Weekly visions - week 6, 2026

Reality/Réalité, written and directed by Quentin Dupieux, Belgium/France, 2014 - ⭐⭐⭐

The Dupieux of the week goes back a bit further into the director and former Mr. Oizo’s career. It’s his first collaboration with Alain Chabat (who also was in the last two films of his I’ve watched) in the role of a TV cameraman who’ll only get funding for his debut film if he can convince the producer that his work can include an Oscar-worthy moan of suffering.
This movie is a puzzling depiction of the Hollywood business, possibly a reaction to the French director’s experiences in the US (this is his last film that’s primarily in English and with a mostly American cast). Outside of this context, it could be described as a very lightweight Lynchian effort.
Overall, I’m not sure it makes a lot of sense, but it’s fascinating enough to be enjoyable even when it’s clear it’s not going anywhere.
The man who was Napoleon Dynamite, Jon Heder, plays the host of a TV cooking show dressed in a rat costume (maybe a reference to Ratatouille?), while Smallville’s Lionel Luthor, John Glover, is a genius director.

Malum, directed by Anthony DiBlasi, co-written with Scott Poiley, US, 2023 - ⭐⭐

In summer 2024, after watching Last Shift, I wrote that I was curious about the bigger-budget remake by the same director. Here it is, and I’ll join the masses in saying the original version was much better. In that mini-review I complained the story was under-developed, so this is a case of ‘be careful what you wish for’, because the backstory explained here doesn’t seem very original, or satisfying.
It feels as though the whole third act puts us and the protagonist in a constant state of nightmarish hallucination, to the point that nothing is worth caring about anymore.

I Do/Prête-moi ta main, directed by Eric Lartigau, written by Alain Chabat, Laurent Zeitoun, Philippe Mechelen, Laurent Tirard and Grégoire Vigneron, France, 2006 - ⭐⭐⭐

I’m so used now to seeing Alain Chabat in his fifties or sixties that it felt weird watching him in this film from the earlier decade. Here, bachelor Luis is constantly harassed by his mother and sisters because of his unwillingness to get married, so he decides to hire a (much younger) woman (Charlotte Gainsbourg) to pose as his fiancée and abandon him at the altar, so he’ll have an excuse not to be in a relationship ever again.
You will never guess what actually happens. Okay, you’ll totally guess where it ends, but the way it gets there is so contrived that there’s a chance you won’t predict it. At least I didn’t.
No wonder it took so many writers to compose the script.
Anyway, this element of surprise makes this romantic comedy a bit less trite than I feared.

Spaceballs, directed by Mel Brooks, co-written with Thomas Meehan and Ronny Graham, US, 1987 - ⭐⭐⭐½

I can’t say I’ve ever been crazy for Mel Brooks, but I don’t know his filmography well either. This parody of Star Wars, although beloved by some of my friends, relies a bit too much on crotch gags for my taste.
Nevertheless, some gags are so memorable ("I’m my own best friend") that I still remembered them thirty years after my last watch, so that elevates my appreciation a bit.
Fun fact: while Spaceballs 2 is coming out soon worldwide, in Italy Balle Spaziali 2 has existed since 1989, because it was the title that Italian distributors arbitrarily gave to the completely unrelated film Martians Go Home.

La Grazia, written and directed by Paolo Sorrentino, Italy, 2025 - ⭐⭐⭐

Grazia is an Italian word meaning both grace and pardon (as in ‘Presidential pardon’), and director Sorrentino uses this double meaning to weave the story of an Italian Republic President having to decide on pardoning two people, each convicted for killing their partner, while he’s looking to regain a state of peace of mind years after his beloved wife died.
I normally like his work, but this film is so static, slow, and ponderous that it challenged my dedication, and had me looking at my watch multiple times in impatience.
For my taste, even the dialogue and the acting by the usually irreprehensible Tony Servillo (who nevertheless won the Coppa Volpi for Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival) were a bit too ‘on the nose’, constantly screaming ’this is an important film’.

