Armando 'Bing' Lao is 2026's National Artist for Film
This September 2026 Armando 'Bing' Lao (1948 - 2024) was posthumously granted the title of National Artist of the Philippines, generally considered the highest honor the state can give one of its citizens.
Long day's journey into night
(Warning: story and plot twists of the movie-- and the three thousand year old epic poem the movie is based on-- discussed in explicit detail!)
First things first: Got no problem with Lupita Nyong'o's Helen/Clytemnestra or Elliot Page's Sinon (not Achilles as conservative pundits had complained about early on); Helen's fierce bitterness about being pawn and property to Menelaus (Jon Bernthal) and Sinon's hauntingly solemn reproaches to Odysseus for using him as bait are rare bright spots in the movie.
I do have problems with Matt Damon as Odysseus.
Wolfgang Peterson's Troy is an odd mix-- a summer blockbuster with the patina of a sincere attempt at adapting a literary classic painted all over its bright surface. David Benioff's script, loosely-- very loosely-- based on Homer's epic, tries to re-imagine the story as it might really have happened, that is, closer to what people might conceivably have thought and felt, filtered through what we might feel happened. For starters, Benioff (a newcomer, but not an entirely inept one--he wrote the novel 25th Hour and adapted it for Spike Lee to direct) does away with all the inconvenient gods and goddesses, without whom you get the impression Greeks and Trojans couldn't put one foot in front of the other much less wage a war. Then he incorporates a more cynical, more realpolitik motive for Agamemnon (Brian Cox) to go into battle: not to win back his brother Menelaus' (Brendan Gleeson) stolen wife Helen (Diane Kruger), but to use her kidnapping as a pretext to move on Troy, a bid to add the mighty kingdom to his already impressive collection of conquered territories (an act of arrogant aggression, in effect, by an established world power).
I'm an alien, I'm an illegal alien
Easy enough to call Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day his reworking retelling reboot of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a film so elegantly worked out on the big screen you can recall most shots as being not just effortlessly lyrical but inevitable, locking in place to present a vast sound and light show, a once in a lifetime rock concert burnt into your brain the way the shape of Devil's Tower is burnt into Roy Neary's.
Disclosure is a different creature flavorwise. Spielberg's visual grammar (using his present favorite cinematographer Janusz Kaminski) has grown more sophisticated, his color palette more complex and mutedly realistic, his editing chops (with the relatively unfamiliar Sarah Boshar) if anything more daringly intricate. But that wide-eyed spirit is still there, for better or worse, that willingness to lift one's head up and look around to check if there's someone really out there.
Sunny with a chance of rain
Anthony Maras' Pressure (2026)-- based on a 2014 play by David Haig-- answers a question no one thought to ask before: can a riveting thriller be made out of weathermen? Not storm chasers (looking at you Twister); not disaster flicks involving climate change (You too Day After Tomorrow and Geostorm)-- I mean weathermen, folk who pore over isobaric maps and stare at thermometers and take windspeed readings. The science nerds.
Apparently the answer is yes if-- big if-- 1) We're talking Operation Overlord, 160,000 troops launched on 7,000 ships supported by 12,000 aircraft, arguably the largest seaborne invasion in history; and 2) Landing point's on the Normandy coast in France, at the center of one of the most unpredictable weather systems on the planet.
Just deserts
Oliver Laxe's Sirat is a little hard to describe: Luis (Sergi Lopez) and his son Esteban (Bruno Nunez Arjona) look for his daughter Mar in a rave in southern Morocco. The pair wander aimlessly while the dancers surround them in an assortment of clothing haircuts hair dyes tattoos piercings, all swaying to the pulsing rhythm. They talk to people, hand out photos; no one has seen her, but there's another rave, closer to Mauritania, where they might find her.
(Warning: story and narrative twists discussed in explicit detail!)
Josh Safdie's Marty Supreme takes its cue from its central character: brassy, loud, unrelentingly annoying, chronicling the life of one Marty Mauser, a nascent shoe salesman and up-and-coming pingpong player. Marty to put it mildly likes to burn both ends of his candle: he hustles players at the local bar; hustles his rich friend Dion (Luke Manley) to finance production of orange pingpong balls with his name printed on them; hustles his married friend Rachel (Odessa A'zion) for sex at the shoe store's back room; hustles his Uncle Murray (Larry Sloman) for $700 to help finance a trip to the British Open in London (to be fair Uncle Murray's hustling Marty too, trying to manipulate the young man into staying on as salesman while having an affair with Marty's mother Rebecca (Fran Drescher)).
Timothee Chalamet trades in his Kwisatch Haderach stillsuit for a long-sleeved blouse unbuttoned to reveal the sweatsoaked undershirt, glues a dead caterpillar to his upper lip the way I assume Guy Gardner likes to sport a bowl cut-- as a loud 'FUCK YOU' to anyone who objects to his grating personality. It's perfect; like him or not as an actor, have to admit this role fits Chalamet's less-than-charming persona to a t, down to the nipples standing defiantly erect 'neath the thin cotton.
