Failed Experiment

Bugonia (2025) - Lanthimos It is pretty obvious why Yorgos Lanthimos chose to remake a wacky Korean sci-fi comedy, Save the Green Planet: it has all the elements we've grown to associate with his films - the cynicism, cruelty and absurd sense of humor. With Bugonia, starring very committed Emma Stone in their 4th collaboration, and Jesse Plemons, Lanthimos shoots for the most absurd film to date.

It's a hit or miss for me when it comes to Lanthimos films. For me, like his other fans, it all started with Dogtooth (2009), a perennial hit that started the Greek New Wave or Weird Wave or whatever it was labeled as. It was when Greece was battered with waves of crushing austerity measures and governmental restructuring. Greeks, being a rowdy bunch who didn't really have faith in their government anyway, made a series of films that vividly depicted generational divide and discontent of the younger generation with little prospects for the future. But however penetrating Lanthimos's observation of the world has been, it's his cynicism and cruelty that kept me at bay to be a full fledged fan. I admit that it's hard to do in comedy, considering he is not Haneke or Bergman.

When a Lanthimo's is balanced right, with the right amount of sweetness and heart, it's really great - Lobster, The Favourite, Poor Things. But when it is just cynicism, such as Bugonia or Kind of Kindness, it loses me.

Bugonia concerns Teddy (Jesse Plemons), a conspiracy-addled worker at an Amazon style processing facility. The conglomerate is headed by a ruthless Michelle (Emma Stone), by all appearances, Michelle is a powersuit wearing, posh CEO with all business and no heart. Teddy and his dim-witted cousin Donnie (Aidan Delvis), believing Michelle is an alien from The Andromeda Galaxy, bent on destroying the human race, kidnaps her and puts her chained to the floor in the basement of their rural house. Teddy tortures Michelle to admit that she is an alien and to arrange a meeting with her emperor in their space craft which is heading to earth during the next lunar eclipse which is three days away.

Things get complicated when Michelle manipulates them into harming themselves and their loved ones. Is she really an andromedan intent on eradicating the human species or are we just one of those cruel experiments by higher power, on the verge of failure?

If Bugonia is a satire of billionaires controlling the fate of humanity and we are all just their play things - either just pawns in the game or rebellious crackpots, it's just too bleak and too close to home to laugh about.

As Bugonia progresses to an absurdist territory with much blood shed, you are left with that cold feeling that we are supremely manipulated to and fro for laughs. But who is laughing anyway?

Life/Work/Death

No Other Choice (2025) - Park Mansu (Lee Byunghun), a 25 year veteran in a paper mill company with a big house in the countryside with a loving family - wife Miri (Son Yejin), teenage son, ten year old autistic daughter and two golden retrievers affectionately named after his children, just got laid off. Just before he was laid off, he was planning union activities with his subordinates. The only thing he has known in his adult life was the paper mills and he has no prospects other than that industry and with the mortgage company repossessing the house in three months, the clock is ticking for Mansu to get another job.

Taking the cue from his stress, Miri restructures the household in order - no more outlandish meals, no more tennis lessons, no more Netflix, dogs to her parents house, downsize the 2 big cars to one small one and put the house on the market. Mansu refuses to sell the house since it's the one he grew up in and bought it with his own money. And especially, the potential buyer is a sleazy local electronic shop owner who is a dad of his son's best friend. Three months, Mansu tells Miri.

Mansu does research on his competitors just in case Moon Paper, a big paper company, is in need of hiring another manager. He narrows down the potential competitors to two and devises a plan to eliminate them.

No Other Choice says a lot about salaryman life in Korea where you are defined by your work, where your life is completely tied to your job and the job defines you. In Mansu's elaborate scheme - spying on his competition at home and work in order to get a chance to kill them, exposes that they are in the same boat as he is: the grueling unemployment life- the daily humiliation, temptation of alcohol and drugs, suspicion of spouse infidelity, etc. They are the mirror images of himself! But Mansu, trapped in the cruel rat race in the capitalist system, has no other choice but to pursue his plan to save his family from poverty.

As usual, Park Chanwook is a first and foremost visual stylist. There's more visual ideas in No Other Choice than most Hollywood releases in a year combined. Lee, with his model like angular face twitching as a stressed middle aged man, is tremendous as Mansu, the stressed out salaryman. Son, as a practical wife who loves her man, no matter what, is fetching in her coy performance.

