Summary: 9/10: Panahi's defiant meta-documentary exposes the mechanics of authoritarian control through the lens of village superstition, proving that Iran's attempt to silence one of its greatest filmmakers has only made his voice more essential.

It's a small miracle that this film exists at all. In 2010, Jafar Panahi was sentenced to six years in prison; and a 20-year ban on filmmaking, writing screenplays, and international travel by Iranian authorities for what they called "making propaganda against the system." He made films anyway, smuggling them out of Iran on USB sticks, continuing to work in defiance of a regime determined to silence him. In 2022, shortly after completing this film, he was arrested again and detained for seven months before being released following a hunger strike.

No Bears proves Panahi hasn't lost his edge; if anything, his filmmaking has sharpened with constraint. Working in a documentary style, he plays a fictionalized version of himself directing a film remotely from a rural Iranian village near the Turkish border, unable to cross because of the government's travel ban. What unfolds is a piercingly self-aware exposition on invisible borders, superstition, and the stories that maintain authoritarian control, whether religious or governmental.

The villagers warn Panahi not to walk a certain path because of bears. There haven't been bears in the area for years, maybe decades, but the belief persists, passed down from generation to generation. Without education, without anyone willing to question inherited wisdom, the imaginary becomes as powerful as the real. The path remains forbidden not because of actual danger but because everyone agrees to believe in danger that no longer exists.

Panahi's political critique is devastating. The film explores what the "primitiveness" of village life, but it's not condescension; it's recognition that these dynamics are universal. My own grandmother had superstitions that made no logical sense but governed her behavior completely. And how many of us still say "gesundheit" or "God bless you!" when someone sneezes? The difference is scale and consequence. In the village, a photograph Panahi allegedly took becomes "evidence" in a morality case against a young woman, and suddenly unconfirmed belief, or the bear that may or may not be there, has the power to destroy lives.

Panahi structures the film around two parallel stories: the film-within-the-film about a couple trying to escape Iran, and his own entanglement in village politics when his camera becomes a tool of surveillance and accusation. The boundaries between the two narratives, between fiction and documentary blur deliberately; we're never quite certain what's staged and what's real, which is precisely the point. In a country where the state controls narrative, where a filmmaker can be imprisoned for telling stories the regime doesn't like, the act of making any film becomes inherently political.

The film reminded me of something Sam Harris once said: "I don't get that — people going to war over religion. I don't know, I could see going to war over justice or democracy or even revenge. But if you're going to war over religion, now you're just killing people in an argument over who has the better imaginary friend." The villagers' insistence on invisible bears, the morality police's enforcement of arbitrary rules, the government's persecution of artists: it's all the same mechanism. Belief systems that can't withstand scrutiny require force to maintain, whether that force comes from social pressure or state violence.

Panahi's brilliance lies in connecting dots between the microcosm of village superstition to the macrocosm of authoritarian control. Both depend on unquestioned belief, both punish deviation, both create borders that exist only in collective imagination but have entirely real consequences. The filmmaker can't cross into Turkey not because of any physical barrier but because his government says he can't. The woman faces punishment for living her own life outside the villagers' imaginary borders set up to maintain control over her.

No Bears won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival; his award was accepted by two of the film's actors in his absence, the audience giving a standing ovation for a filmmaker imprisoned for refusing to stop making films.

Summary: 9/10: thrilling, funny, emotionally resonant sci-fi that uses its high concept to ask essential questions about cooperation, sacrifice, and whether we can save ourselves before it's too late.

I hadn't read Andy Weir's award-winning novel before seeing the film, so I wouldn't be disappointed by the adaptation. And I wasn't. The Lord-Miller team, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, made this an exciting and rewarding sci-fi film that captures Weir's science-heavy problem-solving while never losing sight of its emotional core.

Ryan Gosling totally nailed the sardonic scientist, insisting on playing someone not good at being in space, someone who flips out and feels clumsy in zero gravity. His character arc, from isolated problem-solver to someone capable of profound emotional connection with Rocky, a sentient rock-shaped alien, is beautifully rendered. Gosling brings vulnerability and humor to a role that could have been purely cerebral, making Grace's transformation genuinely moving.

