Author: SceneByGreen

Apichatpong Weerasethakul | 2hr 2min

In a former elementary school somewhere in Thailand, a temporary clinic has been set up to manage the overflow of comatose soldiers from a nearby hospital. A mysterious “sleeping sickness” has been taking over military units, and the only way nurses have been able to treat them is by soothing their dreams through light machines, each one standing tall above the beds like over-sized, neon canes. Outside, palm trees and bamboo try to peek through the upper-storey windows into these classrooms, but every night the shutters are closed to cut out any natural light, letting the artificial glow of red, green, blue, and pink hues softly bathe the room. As the machines rotate through colours in this otherwise pitch-black space, Apichatpong Weerasethakul invokes a hallucinatory dreamscape of hypnotic effervescence, described by one character as looking “like funeral lights”, though often feeling more like ethereal representations of human souls, constantly shifting in cyclical patterns as if they were alive.

For all the beauty of these psychedelic sequences, and as unique a cinematic artist as Weerasethakul is, Cemetery of Splendour does not go down as one of his finest works. The extended middle sequence which sees those neon colours reach out into public spaces like some spiritual infection and which lets the camera gaze down several storeys of intersecting escalators as if descending to hell stands out as a highlight, but elsewhere there is little that matches the delirious jungle madness of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives or the masterfully mirrored structure of Syndromes and a Century. For the most part, Weerasethakul largely commits to long, static takes of tropical nature reserves and rural interiors – a formally consistent choice, effectively infusing a quiet stillness into Weerasethakul’s tableaux, if not particularly exciting.

The greater intrigue here lies in the quiet air of mystery that envelops this clinic and the surrounding forest in a dreamy shroud, blending sleeping and waking life to the point that they are not just indistinguishable, but virtually the same. Jen is the clinic volunteer who we quickly latch onto and follow through these obscure states, as she develops a particular attachment to one specific patient, Itt, who is among the many soldiers that have fallen into a coma. Their relationship is initially one-sided with her being the only one between them talking, but then Itt begins to talk back. Soon, they are going out for lunches and dinners together, and as he learns about her family and cultural background, she learns about what lies on the other side of unconsciousness.

As we discover, the answer has been foreshadowed all along by the motif of the digger outside the clinic excavating earth. Beneath the surface are the graves of ancient villagers and soldiers, buried on the site of a once-great palace where a king was defeated in battle. Now, he is using the spirits of modern-day soldiers to fight his battles in the afterlife, enlisting them against their will while they helplessly slumber. They are never expected to recover from this haunting illness that has forced them to serve a monarchy they don’t believe in, but the closest they might come to regaining consciousness is this in-between state that Itt exists in with Jen, seeing both the modern buildings and jungle which conceals the land’s history, and the kingdom which once dominated the landscape.

Weerasethakul is no stranger to mystical stories that ponder processes of healing, reincarnation, and dreams, but in the allegory at the heart of Cemetery of Splendour he also evokes his common themes from an unusually political angle. This kingly command over dormant soldiers echoes the anti-defamation laws protecting Thailand’s monarchy, subjugating and forcing its people to lend their arms to a ruling power that no longer holds any relevancy. Their sleep is a disturbed one, trapping them in an afterlife that blocks the natural cycle of reincarnation from taking place.

As Jen wanders a park of concrete Buddhist sculptures and wooden gazebos, Itt points out the features of the palace that once stood, seeing through time via the supernatural sickness that has taken over his body. Perhaps whoever is operating the excavators outside the clinic is similarly trying to gain a better understanding of the past by exhuming its artefacts, or maybe they are digging even more graves for those casualties of a cruel, careless government. Either way for Weerasethakul, the pits they create are symbols of death and permanent stasis, trapping the minds of the Thai people in a half-conscious state that keeps them powerless against the abuses of human rights visited upon them.

Cemetery of Splendour is currently streaming on SBS On Demand.

Michael Haneke | 1hr 50min

At its best, Happy End is a summation of every significant idea that Michael Haneke has ever examined throughout his career, from the suppression of French bourgeoisie guilt in Cache to the chilling sociopathy of children in The White Ribbon. At its worst, it never quite escapes from under the cloud of any of these films, spreading itself too thinly across so many subplots that it struggles to become its own cinematic statement. It takes until one of the final scenes between 13-year-old Eve and her grandfather, Georges, for the film to effectively congeal into anything more substantial. As the two sit across from each other, unsettling confessions begin to spill out, and for the first time there is a mutual acknowledgement between characters of the depraved darkness which is only barely obscured beneath their stoic, loveless expressions.

Even as these two generations open up to each other though, Haneke never unites them a single shot the way one might expect from a union of characters. Like so many other conversations in Happy End, each actor is kept isolated in their own frames, entirely cut off from their scene partners. The cold loneliness felt all throughout the film has a quietly crushing effect, leaving behind long stretches of silence that force us to simply sit with the visual horror of a dying hamster, a collapsing retaining wall, and an aggressive online affair.

