Once Upon a Time in Gaza [2025]

 Directed by Nasser Brothers – identical Palestinian twins Tarzan and Arab – Once Upon A Time in Gaza is what the seemingly hackneyed title suggests, viz. a wacky potpourri of politics and meta-references. It’s made in the veins of a revisionist Western – populated with crooked characters, crumbling moralities, wry ironies, stylized dynamics, grimy landscapes and random violence – and set in the titular city which has been under a draconian siege for decades. It’s particularly shaped by the brothers’ intent in capturing life – with its idiosyncrasies, inconsistencies and arbitrariness – beyond the blockade, apartheid and genocide that informed its backdrop, and strongly recalled the great Elia Suleiman’s films. Divided into two disparate halves, the first was led by Osama (Majd Eid), a gregarious and amoral hustler who runs a small falafel outlet and peddles in smuggled painkillers on the side; he employs the unassuming Yahya (Nader Abd Alhay), and faces a deadly face-off with Abou (Ramzi Maqdisi), a nasty cop wanting a pie of the drug trade. The focus shifts to Yahya in the second half where, traumatized by Osama’s murder by Abou (who’s now grown in power), he’s offered to star as a martyred revolutionary in an agitprop action film sponsored by Gaza’s Ministry of Culture. Though the two halves felt disjointed – sardonic slice-of-life followed by deliberately self-reflexive events – they together carried a free interpretation of the good, the bad and the ugly personas from Sergio Leone’s iconic spaghetti Western. Majid was captivating, as were the grubby locales, subaltern subtext and deadpan humour. Filmed in Jordan by the exiled brothers, it also featured snippets from the subversive, over-the-top movie-within-movie, and operatically-scored funeral processions that nodded at Kalatozov ‘s magnificent I Am Cuba.

Director: Tarzan & Arab Nasser

Genre: Black Comedy/Political Satire/Crime Thriller/Buddy Film/Neo-Western/Action

Language: Arabic

Country: Palestine

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

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

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

Godzilla Minus One [2023]

 If collective national trauma emanating from Japan’s dark martial past, especially pertaining to WW2 and its aftermaths, informed Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron, these were in the foreground of Godzilla Minus One, the smashing new entrant in this long-running kaiju franchise featuring one of Japan’s biggest pop-culture icons. The narrative begins towards the end of the war when, facing certain defeat, Japan notoriously deployed kamikaze pilots for suicide attacks. Upon letting pragmatism and survival instincts trump over the dated concepts of honour and valour – inevitably construed as shameful cowardice by his countrymen – Kōichi (Kamiki Ryûnosuke) feigns technical snags to make an unannounced landing at a small island, where we have our first sighting of the angry reptilian monster. Plagued by immense survivor’s guilt upon his return to a ravaged Tokyo after the war, he tries settling down with his found-family comprising of a woman who’s lost her family (Minami Hamabe) and an orphaned kid, but eventually joins a ragtag crew of fellow vets tasked with diffusing naval mines which are dark remnants of the war. Meanwhile, relentless nuclear tests by the US at Bikini Atoll have brought about deadly mutations to Godzilla, making it not just infinitely more massive and ferocious, with an ability to produce devastating heat rays, but nearly indestructible too. Consequently, when it starts causing massive damages upon reaching the Japanese shores, former weapons engineer (Hidetaka Yoshioka) devises an ingenious, if enormously convoluted plan, to defeat this primordial beast. Buoyed by spectacular visual effects, the director delivered a commendable mix of scintillating sequences, deliberately melodramatic human story, and a dismal historical setting reminiscent of Japanese New Wave films that added vital meanings to the proceedings.

Director: Takashi Yamazaki

Genre: Sci-Fi/Action/Adventure/Family Drama/Creature Film

Language: Japanese

Country: Japan

Everything Everywhere All at Once [2022]

 Everything Everywhere All at Once, the unlikely smash hit by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, a.k.a. ‘The Daniels’, was clearly a film of two halves. The first half, which transitioned from a grimy, grubby, and immediately identifiable immigrant story – filled with anxieties, stresses, feelings of otherization, futile attempts at assimilation and generational fault-lines that deftly articulated the lost dreams, and was complemented by low-fi, grainy realism that had “indie” written all over it – into a wacky, gonzo, stylistically dazzling, absurdist, gleefully farcical and unapologetically over-the-top sci-fi action comedy – that subverted genre trappings while freely jumping across alternate realities, parallel universes, and the lines between deadpan realism and unrestrained fantasies – was like a breath of fresh air. The way it meta-referenced kung-fu movies, red pill / blue pill duality, wuxia fight choreography, etc., while retaining an underlying layer of melancholy, was captivating. “Poignant maximalism”, as one reviewer coined it, was apt in this context. The second half, unfortunately, undid some of its goofy brilliance, as it became increasingly maudlin, resorted to literal philosophizing, took up one concept too many in its attempt at irreverence, and, at some point, overlong. The film’s storyline was centred on Evelyn (a truly terrific and inspired Michelle Yoeh) – a harried, embittered, middle-aged Chinese-American woman whose marriage to her meek husband (Ke Huy Quan in an endearing turn) is falling apart, relationship with their daughter (Stephanie Hsu) has estranged, the struggling laundromat that she runs is struggling with tax complications thanks to an exacting IRS inspector (Jamie Lee Curtis) and stuck in escapable existential rut – who must tap into spectacular alternate selves – action star, cook and whatnot – in order to save the world, err, the universe(s).

