Philip Seymour Hoffmanâ. 5/10.
Dune Reloaded / Dune 2: Dune Harder / D2NE (2024). Seen in Imax. A titanic achievement that improves upon the often unfeeling first in every way. I take back everything i said about Wonka â Mr Chalamet is magnetic in a way that cements him as the zoomer generationâs first true movie star. Every gushing ten-star review youâve heard is true. See it now on the biggest screen you can, with bass that shakes the leather in your seat, because youâll never forgive yourself if you donât. 9/10, with that final point conditional on the inevitable third part hitting the mark.
Some Like It Hot (1959). My pick for family movie night. Iâve been accused of being a bit of a âmiserabilistâ (iâm sorry, but Synecdoche, New York bangs, and i have no regrets on making them watch it), so i thought iâd kick the year off with something a bit funny, a bit light-hearted, and a bit gay, and cor, was this an absolute classic! A comedy from the fifties about two men cross-dressing to infiltrate a womenâs jazz band should be positively radioactive, but this misses all the potential pipelines of âwell, you know, back in the dayâŚâ sewage and instead hits a gold-mine of timeless commentary on gender relations. Iâm on Team Daphne â heâs so much more confident in being a woman than Josephine and does not deserve that terrible toad man. (And, having seen both this and Rear Window, i can finally weigh in: Grace Kelly is a thousand times prettier than Marilyn Monroe. Sorry.) An instant 10/10.
âNoĂśne knows who created skull trumpet (until now)â. Had to click this as soon as it appeared on my feed. Thereâs really something beautiful about the amateurism of the early web, how a woman with no formal training in graphic design or anything of the sort could make all these wonderful, whimsical images, and have one of them persist into the present day. Rest in peace, Cathy Jarboe, you beautiful diamond, you. 6½/10.
The Master (2012). Mamaâs pick for family movie night. Philip Seymour Hoffman is incredible in this as an L. Ron Hubbardâstyle cult leader, to the extent that you often find yourself agreeing with him â i totally get why people join these sort of things now. Joaquin Phoenix, on the other hand⌠man, i hate to say it, but i might be falling off the Phoenix train? Heâs always doing that same snivelling Joker thing, even when itâs totally inappropriate like in Napoleon, and itâs getting kind of old. Joaquin Phoenix Play A Character With Social Skills Challenge (Impossible). Paul Thomas Anderson directs the shit out of this. 6/10.
The Hudsucker Proxy (1994). Rewatched with mama.1 Loved it even more than the first time, especially Jennifer Jason Leighâs character. Just a terribly good-natured film that only sits in obscurity because of its obsequious title. Itâs a shame Tim Robbins disappeared after this â i looked up his filmography and he seems to have been in bomb after bomb (Green Lantern, Mission to MarsâŚ). 9/10.
Poor Things (2023, but didnât come out until 2024 here). Watched at the Tyneside. Iâd been eagerly awaiting this since i saw the bonkers trailer back in September, and it didnât disappoint. There was a moment 15% of the way through where i thought i might walk out, but good lord, did it ever win me back over! Bella Scissorhands goes on a steampunk adventure across Europe filled with childlike whimsy, discovers herself, has lots of sex, and winds up Mark Ruffalo. Everyone is absolutely brilliant in this â special commendation to Willem Dafoe as a Scottish mad scientist. Already the strong front-runner for my favourite of the year. 9/10.
I would like to kick off the second annual Satyrsâ Forest Horny Awards⢠with an epigraph from myself, at the end of 2021, predicting what lay ahead. I wrote, and i quote:
It came out in December and i watched it in January of 2023 â iâm counting it.
Look. Look. Iâm not happy about this either. But he got me. That fucking James Cameron boomed me. Iâve never even seen the first one!
