A relatively grounded—for Quentin Dupieux—meditation on ageing and rejuvenation via two interconnected stories. ‘Grounded’ here involves a time-defying tunnel in a basement and an electronic iPenis but still more verité than Dupieux’s RUBBER or DEERSKIN. This isn’t nearly as effective as his more Surrealist work and could have worked better as a short film: as it starts to outstay its welcome, it wisely descends into montage as events spiral to their all-too inevitable conclusions.

Tomas (Franz Rogowski) is an intense and chaotic star, pulling people into his orbit and taking position at the centre of their lives. This is most clear in the shots where his body literally eclipses one of his romantic partners in the frame (apart from one significant sex scene). He’s a deeply frustrating and overwhelmingly narcissistic man and it’s testament to Rogowski’s charm that it takes so long for this to become apparent and that, even when it does, Tomas remains human to the audience: contradictory, both fluid and rigid at once.

Every musical cue from this is burned into my brain from dozens of VHS viewings as a kid. It’s an essential part of the canon of ‘70s–’80s children’s fantasy films that hid traumatisingly terrifying or unsettling scenes along with RETURN TO OZ and WILLY WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY. This era of production design—matte painting backgrounds, practical puppet effects—was key to my sense of how fantasy cinema should look.

Steven Beard (Eli Gabay) is the exemplar American man: extraordinarily wealthy despite having no apparent job and consisting on a diet exclusively of beef. His new wife, Celeste (Julie Benz) plots to have him injured just enough so that he has time to change his will before dying. Despite Celeste’s plot to seduce a rich man and have her lesbian lover shoot him, the film is oddly sexless and a last-minute evocation of the Bible leaves the viewer wondering if this was a Christian movie all along.

CORNER OFFICE taps into a specific niche of absurdism directed at the banalities of everyday existence that I associate with Scandinavian directors like Roy Andersson and Thomas Vinterberg. Beneath the film’s chilly Brutalist surface, there’s a Kafkaesque examination of the anomie and mental compartmentalisation required by the 21st Century corporate workplace that really clicked for me. Jon Hamm excels himself with a performance that taps into the sheer unpleasantness demanded of a good corporate worker and carries the film along with a dour, monotonous, and fascinatingly grotesque narration. Reminded me of Richard Ayoade’s THE DOUBLE by way of The Stanley Parable.

It’s astonishing to me that this never looks nearly as good as Peter Jackson’s THE LORD OF THE RINGS films which were made over twenty years ago and, adjusted for inflation, with each film costing roughly the same as this. The scene with Bradley Cooper’s halfling uses such obvious green screen compositing and digital backgrounds that it looks terrible compared to the physical forced perspective used in the Bag End scenes between Bilbo and Gandalf at the very start of THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING.

It’s 2012 and Disney announces a SORCERER remake and sequels for APOCALYPSE NOW and FITZCARRALDO. SORCERER beat STAR WARS and New Hollywood dominates.

Amy Jump and Ben Wheatley pull out a three minute shootout scene from a standard action film and expand it to a full ninety minutes making every bullet impact important, every injury significant, and every movement a struggle. This expansion stretches the characters fairly thin but strong performances especially from Cillian Murphy, Michael Smiley, and Sharlto Copley buoy them up. Not nearly as stylish and Tarantino-esque as it thinks it is but it makes up for that by embodying precisely what Tarantino doesn’t: stripped-down and economic filmmaking. Up the ‘RA.

There’s a sense of horror in the description of the ‘college campus’ atmosphere that these intelligent, liberal young scientists brought to the top secret military base where they were constructing weapons of mass destruction. Jon Else is unequivocal in his condemnation of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and very squarely blames inertia for the bombing: that not one of the ‘great men’ involved—Oppenheimer, Truman, Groves—had the courage to stand in front of the political machinery of military, industry, and capital that had already been set in motion.

Christopher McQuarrie is a better Mission: Impossible director than screenwriter. Aside from this script’s unclear motivation for the antagonists and overreliance on rubber mask twists, McQuarrie’s bad habits emerge throughout ROGUE NATION and FALLOUT and come to full fruition in DEAD RECKONING PART ONE: the mythologisation of Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) as global saviour figure; the self-sacrificing and vaguely cult-like nature of the IMF; the emphasis on ‘friendship’ as an emotional locus.