Film Box
I just saw We Live in Time and it was ruddy good. I normally don’t see weepies and watch maybe one or two rom-coms a year, but I chose to see this one because there was darn all else on. I was surprised by how entertaining it was by the end. Rarely has a film in recent months taken me out of myself, and this one managed it perhaps just because it’s a flawless execution of its genre. There’s nothing groundbreaking or even complex about it, its plot is extremely simple. It’s “generic” in the best way, like eating a perfectly cooked, well-done steak.
The story charts the courtship, marriage, and health concerns of a couple played by Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh. Their characters are written to be very middle-class professionals not beyond the range of people you might meet wandering around Waitrose or your local garden centre. She’s an ambitious chef and he’s… something to do with Weetabix, I was never quite clear on that. Probably a corporate job, I think. The script is a technically flawless machine but what gives the characters life is probably more Garfield and Pugh’s performances, which are charming and play into their good-looking amiability. Their story is told non-linearly, hence the title, various threads from the couple’s duration together converging on the tearjerker finale.
It’s funny, especially a scene at a petrol station - the film’s highlight, in ways - and has some able support work from two or three British character actors, particularly Kerry Godliman, a great comedienne. We Live in Time is not one of the heavyweight tearjerkers like Terms of Endearment (1983), but it’s about on the level of Steel Magnolias (1989). (And shares with it a questionable decision about medical treatment versus having babies, though I guess it’s not for me to question such things too harshly.)
Its milieu is typecast; besides one passing reference to possible drug use, all of these characters lead picture postcard lives discussing love and careers over wine with mum and dad. I think it knows that, though, and that’s its point, to depict two safe and ordinary lives coming together. The best thing I can say about it is that it solidly entertained me for a couple of hours and made me glad that I stepped out of my genre comfort zone. Can’t say fairer than that.
Rating: 3/4
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I just saw Companion and it was really good, a clever and comic satirical take on the classic feminist horror The Stepford Wives, the one where post-sexual revolution men replace their strong and intelligent wives with automatons who wax floors in pinnies all day.
It’s tough to synopsise Companion, which comes on the heels of Barbarian (2022). (It shares with that film producers, and themes of misogyny and male violence.) I went in relatively cold and my experience felt unique as a result, different than if I’d been even dimly aware of where it was going.
What I can say is that it represents a fairly pitch-perfect screenplay that mixes genres to engaging effect. Though marketed as horror, it’s not really fearful or Gothic as such and is better understood as a blackly comic thriller. It even has some of the charms of old crime films in that style, from The Ladykillers (1955) to Fargo (1996), wherein silly people try to pull off serious crimes and carnage ensues. All I’ll say about the plot is that Sophie Thatcher and Jack Quaid play a handsome young couple who arrive at a cabin in the woods (there’s your first red flag) to spend the weekend with two other couples before secrets about certain people are revealed and a criminal scheme kicks into gear.
This is one of those tales where everything that ultimately happens is given in the first line of dialogue, but you’re held by the suspense of how things could possibly get from A to B as described. The plotting is consistently surprising, stronger than you necessarily get in satirical films of this type, which sometimes neglect the pulpier thrills for heavy-handed sermonising. Companion is a satirical text, though it wears its meanings gracefully, getting laughs from the characters’ greed, selfishness, and stupidity while tossing out twists and turns.
It ends up becoming a biting satire of incels (or “involuntary celibates”) and their pathologies. One man is summed up as enjoying bar trivia, video games, and complaining about what the world owes him. Ouch. It deftly and somewhat subtly makes fun of men who see themselves as “nice” and consider themselves “good guys” when really they’re just weak, and if given a safe opportunity would rape and pillage as much as their forefathers did. The type of man you see on Reddit bragging about how they put a blanket on a drunk woman WITHOUT molesting her, thereby proving the opposite of what they were trying to convey: that they thought about it.
