If I Had Legs I'd Kick You [2025]

 Writer-director Mary Bronstein’s wackily titled film If I Had Legs I’d Kick You – her first feature direction in 17 years which she shot over just 27 days, including two additional ones by trading her director’s fee – began on a dry note with Linda (Rose Byrne) grudgingly agreeing with her daughter’s remark that “Mommy is stretchable”. However, as physics teaches us, nothing is indefinitely stretchable, and an over-stretched object inevitably snaps. The woman is already simmering with nerve-racking anxieties and teetering on the edges, having to care for an overdependent daughter with a mysterious feeding problem that necessitates difficult medical arrangements, and do so helplessly alone due to a perennially absent husband who keeps alluding to conventional gender roles, while also managing her own job, dealing with a damaged apartment, and indefinite relocation to a shabby motel. As a result, it doesn’t take much for her to unravel, and which Byrne portrayed with aplomb. The movie was claustrophobic, tense and distressing, but it was also oftentimes darkly funny and borderline unhinged. Linda, despite being a spiralling trainwreck, is ironically a psychiatrist herself, who – further ironically – takes psychiatric help from her colleague (Conan O’Brien) with whom she shares a passive-aggressive relationship. Additionally, she must continuously engage with people who keep getting on her frazzled nerves – a supremely irritating motel receptionist, a pedantic parking guard, and a couple of overbearing patients, including a teenaged guy who’s physically besotted with her. The script, unfortunately, felt overloaded at times, a serial embodiment of Murphy’s Law, and tad heavy on metaphors; a lighter-footed approach might’ve better complemented the emotional battleground. This, was, nevertheless, a gusty work that courageously navigated through motherhood at its most strained.

Director: Mary Bronstein

Genre: Psychological Drama/Black Comedy

Language: English

Country: US

The Encampments [2025]

 There’s something magical about documentaries that capture, with rousing political urgency and here-and-now, the collective resistance by civilians who’ve taken to the streets to protest against a boorish establishment. The electrifying co-directed docu The Encampments, simultaneously observational and immersive, belongs to that breed where the throbbing crowd – in this case progressive, defiant and courageous college students – is its protagonist, as they decide to go about being on the right side of the history with daring abandon. The agitprop filmmaking, blending on-ground reportage with political activism, chronicled the Gaza Solidarity Encampment that the Columbia University’s students set up in April 2024, demanding complete financial divestiture by the institute’s complicit management from companies enabling Israel’s horrific genocide in Gaza, and amnesty for students censured by it. Their stirring pro-Palestine dissent and speaking of truth to power in the face of ugly vilification and repression by politicians and the media spread like a contagious wildfire across university campuses in the US and beyond, and – in parallel – eloquently recalled how, during the 1960s, Columbia’s students had similarly defended that era’s civil rights movement and opposed the Vietnam War against similarly heavy-handed authorities. The organic and decentralized movement, whose lead spokespersons were Mahmoud Khalil and Sueda Polat (among others), witnessed student and alumni participation that cut across religious, ethnic and national backgrounds, and their intoxicating passion and resilience were paralleled with gut-wrenching footage from Gaza and shocking brutality by NYC cops inside the campus. In perhaps the film’s most enduring moment, the students briefly occupy Hamilton Hall and rename it Hind Hall, in honour of the martyred seven-year-old girl whose harrowing story was memorialized by Kaouther Ben Hania in The Voice of Hind Rajab.

Directors: Michael T. Workman & Kei Pritsker

Genre: Documentary/Political Reportage

Language: English

Country: US/Palestine

Dead Man's Wire [2025]

 Gus Van Sant’s Dead Man’s Wire was filled with absorbing zeitgeist, gritty 1970s vitality, sly humour and subversive “state of the nation” satire, and channelled two Sydney Lumet gems. Like Dog Day Afternoon, its protagonist is a regular Joe who commits a sensational crime in an act of desperation, triggers a media circus, and becomes an anti-establishmentarian folk hero; and, like Network, he’s incredibly angry at capitalist greed. Based on an actual event from February 1977 – and all the more phenomenal for it – it starts off with Tony Kiritsis (Bill Skarsgård), intending to kidnap Meridian Mortgage Company’s owner M.L. Hall (Al Pacino), whose mala fide and predatory business practices have cost him his commercial property which he’d dreamt of turning into a shopping centre. However, as Hall Sr. is enjoying a lavish impromptu vacation, Tony kidnaps his son Richard (Dacre Montgomery) instead, and walks/drives him to his own apartment – through cops, journalists and passers-by – by devising an audacious improvisation that lent the film its title. He then holds the man captive for the next 72 hours while engaging in negotiations with the company’s lawyers, the FBI and local cops via a local RJ (Colman Domingo), who’s loved for his velvety voice and his jazz music show. Tony’s demand is simple – compensation for his financial loss and a public apology. Skarsgård was spellbinding – bringing in a blend of fury, screwball planning, vulnerability and uncanny media savvy – and Pacino was captivating in his cameo as a platinum-grade douchebag. They were complemented by a great soundtrack, analogue visual compositions and controlled farce, as the film portrayed class war and rotten corporate opportunism – all too prescient even today – while also delivering crackerjack entertainment.

