#the tragedy of macbeth

The Power of the Dog(12/1)

Wolf(12/3)

Agnes(12/10)

The Tragedy of Macbeth(12/24)

Cyrano(12/31)

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Feel so so so lucky that I got to see Saoirse Ronan as Lady Macbeth in The Tragedy of Macbeth at Almeida Theatre last night. I can’t stop thinking about how incredible it was and Saoirse Ronan is so talented and even more beautiful in person. The show was amazing I didn’t want it to end even though it was 3 hours. Probably was the best night of my life tbh.

The Top Ten:

10.  THE 355 – my cinematic year kicked off in what I thought was thoroughly fine style with a rip-roaring, star-studded spy thriller which was clearly intended to start a franchise which I’d totally be up for since it’s everything I love to watch – hard-hitting, visceral action pinned to a genuinely compelling plot powered by a quintet of strong women who take on a patriarchal establishment and beat it at its own game.  Clearly it wanted to shake-up the status quo and as far as I’m concerned it pulled it off in fine style  … NO WONDER, then, that it’s been (largely) roundly reviled by critics and tanked at the box office, much as previous attempts for similar ends such as the intended GhostbustersandCharlie’s Angels reboots did a few years back. I thought we’d gotten over this, guys! Come on … it’s a criminal shame, because this is SUCH great movie.  Jessica Chastain heads the cast as tough-as-nails CIA operative “Mace” Browne, out for blood after a botched operation in Paris to acquire a potentially devastating piece of terrorist-tech results in the death of her partner and friend Nick Fowler (Sebastian Stan).  Given a second chance at tracking down the device, things get complicated when a clandestine conspiracy is revealed and Mace is forced to team up with retired MI6 officer Khadijah Adiyeme (Lupita Nyong’o), rival German BND operative Marie Schmidt (Dianna Kruger), Colombian DNI analyst and psychologist Graciela Rivera (Penelope Cruz) and Chinese MSS agent Lin Mi Sheng (X-Men: Days of Future Past’s Fan Bingbing) to beat the bad guys and clear their names after they’re all framed as terrorists themselves.  All five of the film’s badass leading ladies have been given impressively memorable and thoroughly well-written characters with plenty of potential for growth and character development not only throughout this film but in what now looks like an extremely unlikely franchise future (even Fan who, despite coming into the action quite late, immediately makes QUITE the impression and builds on that groundwork admirably throughout the latter half of the film); similarly, Stan once again proves what a mighty screen talent he is, while there’s an enjoyably reptilian turn from Jason Flemyng as the film’s Big Bad, international crime boss Elijah Clarke.  While this was advertised as a relentlessly-paced, breakneck thrill ride, the action quota is actually somewhat more restrained here than on some of its more established peer franchises (like BondandMission: Impossible), but what IS on offer is, correctly, very much in service to the intelligently written story, and the film certainly doesn’t scrimp on the thrills when it DOES decide to get our adrenaline pumping, delivering some suitably robust set-pieces that punctuate rather than drive the agreeably pacy plot.  Former X-Men writer Simon Kinberg acquits himself admirably here, but like his previous crack at directing it really is starting to look like Hollywood just has it out for him, since Dark Phoenix ALSO got a critical and release-debacle-based financial mauling it really DIDN’T deserve.  This is a cracking spy thriller with a killer premise and exceptional cast of characters which deserves far more respect than it’s received – altogether this is a film which needs a SERIOUS reappraisal.  Give it a chance, guys, it REALLY needs it …

