Asedillo (Celso Ad Castillo, 1971)

Gun and typewriter

By 1971 Celso Ad Castillo had written and directed a number of features when he was tapped by Fernando Poe Jr. to direct a biopic on one Teodoro Asedillo, a former schoolteacher and police chief turned revolutionary during the American Occupation. 

Apparently the two were feeling each other out. Ad Castillo may be a veteran filmmaker, having written eighteen scripts and nine features previously, but FPJ (as Poe is popularly known) had at this point directed eight, produced fifty, acted in approximately ninety. Ad Castillo must have acquitted himself well; FPJ called him 'my little genius' and asked him to direct three more pictures in quick succession (Ang Alamat, 1972; Sto Domingo, 1972; and Esteban, 1973)

FPJ was said to have impressed Ad Castillo in turn with the scene of Asedillo addressing the people of San Antonio (see pic above) who, thanks to American propaganda, have lost faith in him. The shoot happened in the latter part of the day, involved a high wide shot with plenty of extras, was eight pages long on paper including an intense monologue; on top of which they had already been delayed some three to four hours setting up. FPJ was exhausted; his brow furrowed while reading the script, and no one knew if he was happy or not with what Ad Castillo had written. 

Then the movie star launched into it: a long, involved speech at the end of which he was yelling himself hoarse, and you felt the frustration exhaustion and anger in his voice wasn't all acting.*

Magellan (Lav Diaz, 2025)

Killing fields

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!'

The Apprentice (Ali Abbasi, 2024)

Birth of a supervillain

Calling it: there will not be a more terrifying film to come out this year than Ali Abbasi's The Apprentice, a startlingly evoked, reasonably entertaining, essentially accurate biopic of the former and possibly incoming president Donald J. Trump.

The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, 2013)

The lower depths

There's David O. Russell's approximation of a Martin Scorsese film, and then there's the original. The Wolf of Wall Street is everything American Hustle is-- sexy, funny, fluid, profane-- and more: disgusting, despairing, demented, in both a good and bad way.

Hit Man (Richard Linklater, 2023)

Assassin's creed

Richard Linklater's Hit Man -- adapted from the Texas Monthly magazine piece of the same name written by Skip Hollandsworth-- is that rare news article adaptation that takes an interesting premise (ordinary joe poses as assassin-for-hire for New Orleans PD sting operation) and pushes it to its logical extreme, or at least as extreme as the director can manage. Glen Powell is Gary Johnson, a philosophy professor who teases his students with questions like "What if your self is a construction?" Linklater wastes no time testing that postulate: one day the operation finds itself without a plainclothes officer to deliver the sting, and Gary's colleagues coax him to step in instead.

Tikoy Aguiluz (1947 - 2024)

Pugilist

Tattooed gangster

As Tikoy put it he grew up in a penitentiary (the Davao Penal Colony, or Depacol, where his father was prison auditor) learning how to box from one of the veteran convicts. With his six other brothers, all of them wearing shorts instead of long pants and speaking in a funny Tagalog accent instead of everyday Visayan, they attracted the attention and ridicule of all the other kids, not necessarily starting fights but finishing them wherever they went. Tikoy's ambition in life was simple: to get a tattoo, and be a gangster; he ended up working briefly in Hollywood, then coming back to the Philippines to become one of the finest filmmakers in the industry. 

Ferrari (Michael Mann, 2023)

Fast car

(Warning: plot and story discussed in explicit detail)

Michael Mann's Ferrari continues his tradition of depicting work-obsessed introverted men but with a key difference: Enzo Ferrari was reportedly more gregarious till the death of his son Dino at the age of 24 from muscular dystrophy. Mann doesn't make the obvious connection, just shows the aftereffects: Enzo depressed and focused on his beloved racing cars with a singleminded ferocity. 

Napoleon (Ridley Scott, 2023)

Make love, not war

Ridley Scott at his best can be an immersive filmmaker and with the opening of his latest feature Napoleon he manages to locate you in the middle of the Place de Revolution, 1793, where a wood cart wheels one Marie Antoinette to the guillotine. Lovely little vignette with the queen (Catherine Walker) standing stoically while folks jeer and pelt her with rocks and rotting vegetables (a tomato stain marking her bosom like a scarlet letter). Some trouble fitting the stock onto her neck-- these are the little details that help you believe the reality of her oncoming death, and when the executioner picks up the head by its locks and shakes it at the roaring crowd you watch the expression closely wondering if you might catch it blink (you don't). Apocryphally Napoleon (Joaquin Phoenix) stands in the sidelines, watching.

Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan, 2023)

Mission impossible

(Warning: plot twists discussed in explicit detail)

Get this out of the way: Christopher Nolan is the boxoffice savior of modern American cinema.

The Pianist (Roman Polanski, 2002)

Survivor

Roman Polanski's The Pianist is surprising in more ways than one. You wouldn't think Polanski capable of filmmaking on this level anymore-- the kind of seemingly simple yet elegant visual storytelling that characterized major works like Rosemary's Baby or Chinatown (and was frustratingly evident in snatches of Frantic and The Ninth Gate). You wouldn't think Polanski capable of epic filmmaking of this scale either: the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, the stretches of ruined city afterwards-- it's uncharacteristic of his work, the best of which stay at eye level and on intimate terms with their characters; they have an inwardness to them, a tendency to turn into solitary quests where the protagonist struggles against an inexplicable world bent on their destruction.

