Magellan [2025]

 With his hypnotic film Magellan – through co-existence of sublime beauty and harrowing monstrosity – Lav Diaz delivered a searing peek into the horrors, madness and violence of colonial adventurism, and a trip into the heart of darkness. Sitting alongside such spellbinders on this theme as Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Martel’s Zama, the great Filipino auteur’s smouldering latest exercise in formal rigour and slow cinema – at a “mere” 2 hours 45 minutes it’s among his “crispest” works, but there’s apparently an 8-9 hour director’s cut waiting somewhere – depicted a demythologized examination of the colonial campaigns to Malaysia and the Philippines by 16^th century Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan (played by Gael Garcia Bernal, an international star, which is a first for Diaz, even if in a non-heroic turn). It begins with the capture of Malacca under Afonso de Albuquerque’s command, in which Magellan participated and returned with a slave. Back home in Lisbon, while dealing with the accusatory gaze of widows of dead compatriots and marriage to Beatriz (Ângela Azevedo) who nurses him to health, he first tries in futility with the Portuguese king and then successfully convinces the Spanish king to sponsor a crazy circumnavigation voyage. The film – composed through ethereal and visually splendorous static frames straight out of classical oil paintings – thereby covered the exhausting expedition that begun Magellan’s descent into zealotry and brutality, and then his obsessive attempts at converting Cebu’s residents en masse into Christianity, while punishing “heretics”, that ended in bloody carnage. Epic in scope, minimalist in form, staggering in ambition and viciously powerful in its anti-imperialist stance, this is a bold new direction in Diaz’s life-long meditations on his country’s past and present.

Director: Lav Diaz

Genre: Drama/Historical Epic/Biopic/War/Adventure

Language: Portuguese/Spanish/Cebuano

Country: Philippines

Sirāt [2025]

 Óliver Laxe’s existential road movie Sirāt was both an unconventional film and a film made unconventionally. Combining the hellish journey of outsiders with nothing to lose (except their lives) in Clouzot’s Wages of Fear – or perhaps more appropriately, due to their tonal likeness, Friedkin’s remake Sorcerer – and the dystopian, post-apocalyptic landscapes of Mad Max, with the monomaniac quest of a father for his daughter who’s switched sides with the “philistines”, so to speak, in Ford’s The Searchers, it formed an elemental and sensorial experience. The latter aspect was heightened by its hyper-saturated realism, a visceral audiovisual palette counterpointing a stripped-down narrative, and its embracing of a techno-trance world where music is for dancing rather than listening to. Set in the harsh and visually stunning deserts of southern Morocco – captured through electrifying cinematography and accompanied by a pulsating electronic score – its primal setup followed Luis (Sergi López), a middle-aged man who, along with his adolescent son Esteban, joins a subaltern group of nomadic misfits residing outside societal boundaries – and whose raison d'être is to reach transcendence through hallucinogenic music and drugs – in search of his missing daughter. They meet at a throbbing rave held in the desert, and when that’s dismantled by the cops, they embark on a crazy ride that evolves from thrilling and immersive to tragic and shocking, to reach another illegal rave – Luis, hoping to locate his daughter, and the eccentric gang for music that never ends. This was, therefore, a story that begins in media res and ends just as abruptly, and the arbitrary violence, meaninglessness and breakdown of civilization that they encounter served as proxy to the third world war that blazes outside the frames.

Director: Oliver Laxe

Genre: Psychological Thriller/Neo-Western/Road Movie/Adventure/Epic

Language: Spanish/French/Arabic

Country: Spain

Grand Tour [2024]