The premise of the film carries urgent relevance: we humans can survive only within a rather narrow temperature range. Project Hail Mary presents a cooling scenario, but the existential threat is the same whether we cool or overheat through global warming. The astrophage consuming the sun's energy becomes a metaphor for the forces draining our planet's capacity to sustain life.

According to a study published in Nature, almost two-thirds of global warming is caused by the wealthiest 10% of the world. Our time is running out, and this film functions as a call to action: we need many heroes like Grace and Rocky to step up and wrestle our future from the wealthy capitalists, monopolists, "kings," dictators, and other "astrophages" consuming resources without regard for collective survival.

Lord and Miller, working from Drew Goddard's screenplay, balance the novel's technical problem-solving with genuine humor and heart. The film understands that science fiction at its best isn't just about solving equations; it's about what we're willing to risk, who we're willing to become, to save each other.

Sunset Boulevard, 10/10

Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard is a masterpiece of black comedy and savage Hollywood critique, a film so dark and so funny that it becomes something singular. Everything about it is wonderful: the performances, the direction, the audacity of its premise, the cruelty of its vision. It's a film about delusion and exploitation, about an industry that devours its own, and it tells that story with a viciousness that never stops being entertaining. Seventy-five years later, it remains one of the greatest films ever made about the movies, and one of the finest examples of how merciless art can be when it's done right.

Joe Gillis (William Holden) is a struggling screenwriter, broke and desperate, fleeing repo men when he stumbles into the decaying Sunset Boulevard mansion of Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), a former silent film star who has retreated into total delusion. She believes she's still a star, that the world is waiting for her return, that the studio will call any day. Joe becomes her kept man, hired to polish a deranged screenplay for her nonexistent comeback. Her devoted butler, Max (Erich von Stroheim), enables every fantasy. The film's structure is audacious: Joe narrates the end of the film even after his dead body is removed from the scene, a voice from beyond the grave that somehow makes perfect sense in a film this extreme.

Gloria Swanson's performance is radical. She expresses everything through her face and eyes, exactly as a silent film star would, because that's what she was. Wilder cast her knowing the meta-commentary would be inescapable: Swanson, largely washed up by 1950, playing a woman destroyed by Hollywood's indifference to aging stars. The role could have been camp, could have been pitiful, but Swanson plays it with total commitment and a kind of fierce intelligence. She knows Norma is ridiculous, but she never condescends to her. Norma's gestures are theatrical, overwrought, absurd; she moves through the world as if cameras are always watching, and Swanson makes that both hilarious and heartbreaking. The way she uses her eyes and face in "real life" is a performance within a performance, a woman who can no longer distinguish between being and acting.

Norma's final descent into total delusion is both inevitable and mesmerizing. We see it coming from the first frame, but Swanson's execution is so brilliant that the ending still lands with devastating force. When she believes the newsreel cameras have arrived for her comeback and delivers her most famous line — "All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up" — it's tragic, grotesque, and somehow triumphant. She's completely mad, and she's finally getting what she wanted: the cameras are rolling, and she's the star again.

In a lesser film, the narration device would feel gimmicky, but Sunset Boulevard is so darkly comic, so heightened in its gothic intensity, that the impossible perspective works. The film has already asked us to accept a world where Hollywood's cruelty is so complete it becomes operatic, where a silent film queen lives in a mausoleum of her former glory. The voice-over is just one more layer of stylization in a film that understands style is inseparable from meaning.

Wilder's direction is merciless. He films Norma's mansion like a tomb, all shadows and decay, the grandeur rotting from the inside. The script, co-written with Charles Brackett and D.M. Marshman Jr., is venomous and precise, every line a little knife. The film skewers Hollywood's obsession with youth, its disposability of talent, its hollow worship of fame. But it's also funny, wickedly so, because the tragedy is so predictable and the savagery so unrelenting. We know Joe is doomed the moment he walks into that house, and watching him try to escape while sinking deeper is both pathetic and perversely entertaining.

Sunset Boulevard is a film that understands Hollywood better than Hollywood understands itself. It sees through the glamour to the rot underneath, and it presents that rot with a kind of glee. It's a Gothic horror story, a noir, a black comedy, a tragedy, and somehow all of these at once. Swanson's performance alone would make it essential, but everything here is working at the highest level: Holden's cynical narration, von Stroheim's mournful dignity, Wilder's unsparing intelligence. This is filmmaking as autopsy, cutting open an industry to show what's really inside. And it's glorious.

