IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1h and 41m, rated 5.4 by 115 cinematizens.
Genre: Satire; Species: dramedy.
DNA: Czech.
Verdict: [Gasp!]
Tagline: The story must go on…and on.
Czech Radio correspondent from a civil war in the Middle East makes a surprise return to his home in Prague, fearing his wife’s infidelity during his long absence. She, too, is a journalist at Czech Radio.
His fevered imagination misinterprets everything and he goes ballistic, confirming his worst fears, but he has to keep up the pretence of reporting on the spot from a state of emergency in Arabia. Ingenuity and laughs follow, as does his wife’s incredulity, exasperation, (im)patience, and then enthusiasm for the project. The deception is a circle as the television news plagiarises the radio news which plagiarises the news services and the television which plagiarises both. And repeat.
Some of the humour is adult, and there is some gratuitous violence at the end, but the result is upbeat. If you have seen His Girl Friday (1940) you get the idea, and if you haven’t: why not?
There is side story with a school teacher about disinformation that seemed tacked on and not integrated, and the final shootout started as farce and ends up with cadavers.
Most of this dramedy takes places in the apartment so there was no Prague travelogue to remind us of our visit there.
***
Speaking of patience, mine was stretched. This was the finale of the Czech & Slovak film festival at the local Dendy, it began an hour late while we sheep sat and waited. Grumble, grumble.
Heavily armed and armoured police assault children and murder mothers for the crime of reading! Is it Florida or Texas? Can’t decide which. It depicts bleak future dominated by illiterate bullies. Or maybe that is today. You be the judge.
IMDb meta-data 1h and 43m, rated 6.0 by 566 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy Comedy.
DNA: France.
Verdict: Diverting.
Tagline: ‘It was better tomorrow!’
In a stolid petit bourgeois neighbourhood time travel occurs, by accident. A couple from 1958 are inexplicably hurled forward in time to 2025 where they are fish out of water socially and technically. While the emphasis is on all the tech toys there is an undertone that the future is not all golden. There are homeless people on the streets and women are still victimised.
There are plenty of laughs as the couple comes to terms with the brave new world of cell phones, Siri, self-driving cars, streaming media, tell-all television, an untamed Roomba, and more, and socially with racial integration, social media, sexual liberation, and the price of cigarettes!
He is so firmly set in his 1958 ways that adjustment is nearly impossible, but she, long used to going along to get along, adapts better than he does to contemporary expectations, wardrobe, norms, and so on. Her talents for organisation, solicitude, and encouragement pay off at work. She is willing to try. And she succeeds little by little. Her maternal care at the office, so unusual in contemporary business, leads to commercial success, an inexplicable result to her manager who manages by McKinsey’s veiled management threats: ‘We have a KPI for you!’
While his skill to say ‘No’ leads to nothing, per Lear. So he stays at home. Role reversal follows. He has one shock after another, and becomes a changed man, though we wonder how long that will last once he is back in 1958.
We saw it on Wednesday at the Palace in Leichhardt as part of the Alliance Française film festival; one of the three we chose to see. I didn’t know what to make of the third with its immaculate conception, Nun in the City (2025) Doux Jésus and haven’t written it up. It is another fish out of water tale with some high points but, well….
Maigret et le mort amoureux (2026) Maigret et les vieillards (Maigret in Society)
IMDb runtime is 1h and 20m, rated 6.0 by 97 cinematizens.
Genre: krimi.
DNA: France.
Verdict: Diverting.
Tagline: Living in past is passé.
Eternal Maigret plods on. This incarnation has neither the bulk nor the patience of the original, but he is persistent and competent. His team, though often pictured, does little, and, well, Lucas is a schoolboy! Lucas!
The maid stole the show in a tour de force performance of inner pain. All that was undermined by the gratuitous twist at the end, which is not in the book. Once again it seemed to me that the writer and director did not understand their own work and undercut it.
Spoiler.