 Diverse elements that constitute cinema – from its technical facets and grammar to its sociocultural roles and historicity – were evoked with joyous abandon in Grand Tour by the virtuoso Portuguese auteur Miguel Gomes. Forming a fascinating companion piece to his sublime masterpiece Tabu – in its tapping into colonial-era tapestry where nostalgia is sharply counterpointed by irony; chronicling of an infectious travelogue self-consciously stripped of exoticism; and channelling the palette of classical-era movies while deconstructing that and even celebrating its artifice – this wistful, eccentric, gorgeously composed, feverishly mounted and wildly experimental gem was ingeniously constructed in the form of a diptych. In the first act we follow Edward (Gonçalo Waddington), a British civil servant stationed in Rangoon in 1918 who flees in a fit of existential panic on the prospect of marriage to his fiancée Molly (Crista Alfaiate) arriving for that purpose; he travels to Singapore, Bangkok, Saigon, Manila, Osaka, Shanghai and further – initially to escape, but eventually through delirious inertia of motion – only to keep finding cheerful telegrams from Molly informing him that she’s happily in pursuit. In the second act we switchover to the optimistic Molly and follow her indefatigable journey, undeterred by Edward’s abandonment. Gomes, in a playful and idiosyncratic formal choice, alternated the story of the globetrotting lovers – shot in 16-mm on soundstage and accompanied by voiceovers whose languages changed based on the countries they’re in – with essayistic present-day footage of those places, some of which he’d shot before Covid stuck and directed the rest remotely. Further, though set in the past, one often sees them juxtaposed with anachronistic components, and this dazzling collapsing of the past and the present reminded me of Petzold’s engrossing film Transit.

Director: Miguel Gomes

Genre: Comedy/Romantic Comedy/Road Movie/Adventure

Language: Portuguese/Burmese/Thai/Chinese/Vietnamese/English

Country: Portugal

Bhuvan Shome [1969]

 Mrinal Sen’s first Hindi film, Bhuvan Shome, came at an intriguing juncture. While he’d already made 8 features – including the delightfully roguish romcom Akash Kusum – he was still a year away from transitioning into an emphatically political filmmaker. This seriocomic ‘slice of life’ tapestry – which he adapted in an understated deadpan vein from a story by the pseudonymous Bengali novelist “Banaphool” – nevertheless amply demonstrated his burgeoning love for formal playfulness, from jump cuts, freeze frames and animated doodles to whimsical episodes, wry internal monologues and sardonic narrations (by Amitabh Bachchan in his first movie credit). Incidentally, Satyajit Ray, who’d derisively summarized it as “Big Bad Bureaucrat Reformed by Rustic Belle” – his seven-word synopsis, though, was inch-perfect – may’ve been influenced by it to an extent when he made his first Hindi feature 8 years later, viz. the deliciously satiric period film Shatranj Ke Khiladi. The eponymous Mr. Shome (Utpal Dutt), a high-ranking Bengali civil servant and middle-aged widower – is an incorrigibly proud and uncompromising stickler for rules. Growing mid-life existential crisis leads him to a “hunting holiday” – in a farcical attempt to cure loneliness with adventure – and finds himself in an isolated terrain in rural Gujarat. At the end of an absurdist last-mile bullock cart ride, he’s inadvertently acquainted with Gauri (Suhasini Muley), a lively, unambiguous and friendly village girl who helps the gauche Shome, clearly a fish out of water, while also reforming him without really meaning to. During his bumbling expedition, Gauri’s vivacious charm and nonconformist views end up striking a deep chord within him – probably falling in love with her too – and he finds himself a light-hearted and uncharacteristically forgiving man upon his return to the city.

Director: Mrinal Sen

Genre: Comedy/Social Satire/Adventure

Language: Hindi

Country: India

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

The Boy and the Heron [2023]

 What immediately arrests one about The Boy and the Heron – the first film in a decade by legendary octogenarian Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, who came out of his retirement to make this, and the 25^th feature production by Studio Ghibli – are its dazzling, painstakingly handcrafted and decidedly anachronistic 2D artwork. Miyazaki was heavily inspired by the 1937 Japanese novel How Do You Live? by Genzaburo Yoshino (the film’s original title is, in fact, a direct nod to the book); he also self-consciously looked back at his own childhood days and filmography while conceiving this story, which made it semi-autobiographical and self-reflexive. It begun against the harrowing backdrop of WW2 as young Hisako loses his mother to a tragic fire accident. As the war rages on, he finds himself displaced to tranquil rural environs when his father, an ecstatic manufacturer of fighter planes for the military, marries his sister-in-law and relocates to her large estate. There, haunted by his memories and engulfed in debilitating grief, Hisako finds himself lost amidst his new mom and a group of eccentric old ladies, and becomes even more withdrawn upon facing bullying at the local school. That’s when he encounters a speaking, anthropomorphic Heron who mocks him out of his stupor and provokes him into a parallel world – filled with blazing phantasmagoria and outlandish creatures – where he must overcome fantastical obstacles to save his old and new moms. Wildly imaginative and heavily metaphorical – especially around its underlying evocations of past, present and future – the film took an uninhibited turn after having begun on a low-key note, which made it seem messy and overdone on occasions, its affecting mix of loss, melancholy and hope notwithstanding.

