Category: film

Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr, best known for his dark and distinctive works of feature filmmaking, has died. He was 70. 

Tarr’s death was announced this morning on Hungary’s national news agency MTI by filmmaker Bence Fliegauf on behalf of Tarr’s family. The European Film Academy also shared news of Tarr’s death this afternoon in an email. The Academy said Tarr died “after a long and serious illness.”

• BELA TARR: A Curzon Collection
• Morning Computer: Dead Time
• Satantango Box

I conceived of the recent CONCLAVE as a kind of classical filmmaking that doesn’t really happen much any more. And now here’s NUREMBERG.

Hermann Goring and the rest of the surviving Nazi leadership are on trial at Nuremberg for crimes against humanity. You know the story. Army psychiatrist Doug Kelley is charged with keeping them alive until the trial, and forms a particular bond with Goring.

The performances are interesting. Russell Crowe as Goring is twinkling and avuncular. Rami Malek as Kelley is quick and a little twitchy. At the top of the film, Kelley is shown Goring’s stash of “heart pills”, pops and crunches one, proclaims them to be codeine and smiles “I’m a fan.” Goring and Kelley are both showy egomaniacs, is the thing – but Goring has achieved something in his life and Kelley, in his mid thirties and already starting to show grey hair (Malek is actually 44), hasn’t. Michael Shannon, as Justice Jackson, the man who pressed for trials rather than summary execution and achieved this by blackmailing Pope Pius, finds a sort of man-out-of-time Lincolnesque gravitas while also being hobbled by ego and wants. Richard E Grant does a stately turn, and Steven Pacey from BLAKES 7 in my childhood shows up as George Marshall.

There’s a nice set of double bookends to the film, and a message-y coda that feels a little bit nailed on but is nonetheless handily done. It’s generally a solid, well-written piece of work, almost a chamber piece – I suspect there are barely more than a dozen speaking roles. Crowe and Malek have to carry the majority of the film, and they’re very watchable: two vain, insidious charmers: but only one is comfortable in his own skin.

Seen via the WGA FYC app.

Sean Penn’s performance is an inventive and ambitious display of physical acting. Tewana Taylor and Chase Infiniti work really really hard. Leonardo DiCaprio experiments with ageing badly, to good effect. The film just didn’t work for me. Too long, no attack, god knows where the budget went, three jokes – and, for something inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s VINELAND, it has very little of Pynchon’s gleeful mad energy. There’s a logical break towards the end that threw me out of the film, but, honestly, it didn’t really hold my attention well after the first half hour anyway.

One suspects that on paper it all had a headlong madcap drive to it, but it didn’t survive shooting and indulgent editing. There are a handful of stunning shots, the three jokes are fun jokes, an escape scene on rooftops that’s nicely done and concluded, but this does not seem to be the Paul Thomas Anderson who once had full control of his material and did not waste a minute.

I came away from it feeling like it didn’t commit to the Pynchon, or to a tone – it’s obviously very well made (though I personally didn’t enjoy the score), it’s just kind of flat and slack when it seemed to me to be asking to be fast and lunatic and breathless – one battle after another, in fact.

I really wanted to like it, but it just wasn’t enough of anything.

BUGONIA has gotten roasted in reviews, I’ve heard. I avoided all the reviews, and haven’t seen SAVE THE GREEN PLANET, which this is apparently based on, and went in cold. I haven’t even seen any of the director’s recent films.

I really liked BUGONIA. Writer Will Tracy is a clever bastard. Jesse Plemon’s opening voiceover, talking about pollination, tells you so much about the character in these lines- “It’s like sex. But cleaner. And nobody gets hurt.” That is fucking excellent writing.

Jesse Plemons is Teddy, small town conspiracy theorist, and he and his neurodivergent Don enact the abduction of the CEO of the company he works for because he knows she’s an alien trying to destroy Earth.

People will tell you it’s a comedy. It is not.

The actor playing Don, by the way, Aidan Delbis (who self identifies as autistic), is a bit of a genius – when Teddy tells Don he’s not allowed to jerk off any more he does this thing with his hand and his face that is just brilliant.

But this is Plemons’ show. Early on there’s a scene by firelight where Plemons seems to turn into Brad Dourif, and in fact Dourif’s turn in WISE BLOOD isn’t the worst comparison. The guy who entered public consciousness as “Meth Damon” on BREAKING BAD has become one of America’s best actors. Emma Stone is fine, of course, but it’s his film from top to bottom.

I also note a small role for an unrecognisable Alicia Silverstone, who probably never imagined she’d have to say the words “your slob cunt mom” in front of a camera.

There are a few laughs. More than in ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER, which is now being rebranded as a comedy for awards season. But BUGONIA opened on Halloween here for a reason. It’s a horror film. A desperately sad one.

I’m sure it’s a straight adaptation from the original and all that, but, as I say, I came to the film cold.

The budget is all spent on its magnificently weird and chilling final fifteen minutes, which has scenes in it that are totally unexpected. (And I very much appreciated some of the design choices)

And the structure is circular. Again, that clever bastard Will Tracy, who wrote THE MENU, which may give you a clue to how this film feels and lands: a chamber piece. I liked THE MENU. This shares that film’s craft.

BUGONIA is bugfuck and I liked it.

