It was never on my very biopic-unfriendly list, but after having surrendered to Spencer and Elvis, it only seemed fair that I watched this too. And that will be it for a while.
Blonde is so patchy to have left me unsure of what I’ve seen or, if anything, with a series of thoughts that are equally dichotomised. Alternating notable glimpses of creativity with jarring uninspired moments, its aesthetics are messy to say the least. The image gets often overly manipulated by pointless visual effects of all sorts. Too much trying, and perhaps too cinephile a director. The freaking talking photo à la Harry Potter of Norma’s dad put me off. I resisted the temptation to give up purely because it was too early in the film to be so resolute. The elaborate use of different aspect ratios combined with the random back and forth between colour and b/w also felt a bit crafty, overthought, only bearable because of the superbly photographed shots coming through at regular intervals to save the day.
Ana de Armas is a marvel as an actor even when the script, despite appreciable efforts, doesn’t allow her to dare beyond the received notion of the icon. The interesting thing about a film on such a mythical figure is that it inevitably has to deal with the consequences of that very idea, with the established gossip, with the popular knowledge whether false or true, and with whatever publicity fed us with over the years. Where Blonde fails is in finding a voice that doesn’t necessarily say anything more or different, but does it independently enough to really intrigue. Although with a certain style, Blonde essentially joins the chorus at the likely risk of being soon forgotten.
Adrien Brody and Bobby Cannavale brilliantly portray what I guess are to be considered particularly fictionalised versions of Joe di Maggio and Arthur Miller. Shame they didn’t get more screen time. But the silent heroes in the cast are Julianne Nicholson and David Warshovsky, who turn Norma Jeane’s mum and Marilyn’s trusted make-up man into unexpectedly seductive characters.
‘I just wanna begin again from zero,’ is a line that resonates with me, but what she says immediately after, is the piece of dialogue that I shall remember. ‘In the movies they chop you all to bits. Cut, cut, cut. It’s a jigsaw puzzle. But you are not the one to put the pieces together. Oh, but to live in a part. To just be in it till the closing curtain every night.’ Which is not just Dominik’s way to bluntly state what he doesn’t seem to like of cinema—Blonde being full of highly enjoyable long takes and monologues—but also one to note how brutal the world can be in dissecting people, and how endemic their desire to escape from their own lives has worryingly become. Echoing this, the uncomfortably long shot on Norma’s feet as she lies motionless on her bed is eerie and touching at once. It should have lasted even longer.

To say that a good part of it is made of Steadicam closeups on people walking—or rather marching, frowned, mostly on their own—might sound reductive, and yet is not, nor is a lie. Romain Gavras embraces the fashionable technique of long continuous shots to give his otherwise classically conceived tragedy a contemporary, relentless, human pulse. Arms throw Molotovs, but it’s when legs move that ideas are processed. Athena advances through reflective moments tightly framed, while fancily choreographed hectic sequences populated by hordes of extras serve as bridges and provide the spectacle—one of such furious energy to evoke the crazed spirits of Fury Road. To craft his complex camerawork, Gavras avoids resorting to CG, resulting in gravity and a more physical flow. Without indulging as many directors have done in recent years in ungrounded visual or technical itches, he knows when to cut and when the narrative requires a more conservative language. His background in music videos might be apparent, but however aesthetically stylised, his cinematic vision is convincing and efficient. I don’t mind how blurry is his political take, or shallow the social insights. Athena is about the inherent nonsense of any act of violence in a world where media and devices are catalysts of escalating apocalyptic traits. And she is the woman wearing no helmet that calls her sons in the most crucial moments reminding them, and us, what is at stake—what really is being destroyed.

Regarde là-bas, un bateau! A man and a woman promenade along the waterfront after dinner. ‘It travels to other countries, other worlds,’ she says. ‘I’m so jealous of people who travel.’ Reverse shot on the sea, a Western rock tune¹ kicks in. We stay for an awkward stretch of time on the almost mystical view, a few glowing dots neatly aligned in the pitch black that we only know from the lady’s remark being a ship. It is an unexpected meditative moment that takes us to the very core of Timité Bassori’s oddly psychedelic tale. Whether it is the afterlife, a distant place, or the future experienced through an ominously real hallucination, La femme au couteau is pervaded by a vivid sense of elsewhere that is in any case unknown, inescapable, and therefore source of dreams or nightmares. The conflicting awareness that what is perceived as a promised land is also sweeping away a cultural identity, intersects with personal human struggles, one becoming a metaphor for the other. As revealed by Bassori himself, the angry woman with a knife is the symbol of a traditional Africa fighting to reclaim her children. But however messy the structure he gave to the ambitious ideas of which the film is brimful, what her image evokes goes far beyond the intentions stated.