Atonement (2007)

Directed by Joe Wright

The story is powerful and emotional, based on Ian McEwan's novel about a single catastrophic lie and its decades-long consequences. The screen adaptation by Christopher Hampton is as strong as, or stronger than, the source material. This is an incredible, maybe perfect, screenplay brought to life by Joe Wright with a visual style that's utterly unique. Wright doesn't just film the story; he creates a cinematic language for it, using long takes, precise compositions, and that extraordinary Dunkirk tracking shot that moves through chaos with impossible grace.

The continuity of the three actors who played the aging Briony, from Saoirse Ronan as the precocious child who tells the lie, to Romola Garai as the young woman seeking redemption through nursing, to Dame Vanessa Redgrave as the elderly novelist still wrestling with her past, was astonishing. You believe completely that you're watching the same person at different stages of life, carrying the same guilt, the same need for atonement that can never quite be achieved. This is a huge accomplishment of Joe Wright's direction, and of course of the three actors who inhabited the role with such precision that the transitions feel seamless.

The film takes place within a period when the meaning of class has begun to erode and evolve. Robbie (James McAvoy) is the housemaid's son, educated by the Tallis family, loving Cecilia (Keira Knightley) across a class divide that's starting to crack but hasn't broken. World War II accelerates that dissolution; the old order is dying, but it still has enough power to destroy lives. Briony's lie works because the authorities want to believe it, because a working-class man accused of assaulting an upper-class girl fits their worldview too perfectly to question.

What haunts about Atonement is the recognition that some things cannot be undone, that guilt carried for a lifetime doesn't necessarily lead to redemption. Wright crafted a film that understands this with devastating clarity, refusing easy absolution or false comfort. It's a masterpiece, one of the finest literary adaptations ever filmed.

10/10

The People's Joker (2022)

Directed by Vera Drew

Vera Drew's The People's Joker is creatively brilliant with a moving narrative, and she proves you don't need a multimillion-dollar Hollywood budget to make an awesome film. Shot in five days for $25,000, with an army of volunteer animators and visual effects artists recruited through Drew's YouTube show, this DIY trans coming-of-age story wrapped in a Batman parody has more invention, heart, and genuine risk than anything Marvel or DC has produced in the last decade.

Drew plays Joker the Harlequin, telling an autobiographical story about growing up trans in the Midwest, coming to Gotham to pursue comedy, and discovering her identity through the worst relationship of her life with a character who looks suspiciously like Jared Leto's Joker. If I have any complaint, it's that the film is paced a tad too fast to catch all the nuances. But to be completely fair, I haven't watched one of those Hollywood, non-creative, comic book movies in many years, so was maybe contextually disadvantaged. Drew crams so much visual information, so many references, so many layers of meaning into every frame that you could watch it three times and still find new details.

The "anti-comedy" warehouse is hilarious, especially on a meta level. Joker performs in an underground space with other Batman villains doing edgy comedy in a world where laughter has been outlawed by the United Clown Bureau, a vicious parody of SNL and the Upright Citizens Brigade. The fact that Drew made this film on lunch money is itself meta anti-comedy. The People's Joker is an anti-superhero film, featuring queer and trans friends, anti-establishment in every frame. This is the revolution, not metaphorically but literally. This is what it looks like when artists seize the means of production from corporate overlords and make something that actually matters.

With the exception of maybe Deadpool, The People's Joker is the best superhero movie of this century. It's the only one that understands what Grant Morrison wrote 35 years ago: that the Joker possesses "super-sanity," an ability to perceive reality more clearly than the rest of us precisely because the character refuses to accept the world's absurdities as normal. Drew's Joker is super-sane in a world gone mad, and her refusal to conform, to be palatable, to apologize for existing is what makes her heroic.

The People's Joker made its debut in 2022 at the prestigious Toronto International Film Festival. It was a wildly successful screening, and then was forced off the roster by a message from Warner Brothers that it had violated its copyrights, kind of like a false DMCA takedown enabled by the corrupt politi-puppets of the capitalist infrastructure. The mere fact that a Warner Bros. CEO, who was paid $165 million in 2025, attempted to frighten a young creative filmmaker with a bogus copyright claim, knowing full well that parody has been protected since the Supreme Court case of Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., is probably a good reason for movie pirates to target Warner Brothers films. Not that I'm advocating that.

