Spielberg | 1977 | USA

First watch – my final Spielberg blind spot addressed, and I now feel adequately prepared for Disclosure Day. Some of the photography here is breathtaking, including the shot above (and the one below). I find it much more interesting when the existence of aliens is just taken as given (rather than teased) and so the story can instead focus on how people react to their existence. He perfects this trick with E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.

This is the least “Spielberg-y” of his movies, playing more like a straightforward thriller. The extent to which you enjoy his later signatures of backlighting and, shall we say, “mom stuff” will colour that conclusion but the layers are all still here. If anything, he trusts his audience more to connect the dots.

As a filmic artifact, it’s ceasessly compelling. The Girl joined me on the couch for the third act and we mused that old school special effect shots are in many ways much more interesting than so much CGI and the use thereof to render unreal realities in a photo-accurate manner. I don’t mind being made aware that I’m watching a movie. Especially if it’s a good one like this.

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Recommended Reading:

2017 Review by Adam Kempenaar

2024 Review by Christopher McQuarrie

Spielberg | 1982 | USA

I know that I must’ve watched this a lot as a kid but I have no single memory of ever watching the whole thing through and so, rather improbably, this is my ‘first watch’. A blind spot I was correcting as I prepare for Disclosure Day and not one that I expected to affect me the way that it did. Suffice to say, this made me feel things.

You see, I became a father to a boy just a smidge over five years ago. In a previous century, I was a little boy myself. My memories of this time are troubled by the role adults played in my life through those years, up to and including the adult bully who plagued my high school years. But I was, for sure, a little boy with the built-in thirst for adventure.

Parenthood has forced me to confront my boyhood through an inescapable duality – I see my son and at the same time I see myself as my father would have seen me. This film presented me with a boy who is my son and also me, and he encounters adults who understand him and want to help; adults who give the benefit of the doubt. Considering how significantly this differed to my own experiences, it moved me deeply and made me hope the world will better accommodate my son as he grows up.

Naturally, this take is highly idiosyncratic to myself, but it wouldn’t land if the movie itself wasn’t excellent. Tightly paced and delightfully whimsical, these two hours feel like 80min- and yet there’s more character development here than you’d get in an 8 part Netflix series. Even Mike’s gang of friends have distinct personalities.

The first time Elliot and E.T. take flight on the bike, Elliot is initially afraid. “Not so high!” he yells, but the thrill overtakes him only a moment later and he yells “go higher!” My childhood made me timid for a long time, but parenthood has me wanting to fly higher.

Luhrmann | 2013 | USA, Australia

5th or 6th watch; first since 2020. In my younger and more vulnerable years, I fell in love with this film at first sight. I was in the minority at the time (outnumbered by an oddly large portion of the cinemagoing public that engages with art so literally that they can only judge an adaptation by its fidelity to the text) but it’s rightfully won over a few champions through the years. For me, the only dissonance is caused by the recognisable Sydney filming locations.

Many of the things I like here are exactly the things others do not: the saturated colours, the earnest dialogue, the modern music airlifted into a previous age. I don’t even mind that they stuck Nick in a mental hospital and put a pen in his hand.

I’m a big DiCaprio head – he’s probably my favourite working actor – and his turn here is atypical for him (and so, rather arresting). Stilted and layered to the point of being off putting – so, more or less exactly Jay Gatsby. I’m always impressed when an actor can be good playing a character that is, in the story, a bad actor. This would be my favourite Tobey Maguire performance if I didn’t have an incurable soft spot for Spider-Man 2. So yeah, lots to like. I always enjoy giving this a spin.

Leitch | 2017 | USA

4th or 5th watch; a singular pleasure but one I had apparently not indulged in for five years. I’ve never liked Charlize Theron as much as I do here – she’s all in and understands the assignment. Highly stylised from lights to soundtrack (a frequent spin before my turntable went kaput, and a good motivator to get it fixed), which has the effect of making this feel like a neon postcard from an electric moment in history (being the fall of the Berlin Wall).

What stops this from being merely flash are the moments of reversion to verisimilitude – take, for example, the deservedly famous stairwell fight (which is itself only one component of a longer and consistently stunning action sequence).

Here the music stops and the light is natural (read: bleak). The scene unfolds in real time (as a simulated “oner” with hidden cuts). The only sounds are those of punches landing, guns clicking (and firing), and bodies hitting surfaces. A bag of supplies is thrown and the clattering of its contents hitting the ground echoes throughout the building. You are instantly drawn in; a part of it. When it’s over, you realise you’d sort of stopped breathing. Heady, rather miraculous stuff.

