The neverending struggle
Paul Thomas Anderson has taken Thomas Pynchon's 1990 novel Vineland and turned it into an epic production about immigration raids, white supremacy, radical leftist groups, generational conflicts, a father's love for his daughter and vice-versa-- the picture feels so overstuffed with high drama low farce and handheld ordnance you don't feel much if any of the 166 minute running time.
I'll call it: easily Anderson's best most ambitious most appealing work to date.
Jaguar has a tony reputation: directed by Lino Brocka, loosely adapted by Jose 'Pete' Lacaba and Ricky Lee (from the true-life story "The Boy Who Wanted to Become Society," by Nick Joaquin), edited by Augusto Salvador, lensed by Conrado 'Carding' Baltazar, it's the first Filipino film to compete in the Main Competition of the 1980 Cannes Film Festival.
That said the film doesn't come up as often in cinephile discussion as Brocka's Maynila sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag or Insiang, which shouldn't be a surprise. Maynila and Insiang were released on DVD, Blu-ray, and streaming as part of the Criterion Collection; Jaguar is only available in crummier and crummier streaming copies, in the nether regions of the internet-- until recently, when the Film Development Council of the Philippines (FDCP), the Philippine Film Archive (PFA), and Cite de Memoire all collaborated on a restoration. The film premiered in last year's Lumiere Festival in Lyon France, then opened the Sinag Manila Film Festival last night with a star-studded screening. After over forty years, Jaguar returns to Filipino audiences with a vengeance.
You hear the debate at the fringes of socmed discussion: "Which is the better film, Henri-George Clouzot's black-and-white thriller or William Friedkin's $22 million tribute/remake?" Well let me tell you
(WARNING-- plot twists discussed in explicit detail!)
Looked down at my notes after just having finished Lav Diaz's latest Magellan (2025) I see-- circled and underlined, on top of the page-- the words: 'so much killing!'
Finally saw John Ford's The Searchers (1956) in a 70 mm print and the experience is as sprawling and expansive as the VistaVision landscape.
(WARNING: Plot of this 69-year-old film discussed in explicit detail!)
Psychospace
I thought Weapons-- Zach Cregger's brilliantly structured supernatural thriller about seventeen children running out their front doors and vanishing into the night-- was hot shit, arguably the best horror of 2025; along comes Kurosawa Kiyoshi saying "hold my beer."
Incoming
First things first: Weapons is easily the best horror in 2025 to date, an ingeniously written inventively shot and staged film written and directed by Zach Cregger, whose debut feature Barbarian was also an inventive ingenious horror released in 2022.
With that out of the way-- (WARNING: plot and surprise twists discussed in close and explicit detail!)