Fortunately for us, Drew persevered, found distribution through Altered Innocence, and got the film released. Corporate intimidation failed. The movie exists. And it's magnificent. 9/10

Seven Psychopaths (2012)

Directed by Martin McDonagh

This is pure fun, a twisted crime comedy with an all-star cast firing on all cylinders. Colin Farrell plays a struggling screenwriter named Marty trying to finish his script "Seven Psychopaths" while his friends Billy (Sam Rockwell) and Hans (Christopher Walken) run a dog-kidnapping scheme that goes sideways when they steal a gangster's (Woody Harrelson) beloved Shih Tzu. The plot is twisted in more ways than one, folding back on itself as the real-life chaos becomes material for Marty's screenplay.

The meta angle works here. McDonagh plays with the conventions of violent crime films while making one, commenting on the genre while delivering exactly what the genre promises: sharp dialogue, gleeful violence, eccentric characters. It's Tarantino viewed through the British dry humor lens, all the blood and wit but with that sardonic distance that keeps it from taking itself too seriously.

The cast is phenomenal. Rockwell is manic energy, Walken brings his particular brand of calm menace and unexpected tenderness, Harrelson is perfectly unhinged, and Tom Waits shows up because of course he does. Farrell grounds the chaos, playing the one sane person trying to make sense of the madness while realizing he's complicit in creating it.

This is a film that knows exactly what it is and enjoys every minute of it.

my rating 7/10

The Prince of Egypt (1998)

Directed by Brenda Chapman, Steve Hickner, and Simon Wells

The animation in The Prince of Egypt, considering it was last century, was quite amazing and luscious. DreamWorks created something visually stunning, epic in scope, using the medium to capture the grandeur of ancient Egypt and the intimacy of Moses' journey. The all-star cast of voices was impressive: Val Kilmer as Moses, Ralph Fiennes as Rameses, with Michelle Pfeiffer, Sandra Bullock, Jeff Goldblum, Danny Glover, Patrick Stewart, and Helen Mirren rounding out the ensemble. They brought weight and humanity to characters that could have been flat archetypes.

But never mind the religious context. This is a currently relevant story about resistance against a despot. According to David Graeber and David Wengrow, authors of The Dawn of Everything, just moving away is the first primary freedom of humankind, and one we seem to have been remiss in holding onto. They write:

"Over the course of these chapters we have instead talked about basic forms of social liberty which one might actually put into practice: (1) the freedom to move away or relocate from one's surroundings; (2) the freedom to ignore or disobey commands issued by others; and (3) the freedom to shape entirely new social realities, or shift back and forth between different ones."

The Exodus story is the archetypal narrative of that first freedom. A people enslaved by authoritarianism choosing to leave, to relocate from conditions of oppression, to refuse the system that claims ownership over their bodies and lives. Moses leading the Hebrews out of Egypt is not just a religious parable; it's a political act, the assertion that no despot has the right to prevent people from leaving. That freedom, to move away, remains under assault everywhere: borders, walls, immigration restrictions, all designed to trap people in places where they can be controlled and exploited.

The Prince of Egypt reminds us that sometimes the most radical act of revolution is simply refusing to stay.

The Room Next Door (2024)

Directed by Pedro Almodóvar

This may be the first Pedro Almodóvar film that really disappointed me. Not because it's badly made, Almodóvar doesn't know how to make an ugly film, and The Room Next Door has his usual rich visuals, the gorgeous color palette, the meticulous design. But on the whole, it lacked the probing emotional intensity we associate with him. For a director who built his reputation on raw feeling, on characters whose emotions spill out messy and uncontained, this felt restrained to the point of distance.

The film follows Ingrid (Julianne Moore) and Martha (Tilda Swinton), two friends who reconnect after years apart when Martha, dying of cancer, asks Ingrid to stay in the room next door while she chooses to end her life. It's Almodóvar's first English-language feature, based on Sigrid Nunez's novel What Are You Going Through, and it tackles a subject that cinema has explored with more urgency elsewhere: La Mar Dentro with Javier Bardem's brilliant portrayal, Amour (2012), The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, even Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby which dropped this question into its finale. All of those films had something this one doesn't: they made you feel the weight of the choice, the desperation or the clarity or the love that drives someone to choose death over continued suffering.