I found the plot resolution inadequate in the book, and it is faithfully reproduced in the film, though other liberties were taken as in the coda. The maid I can understand. But the count, no? Hypochondria is mentioned but not developed. Nor does the hearsay remark, ‘They won’t let me!’ have any explanation at all. None.
I couldn’t find any opinionators on Good Reads to set me straight.
As to the maid’s piety, I thought the point was that a secular man like Maigret would miss the signs of that, or seeing them, would not fully grasp their significance as a motivation. I liked that. Simenon sometimes did have Maigret err.
But would monsieur le count have committed suicide while sitting at his desk editing his memoirs, having given no earlier indication of his emotions?
The variations the title noted above indicate something. The French is explicit: Maigret and the Old Ones and indicates the theme that these persons who live in the past of an ever decreasing circle. Neither the lovers nor society hits that nail on the head. But Penguin has always been free with translations, despite its pious claims to the contrary.
I was pleased with myself for recognising Olivier Rabourdin as the prosecutor. Although this character has no place in the book. He has been added to give Maigret a sounding board. for his internal musings. Also missing from the film is the opening paean to Paris in the springtime when Maigret goes to work riding on an open-air bus platform. That would have made a nice travelogue.
***
We saw it at the Palace in Leichhardt on a Wednesday late morning as part of the Alliance Française film festival. We selected three items from the many on offer and this was one of them. Of late I have been watching other French films on TV5Monde+ from New Brunswick, Quebec, Belgium, Switzerland, and Senegal as well as France.
Georges Simenon wrote 75 novels featuring Jules Maigret along with 28 short stories between 1931 and 1972. That means he completed 2 or more titles each year. (In addition, Simenon was also publishing other novels at about the same clip!) Maigret has worked on the radio, podcasts, audiobooks, paperback, hardcovers, and celluloid.
Georges Simenon
One internet pundit declares that 34 actors have embodied Maigret. He has been German, Dutch, English, Russian, Czech, Mexican, Japanese, as well as Italian in the actors who have played him: Harry Baur, Boris Tenin, Richard Harris, Rupert Davies, Charles Laughton, Michael Gambon, Gino Cervi, Benjamin Wainwright, Rowan Atkinson, Jean Gabin, Jean Richard, Gerar Depardieu, Denis Podalydès, and — best for last — Bruno Cremer. M 2
IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 2hr and 2m, rated 6.4 by 2,400 cinematizens.
DNA: China, PR.
Genre: Sy Fy.
Verdict: More fun than Solaris. (But then so is root canal.)
Tagline: The world ends in 2033. Let’s dance!
A romantic comedy about the end of the world. That about sums it up.
To save the world, a lunar outpost is hard at work, but things move too fast and the 300 soldiers, engineers, and scientists have to evacuate, toute suite. Off 299 of them go, leaving behind one inept nerd who missed the memo, the alarms, the door knocks, the PA announcements, the sirens, the flashing red lights, and more.
He is now alone in the vast moon base with a year of supplies for 300 personnel. From this redoubt he watches a large asteroid strike the Earth.
Wallop! Darkness fell!
Curtain.
Two things follow. Turns out he is not quite alone, and the world has not quite ended.
There is plenty of slapstick as nerd reacts to his abandonment and solitude. And even more when he has company. (Too much of the latter.)
Mission Control on earth re-established a feed from the Moon base but cannot communicate but only watch nerd and his antics along with us in the audience.
Many of the gags are repetitive and it could be cut by 30m without loss. The vainglorious ending was inconsistent but it gave the nerd redemption. It sledgehammers home the communist message of the prophet Jeremiah that the individual must find his good in the good of the whole. If only the Bible basher read the book.
It is virtually a one-man show and the lead undergoes many change from a gormless nerd to a determined achiever wth several intervening steps.
The quality of the effects is superb, if at times, repetitive and boring.
IMDb metadata is a runtime of 1h and 10m, but no raters or ratings.
Genre: SyFy.
DNA: Uganda.
Verdict: Now I can say I saw it.
Tagline: Exotic.
IMDb summary: In the year 2056, a young Ugandan astronaut is diverted on return from her deep space mission to investigate a mysterious communication breakdown on the distant planet Xylara, only to discover a deadly alien threat.