9.  NIGHTMARE ALLEY – Guillermo del Toro is one of my favourite filmmakers of all time, and one of the things I love most about him is his innate understanding of the inherent truths about the cinematic monsters he frequently portrays in his works. Some of his most interesting thematic material comes when he examines the horrors that his NON-supernatural characters are capable of, but until now the only time he’s genuinely FOCUSED on inherently human monsters was in 2015’s Crimson Peak – sure, it had proper ghosts in it, but the actual threat was very much from the film’s living, breathing flesh-and-blood characters.  His latest offering has embraced this principle to a far greater degree as he adapts William Lindsay Gresham’s none-more-dark novel about morally grey grifters and carnival sideshow charlatans in World War II America, Bradley Cooper delivering what might be a career best turn as voraciously ambitious and inherently talented con-artist Stan Carlisle, who rises through the ranks working the sideshow acts in a lowly travelling carnival before finally striking it big when he goes it alone in a one-man psychic act in Buffalo, New York, with the increasingly reluctant help of his disillusioned girlfriend Molly Cahill (Rooney Mara).  When he comes to the attention of influential high-society psychologist Lilith Ritter (Cate Blanchett), she opens the door to a business opportunity which has the potential for MASSIVE financial rewards, but also a truly ruinous fall from grace if Carlisle doesn’t play it JUST RIGHT … del Toro’s always has some pretty palpable darkness in his movies, but he’s never tackled subject matter so genuinely jet black in its pitch before, the film wallowing in some seriously murky waters as we follow an already morally questionable protagonist as he digs down into the most thoroughly reprehensible depths of his own meagre soul, as well as the heart of an uncaring society as irredeemable corrupt as he’s in danger of becoming.  This is NOT an easy film to watch, several times testing the resolve of even the strongest viewers, but the rewards on offer for sticking with it are vast – this is another gold-plated work of art from an immensely talented filmmaker at the very height of his game, and it deserves all of the Oscar buzz it got, even if it ultimately missed out on that coveted Best Picture gong (much as del Toro was snubbed for a directing nomination this time round).  Cooper is a genuine revelation here, suitably seductive but still thoroughly slimy as an already shady guy who becomes progressively worse as his success grows, while Rooney’s definitely the only true bright light in the cast as the sweet innocent he takes for a ride who ultimately gets wise just a little too late; Willem Dafoe once again piles on the creepiness as suitably unpleasant geek show barker Clem, while Toni Collette and David Strathairn are both excellent as Zeena and Pete Krumbein, the fading psychic sideshow act that teach Carlisle his craft, and Del Toro’s The Shape of Water star Richard Jenkins is far more complex than he first seems as Ezra Grindle, the potentially lethal mark that he underestimates to such dangerous degrees.  The REAL standout star of the film, however, is Blanchett, who captivates and repulses in equal measure as an ice-cold psychopath who deserves to go down as one of the all-time great femme fatales of cinema.  This is DEFINITELY going to be the year’s darkest film, I don’t see ANYTHING unseating it from this dubious honour, but it’s also an immensely rewarding viewing experience, incredibly intelligent, breathlessly edgy and unbelievably tense from its creepy opening to its ruinous ending, and every inch as surprisingly seductive as its untrustworthy lead character, the truest film noir to come along in a very long time indeed …

8.  AMBULANCE – Michael Bay’s cinematic output in the last ten years in particular has been very interesting.  It’s like he’s going through phases as he’s trying to work out how he wants to go forward as his style “matures” – 2013’s Pain & Gain was, like all his previous output, big, loud and definitely flashy in the most indulgent way, but it also had something somewhat serious to say, given its origins as an (admittedly genuinely BONKERS) actual TRUE STORY.  Then came the fourth Transformersfilm,Age of Extinction, widely regarded as THE VERY WORST of the bunch, and rightly so.  But then he turned right round and did something COMPLETELY SERIOUS when he tackled a much less OTT but far more emotionally charged and potent true story in 13 Hours: the Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, which is a genuinely masterful piece of work which I personally regard as his VERY BEST FILM. Then he went and did ANOTHER Transformers movie with The Last Knight, which was more of the same – juvenile, disjointed in plot and narrative and pure over-the-top indulgence – and yet, somehow, it was just a little bit BETTER than much of what had come before all the same (actually getting close to the quality of his first, still BEST, instalment).  Most recently he went to Netflix to create something which was clearly always INTENDED to be over-the-top and indulgent, but this time saw him actually getting it RIGHT, like he did on The Rock–6 Underground, a thoroughly enjoyable action-packed escapist romp with Ryan Reynolds effortlessly holding court like he always does.  Anyway … Bay’s latest feels like something else entirely, somehow managing to sit VERY comfortably in the middle ground – once again, it’s big, loud, flashy and DEFINITELY indulgent, but it’s also one of those rare things for a Michael Bay film, because it’s anything but dumb.  Sure, it’s got a REALLY simple premise – veteran marine Will Sharp (CandymanandThe Matrix Resurrections’ Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) and his dangerous livewire adoptive brother Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal), the sons of a notorious LA bank robber, pull off a spectacular high-stakes daylight heist but are then forced to hijack an ambulance and its inhabitants, skilled but jaded EMT Cam Thompson (From Dusk Till Dawn’s Eiza Gonzalez) and her patient Zach (Mrs Fletcher’s Jackson White), an LAPD patrolman wounded during the robbery, which leads to a crazy cat-and-mouse chase through the streets of Los Angeles – but there’s clearly some real intelligence behind the script.  The plot is surprisingly smart despite it clichéd nature, the characters all impressively well-written and skilfully developed over the course of the film, and the twists are rewardingly effective when they come.  Sure, Bay keeps throwing the camera around like a lunatic, sometimes chucking in some genuine vertigo-inducing drone shots PURELY because he can, I think, but this time it just seems to ramp up the excitement factor as he does one of the few things he’s always really excelled at – crafting properly BLINDING action sequences – over and over again.  Certainly the second unit and stunt teams really earned the big bucks on this one, every car crash, crazy jump and desperate manoeuvre executed with astonishing precision made all the more impressive because it’s immediately obvious that there’s NO CGI AT ALL being used to pull any of this stuff off.  Refreshingly, though, Bay doesn’t scrimp on the character work at all here, screenwriter Chris Fedak’s impressive work doing a lot of the heavy-lifting so the uniformly excellent cast can just concentrate on BEING their characters for 2+ hours – Gyllenhaal is a ferocious, tightly-wound force of nature who’s both antihero and antagonist throughout the film, while Abdul-Mateen II is, as usual, electric in every second of his screen time, investing Will with wounded intensity and conflicted complexity as a desperate everyman stuck in this impossible situation because he’s just trying to help his family, and Gonzalez holds her own against these two craft-MASTERS with incredible skill and determination as a world-weary, disillusioned blue collar worker who finally rediscovers the passion she once had for her work under the most extreme circumstances; Garret Dillahunt (Fear the Walking Dead) and Keir O’Donnell (American Sniper), meanwhile, both shine as a winningly spiky odd-couple as LAPD SIS Captain Monroe and FBI special Agent Anson Clark, the polar-opposite cops thrust together in the race to hunt the Sharp Brothers down, and The Walking Dead’s Olivia Stambouliah frequently steals entire scenes with a single withering putdown or quirky aside as LAPD surveillance wizard Lieutenant Dhazghig.  Sure, this ain’t a perfect movie, Bay still not FULLY jettisoning his off-the-wall and rather off-colour sense of humour, which still surfaces in a few scenes, and it’s still VERY overblown, but these are small quibbles when a film is THIS enjoyable, visually impressive, pulse-pumping exciting and truly unforgettable. Definitely leaning into the camp of Bay’s more worthy films, this is another cracker that once again proves he’s a director who really can DELIVER when he actually TRIES.