Moore and Swinton were quite beyond incredible in their portrayals. They bring intelligence, nuance, and a deep understanding of these women to every scene. The problem isn't the performances; it's that the film around them never quite matches their commitment. Almodóvar seems more interested in surfaces than depths here, more concerned with how things look than how they feel.

I suspect that since baby boomers are now approaching the age of these questions, we might see a few more films exploring dying with dignity. That's not a bad thing; these conversations need to happen. But when Almodóvar, of all directors, makes a film about death and friendship that feels emotionally muted, something has gone wrong. This is a beautiful film that kept me at arm's length when I wanted to be devastated.

THOSE WHO REMAINED (2019) Director: Barnabás Tóth

Just when I think I've seen so many Holocaust films that nothing in that realm will impress me, Hungarian director Barnabás Tóth brings me Those Who Remained. I think I used an entire box of kleenex.

Tóth deserves all the awards he received and more he should've received. This is a brilliant film on many levels. His sense of color and tone are perfect, subdued and careful, never overwhelming the quiet devastation at the film's center. His timing is impeccable, knowing when to hold on a face, when to let silence do the work, when to allow small gestures to carry enormous weight. He makes post-war Hungary feel very close, not as historical distance but as immediate, lived reality.

The film follows two people: a middle-aged doctor and a teenage girl, both Holocaust survivors. When we think of PTSD, we think of soldiers who were in Vietnam, or Iraq, for example. But the two lead characters in Those Who Remained suffer PTSD from the trauma of having their entire families ripped out of their lives. None of us can even begin to imagine the horror. And yet, this kind of thing happens still in the world — families destroyed, children orphaned, survivors left to navigate grief so profound it has no language.

Were they in love? You've heard of Freud's transference, no doubt. There is another aspect of therapy that few talk about. For the best therapists, it is an act of love, and more often than not, it costs them a piece of their heart. I had such a therapist who admitted this to me, that he understood he couldn't continue for too long. The work of truly seeing another person's pain, of holding space for their healing, requires giving something of yourself that cannot be replaced.

What these two characters have is a kind of therapeutic relationship. The older man gives more because he can, because his age and his profession have taught him how to hold suffering without collapsing under it. But in return, the girl helps him too. She gives him purpose, a reason to stay present, someone to care for when caring feels impossible. They save each other, not through romance but through the simple, radical act of remaining in each other's lives when everyone else they loved is gone.

The performances are extraordinary, conveying volumes of loss through glances and hesitations. Tóth directs them with such restraint that we feel we're witnessing something private, something sacred. This is not a film about grand gestures or cathartic breakthroughs. It's about two people learning, slowly and painfully, that survival is possible even when you're certain it shouldn't be.

Those Who Remained belongs in the company of the great historical memory films, the ones that refuse to let genocide become abstract or distant. It reminds us that the horror doesn't end when the camps are liberated, that the work of surviving continues for decades, that trauma rewrites you in ways you can never fully undo. And it shows us, with immense tenderness, that connection is still possible even in the ruins; that love, not romantic but human, human love, can be the thing that keeps us tethered to life when everything else has been taken away.

Get Low (2009)

Directed by Aaron Schneider

*[maybe some spoilers] * Felix Bush, the hermit at the center of Get Low, has lived alone in the Tennessee woods for forty years, avoiding and avoided by townspeople, the subject of rumors and whispered stories. When he emerges to plan his own funeral party while he's still alive so he can hear what people say about him, it seems like the eccentric act of a crazy character. But this is a psychological mystery and drama about something deeper, something most people recognize even if they've never heard the term: the painbody.

The painbody is Eckhart Tolle's concept for accumulated emotional pain, the unresolved trauma and guilt that lives in us, often dormant but never gone, waiting to be triggered. When we refuse to face it, when we carry shame or grief or regret for years without release, it calcifies into something that controls us without approval, shapes our lives, isolates us from true connection. Felix Bush holds onto his painbody. He has carried a secret for forty years, a guilt so profound that he exiled himself from human community, living alone with his painbody because he believed he deserved nothing else.

Without understanding this deeper level, the film is just an oddity. With it, Get Low becomes a story about what it takes to release what has been destroying us from within. Even if audiences never heard Eckhart Tolle's explanation, the story resonates with the subconscious because we all know what it means to carry something we can't put down, to live with a version of ourselves we can't forgive.