Everything about Avatar: The Way of Water puts our decade-long glut of superhero movies to shame. The visuals, thirteen years in the making, are indistinguishable from reality. (You will believe the sexy blue cat people are real, and you will rewatch it three times in Imax and still never figure out how they composited the scrawny human kid in.) Every tiny anthropological detail envelops you in the world of Pandora, meticulously constructed by the new god-king of worldbuilding. But most of all, itâs sincere. There are no tiresome quips of âwell, that just happenedâ. The characters never make fun of how silly this all is. It just lets itself be itself.
Some might shunt the filmâs story and characters to the back seat, and in many ways, thatâs fair: nobody goes to see an Avatar movie to find out if Jake and Neytiri get a divorce. But thatâs just the James Cameron style, man! He paints with a broad brush, and because of that, his stories connect with everyone from Chicago to Chittagong. NoĂśne ever complained about Titanic just being Romeo and Juliet on a boat, after all.
So, much as it might bug the poser in me to heap praise upon the fourth-biggest film in history, congratulations to the best film of the year: the one with the smurfs.
I have too many thoughts about Synecdoche, New York and iâve never been able to organise them all into anything coherent, so iâve set a timer for fifteen minutes and iâll just stop when i stop. This is going to be a mess.
So, first of all, this film is only two hours long. I say âonlyâ because it feels like four when youâre watching it. This takes place over, god, what, thirty or forty years? And you feel time slipping away just as Caden does.
Oh, uh, Caden Cotard is our main character, a hypochondriac playwright with ambitions of dizzying scale, played masterfully by the late great Philip Seymour Hoffman. Iâm not sure heâs meant to be a real person; rather, just as his fictional play (the size of the actual city of New York) balloons to its own world with its own Caden and its own play, he is just the creation of the unseen Ellen1, one world up, somewhere in between him and Charlie Kaufman.
Thereâs a moment halfway through that might be the best single second in a movie ever. Caden goes to Berlin to find his long-lost daughter Olive working as a prostitute â and as he enters the brothel, the door creaks behind him⌠sounding just like a babyâs cry.
That shot, when Caden finds out his dad died, and Sammyâs shadow looms behind the curtains like the Grim Reaper? Brilliant.
The one piece of the puzzle i still canât figure out is whatâs up with Maria. Sheâs this corrupting influence on everyone Caden loves, but bears the name of the Virgin Mary â which makes it difficult to slot her in, as i tried, as the Devil to Ellenâs God. Hm.
Itâs funny how Caden never really gets any sicker, but the world around him does. (Thereâs some gender identity stuff in there too, but honestly it all seems like the type of thing that could be attributed to other stuff to me. I donât think Cadenâs literally trans, he just happens to be the self-insert of a woman.)
Thatâs my fifteen minutes up. Synecdoche, New York! Greatest movie ever made.
Again, not a 2023 film, but i actually quite liked every 2023 film i watched, and i was annoyed enough by this one to put it on here instead.
It all started so innocently. It was a family movie night, and me and my mam were in the mood for something uplifting. Iâd asked on Reddit for movies with the same manic exuberance as The Fifth Element or Elvis, where some strange new colourful thing is thrown at the screen a mile a minute and the viewer is ripped along for the ride.
Mad Max: Fury Road? Seen it. Mandy? Not in the mood for horror. But The Congress? Now that sounded interesting. The reviews were coy, but all praised the psychedelic, mind-bending world crafted by director Ari Folman.
Count us in, i suppose. And so began my journey into hell.
To get the âcovetedâ Pebbledash Dildo, you donât just have to be bad. It is, after all, an award for disappointment. You must have a kernel of a great idea within you, one that is so simple to make something good out of, and fuck it all up anyway. That kernel can be found in a single brilliant scene, a diamond within this pile of filmic zirconia.
