Failed Experiment

Bugonia (2025) - Lanthimos It is pretty obvious why Yorgos Lanthimos chose to remake a wacky Korean sci-fi comedy, Save the Green Planet: it has all the elements we've grown to associate with his films - the cynicism, cruelty and absurd sense of humor. With Bugonia, starring very committed Emma Stone in their 4th collaboration, and Jesse Plemons, Lanthimos shoots for the most absurd film to date.

It's a hit or miss for me when it comes to Lanthimos films. For me, like his other fans, it all started with Dogtooth (2009), a perennial hit that started the Greek New Wave or Weird Wave or whatever it was labeled as. It was when Greece was battered with waves of crushing austerity measures and governmental restructuring. Greeks, being a rowdy bunch who didn't really have faith in their government anyway, made a series of films that vividly depicted generational divide and discontent of the younger generation with little prospects for the future. But however penetrating Lanthimos's observation of the world has been, it's his cynicism and cruelty that kept me at bay to be a full fledged fan. I admit that it's hard to do in comedy, considering he is not Haneke or Bergman.

When a Lanthimo's is balanced right, with the right amount of sweetness and heart, it's really great - Lobster, The Favourite, Poor Things. But when it is just cynicism, such as Bugonia or Kind of Kindness, it loses me.

Bugonia concerns Teddy (Jesse Plemons), a conspiracy-addled worker at an Amazon style processing facility. The conglomerate is headed by a ruthless Michelle (Emma Stone), by all appearances, Michelle is a powersuit wearing, posh CEO with all business and no heart. Teddy and his dim-witted cousin Donnie (Aidan Delvis), believing Michelle is an alien from The Andromeda Galaxy, bent on destroying the human race, kidnaps her and puts her chained to the floor in the basement of their rural house. Teddy tortures Michelle to admit that she is an alien and to arrange a meeting with her emperor in their space craft which is heading to earth during the next lunar eclipse which is three days away.

Things get complicated when Michelle manipulates them into harming themselves and their loved ones. Is she really an andromedan intent on eradicating the human species or are we just one of those cruel experiments by higher power, on the verge of failure?

If Bugonia is a satire of billionaires controlling the fate of humanity and we are all just their play things - either just pawns in the game or rebellious crackpots, it's just too bleak and too close to home to laugh about.

As Bugonia progresses to an absurdist territory with much blood shed, you are left with that cold feeling that we are supremely manipulated to and fro for laughs. But who is laughing anyway?

Life/Work/Death

No Other Choice (2025) - Park Mansu (Lee Byunghun), a 25 year veteran in a paper mill company with a big house in the countryside with a loving family - wife Miri (Son Yejin), teenage son, ten year old autistic daughter and two golden retrievers affectionately named after his children, just got laid off. Just before he was laid off, he was planning union activities with his subordinates. The only thing he has known in his adult life was the paper mills and he has no prospects other than that industry and with the mortgage company repossessing the house in three months, the clock is ticking for Mansu to get another job.

Taking the cue from his stress, Miri restructures the household in order - no more outlandish meals, no more tennis lessons, no more Netflix, dogs to her parents house, downsize the 2 big cars to one small one and put the house on the market. Mansu refuses to sell the house since it's the one he grew up in and bought it with his own money. And especially, the potential buyer is a sleazy local electronic shop owner who is a dad of his son's best friend. Three months, Mansu tells Miri.

Mansu does research on his competitors just in case Moon Paper, a big paper company, is in need of hiring another manager. He narrows down the potential competitors to two and devises a plan to eliminate them.

No Other Choice says a lot about salaryman life in Korea where you are defined by your work, where your life is completely tied to your job and the job defines you. In Mansu's elaborate scheme - spying on his competition at home and work in order to get a chance to kill them, exposes that they are in the same boat as he is: the grueling unemployment life- the daily humiliation, temptation of alcohol and drugs, suspicion of spouse infidelity, etc. They are the mirror images of himself! But Mansu, trapped in the cruel rat race in the capitalist system, has no other choice but to pursue his plan to save his family from poverty.

As usual, Park Chanwook is a first and foremost visual stylist. There's more visual ideas in No Other Choice than most Hollywood releases in a year combined. Lee, with his model like angular face twitching as a stressed middle aged man, is tremendous as Mansu, the stressed out salaryman. Son, as a practical wife who loves her man, no matter what, is fetching in her coy performance.

No Other Choice touches upon a lot of modern society's illness with satirical humor. There's dying manufacturing industries, automation and A.I. taking over human labor, deforestation and autism. I do not want to compare Park's movies to others, but the head of the family losing his job as a subject, is done before much more realistically in Tokyo Sonata by Kiyoshi Kurosawa. I mention this because there's also a theme of music and gifted child involved. But it's Park Chanwook movie. So it has to be fantastical and much more artificial, therefore less emotionally resonant. It's superb entertainment but boy is it stressful.

Smells Like Indie Spirit

Nouvelle Vague (2025) - Linklater Breathless, a perennial French New Wave film that started everything and changed filmmaking forever, is closely reenacted and memorialized along with the movement and people involved. I got to admit, being a diehard Godard-head, I was very skeptical going into this film. But rest assured, Linklater, coming from the experimental indie filmmaking background, knows his history of cinema and understands how to pay homage without being nostalgic and sentimental about the New Wave and its influences that had on him as a filmmaker. And Linklater's assumption is right about his view on Breathless as a granddaddy of indie filmmaking.