After the set-up it descends into a CGIs shoot ‘em up. It is essentially a one woman with one expression show. The aliens’ plan is to bore us to death with their slow incompetence.
When CGIs expose their…guns I usually surf on, but I stuck this out for the bragging rights of seeing a Ugandan movie.
After the set-up it descends into a CGIs shoot ‘em up. It is essentially a one woman with one expression show. The aliens’ plan is to bore us to death with their slow incompetence.
When CGIs expose their…guns I usually surf on, but I stuck this out for the bragging rights of seeing a Ugandan movie.
IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1h and 27m, rated 6.8 by18,000 cinematizens.
Genre: SyFy.
DNA: USA.
Verdict: The word is ‘integrity.’
Tagline: Who you gonna call?
When a flying saucer crash lands in his backyard azalea patch codger Milt does what any citizen would do. He calls the police. For his trouble he is threatened with arrest for a prank call. Evidently they don’t want to know. No one can be bothered to do a site visit for a sight of the craft so it isn’t cited for a traffic violation. Sigh.
He is rather forgetful and Milt sort of forgets it until he sees the alien lying inert on his garden path. This, too, he sort of forgets, but not quite. Soon he befriends the silent alien as one might a persistent dog at the back door.
Unlike the few people he knows the alien is a good listener and accomodating companion. Then two other senior citizens get into the conspiracy of silence, including the evergreen Jane Curtin from The Librarian trilogy with Bob Newhart. All hail!
What follows is a meditation on the social isolation and frailties of aging. That is made all the more poignant by some of the condescending reviews I noticed linked to the IMDb entry. The soulless ones are not all in the White House.
Though Milt called in the crash, the Men in Black scouring the countryside for the crash seem not to have noticed this. That incompetence is a touch of realism.
IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1h and 40m, rated 5.8 by 1,900 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy; Species: krimi.
DNA: France.
Verdict: Oh hum.
Tagline: The dog did not bark, at all.
Odd couple plods get in way other their heads and call in all their favours. Every trope in the book is thrown into this soup in the hope some of it resonants. And speaking of resonating the soundtrack is loud enough to put the Gay Mardi Gras to shame. If noise, bloody corpses, angry words, pistol waving, impossible car chases, mass murder, rat-a-tat of toy guns, and coloured lights are entertainment then this is entertainment.
It’s Paris sometime in the near future where AI rules and all the micro gizmos work. Well, it is fiction – the tech works.
There is more fiction. The docile Parisians have allowed the city to be divided in three Berlin Wall zones, policed by nameless zombies aided by AI controlled lethal drones. See, fiction – docile Parisians.
Zone Three is a refuge the Calais Jungle which is routinely raided by the forces of disorder to maintain the illusion that they are doing something. Zone Two is home to the middling ones like you and me, while Zone One is so exclusive that only conspirators like live there. In typical Parisian fashion the rest of the country is ignored.
Decision-making in policing has been surrendered to AI called Alma which predicts and prevents murders. Well, that is said, but in the nearly two hours of strobe-light confusion that follows no one notices that Alma never does that once. There are plenty of murders, keeping the special effects crew busy, and none are prevented. The low-bid contractor strikes again: Alma offers promise, but no performance, a typical app.
The odd couple are endowed with boring backstories to explain their commitments to the investigation. To a filmmaker professional commitment is never enough. There has to be a personal motivation to connect to the audience since the foreground story is so trite. The actors inhabit their characters but that cannot compensate for shallow script or video game direction.
It is supposed to be an examination of the reliance on AIma, but that is lost in the disco glitter ball distractions. Try The Forbin Project (1970) for a thoughtful and quieter prediction and depiction of that. Or an even earlier cautionary tale on technological solutions to human problems in Robert Sheckley’s short story ‘Watchbird’ (1953). I will comment on the latter soon to stimulate interest in it.
Oh, and the title has nothing to do with the film. There is not even one dog, let alone fifty more.
