Bugonia [2025]

 Yorgos Lanthimos’ absurdist and unhinged black comedies have toggled between relatively minimalist palettes and unreservedly maximalist ones. Bugonia was primarily constructed in the former vein – seething with anxiety, paranoia, gallows humour, and satire on class warfare, corporate malfeasance and exploitation – and soared for stretches with the unsettling ferocity and straight-faced schlock of his dystopian parable The Lobster. However, unlike that earlier film, it instead ended up literalizing the plot, delivering philosophical explanations and veering towards grandiose tendencies in the final third leading to the “extraterrestrial” climax. That jump into fantasy partially offset the tense and edgy buildup, even if it ultimately closed with a fine montage accompanied by Marlene Dietrich’s rendition of the great Pete Seeger folk song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”. Remade from the Korean film Save the Green Planet!, it follows two marginalized and alienated guys – conspiracy theory-obsessed Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and his autistic cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) – who kidnap Michelle (Emma Stone), the CEO of a powerful pharmaceutical company, assuming her to be an alien (“Andromedan”) secretly here in human form to destroy earthlings and its ecology. At its heart lay the psychological duel between the cold, manipulative and sociopathic Michelle, with her doublespeak, consulting jargon, and frightening lack of empathy, and Teddy, whose grief, past trauma, and emotional estrangement – complemented by his intelligence and detestation for the neoliberal monstrosity that the pharma company represents – has transitioned into volatile and destructive monomania. Stone was riveting, and Plemons no less compelling, in embodying their characters, while Delbis was quietly affecting as the tragically lost and fragile Don, in this bleak and unsparing work that stopped short of brilliance due to Lanthimos’ inability to pull back.

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

Genre: Black Comedy/Thriller/Social Satire/Sci-Fi

Language: English

Country: UK

Resurrection [2025]

Resurrection – Bi Gan’s return 7 years after his hypnotic last film Long Day’s Journey into Night – was as much a work of epic thematic preoccupations and stylistic ambitions, as a mind-bending, hallucinogenic and baffling exercise. Euphoric in its formal audacity, and melancholic in its tone, this elegy to cinema was a classic example of a work that dazzles with its visual splendour and scale – especially in how it glides across diverse filmmaking eras and genres, and serves as a successor to Méliès and Lynch – but also exasperates by its elaborate fantasies, flamboyant flourishes and metaphor-filled conceit. Its premise is an alternate world where humanity has sacrificed dreams to live forever. “Deliriants”, consequently, exist as an anachronism, as they secretly dream, thereby gradually withering away by refusing to conform. Sandwiched between a prologue made as an expressionist, sci-fi, silent film revealing a grotesque and dying “deliriant” that’s an embodiment of movies, and an epilogue mourning its death and culminating with “fin de cinéma”, were four compulsively staged dreams. The convoluted first dream was a 1940s noir and espionage thriller about a tormented musician on the run in sin city; the bleakly beautiful second dream, shot in wintry images, was focused on a lost monk in a derelict monastery haunted by his dead father’s ghost; in the picaresque third dream, a con artist takes an orphan girl under his wings to swindle an ageing mob boss; and in the pulsating final dream – spectacularly filmed in a single take and techno colours, thus recalling his previous feature – a self-destructive hoodlum falls for a mysterious girl employed by a violent gangster. Jackson Yee played the mythical “deliriant” as well as its four manifestations.

Director: Bi Gan

Genre: Drama/Sci-Fi/Thriller/Mystery/Experimental Film

Language: Mandarin

Country: China

World on a Wire [1973]

 Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 2-part 206-minutes-long television miniseries World On A Wire – the German wunderkind’s sole foray into science-fiction, adapted from Daniel F. Galouye’s novel Simulacron-3, and recently restored after years of obscurity – was a gloriously trippy, luscious, paranoid and prescient work where the dystopian future is here and now. Flamboyantly blending the sci-fi genre with noir, melodrama, conspiracy, philosophical meditations, existential anxieties, and distinctive Euro-arthouse sensibilities, and with cold, sleek, metallic and modernist décor complemented with disco-tinged sensuality, it recalled Godard’s magnificent Alphaville in its evocation of one non-compliant individual’s battle against a supra-national techno-totalitarian society, and presaged the Wachowskis’ The Matrix in positing that we might be trapped inside a simulated, hyper-real, virtual reality environment. The film’s protagonist, cybernetics engineer Fred Stiller (Klaus Löwitsch), succeeds as the technical director of a powerful government-corporate mainframe program called Simulacron which has created an artificial world with thousands of “identity units” and has the ability to predict industry trends well into the future, when his boss, Professor Vollmer, dies under mysterious circumstances. He goes on to sense and uncover a massive corporate conspiracy with monomaniac zeal, and before long becomes a hunted fugitive as he gets into loggerheads with the institute’s malicious CEO Siskins (Karl-Heinz Vosgerau). Along the way he gets close to two duplicitous women – Stiller’s personal assistant Gloria (Barbara Valentin) who’s essentially been plugged in to spy on him, and the deceased super-scientist’s sultry daughter Eva (Mascha Rabben) who Stiller becomes enamoured with. Co-written by Fassbinder, this deliciously ominous and tantalizingly foxy film – photographed in lush, grainy 16-mm by Michael Ballhaus, and featuring a rich soundtrack, including Fleetwood Mac’s hypnotic ‘Albatross’ – was populated with RWF’s regular gang of actors.

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Genre: Sci-Fi/Thriller/Mystery/Romance

Language: German

Country: Germany

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

The Spirit of the Beehive [1973]

 Victor Erice’s celebrated debut feature The Spirit of the Beehive remains both a seminal Spanish film and an exceptional chronicling from a child’s POV. Made during Franco’s fascist regime – which was notorious for suppressing “non-compliant” works of art – Erice was compelled to express his critiques and disillusionment through elliptical, allegorical and allusive means; one therefore must engage in critical readings of the film to interpret its brooding political undertones. What remains unambiguous, however, is that this was a haunting and ethereal masterpiece, and a sublime text on how cinema can be a distillation of magic, poetry, memory, politics and defiance rolled into one. Set in a rundown village in 1940 – with the devastating Civil War having just ended with the Republicans’ defeat – the moody, minimalist and delicately weaved narrative is centred around wide-eyed six-year-old Ana (Ana Torrent). Her ageing father (Fernando Fernán Gómez) remains absorbed in beehives, while her mother is lost reminiscing about someone she’s lost in the war. Her closest friend is her sister Isabel (Isabel Tellería), who loves playing little pranks on her naïveté. When James Whales’ Frankenstein is screened at a rundown theatre which the sisters watch in awe, Ana becomes fixated by the misunderstood monster – more so, when Isabel teasingly convinces her that he exists as a disembodied ghost at an isolated cabin nearby. Consequently, upon encountering a wounded Republican soldier who’s taken refuge there, she helps him assuming he’s the spirit’s manifestation, and is deeply scarred when he’s killed. Torrent, who’d star in Saura’s equally haunting masterpiece Cria Cuervos 3 years later, and Tellería were unforgettable, as was the magnificent, washed-out cinematography by Luis Cuadrado who started losing his eyesight during the filming.

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

p.p.s. This also happens to be my 2000th film review at Cinemascope.

Director: Victor Erice

Genre: Drama/Coming-of-Age/Fantasy

Language: Spanish

Country: Spain

The Hawks and the Sparrows [1966]

 The Hawks and the Sparrows ingeniously harboured parallel tracks, as it was both informed by the austere aesthetics and social commitment of neorealist cinema that Pier Paolo Pasolini had a strong background in, and was expressive of the radical, modernist, and asinine aspects of his subsequent filmography. This picaresque road movie, Marxist parable, and darkly funny commentary on social inequality demonstrated that pivot. Its farcical, eccentric and subversive whimsy were evident from the get-go as it began with an amusing song, accompanying the opening title credits and introducing the cast and the crew, including how producer Alfredo Bini might’ve “endangered his position and reputation” by backing this work. An idiosyncratic father-son duo – played by the celebrated thespian Totò as the elderly, droopy-eyed, Chaplinesque dad, and Ninetto Davoli, Pasolini’s lover and frequent collaborator, as the goofy, curly-haired, skirt-chasing son – are on an ambling walk through the gritty countryside of Rome, albeit going nowhere, and meeting oddball characters and having offbeat encounters along the way. They’re joined in their peregrinations by the Crow, a talking raven and left-wing intellectual. He spouts gentle advices, wry reflections, and philosophical musings, and chronicles an allegorical tale involving two monks (also played by Totò and Davoli) who’re asked by St. Francis – presented as a Marxist cleric keenly conscious of class conflicts, and reminiscent of Pasolini’s celebrated preceding narrative feature The Gospel According to St. Matthew – to preach the gospel to the haughty, powerful hawks and the humble, vulnerable sparrows. Filmed in sparkling B/W and irreverently scored by Ennio Moricone, it interplayed between political satire and dialectical analysis, and contained an homage to just-deceased Italian Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti through a stirring montage of news footage.