And then there is Haneke’s violence, landing with muted thumps that draw as much attention to the sadistic intent of its perpetrators as it does to the physical pain exacted upon their victims. He is not one to push our attention around with moving cameras and cutaways, or to didactically carve out moral statements from the sins and virtues of his characters. When one young man is beaten by another outside an apartment building and when a mother breaks her son’s finger to stop him from acting out, he instead stifles these acts of brutality by staging them just offscreen, or otherwise relegating them to the background of long, static shots. Within the upper-middle class of French society that the Laurent family inhabits, violence is a useful tool that they would rather not directly acknowledge. In fact, the only offender who does face consequences in the film is the underprivileged son of an injured labourer, clearly unable to afford the same legal protection that keeps Haneke’s wealthier characters safe from repercussions.

With misanthropy like this being allowed to fester within the Laurent family and no threat of accountability, one could even assume it is hereditary, intensifying with each passing generation. We do feel real heartbreak for Georges when he admits to mercy killing his sick wife, but this almost feels trivial next to Eve’s poisoning and incidental murder of her own mother, Anaïs. In the film’s opening sequence, we watch through her phone’s voyeuristic lens as she records Anaïs from a distance gradually growing sluggish, until she falls asleep on a couch. The livestreamed comments she writes with these videos are disturbingly heartless, speaking of her mother’s coldness that has bred an even worse contempt in her.

When we return to Eve’s phone video again at Happy End’s close, there is something a little more sympathetic behind its intent. She, more than anyone, understands her grandfather’s suffering, and so she becomes an accomplice in his attempted suicide, letting his wheelchair roll down a ramp into the ocean where he hopes to drown. With the phone once again acting as a barrier between her and her dying relative, the detachment is still present, but there is also some shared relief between them that neither needs to pretend to be anything but their own angry, disdainful selves anymore. Her aunt’s horrified face as she rushes past the camera towards a sinking Georges in the very final second of the film says it all. For those with pristine reputations to uphold, these displays of cruelty and misery are best kept on in the inside, never to be shared with the outside world. To Haneke, this is both the curse and ultimate hypocrisy of living a privileged life.

Happy End is currently streaming on Stan, and is available to rent or buy on iTunes, YouTube, and Google Play.

Vincente Minnelli | 1hr 52min

A couple of decades before Vincente Minnelli took to The Band Wagon with his excitable camera and lavish colour palettes, it was a musical revue on Broadway, playing through comedic sketches and musical numbers with no great connective thread other than a consistent dedication to entertaining its audience. Fred Astaire headlined the show, though this would be one of the last theatrical productions he would perform in before becoming a major movie star at RKO Radio Pictures. When he returned to it again in 1953, it took a very different form – not as a revue, but rather a full-fledged movie-musical, with a story that plays out a fictionalised account of its creation and triumphant acclaim. Much like Singin’ in the Rain, The Band Wagon’s boisterous examination of the thin line that divides failure and success in the entertainment industry rolls along with grace and zeal, marking it as one of the finest musicals of Golden Age Hollywood.

Even before Astaire appears onscreen, his presence is already announced from the very first shot of the iconic top hat and cane held through the opening credits. Then without so much as a cut, we pan to the left and discover the significance of such items within the film – nothing more than relics of a washed-up actor who can barely make a dime off his old props and costumes. The ever-churning Hollywood dream machine has effectively written Tom Hunter out of its story in favour of younger actors, though one last shot at reviving his career arrives in the form of his good friends Lester and Lily, whose musical comedy script could set the stage for his comeback. The only obstacle is the vision of one Jeffrey Cordova, the chosen director whose background in traditional theatre barely masks his camp, tasteless sensibilities, leading him to interpret their creation as a retelling of Faust.

Given the theatre sets that form the basis of many scenes through The Band Wagon, it is no surprised that those stage performances make for some gorgeously expressionistic set pieces. Minnelli indulges in a deep red lighting setup early on when we first meet Jeffrey in a production of Oedipus Rex, complete with ancient Greek robes and Doric columns to fill out the mise-en-scène, and later Cyd Charisse’s young starlet Gab Gerard bursts forth from the frame as she sings ‘New Sun in the Sky’, matching the bright yellow set with a sparkling dress. The camera glides and swirls around these performances, rushing up to meet the actors in elaborate entrances and quietly following them around as they tap dance across the screen.

This is a level of cinematic energy that Minnelli maintains all throughout the film, not just in those musical numbers that the characters self-consciously perform for audiences on stages. The film starts off steady with Astaire’s solo number ‘Be Myself’ and a set of long tracking shots that capture his jazzy, prancing dance around an arcade in ‘Shine on Your Shoes’. ‘That’s Entertainment’ might as well be this film’s version of ‘Make ‘em Laugh’ in its vaudevillian comedy that continues to show off the talents of the broader cast, but it is when The Band Wagon finally reaches the instrumental piece ‘Dancing in the Dark’ that the bravado of Minnelli’s full spectacular vision is unleashed.

