Reviews

Mi vacío y yo

A young trans woman in Barcelona deals with her transition, dating and daily life.

The film has a straight-forward narrative style to the extent that it borders on documentary, though every scene burns with an authenticity that is entirely engaging. It is emotionally intense and yet naturalistic, confronting complex existential issues, yet never melodramatic. Nothing is played for pathos and yet I was entirely emotionally invested.

Written in collaboration with the protagonist, played by Raphaëlle Pérez, the film depicts the process of her being diagnosed with gender dysphoria, taking hormones, support group discussions with other trans people and the general emotion and confusion of transitioning. The joys and pains of dating and sex with men via an app are dealt with candidly. Finding authenticity is difficult when men are likely to have one of various reactions to her transness: shock, curiosity, fetishisation, uncertainty. She moves through these struggles neither as a victim nor a warrior, simply as a person confronting what is necessary in order to create the life she wants for herself.

A young rural Australian man escapes a small-town scandal to Sydney, meeting another guy through Grindr.

The plot feels less important than the intimacy between the lead actor and the filmmaker. The impressive performance of lead Josh Lavery is unusual and takes time to reach its full impact. At first I felt his character was too underplayed, but at least he was aware of his limitations. Slowly throughout the film I felt the impact of his hopelessness and the tangible reality of his survival-mode. Similarly, there is a lot of nudity and no aspect of his experience is excluded, the cumulative effect of which is a deep empathy and familiarity, like intimately getting to know a new lover. Subsequently, the extent of my identification with the protagonist by the end of the film was quite shocking. His relationship with the Grindr hook-up that doesn't end is also depicted in a matter-of-fact way that somehow creates a cumulative impact, where the casualness of their commitment to each other obscures the evident fact that they have something very real and significant to offer each other. I hope this film gets a chance to reach the world and that Josh Lavery gets opportunities to surprise us further as a performer.

I don't understand how there can be near-unanimous acclaim for this film. Is it because Martin Scorsese and his renowned cast can do no wrong? Who can question the work of three-time Academy Award winning actor and legend Jack Nicholson? He is one of the best actors of his generation and of course when his fellow actors were promoting the film they all spoken about how much of a privilege it was to work with him. Is it difficult to notice that he can't actually act anymore; that he merely caricatures himself? Maybe he destroyed himself with playing The Joker in Batman (1989) for which he was given a percentage of the profits and made about $60 million dollars for one of the worst performances from a great actor in the history of cinema. His performance in The Departed was barely more restrained than The Joker. His performance is like a cartoon and utterly unconvincing as a real human being, despite being surrounded by grounded, effective performances. This makes sense discovering that he was given free-reign on set to improvise and ham it up, his director trusting that he is still a great artist, or simply too afraid to question him. Despite Scorsese's definite competence, Nicholson is unrestrained and detrimental.

The rest of the cast do an impressive job of being tough guys and talking dirty and were clearly working hard and taking the film seriously. It cannot have been easy to get into the minds of such cardboard charaters.

In some ways this film is classic Scorsese, portraying the intricate dealings of American organised crime. He seems to have moved on to Irish crime syndicates, perhaps responding to criticism that he was reinforcing stereotypes about Italian-Americans being criminals. In some ways it is a hollow simulacrum of his greatest films. The film is competently directed. Apart from the stain of Jack Nicholson, its surface is immaculate. But this is a film with no soul. It is utterly lifeless, devoid of heart, or spirituality, of morality or any thematic resonance that speaks to the experience of being human. To me, this soullessness is fundamental.

Is this supposed to be pure entertainment, with no artistic intentions? I do not find it entertaining to watch hollow violent vulgar men destroy each other and themselves within the context of a convoluted and banal narrative with zero character development. For this film to be entertaining it would require emotional engagement with the characters and tension and suspense in the narrative. But the only character who I could even begin to engage with was Leonardo DiCaprio's character, who did display an emotionally complex response to the disgusting violence and deceit occurring around him, but even within the 2.5 hour duration his character did not have time to develop or find any resolution. There was not even a palpable sense of injustice in the film about how his character was being exploited by both the mob and the cops, only incident and plot convolutions.