No Other Choice touches upon a lot of modern society's illness with satirical humor. There's dying manufacturing industries, automation and A.I. taking over human labor, deforestation and autism. I do not want to compare Park's movies to others, but the head of the family losing his job as a subject, is done before much more realistically in Tokyo Sonata by Kiyoshi Kurosawa. I mention this because there's also a theme of music and gifted child involved. But it's Park Chanwook movie. So it has to be fantastical and much more artificial, therefore less emotionally resonant. It's superb entertainment but boy is it stressful.

Smells Like Indie Spirit

Nouvelle Vague (2025) - Linklater Breathless, a perennial French New Wave film that started everything and changed filmmaking forever, is closely reenacted and memorialized along with the movement and people involved. I got to admit, being a diehard Godard-head, I was very skeptical going into this film. But rest assured, Linklater, coming from the experimental indie filmmaking background, knows his history of cinema and understands how to pay homage without being nostalgic and sentimental about the New Wave and its influences that had on him as a filmmaker. And Linklater's assumption is right about his view on Breathless as a granddaddy of indie filmmaking.

Casting and working with French speaking actors, Linklater commands a very convincing reenactment of the events in and surrounding the production of Godard's tumultuous feature debut.

Godard, played wonderfully by Guillaume Marbeck, encouraged by/and riding the coattails of the success of his two Cahier du Cinema colleagues' directorial debuts not too long ago - François Truffaut's 400 Blows (1959) and Claude Chabrol's Le Beau Serge (1958), finally tries his hands in directing a feature, with the help of a producer Beaureguard (Bruno Dreyfürst). With the rebellious spirit of countering the cinema that came before, and his own eccentricities, Godard embarks on directing a film as unconventionally as possible. Working off of a thin treatment that Truffaut and Chabrol wrote, about real life incidents of a car thief who ends up killing a police officer, Godard charges on Breathless without a script. Casting includes a newbie actor/boxer named Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin) and a reluctant American movie star Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch). In 23 days of shooting with no lights and all hand-held camera by army vet, documentary photographer Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat), who later went on to shoot most of the memorable Godard films.

Linklater makes sure that who's who of the French New Wave are all mentioned in the film- portrait style with their names appearing on the screen - Truffaut, Chabrol, Suzanne Schiffman, Rivette, Rohmer, Rozier, etc. Godard's mentors/idols also appear on screen - Jean Pierre Melville, Roberto Rosselini, Jean Cocteau and even has a run in with Robert Bresson in the subway where the master is in his production of Pickpocket, around the same time.

Sure, championed by Cahier writers, including Truffaut and Godard, The Auteur Theory elevates the director as the primary creative force behind a film, but Linklater shows and acknowledges that there are a lot of people contributing their talents and hard work and time in making a film - that extends to the job of an assistant director, script continuity, make-up, editor, so and so forth.

Yes, the film's monochrome shot on 35mm and impeccable period set design and costume take us into a nostalgia trip. But the film is never corny or sentimental. Linklater is after something more direct, only concentrating on the production of Breathless; people involved in it and the overall climate that incubated the French New Wave.

It's a lovely, charming and endlessly enjoyable homage to one of the most influential film movements and which birthed perhaps the most singular and unique filmmaker ever lived. Loved it.

Heart of Glass

La tour de glase/The Ice Tower (2025) - Hadžihalilović Lucille Hadžihalilović continues with her coming of age/dark fairy tale with The Ice Tower, taking on Hans Christian Andersen's The Ice Queen. And just like her previous films (Innocence, Evolution and Earwig), it's a visual stunner. The director has a penchant for painting the grownup world as something disturbing and mysterious and The Ice Tower is no exception.

The film concerns a runaway teenage orphan girl Jeanne (Clara Pacini). She is fascinated with the Ice Queen story and the dark icy forest, as she reads the book to her younger foster home sister every night. She runs away into the frozen mountains and ends up in another town, after a close encounter with a predatory old man while hitchhiking. She breaks into what appears to be a warehouse to spend the night, but the building turns out to be a film studio staging the production of The Ice Queen. Jeanne, now taking on the identity of a stranger named Bianca, gets the attention of Christina (Marion Cortillard), a diva movie star with a similar history as Jeanne. The cold, sad façade of Christina gets an obsessive attention from wide eyed Jeanne. With Jeanne's mother dying in freezing cold when she was young, Christina becomes an embodiment of a maternal figure, idol and fantasy all in one.