Director: Gus Van Sant

Genre: Thriller/Crime Thriller/Docudrama

Language: English

Country: US

Peter Hujar's Day [2025]

 In 1974, writer Linda Rosenkrantz – who loved harnessing casual conversations and gossips – invited celebrated photographer and her friend Peter Hujar – who was still operating in the margins at that time, even if he was already a part of New York’s underground cultural circle, and died at the young age of 53 a decade later due to AIDS related complications – to her Upper East Side apartment to share how his previous day had been. The freeform “interview” that was recorded on tape as part of an intended larger project was unfortunately lost, but the manuscript resurfaced nearly half-a-century later in 2021, and which filmmaker Ira Sachs discovered at a Parisian LGBTQ+ bookstore. Peter Hujar’s Day is a delectable adaptation of that interaction – at once a meticulous, word-for-word transliteration of the text and a self-reflexive interpretation through such playful gestures as changing attires, the day transitioning into night in sync with Hujar’s recap, jump cuts, and the film’s crew bleeding into the frame on occasions. This warm, droll and captivating work provided a fascinating time capsule of 1970s NYC while also revealing, through gentle touches, the deep friendship that Rosenkrantz (tenderly portrayed by Rebecca Hall) had with Hujar (played with terrific panache by Ben Whishaw). Over the course of this intimate pas de deux, an exceptionally chatty Hujar recounts activities both consequential (Allen Ginsberg’s photoshoot, receiving tips for winning over William Burroughs, phone call from Susan Sontag, the challenges of getting paid, etc.) and banal (napping, eating Chow Mein, etc.), and their rambling exchanges – mostly indoors but at times on the balcony with the NYC skyline as backdrop – were captured in rich, grainy and exquisitely zeitgeisty 16-mm photography and art décor.

Director: Ira Sachs

Genre: Drama/Docudrama/Biopic

Language: English

Country: US

Father Mother Sister Brother [2025]

 Father Mother Sister Brother – Jim Jarmusch’s fourth anthology film, a form that he keeps returning to – was interwoven with his love for aimless drifters, low-key emotions, deadpan humour, and loosely-strung stories that don’t reveal any big truths. The overarching theme of this gently idiosyncratic and curiously compelling triptych was the unknowability of the inner workings of one’s parents and a Rorschach test on defining familial relationships through one’s subjective interpretations. In the wryly funny and ironic first episode, “Father”, carrying delectable traits of O’Henry and Maupassant, siblings Jeff (Adam Driver) and Emily (Mayim Bialik) visit their aged, reclusive, widowed and estranged dad (Tom Waits) who stays in remote New Jersey; while they wonder how their father survives with no social security, and his dishevelled cabin confirms their doubts, there’s something brewing underneath which delightfully comes to the fore eventually; the father’s nonconformist existence (which Waits channelled naturally) made for an amusing contrast to his children who’re squares. In the relatively weaker middle chapter “Mother”, the scenario is reversed as two neurotic sisters – the uptight Timothea (Cate Blanchett) and the oddball Lilith (Vicky Krieps) – visit their successful, self-assured mom (Charlotte Rampling) in Dublin, for a rather stiff-collared annual reunion. In the wistful and glorious final chapter “Sister Brother”, that saw Jarmusch operating in commanding form, American-Parisians and fraternal twins Skye (Indya Moore) and Billy (Luka Sabbat) reconnect over the melancholic memories of their bohemian parents – who’ve recently died – over coffee, old photos, their parents’ emptied apartment, and final belongings; it featured a cameo by the legendary Françoise Lebrun. The film featured Dusty Springfield’s seductive song ‘Spooky’, Anika’s haunting rendition of it, oddball connecting threads, and carefree skateboarders representing subaltern freedom.