Despite Matt Damon's balanced efforts his character does not manage to be anything other than a monster. The only female character in the film, played by Vera Farmiga, is anything but a woman. She seems to have a heart, though zero intelligence, despite being a doctor of psychology, and there is no reason why she could be attracted to Matt Damon's character except that she loves sex, which would be interesting, but is of course undeveloped. Otherwise it is inconceivable that she is not aware that he is a psychopath with no redeeming qualities or human emotion. The only explanation is that she is not a woman at all, but a man's idea of a woman, less even than Nicholson's cartoon character, she is a cardboard cut-out, in the film only to add another needless convolution to the plot.

Of course it is possible that I am not the target audience for the film. I like well-made, serious, intense and involving dramas, but I am not a heterosexual male. This film is overflowing with machismo to the extent that I can't imagine it appealing to anyone who is not a heterosexual male also full of machismo. The whole cast is male and super-straight, even the one female character is basically a man, in that she is the creation of men who know nothing of women. The characters are all extremely vulgar and violent and act as if they have no feelings. The film is actually appallingly badly written. That this film won an Academy Award for Best Screenplay is only evidence of how far removed from reality certain people are. Even Scorsese doesn't seem aware that he's working with a screenplay that is hollow, crude and juvenile. The characters speak to each other like insecure teenage boys, though the film offers no perspective or insight into their damaged masculinity. There is no depth, no substance, no thematic interest, no narrative shape or character development. It is simply a convoluted plot with all the characters trying to figure out what is going on before everyone else figures it out. However, the audience already knows everything, so there is nothing to learn, so there is no suspense or tension, and therefore no interest or excitement, and therefore no entertainment, and therefore no reason for the film to exist.

Surely Scorsese and his heroic cast could have found a better screenplay to put all that energy into. Scorsese has been directing films for a long time now, and it is evident in this film that he is strong, confident and fluent in the process of filmmaking. But it seems his heart is not in it. Lawrence Toppman in the Charlotte Observer suggested that "this picture feels like an exercise by a Scorsese clone". It is the best film anyone could have made of this screenplay without awakening their creativity, their imagination or their humanity.

It is devoid of meaning and morality. And if I am wrong and there is morality intended in the ending, it is even more unforgivable. There is no redemption after the violence. The violence is redemption. And that is a repugnant conclusion, and it is irresponsible and unforgivable in an impactful Hollywood product such as this.

Finally, the last shot of the film offers a visual flourish so lame it contextualises the film perfectly.

A man on an international mission to save the world from the deadliest weapon of all, the future.

Two moods: excessive incomprehensible exposition and LOUD incomprehensible action sequences. At no point do you know what is going on, nor are you given any reason to care. It is at all times tedious, meaningless and irritating. None of the characters are remotely interesting, much of the dialogue is inaudible and the ridiculous convolutions add up to nothing. And this cost over $200 million to make.

Here Nolan has retreated deeply, unpleasantly and unforgivably into his own idiosyncrasy and left his loyal audience scrambling to come up with excuses for him.

Abby, a young woman working as a marine biologist, recalls her teenage years with her mother in Western Australia. She is introduced to the diverse marine life in the bay she grew up in, makes friends with a blue groper and helps her mother fight to protect the bay's marine life from encroaching property developers.

A straight-forward, heart-felt film with a pleasant, leisurely pace about pursuing a passion to protect something you care about, aimed at a young audience. The flash-back narrative structure is nostalgic and makes clear why the adult Abby is working to protect the bleaching coral reef, but it obviates any emotional or dramatic impact from either time-period. The underwater photography of the ocean life, and the actors interacting with it, is very beautifully shot, tranquil and convincing of the film's thesis, to protect ocean life. Though short on depth and complexity the film successfully depicts the simplicity and integrity of spending your life caring for your immediate environment.

Hyper-masculine action hero James Bond reluctantly agrees to save the world from bad people who want to kill everybody.

I could have anticipated how banal and formulaic this is. Elaborate, hollow, convoluted and meaningless action set pieces that test the limits of credulity and give you no reason to care about the result of them, though it's always obvious that no harm can come to Bond. The sincere attempts at emotional feeling are merely embarrassing and the action is slick to the point of translucency. A concerted effort to hit all the familiar points and no desire to stretch the formula that has worked for so long. It contains a number of homages to itself, reminding us that we're watching a film that has been remade every few years since the early '60s.

A lonely young man struggling with his mother's death is confronted by the visit of his acerbic alcoholic grandmother.

