Watching

The boxy aspect ratio squeezes the Alps into a portrait shape, which makes the peaks feel tall rather than wide. It also means the landscape never quite escapes the two men at the centre of it. All perfectly fine stylistic choices yet I still spent the first twenty minutes wishing someone would open the curtains.

Narratively it’s straightforward, and there’s no reward in coming for the plot. Two boys meet in Grana; one leaves, one stays; they build a house together decades later. Directors Van Groeningen and Vandermeersch let it run to 147 minutes and not all of that is essential. The Nepal digressions are interesting but you could skip one and lose nothing. What accumulates instead is a study of class and social mobility working itself out inside a friendship: Pietro’s family can afford to consider adopting Bruno, and that offer is the wound the rest of the film and their friendship circles.

The two of them see the world in completely incompatible ways and understand each other perfectly, which is a harder thing to dramatise than it sounds, and the leads Marinelli and Borghi do it mostly in silences. It builds to something genuinely affecting and it looks utterly beautiful.

Third in the summer’s John Cusack rotation, and the first where he’s actively running the con rather than absorbing someone else’s. Nick Easter arrives with the whole thing planned, and the fun is watching him work rather than watching him decide.

Which makes him the odd one out. David Shayne in Bullets Over Broadway trades his principles away a concession at a time. Buck Weaver in Eight Men Out is ruined for a compromise he never actually made, done for standing in the room. Even Martin Blank, who at least chose his profession, spends Grosse Pointe Blank trying to reverse out of it. (Incidentally: one of my favourite films. Cannot wait to rewatch it.) Here, Easter is the one who got there first, and knew what he was doing when he did.

The film belongs to the excellent Hackman. Rankin Fitch (a name that simply screams “Grisham adaptation”) with his wall of monitors is doing what Cusack usually does: playing it straight while everything around him gets sillier. And, of course, the plot gets sillier by the minute.

Hoffman, sharing a screen with Hackman for the first time in their careers, is somehow given nothing to do. I’ve seen this film before but had very little memory of it, and I suspect that will be the case again should I ever press play once more.

In the early '90s I read Super Play, a Super Nintendo magazine whose staff were unusually well versed in Japanese culture and the parts of it that bled into gaming: anime, manga. Helen McCarthy’s reporting and Wil Overton’s artwork did a lot of the teaching. That’s how I came to the likes of Akira, Fist of the North Star and Golgo 13 fairly young, and how I knew something about what Akira was supposed to mean before I’d managed to see it.

When I finally got a VHS copy of Akira through a subscription offer, it didn’t change my life. I think I found it hard going. What I couldn’t place at that age was Japan’s post-war relationship with technology, and its recurring critique of the abuse of it: nuclear power and weapons, biotech, the running conclusion that humans make irresponsible stewards. As the only nation to have been hit with nuclear weapons, Japan is uniquely placed to warn against reckless use of dangerous things, and by now that warning has practically settled into its folklore. Like Godzilla before it, Akira is folklore of that kind, which is why it survives the specifics of its plot.

Thirty-odd years on, and that reading is obvious. I’ve caught the film once or twice in between, but only now do I see it whole. It’s more violent than I remembered, though I’m a father these days and softer on that sort of thing. The hand-drawn animation has aged into something remarkable, and a good deal more likeable than the computerised work that’s followed it.

The one place its influence never properly landed is the medium that introduced me to it. Akira never got the game adaptation it deserved: an apparently duff Famicom title that never left Japan, and a Super Famicom version I remember Super Play trailing as in-the-works, which came to nothing. The film shaped Cyberpunk 2077 and the genre around it instead. The magazine got me there; the games it covered never quite followed.

That scandal that Field of Dreams turned into myth, this time told straight. Where the other film lets Shoeless Joe walk out of the corn to be forgiven, this one keeps things factual: how the 1919 White Sox actually threw the World Series, and how they were ruined for it.

Another film I’m mostly watching for John Cusack. Here he plays Buck Weaver, the one who knew the plan, stayed quiet and took nothing. And who still paid the same price as the men who sold out. Not the same as his other characters’ moral slides: here a decent man is ruined for being in the same room. You want him to escape it all and you know he won’t.

Incidentally Strathairn and Sweeney are both good here. Actors you wish the industry had handed bigger careers.