Director: Jim Jarmusch

Genre: Comedy/Family Drama/Anthology Film

Language: English

Country: US

The Mastermind [2025]

 Kelly Reichardt’s minimalist “anti-genre” exercises – subversion of genre trappings, prioritizing inaction over actions, and leaving cine-goers without conventional payoffs – have produced anti-road movies (Wendy and Lucy, Certain Women), anti-Westerns (Meek’s Cutoff, First Cow), anti-political/legal thrillers (Night Moves, Certain Women), and anti-relationship/domestic dramas (Certain Women, Showing Up). She’s now made an absorbing anti-heist film with the beguiling and captivating The Mastermind. On that note, it recalled two other marvellous recent films – Rodrigo Moreno’s The Delinquents (especially how they glided through mischievous non-sequiturs) and Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera (both starred Josh O’Connor as roguish art thieves, though the similarities in their characters ended there). The protagonist here may well be the world’s worst art thief, giving a deliberately ironic ring to the film’s hyperbolic title. Aimless, unemployed, emotionally stunted, financially dependent on his well-off parents and working wife, and once considered very promising, JB (O’Connor) is the quintessential drifter. The Massachusetts resident hatches a foolhardy plot to steal four paintings – tellingly, by the American abstract painter Arthur Dove, thereby demonstrating his intellectual superiority over his material stupidity – by borrowing money from his mom, employing fellow losers and with no follow-through or backup plans. Significant portions of the film delved into the aftermaths of the robbery, as things go south right-away and JB is forced to go on the lam. The terrific jazz score complemented the improvisational form, and O’Connor embodied his character’s aloof, self-serving, hangdog charm, untouched by the era he’s living in, viz. the 1970s, anti-Vietnam War protests and counter-culture movements. The zeitgeist, incidentally, existed in the edges, bleeding in through the brilliant diagetic soundscape (TV programmes, radio bulletins, people speaking in the backgrounds), until JB inadvertently walks into it.

Director: Kelly Reichardt

Genre: Crime Drama/Heist Film/Road Movie

Language: English

Country: US

The Conversation [1974]

 Right from its bravura opening sequence – shot in grainy analogue and single-take using a telephoto lens which slowly zooms in from high-up, starting with a crowded scene bursting with activities and ending by focussing on Gene Hackman’s central protagonist – The Conversation announced itself as a thrilling work of its time. Much-sought-after surveillance expert and professional eavesdropper Harry Caul, ironically contrary to his vocation, is fiercely protective of his anonymity and privacy, while his drab and banal existence – he lives alone in a stripped-down apartment, spends his free time playing on the sax to jazz music, and never lets off his emotional guard – sharply contrasted his professional brilliance, adroitness with state-of-the-art technology and bespoke innovations. His latest assignment – employed by the Director of a shady organization and his sinister assistant (Harrison Ford) – involves snooping on a couple, through intricate planning and triangulations, while they amble around San Francisco’s Union Square. While extracting their conversation from the ambient noise, he becomes convinced that their lives are in danger, and his extreme anxieties, catalyzed by his severe guilt from a past job and repressed childhood memories, precipitate his devastating psychological meltdown. Made between The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, Francis Ford Coppola crafted this riveting, low-key, chilling and magnificent exploration of seething paranoia, personal demons, and moral conflicts – and an exercise in melancholy in a minor key – that remains a high watermark for political conspiracy thrillers. Hackman was electrifying in conveying Harry’s complex contradictions, obsessions and unravelling, while the surveillance trade fair that he attends – followed by vulgar one-upmanship by a jealous professional rival and a rare night of hedonism, intimacy and betrayal – amplified the film’s caustic commentaries and haunting prescience.

p.s. This is a revisit. My earlier review can be found here.