I found this very moving. With very real characters whose lives you can feel right into and performances to match, with George Ferrier looking very good beside veterans Charlotte Rampling and Martin Csokas. I empathised strongly with the protagonist's situation: his grief, his inability to communicate it, his feelings of isolation and hopelessness, and also how the slightest hint of positive attention from someone new, unlike anyone else in your world, can change your whole perspective. A character study with vulnerable honesty and an underplayed depth of feeling.

A group of tourists are trapped on a beautiful mysterious beach that causes them to age and die at a rapid rate.

This film is so utterly bad in all the ways a movie can be bad that it baffles me that anyone takes it seriously. Despite the great cast it is terribly acted, which has got to be writer/director Shyamalan's fault. If the premise is not implausible enough already, our willingness to suspend disbelief is challenged by the fact that all developments and all attempts at complexity are not woven into the action or plot but simply explained by the actors with shocked looks on their faces. "We seem to be aging at a rapid rate." "I estimate about one year every thirty minutes." "Maybe it's something about these ancient cliffs that cause our cells to age." There is not a shred of humanity in any of the characters, so there is absolutely no reason to care about them. There is no resonance whatsoever to the thematic elements. The overwhelming feelings this film evoked were boredom and a faint embarrassment about being in the room in which it was projected, like I had found myself at some seminar for a pyramid scheme.

A rich modern couple, interested in new age spirituality, explore novel ways of holding onto their crumbling wealth and marriage.

Like Tolkin's previous The Rapture (1991), this is a scathing satire that is played so straight it is not always obvious that it is hilarious. Nothing about these vapid characters is allowed to suggest any possibility of redemption. "How are your morals?" Peter asks a random beautiful woman at a party. And his own? "I just can't seem to find them." And this is the guiding force behind the protagonists decisions, guided by diverse con-artists. The film doesn't quite have the same cumulative dramatic and philosophical force as The Rapture, though it aims in a similar direction. While it believably dissects their emptiness, we don't learn much more about them than that.

A good everyday American is wrongfully charged for sabotage of US war infrastructure, so on the run from the law he seeks out the real criminals.

In the Hitchcock style, the thriller plot is clear, tight and involving, but with hilarious comic asides played completely straight, so we can feel smart about being manipulated as we are being manipulated. The propagandist speeches about why Good Americans are fighting the war also seem simultaneously sincere and satirical, maybe simply calculated to serve the embedded audience of the time and the detached future audience, like me. Entertaining, satisfying, but somewhat superficial.

In an institution for dwarfs, the inmates destroy their environment and taunt their authority figure.

An obscene and potentially meaningless piece of endurance filmmaking. As we sit through 96 minutes of chaotic shenanigans there is the vague possibility that this is some sort of elaborate metaphor, but the fact of what is literally happening is much more compelling than any projected meaning. It opens with an unbearable screeching vocal performance that forced me to turn the volume right down, and I wasn't compelled to turn the volume up again to hear incessant shouting. It is nothing more than an array of destruction and the moments I did enjoy were only on this visceral level: a driverless car going incessantly in circles while pots of flowers burn and the characters throw plates at the car. I found the scenes of real animal abuse very disturbing and unacceptable.

An 86-year space mission to reach another planet goes wrong when the young crew choose to stop taking their impulse-control drugs.

Very elegant, glossy, metallic design and beautiful young actors in an allegorical science-fiction movie that basically repeats the plot of Lord of the Flies by William Golding, except that it all happens in a space ship on a one-way mission. There is a frustrating lack of nuance and complexity in the psychology on display, as if it was written by a high school teacher for his junior political science class. It is also not as sexy as you might hope.

A woman in despair after a tragedy retreats to a cabin in the mountains to live alone.

Robin Wright directs her own performance, spending much time onscreen alone and silent as a woman struggling to survive both in relation to the wilderness and her own pain. Her performance always rings true emotionally, and the beats of her transformation are lucid. The landscape is beautifully filmed, the landscapes are vast, the winter is bitterly cold and the wilderness is living and breathing; though her interaction with it, her struggle to chop wood and hunt deer, the physical realities of her life, a very superficially depicted. The beauty and tangibility of the world is so real that I can't help but want to believe in her relationship with it. But the ultimate impact, of a woman struggling with significant emotional turmoil and despair, is real and her transformations and relationships are moving.

Jazz singer Billie Holliday struggles with addiction to heroin and men while being persistently harassed by the FBI for racist reasons.

