I never fully enjoyed – and sometimes quite hated – Wes Anderson films until THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL. THE FRENCH DISPATCH is very nearly perfect, marred only (for me!) by the extended animated sequence (other people love it, I know). I still have ASTEROID CITY in my queue (my queue is a million miles long). I’ve never seen a Wes Anderson at the cinema, and I’m hoping I get to break my streak with this one, which looks like it has that GRAND BUDAPEST energy.
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Of the Oscar nominees for Best Picture, I have only seen DUNE PART TWO and THE BRUTALIST all the way through. ANORA and THE SUBSTANCE have been in my queue for ages, and I do want to see CONCLAVE because I enjoyed the book. DUNE PART TWO is fine, occasionally brilliant, and a clever adaptation/update of the original text. Its flaws are minor – Javier Barden spends the last half of the film saying nothing but “Lisan al-Gaib” in varying tones, and establishing the family atomics and then having Timothee Chalamet looking directly at them exploding seems like a slip. But it’s fine.
THE BRUTALIST, working with a total budget that might just have covered the cost of DUNE PART TWO’s costumes, is something else. It, too, has flaws. We see what we presume to be Adrien Brody’s left hand writing a letter, but Brody is right-handed for the rest of the film. Scenes are over-long. It loses sense of its own timeline here and there. But it is a work of great ambition. Yes, so is DUNE, but DUNE is starting from an established text. THE BRUTALIST starts from scratch, inspired by true stories but not bound by them. It goes for something else, something bigger.
(The score, by the way, is brilliant, and goes a long way towards arranging the scale of the film. When it comes in, it’s immense. That Oscar was deserved.)
It’s the story of Bauhaus-trained monumental architect Laszlo Toth escaping to America after the Holocaust and falling into the orbit of a shallow, rapacious industrialist who commissions Toth to build a community center to honour his dead mother. Everything goes wrong. But Toth sees the shape of the place. He sees its statement. Almost all in his life is sacrificed to making it real.
It’s art as a balance between cost and reward. What the world wants and what the mind wants.
It’s a tricky film. Sometimes it wants you to take it literally, sometimes it wants you to see through it and its people. Its Brutalist architecture is a put-on, because the Brutalist of the title isn’t the architect or the architecture. Full marks for using Bauhaus design for the main titles, though. It’s a long film, and, like the center Toth builds, it’s far vaster in its underneath than it looks.
The coda is odd. It radically complicates and re-contextualises most of the previous two hours. It’s about the power of art to take ownership of victimhood and transcend it: the power of a creative mind to pull a victory from the mud.
Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold pull off a huge magic trick in THE BRUTALIST, and it’s worthy of awards. I am faintly annoyed it didn’t get Best Picture, because that would have been a strong signal about art. I’m looking forward to watching it several more times.
“No matter what the others try and sell you, it is the destination, not the journey.”
(Written for my newsletter, 9 March 2025)
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It’s a Jackie Chan film in the style of the Bob Odenkirk film NOBODY, with a Valentine’s Day theme stapled to it. I say Jackie Chan because Ke Huy Quan gets the crap beaten out of him a lot – one of Chan’s innovations was being the hero who gets hit, in opposition to the near untouchable likes of Bruce Lee. Quan keeps his glasses on, which seems almost like a nod to one of Chan’s Western influences, Harold Lloyd. There are nice details on the violence -I especially enjoyed the drinking straw through the eye, pulling out teeth with duct tape and fucking up two guys with what look like cookie cutters. One shot towards the end reminded me of Stephen Chow’s KUNG FU HUSTLE to the point where I was waiting for the pinball sounds.
Way too much voiceover sticking it together, not enough action scenes, but there are a couple of fun performances in there and the fight scenes are generally very well done and occasionally inventive. It’s not NOBODY or BULLET TRAIN, but that handful of action pieces are worth a look.
“This little motherfucker’s a spider-monkey ninja god.”
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There’s a scene towards the end where Lily-Rose Depp is freaking out and screaming at her useless husband and her arms stiffen as they hang down and judder in front of her. And you notice she’s holding her fingers in hard claw shapes. And you realise, as she screams and her arms spasm, that her hands have become Max Schreck’s Nosferatu hands. It’s quite brilliant.
Simon McBurney, as the Renfield figure Herr Knock, is a stage actor, writer and director who most often appears on film and tv as a character actor. One of those clever, suspicious and tastefully restrained performers a director will lean on as a solid post in the work’s structure. The sheer pleasure in seeing him untied and going fucking nuts here! He has permission to chew on every bit of scenery and every other actor and it’s wonderful.
I’ve not, to my knowledge, seen Lily-Rose Depp in anything else. She has to hold the film together: she has to be brave, vulnerable and not of her world all at the same time, and she pulls it off with style and intelligence. Because she has to be at least a little ill at all times, the other actors become more stolid to contrast it up. Even Willem Dafoe, given every opportunity to go batshit, makes his disgraced occultist professor troubled and passionate but observant and incisive. There is a wonderful moment where he realises and acknowledges that Depp’s character and her initiative are the solution to all their problems, and you watch him visibly put away all the biases of their time and his training to see her as the hero and to see her forthcoming sacrifice.