7.  THE CURSED – some of my favourite horror movies are films that snuck in under the radar to become cult hits, or simply stuck to the shadows to become secret weapons of the genre, uncut gems known to a lucky few who always recommend them to likeminded genre fans when they get the chance.  This immensely impressive indie horror from writer-director Sean Ellis (The Broken, Anthropoid) is another great example of this particular phenomenon, and I’m sure it’s destined for some small cult status somewhere down the line.  The plot is … STRANGE, but in a very good way, and there’s a lot here that I really shouldn’t give away because it’s better to let you just ease in and discover it on your own - suffice to say, this is an intriguingly offbeat take on the classic werewolf trope, set in late 19^th Century France (albeit with a mysterious coda set during World War I’s Battle of the Somme) but shot in England with a largely British cast and thoroughly OOZING with a genuinely palpable doom-laden atmosphere of pregnant dread teeming with hazy mists and overcast skies.  Narcos’ Boyd Holbrook pulls off a surprisingly decent English accent as he smoulders with restrained, broody intensity as John McBride, a haunted pathologist who goes to an isolated French village to investigate a succession of animalistic killings which may be the result of a curse laid upon the community after the brutal eradication of a group of Roma travellers some years before.  There are allusions made to the legendary Beast of Gevaudan throughout, which formed the inspiration for the enjoyably oddball cult classic Brotherhood of the Wolf, but this is a very different breed of horror cinema – moody, understated and deliberately slowburn, parcelling out its scares and impressively visceral violence with cool restraint throughout while building to a feverish climax that brilliantly pays off the groundwork meticulously laid through its two hours, while the inventive use of some very icky physical effects has crafted something pretty unique to this particular sub-genre.   Holdbrook makes for a tragically fallible hero here, while Kelly Reilly brings restrained, wounded classiness to the film as Isabelle, the wife of complicated, brutish landowner Seamus Laurent (a restrained but potent turn from Rogue One’s Alistair Petrie), whose pig-headed short-sightedness seems to have doomed his community, and Amelia Crouch (Kate, The Last Dragonslayer) thoroughly impresses as the Laurents’ daughter Charlotte, whose younger brother Edward (Rocketman’s Max Mackintosh) was the first bitten and therefore first cursed.  Ellis has crafted a magnificently subtle masterpiece of the genre, playing an understated long game that pays off magnificently, and what resulted is one of the best indie horror movies I’ve come across in years.  I look forward to whatever he does next.

