Like ALIEN ON STAGE and A BUNCH OF AMATEURS, RAIDERS! is a charming insight into amateur filmmaking that reveals the importance of creative outlets for ordinary people outside the big-budget industrial systems of mainstream filmmaking. In terms of melancholy, this skews more towards A BUNCH OF AMATEURS as the documentary reveals the petty dramas of the filmmakers’ childhood that pushed them apart and the quasi-dangerous obsession that completing their film has become. There’s an ‘80s Stephen Kingish poignancy throughout in the implication that their lives’ biggest achievement is something they did as kids.

“It’s always difficult coming back to England[…]”.

Patrick Keiller’s peripatetic essay films remind me of the best of David Foster Wallace’s creative non-fiction (his visits to the State Fair, the pornography convention, and the cruise) in their style and digressive nature. They both share a sense of minutely detailed reportage gradually accreting into unerringly precise interpretative analysis. This one is a little more diffuse in focus than LONDON, psychocartographically charting England’s post-modern decline through the prism of industrialisation.

A sensitive and joyously optimistic documentary about living with a condition in an industry that punishes things it sees as disabilities. Michael J. Fox comes across as charming, witty, and self-reflective in a way rarely seen in Hollywood actors of his generation. It is incredibly endearing how much he clearly adores his wife, Tracy. I would have liked there to have been a little more biographical detail of his life and his career after the point he revealed his Parkinson’s diagnosis to the world so as to lessen the impression of a career cut short.

If you were scheduling an eco-”terrorism” double-bill of NIGHT MOVES with HOW TO BLOW UP A PIPELINE, you’d have to screen NIGHT MOVES first so that its languid pace wasn’t a comedown after the extreme tension of PIPELINE. Though covering similar thematic ground around the ethics of eco-terrorism, NIGHT MOVES is both more didactic and more equivocating than PIPELINE. The slow-boiling tension of the first half gives way to a morally uncertain second half with the irritating implication that violence against fossil fuel infrastructure begets and is equivalent to interpersonal violence as if violence against property and violence against people are the same thing. Slow, atmospheric, and thirty minutes too long.

Vividly rendered but too brief for its delicious tension.

Joanna Hogg has a tremendous skill for representing the self-inflicted emotional agonies of the English upper-middle class that others may find self-indulgent but that I find quietly horrifying. Like in the family scenes in THE SOUVENIR films, Hogg exquisitely captures the details of relationship dynamics within an upper-middle class family who have everything they could want but still manage to be pissy and passive-aggressive about it all. There’s a tension verging into horror in this sense that the English are incapable of happiness and yet cannot acknowledge that or anything but the mildest upsets to the status quo. Hogg captures the horrifying nature of English conservatism: nothing can ever change, nothing will ever change.

“It seemed there was no longer anything a Conservative government could do to cause it to be voted out of office. […] The press, the voting system, the impropriety of Tory party funding, none of these could explain away the fact that the middle class in England had continued to vote Conservative because in their miserable hearts they still believed that it was in their interests to do so.”

Charming and atmospheric local horror.

David Fincher gets a lot better and a lot more subtle at hiding his disdain for his films’ ‘airport bestseller’ source material. In ALIEN³, he barely disguises his contempt for James Cameron’s ALIENS and we end up with this film’s identity crisis as the narrative is pulled between the horns of ALIEN and ALIENS while tackling heady themes that the film’s grotesque mishmash of a script cannot support. A strong first half sets up some interesting ideas around religious oppression and redemption, toxic masculinity and Christian fundamentalism, and nihilism and suicidal ideation that all collapse in the second half as a shonky action-scene-by-committee extends interminably. A disappointment that collapses under its own thematic weight.

In Paul T. Goldman, director Jason Woliner unravels the life and works of Paul Finkelman, a delusional but affable man whose experiences of life revolve outwards into bizarre and fantastical pastiches of crime dramas and blockbuster action films. Each plot twist in Finkelman’s amateurish novellas and screenplays makes less sense than the last, building and building to crescendos of joyously unintended absurdity. DO YOU KNOW ME? is like if someone filmed one of Paul T. Goldman’s books as a 100% straight adaptation.