1. As the end credits make no mention of the soundtracks, I couldn’t help scooby-doo-ing around it, finding out that this particularly fine guitar solo is from an instrumental Southern soul interpretation of The Beatles’ Come Together by Booker T. & the M.G.’s (McLemore Avenue, 1970).

Crimes to the Future opens with a striking image that is likely to slip into the back of our mind as the story unfolds, only to gain meaning retrospectively, maybe strengthened by a second viewing. In the only shot filmed in the sunlight, the wreck of a liner lies on the shore obstructing the horizon. Huge, rusty, and abandoned. The camera lingers on the carcass, then tracks back to reveal a long-haired kid, squat in a vaguely simian pose, playing with a stick, the muddy sand, some pebbles. ‘I don’t want you eating anything you find in there, you understand me?’ A monument to the failure of evolution as we thought of it for centuries, next to that of a new generation that’s about to establish itself. And from there, we are thrown into the dark.
People craving for physical pain. Parents killing their own offspring. New vices and inner beauties. Prophecies such as ‘surgery is the new sex’ and ‘sexier means easier funding’ echoing like mantras. Performing, appearing, competing. And plastic eaters. ‘Because our bodies are telling us it is time to change, time for human evolution to sync up with human technology. We’ve got to start feeding on our own industrial waste, it’s our destiny.’ Is that what it is—destiny—our very crime of the future?
Cronenberg orchestrates a cerebral noir without fedoras, trench coats, or rain, where environmental questions intersect a provocative reflection on the meaning, purpose, and boundaries of art. His daring intuition appals from the very first sequence, his passionate lament is loud and timely, but alas the execution—somehow ordinary, at times naff, with dialogues that seem devised to encourage the actors to try and act as bad as they can, succeeding—is not quite up to the exciting ambitions of the concept.
And yet the experience his vision offers escapes the rational thinking it triggers while and after. Despite its flaws, there’s something utterly addictive about it that I can only surrender to. Out of many great films that leave me awed and get me to write down notes and scribbles, here is one that hardly fits in that category, but seduces me completely, making me want to endlessly lose myself in its gloomy meanders.

DOTRICE: Are you afraid of a little emotion?
TENSER: I’m afraid of everything.

I jump on a bus feeling like a fugitive who’s finally managed to give his followers the slip. I’m starving, like most escapees do. I grab a sandwich on the way. Egg and cress is my favourite, as I am sure all London knows. Outside of Holborn Station there’s a fruit and veg stand, and it drizzles. While I walk down the narrow Parker Street, I still wonder how come it took me so long to discover its existence. The programme of The Garden Cinema is as fascinating as its story, that of a man who had enough money to open a cinema, and passion to actually do it. I go to the bar while I wait for a couple of friends. I am early on purpose, so I can seat, let the day fade in a book and—as they don’t serve decaf, which was my first choice—a glass of vodka.
Moments later my company shows up. More drinks and nibbles for them. I am fine after my solo sip and read. As we leave our scarlet booth, go past the bar again, make a stop at the loo, and finally get into the screening room, I breathe in almost afresh the modernised art deco style of the spaces. And as the b/w opening cards appear on the screen on the dusty notes of a suave soundtrack, the transition to London’s Forties feels incredibly seamless.
It Always Rains on Sunday is a remarkably intricate and well structured tangle of subplots, where the main storyline—of a jailbreaker finding shelter at his once fiancée, who has meanwhile married someone else and got three times busy—only looms quite unnoticed over the lively swarming of an East End scarred by the Blitz. The contrast between the preoccupations of the many characters of the former—ultimately petty, by comparison—and the dramatic tone of the latter, is the driving force of the film. Many laughed at Hamer’s humorous intercalations and cringed at its brutal account of the postwar hardship. They giggled one last time at a rudimentary special effect involving a miniature train, and were certainly touched by its picaresque traits as they gently surfaced.