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Genre: Thriller/Political Thriller/Conspiracy Thriller

Language: English

Country: US

The Getaway [1972]

 Sam Peckinpah delivered a gripping genre exercise with The Getaway – arguably the most straight-up actioner in his incendiary career – and an archetypal, albeit lesser-known, early entry in the pantheon of gritty 1970s American crime cinema. It was a substantial hit too, despite stretching mainstream sensibilities with its nihilism, violence and cynical amorality, facing considerable behind-the-scenes turbulence, and receiving negative critical reviews (which has fortunately reversed with time). The credit for its appeal goes as much to Peckinpah’s high-throttle direction and leading man Steve McQueen’s “King of Cool” on-screen persona, as the enormously cinematic source novel by Jim Thompson – with its blend of heist gone awry, sociopathic outlaws, on-the-road thrills and brooding violence – and the crackerjack script by Walter Hill, who rewrote the original adaptation by Thompson, including completely doing away with the novel’s final third and its pungently surreal finale. The film’s rakish stylistic flourishes were evident at the outset during the ingenious opening montage – capturing overlapping moments in times while introducing incarcerated career criminal “Doc” McCoy (McQueen) who’s up for parole – which was accompanied by flamboyant freeze frames and terrific sound design by Quincy Jones. Upon securing his release, he’s arm-twisted into immediately planning a bank robbery, which starts unravelling from the get-go thanks to a sleazy, rotten partner (Al Lettieri) who intends to double cross Doc at the first opportunity, and an alarming escalation in unplanned body counts. He’s consequently forced to go on the lam along with his wife (Ali MacGraw) – who doubles as a driver with fine get-away skills, thereby potentially serving as a prototype for Hill’s protagonist in The Driver – and partake in spectacular shoot-outs that stretch plausibility, while planning an escape to Mexico.

Director: Sam Peckinpah

Genre: Action/Crime Thriller/Road Movie

Language: English

Country: US

Seconds [1966]

 Seconds – the nightmarish final chapter in John Frankenheimer’s ‘Paranoia Trilogy’ – wasn’t an overly political film, unlike the two that preceded it, viz. The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May. It was, instead, a bleak and discordant foray into mid-life crisis and existential disillusionment, along with an unsettling study on the malleability of identity – through the dystopian premise of “rebirth” via next-gen plastic surgery – that recalled Georges Franju’s Eyes Without A Face and Hiroshi Teshigahara’s The Face of Another; this latter facet, incidentally, would keep recuring in both future arthouse films (e.g. Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In) and mainstream movies (e.g. John Woo’s Face/Off). However, that said, it wasn’t without political undertones thanks to its sharp critique of the American Dream that’s supported by conventional suburban family, corporate job, material wealth, consumerist desires and heteronormative existence. This was clearly a work of two halves. In the brilliantly constructed first half, middle-aged, well-off and deeply dissatisfied New York banking exec Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph) is lured by a shady company – through hilariously sleazy salesmanship (by Jeff Corey), spurious smooth-talking (by Will Greer) and wicked entrapment – into agreeing to shed his current identity and transform into bohemian Malibu-residing artist Tony Wilson (Rock Hudson), in lieu of a steep price that they exact in return. In the rather formless second half, Tony struggles to adjust in his new persona and life – finding it equally empty and meaningless – and faces a horrific destiny in the memorably macabre closing sequence. The film’s visceral mood was amplified by the expressionistic B/W cinematography and jazzy score which, along with its free-flowing Kafkaesque segments, made it feel closer to a European than an American film.

Director: John Frankenheimer

Genre: Thriller/Psychological Thriller/Sci-Fi

Language: English

Country: US

Seven Days in May [1964]

 The Cold War, a period marked by paranoia and political conspiracy, saw the US playing a particularly fiendish role in “spreading democracy” to other countries, while undermining it internally in the name of battling “red terror”. American filmmakers memorably responded to this anxiety-ridden atmosphere with multiple fine movies, with three in 1964 alone by Stanley Kubrick, Sydney Lumet and John Frankenheimer. The latter filmmaker, who’d made the baroque and unsettling political thriller The Manchurian Candidate two years back, took that ahead with Seven Days in May – the middle chapter in his ‘Paranoia Trilogy’, which he’d conclude with Seconds – that refocussed from McCarthy-era hysteria to murky machinations during the nuclear age. When pacifist US President Lyman (Fredric March), in a courageous but unpopular decision, signs a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union, the highly decorated, megalomaniacal and right-wing zealot Air Force General James Scott (Burt Lancaster) plots a nefarious coup d'état to replace the elected government with a military junta, as he believes that the President is undermining America’s strength and power by going soft on Communism. Colonel “Jiggs” (Kirk Douglas), who reports to Scott, uncovers the ploy from a series of suspicious clues, and takes the difficult call of choosing insubordination over allowing constitutional principles to be trampled. Though tad heavy on verbal exchanges at times, it wasn’t short of crackerjack thrills and intrigue, and was propelled by a menacing turn by Lancaster that was reminiscent of the chilling masterpiece Sweet Smell of Success. The storyline bore additional self-reflexive irony given how the United States frequently enabled military coups during the 20^th century, while Lancaster would star in another similar conspiracy thriller a decade later with Executive Action.

