Review collection 2024-25

21 November 2024

Here is a determinedly old-fashioned drama, verbose and elaborate but also forthright and watchable in its way. It is a Stoppardian what-if meeting, imagining a bruising encounter between two celebrated historical figures who could, theoretically, have run into each other; it is adapted by director Matt Brown from a stage-play by American dramatist Mark St Germain, in turn inspired by a 2002 book by Harvard psychiatrist Armand Nicholi who had seized upon a report that Sigmund Freud met with an unnamed Oxford don just before his death. What if that don was CS Lewis, the Christian apologist who in his 1933 book The Pilgrim’s Regress had mocked atheist Freudianism and every other sort of godless trendiness? the guardian

Gabriele Salvatores has crafted a delightful film based on a treatment written in their youth by Fellini and Pinelli. They are responsible for the story of Celestina, who, a few years after the end of the war, decides to escape a life of hardship in Naples to reach New York, the promised land brimming with opportunities. The protagonist’s coming-of-age story is mirrored in the narrative style, which transitions from the neorealism of the first part to the fairy-tale quality of the second. Salvatores and the cast deliver an extraordinary performance, maintaining the film’s delicate balance between drama, comedy, and fantasy. The result is a refined elegance that avoids the saccharine or overly sentimental tones the story could have easily inspired. A significant contribution comes from the impeccable production design and the soundtrack, combining period and contemporary music, which imbues the film with a poetic lightness throughout.

“Juror #2” follows family man Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult) who, while serving as a juror in a high profile murder trial, finds himself struggling with a serious moral dilemma… one he could use to sway the jury verdict and potentially convict–or free–the accused killer (Rotten Tomatoes)

How we liked Clint as a tough guy, first in Leone’s spaghetti westerns and then as Inspector Callahan in the Dirty Harry series! Since Eastwood has moved to the other side of the camera, he has produced a series of genre films which show a sensibility, a human touch, an understanding of the human soul and its dilemmas which was at first strange, then it became a trademark of his (it seems almost impossible that he endorsed D. Trump in 2016 or that he has always been a Republican, home of the worst vulgar instincts). Juror #2 is no exception, much more than a legal thriller, a comedy of errors where truth and justice hardly meet. His final testament? hopefully not, we do need sensitive directors like Clint in these times of desolately high-tech movies.

It’s not quite an ultra-villain origin story. But nor is Iranian-Danish director Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice in any way a flattering depiction of its subject, the young(ish) Donald Trump (a horribly convincing Sebastian Stan). The film follows Trump’s early journey, starting as “Little Donnie”, the browbeaten second son of an overbearing father who scoffs that his boy “needs all the help he can get”. But, as the film tells it, the young Donald finds a second father figure in the well-connected and widely feared rightwing lawyer Roy Cohn (Succession star Jeremy Strong, bringing his trademark unblinking gimlet intensity to the performance, with chilling effect). The lessons learned from his mentor – chicanery, bluster, vanity and the need to win at all costs – shaped the Trump we know today.

It would have been easy to make Trump into a monster or a ridiculous figure of fun … But it does show a side of the former US president that, you suspect, he would prefer not to be seen. This Trump is an unexpectedly weak and malleable figure; an impressionable man who mistakes bullying for strength and views power as something to be weaponised… the fact the Donald has worked himself into a frothing, impotent rage about the film suggests that it must be doing something right… Cohn sets about moulding young Donald into a winner. He rattles off his three rules for success. No 1: attack, attack, attack. No 2: admit nothing, deny everything. No 3: always claim victory, never admit defeat… https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/oct/20/the-apprentice-review-ali-abbasi-donald-trump-roy-cohn-biopic-jeremy-strong-sebastian-stan

With his 13th film, Gabriele Muccino signs his first action thriller, following a young American woman on holiday in Italy who turns her life upside down over the course of one night.

Here Now begins like a love story under the sun of Sicily, but soon turns into an action thriller, until its very last moments. The director … for the first time measures himself against a genre high in adrenaline, in which his proverbial style of direction of actors (“Gabriele is a director who gets agitated, sweats, shouts at you”, says one of them) adds frenzy to frenzy, reaching almost extreme levels.

… the film explores the dangerous drifts of the desire for adventure and for a challenge with oneself. The protagonist is a Californian girl in her 20s, Sophie (New York actress Elena Kampouris), recovering from a great pain and who, on her last day of holiday in Italy, decides to go to the sea for a swim (we are in Palermo, in Sicily) rather than accompany her sister Rachel (Ruby Kammer), passionate about art, to visit yet another cathedral. This is the first of a long series of choices that the young woman will make over the following 24 hours, against one and all, and which will turn her life upside down. On a high rock for dizzying dives, she meets the beautiful and seductive Giulio (Saul Nanni) and his friends Komandante (Lorenzo Richelmy), Samba (Enrico Inserra) and Sprizz (Francesco Garilli), a group of boys from the area who aren’t really recommendable, but who win Sophie over with their friendliness and audacity. The girl, who has meanwhile fallen for Giulio, decides to spend her last hours in Italy with them and to live, at whatever the cost, the most adrenaline-filled night of her life – a night during which all kinds of things truly happen.

Inspired by After Hours by Martin Scorsese (“a film that has chased me for years”, declares the director), Here Now definitely keeps you glued to your seat. The at once hyper-vibrant and painful parable of this young woman is intriguing, as she continually pushes the limit of risk in order to get out of her emotional cage. It is also interesting to see how the border between good and evil, licit and illicit, can be blurred, and how it might be easier than we think to find oneself on the wrong side. With a little more sense of proportion … the film would still be good for its genre, that of the action film with a sentimental background. Muccino knows how to direct and also experiments – for this film, he used, among others, a camera prototype that immerses itself in the cockpit of a moving car and shoots the actors in 360 degrees. “It’s a film we shot with shivers on our backs”, highlights the director, “a film that doesn’t simulate adrenaline, but lives it”. And this undoubtedly can be seen on screen. https://cineuropa.org/en/newsdetail/468975/

Daniel Auteuil directs, produces, co-writes and stars in this solid, slightly plodding courtroom drama about a jaded barrister who finds himself unexpectedly emotionally connected to what should be just another ordinary case. Auteuil plays Jean Monier, the lawyer appointed to defend Nicolas Milik (Grégory Gadebois), a gentle teddy bear of a man and a loving father who has been accused of murdering his wife. The more Jean explores the case, the more he becomes convinced of his client’s innocence. https://www.screendaily.com/reviews/an-ordinary-case-cannes-review/5193908.article

Best line of the year 2023 (from the classic noir 'The Big Steal')