Weekly visions - week 5, 2026

Incredible But True/Incroyable mais vrai, written and directed by Quentin Dupieux, France, 2022 - ⭐⭐½

Another weird Dupieux film (well, that’s a tautology… all his films are weird), this one is about a couple (Alain Chabat and Léa Drucker) who buy a house with… something special. I don’t want to spoil what it is, so there’s not a lot more that I can say, except that the premise is so thin that, even in its weirdness, the plot struggles to fill its 74-minute runtime.
I don’t think I’ve seen a film before where most of the third act is a montage: the director clearly has nothing additional to say after an hour, so to avoid repeating himself, he just speeds up the path toward an ending… of sorts.

Tampopo/タンポポ, written and directed by Jūzō Itami, Japan, 1985 - ⭐⭐⭐⭐

A very generous friend, after hearing me mention that I couldn’t find a legal way to watch this film, gifted me a Criterion Collection Blu-ray. This is not the film I thought it would be.
First of all, I have learnt that, before eating it, you need to caress the ramen, and apologise to the pig that gave its life for your enjoyment of the dish.
Trigger warning: this is not a vegetarian film, and there is one specific scene, in this sense, that upset me as it shows - very quickly - real violence against an animal.
Aside from this, it was a very enjoyable movie: I guess director Itami watched some spaghetti westerns and thought that it was a good idea to write a ramen western: rather than the serious Sergio Leone films, he seems to have been inspired by Enzo Barboni’s western buddy comedies where Bud Spencer and Terence Hill help families in need and everything is solved through funny fist fights.
The main plot line here sees a cowboy-hat-wearing lorry driver (Akira Kurosawa’s regular Tsutomu Yamazaki) spending some time helping the titular Tampopo (Itami’s wife Nobuko Miyamoto) learn to cook, so that her late husband’s ramen restaurant can provide a source of income to her and her young child.
But this is only one of the elements in this movie, as that story is interspersed with two unrelated sets of scenes.
One is a series of stand-alone vignettes centred around food experiences (including one with actual spaghetti, in a scene which could be interpreted as a way to depict them as pretentious ramen); the other one is something I’ve never seen in spaghetti westerns: very sensual scenes exploring the link between food and sex, featuring a young Kōji Yakusho and either first-time actress Fukumi Kuroda (who will next act in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Sweet Home), or Bumpkin Soup’s Yoriko Doguchi.
These scenes feel like the actual point of the film, or at least what makes it memorable, much more than the sweet implied romance between Tampopo and the cowboy.
A young Ken Watanabe plays the lorry co-driver.

Send Help, directed by Sam Raimi, written by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, US, 2026 - ⭐⭐⭐½

As everybody points out, this is Sam Raimi returning to the horror genre. I’d argue that there is not much more horror here than in Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. It’s just that the director is much more free here to do whatever he wants, however little sense it might make. I didn’t buy the evolution of Rachel McAdams’ character, but I’ve read some reviews praising it, so that must be subjective. The same, to a lesser extent, applies to the other lead, Dylan O’Brien. I liked the fact that it doesn’t let you decide for which of the two main characters you should root, otherwise it’s a fun, but quickly forgettable, watch.

Smile 2, written and directed by Parker Finn, US, 2024 - ⭐⭐⭐½ (up from ⭐⭐⭐)

I rewatched this film because I didn’t find anything more inspiring on Netflix, and I must say I was a bit too hard on it on my first watch: it has some great set pieces and it really got under my skin. That said, I still 100% agree with past myself and with the negative points I mentioned in 2024. I just enjoyed it a bit more nonetheless.