Weekly visions - weeks 45-49, 2025

Rumours, written and directed by Guy Maddin, Galen Johnson and Evan Johnson, Canada, 2024 - ⭐

If this is some very clever satire, I didn’t get it. If the authors of this mess have a strong political background and are entitled to the commentary they’re making, then I’m probably very wrong. But until someone confirms the above to me, for me this is the worst film I’ve seen in a long long time, pointless, nonsensical and offensive.
Sorry to see Cate Blanchett (playing the German prime minister), Charles Dance (playing the US president) and Alicia Vikander involved in this.

Bugonia, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, written by Will Tracy, based on the film Save the Green Planet!/지구를 지켜라! by Jang Joon-hwan, US, 2025 - ⭐⭐⭐½

Lanthimos adopts a South Korean film and dresses it in a light The Killing of a Sacred Deer bleak sauce. Although this is a bit reductive, because this film is at the same time much funnier and quite darker than that, wildly swinging between comedy, thriller and horror. What makes it a minor entry in the canon of the Greek author is a predictable ending, that nevertheless leaves you silent and pensive in the final moments.
Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone are excellent, but that’s nothing new.

Kill Bill: Vol. 1, written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, US, 2003 - ⭐⭐⭐⭐

News that Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair may be getting to cinemas after so long made me want to rewatch the original films.
Vol. 1 is always great entertainment overall, but this time I noticed more distinctly all the elements that must have been included just for the sake of homaging other films and they felt like they were… everywhere, giving the impression of a movie that doesn’t have many original ideas.

The Running Man, directed by Edgar Wright, co-written with Michael Bacall, based on the novel by Richard Bachman/Stephen King, US, 2025 - ⭐⭐½

I understand the protagonist of this story is supposed to be a flawed and unlikeable person, but I don’t think the exaggerated performance by Glen Powell, obliged to set aside his usual charm, works at all. As a result, I couldn’t care less about his fate.
Much has been said about the lack of Wright’s usual playful directing (not that it saved Baby Driver… oh right I’m the only one who dislikes that film), but it’s there in a couple of occasions. What really kills the film is the messy ending, which feels unsure about the best way to make its lead character a hero.

Dedalus, directed by Gianluca Manzetti, written by Vincenzo Alfieri, Nicola Barnaba, Roberto Cipullo and Francesco Maria Dominedò, Italy, 2024 - ⭐½

A group of Italian influencers are selected for a live game show, which will expose them to their fans a bit more than they expected, and might prove lethal not only for their status, but their lives too.
There’s nothing really wrong with the acting - maybe a bit too many regional inflections for my ears - but the plot is highly derivative from a number of different sources (Seven, Saw, And Then There Were None, in a Black Mirror sauce), the characters are one-dimensional, and there is some women’s humiliation that could have been avoided.
Gianmarco Tognazzi plays the master of ceremonies, but his Steve Jobs impression gets old very quickly.

Kill Bill: Vol. 2, written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, US, 2004 - ⭐⭐⭐½

After having slightly changed my mind about Vol.1 the previous week, I wanted to see whether I would reassess also the second half of the story - that is, whether I would like more what I’ve always considered the lesser of the two films.
And the answer is… not really. The essentially monotonous environment, the cartoonish training section, and a feeling of general bad taste make this part too different stylistically from the polished first one.
The redeeming part comes right at the end, where Tarantino exercises some exceptional restraint (except for the indulgence in the ‘Superman/Clark Kent’ story, which made me roll my eyes) and gives some emotional payoff.
Who knows, maybe the two Volumes really need to be watched as a single film.
I may be the only one having this opinion, but the About Her scene is the showstopping moment for me.

Frankenstein, written and directed by Guillermo del Toro, based on the novel by Mary Shelley, US, 2025 - ⭐⭐⭐½

I haven’t watched that many adaptations of Mary Shelley’s novel, but the story is more or less well known, so I wondered what could Guillermo del Toro’s passion project add to a saturated landscape. And what he could add to his own canon, since sympathy for the creature has been a recurring theme in his oeuvre. Even his Pinocchio had some very explicit Frankenstein moments.
The answer, maybe, is that Carlo Collodi’s tale somehow ‘returns the favour’, providing elements that were not necessarily in the original story (I’ll rewatch at some point the other most faithful adaptation of the novel, Kenneth Branagh’s version from 1994).
For my personal taste, I enjoyed much more the Oscar Isaac-Victor Frankenstein-centric first half of the film, both because of the other characters involved (especially Mia Goth’s Elizabeth and Christoph Waltz) and due to my soft spot for stories about genius and obsession. The second part, not at all for Jakob Elordi’s fault, suffered from everyone’s familiarity with the source material.
For such a beautifully looking film, I was taken aback by the very staged-looking initial scene in the Arctic, which reminded me somehow of The Anvil Chorus from Giuseppe Verdi’s Il Trovatore.