6.  THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH – this adaptation of one of my very favourite William Shakespeare plays is a particularly notable milestone in cinematic history, because for the very first time, writer-director Joel Coen has made a feature film without his ubiquitous filmmaker brother Ethan having anything to do with the project.  That being said, Joel’s always been such a dominant force on the DIRECTING side of the Coen Brother’s output that, if you didn’t know this, you’d never know Ethan was absent on this one, because it’s still EVERY INCH a Coen film.  It’s also Denzel Washington’s first time working for either Brother, but he’s SO magnificent as one of the greatest fictional villains OF ALL TIME that you won’t have any idea WHY they never worked together before.  He’s absolutely MESMERISING as Macbeth, the doom-courting Thane of Cawdor, who decides to murder his way to the throne of Medieval Scotland after receiving a very tempting prophecy from a trio of creepy-ass witches right after a decisive battle sees him get one hell of a royal promotion – Washington sizzles and sears in every scene, whether he’s smouldering with pregnant understated menace or exploding with un-righteous fury as Macbeth is haunted by gruesome ghosts or egged on by his scheming, ambitious wife.  Coen-regular Frances McDormand matches him in every scene as the DEFINITIVE Lady Macbeth, particular as she crumbles spectacularly once the guilt of what they’ve done starts to weigh her down; Brendan Gleeson is typically grand yet cuddly as ineffectual ill-fated King Duncan, while Harry Potter star Harry Melling continues to prove that he’s grown up into a truly DYNAMITE star-in-the-making as his untested but prematurely put-upon son Malcolm, The Boys’ Alex Hassell is obsequious but complex as duplicitous young nobleman Ross, and Straight Outta Compton’s Corey Hawkins makes for a suitably strapping and dynamic Macduff (ALWAYS my favourite character in the play and EVERY adaptation). Joel Coen has once again dropped a blinder on us, solo-effort or not, making Sakespeare’s text breathe in fresh and interesting ways while he weaves a beautifully bleak and haunted visual spell, unleashing compositions on us that recall the subtly unsettling weird mundanity of American Gothic art or the surreality of German expressionist cinema, especially in the film’s very unusual interpretation of the supernatural, as well as framing the story’s bloody and decidedly non-glamorous violence with an almost clinical detachment which perfectly complements the gorgeously stylised world he’s built, all of it topped off with an unsettlingly lowkey atmospheric score from regular Coen collaborator Carter Burwell.  Thoroughly deserving all the immense acclaim it’s had heaped upon it, this has definitely proven to be one of the year’s early surprises and one of its most downright exquisite works of art (so far).  Most important of all, though, Joel’s taken what’s always been a definitive Shakespearean villain and turned him into one of the all-time GREAT Coen protagonists …

5.  BELFAST – Kenneth Brannagh’s an interesting duck.  As an actor, I love his work, he’s consistently impressed me over the years, blowing me away with some truly spectacular performances, whether in his favoured territory (essaying Shakespeare) or doing something fun and different (such as The Road to El Dorado), or even just providing some solid support to other stars in a smaller role (Dunkirk instantly springs to mind); as a director, on the other hand … yeah, the results have been mixed at best.  For every masterpiece like Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing, ThororMurder On the Orient Express, he’s also brought us dreck like Dead Again, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or (gods help us) Artemis Fowl, and a fair amount in the middle ground that’s either kinda meh or actually not too bad if you just go with it (Hamlet, Jack Ryan: Shadow RecruitandPeter’s Friends are certainly ones I actually kinda liked).  Approaching a new release, therefore, is always a trepidatious business, you never know what you’re gonna get … so you can probably imagine my surprise when his OTHER latest offering (JUST preceding the aforementioned Death On the Nile) ACTUALLY turned out to be the very best feature I’ve ever seen from him.  Then again, this is BY FAR his most personal film to date, Brannagh going RIGHT back to his roots with a semi-autobiographical story which is HEAVILY based on his own personal experiences as a boy growing up in the titular city in Ireland at the height of the Troubles, specifically during the August Riots of 1969.  The film is told largely from the point of view of nine year-old Buddy (newcomer Jude Hill), the younger son of a small working class family living on a mixed denomination street, who find themselves in the middle of a powder-keg when anti-Catholic resentment starts to boil over in their neighbourhood.  His dreamer “Pa” (Jamie Dornan) is looking at the possibility of a brighter future for him and his family if they move abroad to greener pastures, but forceful and pragmatic “Ma” (The Beauty InsideandFord V Ferrari’s Catriona Balfe) just wants to stay put, and both are forced to make hard choices that directly affect the family’s future as the Troubles start to impact their lives as a whole.  Dornan and Balfe are both exceptional throughout, Balfe in particularly shouldering a lot of the film’s heavy lifting with spectacular skill and undeniable talent, while Dame Judi Dench and Ciaran Hinds warm our cockles and pluck at our heartstrings in equal measure as Buddy’s grandparents, two people who are clearly still deeply in love even in the twilight of their time together, and Merlin’s Colin Morgan brings a charged menace to proceedings as the film’s nominal villain, Billy Clanton, an up-and-comer in the local sectarian movement who wants Pa to join The Cause.  Buddy’s the undeniable beating heart of the film, though, Hill instantly showing he’s gonna be a star in the future as he essentially brings a young Brannagh to life, a deeply imaginative boy who loves movies and science fiction (especially Star Trek) but is struggling to find his place in the world and what’s going on around him.  The director shows as much skill with his writing as he does behind the camera, weaving a compellingly rich tapestry out of a deceptively simple storyline and bringing some genuinely palpable, fully realised characters to vital breathing life (although I guess he had STRONG inspiration to draw from), as well as paying frequent, loving respect to all the massive influences he’s drawn from over the years, from the films he grew up with (Chitty Chitty Bang BangandOne Million Years BC among others) to the music his parents taught him to love.  The resulting film is a powerful and rewarding viewing experience, a clear labour of love which is equal parts dramatic, moving, heart-breaking, warmly funny and deeply inspiring.  Brannagh wins our hearts by wearing his on his sleeve.