Director: John Frankenheimer

Genre: Thriller/Political Thriller

Language: English

Country: US

The Train [1964]

 Watching The Sorrow and the Pity and The Train within a few days of each other was rather ironic, given how the former demythologized the idea of widespread French resistance during the German occupation while the latter emphatically celebrated it. John Frankenheimer, who took charge after Burt Lancaster got Arthur Penn fired, dramatically altered Penn’s script – which was more character-driven and primarily focussed on the value of art – into a kinetic, action-packed movie foregrounded on the titular locomotives. Along the lines of John Sturges’ The Great Escape from a year back, this too was fiction spun around facts – or “faction”, as one might call it – set during WW2, and was a similarly rip-roaring war film that nevertheless retained tangible character developments and political stances. It’s August 1944 and Colonel Waldheim (Paul Scofield), an “aesthete Nazi” who loves “degenerate” modern art, decides to take the crème de la crème of artworks housed in Jeu de Paume to Berlin – at any costs necessary – upon sensing Paris’ imminent liberation by the Allies. The museum’s desperate curator appeals to the French Resistance to prevent this given their incalculable cultural significance. Labiche (Lancaster), a railway inspector at the station from which this prized cargo will depart and leader of the local Resistance cell down to its last three men, reluctantly agrees to sabotage Waldheim’s plans despite not caring much for art. Stunningly photographed in B/W – deploying a mix of wide-angles, deep focus, and ingenious single takes – the battle of wits between the two men, manically driven by contrasting objectives, was matched by thrilling set-pieces involving authentic trains. The fine support cast included the striking Jeanne Moreau as a brusque inn-keeper forced into chooses sides.

Director: John Frankenheimer

Genre: Action/Thriller/War

Language: English

Country: US

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me [1992]

 David Lynch’s arresting prequel to Twin Peaks – greenlighted after the show was cancelled, and which massively polarized everyone upon its release – couldn’t have been more radically different from the television series. While the first two seasons were splashed with cute Americana, despite the outrageous events that unfolded, the film was edgy, visceral, grungy, nightmarish and enthralling. The two together, consequently, reminded me of three of his films – Blue Velvet, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive – in how they’d juxtaposed idyllic exteriors with grotesque underbellies. The film, which evoked a suburban purgatory through disturbing depictions of abuse behind closed doors and monsters inside the closets, took the viewers into the turbulent life of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) leading to her vicious murder that the series began with. It, incidentally, kicked-off with a MacGuffin involving two FBI Agents – Chester (songwriter Chris Isaak) and Sam (Kiefer Sutherland) – investigating Teresa Banks’ brutal murder that the show had referred to. The narrative, subsequently, dove into the final seven days of Laura – a beautiful high-school student who everyone admires, but whose secret double life is spiralling out of control, exacerbated by the assaults she’s been facing at the hands of her obsessive father Leland (Ray Wise) who’s possessed by the malevolent spirit of Bob, cocaine addiction, wilful prostitution, self-destructiveness and intense trauma – leading ultimately to her tragic end. The film’s most gripping sequence took place in a grimy underground pub – accompanied by a loud, jangling and addictive score – where the tortured heroine, along with her best friend Dona (Moira Kelly, replacing Lara Flynn Boyle who didn’t reprise her role) are swept into a netherworld where three leery middle-aged men take advantage of the two underaged girls.

Director: David Lynch

Genre: Horror/Psychological Thriller/Crime/Mystery

Language: English

Country: US

Twin Peaks [1990-91, 2017]

