Category: Film Review

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1h and 54m rated 6.4 by 8,400 cinemtizens.

Genre: Sci Fi.

DNA: Sweden.

Verdict: Diverting.

Tagline: The worm (hole) turned.

After her father disappears in the north woods one night UFO chasing, a young girl becomes obsessed with finding him. (There is neither wife nor mother in evidence.)  In so doing she teams up with a group of misfit UFOlogists.  

Her determination to do something — anything! everything! right now! — to find dad brings tensions to the group which has functioned more as a sheltered workshop for its members than an investigative project. Apple carts go flying. The weather and the bureau of meteorology figure in the story. 

It all hinges on the adolescent lead who carries the picture. She is not in every scene but when she is there is an energy and urgency.  

There are many chases, usually the police interfering with their illegal activities to secure data.  Action fans will be satisfied. Me, not so much. 

Quadruple ending as if the writer/director couldn’t let go made it far too long.   Alain Resnais once said something like if you can’t tell a story in 90 minutes, you don’t know what story you are telling.  

About the plot: Was the weather bureau involved in some kind of conspiracy? Why was the meteorologist a crucial character and then dropped? Apart from his lugubrious name what was Jonah (Gunner) doing?  Does a patrol officer have that much authority? After the journey why didn’t daddy’s girl follow him? Pick, pick, pick, I know.  

I enjoyed it. Enuf said.

***

The supercilious and condescending review on the Ebert platform is, well, not something the dean himself would have condoned. Too many reviewers are so jaded they can’t see what it in front of them. I admit this review was intelligible, unlike many I have read in the name of Ebert which are incoherent, written to show peers how clever they are, not to inform movie viewers but reviews are supposed to be for viewers. 

Swedish made but spoken in English for the international market. So I thought.  Turns out to be more complicated. It was made in Swedish and then Ai dubbed with Swedish accents and edited with lip sync to correspond. Had me fooled.  Seeing is no longer believing. If ever it was. 

By the way, pay attention to the ear tag on that cow. Like the title, it is part of the tribute to the genre. The title?  Oh, those are the last words of The Thing (1951) one of the best Sci Fi movies.  The number? Well those that know know….  

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1h and 54m rated 7.1 by 31,066 cinematizens. 

DNA: Belgian.

Genre: Comedy; Species: Black, very. 

Verdict: Big heart; bigger imagination.

Tagline: What a bastard!

Something to offend all the many self-righteous: blasphemy, cruelty, bestiality, profanity, pornography, prostitution, and more. The surprises just kept coming.  

The reality is that God continues to lay down the law from a slovenly apartment in Brussels that he never leaves. Each new law is even more petty, spiteful, and meaner than the preceding 2,507 ones. He is a right bastard, dyspeptic, short-tempered, mangy, unwashed, odiferous, and selfish, a being who delights in the misfortunes of people. He embodies pride, greed, gluttony, wrath, sloth, the whole seven and more all rolled into one.   

He is, indeed, old school, Old Testament in worn carpet slippers and a torn bathrobe with a grey singlet that might have been white, once, long ago in B.C.  

His son, JC, rebelled against the old bastard, and that provoked God to even more meanness, starting with abandoning his only son. It has been downhill since, as he lays down one law after another, e.g., a dropped piece of toast always lands buttered side down!  The other line always moves faster than yours with a corollary that if you can change lines, the new one stops.  Remember Law 2003?  The freeze in your computer does not occur when the technician logs in with Team Viewer. The last bus left just as you arrived at the stop. No problem is too small for this god to take the time to make it worse. After all, he has eternity to make everyone’s life miserable.  

Turns out, Murphy was right, far more right than she realised. It has all been part of the masterplan.  

Now JC’s little sister has had enough and…she sets out to recruit more apostles to write a brand new testament. This sprite begins by leaking divine data before going on a quest to recruit six new apostles to achieve a balance.  Meanwhile, she is pursued by her angry old man, that is, god to you, but since he has never been out of the apartment in the world before, he is not very good at it, and he keeps running into the consequences of the very laws he has promulgated. 

Charming, amusing, surprising, insightful – these are the words that come to mind. There are loose ends, e.g., what happened to the tears she collected?  Why is eighteen the right number?  What does baseball (in Belgium?) have to do with it, anyway?  

I came across it on TV5Monde+ and the irreverent summary was interesting as was the presence of Catherine Deneuve who at age 74 has more screen presence than most at 24. Her last credit on the IMDB of 150 films is dated 2026 so at 80 she is still trouping 0n. Her first credit was 1957. Every time I see her I think of Repulsion (1965).  

IMDb meta-data is 1h and 47m, rated 6.0 by 4,500 cinemtaizens.  