4.  KIMI – we were already getting movies about the COVID outbreak and the resulting chaos that the Pandemic’s wrought upon us around the world as early as late 2020, but for the most part it’s largely been small, under-the-radar indie stuff.  Now we’re starting to get BIG stuff, and the latest from Steven Soderbergh is one of the most impressive offerings I’ve seen to date.  Written by thriller cinema extraordinaire David Koepp (Carlito’s Way, Panic Room, Stir of Echoes), this is a spectacularly taut and blissfully streamlined suspense thriller that not only brings the impact of the Pandemic into sharp perspective, but also our growing overreliance on smart device technology and social media – altogether then, fertile ground for a socially-conscious filmmaker like Soderbergh, who essentially PREDICTED all the shit COVID just put us through with 2011’s terrifyingly prescient outbreak-thriller Contagion. The Kimi of the title is the latest creation of the film’s fictional tech conglomerate Amygdala and its visionary CEO Bradley Hasling (Derek DelGaudio), an all-encompassing smart speaker which revolutionises the technology by taking the potentially controversial step of having live human moderators overseeing its operation instead of AI in order to cut down on potential voice recognition-based cock-ups. The film’s main narrative focuses on one of these moderators, Angela Childs (Zoe Kravitz), whose long-standing social anxiety and agoraphobia have been immensely exacerbated by lockdown to the detriment of many aspects of her life.  Then one day, a routine review of some of her daily moderations uncovers something deeply disturbing – what sounds to her VERY MUCH like a break-in and the murder of a Kimi owner.  Under pressure from Amygdala to bury the information but driven by her own conscience and personal trauma from a similar incident, Angela decides to take matters into her own hands instead … this might be the best performance I’ve EVER seen Kravitz deliver (which is definitely saying something when we just saw her PERFECTLY embody one of my favourite comic book characters of all time), as she invests Angela with twitchy awkwardness but also fierce, unshakeable determination when faced with truly insurmountable obstacles, creating one of the most refreshingly compelling and resourceful lead protagonists I’ve come across in cinema so far this year, and since big chunks of the film are a one-woman show with many of her interactions with other characters playing out through phones and computer screens, this means she largely DOMINATES the film. That’s not to say there aren’t other great performances in this – DelGaudio does a lot with quite a small part, while there are excellent turns from Byron Bowers (The Chi, Honey Boy) as Angela’s occasional casual friend-with-benefits, Terry, who wants to become something more to her, Devin Ratray (Blue Ruin, The Tick) as Kevin, a fellow shut-in neighbour, and Rita Wilson (Runaway Bride, The Good Wife) as Natalie Chowdury, an executive with Amygdala to whom Angela attempts to blow the whistle on her findings.  Soderberg and Koepp have crafted a spectacularly suspenseful thriller which expertly ratchets up the atmospheric dread of Angela’s situation from the slowburn scene-setting start to the fraught and harrowing climax, the film’s determination to keep its focus squarely on Angela meaning that we’re right there in the thick of it with her throughout all her anxiety, paranoia, terror and downright feral fight for life.  The end result’s one of the best films either Soderbergh OR Koepp have delivered in a good while, and definitely the year’s top big screen thriller (so far, anyway).  Not bad for something which was inspired by and executed entirely in the midst of COVID.