Impeccably well made, cleverly written, some wonderful performances. But.

It’s a story about a nuclear weapon launched from an unknown location and everything that happens in the 18 minutes of its flight. Those 18 minutes are retold three times from the perspectives of different characters. Sometimes we hear those characters as voices in one part and then see them speak those words in another part, in an overlapping structure that is clever but also starts to suck some of the air out of the piece.

Rebecca Ferguson’s signature weird chill of edgy professionalism denotes the first part. Tracy Letts is cast as the Curtis LeMay bomb-‘em general – but Letts is, as ever, so sympathetic and likeable that it lights the role differently. Jared Harris does a nice soft cameo. Idris Elba, as intelligent and creatively curious as any actor working, portrays a president essentially forced to relive George W Bush being told about 9/11 during a visit to a school, while possessed with Obama-like caution and hesitancy. Which makes him either the best or worst person to be put in the position of having to press the big red button.

But. We never find out what happens. And, with all the warm interpersonal and occasionally slightly soapy stuff, this is more THE DAY AFTER than THREADS. It outlines the worst case scenario, and, while it does what it set out to do, I can’t help but feel like it was missing some real hardness and real commitment to the bit. Which is unfair. That ending was a brave creative choice and I admire that, But it does feel like a softer, more conventional work than it could have been.

I will watch it again.

Worth reading NUCLEAR WAR: A SCENARIO in conjunction with this.

A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE is on Netflix.

In SUCCESSION, Logan Roy and many of those around him were functional people,even capable of physical violence and disappearing bodies and crimes.

SUCCESSION, on one level, is Lear’s kingdom not outliving him, conquered by a prince of Scandinavia while Lear’s children squabble and fail.

MOUNTAINHEAD, written and directed by Jesse Armstrong – which has more of his time on THE THICK OF IT in it than his SUCCESSION, I think – is the story of people who are not functional in the physical space. People who plan to cheat death but can’t boil an egg.

There’s a nasty hint of Steve Jobs in Steve Carell’s ageing venture capitalist Randall – “Dark Money Gandalf” – grappling with relevance and cancer (Jobs is infamously said to have tried to treat his rare cancer with acupuncture and juices, exerting “magical thinking” on the tumour). He’s on his way to a regular retreat/bro-party with three other tech overlords, two of whom are billionaires like him, and the party’s host, who’s “only” worth $500 million, so the others call him Soup Kitchen. One of these billionaires has unrolled unguarded generative AI on his Twitter-like service Traam.

(Traam – tram – trolley – trolley problem)

(There’s a real company called Traam that makes bullet-resistant glass, and another that makes skis. Mountainhead is what Soup Kitchen names his grim mansion on the side of a snow-covered mountain.)

The AI rollout has lead to a global deluge of sophisticated deepfakes that’s lit off riots all over the planet. The four tech kings sit in their mountain hideaway watching the world burn. And, after a while, they realise this is opportunity.

The music is a little too SUCCESSION-y, if that makes sense? It acts as a signal that it’s a Jesse Armstrong post-SUCCESSION joint, which probably makes sense – MOUNTAINHEAD, shot in a month, is very much a proof of concept for “Jesse Armstrong, director.”

The plot has an elegant line with a nice turn – it’s not about the future of the world, it’s really about Randall and his fear – but that gets obscured in the last quarter or so by the cringe. These are financially and technologically incredibly consequential people who are wildly ineffectual physical human beings. They think they’re early Roman emperors who are comfortable with the sword, but, no, they’re gits in gilets. They can only kill by inaction.

Think of it as a short story. Don’t treat it as the next big statement by the guy who created SUCCESSION. It’s a fun miniature between big works. And it operates very well in that framework. There are also some funny lines – but not as many as you’d expect. Armstrong is shifting position. The next thing should be really interesting.

Based on the entertaining short read by Robert Harris, and feeling very faithful to that slight book, I found CONCLAVE a perfectly pleasant way to spend a couple of hours, in a very specific way.

When I was a kid, the Sunday afternoon film on tv was a thing. It would usually be a light drama – maybe a war film with Kenneth More or John Mills, maybe a John Wayne film, a Western, Charlton Heston in a period film, in my memory almost always some kind of historical piece. Well-made films that didn’t ask for a lot more than your attention. Involving but not deeply challenging, sober and adult without any jagged edges to it.

My first thought on finishing it, oddly, was TWISTERS. A solidly-carpentered piece with two ridiculously charming leads, about place, people, passion and service under big skies. Great Sunday afternoon movie, and the sort of foursquare American flick that doesn’t seem to get made much anymore. CONCLAVE – which was apparently made for 20 million dollars – got me the same way. Nobody makes this kind of film any more.

CONCLAVE is almost a portfolio piece for the director Edward Berger – it’s beautifully composed, there’s a montage of cardinals towards the top of the film that feels strongly European, Isabella Rossellini has never been better, Fiennes is the sort of sober and contained English actor you’d find in a Sunday afternoon film, Tucci and Lithgow are always a joy to watch, and there are some fantastic shots. In fact, it’s worth a second watch just to look at the way Berger and his cinematographer build those shots.

CONCLAVE is more of a piece of art than it needed to be, and I love that. I also enjoyed that it felt like the kind of film they don’t make any more.

CONCLAVE (UK) (US+)