The climax of Companion goes on a touch too long and requires flattening out its antagonist into more of a Hollywood monster, to be defeated with generic action. Its last touch is pleasingly gruesome, though, and what came before is so strong that it doesn’t leave too much of a bad taste in the mouth. Though it isn’t exactly horror, Companion looks set to be one of the stronger entries marketed as such in 2025.
Rating: 3/4
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Casted_Runes said:I just saw Companion and it was really good, a clever and comic satirical take on the classic feminist horror The Stepford Wives, the one where post-sexual revolution men replace their strong and intelligent wives with automatons who wax floors in pinnies all day.
[ . . . ]
Rating: 3/4
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Another excellent review. I enjoyed the Stepford Wives so look forward to watching this one.
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Rating: 3/4
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Another excellent review. I enjoyed the Stepford Wives so look forward to watching this one.
I wasn’t a mature child
Pretty clever mix of slasher and rom-com tropes that, while not a game changer to any degree, is novel enough to help keep the slasher genre going another decade. Slasher films in recent years have been moving more towards comedy than ever before. Post-Scream (1996), these movies were almost always ironic or self-aware to some degree, the genre having been forced to grow up and start churning out slicker, better-made content than the exploitation trash that gave it its start in the Golden Age. Now that we’re post-post-Scream, though - maybe even post-post-post - the Dead Teenager (or young person) flick has become almost cosy, something you’d bring a date to, and not just to cop a feel when they bury their face in your chest during a scary bit.
The real cleverness here is that this is genuinely just as much a rom-com as a slasher, and starts out neatly parodying the proposal scene from countless date movies, right down to the vomitous Hallmark/Netflix-original lighting. No slasher prologue has ever come close to the wit and suspense of the original Scream’s (controversial statement?) - the whole Scream franchise’s success is based arguably in part on its cold opens - but Love Hurts’ captures something of the same genre deconstruction. And features a nifty new way to use a wine press.
The structure of the film as a whole is derived from the romantic comedy, starting after the prologue with a Meet Cute between our boy and girl, two advertising creatives who bond over a shared coffee order. But she’s given up on romance and is such a klutz she headbutts him twice! And he’s a smooth talker with big dreamy eyes and such a strong manly bosom…
You can see how this could have been a ‘90s or ‘00s release with Meg Ryan or Brittany Murphy as the heroine. However, the romance is paused when the two of them are targeted by Heart Eyes, a killer who stalks and kills couples in different cities on Valentine’s Day.
The kills are sufficiently gory, providing ample fodder for “Kill Count” videos on YouTube, like Dead Meat. (I think I can already tell which kill is going to win his coveted Golden Chainsaw.) It’s funny how even the murders in these movies have become cosy. In real life murder is a terrible thing, and would leave behind it in the case of this film’s killer so much grief and agony, young lives lost to needless violence. But a genre film like this is essentially a mental playground, and the deaths leave as little impact in the long run as all of the lords and ladies killed in stately homes in Golden Age crime fiction.
I will say the film takes place in that alternative reality common to popular thrillers where, for example, a serial killer can walk into a city PD in the modern day and kill the desk sergeant and seemingly two detectives without alerting every police officer within a thousand-mile radius. I’m not sure if inner-city precincts in the US are at any point manned by just three staff, but they’re especially not when it seems like they’ve just caught a high-profile serial killer. I guess you could explain the lack of security cameras by arguing that the killer is tech-savvy and disabled them, just as they shut off the lights for some murder-in-the-dark scares. But come on. The jailhouse assault by one guy is a cliche that’s useful in Westerns set in the bum crack of nowhere in 1860, not so much a story in Seattle in 2025.
Like how, as much as I loved the finale in a rundown church on a dark and stormy night… how many of those would you find in this setting? And all those candles just seem like a logistical nightmare.
I say these things like criticisms but in a way, they’re baked into what the movie is and make it the fun and silly ride that it’s trying to be.
Rating: 3/4
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I just saw A Real Pain and it was good. It’s a Holocaust dramedy about New York cousins played by Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg (also the writer/director) who go on a Jewish heritage tour in Poland to honour their late grandmother.