With their past mirroring each other, Jeanne/Bianca becomes Christina's new favorite, being promoted for the stand-in for the young actress who plays the main role. Christina, a possibly a depressed drug addict (suggested without so many words), has a death wish and wants Jeanne to join her at the edge of the cliff one night but Jeanne refuses.

The Ice Tower is a kaleidoscopic mood piece that plays around with the idea of mirroring images - fantasy and reality, past and present, darkness and light. Cortillard is perfect as an alluring ice queen who attracts people around her to their destruction and suffers from eternal loneliness in her frozen kingdom. The film, shot by Jonathan Ricquebourg (The Taste of Things, The Death of Louis XIV), is seriously dark and moody, and makes the best of its frozen, shiny and empty Northern Italian landscapes.

Ice Tower, just like her previous films, Hadžihalilović aptly suggests the frightening grownup world where things are not as bright and exciting as one hopes to be, but decidedly dour, sad, full of pain and filled with ugliness. Her explorations might be seen as only scratching its shiny surface. But it's usually the negative space behind the façade that looms over all of her films, keeping all the mysteries intact and bewitching us to come back time and time again to see her dark and hypnotic artistry.

House and Everyone In It

Sentimental Value (2025) - Trier Joachim Trier's new film, Sentimental Value starts with a house in Oslo: a handsome house with red paints around the edges. A female narrator speaks of a grade school assignment - if you choose to be an inanimate object, and you choose to be a house, do you feel whole when it's crowded with people, or when it's empty? Do you feel pain when someone slams the door or breaks the glass on the floor?

Nora (Renate Reinsve) is a stage actor who suffers from a stage fright. In a hectic scene in the beginning, she has a last minute panic attack just before the curtain raises- claws at her tight costume, complaining she can't breathe. It takes her whole theater production team to calm her down, to finally get on stage. It shows that she suffers greatly from a childhood trauma, stemming from her famous filmmaker father Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård) constantly fighting with her mother, then abandoning her and her sister. The morning after her affair with her co-worker (Anders Danielsen Lie), she tells him that she is 80 percent crazy. While Agnes is married and has an adorable son, Nora is single and lonely.

At their mother's funeral, the sisters encounter Gustav again after a long while. Gustav, who hadn't made a film in 15 years, has a new script that he has written for Nora and begs her to star in it. It will take place in the house the girls grew up in. It's slightly based on the life of his mother, who was a resistance fighter during Nazi Occupation and was tortured in prison, who later killed herself- but also about Nora and a lot of other things. Nora flat out refuses and doesn't want to do anything to do with him.

By chance, Gustav finds a Hollywood Starlette, Rachel Kemp, being enamoured by one of his old films at his retrospective in France, decides to work with him for the part that he wrote for Nora. It being a Trier film, the scenes where they bond- an old artist and the Hollywood movie star with her entourage in tow, come across as not cliché, but sweet and endearing. But as the rehearsal goes along, both Gustav and Rachel slowly realize that she is not the right fit.

As usual, it being a Joachim Trier film, Sentimental Value is not about one thing, but about a lot of things, so not just the house or any inanimate objects that we have feelings towards - parents, siblings, history, art, trauma, loneliness and most importantly, love. Something that AI can never reproduce or emulate, at least not yet. It is yet again, a beautifully written (co- written by Trier's long time writing partner Eskil Vogt), nuanced film that you come to expect from one of the most literary filmmakers of our time. And also, it's beautifully acted as well. Reinsve is phenomenal as Nora, a damaged stage actor. Skarsgard has never been better, as Nora's semi-estranged dad, and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas as Agnes, the younger sister of Nora, is also great. Add Elle Fanning as a good natured Hollywood starlette and Danielsen Lie in a small role.

The strongest moments of the film (and there are many), are when the sisters go through things in the old house and reminisce about their tumultuous childhood, they talk about how much they meant to each other and when Gustav plays with Agnes's young son. It's both tender and searingly beautiful.

