Jackie Brown

What a great flick! My beef with Tarantino is that you can often tell that, just behind the camera, he’s jacking off at the thought of how clever he is and how many obscure seventies TV shows he knows, and while that’s still true here, the electric pairing of Pam Grier and Robert Forster washes all those eye-rolling feelings down until you’re left with the aftertaste of nothing but a good-ass crime thriller. 8/10 — my Tarantino power ranking goes something like Inglourious Basterds > this > Pulp Fiction > Django Unchained >>> Reservoir Dogs.

Spoorloos (The Vanishing)

This grim Dutch crime thriller is consistently mentioned alongside Paul Verhoeven as proof that “see? Dutch cinema isn’t all bad”, which is something you could almost convince me of if it weren’t for every top-five list’s inclusion of a film about an evil lift.

Anyway, while Spoorloos does occasionally veer uncomfortably close to “TV movie of the week” territory, it’s carried by its villain, an exemplar of the banality of evil. He does what he does because he’s experienced being a hero, and he’s just curious what it feels like to be a villain — and that’s what makes him fucking terrifying. Check this out if you get the chance. 7/10.

The Monkey

Osgood Perkins returns right soon with another horror endeavour, this time a gory comedy about an evil cuddly monkey. The Monkey doesn’t reach the highs of fear and tension that Longlegs does, but neither does it completely bottle the ending, so let’s call it a draw, shall we? 6¾/10.

Quiz Show

I put this on on a lazy afternoon. I was suitably entertained. I remember nothing from it. A platonically perfect 5/10.

The Mist (rewatch)

The Twelve Angry Men of horror puts modern (well, 2000s) American society up against a mirror and examines how people would really react to a mass calamity in a way that hits different in the post-covid era, where everyone’s brain has had time to cook in the sun. Plus: the cruelest twist ending in cinematic history. 8/10.

The Blues Brothers

Dan Aykroyd is an actual crazy person and that’s why The Blues Brothers works. This is two-and-a-half hours of overindulgent insanity, the cinematic equivalent of a five-year-old playing with their toys, and i wouldn’t want it any other way. I nearly had an asthma attack laughing so hard. 10/10.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

Warm. Fuzzy. Inessential. It’s weird seeing Adam Scott with a beard. 6/10.

Severance (season 2 finale)

The back half of Severance’s sophomore season fell victim to some shonky pacing decisions, placing two self-contained, slow-paced bottle episodes right before the final two, messing up the flow we were in and negating the chance for an epic Season 1-style three-episode ramp-up, but nonetheless, the double-length finale successfully sticks the landing. The camcorder conversation, where Mark’s innie and outie finally “meet”, may as well be what the whole show has been building up to, and it just keeps going from there. Every company needs a Choreography and Merriment department. 9/10.

Flow

The first part of a feline double feature, about an adorable black kitty who goes on a maritime journey after the world is inundated by a mysterious flood. The gimmick (if you can call it that) is that the film is told without a single line of dialogue — just animal noises and a backing of beautiful C418-esque music composed by the film’s director.

It’s a beautiful, serene, lovely experience — all animated in good ol’ open-source Blender, no less! It got me to really feel things for these animals — it was a good idea to dial the anthropomorphism down to, like, 10%, rather than 75%. They’re intelligent enough to steer a boat, but that’s about it. The kibby bats around a lemur’s tail and hates dogs. 9/10.

Felidæ

The second part of the double feature: Felidæ¹, a 1994 German film about… okay. Okay. Look. Bear with me here. The idea is that it’s a film noir except everybody is a cartoon housecat. And for the first twenty minutes or so, i was thinking, okay, that’s a nice idea, but i don’t know if it has much more than that idea? And then it goes full-tilt into Crazytown. This movie contains, in no particular order:

• Cat buttholes
• Cat sex
• Cat homophobia
• Cat eugenics
• Cats speaking Latin
• Cats reading German
• Cats using a computer
• Cat murder
• So much gory cat murder
• An electroshock cat cult
• Genetically engineered lab cats
• A cat psychopomp who takes care of the cat dead in his cat catacombs
• A dream sequence involving a giant evil Gregor Mendel commanding a literal sea of dead cats

And it’s all done in the animation style of an eighties-nineties-type Disney film (with some budgetary concessions and dodgy lip-synch, because, hey, nobody’s actually going to watch this). It reminded me, weirdly enough, of an old Garfield cartoon i watched as a kid — the one where he had nine lives, specifically that segment where he was an escaped lab cat. I have only the haziest memory of it, but damned if it (and the annoying-ass little girl in the Garf-den of Eden) didn’t stick with me…

I don’t know who the fuck the audience for this is other than furries and sicko Europeans, but i fucking love that it exists. I’m gonna be thinking about it forever, whether i want to or not. All hail Claudandus? 9/10.

I’ll confess i’m skipping past a lot of Christmas films for this recap, because i’d seen most of them before and those memories are blanketed in a thick fog of advocaat and chocolate. Nevertheless: here’s — if not all — most of the things i’ve watched over the past couple of months.

The Wizard of Oz (1939)

Perhaps i’m being unfair to a film that’s 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)

Conclave (2024)

“If 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.”

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 world’s oldest bureaucracy.¹ (10/10)

Nosferatu (2024)

“I have seen things in this world that would make Isaac Newton crawl back into his mother's womb!”

I’m playing a dangerous game here, because i watched this on the first of January, 2025 — meaning that, once again, there’s a good chance that my “favourite film of 2025” will have come out in 2024. Not that i’m complaining.

Robert Eggers hits it out of the park again in this incredible adaptation of an adaptation of Dracula. Visually, it’s 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 actor’s hands could have been yet another generic traumatised wife.

Tl;dr: Don’t go to Romania. (10/10)

Brazil (1985)

I have such a love–hate relationship with Terry Gilliam. His films are so inventive, so wonderful, in theory, everything i love. But they’re 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 that’ll make any Brit who’s ever had to deal with the welfare system cry-laugh in how true it all is. Have you got a 27B/6? I’m a bit of a stickler for paperwork… (8/10)

Heretic (2024)

Talk about wasted potential. Heretic starts out brilliant — 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, i’d be strapped in.

But, nope! The third act starts, they go into his eeeeevil basement, and there’s a creeeepy emaciated woman talking in cryptic breathy half-sentences!!! Are you scared yet??? (4/10)

Better Man (2024)

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. It’s pretty good, and the monkey gimmick’s fun, but i’m not itching to rewatch it any time soon. (5¾/10)

Severance, season 2 (2025)

We are so fucking back. Ben Stiller and company haven’t missed a single step in the three-year-long gap. I’m tearing my hair out trying to figure out the mysteries over here!

The Name of the Rose (1986)

The main message i got from this was reinforcement that the mediæval era is, indeed, the least interesting (to me) of the three broad ages of history. Still, there’s 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)

The Zone of Interest (2023)

“I wasn't really paying attention… I was too busy thinking how i would gas everyone in the room.”

Behold, the anti–Schindler’s List: a quiet family drama where the head of the family just so happens to be the KZ-Kommandant of Auschwitz.

The magic’s 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. It’s enough to make anyone throw up. The music’s no respite: John Williams this ain’t; what little there is is harsh, discordant, pained.

Sandra Hüller is incredible as the commandant’s 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. There’s 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, it’s a little disjointed; some fragments and branches never quite meet back up with the main trunk of the film. It’s a hard thing to rate… but let’s say (7/10).