Fukasaku | 2000 | Japan

So glad I saw this for the first time in a cinema (where it paradoxically played as a “cult classic” to a sold out auditorium on a cold Monday night). One of those experiences where you can appreciate how original this would have been contemporaneously while also clocking how undeniably influential it’s been on movies for the last quarter of a century.

Once again, I can thank my newfound fondness for manga for helping me appreciate the absurdity of the proceedings – including and especially the ending – rather than feeling overwhelmed by it. Helped to have a game audience who were willing to laugh at some pretty dark stuff (at which we were meant to laugh).

The first act of this – all swelling orchestral music behind cartoonishly loud sound effects – is truly thrilling. You’re either on this ride or you are most definitely not. That it only manages to get weirder than the basic premise of a class of 9th graders being legislatively compelled to fight to the death is the great joy of the experience.

And I suppose that’s what makes it all work – that at the end of the day, you more or less believe these kids are 9th graders who find themselves in a patently absurd situation. Nobody acts appropriately; there is no appropriate way to act.

Strangely, you walk away from it feeling vaguely as if you’ve just been swept away by a romance? I’m not sure how they pulled that off but I look forward to enjoying repeated viewings (at maximum volume) as I attempt to figure it out.

Kawamura | 2025 | Japan

Oh yes, thank you very much. I am a sucker for a simple premise infused with layers of pathos and, importantly, executed more or less to perfection. Right when I was talking about cycles (regarding Last Night in Soho), along comes a literal representation of the psycho-cyclical essence of life as we cognitively and emotionally encounter it. That the cycle is guilt is of secondary importance to the idea that such cycles intersect with the similar cycles of others (and that we ignore this at our peril). This is rendered rather literally here – only by taking note of deviations can our hero hope to escape.

Speaking of cycles and guilt, it just so happens that Camus’ final cycle of creative output focused on guilt. The novel component of this cycle – La Chute [The Fall] – is my favourite of his novels. Every word of the book is the spoken dialogue of the central character, a self-proclaimed ‘judge-penitent’ haunted by a heroic endeavour he did not undertake out of fear and cowardice.

Surviving merely to judge himself and anybody unfortunate enough to get dragged into hearing his tale, he completes the telling of that tale by concluding that, presented with the same scenario in which we initially failed, we would only fail again:

A second time, eh, what imprudence! Suppose, dear sir, someone actually took our word for it? It would have to be fulfilled. Brr…. the water is so cold! But let’s reassure ourselves. It’s too late now, it will always be too late. Fortunately!

The magic of this movie is that it does not agree.

Wright | 2021 | UK & USA

3rd watch. A film I’ve gone all the way around the world with. I really didn’t care for it the first time. I don’t have notes from that viewing but l remember feeling like there was a good movie in here that was never quite drawn out; interesting parts that failed to make a cohesive whole. The second viewing a few months later uncovered nothing new, though I recall finding it more palatable. Flash forward 3.5 years and something about this movie just continued to gnaw at me so down I sat and, well, I more or less love it now. The Girl will call it “A Classic Greg Move”.

The boundary between this and that – between here and somewhere else – is so thin as to be transparent. David Lynch would remind us that the truth is just in the next room (if only we could get into that room). The passageways between here and there which the film conveys are never explained to the audience and it finally occurred to me that they don’t need to be. There is a door – a threshold – and that is all we need to know.

It may also be true that if we possess the ability and willingness to cross these thresholds, we will do so through portals as commonplace as music and at locations in space and time to which we are drawn with a force equal to our interest in them. The tuning fork indicates a straightforward path but that path can lead to madness if navigated with naiveté.

And that, more or less, is what this film captures (if imperfectly). The glittering allure of fantasy slips blinders on our eyes as we follow the road and we may find ourselves consumed not only by our own madness, but also by the haunted and sinister madness of others. We might be admiring the reflection in the mirror; we might be the reflection.

Thomasin McKenzie and Anya Taylor-Joy are sublime as the two sides of a psycho-tragic coin. Although this film would probably like for you to think it’s horror, there’s little here that is scary in the traditional sense. What is truly haunting is the idea that these cycles of tragedy – dreaming and falling (under the weight of exploitation) – continue to occur. If Eloise and Sandie are two sides of a coin, it is a coin that continues to flip.