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini

Genre: Black Comedy/Social Satire/Political Satire/Road Movie/Fantasy

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

The Shrouds [2024]

 The complex, tangled and murky ways in which body, mind and technology feed into each another has been a recurring thematic preoccupation for the nonconformist Canadian prophet David Cronenberg. That informed The Shrouds too, the unsettling and morbidly fascinating latest by the veteran provocateur. It’s also an intensely personal work, as he made it to process his grief upon losing his wife to cancer in 2017. The film, therefore, was steeped in pain and melancholy, albeit metastasized by twisted desires, problematic technological overreach, political paranoia and psychosomatic disintegration. Karsh (Vincent Cassel) – imagined as the director’s stand-in with his white back-brushed hair – is a technocrat who’s unable to recover from the loss of his ravishingly beautiful wife Becky (Diane Kruger) who died of cancer and who he continues to have lurid dreams about. He’s channelled his grief into an outré entrepreneurial venture called “GraveTech” wherein one can see – through voyeuristic 3D images – the decomposing corpses of one’s deceased loved ones. The mind-bending tale is provided additional fillip through three other troubled individuals – Becca’s twin sister Terry (Kruger) who’s turned on by conspiracies, her pathologically jealous ex-husband (Guy Pierce) who’s a techie and sees global machinations everywhere, and the sultry blind wife (Sandrine Holt) of a potential billionaire investor – and spiralling, nightmarish developments that’re underplayed by the film’s relaxed editing style and chamber settings, viz. the vandalizing of the company’s showpiece Toronto site, including Becky’s grave, by unknown assailants; Karsh’s virtual assistant (voiced by Kruger) displaying sinister undercurrents; and the blurring of the real with Karsh’s disturbed psyche. Kruger was particularly striking in her evocation of three separate personas in this radical late-career piece that alternated between dark, cautionary and tender.

Director: David Cronenberg

Genre: Body Horror/Sci-Fi Thriller/Marital Thriller

Language: English

Country: Canada

The Substance [2024]

 What happens when you mix a cocktail that’s equal parts grotesque body horror, caustic showbiz satire, deliriously lurid and grisly B-movie, and fierce feminist critique on male gaze, shallow beauty standards and institutionalized ageism? You get a brash, deliciously nasty, wickedly funny and intensely polarizing film like Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, that’s unapologetically in-your-face and dripping with chutzpah. However, for the same reasons, it also felt overdone and unwieldy at times, with its lofty ideological ambitions lacking in complex undertones, even if – admittedly – Fargeat was probably never aiming for nuance or subtlety. This, incidentally, is also a rare body horror film directed by a woman, thereby pairing it with fellow French filmmaker Julia Ducournau’s Titane. The titular “substance” is an experimental black-market drug that spawns a younger and more beautiful self of oneself; the only catch being, the two alternate versions must co-exist symbiotically to avoid horrific repercussions to both. Elisabeth (Demi Morre), once a fabled Hollywood goddess but now leading aerobics shows for the TV, is summarily fired by the network’s boorish and lascivious boss Harvey (Dennis Quaid) – a deliberately noxious caricature given the name – as she’s just turned 50. Faced with anonymity and irrelevance, she falls into the trap and takes the sinister drug, and thus emerges – through a literally spine-crushing process – her young, saucy and sexy doppelgänger Sue (Margaret Qualley). Soon enough a mutually destructive battle develops between them, as they spitefully start treating one another as rivals. Moore and Qualley weren’t just excellent in their respective roles, they also complemented each other as psychedelic variants of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The garish colours and trippy visuals, meanwhile, were reminiscent of De Palma and Verhoeven.