3. TURNING RED – Disney/Pixar’s latest offering is also one of the most deeply personal films they’ve ever produced, with writer-director Domee Shi (who made the spell-binding and evocative Pixar short Bao) making a hell of a splash as the first woman EVER to land a solo direction credit on a Pixar feature with what’s essentially a fictionalised account of her own experiences as a teenage girl growing up in Toronto, Canada.  The result is a film which feels far more emotionally truthful and infinitely resonant that ANYTHING I’ve ever seen EITHER studio deliver before, perfectly encapsulating what it must have felt like to be a 13-year-old girl in 2002 (while I am mostly of the other gender, I too was once 13 and VERY unsure of myself, so I remember only too well how unbearably hard, hectic and downright UNWIELDY that part of my life could feel at times).  The 13 year-old girl in question here is Mei Lee (a DEEPLY affecting performance from newcomer Rosalie Chiang), the only child of a Chinese couple in Toronto who run their family’s temple, which is dedicated to their ancestor Sun Yee, a powerful sorceress who once harnessed the spiritual power of the red panda in order to protect her daughters.  For much of her life Mei has put her own personal feelings on hold to be everything her overbearing mother Ming (Sandra Oh, once again putting in a palpable turn full of deep heart, soul and frequent observational comic GOLD) wants her to become, and she’s become a straight-A student because of it, but as she starts to grow up she’s discovering there’s more to life than just good grades.  Specifically 4*Town, a five-man boyband (yeah, I know) that Mei and her three girlfriends – confident tomboy Miriam (newcomer Ava Morse), stoic and deadpan Priya (Never Have I Ever’s Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) and diminutively hyperactive bundle of barely-contained-malevolent-energy Abby (newcomer Hyein Park) are thoroughly obsessed with, who the quartet discover are coming to play a concert in Toronto … JUST as something awakens in Mei, and she suddenly finds herself stricken by a deeply strange supernatural affliction – specifically, whenever her emotions run out of control, she turns into a giant red panda.  She’s told that her family can perform a ritual to help her remove the panda spirit (which turns out to be on THE SAME NIGHT as 4*Town’s performance), but in the meantime she must learn to control and restrain the panda or it’ll be that much harder to exorcise.  But as the concert approaches, Mei and her friends hit upon a unique solution to help them earn the money for four tickets in time, which utilises the panda’s runaway cute factor and makes Mei realise that maybe she doesn’t actually WANT to get rid of this part of herself … there are definitely a lot of interpretations that can be derived from the phenomenon at the heart of the story, but whether it’s about teenage girls first learning to come to terms with a certain feminine bodily function or not, this is THE most powerful and, if I’m honest, downright ENTERTAINING film about growing up as a teenage girl I’ve EVER experienced, a GOOD DEAL better than all those sometimes genuinely vomit-worthy teen comedies and dramas I’ve found largely preferable to avoid over the years.  Of course it definitely helps that ALL the characters are SO well realised, beautifully derived from what are, clearly, Shi’s own friends, family and personal experiences when she was going through (most) of what we’re witnessing here – Mei and her friends are THOROUGHLY lovable (not least Abby, who became one of my VERY FAVOURITE characters of THIS ENTIRE YEAR within a few minutes of us first meeting her), while Ming is the perfect embodiment of helicopter mums the world over, but in particular that specific kind of Asian mother who seems determined that their only child will grow up be something truly exceptional to the exclusion of ALL ELSE, and as a result she’s very nearly the actual VILLAIN of the film but at the same time has clear, strong redeeming features which make us feel very deeply for her.  Shi and co-writer, playwright Julia Cho, have crafted a deeply affecting but also frequently riotously comical, thoroughly chaotic piece of work, injecting plenty of joyful mirth and madness into proceedings to compliment the massive amounts of heart and emotion on display, and the gloriously designed, beautifully realised early Noughties Toronto setting has been lovingly captured through Pixar’s typically rich and lively animation.  Sweet, spicy and perfectly evocative of its subject matter, this is WITHOUT A DOUBT one of the two studios’ finest collaborations to date.  Simply wonderful.