Sentimental Value is all about finding love and understanding from someone you felt only resentment for most of your life, in the most unexpected way. It's so beautifully written and acted and even surpasses Trier's The Worst Person in the World. It's certainly my favorite film of the year.

Pet Sound

Rabbit Trap (2025) - Chainey This is the second British (well, Scottish and Welsh) film I saw this year that features a rabbit folklore -where as Starve Acre takes place on the Scottish moors, Bryn Chainey's Rabbit Trap takes place in Wales. Rabbits or Hares in Welsh folklore are depicted as a connection to the spirit world and fertility. Known as the pwca in Wales, rabbits are shapeshifting creatures that bring both good and bad fortunes.

A childless musician couple from London - Darcy (Dev Patel) and Daphne Davenport (Rosy McEwen), have moved into a secluded cottage to finish their album. Equipped with recorders and a soundsystem, they are exploring the new sound in the Welsh woods for inspiration. One day in the woods, doing the field recording, Darcy hears distinctly human voices in the woods. Then he finds a circle made of white stones in the floorbed of the forest. Soon, he encounters a young person of indeterminate age and sex (Jade Croot), who claims that they are from a nearby village. They know places in the woods that would interest the Davenports.

The child takes a shine on Daphne and their visitation to the cottage becomes more frequent. But the child's insistence and clinginess becomes more intense and uncomfortable, first for Darcy, then eventually for Daphne. There's something supernatural definitely in the woods and the child is not what they say they are.

Moody and trippy, both cinematography (Dp, Andreas Johannessen) and sound design are terrific. Verging on magic realism, the moss and fungus invading the interior of the cottage as Davenports are put under the spell of the child is truly a wonder (thanks to production designer Lucie Red). Patel and McEwen are both fantastic as a couple who share an unspoken, probably some dark backstory, and have terrific chemistry together. But it's young Jade Croot who shines as a mysterious child who throws themselves in the lives of Davenport, and who might not be human at all. Croot's performance has the similar intensity as young Barry Keogan in Lanthimos's Killing of a Sacred Deer.

Rabbit Trap is a terrific folk horror/fantasy film that is beautifully crafted and put together with stellar performances. Now streaming on multiple platforms.

Monsters

Frankenstein (2025) - Del Toro Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus, portrayed the human arrogance in the age of industrial revolution and tragedy that befalls its protagonist, a mad genius, Dr. Victor Frankenstein. In Guillermo Del Toro's version, which is magnificent by the way, Frankenstein is told in three perspectives. One from the captain of a Danish ship marooned in the arctic ice, the other from Victor's point of view and then by the creature.

Frankenstein starts in the frozen arctic sea, as Danish sailors struggle to thaw the ice so their ship can get free. There's an explosion in the distance and they rush to investigate. A gravely wounded man they find on the frozen ground is disheveled Baron Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac), he warns of a creature who is stalking him, and protecting him would put everyone around him in danger. Soon enough, the tall creature (Jacob Elodi), comes charging in with superhuman strength, killing everyone in his way. Bullets and knives are no match for him.

Secluded in the captain's quarter, Victor tells his version of a story to the captain (Lars Mikkelsen), so starts one of the most rapturous, big budget Hollywood films worthy of a theatrical experience in a long time. Production design and costume in Frankenstein are typically Del Toro-esque, but turned up to eleven, in that unmistakable Victorian gothic/steampunk way. It shows Victor's upbringing and fixation with conquering death- growing up with a stern, borderline abusive surgeon father (Charles Dance) and losing his mother early in a child birth. His younger brother William (Felix Kemmerer), with his sunny dispositions, becomes naturally father's favorite. So while he is being a brilliant but unorthodox weirdo in medical school tinkering with human corpses with electricity, William makes names for himself in the finance world. It's William's business associate Harlander (Christophe Waltz) who recognizes Victor's genius and bankrolls his grand vision of a laboratory to resurrect the dead. Willam also introduces his fiancé, the niece of Harlander, Elizabeth (Mia Goth), a fetching young woman who doesn't mind being around the corpses and flirting with Victor. It's his arrogance and drive that she finds intriguing.