Director: Coralie Fargeat

Genre: Sci-Fi/Body Horror/Showbiz Satire/Black Comedy

Language: English

Country: France

All of Us Strangers [2023]

 Adam (Andrew Scott), the protagonist in Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers, is a man shaped, bound and defined by internalized trauma – on account of his parents’ death when he was just 12, and growing up as an alienated orphan on account of his homosexuality – and the consequent rootlessness, social estrangement and deep-rooted feelings of otherness. He, as a result, exists in a liminal space haunted by past ghosts, detached present and formless future. His loneliness and melancholy are complemented by his sense of being stuck and intensely secluded life. A drifting television screenwriter, he lives alone in a swanky but thoroughly deserted upscale high-rise in London. Two parallel – and ostensibly unconnected – threads suddenly unfold that throw his ennui-filled life into an emotional whirlpool. On one hand he finds his parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) at the suburban house he grew up in – exactly as they were just before they died, thus making the film seem an intriguing mix of magic realism, ghost story and a schizophrenic mirage induced by the subconscious – and starts reconnecting with them and bringing them up to speed about his life, including his being gay. On the other, he befriends and gets sucked into an intense relationship with Harry (Paul Mescal), an enigmatic, volatile, borderline self-destructive younger guy – and seemingly the only other resident in that building – who exudes a troubled vulnerability. Led by powerhouse turns by Scott, Mescal and Foy, suffused with rippling emotionality, comprising of a glorious disco-era soundtrack, and adapted from the Japanese novel Strangers by Taichi Yamada, this achingly intimate exploration of loss, grief, loneliness and being queer boldly walked a delicate line between passionate melodrama and sentimental contrivances.

Director: Andrew Haigh

Genre: Drama/Romantic Drama/Fantasy

Language: English

Country: UK

Poor Things [2023]

 Poor Things is possibly Lanthimos’ most unreservedly ambitious film to date – ribald, outré and gleefully grotesque – while also being situated in his distinctively weird aesthetic palettes and expressions. Adapted from Alasdair Gray’s novel of the same name, it conjured a wildly imaginative blend of period setting and punk-dystopia, and thereby a mix of black humour, body horror, sci-fi fantasy, existential inquiries and feminist fable. Yet, for all its absurdist splashes, it was also ultimately an exercise in humanism and morality, and therefore bereft of the wickedly savage and deadpan nihilism that he’d pursued so far. Consequently, for all its fantastical imagery, extravaganza and provocations, it demonstrated that he’s either mellowing with age or attempting an expanded audience (or both). Set in cartoonish Victorian England – flamboyantly evoked through zany cinematography, garish backdrops and discordant scores – it’s centred on Bella (Emma Stone), who has the mind of a child in the body of a woman. This freakish contradiction is the result of the handiwork of mad scientist Godwin (Willem Defoe) – who she unironically calls “God” – as he revived a woman who’s committed suicide by transplanting an unborn child’s brain into her. Unapologetically gauche, outrageously libidinous and infinitely curious, she embarks on a wild adventure of self-learning, first with the gloriously louche Duncan (Mark Ruffalo) – their romps represented the film’s most enjoyable sections – and then as a prostitute at a Parisian brothel where she’s drawn to socialist ideas. The drab final segment and some self-consciously serious set-pieces, unfortunately, were dampeners. Excellent performances aside – Stone was particularly fearless and nuanced – the film comprised of a charming cameo by Hanna Schygulla and droll inter-species hybrids reminiscent of Sukumar Ray’s unforgettable nonsense poem ‘Khichuri’ (“Hodgepodge”).