2.  THE NORTHMAN – over the last few years, writer-director Robert Eggers has been getting under our skins to magnificently unpleasant effect through his subtly unsettling arthouse horrors, The WitchandThe Lighthouse.  When we heard he had another movie in the works we started preparing ourselves for another skin-crawling mind-troubler of a horror movie, but he’s taken an intriguing leftfield swerve and really surprised us with his third feature, a dark, edgy and subtly fantastical retelling of the legend of Amleth, the Viking prince who became the inspiration for Shakespeare’s Hamlet.  As a boy (played by impressive newcomer Oscar Novak), Amleth witnesses the murder of his father, King Aurvandill (Ethan Hawke), at the hands of his uncle Fjölnir (The SquareandDracula’s Claes Bang), who then usurps the throne intended for Amleth and with it his mother, Queen Gudrun (Nicole Kidman). Amleth flees, swearing to avenge his father, kill his uncle and save his mother, but when we next encounter him many years later (now played by Alexander Skarsgaard), a berserker raiding the lands of the Rus, it’s an oath he seems to have largely forgotten, at least until a chance meeting with a mysterious seeress (Bjork) reminds him in Eggers’ typically unnerving fashion.  Suitably inspired, Amleth disguises himself as a slave and secretes himself amongst a party destined to be shipped to the Icelandic land of Fjolnir’s underwhelming exile, where he now rules over a far less impressive kingdom than he once intended.  Through canny strategy and subtle magical assistance, Amleth begins to torment his uncle as he tightens to screws in the build-up to his vengeance, but as he draws closer to his goal it begins to become clear to him that things may not actually be that simple … this is a singularly stunning feature which PERFECTLY encapsulates everything that’s so great about Eggers’ filmmaking style while also effectively repackaging it as something completely fresh and new to what he’s brought us before as he takes all the tricks he so keenly fashioned through his previous horror ventures and sets to them to ruthlessly efficient and thoroughly fiendish effect in what is surely destined to become known as the greatest Viking movie of all time, or at least the most interesting.  Skarsgaard is SPECTACULAR here, by turns understated and downright FEROCIOUS depending on the needs of the story and Amleth’s own personal plot, but he also crafts a character who’s far more complex that just a spiteful, vengeful warrior out for blood; Anya Taylor-Joy (The Witch), meanwhile, brings subtly fierce feistiness to proceedings as Olga of the Birch Forest, the enslaved Slavic witch that Amleth forms a conspiratorial bond (and eventually more) with in his quest, Bang and Kidman both skilfully subvert expectations of their characters as the story progresses, and both Hawke and The Lighthouse’s Willem Dafoe deliver brief but potent performances in their early scenes which sear great impressions on us that resonate throughout the rest of the film.  As with his previous films, this is as much about mood, atmosphere and some truly jaw-dropping visuals as it is about its dark and twisting labyrinthine central plot, but this is still BY FAR Eggers’ most refreshingly coherent and linear film, even if there are times when it seems to turn into some kind of strange (but admittedly deeply compelling) cinematic fever dream, and the characters are all impressively well-developed and three-dimensional, quickly making us root for or hate them according to requirements before the ingeniously crafty script sometimes turns things on their head to frame them in a new and startlingly different light.  This is as powerful, inventive and downright DOOM-LADEN as we would ever have expected from Eggers, but also definitely THE BEST film he’s brought us so far, and as he goes on this is going to be a really tough one to beat …