A spectacularly impressive recreation of a historical milieu, with settings, costumes, make-up, ways of speaking and cultural attitudes supremely realistic and immersive. Every scene is a magnificently composed world, but together they form no cohesive narrative, no complex thematic expression apart from a recreation in popular form of a racist history, and no interesting trajectory for a complex, inspirational, talented woman apart from self-destruction and degeneration. There is no depth, no overarching motivation, no transformation, just a pain explained in flashbacks of trauma. Like her controversial song "Strange Fruit", the painful and shameful recent history of racist America is being revealed, but is Holliday's strength and talent and legacy being honoured, is her story being given the depth it deserves? Andra Day's performance is the same, extremely impressive on the surface, powerfully lucid within an individual scene, but no dramatic shape. Perhaps the screenplay is to blame. It amounts to a glossy surface and no heart.

The film's political theme is clear: lynchings have not yet been banned, even if her song about them was. But the more intimate theme is perhaps akin to Asif Kapadia's powerful documentary Amy: that we, from our distance, though the veil of the media, have some empathy and patience for the particular and real challenges faced by those who pour themselves into music for us.

UK 1939. A British agent gets a job undercover at a school for rich German girls days before the beginning of WWII.

Effective suspenser without ambition or pretension that often solves scenes of danger and difficulty with the protagonist literally running away.

Death in Venice is a sumptuously beautiful Technicolor immersion into pesilential Venice. Dirk Bogarde gives a lot in his performance as the isolated composer Gustav von Aschenbach. He is holidaying alone in Venice to recover from the overwhelming stresses of his life, particularly of being massively uptight and self-denying, while simultaneously giving of himself through the committed and considered perfection of his music.

Flashbacks of passionate conversations with a friend spell out explicitly how we are to interpret the present scenes in Venice. There is no separation between the man and his music; he expects perfection of himself, moral purity, and no corruption through a mere pleasure of the senses. He dreams of a spiritual beauty that is pure and perfect. And he discovers this in the beautiful form of a teenage boy he sees in his Venice hotel, holidaying with his family, the magnificently beautiful Björn Andérsen. He observes this boy from afar but does not dare to approach him. Tadzio notices his attention and is as captivated by his gaze as Gustav is captivated to gaze upon him. But, as we are so clearly told in the flashback philosophical conversations, his engagement with life is as a detached observer.

Bogarde's performance is excruciating in its precision and commitment to communicating, through almost no dialogue and often merely sitting alone, the painful self-loathing expressed as pomposity and cowardice. Gustav is horrified in the beginning to encounter a painted and flamboyant queen who addresses him on equal terms, as if to a fellow queen. He does not want to humiliate himself with such shameless abandon.

Tadzio plays with his attention and the power it gives him, but Gustav cannot act, cannot place himself on the line, cannot risk to feel so much, cannot allow himself the potential pleasure promised by engagement with this beautiful young man fluttering about in front of him like a butterfly. I suppose this self-loathing and self-denial speaks to a very specific queer experience that would have been all too common at the time, and only somewhat less so today. The expression of queer desire and admiration of beauty is more permissible in Western societies today, but the admiration of the beauty of adolescent boys, is less permissible perhaps.

Gustav's struggle is as much present in the languorous gaze of the camera, its subtle movements and carefully editing, as it is in Bogarde's performance.

While I find it unpleasant to identify with Bogarde's character in very personal and humiliating ways the film remains a work of beauty and sympathy, with the squalid and dangerous beauty of Venice and the as-yet-uncorrupted beauty of Tadzio, perhaps equally dangerous.

Entwines the very different lives of three Maori girls, cousins, through tumultuous decades, after one of them is taken from her family and raised in an orphanage.

A very moving and cinematic adaptation of Patricia Grace's novel, very effectively condensed into movie length while maintaining the scope and complexity of the multiple threads. The lives of these three women, though particular and intimate, effectively represents a larger story of a culture interrupted by colonialism but regaining its strength and groundedness. The interaction between the personal and the cultural, memory and the moment, are woven together with various events, spanning decades, creating a complex portrait revealing how the past, the present and the future interact with each other, how members of a family interact through space and time, in life and in death. Though the performances were sometimes uneven, the editing and Terence Malick-like cinematography very skillfully conveyed a specific yet expansive spiritual and cultural journey through the entire lives of three compelling and tangible characters.

An American archeologist goes to Egypt to steal a priceless artefact from a tomb, creating havoc for the local population amidst which he is impervious.