Director: Hayao Miyazaki

Genre: Animation/Fantasy/Adventure/Coming of Age

Language: Japanese

Country: Japan

La Chimera [2023]

 Time and history are fluid, elusive and mysterious in Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera, an oddball mix of whimsy, irony and melancholy, with burlesque splashes reminiscent of Fellini and Pasolini thrown in. The film’s roguish and eccentric anti-hero Arthur (Josh O'Connor) – an alternately disreputable and righteous British archaeologist of unknown backstory who’s involved with a group of boisterous tombaroli (grave robbers) who’re into scavenging antique artefacts that the Italian lands teem with, while being haunted by memories of a lost love – formed a sardonic embodiment of its seriocomic tone and temporal themes, as he’s continually switching between ancient and near pasts. As the film starts, he’s just been released from prison, and despite moral pangs, he rejoins the colourful gang and leads them using his preternatural abilities in locating the right spots to dig, while dodging the suspicious cops on their tails and scandalizing the locals through their sacrilegious defiling of sacred traditions. Shot by Hélène Louvart – who sumptuously captured the landscapes’ rough beauty, and made playful use of multiple formats and speeds – and accompanied by an earthy and bawdy texture that complemented the script’s sensuous undercurrents and magic realism, the film served as irreverent satire and elegiac meditation on human’s insatiable lust and profane greed. The arresting O’Connor spearheaded a fine cast comprising of Carol Duarte as the alluring Italia who’s drawn towards Arthur and hilariously teaches him Italian hand signals, Isabella Rossellini as the tough yet sentimental mother of Arthur’s lost lover, Vincenzo Nemolato as a gangly scoundrel, and Alba Rohrwacher as a smooth-talking shark. One of the film’s most captivating treasures was a rueful folkloric ballad that added wispy, offbeat and metatextual layers to the quixotic proceedings.

Director: Alice Rohrwacher

Genre: Black Comedy/Social Satire/Adventure/Romance/Magic Realism

Language: Italian/English

Country: Italy

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

Da 5 Bloods [2020]

 Watching Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods – like his devilishly funny previous feature BlacKkKlansman – one can’t often say whether it was a serious political film masquerading as a kinetic entertainer, or the other way round. But, either way, there’s no denying its chutzpah. Equal parts unfettered war film, pointed political protest, messy morality play, badass adventure tale and bittersweet buddy movie, it didn’t shy away from bristling commentary, meditation and indignation on entrenched racialism, while also being wildly entertaining. It begins with 5 middle-aged Vietnam War vets – level-headed Otis (Clarke Peters), deeply troubled Paul (Delroy Lindo), easy-going Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) and conscientious Eddie (Norm Lewis) – reuniting at Ho Chi Minh City decades after the odious war, in order to locate a treasure they – serving under their enormously revered squad leader Norm (Chadwick Boseman), who was killed in action – had chanced upon during a particularly bloody mission. Add to this motley group Paul’s estranged son (Jonathan Majors), a spunky French lady (Mélanie Thierry) who’s into clearing unexploded landmines, a former Vietnamese prostitute who Otis had an affair with during his GI days, a double-faced mercenary (Jean Reno) et al, and it’s quite clear that their tryst is bound to be as volatile and violent as the last time they were here. The gradually unfolding plot – a few ham-handed moments aside – was bolstered by tense set-pieces, caustic ironies – around still prevalent scars among Viet Cong descendants, references to American braggadocio, counter-propaganda by silken-voiced Hanoi Hannah (Veronica Ngo), etc. – and an especially gripping performance by Lindo. The proceedings were rousingly juxtaposed with archival footage highlighting Black history from slavery and their disproportionate conscription in wars to the Civil Rights and BLM movements.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Spike Lee