As Tony and Gaby stroll through a city park at night, the camera sweeps in a majestic crane shot over a garden of couples dancing in close embraces, accompanied by a small chamber ensemble off to the side. As the only pair still holding their inhibitions between them, they independently make their way through the crowd, until they reach a hidden courtyard shrouded by trees imprinted against a matte backdrop of tiny city lights off in the distance. Their dance movements start slow with matching footsteps and a twirl, before they both strike a pose. From there, the entire story of their relationship unfolds in their unified movements. It also calls to mind ‘A Lovely Night’ from La La Land which was almost certainly influenced by Minnelli’s narrative setup and elegant visual execution here, but ‘Dancing in the Dark’ even more significantly evokes Astaire’s traditional 1930s movie-musicals with those long, sweeping camera movements that seem to dance with him in synchronisation.

Even outside his musical numbers, Minnelli’s attention to detail in his exquisite production design continues to astound, surrounding characters with deeply sensual and highly curated colour palettes. It is a fortunate thing too that he possesses such a keen eye for spectacle given that the revue The Band Wagon as it exists within the story opens as a major flop. Unlike its theatrical source material, there is narrative tension driving this piece forward, and much of it comes down to the chaotic direction of the production itself. One could imagine a young Mel Brooks watching this and conceptualising The Producers in all its zany ambition, with flamboyant characters taking charge of a disastrous show destined for failure, and Minnelli too fully manifests a catastrophe of grand proportions. On the night before opening, he simply sets his camera back in long shots to watch the chaos comically unfold, with wired actors flying across the stage, the cast breaking down in confusion, set pieces moving up where they should move down, and down where they should move up.

After audiences leave in disturbed confusion from whatever they just watched, the cast and crew party, revelling in what they describe as a “good old-fashioned wake” as if celebrating the death of something they couldn’t get out of their lives sooner. Upon being offered some ham and devilled egg, Tony responds with a sardonic “I think I’ve had enough of both for one night,” trying to keep the tone light, though it doesn’t take long for sobering artistic integrity to kick in. To give up on this show would be to compromise their commitment to entertainment. All it might need is a makeover and back-to-basics revision, without any pretensions of heavy thematic material.

It is with the thirty remaining minutes of The Band Wagon that Minnelli delivers what is essentially the closest thing to a direct depiction of the original revue that the film gets. A medley of musical numbers cascade across the screen, taking the cast from city to city on a wave of success. Astaire finally gets the tap performance with a top hat and cane that is so characteristic of his style, but he also becomes a pulpy detective hero in ‘Girl Hunt Ballet’, a twelve-minute episode that could very well mark the high point of Minnelli’s career. Fight choreography blends seamlessly with dance as the set expands beyond the stage and becomes its own boundless world much like the ballet sequence from The Red Shoes, offering him the opportunity to vivaciously spin and twirl his camera in conversation with this heightened mini-story.

Needless to say, both versions of The Band Wagon end up a resounding success, though it is far easier to speak to the artistic accomplishment of the film over the revue. The process of creation organically melds into its very narrative construction, and with a director like Minnelli taking charge of the difficult task to render it in cinematic form, it flourishes in becoming far more than just a string of disconnected songs and dances. The Band Wagon lands as one of Hollywood’s most exceptional movie-musicals, fully realising the potential of movements behind the camera to bring exhilarating, propulsive dimensions to that which unfolds onstage.

The Band Wagon is currently streaming on Binge, and is available to rent or buy on iTunes, YouTube, Google Play, and Amazon Prime Video.

Jacques Tati | 1hr 55min

Playtime opens with a chaotic jazz track of frenzied drums and an electric keyboard against a cloudy sky, though it won’t be until we reach the final act about ninety minutes in that we will come across anything close to this anarchic again. The Paris of Jacques Tati’s slightly futuristic France is a highly curated assortment of rigid lines and boxes, fastidiously fitting workers into cubicles, citizens into apartments, and tourists into buses. His regular silent buffoon, Monsieur Hulot, doesn’t mean to disrupt this tidy, bureaucratic order, but letting a force of innocent curiosity loose in a city of inefficient processes and absurd designs does not bode well for either party.

In real life, the sprawling city set was dubbed Tativille, and pushed Playtime’s budget so far that it claimed the record for the most expensive French film ever produced. This isn’t surprising either – anything less simply would not have satisfied Tati’s extravagant metropolitan vision, built out of large, meticulous set pieces as sharp in their visual design as they are in their social satire.