The premise of The Congress is more relevant now than ever, in this age of digital doubles, deepfakes, and AI actors. Robin Wright plays herself, who reluctantly decides to scan herself into digital form, so the studio can use her likeness forevermore without her having to break a sweat. As she stands among the blaring lights of the scanner, her agent recounts to her the story of how they first met, bringing tears to her eyes. Itâs a genuinely touching moment, and a springboard off of which so many ideas could dive, a trunk from which so many stories might branch.
Then it all goes to pot, and thirty years later, everyone is permanently on drugs, and so the film switches to oh god what the fuck is that get it off get it off get it off my fucking screen
So Robin Wright, now in a world of terrifying Newgrounds Betty Boop clones, attends the titular congress, where the CEO of the subtly named Miramount does a Hitler rally for his new drug. Then she meets generic Prince Charming man, the very person who scanned her in to the system â an interesting idea that they do absolutely nothing with â and they have ugly cartoon sex, she gets locked in a freezer for 300 years, and she goes in a balloon to find her terminally ill son⌠or⌠something?
I have never seen a film fumble the ball this badly, and be such an assault on the senses to boot. You won, Ari. Enjoy the money; i hope it makes you happy. Dear lord, what a sad little life, Ari. Youâve ruined my night completely.
The Golden Lyre Award for Excellence in New Music: Edinburgh-based Young Fathersâ euphoric senior album Heavy Heavy stole the show this year.
The Broken Link Award for Best Use of Hypertext: The best âmiscellaneous thingâ i saw online was Atlas Altera, an absolutely ludicrous worldbuilding project dedicated to the surgical maximalisation of global diversity.
The Fred Figglehorn Memorial Award for Online Video: Spanning the end of 2022 to the start of 2023, Geowizardâs âHow not to travel Americaâ series brightened up my day every time a new one appeared on my feed. People are just nice!
The Hubert J. Farnsworth Award for Good News, Everyone!: This one may be a wee bit controversial, but i have to go with the rollout of a new generation of obesity drugs (most famously semaglutide) â which not only finally work to combat obesity, but seem to dull all sorts of other harmful impulses too. One step closer to true freedom of form?
Gremlins 2 is the hardest iâve laughed at a film in some time â a movie written and directed by cocaine.
I think i broke something when the smart gremlin started talking in a New Zealand accent.
The internet was lit ablaze last year with the rediscovery of Martin Scorceseâs obscure masterpiece Goncharov, and itâs easy to see why. Accessible yet complex, of its time and yet progressive, it was ripe for a critical reĂŤvaluation.
What people donât often hear about is its sequel â one that Marvelâs biggest fanboy didnât even know existed. The rights having fallen into the lap of the bloated corpse of Cannon Entertainment, they dumped it straight to video in 1989, leaving it to be forgotten.⌠until now!!!
Goncharov 2: The Quest for Gonch (sold in the USSR as The Quest For God) is the biggest piece of shit since the fat one i laid in the McDonaldâs deep fryer last weekend.1 The Gonch himself is no longer played by Robert DeNiro â clearly too good for this shit â but an up and coming Danny DeVito, wearing an unconvincing latex mask which sits somewhere in between Tom Cruise in Vanilla Skyand that one I Think You Could Leave skit.
Yes, this was the Farrelly Brotherâs first picture. They tried taking a more serious film for their first work, but it falls flat on its face in many places. I found the scene where the Gonch huffs thirteen cans of glue to be quite amusing for all the wrong reasons. Devito put his heartâ
I neither know nor care who you are but please stop defending The Quest for Gonchâ˘. The Goncharov Cinematic Universe does not need this sort of slander, and neither does this blog!
Listen, there is TONS of potential for the Goncharov Cinematic Universe to expand from this film. Itâs not the best film, sure itâs⌠wellâŚ
âŚ..
âŚwell, it is definetly2a film.
Well if youâre going to get technical, itâs not a film! Itâs a video! Iâd say it was shot on a potato, but thatâs an insult to potatoes â when you compare it to the beautiful composition of Gonch 1â˘âs ending clock shot, this was shot on a yam.