Why is Indiana Jones the hero of this movie? He murders hundreds of people in order to steal valuable artefacts from poor countries. He's not even charming. He's just American. His intelligence is entirely unconvincing. His only apparent ability is determination, and of course miraculous amounts of luck. Harrison Ford's performance is only grimace, brawn and hat.

The film assumes you are stupid. It not only signposts everything without any subtlety, it assumes you have only the most superficial and passing interest in anything that happens, and so it only aspires to that level of engagement. It assumes you will forget everything instantly and be satisfied with that.

The film is utterly racist. The Americans are the good guys for no discernible reason. It is simply unquestioned. The Nazis and South Americans suffer familiar racial stereotypes, but the Arabs are simply set dressing. Jones smashes through their city and their bodies as if it was a field of corn. He trashes their cartoon city as if he was knocking over a pile of empty boxes and they flail their arms meaninglessly and helplessly. And the film assumes you feel the same way, and that it's all fun and games. The rest of the world is just a toy for the real people, the Americans, to play with. It is offensive and there is nothing remotely charming, inventive or clever to justify it.

The extreme lack of sophistication or cinematic flair and the huge commercial success can only suggest that Spielberg is a coldly-calculating commercial, good-natured psychopath firmly embedded at the centre of the American psyche. The idea that genius, intelligence or artistic skill could topple him is to misunderstand the nature of the industry. The fact that art gets exhibited alongside this type of product is merely a technical issue. They utilise the same technology but have nothing further in common. If this is art then a carpark is an installation.

Two minutes of very fast still images of plants pressed between two plates and photographed. There is no sound and it all moves too fast to see anything. I then slowed it down to 1/16th speed, so each frame takes a bit less than a second, and discovered many beautiful images. It's much better much slower.

Two and a half hours of life-spanning superficial gushing. There is almost no music in the film. Michael Jackson was a great musician and dancer, and the production clearly only had the rights to the Motown Jackson 5 music. There is no subsequent music whatsoever, no performance footage, and no interesting archival footage at all. There must be so much incredible footage of Michael Jackson out there that could be shaped into an exquisite documentary. This is not it. It is more about his life than his music perhaps, but there is no insight into the complexities of this very unique life. Despite the impressive array of interviewees, none of whom are named, which is just annoying and confusing, so you never know who is talking, there is very little insight. How many times can you hear, "Michael is the greatest entertainer who has ever lived"?

A bit more detail is entered into concerning the child molestation trials, but again, especially considering the more recent revelations, it is ultimately confounding. People say, "Michael is such a loving person, he would never do something like this," rather than presenting the evidence of what actually did or did not happen.

This is very poor filmmaking. It basically consists of people saying uninteresting things that we have all heard before, interspersed with many still photographs shot in irritatingly novel ways, to make up for the lack of actual moving footage.

The first season of this show was an effective drama with interesting characters with real problems. The second season is worse with every passing episode. This was incoherent nonsense. It was neither funny, nor did it contain any sense of reality.

An English nobleman is captured by Sioux Indians and due to his inherent superiority is eventually able to manipulate and dominate them, and even show them some pity in their miserable existence.

This is the synopsis this movie deserves, as repugnant as it is. This film barely qualifies for racial stereotyping, the Sioux characters basically just being decor. Even the protagonist's wife is just a piece of scenery.

Even if you accept the racist premise that the Englishman is inherently superior and all he has to do is convince the natives, the plot development of how this happens is entirely unconvincing and the ending is meaningless in terms of plot development.

It is very telling that a title at the beginning of the film, before we see a single image, thanks some natural history museum and a couple of anthropologists, as opposed to the people whose culture is being appropriated.

A serial killer narrates some of his murders to a mysterious interlocutor, contextualising them into theories of art and philosophy.

Like Nymphomaniac, Lars Von Trier's other philosophical conversation movie, this is strangely compelling viewing despite unpleasantness, excessive length and an inevitable remaining dissatisfaction. If only because of the greatness of his previous films, this deserves in depth critical analysis, if only to confidently regard it as a grotesque and pretentious insult to its audience. It is anti-genre in its interspersing hip serial killer antics with banal dialogue, it is anti-morality in its nihilistic emptiness, it is anti-art as it justifies itself repugnantly while simultaneously tearing itself down, and it is anti-it's audience, Lars Von Trier begging to not be taken seriously anymore.

The delightfully outrageous energy of the opening episodes has now given way to an empty superficiality that is more tiresome with every episode.