Genre: krimi.

DNA: France.

Verdict: Incoherent. 

Tagline: Meh.

This is the IMDB summary: ‘The renowned psychiatrist Lilian Steiner mounts a private investigation into the death of one of her patients, whom she is convinced has been murdered.’

The local advertising labeled it a mystery comedy.  Such was the bait.

The laughs, if there were any, were on me because the switch was immediate into stylish incoherence.  

There was too little and too much of everything, and a last act in which new information is used to explain the previous one and half hours by introducing a new character.  Aristotle neither nor Knox would approve. All that went before proves to be irrelevant, the cigarette smoking man, the constant rain, the hypnotist, the pregnant daughter, the Nazi son, the walking backwards in Central Park clip, and so on.  If you were paying attention to all those clues, you wasted your time. I know I did. 

I went to be amused, entertained, informed, or diverted and I wasn’t.  More fool me.  

It was so convoluted at end I am not sure what happened or why. But I know I don’t care. No, I don’t know what the title has to do with anything. But I did wonder how a psychiatrist could get to be renown. Isn’t their work supposed to be private, very.  I concluded that the copywriter did not know what the word means.  

I did re-new my celluloid acquaintance with Daniel Auteil whom I haven’t seen in years.  I also savoured the brief look into the Bibliothèque Mazarine which I used to walk by in my Sorbonne days. I don’t think I ever dared enter.  It is based on the eponymous 17th Century Cardinal’s collection. He was chief minister to Louis XIV for twenty years. It is the oldest public library in France.

We saw the movie at the Dendy Newtown Theatre 5 row G 9 and 10 seats.  N.B. entry is from the front and upstairs to seats.  There is only one aisle on the left (is that permitted by fire regulations?) facing the screen, or on the right as one enters.  Aisles seats are 1 and 2  and midway would be best another time.  I’ve been caught on this lack of a second aisle and front entry before. Now I have a second time maybe I will avoid it next time. 

Berlin Hero (2025) Der Held vom Bahnhof Friedrichstasse

IMDb meta-data is 1h and 52 m, rated 6.3 by 389 cinematizens.

Genre: Satire.

DNA: Deutschland.

Verdict: All too true. 

Tagline: Believe it or not!

Bear runs a bankrupt video store in Berlin of 2020.  It is more like a derelict museum than a business.  When a cheque-book journalist in search of a story offers him Euros to tell his tale, he obliges for the geld.  Since there was no story to tell he makes one up to jack up the price.  He is surprised when that works, but Euros are Euros.  

Once the lie is out there, it takes on a life of its own, and then it takes over his life.  It cannot be un-lied for now he has something to lose – money and respect.

He may have been unhappy in his squalid store before the journalist disturbed the cobwebs, but now he is miserable, living and lying up to the expectations his story has ignited. The Euros are important but it isn’t just them. The respect, the civility, the admiration that the lie has brought him, starting with own adult daughter, are heady and addictive.  

The fact that it is all lies does not phase the journalist at all who is eager to keep riding the wave as long as it lasts, and later when it does crash, he switches to another without missing a beat. He is an accomplished lie surfer.  

Some comments on the IMDb suggest it is unrealistic. Oh hum. Watch Fox News for five minutes. Lies are swallowed whole everyday.  

I enjoyed seeing some Berlin sites, though most of filming was done in Leipzig, including the Friedrichstasse station which when I went through it in 1994 still bore the marks of East Germany with a kind of internal Berlin Wall. I also noticed the chain link fence with the posters of the Wall martyrs on it.  When I examined it in 1994 the last one to be killed in the Death Zone was a 25-year-old student two weeks before the Wall fell. Several hundred were killed in the Death Strip. Regrettably most of my photographs from that visit got lost somewhere along the way.  

The Bear is played beautifully on this emotional roller coaster.  

But the best line is dipped in acid when the retired, reptilian, repugnant, and rapacious Stasi officer says, ‘The mother of fools is always pregnant.’ It is from an Italian proverb: ‘La mamma dei cretini è sempre incinta.’ Ergo in German: ‘Die Mutter der Idioten ist immer schwanger.’  Words to live by these days.  

The director died before the final shoot and the editing, and it was finished by another with some re-shooting to patch it up. That may explain why the reconciliation in the lavatory seemed too quick and easy.  Time to get it done and out the door.  

We saw it as part of the German Film Festival.

The Greatest Lie (2026) on DUST.

Runtime of 21m, listed on IMDb without meta-data.

DNA: USA. 

Verdict: Ripped from today’s headlines! 

Tagline: Amos 8:11-12.  

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.

To those who know.  

C’était mieux demain (2025) Cycle of Time

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.  

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.