So they find a decrepit castle with a large spire and a big medusa head adorned wall in somewhere in European continent and it soon becomes a corpse disposal factory - for Victor to assemble body parts from recently executed criminals and dead soldiers from the Crimean War (So Del Toro's version diverts from Shelley's in terms of timeline - the Crimean War was in 1854, the book was published in 1818). Harlander dies in an accident while pleading to be part of Victor's creation because he is dying of syphilis. And the 'IT'S ALIVE!!' sequence is spectacular. But the marveling over his creation is short lived, as Victor finds the creature not too communicative and intellectually stunted. So he has it chained in the dungeon of the castle, equipped with its own, elegant, tiled drainage system (reminiscent of a Turkish bath). But the creature finds great empathy from Elizabeth. She asks Victor whether he considered if the creature had a soul, when he was creating it. Victor admits that he hadn't. Disgusted with what he created, Victor tries to burn the castle down with the creature with it. The creature escapes and Victor loses his leg in the explosion.

And the creature comes on board the ship and tells his side of the story. Even with the POV shifts, told in chronological order, Del Toro maintains the forward momentum without a hitch. The film is a lean two and a half hour experience where you don't feel its running time. Frankenstein feels much more refined in its depiction of violence and its sentimentality than GDT's other films. The action sequences are violent, but not his usual over-the-top, sadistic way (no act of facial disfiguring, of course except for the creature. who is already sewn up with different parts.

The segment with the farmer's family and the blind man, played by David Bradley (from Harry Potter films and the voice of Geppetto in GDT's Pinocchio) is perhaps the most touching part of the film. From Oscar Isaac as arrogant Dr. Frankenstein who gets his comeuppance and his sins forgiven, to Jacob Elodi's skulking, yet highly humanistic creature, to Mia Goth's smart and kind-hearted Elizabeth, not to mention the great Dance & Bradley, the acting in this film throughout is superb. Regular character actors Ralph Ineson and Burn Gorman also show up briefly.

The story of a madman's obsession destroying everything he loves and blaming it on his own creation, their unbreakable bondage and finally forgiveness really moved me in the end. Del Toro, chasing after his childhood dreams of remaking Universal Monster films, created something classy and beautiful here. I understand that he is teaming up with Netflix because he wants to continue making big budget projects, but it's a pity that the theater run of Frankenstein is only a few weeks before it premieres in streaming. It's a gorgeous film and I want everyone to experience it big. Go see it in theaters if you can.

Grand Illusion

Mr. K (2024) - Schwab The 90s and 2000s were wild times in art-house cinema. These little idiosyncratic and absurd European films that didn't make much sense plot-wise, but had elaborate set designs and filled with surrealist whimsy, were dime a dozen, and you were glad they existed and available through Netflix DVD services (R.I.P.) Two decades later, with plot driven superhero movies, taut policier thrillers, 3D animations dominate the cinemas. Then Mr. K comes along, starring the king of oddity, Crispin Glover, directed by Norwegian born, Dutch filmmaker Tallulah Schwab. The film, referencing Kafka with his protagonist Joseph K from The Trial, indeed showcases a Kafkaeque labyrinth, where our protagonist can't escape from. With a great production design (Maarten Piersma and Manolito Glas) and filled with eccentric characters, harkening back to good old days of art-house nonsense filmmaking, Mr. K is a breath of fresh air.

Traveling Magician, Mr. K (Glover), is first seen doing tricks in front of uninterested audiences. The trick, suspending the globes of the solar system in the air, doesn't get any responses. This beginning reminds me of the mysterious and whimsical way Bela Tarr's Werkmeister Harmonies starts, where the village idiot explains how a solar eclipse works to a bunch of drunkards, delving into philosophical comedy to set the tone. “Every being is a universe within themselves, floating about in eternal darkness.” K narrates, alluding to the dream logic conclusion of the film.

The self contained universe in this film is an opulent but aging hotel that K checks into. After dealing with a glass eyed grumpy matron, and witnessing a man under his bed and a cleaning woman in his closet, hurriedly scampering out of his room, K goes to uneasy sleep, expecting to check out the following day.

As K wakes and gets ready to go, he finds himself marooned in the decaying hotel. Endless corridors lead him in circles and K can't seem to locate the exit. Someone scribbled "LIBERATOR" on the wall of the corridor. Chased by a marching brass band that seemingly materialized from the walls, and his bag stolen by feral children, K ends up in the opulent stuffed room of two old sisters (Dearbhla Molloy and Fionnula Flanagan) who are kind but can't seem to direct him to the exit.

