28 Years Later (Danny Boyle, 2025)

Dead on arrival

Charles Dickens got it right.

Some hundred and eighty years ago, he wrote a passage in Oliver Twist describing a haunting: 

He could trace its shadow in the gloom, supply the smallest item of the outline, and note how stiff and solemn it seemed to stalk along. He could hear its garments rustling in the leaves, and every breath of wind came laden with that last low cry. If he stopped it did the same. If he ran, it followed--not running too: that would have been a relief: but like a corpse endowed with the mere machinery of life, and borne on one slow melancholy wind that never rose or fell.

That sentence-- not running too: that would have been a relief-- is key. The undead are not in a hurry, they are never in a hurry; if they ever for once hurried that would break the tension. 

Materialists (Celine Song, 2025)

Surface tension

Celine Song's Materialists on the surface is about the business of matchmaking-- an industry on the rise with the difficulty of online dating and of life in general (New York in particular); prices are not mentioned but looking at the clothes the characters wear and the milieu they inhabit you can probably figure it's in the five to six figure range for an annual service.

So the movie looks good and the cast looks handsome and the conversation in the trailer sufficiently sparkled (not Billy Wilder league much less Ernst Lubitsch divine but bubbles popped)-- is the actual experience worth it?

Bona (Lino Brocka, 1980) 4K Restoration on the big screen

Close to you

This early shot in Bona (1980) I think says it all.

What's so remarkable about Nora Aunor's face here is just how unremarkable it looks in that sea of faces, standing in the brainfrying streets of Quiapo. The biggest star in all of Philippine cinema crammed in a crowd like sardines in a can, and she doesn't just look as if she doesn't stand out, she looks as if she belonged there, milling among the pious, the pickpockets, the prostitutes, all out in force on the Feast of the Black Nazarene. After all when you think about it: what's the point of appearing as the lead in a Filipino film if you don't look like a typical Filipino?

Mission Impossible 2 (John Woo, 2000), Rosetta (the Dardennes, 1999)

Midget Impossible

Movie begins with Cruise climbing an impossibly sheer cliff. He slips; he recovers; he hangs ten several thousand feet off the ground. This being a John Woo film, credibility is not a very big issue, but “cool” is--as it turns out, the entire elaborate rock-climbing sequence was staged just so Cruise can rendezvous with a pair of telecommunicating Ray-Bans, shot at him via rocket launcher from a hovering helicopter. The shades instruct Cruise on what he is to do for the next two hours…which, come to think of it, pretty much sums up how Cruise has handled his acting career to date.