He can hardly walk, almost gasps for breath. A valet helps him to a grand piano, holds the microphone for him. ‘This is a song that I just recorded . . . it’s an old song . . . is it out?’ In two weeks, someone confirms. He makes a hazy joke. ‘I don’t know all the chords so . . . show me the right keys.’ People laugh, he does too, then fumbles. ‘It’s called Unchained Melody.’
If one credit must be given to Baz Luhrmann, is to have revived the memory of one of the most touching moments in the history of popular music by seamlessly cutting from Austin Butler to real Elvis in one of his latest public appearances—his second to last concert held in Rapid City on 21 June 1977, to be exact—less than two months before he died. He was sweating like I never could even if I went drunk into a sauna, but his singing was still jaw-dropping, pristine in fact, his coolness unscathed, his gaze killer as he briefly turned to the audience and smiled at the sight of their joy.
But apart from the fortunate intuition of discreetly intercutting the entire film with archive footage, Elvis looks very much like one of the stunning outfits he used to wear—sexy, elaborate, expensive—yet ultimately lacking the same seductive brazenness. A two hours and forty minutes hysterical montage of acrobatic digital camerawork, Elvis might have the merit of not attempting at revealing the mystery of genius nor displaying the arrogance that most biopics have of purporting to own the truth, but at the same time it doesn’t seem to even try and dare beyond the myth or challenge any of the ideas I had about Elvis Presley.
Narratively, its approach is disappointingly conservative—all the more so being the anticipated work of a director rightly praised for his unique style as he deals with a subject that, at least on paper, seemed to naturally fit his own idiosyncrasies. Despite the promising concept, Colonel Parker is a Salieri without the depth Shaffer put into his devilish fictional narrator or a hint of that provocative nature, because he—the villain, the miserable, the untalented, the envious—is the one among all the characters that most resonates with us. Scary. But who is Parker? How in the bleeding world are we supposed to relate to him if his dramatisation is so shallow and one-dimensional?
As a retrospective reflection—while on the go it felt a little frustrating—I think it is an interesting choice to never show Elvis performing Can’t Help Falling in Love, leaving it to other voices or as a distant echo in the background. ‘Take my hand. Take my whole life too.’ But then again, if the bare thought of these few words has just made goosebumps appear on my skin, I regret saying it is not quite this overly post-produced cinematic take on his short life that I have to thank.

O death, rock me asleep,
Bring me the quiet rest.
Let pass my weary guiltless ghost
Out of my careful breast.

Spencer is not as irreverent as it might appear, or at least not in the way it seems. If there’s anything it encourages to reflect on it isn’t much the unsympathetic gazes of the Royals, as the hypocrisy of a culture that allows people to live in captivity, only pretending to really question itself. However golden the bars, they are nonetheless those of a cage.
Even if Kristen Stewart’s performance alternates some excellent moments, especially non-verbal, with less convincing ones where the acting almost looks blurred by the effort of finding the absolute right mannerisms, and even though the slightly uncomfortable unrealistic and verbose eloquence that shapes many of the dialogues in the draft I read have survived here and there throughout the shot script (like a convoluted metaphorical dissertation on the tenses or a monologue where she improvises as a pheasant lifestyle guru)¹, there is very little to go around. Spencer is a magnificent film.
Pablo Larraín’s take on a material that could have easily led to tatty results; the supporting actors’ blazing display of bravura (I would watch any film that has Sean Harris, Sally Hawkins or Tim Spall in it); Claire Mathon’s photography, whose sensibility had already enchanted me in such wonders as Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Stranger by the Lake; and above all the phenomenal music composed by Jonny Greenwood. Everything works as a whole and seduces even those like me who didn’t think they needed the umpteenth speculation on poor Princess Diana. The beauty of Spencer is just as toxic as art can be.

1. To be anal, and for my own record, I also wonder if such lines as, ‘It doesn’t fit with my mood, it should be black, black to contrast the pearls,’ (referring to a sea-green satin dress she is supposed to wear to Christmas Eve dinner that incidentally will end up matching the color of the pea soup served that evening) or, ‘They dream but they are able to wake up, I am not allowed to wake up,’ (punctuating what Maggie just said, that people dream of being her) or again Diana’s sarcastic reply to a maid offering help, ‘How can you help me? No one is here to help me,’ could have dropped the redundant elaboration of the concept in second half to a more natural and even more effective result. But again, I genuinely just wonder. Other lines, like Diana’s first meaningful utterance as she drives in the middle of the British nowhere, ‘Where the fuck am I?’ or when she replies, ‘Oh yes, terribly,’ to William asking if she likes them getting mad at her, or later on when she wittily remarks, ‘All set, as if everything has already happened,’ are brilliant.

