It Happened One Night (1934)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

It Happened One Night (1934) – F. Capra

It seems to me that Frank Capra is one of those filmmakers that you first encounter as a child or youth (from It’s a Wonderful Life, 1946, to Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 1939, and maybe to Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, 1936), when his “Capra-Corn”, full of sentimentality and simple populist politics, can have its biggest impact.  But there’s no denying the pleasures available to adult viewers in a film like It Happened One Night (1934), winner of 5 Oscars for Capra, screenwriter Robert Riskin, and stars Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable, not to mention Best Picture.  Gable is at his charismatic best as the no-nonsense straight-talking but principled reporter who gets drunk, gets fired, and then stumbles onto the story of a lifetime: heiress Colbert has run away from her over-protective banker father (Walter Connolly) to elope with an older aviator, acknowledged by all to be a fraud. When her bag is stolen, bystander Gable helps her to navigate the journey from Miami to New York to meet her fiancé (by night bus and other modes of transport), teaches her about hitch-hiking (the thumb!), piggy-back rides, and donut-dunking – and also falls in love with her. There are some highly-charged erotic moments when the couple are separated by the Walls of Jericho (a blanket suspended between two twin beds). When they aren’t fighting (which is most of the time), you can see the care developing between them.  Anyway, it’s a comedy with the kind of plot that puts all sorts of obstacles in the way of young love until we reach the requisite happy ending. They don’t make them like this anymore.

 

Bugonia (2025)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Bugonia (2025) – Y. Lanthimos

For some reason, I haven’t checked in with director Yorgos Lanthimos for quite a while (last time was The Favourite, 2018), so I missed his two previous collaborations with Emma Stone. After watching Bugonia, also starring Stone, I think I’m going to need to go back and catch up.  To be honest, I wasn’t certain that I would like this one.  I mean, “conspiracy theorists who kidnap a CEO because they think she is an alien” sounded either too facile or trying too hard to be weird. So, the film had to work hard to convince me – and by the time it was done (with those amazing freeze-frame shots), I was convinced.  Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis play the conspiracy theorists, none too bright, but Plemons (playing “Teddy”) is clearly obsessed while Delbis (playing “Don”) appears to have some sort of disability and is more ambivalent (and not lacking in empathy). The film plays out sort of exactly how you think it would – CEO denies being an alien but tin-foil-hat guys persist.  Yet Lanthimos keeps adding extra details and the cast fully inhabit their roles, going for broke. To say that this production pushed things as far as they possibly could is probably an understatement. Weird, but not only for weirdness’s sake – there are some deeper themes here about corporate greed (of course), the destruction of the environment (particularly bees – which relates to the ancient Greek origin of the film title) but also about power’s need for victims (even the cop-babysitter evokes this) and the merry path to hell that we humans are currently traversing… Perhaps this could be read as one big cosmic joke but the final moments arrested that thought. Highly recommended.

The Mastermind (2025)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

The Mastermind (2025) – K. Reichardt

I guess I lost track of director Kelly Reichardt since the pandemic but I have enjoyed all of her films that I’ve seen (particularly Old Joy, 2006, and First Cow, 2019). With The Mastermind, Reichardt has brought her technique and themes to the heist drama. (It is always hard to know whether these arthouse directors choose to make genre films to attract a wider audience, for commercial prospects, or because, like many of us, they are truly fond of the genres). The setting is Framingham, Massachusetts, circa 1970. Reichardt and her team (including longtime cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt) use film stock and camera techniques to evoke films shot in this period (gauzy, washed-out colour) alongside pitch-perfect art design and set-decoration and costumes (furniture, cars, buildings, shirts, dresses, etc.).  The plaintive jazz soundtrack by Rob Mazurek lends an emotional note to the proceedings even when some scenes are scored only by extended drum solos. The plot centres on Josh O’Connor’s failing carpenter/architect/art-school graduate, married (to Alana Haim) with two young sons, who concocts a plan to steal some abstract paintings from the local art gallery with a couple of local guys/friends. Reichardt takes us step-by-step through the caper and its aftermath in true slow-cinema style, allowing viewers’ awareness of the genre to fill in some of the gaps in the plot as she hones in on a character study of O’Connor’s “mastermind”. Rather than using other characters to psychoanalyse him, Reichardt allows O’Connor’s actions (and the little bit of context we glean about him and his past) to help viewers to draw their own conclusions. The film concludes, with Vietnam War protests on TV and on the streets, with a sort of sudden ironic joke and no denouement (possibly one could see 2/3 of the film as a long long denouement, I guess!).  Slow but always absorbing.