Director: Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert

Genre: Comedy Drama/Action/Sci-Fi/Martial Arts Film/Adventure

Language: English, Cantonese

Country: US

The Matrix Resurrections [2021]

 The Matrix and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, as I’ve maintained for long, were two films that provided such tremendous step changes to SFX in cinema – and so flamboyantly and organically too – that action movies thereafter have managed to only either mimic or rehash them despite significant technological advancements since then, but without even being able to equal their brilliance, let alone better. Further, with the ‘The Matrix Trilogy’ the Wachowski sisters had created a terrific cyberpunk pop-culture too. Hence, resurrecting the blockbuster franchise nearly 2 decades later came with its share of trappings (proclivity for wallowing in nostalgia, and the innate difficulty in doing anything new or fresh out of something as popular as this), and a few opportunities too (satirizing the franchise, and in turn Hollywood’s gluttonous love for vapid remakes and consumerism). But then, as Lana Wachowski cheekily quipped in The Matrix Resurrections – she went solo this time as director, without her sister Lily – Warner Bros. intended to have this made with or without them, and hence she might as well do it instead of someone else. Consequently, while it was an intriguing and impishly self-aware work, it was also a rather pointless exercise at times – especially once it descended into its been-there-done-that climactic sequences – that didn’t really provide any new filip to the series. Set 60 years later, it revolved around the dramatic reunion of Thomas Anderson / Neo (Keanu Reeves), whose memories have been reprogrammed and he’s now a successful but disoriented “blue pill” popping video game developer, and Tiffany / Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss), who’s now a placid married woman with three kids, haunted by recurring dreams and with a continued love for motorcycles.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Lana Wachowski

Genre: Action/Sci-Fi

Language: English

Country: US

No Time To Die [2021]

 There are few absolutes in life, but one of those is the fact that Daniel Craig completely redefined James Bond. He provided the franchise – which had become staid, sagging and plain uninspired – with a dramatic fillip by replacing slick, over-stylized, blasé depictions of ubercool with a gritty, grimy and gripping palette, so much so that the first three (of the five) films starring him remain by some distance the best “Double-O 7” movies ever made and strong spy thrillers too. This tectonic shift was heralded by the exceptionally thrilling Casino Royale, and things were taken a notch higher in the brilliantly topical Quantum of Solace – my personal favourite of the lot – and the dark, visceral Skyfall. The curve, however, went south with Spectre, especially through introduction of a typically all-powerful, megalomaniac, sociopathic super-villain – something that Bond movies are overstuffed with, but which the above three had intelligently sidestepped – and that annoying facet was continued in No Time to Die. But, that aside, Craig’s last hurrah as a bruised, battered and beleaguered Bond – he’s decided to retire but his past inevitably catches up with him– was interesting, if uneven. Its first half, in fact, was spectacular – covering a mysterious flashback; a leisurely vacation with his fiancée Madeleine (Léa Seydoux) that gets explosively ambushed; a high tech robbery; an engaging, extended sequence in Jamaica involving a new 007 (Lashana Lynch), Bond’s final get-together with Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright), and a sassy CIA agent (Ana de Armas); his antagonistic reconnect with M (Ralph Fiennes); and an ominous but brief reintroduction of Blofeld (Christopher Waltz). The rather bloated second half and overlong climax featuring a tepid super-villain (Rami Malek), however, were big downers.

 

 

 

 

Director: Cary Joji Fukunaga

Genre: Spy Thriller/Action

Language: English

Country: UK

Angamaly Diaries [2017]

 Lijo Jose Pellissery’s Angamaly Diaries is purportedly a crime drama and gangster film; however, what, perhaps, the director essentially intended it to be, is a grimy and darkly funny collage on the eponymous locality in the port city of Cochin in Kerala. In that sense – with its expansive timeline, colourful characters from the crime-ridden underbelly, and idiosyncratic evocations of sights, sounds, flavours and palettes – the inspiration, quite clearly, was Scorsese’s irresistible portrayal of Little Italy in his dizzying masterpiece Mean Streets, and perhaps also the magnetic world of Italian American mobsters in Goodfellas. However, though the constant streak of levity added a layer of irreverent fun to the proceedings, it – along with the rather avoidable romantic asides – were mood spoilers at times (especially because I was anticipating a grittier treatment). The latter Scorsese gem began with the iconic (cheeky) quote, “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster”, and the same was true for the protagonist here, viz. Vincent Pepe (Antony Verghese). Right from an early age he’s fascinated by the area’s strongmen – who’d win football trophies through brute force, and were the local troubleshooters too – and forms a gang of his own with whom he enjoys raucous teenage years and grows into carefree men drawn to inter-faction rivalries, messy brawls, machismo and violence, while trying to get into the pork business. The region’s quintessential cuisine formed a gleeful running motif and driving force for protagonists; that, along with some of its stylized setpieces, and the wildly ambitious climactic sequence – a nearly 12 minute single take that begins with packed street festivities and ends in street violence – formed the film’s most arresting constituents.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Lijo Jose Pellissery

Genre: Crime Comedy/Gangster Film/Action

Language: Malayalam

Country: India