Ok, sure, the picture quality wasnât the best, but Iâd blame that on the filmâs rushed development. It was first approved by Scorceses in the late 1980s as a fallback in case he was killed by a conservative lynch mob during the production of The Last Temptation of Christ as a fallback.
You have no understanding of the complex lore behind /The Quest for Go(nch|d)/, you absolute fucking nitwit. You fool. You Fucking Nimrod.
The Last Temptation of Christ was released in 1988, and Concharov II was released in 1989â
Martin Scorcese had no involvement in this. This was that fucker Matteo Bunchofnumbersâ idea. You know how i know that? Because if Martin Scorsese knew about the existence of Goncharov 2: The Quest for Gonch, heâd have not only killed himself, but figured out how to kill himself twice.
Youâre half-right; he had no involvement in the film, but he did approve its creation solely to profit off of any VHS sales. I know this because a friendâs cousinâs nephewâs sister-in-lawâs bossâ sonâs great uncle knew a guy who worked for the Cleveland Plain Dealer and did an interview with Scorsese not long before the filmâs release.
I guess killing yourself twice just results in you coming back to life. Look â regardless of Marty McFly or whatever his name isâ affiliation with it, can we focus on the end product? I mean, that scene where Kremlinova trips over her high heels in that blue dress, and then when it cuts to the next shot, itâs orange! Orange! Donât you try and fucking pretend itâs some deep symbolism that predicted the rise of every movie poster in the 2000s, itâs just the director having a fucking washing sponge6 for a brain!
Actually, I thought it was one of the more insightful scenes of the film. The dress colors symbolize the slow and gradual fall of Russian society from great pride in an idealistic world to the growing realization that said utopian dreams will never fruition, and the subsequent moral collapse 127.192.34.27 therein.
They couldâve used a better dress for the scene, though. 73 West Boulevard, Ocala, Florida8
So then Goncharov gets aids. You know â given how tenderly G1 / Gonch Wick Chapter 1 handled its gay love scenes, thereâs a real opportunity there! But since this is being directed by Thomas Ouiseau (no relation? I think?), he âcatches aids from a government cactusâ, starts coughing up blood, and immediately says âi have the aidsâ and dies. Yes! Iâm writing over you! Fuck you!
My least favorite part of the film would be the scene where Goncharov punches an Albanian consort woman. It was not necessary to the plot at all, and just felt like a dated excuse to throw in a bar fight scene. Oh my god, are you seriously writing over me? Wha- how is this even possible?
Fine, you know what, here.
Youâve heard of Marsyas and Applo before, right?
Youâre in Comic Sans now.
hhhNOOOOO
You know what, hang on, this is my blog. I donât have to put up with this crap. I can just tell you to leave. Or whatever.
That feels rude, actually, now i think of it.
I was never invited, so telling me to leave simply doesnât work in the first place. Algorian logic. Pretty deep stuff interdimensional. Donât think a normie like you would understand.
Look, can we just agree on a rating out of 10 and then go? The people need to know if G2ÂŽ is worth the purchase!
âŚ
0.85/10.
I think youâre being too nice with that 0.85. I mean, what is this? IGN?
Thrembo/10. Too many overly long sex scenes.
Thatâs not even a real number. Not since the incident.
Anyway â i give Goncharov 2: The Quest for God (God never shows up, incidentally, unless you count the Kandinsky painting in the beach scene) an (eiĎ+1)/10.
I revise my earlier rating. Rational numbers are better for ratings.
I give the film a -bÂąâ(b²-4ac)2a/10. Has the potential for greatly expanding the Goncharov universe, but its attempts at being both a psychological thriller and a slapstick humor film wrapped into a mafia film are simply too confusing for most viewers.
Thankfully, the first Goncharov11 film on VHS was also the last. And itâs stayed that way ever since. (We donât talk about the Blockbuster trilogy.12) Good night.