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

Genre: Sci-Fi/Black Comedy/Fantasy/Romantic Comedy/Existentialist Drama

Language: English

Country: UK

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

Barbie [2023]

 The most intriguing irony defining Barbie is that, it’s a riotous satire of patriarchy, consumerism and the shallow beauty standards that the eponymous dolls had embodied and glorified, and yet it was also promoted through gimmicky marketing blitzkrieg that reinforced the very attributes the film lampooned. It’s, therefore, fascinating not just on account of Greta Gerwig – who’d established her toehold in the industry as an actor in low-budget Indie cinema, and demonstrated her understated feminist streak thereafter as a filmmaker – helming a big-budget studio movie as this, but more so in how she succeeded in making such a subversive and feminist work despite it being produced by Mattel Inc., the very organization that was responsible for these plastic, vacuous and regressive toys. One half of the pop-culture frenzy “Barbenheimer” – a portmanteau that was coined despite Barbie and Oppenheimer being two diametrically opposite works, in order to indicate the hype that presaged their simultaneous theatrical releases, and the gargantuan blockbusters that both became even though they were far removed from straightforward mass entertainers – its deliberately garish colour palette and kitschy aesthetics served as apt juxtapositions to its silly fantasy and comedic portrayal of Barbieland, a joyous matriarchal society inhabited by, among others, the ravishing Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) who, upon experiencing existential crisis, takes a trip to the grimy real world in company of a drooling Beach Ken (Ryan Gosling). That leads to widespread repercussions, including among the all-male Mattel executives led by its CEO (Will Farrell), a disenchanted mother-daughter combo, and Barbieland’s motley residents. The narrative’s messy, self-conscious and meta elements were both its unique strength and, by kind-of embracing the very artifice that it parodied, also its failing.

Director: Greta Gerwig

Genre: Comedy/Black Comedy/Social Satire/Fantasy

Language: English

Country: US

Nope [2022]

 Jordan Peele constructed Nope like a multi-layered cake – wryly revisionist Western, acerbic satire on insatiable consumerism, and delightfully original sci-fi thriller that resorted to clever reworking of hackneyed genre tropes. It was also ecstatically permeated with metatextual elements through ironic references to movies and showbiz spectacles – through the recurrent motif of the camera’s gaze, audience’s voyeuristic impulses and exploitive nature of the industry – while resonant political readings were consciously invested into the narrative; the latter aspect made it particularly interesting for me, having watched it in succession with Kimi and Emily the Criminal over a long flight, given how the scripts were charged with topical political subtexts, even if, in this case, the scope was broader, the form more complex and the commentary subtler. Peele, therefore, displayed considerable audacity in composing this film; and, even though its zany ideas and moving parts didn’t always combine into a coherent whole, that never made it any less enjoyable. The brooding, taciturn OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and his sister Em (Keke Palmer), who has bundles of dramatic flair, are struggling to keep their family business afloat – training and handling horses for film productions, out of their ranch in rural California – and therefore the legacy of being descendants of the nameless black man in Eadweard Muybridge's pioneering Animal Locomotion, after their dad mysteriously dies of a metallic piece that falls from the sky. Having had to sell most their stable to a former child actor (Steven Yeun), who’d faced a horrible experience while shooting and now runs a kitschy theme park, they decide to capture on camera – as their foolproof ticket to the wealth – a sinister UFO that’s been stalking the desolate, breathtaking place.

Director: Jordan Peele

Genre: Sci-Fi Horror/Western/Mystery/Showbiz Satire

Language: English

Country: US

Dry Ground Burning [2022]

 Dry Ground Burning, as the title indicated, was scorched, grimy and incendiary, and – as a ferociously feminist, bleakly dystopian and boldly political film; cinema of resistance; an exercise in agitprop; grungy, revisionist Western; speculative thriller; “ethnographic sci-fi”; and a work of docufiction – operated, with formal suppleness, in the shifting intersection of multiple genres. It simultaneously captured Bolsenaro’s toxic, right-wing politics, and evoked a nightmarish “what-if” scenario wherein the country has devolved into a post-apocalyptic police state and carceral society, leading to underground dissidents defiantly seizing pockets of control. And what a brash defiance it was! An all-female collective of outlaws and residents of the impoverished Sol Nascente favela in the outskirts of Brasilia – comprising of Chitarra (Joana Darc Furtado), a single mother and the voluptuous leader of the gasolinheiras; her nonchalant half-sister Léa (Léa Alves da Silva), who’s recently been released from jail; and Andreia (Andreia Vieira), who’s founded the Prison People Party with the aim to provide voice and empowerment to people, especially women, who continue to face terrible discrimination and impediments on account of past incarcerations – have taken control of an underground pipeline from which they extract crude gasoline, refine it into oil and sell that to a motorcycle gang for distribution. The film’s three gangsta protagonists – whose lives, in a blurring of boundaries, mirrored that of the respective actors –, therefore, formed a fearless vanguard and represented a proud future that “isn’t just female: it is Black, lesbian, profoundly matriarchal.” Its most scintillating moments included Andreia’s rap-canvassing of her political manifesto, and a hypnotic pan within a Bolsenaro rally where the crowd of smug conservatives was the very antithesis of this film and its three heroines.