 Twin Peaks – the surrealist, grisly, horror, mystery, campy and goofy soap opera that David Lynch co-created with Mark Frost – was a surprise hit when it premiered in 1990, and became a pop-culture phenomenon with a cult following despite its eccentric, outlandish and bizarre plot elements. The first season – arguably the highest-point in the series – opened with the murdered body of the beautiful but troubled high school student Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) in the tranquil town of Twin Peaks. It followed, on one hand, the murder investigation led by the incorrigibly optimistic and doggedly persuasive FBI Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) supported by the local Sheriff, and on the other, the private affairs, sly ploys and nefarious machinations of the town’s offbeat residents which included corrupt businessmen, impassive cops, mad psychiatrists, punks, drifters, and striking damsels (Lara Flynn Boyle, Sherilyn Fenn, and Joan Chen), along with teasing forays into alternate realms. The longer second season concluded the investigation, and then took the plot forward. With the broader narrative scope, it succeeded in being more playful, madcap and adventurous, while also stepping the gas too much on occasions on silly humour and psychedelic excesses. Though the second season ended on a cliffhanger note, and Lynch followed it immediately with the gripping prequel feature Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, it was a whopping 2 ½ decades before a much-awaited third season finally arrived. Largely bereft of the campy Americana and soap opera elements of the earlier seasons, this alternately arresting, ingenious and exasperating season – filled with multiple parallel plots, interludes and detours, alongside both returning and new cast members – took the narrative forward, backwards and sideways into a bonkers, mind-bending trip.

Director: David Lynch

Genre: Series/Crime/Mystery/Comedy/Horror/Thriller/Drama

Language: English

Country: US

The Godfather Part II [1974]

 The Godfather wasn’t just scintillating cinema, it was a smash hit too. Francis Ford Coppola, consequently, got a free-hand for the follow-up, and he expanded the tapestry into a breathtaking saga which was broader and richer, as well as darker and edgier. He leveraged unutilized sections from Mario Puzo’s titular novel covering the past – beginnings and rise of a young Vito Corleone (Robert De Niro) – while simultaneously taking the principal narrative centred around Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) forward as he accelerates his chilling spiral – driven by the Machiavellian quad of power, capital, corruption and violence – which he’d embraced in the previous film. The second part, therefore, was both an adapted prequel and an original sequel backed by a sprawling script. While Vito’s journey was laced with warmth and was driven by memories of Sicily, familial loyalty, bonds he forged with fellow Italian-Americans, and street-smarts, making the flashback sections an elegiac immigration story, Micheal’s was colder and harsher as he displays a terrifying ability to outsmart his rivals and terminate anyone who offends him, propelled by his ruthless cunning and an absolute inability to forgive. Thus, as he battles the duplicitous Hyman Roth (Lee Strasberg) and antagonistic politicians, he also gets into shattering conflicts with his simple-minded elder brother Fredo (John Cazale), his profoundly disenchanted wife Kay (Diane Keaton), and hot-headed old-timer Frank (Michael V. Gazzo). While the film – aided by Nino Rota’s haunting score – abounded with stunning performances, Pacino’s stood out as one of devastating ferocity which made Michael’s character simultaneously arresting, volatile and diabolical; his interactions with Fredo were particularly unforgettable. The film, incidentally, also painted a captivating time-capsule of Cuba as it transitioned from Batista to Castro.

p.s. This is my latest revisit of this film. My earlier review can be found here.

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Genre: Crime Drama/Gangster/Family Drama/Epic

Language: English/Sicilian

Country: US

The Godfather [1972]

 Right from its magnificent and elaborately staged opening sequence – featuring the boisterous wedding party of the daughter of formidable Sicilian-American “Don” Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando), intercut with the mafia boss bestowing extra-judicial favours – The Godfather established itself as a work of mythic ambitions and immersive power. Adapted from Mario Puzo’s bestselling novel of the same name, this became a remarkable turning point for Francis Ford Coppola – who agreed to direct it because he was struggling with debts – as he went on an incredible four-film run the kind of which is rare in world cinema. This epic tapestry on the warped honour codes, complex familial bonds, elemental forms of justice and retribution, and the unholy marriage of harsh Sicilian mores and brash American capital, was gloriously evoked through its sprawling length, brilliant ensemble cast, mix of leisurely plot developments and stunning brutality, majestic cinematography and score (by Gordon Willis and Nino Rota, respectively), and a gripping peek into the closed world of organized crime that gave a bold new direction to both the gangster genre and immigrant story. The operatic tale of a once powerful patriarch passing his reigns to a reluctant heir – Micheal Corleone (Al Pacino) – and the latter’s conversion from someone who’d embraced a civilian life into an incarnation of chilling ruthlessness, was further enriched by its array of supporting characters (featuring James Caan, Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton, John Cazale, Sterling Hayden, etc.), plot detours, unforgettable set-pieces, and dark social and political commentaries. Coppola’s fiendish spins on life’s supposed conventionalities – marriage, friendship, family gatherings, religious occasions, etc. – made it especially engrossing, and which he expanded into an even grander dimension in the magisterial sequel The Godfather Part II.

p.s. This is my latest revisit of this film. My earlier review can be found here.