1.  THE BATMAN – another year, another Batman movie, it would seem.  But this one … somehow, this one feels a little different, a little special.  Frankly, THAT is actually something of an understatement … yeah, basically, Dawn of/War For the Planet of the Apes writer-director Matt Reeves’ long-gestating (and certainly long-awaited) reboot of DC’s flagship superhero franchise (originally intended to be part of the increasingly problematic DCEU canon but now, thankfully, cut loose so it can be its own thing) has actually turned out to be THE VERY BEST Batman movie outside of 2008’s simply DEFINITIVE The Dark Knight.  Perhaps this take’s most notable (not to mention most controversial) choice was in the casting of its Bruce Wayne/Batman – Robert Pattinson, the admittedly precocious young wunderkind who’s been working VERY HARD INDEED to distance himself from the godawful memory of Edward Cullen but still hadn’t quite managed to fully evacuate the stink of his tenure on Twilight … until now, at least. Turns out, he’s PERFECT for the role, especially in THIS version – this incarnation is JUST starting out, still finding his way as he tries to become the Dark Knight Defender that the nightmarish, corrupt, deeply FUCKED UP city of Gotham desperately needs to rescue it from its inexorable slow descent into criminal hell.  This Batman is still very fallible, still learning his craft, and the police don’t trust him yet, they’re openly hostile and always right on the verge of turning on him as he tries to insert himself into investigations with only one man on his side – Gotham City Police lieutenant Jim Gordon (Jeffrey Wright), perhaps the one good man in a genuinely rotten police force, who’s as determined as his mysterious vigilante “friend” to save his city.  Certainly they’re all Gotham’s got as a brutal murder kicks off a fiendishly Machiavellian game of homicidal cat-and-mouse as newly emerged villain The Riddler (Paul Dano) begins to dig up a twisted web of lies and conspiracies that’s long held the city in the grip of criminal purgatory, spurring the fledgling Batman into a desperate investigation which inexorably leads him to dark and troubling revelations which hit uncomfortably close to home as some truly terrible long-buried truths are finally uncovered.  Matt Reeves and co-writer Peter Craig (The Town, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Top Gun: Maverick) have delivered a screenplay which not only makes this one of the best written superhero movies ever, but just a downright masterpiece of a film, PERIOD, but Reeves’ simply AWESOME direction deserves just as much praise here because every scene has been crafted to flawless precision and shot with an uncommonly artful eye too (certainly cinematographer Greg Fraser, known for the likes of Zero Dark Thirty, Rogue OneandDune, deserves a big dollop of the credit too).  The cast are uniformly phenomenal too – there are FAR too many blazing bright star turns in this to name, but the standouts include Wright himself, noble, steadfast and forthright as the most honest cop in Gotham, John Turturro as a surprisingly seductive mobster kingpin in the role of Carmine Falcone, Peter Sarsgaard as Gotham’s enjoyably sleezy and hopelessly corrupt district attorney Gil Colson, Colin Farrell, COMPLETELY unrecognisable and therefore able to just ACT HIS SOCKS OFF as the very best and DEFINITELY most faithful take on Oswald Copplepot/the Penguin we’ve had to date, a low-down, brutal thug with delusions of grandeur, and of course Reeves-regular Andy Serkis, taking Bruce Wayne’s faithful manservant Alfred Pennyworth in an intriguing new direction as a former soldier and reserved man of action in his own right, while Paul Dano’s clearly having the time of his life as the Riddler (I also fully applaud the way they’ve fully embraced the alternative take on the character from the Hush run of the Batman comics, which finally gives this villain REAL TEETH), playing things subtle and close to the chest in his earlier appearances before he’s finally unmasked and allowed to fully unleash in typical showstopping style.  The film truly belongs, however, to our new Batman and Catwoman – Pattinson largely plays the role in quite an understated way, but it’s a performance BRIMMING with deep nuance and subtle layers, perfectly pitched to highlight this Bruce Wayne’s somewhat isolated upbringing and deep-seated underlying trauma, which manifests in his suitably awkward public image, while when he’s in the suit (which is, of course, how he spends the majority of the film) he’s quietly menacing and thoroughly ODD in the best way possible; Zoe Kravitz, on the other hand, is PERFECTLY cast as Selina Kyle, investing my very favourite comic book antihero with just the right mix of sultry, sexy fire and sass and a ferocious determination to never be owned by ANYONE, and even LOOKS perfect with her spot-on short hair, sharp claw-like nails and genuinely preternatural feline grace (yeah, I thought Anne Hathaway was fantastic and pretty definitive in The Dark Knight Rises, but Zoe has thoroughly trumped her in this).  Altogether this is an essentially perfect package that effortlessly brings the Dark Knight and his hellish Gotham City to life just as effectively as Christopher Nolan did in his seminal trilogy – the design-work is on-point throughout, the action sequences are phenomenal (that insanely awesome car chase in the rain may well be this year’s best set-piece, although there’s also an incredible fight scene, lit ONLY with machine-gun muzzle flashes, which comes impressively close), the plot twists and turns like few others I’ve seen, dropping some genuinely AMAZING rug-pulls that I TRULY did not see coming, and Michael Giacchino’s incendiary score is a MASTERCLASS in low-key dramatic brilliance.  Most importantly, though, this is the first Batman film that genuinely gets the psychology of its central character COMPLETELY RIGHT, and I truly look forward to seeing what Reeves, Craig, Pattinson and all the rest do with the already greenlit sequel when it comes (hopefully it won’t take anywhere near as long as this one did to finally reach our screens).  If it’s anywhere NEAR as good as this it’ll be GOLD …

WHENCE. IS. THAT. KNOCKING.

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“What’s done cannot be undone.” More little value studies from The Tragedy of Macbeth

Finally watched The Tragedy of Macbeth and felt the urge to make some value studies of my favorite shots