An impossible gem of a film. It seems impossible that you can push the form of a documentary so far towards social realist aesthetics and structure. It seems impossible that there are people like Shabu who so embody the heart and spirit of their community with all its optimism, all its joy, all its sorrow, and all its rhythmic Blackness. Like GAGARINE, SHABU exposes the beauty of social housing projects that seem impossible under neoliberalism.

A prurient and nasty film with deeply conservative undercurrents. REQUIEM not only cannot comprehend the anti-capitalist message of the original ALIEN but transforms the (sub-)franchise into something horribly regressive in service of cutting the Xenomorph down into a monster from a generic slasher movie and symbolically punishing the people on the lowest rungs of neoliberal society. Though the film is often too dark to see the actual scenes, what we can see in this film are embryonic traces of the franchise blockbuster model which will soon come to dominate 21st Century Hollywood filmmaking.

Nakedly militaristic propaganda made by a military-entertainment complex secure in its sense of victory in the interregnum between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR. But terrifically well-made nakedly militaristic propaganda. John McTiernan provides a masterclass in creating tension out of confined locations especially the submarine sets (built on hydraulic gimbals to simulate the sub tilting!). But even the non-submarine scenes have a cramped look as if the rooms themselves are closing in on the protagonists. A collection of incredible actors at the top of their game with Scott Glenn and Sam Neill both doing amazing work. Zooming in on Political Officer Putin’s mouth as a way to signify transition from spoken Russian to spoken English in the Red October scenes is such a fun device for a practical purpose.

Enigmatically enticing as a little crystallisation of mid-Anderson aesthetic. Would work better standalone.

It’s easy to read THE DARJEELING LIMITED as self-indulgent: three wealthy white American men searching for a spiritual experience in a culture with which they make no effort to engage. But I think that self-indulgence is both personal and self-reflective for the three white men who wrote it. The film is self-aware enough to laugh at its protagonists while remaining grounded in their humanity and the humanity of those around them. In that way, it’s a very generous film about trauma, familial hurt, and emotional repression, lesser than TENENBAUMS but meaningful nonetheless.

In this final Robinson film, Patrick Keiller examines capitalism as a lichen that has spread out from its origins in England outward to infect the entire world. Unfortunately its focus is so thoroughly on economics and in particular the macroeconomics of 2008 that it loses the cultural and political commentary that made the first two films work. The absence of Paul Scofield’s familiar narration distances the narrative from Robinson and the character’s somewhat grounding and humanising influence. RUINS also has a far more languid pace, proceeding glacially compared to the more dynamic LONDON which remains the strongest of the three films.

Fortunately for our podcast, it’s more interesting to discuss this film than it is to watch it. The film itself is bland and generic with paper-thin characters, a frankly unappealing visual aesthetic, and dialogue that could have been spat out by a machine-learning model. But it represents a fascinating point for the Alien franchise’s turn from a multimedia to a transmedia franchise and occupies a contested position as both mothership text and paratext. There’s also an intriguing path not taken with the Black female main character and the shooting script’s promise that she will return in the unmade Alien/Predator: Annihilation.

An intelligent thriller that trusts its audience to understand that every character both believes they are doing the right thing and are also continually questioning that belief. There are no comic book villains, only a web of different and conflicting motivations that Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Günther uses to slowly but surely tighten the net around his targets. Even through a questionable German accent, Hoffman gives a quietly gripping performance as a greasier version of George Smiley, a man who is very easy to ignore even as he pulls others into orbit around him. Ultimately we’re left to question how it even makes sense to condemn someone when everyone around them is pushing them through a funnel with only one possible exit.

I went into this rewatch thinking that this might drop in my Wes Anderson ranking. If anything, I’m considering moving it higher. Multiple scenes in TENENBAUMS are among the most transcendently beautiful filmmaking of Anderson’s entire career: notably young Richie Tenenbaum (Arianna Turturro) releasing Mordecai; the ‘These Days’ shot; Chas (Ben Stiller) releasing his pain to his father. TENENBAUMS is a profoundly moving depiction of emotional repression and stunted family dynamics that doesn’t hold your hand in explaining the emotional complexities of its characters’ inner lives. It’s also the best cinematic adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest that could ever exist (more so for only ever being coincidentally(?) similar).

A considered depiction of a home that has become a prison—with many other prisons inside it. Nested like Russian dolls inside the prison of the couple’s modernist James Melvin house are the prison of their marriage, the prison of the family they never had, the prison of their artistic careers, and, most significantly, the prison they’ve built between them of how they interact with one another, as if their marriage were an artistic project rather than an emotional engagement. Not as devastating as Joanna Hogg’s other films and altogether quieter but an interesting chapter in her ongoing cinematic dissection of the English middle class.