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Genre: Crime Drama/Gangster/Epic/Family Drama

Language: English/Sicilian

Country: US

One Battle After Another [2025]

 Reworked from Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland – making this his second Pynchon adaptation after Inherent Vice – One Battle After Another was P.T. Anderson at his most thrilling and sardonic. Alternately goofy and gritty, laidback and bristling with urgency, facetious and serious, politically informed and riotously entertaining, the film heavily reminded me of Jean-Patrick Manchette’s radical and anarchic neo-polar comedy-thriller novels; it also bore imprints of the Coens’ insouciant absurdism, and Friedkin and Peckinpah’s muscular actioners, thereby blending elements of left-wing political thrillers (a sub-genre that’s largely vanished) with black comedy, action, chutzpah and rollicking fun. In an extended prologue, we’re introduced to the far-left groupuscule ‘French 75’, that’s led by the fiery revolutionary Perfidia (Teyana Taylor); her boyfriend Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio), an explosives expert, stands out as a misfit white guy in this outfit engaged in guerilla rebellion against the establishment. During a mission to free detained immigrants, she teasingly humiliates the comically twisted and reactionary military officer Lockjaw (Sean Penn), who becomes fixated on her despite his hatred for back people, while simultaneously massacring the group. 16 years later, Bob is now a washed-out stoner who lives off-the-grid with his feisty teenage daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti). His past, however, catches up with him when Lockjaw – wishing to rectify past interracial transgressions to protect his membership in an exclusive white supremacist club where racial purity is sacrosanct – decides to liquidate Willa under the garb of busting illegal immigration. What ensues is pure pandemonium, and an elaborate chase sequence that transitioned from the farcical to the visceral, accompanied by a terrific, jangling score by Jonny Greenwood. The excellent cast also included Benicio del Toro as a deadpan leader of an undocumented community.

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

Genre: Thriller/Comedy/Political Thriller/Black Comedy/Political Satire/Action

Language: English

Country: US

As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty [2000]

 Jonas Mekas’ magnum opus – with a title that mirrored its achingly intimate self-expression, moving tone and expansive length – both underpinned and subverted the idea of experimental filmmaking. At close to 5 hours runtime, it was his longest film; that, along with its fragmentary, loosely-strung, collage-like nature, bereft of any narrative patterns or pay-offs, and unhurriedly paced, emphasized its alternative form. Covering a staggering 30 years – from 1970 to 1999 – it was also the most monumental diary film of his career. That said, it was plaintive, lyrical, effervescent and self-effacing – a “masterpiece of nothing” in his words – which imbued it with joyous simplicity and accessibility. Forming an unintended New York triptych along with Walden and Lost, Lost, Lost – and ‘Diary of an Exile’ tetralogy of sorts when one also includes Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania – this was a home movie in the purest sense as it captured moments that weren’t just autobiographical but also profoundly personal. Composed of a vibrant flurry of 16mm footage shot primarily in New York City but also elsewhere in the US and Europe – which he then assembled in a randomized order (as opposed to chronologically) – it’s lovingly centred on his vivacious wife Hollis, their cherubic daughter Oona and their son Sebastian. These three individuals and the memories they shared – daily life in their Manhattan apartment and outside, lazy Sundays at Central Park, noticing his children’s first steps, celebrating birthdays, loving moments with his wife, playing with his pet, experiencing new places, observing seasons change – represented paradise for him. These laced this exquisitely poetic memoir and most unassuming epic – accompanied by Mekas’ lilting narration and a wistful score – with radiance, melancholy and a gossamer-like delicacy.

Director: Jonas Mekas

Genre: Documentary/Diary Film/Essay Film/Experimental Film

Language: English

Country: US

Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania [1972]