The Sylvian Experiments/恐怖, written and directed by Hiroshi Takahashi, Japan, 2010 - ⭐⭐

The writer of Hideo Nakata’s Ringu and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Serpent’s Path and Foreboding goes solo and directs a confusing story about scientific experiments on young people tempted by suicidal thoughts, also involving two sisters who have been exposed at a very young age to a weird Super 8 film.
Happenings in this film become stranger and stranger and more and more disconnected as it goes on, and while I appreciate unpredictability, I also enjoy having an idea of what goes on. This was not the case.

Possum, written and directed by Matthew Holness, United Kingdom, 2018 - ⭐⭐⭐½

Has anybody ever witnessed Sean Harris smile in a non-malicious way?
I’m not sure I have, and Possum, the feature film debut by the comedian more commonly known as Garth Marenghi, doesn’t offer him any chance of doing that.
Instead, his character Philip runs around the English countryside trying to get rid of the titular nightmarish marionette, which inevitably will reappear to remind him about his unresolved childhood trauma. In the meantime, a boy in the area disappears, and Philip’s demeanour may make him the main suspect. At least, according to disgusting Uncle Maurice.
Possum is mostly about atmosphere than plot, and despite its repetitiveness and bleakness, I found it quite effective, while the scenery reminded me of classic English horrors such as Whistle and I’ll Come to You and The Shout.

Week 49

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, directed by Fran Rubel Kuzui, written by Joss Whedon, US, 1992 - ⭐⭐

Rewatching Buffy: the Movie after decades sounded like a good idea: maybe it wasn’t such a bad film after all.
Actually, no: despite having Donald Sutherland and Rutger Hauer somehow involved, it is bad, not really deciding whether it wants to be intentionally funny or unintentionally cringy.
It’s like - and that’s probably on the director’s shoulder rather than on Whedon’s - each actor is in their own film, so the tone swings wildly.
Buffy is a very different character from the series’ incarnation, so it’s unjust to compare Kristy Swanson with Sarah Michelle Gellar… but she feels very miscast anyway.
The same goes for pretty much everyone else in the film, from Paul Reubens to David Arquette, to Hilary Swank, except maybe for Luke Perry, whom I don’t really know as an actor, but whose Pike here feels like the only one capturing the tone and spirit of future Buffy - just missing an ‘S’ at the beginning of his name.
Wait, what is Ben Affleck doing in this film?

Y2K, directed by Kyle Mooney, co-written with Evan Winter, US, 2024 - ⭐½

In a disastrous week for film watching, the worst was yet to come: reviews for Y2K were generally bad, but the reality was almost offensive.
Maybe it’s because I wasn’t a teenager in the US back in 1999, but it didn’t bring me back to those years: showing a video store and WinAmp, and playing the dial-up noise of a 56K modem are not enough to trigger nostalgia, if they are only a pretext to try and hide a super-standard plot involving student parties and unexpressed love.
Again, I’m probably the wrong generation for this film, as the extended Fred Durst cameo left me cold, and all the mockery of bad computer graphics became quickly irritating.
Finally, for some reason, I couldn’t buy at all the romance between Jaeden Martell and Rachel Zegler: I know their characters are supposed to come from different worlds, but they actually are so distant they seem like belonging to different films.
This is the second film in which Alicia Silverstone plays Martell’s mother.

Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, written and directed by George Lucas, US, 1999 - ⭐⭐

Rewatching Episode I after decades sounded like a good idea: maybe it wasn’t such a bad film after all.
But again, I keep doing this to myself. Phantom Menace is even worse than I remembered: childish, bloated, with horrible dialogues. Why is Bergman’s collaborator Pernilla August in this film? Why is Terence Stamp in it for a scene and a half? Oh, I totally forgot Samuel L. Jackson was in the prequels.
The only rewatchable part of this film is the Duel of the Fates sequence.