The Fabelmans (Steven Spielberg, 2022), Armageddon Time (James Gray, 2022)

Meet the Fabels

Arguably Steven Spielberg doesn't need to do an autobiographical film, he's been doing them all his life-- Sugarland Express features a mother as driven force of nature, Jaws includes the subplot of ship's captain bullying nerdy scientist, Close Encounters of the Third Kind follows a man so obsessed with his quest he abandons his family, ET described a lonely child with head crammed full of dreams, and as it turns out Duel and 1941 (knew it!) allude to one of his most formative traumas-- the massive car-and-train collision in The Greatest Show on Earth, which he saw as a child. That said Spielberg at this point in his career insists on an autobiographical feature-- a direct one this time-- hence The Fabelmans. 

Blonde (Andrew Dominick, 2022)

Bombshell

Andrew Dominik's Blonde is a horror film that fails not because it's so sadistic but because it's not sadistic enough. 

Apollo 10 1/2 (Richard LInklater, 2022)

Destination moon

(Warning: plot and finale discussed in explicit detail)

Richard Linklater's Apollo 10 1/2 is the director's take on the moon landing, which for him isn't just a passion project or historic event to dramatize but his childhood, literally. Maybe one of the funnier moments in the film is when Stan (Milo Coy as the youth, Jack Black as the reminiscing adult) cites all the ways the space race has permeated everyday life: not just car dealership discounts ("the closer they get to the moon the lower our prices are!"), but a rocket slide (which were everywhere-- I remember one at Burnham Park in Baguio City that got rustier and rustier year after year), multimilliondollar space epics (Destination Moon on TV, 2001: A Space Odyssey on a really big screen), the nearby Astrodome (complete with Astroturf), and almost daily bombardments of the Apollo program's progress in beating the Soviets to the moon.

The film has a plot, of sorts: Stan has been approached by government agents to participate in an improvised space program where they try out all the equipment meant for Apollo astronauts on him first, because the LM (lunar module to you non-space geeks) had accidentally been built too small for an adult.

The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971), Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang (Lino Brocka, 1974)

Our town

If you're going to film someone's story-- in this case Larry McMurtry's semi-autobiographical novel-- you can do worse than follow Orson Welles' suggestion to shoot in black and white. Faded photos have an allure no JPEG file will ever have; black and white celluloid will have this much over digital color no matter how high the definition-- they're already texture of memories, snipped out and pasted in someone's yellowing album. 

Federico Fellini's '8 1/2' (1963), Mario O'Hara's 'Babae sa Bubungang Lata' (Woman on a Tin Roof, 1998)

Through the looking glass

(Plotlines of both 8 1/2 and Woman on a Tin Roof discussed in detail)

Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 (1963) is one of the most gorgeous black-and-white films ever made not to mention one of the most influential: it has inspired at least one terribly expensive (and terrible, period) musical (Rob Marshall's Nine), one great dance musical (Bob Fosse's All That Jazz), a royal flush of filmmakers (Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, David Lynch among many many others). If I admire it I admire it for the way the camera--like its protagonist filmmaker Guido--dances nimbly past all the men and women in his (its) life attempting to lay claim to his (its) attention. It's a heady swirl of delicate Prosecco and robust Chianti--of the enigmatic and intimate, the personal and metaphysical.

Mank (David Fincher, 2020)

Wank

Not here to bury Mank; I defer to Welles specialist Joseph McBride's demolition job which may be angry but also densely authoritatively detailed-- he knows of what he speaks. Me? Just here to put my two centavos in.

The Irishman (Martin Scorsese, 2019)

I heard you make movies

In The Irishman (2019) someone puts a question to Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), the same question that is title of Charles Brandt's 2004 book--the same question one might ask of Martin Scorsese with the same innocuousness, and just the hint of something more.

Eskapo (Escape, Chito Rono, 1995)

Escape Films

Eskapo begins with video footage of the days just before Martial Law: eerie, washed-out images of marching demonstrators and riot police. I've always thought that in this cybernetic age our memories would appear as if shot by videocam and with the first few minutes of his film, director Chito Rono seems to suggest this--the First Quarter Storm as a collective nightmare, witnessed through the unblinking eye of television. It's a terrific beginning that sets an ominous tone for everything that follows.

At Eternity's Gate (Julian Schnabel)

Bifocal

It isn't as if the life of Vincent Van Gogh hasn't been adapted for the big screen before. Lust for Life was Vincente Minnelli's lusty take (based on Irving Stone's novel), with Kirk Douglas holding little back as he strained to suggest Vincent's intensity; Robert Altman's Vincent and Theo focused on the relationship between the Van Gogh brothers and their destructively parallel trajectories; Maurice Pialat's Van Gogh--easily the most unsentimental of the collection--presents a harsh uningratiating view of a harsh uningratiating artist, avoiding the traditional highlights (including that ear thing) and dwelling on more quotidian activities--Pialat doesn't even make much effort to show the paintings, or approximate Vincent's unmistakable style onscreen. 

So what does Julian Schnabel's latest bring to the party? 

The Favourite (Yorgos Lanthimos)

The apple of her eye

Yorgos Lanthimos' latest film The Favourite may be his oddest yet if you stop and consider his work so far, from breakthrough feature Dogtooth (about a family teaching a  skewed view of the world to its walled-in children) to the recent The Killing of a Sacred Deer (about a curse hovering over a physician's family) where metaphorical fantasy and (better yet) the machinations of human nature give his films a memorably loopy spin.