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Bruno Dumont's France

Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time

This has had the longest gestation period of any documentary that I can think of, with filming beginning intermittently around 1982 and it being announced as having an impending release around 2005. I'm definitely interested, although it looks a bit conventional and very similar to a lot of current documentaries, particularly with sequences of Vonnegut's artwork being animated. I worry that too much of the focus will be on Weide himself rather than Vonnegut's impact, too.

Roland Emmerich scales things back a little from his usual disaster movies with Moonfall, which seems to be channeling Local58 or Hellstar Remina (though I am crossing my fingers for a modern day remake of Moontrap!)

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, aka the meta-movie that stars Nicolas Cage as Nicolas Cage

Benediction, the latest film by Terence Davies, based on the life of First World War poet Siegfried Sassoon.

Really looking forward to the Terence Davies fil[url]m. The Deep Blue Sea, Sunset Song, and A Quiet Passion were all extraordinary. Dude's on a hot streak.

I also saw the trailer for The Northman in IMAX when I went to see The Batman last night. I loved The Witch (which might be my favorite horror movie of the 2010s) but had some issues with The Lighthouse, which struck me as an attempt to marry the surrealism of David Lynch with the economy of Guy Maddin. But this new one looks really interesting. And the trailer looked lovely on the big screen.

Vortex, the latest film by Gaspar Noé, featuring Dario Argento in an acting role.

As with The Father recently, this looks amazing but also like it is going to hit too uncomfortably close to home for me as someone who recently lost their father to dementia (among other more pressing diagnoses that went somewhat unaddressed), and almost their family home entirely, to be able to fairly assess it. The last couple of years have given me a perhaps controversial take on dementia diagnoses, which is that in itself dementia is scary but perhaps should not be seen as an entirely horrific thing (more perhaps a way for a dying person, consciously or unconsciously, to slowly divest themselves of their worldly cares and concerns in preparation for the end) but is made horrific when outside forces - either family or in my case a tag team of wider family members and social care organisations - use such a diagnosis as a way of imposing their own demands onto the process because they can in some ways get away with that imposition in the face of the blank (or at best gnomic) statements of the person being cared for suggesting a need to step in. At the moment in films I think we might still be at the "dementia is a terrible experience to subjectively have happen" stage at the moment (which of course is a valid and worthwhile approach to take as well), rather than sketching in the wider horror of it all, so I will be curious as to Noé's take on this.

At the very least my usual criticism of something like Enter The Void being something that "we get the point of in the first five minutes and then have to spend the next two hours labouriously covering the same ground over and over before reaching an inevitable conclusion" could perhaps make a detailed process of slipping into dementia with nothing those surrounding the main character being able to do to counter the growing black hole in the centre of their lives and eating everything away from them as well, the perfect one for his sometimes exhaustingly drawn out, inescapably futile approach to storytelling!

Riley Stearns’ Dual

Dean Fliescher-Camp’s Marcel the Shell with Shoes On

DarkImbecile wrote: Mon May 23, 2022 1:59 pm Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One

Now that's an exciting trailer! Looks incredible

João Pedro Rodrigues' musical comedy Will-o'-the-Wisp, premiering at Cannes tomorrow