By breaking his film up into vignettes that wander from one set piece to the next, Tati keeps a lax approach to traditional plotting, allowing for an organic exploration of his bizarre, monochrome vision of Paris. This is a city of metal and glass, shiny and sleek in its smooth textures, but also completely soulless. The charm of old-fashioned French culture only exists in small glimpses – a street florist contributing a few pops of colour to an otherwise drab sidewalk, and an elusive reflection of the Eiffel Tower in a glass door as it swings open. Everywhere else in this environment of harsh angles and parallel lines, there is barely a curve to be found. For Tati, this is an absolute triumph of set design and architecture, relying on these purely visual elements to tell a story of innocent romance and mindless conformity that dialogue alone cannot convey.

It is just as much his immaculate framing of the city as it is his monumental production design which isolates his characters from each other, as there are so many vertical dividers between windows and walls that it is almost impossible for anyone to stand anywhere without being boxed in. His deep focus photography serves well in capturing the breadth and scale of these colossal sets, but it serves a comedic purpose too in the staging of his visual gags, making full use of the frame in all its layers and obstructions. As Hulot sits at the end of an extra-long hallway in an office building, the man he is waiting to meet appears down the other end and begins to make the long journey from the background to the foreground. And then, in awkward silence, we wait some more. Very gradually, the man gets larger, and yet the comically long corridor just keeps on stretching the scene into oblivion.

Elsewhere in this office building, Tati confuses a pair of identical doors that lead to very different locations, observes a call operator confuse himself with a switchboard of buttons and dials, and discovers a labyrinth of cubicles ergonomically designed to cut its workers off from all human contact. So much striving for progress has effectively neutered this society’s functionality, to the point that what should be an epicentre of human innovation has become an absurdly convoluted playground. Should one manage to escape from it, as Hulot eventually does, there is no guarantee they will make it back inside the same building – all across this city are identical structures one could easily end up in instead.

It is in one of those buildings where Hulot comes across a trade exhibition of various pointless inventions. A broom with headlights attracts a small crowd, and a door that can slam silently is on show too. Perhaps the greatest display though is ‘Thro-Out Greek Style’ which turns ancient Greek columns into flip-top bins, tastelessly commercialising history for cheap profit. If we were to theorise that it is perhaps just this corner of the world that has succumbed to modernity, we are proven wrong when Hulot comes across a series of travel posters advertising famous international destinations, amusingly representing each one with the same dreary city buildings we have already seen here in Paris.

“Ultra-modern” is the word citizens proudly use to describe the impersonal style of their architecture and interior design, though there is nothing that looks particularly comfortable about it. Perhaps public buildings can get away with conforming to the same cookie-cutter moulds, but the stacking of identical apartments on top of each other like glass display cases saps the personal lives inside of anything that makes them remotely unique or intimate. Even as Monsieur Hulot enters one of these flats to visit his friend, Tati keeps his camera on the outside, observing the grid of windows from a distance where we can see neighbours going about their own ordinary, unexciting business. At times the camera is positioned in such a manner that we can’t even see the walls dividing the apartments, creating the illusion that their inhabitants are conversing with each other in a unified space. We know better than that though – such a connection between strangers is but a dream in this world of arbitrary barriers.

Our only hope that some quaint European charm might live on lies in the converging paths of Monsieur Hulot and Barbara, an American tourist desperately searching for the France of her dreams. As they find each other in a chic, modern restaurant, its geometric and architectural perfection falls to pieces around them, and Tati turns this ordered environment into one of unbridled chaos. It starts small with a floor tile that keeps getting stuck to shoes, revealing a small structural flaw in this room held together by glue, and then the glass door at the front smashes to pieces, forcing a staff member to hold the handle in place and mime opening it for guests. A spiral neon sign on the ceiling leads drunk customers around in circles, pretensions of restraint go out the door when the jazz musicians are replaced by an erratic, impromptu performance, and then, with one swift motion, Tati collapses a ceiling decoration, marking his infrastructure with a higgledy-piggledy arrangement of wooden planks and exposed wires. This uncontrolled mess is the perfect meet-cute for what appears to be the only two people in Paris who long for simpler, scruffier times.

With his slapstick gags and production design carrying so much of the storytelling, Tati’s scripted dialogue remains notably minimal. Rather than functioning to convey detailed information, it simply melds into the sound design where every other aural cue is accentuated. The loud clacking of shoes on hard floors and the constant hum of fluorescent lights tell us just as much about these environments as the nasally drawl of American tourists or the slick sales pitch of a creatively bankrupt entrepreneur.

Of course, cinema is a visual medium though, and Tati recognises it as such in his exacting formal precision, never failing to put his rigorously designed mise-en-scène front and centre. That he can draw out such playful beauty from a society so void of individuality speaks to his craftsmanship as a comedian and filmmaker, especially in the closing minutes where he leads a balletic dance of cars along the city streets, circling roundabouts in never-ending loops and bouncing in time to carousel music. For all its light-hearted social satire, Playtime remains an intricately stacked construction of gags and set pieces, as monumentally ambitious as it is methodically delicate.

Playtime is currently streaming on SBS On Demand and The Criterion Channel, and is available to rent or buy on iTunes.