Robert Duvall brings a high-level performance that is nuanced and balanced, never playing Felix as simply crazy or pitiable. You see the man beneath the painbody, the person he might have been if one terrible night hadn't defined the rest of his life. This is a perfect performance for a last curtain, though thankfully it wasn't Duvall's last. He shows us Felix's isolation not as misanthropy but as penance, his gruff exterior as armor against a world he no longer believes he deserves to inhabit.

The living funeral is an act of closure and release. Felix needs witnesses. He needs to tell the truth publicly, to confess what he's carried alone, to be seen in his shame and guilt and to discover whether the community will condemn him or offer him something he hasn't given himself: forgiveness. You can't release a painbody in isolation; it requires being witnessed, speaking the unspeakable, allowing others to share the weight that you've been holding alone. The funeral party becomes a ritual, a final unburdening before death, the chance to die having told the truth.

Bill Murray is cast perfectly as the funeral director who makes this strange request possible, bringing his particular blend of weariness and dry humor to a man who sees an opportunity but comes to understand he's participating in something sacred. Sissy Spacek and Lucas Black are naturally superb in their roles, grounding the story in genuine human connection.

Get Low works because it understands that we are all, in some way, carrying pain we haven't released, stories we haven't told, versions of ourselves we've exiled into the woods of our psyche. Felix Bush's living funeral is what most of us never get: the chance to speak our truth, to be witnessed in our brokenness, and to discover that confession and release are possible even after forty years of self-imposed exile.

That's why the film resonates. That's why it's more than an oddity. It's a story about how we survive what we've done, and how we finally, if we're brave enough and fearless enough, find our way back to our true selves.

Morvern Callar (2002)

Directed by Lynne Ramsay

This isn't a movie about some girl who needs to be in a relationship, or who just wants to party. This is a movie about grief. Trust me when I say that no two people in this world of eight billion will handle grief in exactly the same way. Even in one's lifetime, a single person can handle grief in many different ways, depending on the loss, the circumstances, where they are in their life when it happens.

What Lynne Ramsay offers here is an absolutely brilliant portrait of one person's grief. Morvern wakes on Christmas morning to find her boyfriend has committed suicide, leaving behind a completed novel and instructions for its publication. What she does next - claiming the manuscript as her own, taking his money, disappearing to Spain with her friend - will strike some viewers as callous or opportunistic. But that reading misses everything Ramsay is doing. This is suicide loss, and Morvern is trying to survive it in the only ways she knows how, and without outside help.

Everything in this film works in service of that grief. Ramsay's choice of shots, from the opening overhead view of Morvern lying next to her boyfriend's body to the vast ocean, the crowded village, the confusing mountains, all locate Morvern in spaces that mirror her internal state: trapped, overwhelmed, lost, searching for something she can't name. The amazing eclectic soundtrack moves between abrasive noise and unexpected beauty, reflecting how grief distorts everything, makes the familiar strange. Lucia Zucchetti's editing has a sense of timing that understands when to linger and when to cut, when silence is unbearable and when it's the only bearable thing.

Samantha Morton is brilliant as someone experiencing suicide loss. Watching her move through all her personal emotions and thoughts was magnetic; I couldn't take my eyes off her. Each stage, from her trying to internalize and accept the truth, to denial through attempted partying, seeking noise and then seeking silence, each attempt was so visible in her acting and demeanor. She doesn't cry on cue or deliver monologues about how she feels. She just is, moving through the days, trying on different versions of coping like ill-fitting clothes, none of them quite working. It's as though she has been through this process herself, or understood it so deeply that the performance bypasses acting and becomes embodiment.

The film is a masterclass in grief. It doesn't tell you how you're supposed to grieve or judge Morvern for grieving "wrong." It simply watches, with enormous compassion and formal rigor, as one person tries to figure out how to keep living when someone she loved chose not to. That's brave filmmaking. That's brave acting. It's why Morvern Callar endures as one of the most honest depictions of processing loss in contemporary cinema. It cements Lynne Ramsay as one of the finest creators of contemporary film.