Weapons (2025)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Weapons (2025) – Z. Creggar

Ostensibly narrated by a primary school girl from whatever small town in America the film takes place, lending a fable-like quality to the proceedings, we begin the tale with the key mystery to be solved: on one particular school day, all of the students in one classroom (save one) fail to turn up to school (in fact, they each left their houses at 2:17 AM and disappeared). Distressed parents focus their anger on the class teacher, played by Julia Garner. The film is divided into three parts: Justine’s story (the classroom teacher), Archer’s story (one of the parents, played by Josh Brolin), and Alex’s story (the one boy who did show up for school, played by Cary Christopher). Everyone is desperate to understand what happened to the missing children – and, of course, to find them. Amy Madigan, playing Alex’s Aunt Gladys, was nominated for a Golden Globe for best supporting actress for this film but did not win. To say any more would be criminal but I left the film thinking about the Brothers Grimm (and although I was hoping for a strictly supernatural film, I did wince on a few occasions that involved some violence and gore). Worth a look (if you dare)!

The Phoenician Scheme (2025)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

The Phoenician Scheme (2025) – W. Anderson

I will have to watch this one again, having only seen it on my trans-Pacific flight to the USA on the tiny back-of-the-seat screen (possibly with an airline crash edited out).  However, even with these conditions, I’m confident that this is director Wes Anderson’s best feature since The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014). Although I enjoyed them well enough at the time, Asteroid City (2023) and The French Dispatch (2021) felt like a letdown. Here, Benicio del Toro stars as businessman Zsa-Zsa Korda, who may have a shady past and also the target of various attempts at his life (possibly leading to multiple airplane crashes, all survived). He is trying to put together the financing for one last engineering feat, which involves visiting a series of former business partners around the globe. Along with him are Mia Threapleton playing his daughter Liesl, now a nun, to whom he plans to bequeath his estate, and Michael Cera playing Bjorn, a tutor hired to teach him about insects. The characterisations (including from the many, often familiar bit players) are sublimely eccentric. Although not scaling the droll comedic peak that Grand Budapest conquered, Phoenician Scheme offers many amusing moments as Korda seeks to eliminate “the gap” in his financing. As could be expected, the art design, set decoration, and music (Alexandre Desplat, plus curated classical and jazz selections), are highly stylized and exquisite.  Recommended, particularly if you’ve more or less given up on Wes recently.

 

Aliens (1986)

 

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Aliens (1986) – J. Cameron

In preparation for a family visit to the Deep Space escape room at Ukiyo.com.au (courtesy of Nanna & Vaari) – and because I recently played Alien: Isolation (the survival horror videogame) – I rewatched this sequel to the original Ridley Scott 1979 horror sci-fi classic.  This time with James Cameron at the helm (fresh off his success with The Terminator, 1984), the franchise takes a distinct turn to the action film, as a group of marines (including Bill Paxon, Michael Biehn, Jenette Goldstein, and synthetic Lance Henriksen) are sent to THAT planet, where a human colony has now disappeared, approximately 57 years after the first film. Ellen Ripley (played again by Sigourney Weaver) has been on ice in hibernation all this time on the Nostromo’s escape pod but, ultimately, is encouraged to join the rescue mission (by slimy corporate shill Paul Reiser) after a traumatic recovery period on Earth. When they arrive on LV-426, they find only 9-year-old Newt whose parents and brother have been killed, along with all of the colonists (except those used for incubating offspring), by the swarm of aliens that has infested their base.  And with that premise in place, the rest of the film is one long fight between the space marines, Ripley, and the aliens (including their queen), with a few subplots for character development along the way.  Cameron ups the tension and plays up the “maternal instinct” angle by mirroring Ripley (with Newt standing in for her now dead real daughter) and the alien queen.  It’s a relentless ride, although not quite up to the spooky-scary benchmark set by its predecessor.  If I recall correctly, none of the subsequent films in the franchise are as good as the first two.