Segel and Weaving are clearly having the time of their lives, trading insults with the ease of a couple who’ve had years to sharpen them. The best running gag is physical: injuries accrue and stay, so by the closing stretch Segel genuinely looks like a man who’s been through everything the film has put him through. War of the Roses crossed with cartoon splatter, and mostly a delight. Less charming is the mid-film swerve into a rape threat played for tension. It doesn’t land, and the film would lose nothing without it. Plenty of fun regardless.

Cusack, in the Allen role, plays David Shayne, a playwright certain of his own genius, and spends the film discovering he isn’t the best writer in the room. That honour goes to Palminteri’s mobster bodyguard, who keeps improving the script from the wings. Cusack plays the straight man to all the noise and never begs for sympathy.

Playing moral compromise is something Cusack has always been good at. Shayne trades his principles one small concession at a time, and Cusack maps that slide without softening it or asking you to forgive him. It foreshadows the negotiated conscience he’d later bring to Grosse Pointe Blank.

Mixed feelings about Woody Allen, clearly, but this is one of my favourites of his.

Gosling carries this, as he often does. He’s the only human on screen for big stretches and never less than watchable, which the film asks a lot of. Rocky is the other triumph: from what I read, it’s roughly half puppetry, half CGI, and the two techniques together give the alien real character. The overall alien design and technology is a fine balance. Any cuter and it’s Flight of the Navigator; any weirder and it’s another Nolan bore-piece (fight me).

Tonally it just about holds. The premise is bleak, and a braver film might have leaned into that for a bigger payoff. Instead it stays small and personal, the resolution focusing on the Grace–Rocky friendship rather than the fate of humanity. Crowd-pleasing, in a specific sense that I didn’t mind.

Inspired by a Guardian ranked list, I’ve decided to spend the summer rewatching John Cusack films—I’m not sure why, but I’ve been rather obsessed with him for about 35 years—and where better to start than one of the most insane films of the 90s. It was intended as an action film, but it works far better in hindsight as a dark comedy: a postmodern blend of Top Gun, The Rock, Speed, and Face/Off, celebrating and unwittingly sending up those sorts of films by sheer excess.

An absurd premise, stacked cast, bonkers juxtapositions of scene, score and dialogue, an audience set up to cheer for a cannibalistic child killer’s escape to freedom… I ought to watch this more often. Cusack plays his honest, moralistic US Marshal straight as the madness unfolds around him.

The sort of high-concept swing nobody risks any more (which is of course a small tragedy). What struck me most was this: do this exact film with football and it’d be insufferable, yet with baseball it’s earnest and earned. The mundanities of another country’s sport arrive here as something close to myth. We don’t have that for football. Partly the game’s class baggage, partly a national suspicion of taking it too seriously, of being caught intellectualising a thing that’s meant to be felt. Costner stands in a cornfield talking to ghosts and it plays straight. Try the equivalent featuring a centre-half on a wet Tuesday in the Championship and you’re looking at something vastly different.

Three stories, each with a flicker of something that never quite holds. Jarmusch’s deadpan usually finds the warmth under the stillness; here the stillness is mostly just… still. Whatever thread runs through them (family as obligation? as performance?) is far too faint.

It was today I realised that this and The Other Guys are different films. Cleverly written, sharply directed, and Gosling is, as ever, a delight. Keith David and Kim Basinger perhaps a little wasted.

Paolo Sorrentino gives us Toni Servillo as a president in his final months: a former judge who values truth and certainty above all, a man who ponders but does not dream. Several pressing decisions await him, but the film is less concerned with the verdicts than with the weighing. Underneath it all sits a grief he can’t resolve, for a wife whose infidelity he learned too late to confront. A straightforward premise, and a fascinating character study built on it. Servillo brings exactly the gravitas and indecision the part needs, holding the screen while doing, on the face of it, very little.

I can see exactly why people love this. It hands you a version of your seventeen-year-old self and asks you to forgive her, which is a generous trick. The complaints land too. Lady Bird is a brat, and the world Gerwig builds around her is conspicuously white and insulated in ways that are never interrogated. But Ronan and Metcalf are excellent, the latter astonishing at times. Gerwig directs tightly. Other directors would have added at least 15 minutes of exposition.

I really do like this a lot. About as good as these things get (not intended to be faint praise). Half a star bump.

Cooper’s least showy film and for me his best. The stand-up scenes could have been a vanity exercise for everyone involved; instead they’re the most honest stretch of the film. I’ve enjoyed Arnett’s bluster for years but he’s doing something else here and it suits him. Dern matches him scene for scene and then some, especially in the back half once Tess stops absorbing and starts pushing back. They feel like two people who have actually been married. I really enjoyed this.