The Nightingale (2018) -Directed by Jennifer Kent (Babadook)

Jennifer Kent's The Nightingale is a cold, hard look at colonialism, unflinching in its depiction of the brutality that empires are built upon. Set in 1825 Tasmania, it follows ClareAisling Franciosi), a young Irish convict, and Billy (Baykali Ganambarr), an Aboriginal tracker, through the wilderness as they pursue a British officer who has committed unspeakable atrocities. This is not entertainment; this is witness, testimony, a reckoning with historical crimes that we would prefer to forget. (Warning: the film itself is very difficult to sit through.)

Kent has produced an incredible piece of cinema here, one that sits alongside the great historical memory films like Schindler's List, I'm Still Here, Parallel Mothers, and There Is No Evil that refuse to let us look away from what was done in our names or in the names of our ancestors. The brutality and violence are hard to watch, almost unbearable at moments, but they are likely historically correct and perhaps even understated. Kent doesn't sensationalize; she documents. This historical memory needed to be unearthed, and I find her woman-perspective on this history refreshing, essential even.

The timing could not be more relevant. In our current world of Russia, USA, and China, we are watching authoritarianism resurge, watching strongmen deploy the same logics of domination and dehumanization that powered colonial expansion. I would add Netanyahu to that list of modern autocrats, though I suspect the original culprit is this same British Empire for failing to provide a place for Palestinians after World War II. The colonial mindset, the conviction that some lives matter and others are disposable, that some people are fully human and others are obstacles, this hasn't disappeared. It has merely found new expressions, new justifications, new victims.

Aisling Franciosi and Baykali Ganambarr especially deliver amazing performances. Franciosi carries rage and grief in every frame, her Clare both victim and avenger, never allowing us the comfort of simple heroism. Ganambarr's Billy is quietly devastating, a man navigating impossible choices in a world designed to destroy him and his people. The relationship that develops between them, born of parallel oppressions and shared trauma, becomes the film's moral center. These are two people the British Empire considers subhuman, finding humanity in each other while surrounded by systematic inhumanity.

There is no slack in this film. I have only praise. Kent, the leads, and all the supporting cast were perfect. Sam Claflin's British officer is terrifying precisely because he believes completely in his own superiority, in his right to take what he wants and destroy what resists. He is the empire personified, and his casual cruelty is more horrifying than any monster because men like him actually existed, actually did these things, actually built the world we inherit.

The Nightingale is an important film, perhaps a necessary one. It reminds us that historical memory is not about dwelling in the past but understanding how the past shaped the present, how colonial violence created structures of oppression that persist. People tell you exactly who they are right up front; empires do the same. We just aren't listening. Kent makes us listen, and what we see haunts us. That is her gift as a filmmaker.

Score 10/10

(revisiting Robin Williams catalog)

Mike Nichols' The Birdcage is the American remake of La Cage aux Folles, with Robin Williams and Nathan Lane as a gay couple running a drag club in South Beach. When Williams' son brings home his fiancée whose parents happen to be ultra-conservative politicians (Gene Hackman and Dianne Wiest), the setup becomes a classic farce: can this flamboyant household pass for "normal" long enough to survive one dinner?

Williams and Lane absolutely kick it. Both are tremendous actors and comedians, and both turn in top performances here. Williams plays the relative straight man, grounded and capable, while Lane unleashes controlled chaos as Albert, the club's star performer who can't quite hide his true self no matter how hard he tries. Their chemistry is genuine; beneath all the comedy is a portrait of a long-term partnership built on real love and affection. This is Mike Nichols at the height of his powers as both stage and film director in the '90s, and The Birdcage is his prize, a perfectly calibrated comedy that never sacrifices humanity for laughs.

This is one of the early gay films that treats its characters with affection rather than as punchlines. Yes, there's comedy in Albert's dramatics and the elaborate charade everyone must maintain, but the joke is never on their queerness; it's on hypocrisy, on the absurdity of having to hide, on conservative politicians who preach family values while embodying none. Hank Azaria's Agador adds another layer of inspired lunacy as the housekeeper who can't quite master "masculine" domesticity.

It's funny, or perhaps very sad, how the politics in this film haven't aged. The right-wing moral panic, the performance of traditional values by people who traffic in cruelty, the idea that certain families are acceptable and others must hide to survive—we're still fighting these battles nearly three decades later. What was satire then feels like documentary now.