Franklin J. Schaffner | 1hr 52min

Before we see any of the creatures promised in the title Planet of the Apes, we spend a good thirty minutes wandering around a mysterious landscape of dunes, waterholes, and open fields inhabited by mute humans. Charles Heston leads the way as George Taylor, an astronaut from 1972 and captain of a space crew that has crash landed on an unknown world some two thousand and six years into the future. Its environments and civilisations are built slowly and thoroughly, and besides the use of some clumsy camera zooms that insist on pushing our attention in the most obvious directions, Franklin J. Schaffner’s majestic style of epic filmmaking is well-suited to the material. It is when we first see the rustling stalks of corn and an army of apes on horseback bursting through the vegetation that Planet of the Apes moves into truly exciting territory though, whisking us away to a city of prehistoric stone structures and non-human primates.

This entire set is an impressive feat of production design for Schaffner, cleverly combining elements of caveman civilisations and modern technology to craft a world that can’t be placed in any familiar time. Rudimentary labs, courtrooms, churches, and streets carved from rock become a playground for his boisterous narrative of chases and escape attempts, though the apes themselves who are in control of it all possess a far greater intelligence than those that Taylor is familiar with. There is a similar integration of primitive and contemporary sounds in Jerry Goldsmith’s discordant score of exotic percussion and orchestral instruments, hauntingly underscoring the environment’s otherworldly qualities.

The culture that has evolved here is also one that has been thoroughly tipped on its head. The re-invention of popular monkey-centred idioms that place humans in subservient positions can be somewhat glib at times (“Man see, Man do” is one notable offender), but otherwise this subversion of status is one that Schaffner cunningly incorporates all through the structure of this upside-down civilisation. Hunters take proud photos with their human game, theories abound that apes evolved from “dirty” men, and most fascinatingly, cultural conflicts between faith and science are a constant point of contention between different factions of the city’s inhabitants. In these parallels, Schaffner makes his point bluntly but powerfully – the advanced intelligence of any species does not make them inherently special, but rather exposes their ties to their primitive, evolutionary roots.

Then again, perhaps there is a single inherently human quality that separates one genus of primates from another. Schaffner paces his narrative well in his final act leading to this discovery, transforming Planet of the Apes into a western of sorts in which a band of allied apes and humans venture across a harsh desert to uncover the “Forbidden Zone”, where it is said one can find evidence of a pre-ape civilisation. The warnings of the apes’ religious leaders fall on deaf ears, describing man as a “harbinger of death” who makes “a desert of his home.”

As Taylor trudges along an empty beach towards what he believes is his freedom, Goldsmith’s eerie score continues to play beneath with a nervous anticipation. The discovery that they eventually reach at the other end is simply gut-wrenching, not just because of the anguish that reverberates through Heston’s voice, but Schaffner’s framing of the shot itself, slowly bringing those iconic spikes on the Statue of Liberty’s crown into view from behind, before we cut to a wide and realise the full, bleak context. There are no close-ups or frantic cutting to be found here at all. In a few stark, simple shots, humanity’s desire for ultimate dominance is uncovered as the trigger for its own destruction, the pieces of this mystery fall into place, and Schaffner effectively immortalises Planet of the Apes as an immortal touchstone of cinema history.

Planet of the Apes is currently available to stream on Disney Plus, and to rent or buy on iTunes, YouTube, Google Play, and Amazon Prime Video.

The Coen Brothers | 1hr 45min

Like a folk ballad that keeps returning to the same chorus over and over, Llewyn Davis’ life moves in circles, always sending him back to the dim, smoky Gaslight Café in New York City’s Greenwich Village to play the same familiar set. The spotlight that casts him in a pale grey wash also cuts out silhouettes of the audience and industrial brick arches, framing him as he plucks and sings a melancholy tune. “If it was never new, and it never gets old, then it’s a folk song,” he charmingly quips after he strikes the final chord three minutes into the film, but by this point Oscar Isaac has already won us over with just his singing. After his performance, Llewyn encounters a shady man wearing a low hanging hat in the alley outside, and soon gets beaten up for some incident that occurred the previous night.

By the end of Inside Llewyn Davis, we will recognise these events as part of a Groundhog Day rotation that pins our hapless protagonist down in a perpetual cycle of misfortune. This is not some supernatural time loop though, but a trap of Llewyn’s own making, propelled by the same bitterness and self-loathing that leads him to lash out at others. This outward anger is not one we see until a little deeper into the film though. For a long time, the only hints that he might have an obnoxious spiteful side come from the way we see others treat him. The only people he gets along with tend to be abundantly generous and tolerant, while those like Jean, his friend’s girlfriend, hold nothing for him but derisive contempt.