I get there early enough to take a central seat. In recent years I have grown particularly trigonometric in this respect. Within a few minutes, Numana’s outdoor cinema is completely full. Literally, not a single seat is left empty. The last time I witnessed such a prodigy was when I saw Villeneuve’s Blade Runner at the Curzon Soho, only now everybody seems to be determined to stay awake until the end. Wagging its curly tail between chairs’ and humans’ legs—mine, specifically—there’s even a dog in the audience. ‘Does it bother you?’ asks politely the lady who just sat down next to me. ‘Not in the slightest,’ I reply, ‘though I fear from there it won’t see a thing.’ Unlike the dog, who licks its flews in dejected agreement, she doesn’t get the joke. It wasn’t really one anyway.
At twenty past nine, when the show is scheduled to start, there’s still confusion. People are chatting, some are blankly scrolling through their Facebook feeds, an old man in flip-flops is listening to a football match, a couple takes a bench from the foyer and places it to the side as many are still standing. When we seem to have found an acceptable configuration, the projectionist is given the all clear and the idents start rolling. As if so far the experience hadn’t been beautifully old-fashioned enough, I realise that the lights have been forgotten on. But I don’t mind because I remember the ritual, and I eagerly anticipate it. Giving a final blessing to the perfect atmosphere for a film titled Nostalgia, somebody shouts from the back, luci! And as a gentle blow of wind brings us the smell of grilled seafood from a nearby restaurant—not popcorns and gummy bears—we are entrusted to the silent moonlight.
Mario Martone lets us through the hidden doors of a district of Naples sadly known not only for having been the birthplace of Totò. Coming by plane like strangers, we secure our valuable belongings in the vault of an anonymous hotel room. Then we go to the balcony to enjoy the view on what, from there, could be any city. Not until the camera pans right, revealing the unmistakable silhouette of mount Vesuvio in the far distance. This is not any city. Come dusk, we take a stroll in the hectic maze of market stands and noisy locals. Rione Sanità has often been visited by filmmakers—Vittorio De Sica to name one—but never to such a degree of insight and sincerity.
What makes Nostalgia instantly captivating, and more so as we move through its mysteries, isn’t much the melancholy figure of Felice, but the urban vignettes we glimpse in the background. Before we know it, we are seduced by the rugged beauty of the city, its inhabitants. When in the final part both the structure and the message of the film suddenly crumble into an unimaginative resolution worthy of a cheap crime fiction, we are still under the spell and somehow spared the disappointment.
As a relatively minor note, I felt the occasional intrusions of the music redundant and inopportune. But what has definitely left a mark in my memory—sure am not alone here—is the scene where Felice baths his elderly mother. A plastic basin is in the middle of an almost surreal space lit by a bleak bulb pendant. An ancestral sense of intimacy finds its forgotten depth in the electric humidity of the room. The unease, however palpable, never becomes disturbing for the audience, never humiliating for the mother, or the son. Rather, it leads us all to be touched by the most natural expression of love.

The draft I have read is from 2019. I was told it was brilliant. I was told wrong. On the page, the first part zigzags between trite and decent ideas and yet it does grip—if anything because of some good dialogues and the meta cinematic element, which however trite in itself I still believe an exciting territory of exploration. From there on, the film throws any remaining trace of originality out of the window. In the mid section its already wobbly sense of comedy slips into the preposterous, establishing poor Cage and poorer Pedro Pascal as an unfunny couple of morons. ‘It’s grotesque,’ says the former at some point—yes it is. Leading to a happy ending that’s so dull to seem sad, the third atrociously long act could be that of any action blockbuster made in the last thirty years. And I don’t want to hear it was deliberately done so for the parodic spirit—it’s just bad.
When Javi’s oxygenated cousin invites him to join an impromptu Kellogg’s lunch, and we all know that besides being his first it could be his last, it reminded me of a very similar scene from The Irishman with Joe Pesci and Robert De Niro. I have grown rather allergic to homages when they represent the only effort a film does to shape its own personality.
Shame, because I always loved Nicolas Cage. His voice, his body language, and of course his acting often made me swallow some of the more disposable films he worked on. Not this time, but with one notable exception. From Brad Pitt in Inglourious Basterds to Jared Leto in House of Gucci, I have always had a soft spot for American actors mocking the Italian accent and mannerisms. The scene where hidden behind prosthetics Cage impersonates an Italian criminal is hilarious. His silly walk in silhouette to the rhythm of a perfectly chosen music is the only reason why after all I am not so annoyed to have given a few hours to this film. One last thing—I might not have cried or felt the desire to be a better person, though on Paddington 2 I completely agree.