 Jonas Mekas’ poetic and profoundly personal 2^nd feature-length diary, made 4 years after the sprawling and absorbing Walden, formed a vital companion piece to his spellbinding next diary – and possibly his greatest masterpiece – Lost, Lost, Lost. In the latter, he’d powerfully evoked his finding a new habitat and home as an émigré and displaced person. This, conversely, chronicled his brief trip back to his erstwhile home which he was compelled to leave forever many years back. After over 2 ½ decades of leaving Lithuania with his brother Adolfas – they’d left in 1944 and emigrated to the US in 1949 – they were finally able to visit the village of Semeniškiai, the place of their birth and formative years. It began with a short preface that comprised of footage shot on his first Bolex during his initial years in America. The central segment, titled “One Hundred Glimpses of Lithuania”, was a syncopated montage – a simultaneously playful and evocative collage shaped through varying film speeds, exposures, colour palettes and camera motions – which took us into that agrarian, impoverished and sparsely populated village, the rickety house where they lived, their aged mother who likes to cook outdoors, their gregarious relatives who frequently drop by, and the villagers who love dancing and drinking. The high-spiritedness transitioned into bitter melancholy in the epilogue that captured their visit to an establishment in Elmshorn – a town on the outskirts of Hamburg – which’d served as a labour camp during WW2 and where they were interred for nearly a year. Mekas, incidentally, interlaced the film with oblique social/political observations, while cheekily remarking, “You would like to know something about the social reality… but what do I know about it?”.

Director: Jonas Mekas

Genre: Documentary/Diary Film/Essay Film/Experimental Film

Language: English

Country: US

Walden: Diaries, Notes and Sketches [1968]

 Jonas Mekas – towering godfather of American underground cinema and pioneer of diary films – made a momentous feature-length debut, composed of ecstatically shot “haikus” or short reels, with Walden. At once epic, pulsating, freewheeling, elegiac and intimate, he made this 3-hour kaleidoscopic work by stitching together a dazzling blend of encounters, moments, happenings, portraits, events and experiences, that he shot from 1964 to 1968 using 16mm Bolex camera – his comrade of 50 years from 1950, when he purchased his first Bolex upon arrival in the US as a displaced person, through to 2000 when he finally switched to digital – via an intensely subjective lens. With its title borrowed from Thoreau and imbued with Cartesian spirit – “I make home movies, therefore I live” – it was particularly remarkable in its capturing of a vital period in New York’s trailblazing art and culture circuit, as we see gatherings featuring Allen Ginsberg, the Velvet Underground’s first performance, fellow avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage at his getaway mountain cabin, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s visit to the city, John Lennon and Yoko Ono carrying out their radical 1969 “bed-in”, etc. Mekas alternated these with moments embodying 1960s zeitgeist – e.g. street protests by a feminist group and African-American construction labourers spotlighted as “back power” – as well as kinetic bursts of “pure cinema” – observational shots of streets and Central Park, an ecstatic montage on a circus, etc. – and even some anachronistic wedding sequences. These protean images – possessing different colour tones, frequently overlapping and often at accelerated speeds – were accompanied by an eclectic audio track which ranged from jazz riffs to throbbing percussive sounds that he mixed by playing his vinyl records and radio, and occasionally also his lilting, chirpy voiceovers.

Director: Jonas Mekas

Genre: Documentary/Diary Film/Essay Film/Experimental Film

Language: English

Country: US

Monterey Pop [1968]

 The three-day Monterey Festival in 1967 was a watershed moment in the context of both popular music – in elevating the stature of pop and rock-and-roll as artforms and providing an enormous fillip for all future music festivals – and the 1960s counterculture movement that embodied the ideas of love, peace, communal living and non-conformism. D.A. Pennebaker, who’d pioneered the “rockumentary” with his seminal ‘direct cinema’ work Dont Look Back, established the enduring template for all future concert films – from the filming and editing styles to the look and atmosphere – with Monterey Pop, his exhilarating documentary on this phenomenal event co-organized by Lou Adler and the Mamas & the Papas front-man John Phillips, among others. It was only appropriate, therefore, that it began with infectious visuals of people streaming in, in their delightfully sunny attires and carefree demeanours, to the sounds of ‘San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)’, the unofficial anthem for that age written by Phillips. Seamlessly alternating between rousing performers and enthralled audience as a distinctive formal choice, it covered 12 out of the 30+ artists who took stage, using 5 portable sync cameras operated by fellow documentarians Richard Leacock and Albert Maysles. The film’s most iconoclastic and indelible moments included The Who’s Pete Townshend smashing his guitar after ‘My Generation’, only for Jimi Hendrix, after an exceptionally risqué act, putting his on fire; stirring vocals by Janis Joplin and Otis Redding; and elucidation of the show’s international spirit through electrifying South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela, and the virtuoso Indian duo of sitarist Ravi Shankar and tabla player Alla Rakha Khan to whom the final 15 minutes – a whopping 19% of the runtime – were devoted.

Director: D.A. Pennebaker

Genre: Documentary/Musical/Concert Film

Language: English

Country: US