Finally saw Carl Theodor Dreyer's 1928 silent La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc on projected video (thanks to Alliance Francais), with music but without subtitles (no thanks Alliance, though to be fair they tried their level best to get one), so I watched without having understood a word. Nevertheless: an incredible film, one of the greatest-- silent French or otherwise-- ever.
Carl Dreyer’s 1928 French silent La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc is one of the greatest films-- French, silent, otherwise-- ever; Luc Besson’s 1999 The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc is possibly one of the silliest-- French, epic, otherwise-- and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Such is progress.
Dreyer’s film is an astonishingly spare work, essentially a hundred and ten minutes of gigantic close-ups strung together and little else. No fat nothing extraneous-- each shot adds to the film’s sense of inevitability, each cut (1,500 of them) accelerates momentum. Besson’s at two hours and twenty minutes has little meat-- as if Besson had tossed in everything learned in grade school about Joan but stopped short before freshman year. Dreyer’s has the courage of a consummate artist with an idea of what he wants to present to the world; Besson’s has the courage of a consummate hack, piling special effect upon special effect in the hope that heat and pressure would build inside his digitally enhanced big-budgeted compost heap and ignite to yield a vision.
To mourn or not to mourn
Chloe Zhao's latest-- adapted by Zhao and Maggie O'Farrell from O'Farrell's well-regarded 2020 novel-- is a tearjerker, most people will agree. The question one might ask: does it earn our tears, or are we overindulging?
Early in the film Chow Yun Fat's swordsman Bai Li Mu hands his weapon named The Green Destiny to fellow warrior Lien Yu Shu (Michelle Yeoh), asking her to give it to a common friend to hide-- he's retiring from a life of bloodshed, he tells her. Cut to the friend's house: Yeoh has the sword wrapped in a cloth when she bumps into another guest, the Governor's daughter Jen (Zhang Ziyi), a woman she has never met before, and what does she do next? Pulls out the sword and starts showing it off.
Brief thoughts on his first and arguably best film:
Once Were Warriors. Beth Heke--perhaps too neatly--stands for what was proud in her people. A Maori princess, she turned her back on her heritage to marry Jake Heke and have children by him. Jake, who represents the degraded Maori, responds to his wife's royal pride by ignoring their children and beating her. Predictable and schematic, but first time director Lee Tamahori knows enough to give his film an intensity that rides over the obviousness. He bathes the film in orange light-- a brilliant lava glow that falls on the blasted urban landscape, turning junkyards and cheap housing developments into barbaric temples in twilight. Against this backdrop stand the Maoris, huge muscled people with tattooed faces living violent, chaotic lives.
In the film's strongest sequence, Jake throws an all-night party, a nightmare of half-full beer bottles drunken guests greasy dishes that climaxes with Jake battering Beth. No open-handed slaps or rabbit punches--Jake takes roundhouse swings at her with his entire weight behind them, pounding, bone-breaking blows. He grips her by the back of the neck and rams her head into a picture frame. He throws her across the room, and half the furniture at her, then ends the evening by raping her.
It helps the film to have Temuera Morrison, who's both threatening and compelling as Jake; even at his most brutal, he invests Jake with a primitive innocence. As Beth, Rena Owen is earthy, sexy, loving and courageous. You flinch for her when she stands up to Jake-- the bruises on her face are horrendous-- but stand up to him she does. You can see all the pride of the Maoris in her erect posture and magnificently chiseled face.
(WARNING: story discussed in explicit detail)
Some find La Grand Illusion (Grand Illusion, 1937) formless, which I suspect only proves Renoir's artistry. The film does have a design, buried in so much minutiae, told in such an unprepossessing manner, that you can't really be blamed for missing it (as if Renoir ever intended you to see it in the first place). The film is structured like a three-act play, with trimmings: a short prologue gives us the setup and introduces two of four major characters-- Boldieu (Pierre Fresnay) calls out Mareschal (Jean Gabin) to join him on a reconnaissance mission; a quick wipe and Boldieu and Mareschal are POWs meeting the third major character, the officer who shot them down, Rauffenstein (Erich Von Stroheim).
M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense featured a nicely intense performance from a child actor, some creepy atmospherics, a neat twist that makes you want to sit up and applaud for O all of two seconds. Unbreakable I found more interesting because Shyamalan had shrugged off his mainstream appeal and started to show his true colors: a comic-book freak who takes his superheroes seriously, to the point of spending the budget of a major motion picture telling an origin story.
Shyamalan's latest-- where Mel Gibson and family find funny going-ons in the middle of their cornfield-- shows no sign whatsoever of him apologizing for his career to date. His first movie was a hit his second an interesting failure (though not to my eyes, not quite); he's on to something, he believes, and in Signs he wants to make believers of all of us.
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.
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!)
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!)