But The Birdcage endures because humor and humanity are so important, especially when they're deployed together. Nichols understood that comedy can be generous, that laughter doesn't require cruelty, that the best farce reveals truth while making us smile. Williams and Lane deliver performances that are both hilarious and heartfelt, reminding us why both were masters of their craft.

This one holds up beautifully.

Pedro Almodóvar has always had something to say, but "Parallel Mothers" may be his most ambitious statement to date. This is a film that operates on multiple registers simultaneously: a motherhood story wrapped inside a love triangle wrapped inside a political warning so urgent it reverberates far beyond Spain's borders.

The story of mothers and babies here is no mere melodrama. It's a direct metaphor for the mothers whose children were "disappeared" under Franco's fascist regime, stolen and never returned, their fates buried in unmarked graves that Spain has been reluctant to excavate. Almodóvar understands that allowing a fascist government is not without future consequences. Failing to understand history will doom your children and grandchildren to a future you would never want for them. This is a clear warning for the USA to rise up against fascism, and equally for France, the UK, and other Western democracies flirting with authoritarianism. Spain is not the only country haunted by this "Memory." Patricio Guzmán's "Nostalgia for the Light" (2010) explored similar terrain in Chile, documenting how Pinochet's "disappeared" continue to shape generations.

Visually, Almodóvar remains a master. His signature bold colors, meticulous compositions, and sumptuous production design create a world that feels both heightened and achingly real. Penélope Cruz delivers phenomenal character work as Janis, embodying the film's complex relationships with nuance and grace. Milena Smit matches her step for step as Ana, rising to Cruz's level with a performance that feels both raw and deeply considered. Every collaboration between Almodóvar and Cruz has been exceptional, and this may be their finest.

But perhaps what's most remarkable is how "Parallel Mothers" brings Almodóvar's early work, "The Law of Desire," full circle. This is a treatise on the fluidity and limitlessness of love and desire. Humans are not truly binary, not male or female in rigid categories. The world is a large family, and acceptance, Almodóvar argues, is the only answer. Love, in all its forms, is what survives when political systems crumble and history tries to bury the truth.

"Parallel Mothers" doesn't just ask us to remember. Every "disappeared" person was some mother's baby. The film is a call to action before memory becomes the only inheritance we leave behind.

-- Seen it? Comments?

There's a particular discomfort in discovering, after decades of historical education and over a hundred Holocaust-related films, that significant chapters of atrocity have remained invisible to me. "Dara of Jasenovac" delivers precisely this uncomfortable revelation, chronicling horrors at Croatia's Jasenovac concentration camp - a genocide I had never encountered in history books or cinema.

Predrag Antonijevic's unflinching film follows ten-year-old Dara through what was sometimes called "the Auschwitz of the Balkans", where the fascist Ustase regime murdered primarily Serbs, but also Jews, Roma, and political dissidents. That such a significant murder camp could remain relatively unknown in the Western conscious speaks to the politics of historical memory. What distinguishes this story is not just its focus on a lesser-known atrocity, but its disturbing examination of Croatia's independent enthusiasm for mass murder, without direct Nazi management.

"Dara of Jasenovac" functions as both historical correction and cold mirror. The film's most devastating insight is not historical but philosophical. Through Dara's eyes, we witness the seamless transformation of ordinary people into monsters. Unlike the bureaucratic, industrialized killing of Nazi death camps, Jasenovac reveals something more primal - the apparent eagerness with which humans will torture and murder their neighbors when given permission by authority.

The film's power comes largely from its uncompromising realism. Antonijevic's direction, the haunting cinematography, meticulously detailed sets, and the extraordinarily naturalistic performances - especially from Biljana Cekic as Dara - create an immersive historical world that feels horrifyingly authentic. Cekic's performance is remarkable for its restraint; her watchful eyes become our lens into this nightmare.

This movie raises the questions "How could this specific atrocity be forgotten?", and the more significant "What within human nature makes such cruelty possible?" Both these questions are terribly uncomfortable. The latter even more terrifying in the light of the rise of fascist power in the United States. That humans so readily inflict suffering on one another when ideologically sanctioned, casts the lens on the darkest side of our human nature.

"Dara of Jasenovac" is difficult, necessary cinema that reminds us that the phrase "never again" remains hollow so long as significant chapters of atrocity remain unacknowledged and the human capacity for cruelty remains unexamined.