Burning/버닝, directed by Lee Chang-dong, co-written with Oh Jung-mi, based on Haruki Murakami’s short story Barn Burning/納屋を焼く, South Korea, 2018 - ⭐⭐⭐⭐

A film I have heard mentioned a lot in the last few years, without ever knowing what it was about, or that it was another adaptation of a story by Haruki Murakami.
No frogs or aliens in this case, or anything supernatural: just an implied love triangle between rural guy Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in), Hae-mi (Jun Jong-seo) - a girl from his village to whom he never paid attention during their childhood -, and rich, confident and mysterious Ben (Steven Yeun).
The film takes a lot of time to set up the relationship between these characters, but as soon as you realise something may be off, gears shift unexpectedly towards a dramatic ending.
I was not familiar with director Lee, but this film reminded me of Bong Joon-ho style, although without his humour.

Palombella rossa/Red Wood Pigeon, written and directed by Nanni Moretti, France/Italy, 1989 - ⭐⭐⭐⭐½

Following La messa è finita and Bianca, I had planned to move backwards in Moretti’s filmography, but the platform where his film are available is very user unfriendly (you can’t rent films from the apps, only on the website) and on this night I didn’t want to turn my Mac back on. Then I found that Disney+ has in its catalogue all the films that Moretti directed after La messa. What a surprise!
So I started with the next one, a film I had videotaped in the early nineties but never got around to watching. Those were easier days, I was too young to vote, and caring about politics was not a priority (this would soon change for me, and for all Italians), so a film mixing water polo and the crisis of the Italian Communist Party was not at the top of my to-watch list. Still, there must have been a reason why I recorded it on a VHS from a TV broadcast. Maybe I had watched Bianca and I was curious to see more from this funny loud-spoken bearded guy.

It turns out, I was completely in love with this quite disconnected film about the loss of the certainties of our youth, both from the personal side and (for Moretti) the political one.
The film also includes a scene that stayed in Italian culture, where he angrily shouts ‘Ma come parla?! Le parole sono importanti’ (roughly ‘Why do you talk this way?! Words are important’) at a journalist who uses too many clichés (trigger warning: he also slaps her, which might turn you off). It made me think about how sometimes I also prefer using shortcuts - especially when writing in English - rather than thinking carefully of the words I use.

The plot involves a high-rank politician from PCI (the aforementioned Communist Party) losing his memory due to a car accident (he was too focused singing along with Franco Battiato’s E ti vengo a cercare), and finding it back, bit by bit, during a water polo match in which he’s one of the players.
It is nothing more than a simple allegory for the leftists’ loss of identity following the historic changes in Germany and Eastern Europe, but Moretti keeps it interesting and (mostly) unpredictable by inserting here and there scenes from a short film he made in 1973, bits from Doctor Zhivago (spoilers for that film!!!), and his usual singing moments (including Bruce Springsteen’s I’m on Fire).
Many of the secondary actors are ‘carried over’ from La messa è finita, while this is the first collaboration with the excellent Silvio Orlando (playing the team coach). Asia Argento (daughter of Dario), in one of her first roles, plays the protagonist’s daughter.

It might work only for Italian people who were around at the end of the eighties; it definitely worked for me, filling me with nostalgia - not for anything in particular, just for the idea of childhood.

Vivarium, directed by Lorcan Finnegan, co-written with Garret Shanley, Belgium/Ireland, 2019 - ⭐⭐½

A couple - Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots - end up stuck in a suburban house in a neighbourhood where all buildings look the same.
An interesting premise for a film, which unfortunately it doesn’t go anywhere, seemingly stuck on a single idea, that I can’t interpret as anything other than a very negative metaphor for family life and parenthood.
It’s not enough to keep the viewer’s attention for almost 100 minutes, despite Poots’ undeniable dedication.