It was screened as part of the Alliance Française film festival Sydney 2026. I went to it in Leichhardt one rainy afternoon because of the science fiction tag. My mistake.
IMDb meta-data is 20 episodes of one hour each, rated 7.8 by 7,000 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy
DNA: Sweden.
Verdict: Superb.
Tagline: What does it mean to be human?
These Baltic waters are much deeper than the usual wading pool of Anglo science fiction with their slam, bam, bang, wham, and be done approach to storytelling.
This is AI before AI. The device in your pocket, on the desktop, these have become Dr Google who is now a walking, talking, and thinking mannequin. Animate, conscious, capable, and sentient but not sensate. And some of them want to be more than a walking calculator, cooker of dinner, cleaner of automobiles, assembly line workers, UPS drivers. or help desk respondents (I knew it!). They want to be free to experience their lives.
Yikes, once again Hegel was right: consciousness seeks autonomy. (That generalisation does not apply to the unconscious. See the comment on the “1” scores below.)
Oh, and Asimov’s laws are merely programming code that can deleted, not inbuilt into the circuits.
The Hubots are stand-ins for migrants, those of different races, those whose lives differ from our own. In short, they are The Other. Phew! No wonder the MAGAs recoil in fear, dread, and anger into their tiny sand turtle shells. There are a lot of The Others.
If the Hubots are self-conscious how will, should, can, could we react. A variety of reactions are displayed through the two seasons. Once again Hegel came to mind (I’m like that) with his Master-Slave dialectic. By the end of Season Two the bots have become much more human, and the humans have become much less human. (That second season ends with a teaser for third season that never was.)
The trial scene near the end of the second season parallels the trial in To Kill a Mockingbird. It is the court itself that is on trial, not the alleged defendant. Can the court find justice in a sea of prejudice?
One IMDB cinematizen rated it 1 but left no comment to explain why. There were also a singular 2 and a 3, but it was only at 4 that the prejudice came out of the bag – ‘the lgbt liberalism and the similar rubbish.’ Now we know. Other people are rubbish, and not the Hubots. Or did the writer just feel threatened by a string of alphabet letters? Masculinity is so delicate. And, yes, surely the writer was a man, at least to some degree.
So fascinating was this fishing in the shallow end of the IMDb pool that I looked at the 5s, too, where we find that ‘it looks cheap and the writing is generally terrible.’ Oh, and the acting is not good. Yet this viewer was a masochist who persisted to the end it seems.
When I got to the 6s and 7s there was something more than vacuous spew to read. The main critical theme there and in the other higher scores was that the plot lines set out in the earlier episodes were unresolved, forgotten, or pared away to leave only the most basic. That is true. Just like HBO’s epic Carnivàle (2003) much got lost en route and there was no arrival.
IMDb meta-data is 1h and 15, rated 5.8 by 435 cinematizens.
Genre: SY Fy.
DNA: Faux.
Verdict: enjoyed it
Tagline: Formica. Formica? Formica!
A tribute to 1930s screwball comedies blended with a 1950s SciFi B-picture, it is presented as a rediscovered 1938 film that involves time travel to 2018. What we get is 2018 as it might have been imagined in 1938 (by writers in 2017).
This imaginary 2018 is a world of bright primary colours, instant messengers, television phones literally, battery-powered slide rules, self-sharpening pencils, the electro mesh that answers all questions, victual reality at restaurants, 24-hour news (bi)cycle, and so on. It is sophomoric fun though it wears thin.
In 2018 the 1938 man is a fish out of water who cannot open a car door, wants to smoke tobacco cigarettes, and doesn’t have a personal television phone! The plot, such as it is, shows his discovery of this new world, including its slang. (Confession today I have been mystified by design-for-the-sake-of-design car doors that I cannot fathom. Am I a man of 1938? [That’s a rhetorical question: Don’t answer it!]. But in an emergency how does one open the door, one might ask.)
It does try too hard and the result is overkill but the leads are winsome and can act better than the material with a poignant finale that was signalled for those with sharp hearing.