It’s a funny, moving, and refreshingly compact film, reminiscent of Woody Allen for its gentle music, travelogue direction, and economic storytelling, though much less self-absorbed (and occasionally gross) than anything by Allen. The central conflict is that Culkin is regarded as a likeable if eccentric free spirit while Eisenberg is career and appearances-focused, a seller of digital ads with a beautiful wife and children at home in his brownstone.
Part of the experience of the film for me was figuring out how I felt about the Culkin character. There were times when he came across in my view less as charming (which is how the film mostly presents him) and more a passive-aggressive creep, the type of pseudo-”nice” guy who feels connected to a deeper emotional reality and love bombs you, but in the end all you see is his constant need to monopolise and make the situation about managing his moods.
If he and the Eisenberg character were lovers rather than cousins, his behaviour would be better understood as emotional abuse. I don’t know, maybe I’m the type of uptight square that films and characters like this rail against, but if I were on that tour I’d be very annoyed that my deeply personal (and expensive) experience is being taken over by this person who doesn’t understand that you don’t talk over people and cause unpleasant scenes in railway carriages.
This is largely my problem with the tropes of American “indie” or just inspirational movies in general. The story of the uptight square who’s taught to loosen up by some manic pixie or dope-smoking sprite.
A Real Pain’s craft is insidious, however, in the way that it encourages you to see Culkin’s character from the perspective of Eisenberg’s, the square. This weird oversensitive cousin is uncouth and embarrassing, but over time you realise that yes, he IS oversensitive, and that’s the issue. He’s damaged and troubled and means well, he’s just been less able to force himself through the perspective filter that most of us manage to and which allows us to be functional in this brutalist, brutalising world.
The film’s title is thoughtful and apposite in respect to its application to the cousins’ relationship and the larger context of the Holocaust. What is a “real” pain? Does the aimlessness and hopelessness of a modern New York Jew reflect anything when compared to the horror that his ancestors suffered? Do we have a right to despair when we lead such privileged lives, or is that despair a natural result of the past’s injustices? Possibly the film’s most powerful scene is its tour of a concentration camp, which has relatively little dialogue or music (if any in the latter case) and shows you in static, midday compositions the relics of genocide.
Rating: 3/4
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Mickey 17 is writer/director Bong Joon-ho's follow-up to his 2019 Oscar-winner Parasite. It's a sci-fi comedy starring Robert Pattinson - doing his most "aw shucks", innocents abroad, American voice - as an "expendable", a man whose consciousness has been uploaded to a database so that his body can be killed and "reprinted" again and again, allowing scientists on an interplanetary colonisation vessel to experiment with vaccines, dangers to humans, etcetera. The vessel is led by a quasi-religious political leader, sort of a cross between a televangelist or megachurch pastor and a sabre-rattling warmonger, played by Mark Ruffalo while Toni Collette plays his grasping socialite wife.
The film is a bit "all skirt and no knickers", meaning that it looks great but doesn't have much underneath. At its core is a pretty good satire of colonialism, Manifest Destiny, and American westward expansion in the 1800s. Climactic scenes with the alien race are reminiscent of buffalo roaming the plains, while a scene celebrating a rock brought back from the planet made me think of Plymouth Rock. Meanwhile, Ruffalo is clearly doing a Donald Trump impression, all teeth and tan and narcissistic speech, giving the satire relevance to the present day in the grand tradition of sci-fi metaphor. He and the reliably excellent Collette as our antagonists are huge highlights; I'd have been happy to watch a film that was just about them.
The film is incredible to look at and has fantastic acting all around. I'd watch it again just for its direction and performances. The narrative is just all over the place and is trying to incorporate a hundred different elements, from Starship Troopers-esque alien tensions to religious satire to political commentary to a drug-dealing plot to romantic developments and so on and so forth. Its plot is so overstuffed that at times it starts to feel a tiny bit like one of those epic sci-fi follies like Southland Tales or Battlefield Earth, though of course at a much higher level of skill and artistry in the presentation.
Rating: 2.5/4
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