Dear friend,

as one of my 24 readers1, you know that my posts have become less and less frequent and their publication unpredictable.
Well, get ready for even less predictability, as I’m entering a rather complicated and uncertain period, during which I’m not even sure I’ll be able to write these roundups.
If you don’t have news from me for a while, don’t worry, don’t call the gendarmerie, I’ll be back at some point.

Omni Loop, written and directed by Bernardo Britto, US, 2024 - ⭐⭐

A promising premise - a woman with a terminal illness also has a bottle of pills that bring her a few days back in her life - is just the pretext for a reflection on life and missed opportunities and real values and maybe even impostor syndrome.
But the film takes frustratingly long in showing the frustration of its characters going nowhere, just to resolve that in a sentimental way.
If I have to be honest, about 30-40 minutes in the film totally lost me by introducing another fantastic element completely out of the blue, even less believable than the time pills.
I like Mary-Louise Parker, and everybody loves Ayo Edebiri but I hope she starts taking up roles where she’s not just the ‘sensible character to root for’ (I haven’t seen Opus yet).

Love Hurts, directed by Jonathan Eusebio, written by Luke Passmore, Josh Stoddard and Matthew Murray, US, 2025 - ⭐⭐

I postponed watching this Ke Huy Quan film because of its bad reviews, and after watching it, I’m afraid the reviewers were almost right. Almost, because they still praised the fight scenes which for me were also part of the disappointment - looking like people just going through the choreography without even trying to sell them as action.
The story is yet another John Wick-y just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in, and it has a ‘funny’ tone that felt very forced to me - and that didn’t work at all on Ariana DeBose’s performance.
Only positive note, Lio Tipton.

One Battle After Another, written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, based on Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland, US, 2025 - ⭐⭐⭐⭐½

I haven’t really loved a film by PTA since Magnolia, so I was really surprised by how much I liked this latest one. Dynamic and fast-paced, you never know what is going to happen (especially during the first half-hour), and you genuinely get to care for most of its characters.
Chase Infiniti and Teyana Taylor are great, Leonardo DiCaprio is in full dramedy mode (think Wolf of Wall Street or Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood), Benicio del Toro gives a performance that is at the same time fully committed and could also fit in a Wes Anderson film, Sean Penn is so seriously hissable.

  1. I wish I had 24 readers! This is an in-joke for Italian people, who all have been forced by the school system to study a nineteenth-century novel called The Betrothed ↩︎