Orlok is not the Expressionist apparition of the original film, nor Kinski’s weirdly soft, heartstruck version of the Herzog. This Orlok is dead. A speaking dead animal. The breath is forced mechanically out of lungs that are no longer alive, a deep COPD bubbling. It is animated by appetite and nothing else.
Director/writer Robert Eggers is having a hell of a time. The film feels slightly unbalanced and perhaps over-long? But it’s easy to ascribe that to Egger just enjoying himself and the capabilities of his team, and who can blame him? It is a beautiful, inventively shot film with images that persist in the mind weeks later. It’s been nominated in the Oscars for best cinematography, quite rightly.
I previously noted the thought that the film could be uncharitably seen as Eggers auditioning for his $150 million fantasy movie. It was announced afterwards that he intends to either remake or sequelise the fantasy movie LABYRINTH. Seeing what he did with fifty million on NOSFERATU, including a completely convincing illustration of an early 1800s German port town, I would at least be curious to see what he does with three times the budget.
(His other film on deck is a werewolf film co-written with the mighty Sjon, and, given Egger’s historical leanings, I am terrified that he wants to do the same werewolf story I want to do!)
Isabelle Adjani, who played the Depp role in Herzog’s NOSFERATU, was, two years later, in a horror film called POSSESSION. In this NOSFERATU, Depp’s character, wearing Adjani’s hair, has strong echoes of POSSESSION’s sexual horror.
NOSPERATU is on pre-order for home media, looks like it releases next month (UK) (US)
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I dunno how I ended up in front of this one. Possibly because VENOM: LET THERE BE CARNAGE was actually pretty funny, with some fun scene-chewing by Woody Harrelson that almost felt like he was sending up his own Mickey Knox from twenty years earlier. That film was directed with comedic energy by Andy Serkis and written by Kelly Marcel. She returns here as writer and director.
It lacks the commitment to comedy of the previous, and it’s too flimsy a vehicle to carry off the sombre tone it’s reaching for. They give it a a go, though, even as it dissolves into the usual third-act CGI final-battle chaos. Stephen Graham turns up for a few scenes and seems even more out of place and confused as to the reason for his attendance than normal. Chiwetel Ejiofor shows up and only shows a flash of the actor he is because that’s really all that’s required of his generic part. It’s a tight ninety minutes, and it wants to be efficient while Marcel and Hardy have one final play with the superhero-movie toys. And I give them credit for wanting to shift the tone and give the film a sadder end-of-the-line feeling.
The few jokes tend to be fleeting and visual – in a chase scene, Venom possesses a horse, then a fish, then a frog. That sort of thing.
I note here that this film cost around 110 million and made almost 500 mil gross. Marcel will get her next film made.
With this, Marcel has done a thing I’ve seen other writers do: simply prove they can efficiently direct a movie without running the whole production into a wall. I imagine Marcel and Tom Hardy, who developed the story with her and has used her as a script doctor on a few of his other films, will do something else together. And that might be worth watching.
VENOM: THE LAST DANCE is out on home media next month: (UK) (US+)
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Terrible dark picture, but I keep forgetting to log this Xmas gift from a family friend. Haven’t made sure that it actually plays!
in this house, if you don’t love Ray Harryhausen films, you may leave. This is what we had before Industrial Light and Magic
RAY HARRYHAUSEN SPECIAL EDITION COLLECTION (UK) (US+)
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A voice that claims to be the ghost of Pepe, the first and only hippopotamus ever killed in the Americas, tells his story. Beginning in Southern Africa and moving to South America, Pepe narrates his eventful life—from being owned by Colombian drug baron Pablo Escobar to his final days roaming free.
Beautifully shot. Melancholy, surreal, a sly wit: in one moment meditative, in the next jangled.
PEPE (2024) on MUBI.
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It’s finally here. And finally I have a complete collection of Bela Tarr’s films in high quality editions.
Available UK and, it now seems, US+. But probably the same edition, which means it’s region locked.
One folder of blu-rays, one packet containing the book and the little posters.
It’s beautifully made. Half the size of the Criterion Ingmar Bergman, but will look quite nice next to it.
For me, Bela Tarr is one of the most important filmmakers of the last fifty years, and I’m delighted to have this, to finally own all he did, and to be able to extend my study of his work.
One CommentI was watching STATE FUNERAL on Mubi:
Moscow, March 1953: in the days following the death of Joseph Stalin, countless citizens flooded the Red Square to mourn their leader’s loss and witness his burial. Though the procession was captured in detail by hundreds of cameramen, their footage has remained largely unseen until now.
And this part caught my eye. The artists of Stalin’s funeral:
Even a sculptor.
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I could not resist preordering this. I was never able to complete my Bela Tarr collection – some films were just impossible to find.
And now, there it is: a complete Tarr filmography, with some new remasters in there. (UK only, it seems.)
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