He is then pushed into the hotel's busy kitchen, taken in as one of the kitchen staff. He is on an egg sorting line. And he meets fellow egg sorting worker Anton (Jan Gunnar Røise), whose ambition is to be promoted as a whiskerer, and who doesn't seem to have ever been outside the hotel. "We have everything we need here." He tells K. For whatever reason, the head chef (Bjørn Sundquist), takes a shine to our protagonist, as if he is the chosen one sent by some higher power, like a man in some secret prophecy. Without trying, K is promoted to the whiskerer's line, much to the chagrin of Anton. The kitchen staff are party animals it turns out. So they party after hours and sleep on piles of other workers. But K has to make his meeting with a client and needs to get out of the hotel.

K is awakened by the noise from the peeling wall. And he finds the hotel is physically shrinking. And there are some sinewy roots growing inside the walls. He has to warn the residents of the hotel! Is K the liberator?

Thick and dark green interior wall papers, the endless corridors and secret compartments/doors and cramped interior are as much the characters as well as the hotel's eclectic inhabitants. It might annoy you that there's no coherent plot in Mr. K. You will need to surrender your logically wired mind to embrace the film full of absurd humor and surrealist whimsy. Glover, who cultivated a unique persona over the decades playing weirdos and outcasts, fits right in as Mr. K in the world with its own self-contained hierarchy and rules. Part Jeaunette & Caro (Delicatessen), part Roy Andersson (Songs from the Second Floor), part Gordon & Abel (Iceberg), and part Jens Lien (Bothersome Man), Mr. K harkens back to the wry humor and wild imagination that was signature element in art-house cinema of the 90s and early 2000s.

You might be disappointed with the unresolved ending, but Mr. K is undoubtedly a unique film among mountains of narrative driven cinemascape of today. If you want to take a mental break from complicated and intricate plotting, and want to give in to the absurdities of an European art flick, Mr. K will be a highly rewarding movie going experience.

Mr. K plays in New York and will open in theaters in Los Angeles, 10/21.

Slave to the Rhythm

Sirât (2025) - Laxe What starts out as The Searchers type allegory of taming the untameable, this Moroccan desert set film by Spanish helmer Oliver Laxe (Fire Will Come), morphs into an existentialist experimental film that defies categorization. It's at once tragic and riveting at the same time. And you can't look away in this downer for two hours. And I respect Laxe for orchestrating the power over us.

The first thing we see is the great expanse of canyon walls of the Moroccan desert as a large, but well worn speaker system is set up. Soon, it's the rave scene of the weathered, sinewy, dusty bodies gyrating to the heavy bass of the techno music. This is not the Burning Man kind of rave, the group is decidedly older with gnarly teeth, braids and bits of limbs missing. Among them, we see Luis (Sergi López) and his pre-teen son Esteban (Bruno Núñez), moving from one raver to another, handing out a 'Missing Person' sign. They are looking for Luis's daughter Mar, whom they last heard from five months ago. Someone told them that she might be at this particular rave. But no one there knows her.

A raid from local police breaks up the gathering, and instead of following the caravan of cars to evacuate, ragtag of French ravers - Steff, Josh, Bigui, Jade and Tonin breaks off from the crowd with their decked out RVs and Luis and Esteban follow them in their minivan. So starts a road movie of sorts that's filled with death and explosions and unimaginable grief.

The title card indicates that Sirât in Arabic means a narrow bridge between heaven and hell. And that is what the film portrays. A purgatory that plays out in the backdrop of the world in chaos, the inescapable reality of indiscriminate deaths and misery even in the remotest places on earth. Yep, we are all in this, experiencing the end of the world, together.

The improbable sound of techno beats (scored by French musician Kangding Ray) against nothingness of the desert, move the film along and play pivotal roles in key moments of the film.

Sirât is part Madmax, part Sorcerer, part Antonioni, contemplating where Cormac McCarthy's The Road left off. It's not making a grand statement about the hopelessness of the state of the world. It shows how random death stalks, that grief is universal, that we can't ignore the suffering of others because, again, we are all in this together.