Director: Joana Pimenta & Adirley Queiros

Genre: Drama/Sci-Fi/Revisionist Western/Crime Drama

Language: Portuguese

Country: Brazil

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

Crimes of the Future [2022]

 While watching Julia Ducournau’s gloriously seductive body-horror film Titane, one hoped for one last hurray from Cronenberg who’d once made this sub-genre his personal fiefdom and engendered the Cronenbergian grammar. Hence the Canadian auteur’s fabulous new film Crimes of the Future – albeit, conceived and written in the late-90s and was slated to go into production in early-2000s, before it got shelved for the next two decades – and his first in 8 years, felt especially exhilarating for its gleeful, provocative and ballsy evocation of his quintessential brand of outrageous, discomfiting, visceral and caustic social, cultural and biological commentaries in the veins of Videodrome, The Fly, Dead Ringers and Crash. Bearing the same title as his sophomore film but without any resemblances otherwise, it captures a dystopian future when human bodily evolution has moved into uncharted territories where pain and infection are a thing of the past; new human organs are spouting out of nowhere and “surgery is the new sex”, leading to both edgy performance art and increased body control by the state; dietary habits have got radically altered – with an underground anarchist cult feeding on industrial plastic –; and the society has shaped into a battleground between the surveillance state and subversive non-conformists. In this disturbingly allegorical milieu, the story focussed on the tantalizing ménage à trois between a renowned performance artist couple – Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen), a brooding man having “accelerated evolution syndrome” and his sensual partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux), who performs “live” surgeries on him – and saucy National Organ Registry bureaucrat Timlin (Kirsten Stewert) who’s secretly enamoured with Saul. The boldly grotesque visuals, hallucinatory atmosphere, and pulsating techno-classical score brilliantly complemented Cronenberg’s prescient, subversive and satirical vision.

Director: David Cronenberg

Genre: Thriller/Science Fiction/Body Horror

Language: English

Country: Canada

What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? [2021]

 Alexandre Koberidze’s sophomore feature was a quirky, playful and charming ode to youth, flights of imagination, football, cinema and the ancient Georgian city of Kutaisi. It effortlessly operated in the intersection between endearing romance, magic realism and city symphony, through freewheeling infusion of humour, fantasy and whimsy. At the heart of this lilting film is a wistful, oddball romance between two soft-spoken loners. Medical student Lisa (Ani Karseladze) and football player Giorgi (Giorgi Ambroladze) bump into each other twice over the course of a day, upon which they agree to fix a date as they start experiencing the soft pangs of first love. However, in a curious twist of fate, they wake up the next day looking completely different (now played by Oliko Barbakadze and Giorgi Bochorishvili) and shorn of their vocational skills. And hence, while their plans go for a toss, in an ironic development they end up getting employed by an affable, middle-aged café owner who’s spectacularly unsuccessful in increasing his business, though not for lack of trying. As we hope for luck to shine back on these two lost individuals, we’re presented with a series of captivating digressions capturing the myriad idiosyncratic shades of the city – viz. the unique personalities of stray dogs, the tradition of watching football games which is amplified during the World Cup, people’s love for whiling time, a director’s attempt at filming actual couples, and the gentle ebb of life in general. Lovingly shot in saturated colours, set to an eclectic score that alternated between peppy and mournful, laced with deadpan humour, and accompanied by narration by the director himself, this film was imaginative, impish and uplifting, albeit tad frothy at times.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Alexandre Koberidze

Genre: Drama/Romantic Drama/Fantasy

Language: Georgian

Country: Georgia