This masterful character study from the Coen Brothers may very well be their greatest to date, and with a desaturated colour palette that follows Llewyn between American cities hoping to find success, it proves to be one of their most impressive visual accomplishments as well. The frigid New York winter that lines sidewalks with snow and hangs a chilly fog in the air also appears to seep into the Coens’ interiors, where rundown apartment complexes and steel train carriages enclose Llewyn within rigid, oppressive structures. One particular hallway is even framed to look like a dead-end in the way it narrows to a point, and every single time we return to this location Llewyn is shot walking away into its apex where his path terminates.

Rarely has a Coen Brothers film been as bleakly beautiful as this, and it is no coincidence that Bruno Delbonnel is the cinematographer here either, bringing his flair for stylised pictorial textures to scenes of crushing destitution and melancholy. At the same time, there always remains that touch of darkly comedic wit that the Coens wield with such sophistication over, offering Llewyn some sort of hopeful resolve before knocking him down again. It comes with an especially sharp jab when he is invited by a friend to help with a studio recording, only to discover that they are recording a cheap novelty song with no artistic integrity, and again later on the road to Chicago when his driver is arrested for suspected intoxication, suddenly leaving him stranded in the middle of nowhere.

Isaac wears the weight of Llewyn’s poverty and hardship with a beaten down acceptance, so much so that it has almost become part of himself, giving in to despair the moment it arises. There is no version of this character that one could imagine being better off – this is the way he has always been and will continue to be beyond the bookends of the film. Still, the cutting comments hurled his way hurt no less, cutting down any remaining shred of hope. When F. Murray Abraham’s music producer, Bud Grossman, tells him “I don’t see a lot of money here” after a gorgeous, soulful rendition of ‘The Death of Queen Jane’, it might as well be a death sentence to his musical ambitions.

Then again, maybe that hope was lost long ago along when his best friend and musical collaborator, Mike, died of suicide. In the returning motif of ‘Fare Thee Well’, the Coens give this tragic backstory its own poignant theme, and the hole that has been left in Llewyn’s life feels even deeper when we discover that there is a missing harmony in the song that Mike once filled in. With him gone, Llewyn resists any suggestion of playing with others as a permanent act, abruptly chiding one friend who tries to fill in Mike’s harmony and later rejecting an offer of joining a trio. The uninformed suggestion from Bud that Llewyn “Get back together” with his partner makes every other criticism feel all the more damning. If Mike was his only path to success, then he is effectively out of options.

Without any one person to ground him to the world, perhaps then we can look to the tabby cat he is tasked with caring for after accidentally locking it out of its owner’s apartment. With its name remaining largely unknown throughout the film and its habit of running away, it too becomes a slippery figure much like Llewyn, rejecting stability in favour of an untethered life that simply puts a burden on others. There is a distinct irony that he is the one who must deal with the consequences of that behaviour for once, but even with that new perspective there is little hope that he will change much. Just as the same chorus will always be around the corner, the Gaslight Café will always be at the end of the road, and Llewyn will always drunkenly self-sabotage his own friendships. The Coen Brothers more than anyone recognise the grim humour that lies in a stubbornly nomadic character like this, and it is in its quiet tragedy that Inside Llewyn Davis becomes one of their most movingly tactile cinematic portraits of adversity.

Inside Llewyn Davis is currently streaming on Stan, and is available to rent or buy on iTunes, YouTube, Google Play, and Amazon Prime Video.

Asghar Farhadi | 2hr 7min

Rahim’s troubles started three years ago when he was imprisoned for failing to pay a debt of 150,000,000 tomans to his brother-in-law, Bahram. Now, having served his time and been released on parole, the opportunity is there to start afresh – but where is the harm in an innocuous lie that it was he who discovered and returned a lost handbag containing gold, and not his partner, Farkondeh? After all, it helps cover up the fact that she was the one who discovered it two weeks prior, and that they initially planned to use it to pay off his debts. On top of that, letting him take the credit might even restore his reputation in the eyes of the public. It may usually be easy to apply convenient archetypes to moral tales such as these, but the ethical ambiguity that Asghar Farhadi permeates A Hero with undermines any attempts to do so, and from it sprouts a complex drama that sees a simple plan to regain honour veer off in unexpected directions.

With a handheld camera and a flair for searing realism, Farhadi’s directorial presence in this story is largely observational, rejecting artifice in favour of a grounded, down-to-earth examination of flawed people caught up in one poor decision. There is a spontaneity to his frequent rejection of clear, static shots of his scenes, instead letting characters drift out of the frame and behind obstructions as if we too are just another pair of eyes bearing witness to the shortcomings of our own humanity.

As such, his environments feel entirely organic, not just because of his location shooting in the Iranian city of Shiraz, but also the dedication to naturally filling out diegetic soundscapes and busy environments around Rahim. In one early conversation with his sister, the noises of his son’s video game offer an irritating layer of distraction beneath the dialogue, and later as he spies on Bahram at the market, a shopkeeper behind him underscores the anticipation with a hammered dulcimer, offering the only musical accompaniment of the film up until its final minutes.

