A Bond film infused with the spirit of New Labour from the opening action scene focused on the triumphalist national symbolism of the Millennium Dome and the economic regeneration of the Isle of Dogs to the scenes where MI6 sets up temporary headquarters in Scotland acting as an allegory for devolution. Compare and contrast this film’s depiction of power moving from London to Scotland to the country’s appearance in 2012’s SKYFALL where it’s positioned as a dead and decaying ancestral home, an denuded place where no-one would ever look for Bond and M. Unfortunately, like New Labour, the film ultimately gets tied up in incoherent political and corporate plans involving oil and Russian oligarchs before getting bogged down by confused speeches and corny one-liners that simply aren’t meaningful.

A couple who communicate almost exclusively in bombshell decisions go away to Éire for Christmas and make decisions at each other. This bad Christmas movie gets points for actually being filmed in the Republic rather than a soundstage in Canada and for Justin Long who brings a measure of charm to a character who would be quite irritating on paper. I also enjoyed the young lad who gets self-help-pilled towards the end. Unfortunately one subplot hinges on a Christmas Eve Gaelic football match which goes on for like five to ten minutes onscreen and is very tedious to watch.

The older women in this would have better chemistry as a lesbian couple than as sisters. I presumed the script had made them sisters so as not to alienate the conservative audience for this specific subgenre of bad Christmas romcoms. But then I thought, is that really the audience for these films? Has it not totally shifted to extremely online, irony-poisoned Letterboxd users like me who treat the whole month of December as a long MST3K episode? Are there still people watching this subgenre sincerely?

There’s something interesting about these Bond films from the End of History. Wai Lin (Michelle Yeoh) refers to Bond as a “decadent agent of a corrupt Western power” and it’s a joke but a joke that the film feels no need to seriously repudiate or counter. There’s no later scene where Wai Lin is shown the importance of the West or capitalist democracy: there’s just an ironic acceptance that this is how China perceives the UK. It expresses a sense of confidence and security in capitalist liberal democracy that simply doesn’t exist anymore. Similarly, it’s interesting that the villain is a recognisable capitalist entity—Rupert Murdoch’s press—rather than a vaguely ideologically-motivated terrorist or a disgruntled agent of a ‘rogue state’.

The old is dying and the new cannot be born. Behind the onanistically triumphalist surface symbolism of this first post-Cold War Bond film with its literal graveyards of Soviet symbols and its rampages through freshly-capitalist Russia and communist Cuba, there is a hint of rot at the heart of both Bond and by extension England. Quite apart from the villain being a British double agent, Bond’s final act of killing for himself and not “for England” expresses the libertarian individualism that would eventually metastasize into Brexit. You get the sense from Martin Campbell’s first soft reboot of Bond that his direction was striving for more than could be allowed by the script’s caricatures—all the women and Bond himself come across as uncannily inhuman—and the ADRed quips clearly added in post.

Train!

What better place for Poirot to comfortably retire in 1947 than Italy in the midst of its post-fascist reckoning and before the economic recovery brought about by the Marshall Plan? A HAUNTING IN VENICE showcases more technical competence than Branagh’s previous DEATH ON THE NILE (at least this one was filmed at least partly on location) but it’s similarly dramatically inert and sluggish without even the extravagant silliness that made NILE at least worth sitting through. As ever, Branagh prefers the vibe of Poirot to any actual rigour or method and so very little tangible evidence makes it through to the accusing parlour scene.

X xxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxx ‘xxxxx xxxxxxxx xx xxxxxxx’ Xxxxxxxxx xxxx xxxx xxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxx xxx x xxxxxx lack of background music in scenes where you’d expect it. But then! The second half injects genuine energy through Kristian Bruun’s (queer-coded?) villainous artisan baker and, most significantly, through Greg Lawson channelling Ricardo Montalbán at his most scenery-chewing in his role as Chef Paolo Joeljinjo, an enigmatic but strangely compelling judge of a local TV baking competition show. Lawson’s performance alone saves the film and honestly made me glad we didn’t turn the film off.

The most important shot in THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO is when Mikael (Daniel Craig) leans over Lisbeth (Rooney Mara) to find something on his computer and clumsily uses the trackpad to open the wrong applications mumbling to himself while struggling to find the right folder in macOS, all while Lisbeth watches him with a look of impatient contempt. Mikael is a skilled investigator but the core of the film is about Lisbeth and showing us what kind of mind is required to traverse the 21st Century information landscape of the internet, SQL databases, digital banking, and boxes of restricted physical archives.

In one scene, Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) and his yuppie colleagues briefly list all the progressive social issues that they’re aware of as ostensible members of society but clearly care about less than haircuts and business cards. It’s short but so incisively effective as a satire of capital’s liberalwashing tendencies that it’s a perfect synecdoche for the strength of Mary Harron and Guinevere Turner’s script: a script that is broad enough to be laugh out loud funny in its heightened ridiculousness yet precise enough to so devastatingly satirise a particular breed of Reaganite monster which has only grown in cultural prominence since.