Genre: War Drama/Buddy Film/Adventure Film

Language: English

Country: US

Tabu [2012]

Miguel Gomes’ offbeat, poetic and ravishingly beautiful Tabu is a delightfully lavish exercise in melodrama – a genre rarely associated with arthouse rigour and minimalism. And, it’s also a meditation on old age, an infectious love story, an ingenious exercise in formal audacity and, crucially, a striking commentary on the dark heart of colonialism – including, the shallow romanticization of it in cinema. And these, in turn, made this delightfully old-fashioned and yet impishly modernist. The movie started with a dreamlike non-sequitar sequence of a Portuguese explorer in Africa surrounded by the suffering continent’s slave natives and haunted by his dead wife. At this point the main narrative kicked off, structured into two dramatically different halves (stylistically, spatially and temporarily). Part 1 (“Paradise Lost”) was centered on three Lisbon-based women –soft-spoken Human Rights activist Pilar (Teresa Madruga), her neurotic and aged neighbor Aurora (Laura Soveral) and the latter’s African immigrant housemaid (Isabel Muñoz Cardoso) who regularly faces racist insinuations from her senile employer; Part 2 (“Paradise”), told in a long flashback, and set somewhere in Lusophone Aftica just before the Portuguese Colonial War began, chronicled the scorching, illicit affair between a younger Pilar (Ana Moreira), married to a wealthy colonial settler, and a rakish young musician (Carloto Cotta) fleeing from his debobair past. The restrained chamber drama of the first half made for a fascinating contrast to the gloriously sweeping and swashbuckling second which, interestingly, almost played out like an old film with a voice-over narration replacing onscreen dialogues. The elegiac piano score that the film began and is interspersed with, peppy pop songs and rich, grainy B/W photography marvelously complemented its quirky, impressionistic and emotionally enthralling tone and texture.

Director: Miguel Gomes

Genre: Drama/Romantic Drama/Adventure
Language: Portuguese
Country: Portugal

Sonar Kella (The Golden Fortress) [1974]

It is at times difficult to believe that Ray adapted stories starring his immensely popular literary creation Pradosh C. Mitter aka Feluda only twice, given their lasting pop-cultural imprints in the urban Bengali milieu – barring Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, no other film by him garnered more popularity and repeat telecasts than Sonar Kella, made 6 years after he began this franchise, and Joi Baba Felunath, made 4 years later. Mukul (Kushal Chakraborty), a young boy haunted by images purportedly from his previous life, is taken to Rajasthan by parapsychologist Dr. Hajra (Shailen Mukherjee) for academic reasons; however, two notorious crooks – the sly Amiyanath (Ajoy Banerjee) and the thuggish Mandar (Kamu Mukherjee) – smell possibilities of hidden treasure, and decide to join to further their nefarious interests. Smelling chances of foul play Mukul’s father engages the 21 Rajani Sen Road residing sleuth (Soumitra Chatterjee), who Ray had created on his own image and representative of the Bengali ideal, and so he, along with his nephew-cum-sidekick Topshe (Siddhartha Chatterjee), embarks on a trip to protect the kid, and what ensues is a tale filled with thrills, mystery and scintillating adventure. On the way he makes the acquaintance of Lal Mohan Ganguly (Santosh Dutta), a writer of popular fiction using the pseudonym of Jatayu, who would become a life-long friend and companion of the PI. Great narrative pacing ensured an engrossing watch while also investing time on etching characters, building suspense and capturing the flavours of Rajasthan. The wit and humour that the script was imbued with, along with fine turns by the cast, interesting tidbits and the iconic Feluda tune that Ray composed further added to its engagement quotient.

Director: Satyajit Ray
Genre: Thriller/Crime Thriller/Detective Movie/Adventure
Language: Bengali
Country: India