With such a detailed, intricate world being built, the rippling of Rahim’s mistake out into the wider community feels further grounded in the reality of Iranian culture. Even more than money, it is honour which becomes the most valuable commodity in A Hero, so much so that it might as well be a currency of its own. Within this social context, Rahim is a poor man indeed, looking to earn back the respect of his community by whatever means necessary. There is something about Amir Jadidi’s face in this role that is utterly sympathetic too, bearing a well-meaning honesty in his expression while he shoots off what he believes are insignificant lies, as even in those lies there is still a constant struggle between his moral compass and his desire to be seen as a good person.

For a while, Rahim’s plan appears to be successful. His first destination after being released on parole is the royal tombs of Persepolis, carved beautifully into rocky cliff faces where labourers are working on restorations. Farhadi holds his camera at a low angle here for what feels like an eternity, watching Rahim arduously climb the scaffolding steps to a site of great historical honour, and slyly foreshadowing his own journey to the heights of public esteem. Not long after he returns the gold, his story airs on national news, he wins a merit certificate, and he is even promised an early prison release. At a charity event, jump cuts move quickly through the crowd of attendees heaping piles of cash onto a giant plate for his benefit, and with the minor exception of Bahram, his creditor, everyone is more than happy to eat up this feel-good story of an indebted prisoner returning lost valuables.

As it turns out, Bahram’s single seed of doubt is all it takes to spread rumours through the community of Rahim’s dishonesty. Attempts to patch things up and assure others of his integrity tear at the seams, and the honour which he cares so deeply about quickly slips between his fingers. Desperate measures are called for, and eventually his stammering son is pulled into the affair, recording a video that they hope might draw some sympathy. His parole officer who once admonished him for his lies is fine with this cheap ploy, but it still does not sit right with Rahim. Elsewhere, the charity which recognised his generosity is concerned that their affiliation will taint their reputation, and the prison is accused of orchestrating the whole thing. In teasing out these ambiguous moral lines that keep repercussions unclear until they transpire, Farhadi crafts a wonderfully thorny screenplay, refusing to draw hard distinctions between right and wrong, and choosing instead to provoke considerations of what any one of us might do given the very specific and unfortunate circumstances.

For a film relatively free of beautiful imagery, A Hero’s last shot stands far above the rest as a poignant bookend to Rahim’s rise and fall. Just as we first met him leaving prison on a path to success, we now leave him withdrawing back into that dingy, confined space, where those stripped of dignity are segregated from the rest of society. Piercing the dim foyer is a rectangle of bright sunlight leading to the outside world, framing a loving reunion between a newly released prisoner and his wife that now seems like a prospect that might only exist in Rahim’s distant future. The distinction between freedom and incarceration here is as distinct as the sharp contrast of light and darkness in Farhadi’s stunning final composition – or perhaps, in the case of Rahim, it is all the difference between honour and soul-crushing shame.

A Hero is currently playing in theatres.

Joseph Kosinski | 2hr 11min

Delivering a sequel for a beloved 80s action movie is no foreign concept in this era of collective nostalgia and intellectual property-based movies, so it is even more gratifying when one such film can stand on its own merits as well as Top Gun: Maverick. It is a little worrying at first when it opens with the exact same expository text as its 1986 predecessor and goes on to reheat the slow-build montage of jets preparing to take off on a runway at sunrise against the instantly recognisable ‘Danger Zone’. By the time we are up in the air though, it is evident that Joseph Kosinski is interested in pushing its adrenalising aerial sequences just a little further than what Tony Scott previously achieved. With fully transparent cockpits, the landscapes outside the fighter jets tumble around aviators in gravity-defying acts of grandeur, as sharply present as the actors themselves within the epic scope of its IMAX cameras.

While Top Gun: Maverick maintains a charismatic Tom Cruise at its centre, the film otherwise sees an almost complete turnover in its cast, filling in familiar archetypes with younger characters who never let their mere plot functions hold back their sheer charisma. It is this ensemble of fresh faces which Pete Mitchell A.K.A “Mav” is tasked with training for a stealth mission in a foreign country, after being pulled from his post as a U.S. Navy test pilot where he has willingly sat without promotion for decades. Though he has come to terms with the death of his wingman and friend, he evidently still harbours some guilt over it, and it is not long before we learn of the tension between him and Goose’s son, Rooster, following in his late father’s footsteps as an incoming Top Gun recruit. Around them, we meet pilots Hangman, Bob, Phoenix, and Payback among others, rising as the new generation to play beach volleyball, sing along to ‘Great Balls of Fire’ – and of course, deal with the life and death stakes of their dangerous line of work.