A film about storytelling. Incredible to look at. Seems to have been an enormous labour of love; I expect my rating will rise or fall significantly upon a rewatch.

I remember this arriving in 1990, though only as a soundtrack and a general early-60s mood; the film itself never registered. Winona Ryder anchors it completely. Charlotte’s neuroses are pitched exactly right, and the voiceover prayers are the best thing here. Ricci, in her first film, is unnervingly assured. Cher is a natural, somehow both warmer and colder than I expected and with less screen time too. She was forty-four playing a woman of about thirty-one, which no amount of presence quite sells, but it matters much less than it should. Bob Hoskins is charm in a cardigan and flat cap. The whole thing is far sweeter and stranger than its reputation suggested to me.

Kaufman’s least immediately legible film, and potentially his most rewarding for it. I didn’t clock how the Jake scenes and the janitor scenes connected until the credits rolled, which may be the point or may just be me being slow—either way, I want to come back to it, just not yet. I suspect a lot more clicks if you’ve got the full reference shelf to hand (David Foster Wallace, Pauline Kael, Wordsworth, A Beautiful Mind, the musicals, etc), rather than catching half like I did. Buckley and Plemons are fantastic, and Collette and Thewlis match them on a fraction of the screen time.

The marketing was the bait: sold to teenage boys who turned up for Megan Fox and got a feminist horror about the intensity of teenage girl friendship and what men do when they need a sacrifice. In 2026 the reading is unmissable; in 2009, a year after “I Kissed a Girl” had pitched queerness as a party trick for boys, Fox’s casting read as more of the same. She is magnetic and clearly having a great time weaponising her own image, and the script gives her some of the best line readings of the decade. Diablo Cody, Karyn Kusama and the soundtrack each earn the reputation they’ve developed since release. Seyfried almost convinces you she’s the plain one.

I don’t entirely know what I just watched, and I think that’s the point. It opens like a coming-of-age film about two kids bonding over a Buffy-esque TV show, then quietly stops being that and becomes something stranger. The Lynch comparisons are well earned. Schoenbrun shoots suburbia soft and pink, and the Alex G score sits underneath everything like static you can’t quite tune out. The broader soundtrack, Caroline Polachek and yeule especially, is great. What stays with me is how patient the film is about not naming what it’s actually about. For anyone working through questions of identity and dysphoria, I suspect this will matter for a long time.

Sadie Sandler and Chloe East have the right uneasy chemistry, Sarah Sherman’s framing-device dean is doing a lot with very little, and Lyonne and Garofalo turn up exactly when you want them to. Then the third act swings somewhere else entirely—a different film, a different register, a different idea of what the joke is. Whatever it was meant to do, it lands as a shrug. What came before deserved a closer.

The plot creaks and Cruise does his earnest-sprinter routine, but the real pleasure is watching Pollack assemble the deepest supporting cast of the decade. Hackman (weary, rueful), Hal Holbrook’s avuncular menace, Ed Harris doing more with a sigh or a “fuck!” than most leads manage with a monologue, Holly Hunter stealing twenty minutes outright, plus Strathairn, Brimley, Busey, Tobin Bell, Sorvino, Dean Norris: every door that opens, someone you recognise walks through.

Most of Riz Ahmed’s acting happens through his eyes—Ash barely speaks aloud, his lines passed through a telephone relay operator. That constraint sharpens everything, and it’s all gruff exchanges, mailed packages and payphone protocols. Then the ending arrives, and it crumbles. A script this fastidious about process shouldn’t ask you to swallow quite that much.

Uses each of its 160 minutes. Digressions into folklore, a severed leg inside a shark, Jaws, Carnival, yet it’s compelling throughout. Moura anchors the sprawl with a fantastic performance. The real achievement is textural: the 1970s Recife of the dictatorship years is rendered so completely, with all the grain, the cars, the sweat-damp collars, the paranoid zoom-ins that you’d hope for. You’d believe it was unearthed from a vault rather than shot last year.

No narration, no score to speak of, no panning over the bay of Naples at golden hour. Instead, fixed cameras pointed at archaeologists brushing ash off a shinbone, emergency services staff answering calls from scared residents, a tutor helping children learn a variety of subjects, Syrian workers bringing in thousands of tonnes of Ukrainian grain. Vesuvius looms in almost every frame, usually grey, often half-swallowed by cloud. Everyone on screen is, in one way or another, in its shadow: extracting from it, measuring it, living despite it.