This very unusually named film is a Swedish-Danish co-production and apparently uses both languages but of course I wouldn’t be able to tell. It’s a horror film with a strong dose of absurdist fantasy and that means that many elements in it are just inexplicable. At its core though is a time loop phenomenon and it is clever to incorporate this into a horror story. Unfortunately over-exposure to time loop stories seem to have gotten me stuck in a rationalistic mindset when considering them and as such I have difficulty finding this film to be at all scary.
Steven Soderdergh is of course best known for the Ocean’s series of films which I’m not really a fan of but he has made more serious crime films as well. Judging from the praise it won from critics, I thought this period crime film would fall on the more serious side, and for a while it does seem that way. But after a rapid spate of mutual betrayals, this starts looking more like a darkly humorous caper film with an ensemble cast instead. It’s a lot of fun but it’s not a film that really cares about character development or even having them behave in ways that make sense.
The China-made fantasy films we watched recently have been pretty great so far and this latest one is just as impressive. This one is particularly striking in how it conflates multiple disparate issues in China into one film: the popularity of online web fiction, the kidnapping of children on the streets and the scary power of the founders of the tech giant companies. This isn’t great art and there is no point in looking for deeper themes in it but it is rollicking great entertainment and a wonderfully imaginative spectacle even if some of its inspirations are very obvious.
This is very much a rich people problems kind of film but you do have to admit that the story is fascinating. It is about the forgery scandal that rocked the art world some years ago when dozens of paintings were found to have been made by a Chinese painter Pei-Shen Qian. This film focuses particularly on the role of the Knoedler & Co gallery in facilitating the sale of the forgeries to rich collectors. It is extraordinary how filmmaker Barry Avrich was able to obtain the cooperation of many different parties, including the ones implicated in the fraud, to speak on camera and hence capture opposing perspectives.
This is another cultural touchstone that I’ve somehow missed out on and not knowing anything about it just gets embarrassing. It is of course always a pleasure to watch a Coen brothers, even the ones that don’t particularly resonate with me, and this one features a crazily large cast of name actors and a really fun attitude. I didn’t like the familiar plot of chasing a briefcase of money as the MacGuffin at all but I then realized it isn’t meant to matter at all and then I loved the film all the more for it
Wanuri Kahiu is a Kenyan director of some renown and I believe this is the film of hers that has made the most impact internationally so far. It’s a romance about a couple of young lesbians and given the state of LBGT rights in Kenya, it’s no surprise that this was banned in its home country. The ban however was lifted after the director took the matter to court. It feels a little rough around the edges to me in terms of production quality but it is heartfelt and the Kenyan setting makes it doubly interesting.
This marks the first film that we’ve watched in the cinema since the pandemic started and I suspect that this will be the case for quite a few people. We really should have gone earlier to watch Dune but that was just after things started opening up again. Anyway we still waited until after the early rush of people to catch this and by now spoilers are everywhere so I won’t care about it that so much. This features a huge slate of characters, which ordinarily is a bad idea but director Jon Watts somehow makes it all work. I have major gripes about the nature of evil as presented here but in all other respects this is a top tier action movie and a wonderful return to form for the MCU.