With a clear deadline guiding this narrative towards its thrilling conclusion, there is a tightness and direction to Kosinski’s storytelling that supersedes the original, and there is no doubt that his acute, dynamic editing plays a large part in this. In one training scene that sees the pilots run a simulated course, Kosinski skilfully intercuts between the failed run and the disappointing debrief down on the ground afterwards, detailing the team’s weaknesses both visually and verbally. Not only this, but here we also familiarise ourselves with the obstacles and steps of the key mission, foreshadowing some thrilling later developments that keep on driving up the suspense. Across all Kosinski’s aerial sequences, the precise coordination of the fighter jet stunts and communication between each pilot makes for some heart-pumping scenes that never lose sight of individual characterisations, least of all Maverick’s hubris which constantly pushes him just that little bit further than what convention dictates.

In combining its character work and action, Top Gun: Maverick’s energetic pacing flies by with ease, though at times to the detriment of Maverick’s redemption arc. Little time is spent dwelling on his lowest point before he quickly picks himself back up again and gets back in a plane, breaking rules with gleeful abandon just to prove a point. Still, there is otherwise a strong foundation to this emotional journey in his relationship with Rooster, with whom he shares a troubled personal history. There is a tension between them right from the start that keeps them from speaking to each other, but in the air this cold remoteness manifests as outright competition, each trying to get one up over the other.

The dynamic shift that takes place between them does not come easily, but in echoing the spirit of their departed friend and father, Kosinski does draw out a shared grief between the two, driving them forward in their careers. It is ultimately in this intersection of drama and sharply executed, thrill-seeking action that Top Gun: Maverick takes flight, building on the original and resolving its lingering threads of guilt with sensational, breathtaking vigour.

Top Gun: Maverick is currently playing in theatres.

Tony Scott | 1hr 50min

There is something a little wistful in the opening exposition of Top Gun, informing us of the elite school established by the United States Navy to train the next generation of fighter pilots. It describes aerial combat as a “lost art”, practiced only by the select few men who graduate and go on to serve their nation. Before we are allowed to witness it in action though, Tony Scott leads into it with a slow, steady build, setting silhouettes of jets and pilots warming up on the tarmac against a burnt orange sky and low horizon. The early morning light is delicately diffused softly through a light mist, and then, as these men finally take off, so too does the film, playing out a montage of aerial sequences as exhilarating as they are immaculately executed.

The first time ‘Danger Zone’ turns up in Top Gun’s soundtrack, it comes as a rousing though affectionately cheesy underscore to this opening adrenaline rush, aggressively warning us of the thrills and terror to be found in this line of work. After the fifth time it plays, it hits a point of diminishing returns, edging from tactfully familiar to plainly over-used. Still, the visual awe of the tight jet formations that the song accompanies and Scott’s decision to fix his camera to plane cockpits never quite grows stale, flying us through their air with no regards to gravity or orientation. Whether these pilots are simply playing around, running drills, or engaging in real aerial combat, he keeps up an elated energy in his editing and camerawork, skilfully controlling the tension and release of every manoeuvre his characters execute.

When it comes to defining those characters, Scott opts for clean, memorable archetypes, each one embodied in their call name. There is little that the moniker Maverick leaves up to the imagination when we first meet Tom Cruise’s charming daredevil, and his rival, Iceman, similarly takes his title from his flying style and attitude, remaining cool under pressure and persistently wearing down opponents. Goose rounds out our trio of main pilots here, though joining in as Maverick’s love interest and instructor, Charlie, is Kelly McGillis, offering up a chemistry with Cruise that save even some of the corniest scenes.

Where ‘Danger Zone’ marks Top Gun’s aerial sequences, ‘Take My Breath Away’ is assigned to its romantic narrative thread, and is pulled off to greater effect if only for its slightly less prominent and more varied use. Its introductory riff often teases the sexual tension between Cruise and McGillis as they edge towards a consummation, but it isn’t until Scott brings us into that dark bedroom with dim blue light filtering through its curtains that it is played in full. In the silhouettes of bodies and faces inching closer together, Scott marks another key narrative development with visual splendour, opting for raw emotional power over any eloquent verbal expressions of love.

It is a fortunate thing too given how Top Gun’s screenplay tends to bog it down in plotting that is so signposted one could count down the seconds until the next plot point. Perhaps the main exception to this though is the heartbreaking midpoint turn, which sees Goose killed during a particularly dangerous training session. The weight that this holds over Maverick’s character arc from this point on is significant, tempering his reckless confidence with a great deal of guilt, and re-asserting the stakes that come with aerial combat.

Cruise carries this drastic shift well, shifting seamlessly from his charming action star persona into a broken man grappling with the realisation that his defining gift is also his downfall. Had the chemistry of Top Gun been slightly different with Cruise or Scott replaced by a lesser actor or director, it could have edged entirely into the realm of tacky entertainment, devoid of any redeeming qualities. As it is though, it stands as an admirable piece of action cinema, lifting the genre up to new heights and coasting along on its electrifying pacing.

Top Gun is currently streaming on Stan, Binge, and Paramount Plus, and is available to rent or buy on iTunes, YouTube, Google Play, and Amazon Video.