Casting and working with French speaking actors, Linklater commands a very convincing reenactment of the events in and surrounding the production of Godard's tumultuous feature debut.

Godard, played wonderfully by Guillaume Marbeck, encouraged by/and riding the coattails of the success of his two Cahier du Cinema colleagues' directorial debuts not too long ago - François Truffaut's 400 Blows (1959) and Claude Chabrol's Le Beau Serge (1958), finally tries his hands in directing a feature, with the help of a producer Beaureguard (Bruno Dreyfürst). With the rebellious spirit of countering the cinema that came before, and his own eccentricities, Godard embarks on directing a film as unconventionally as possible. Working off of a thin treatment that Truffaut and Chabrol wrote, about real life incidents of a car thief who ends up killing a police officer, Godard charges on Breathless without a script. Casting includes a newbie actor/boxer named Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin) and a reluctant American movie star Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch). In 23 days of shooting with no lights and all hand-held camera by army vet, documentary photographer Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat), who later went on to shoot most of the memorable Godard films.

Linklater makes sure that who's who of the French New Wave are all mentioned in the film- portrait style with their names appearing on the screen - Truffaut, Chabrol, Suzanne Schiffman, Rivette, Rohmer, Rozier, etc. Godard's mentors/idols also appear on screen - Jean Pierre Melville, Roberto Rosselini, Jean Cocteau and even has a run in with Robert Bresson in the subway where the master is in his production of Pickpocket, around the same time.

Sure, championed by Cahier writers, including Truffaut and Godard, The Auteur Theory elevates the director as the primary creative force behind a film, but Linklater shows and acknowledges that there are a lot of people contributing their talents and hard work and time in making a film - that extends to the job of an assistant director, script continuity, make-up, editor, so and so forth.

Yes, the film's monochrome shot on 35mm and impeccable period set design and costume take us into a nostalgia trip. But the film is never corny or sentimental. Linklater is after something more direct, only concentrating on the production of Breathless; people involved in it and the overall climate that incubated the French New Wave.

It's a lovely, charming and endlessly enjoyable homage to one of the most influential film movements and which birthed perhaps the most singular and unique filmmaker ever lived. Loved it.

Heart of Glass

La tour de glase/The Ice Tower (2025) - Hadžihalilović Lucille Hadžihalilović continues with her coming of age/dark fairy tale with The Ice Tower, taking on Hans Christian Andersen's The Ice Queen. And just like her previous films (Innocence, Evolution and Earwig), it's a visual stunner. The director has a penchant for painting the grownup world as something disturbing and mysterious and The Ice Tower is no exception.

The film concerns a runaway teenage orphan girl Jeanne (Clara Pacini). She is fascinated with the Ice Queen story and the dark icy forest, as she reads the book to her younger foster home sister every night. She runs away into the frozen mountains and ends up in another town, after a close encounter with a predatory old man while hitchhiking. She breaks into what appears to be a warehouse to spend the night, but the building turns out to be a film studio staging the production of The Ice Queen. Jeanne, now taking on the identity of a stranger named Bianca, gets the attention of Christina (Marion Cortillard), a diva movie star with a similar history as Jeanne. The cold, sad façade of Christina gets an obsessive attention from wide eyed Jeanne. With Jeanne's mother dying in freezing cold when she was young, Christina becomes an embodiment of a maternal figure, idol and fantasy all in one.

With their past mirroring each other, Jeanne/Bianca becomes Christina's new favorite, being promoted for the stand-in for the young actress who plays the main role. Christina, a possibly a depressed drug addict (suggested without so many words), has a death wish and wants Jeanne to join her at the edge of the cliff one night but Jeanne refuses.

The Ice Tower is a kaleidoscopic mood piece that plays around with the idea of mirroring images - fantasy and reality, past and present, darkness and light. Cortillard is perfect as an alluring ice queen who attracts people around her to their destruction and suffers from eternal loneliness in her frozen kingdom. The film, shot by Jonathan Ricquebourg (The Taste of Things, The Death of Louis XIV), is seriously dark and moody, and makes the best of its frozen, shiny and empty Northern Italian landscapes.

Ice Tower, just like her previous films, Hadžihalilović aptly suggests the frightening grownup world where things are not as bright and exciting as one hopes to be, but decidedly dour, sad, full of pain and filled with ugliness. Her explorations might be seen as only scratching its shiny surface. But it's usually the negative space behind the façade that looms over all of her films, keeping all the mysteries intact and bewitching us to come back time and time again to see her dark and hypnotic artistry.

House and Everyone In It

Sentimental Value (2025) - Trier Joachim Trier's new film, Sentimental Value starts with a house in Oslo: a handsome house with red paints around the edges. A female narrator speaks of a grade school assignment - if you choose to be an inanimate object, and you choose to be a house, do you feel whole when it's crowded with people, or when it's empty? Do you feel pain when someone slams the door or breaks the glass on the floor?

Nora (Renate Reinsve) is a stage actor who suffers from a stage fright. In a hectic scene in the beginning, she has a last minute panic attack just before the curtain raises- claws at her tight costume, complaining she can't breathe. It takes her whole theater production team to calm her down, to finally get on stage. It shows that she suffers greatly from a childhood trauma, stemming from her famous filmmaker father Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård) constantly fighting with her mother, then abandoning her and her sister. The morning after her affair with her co-worker (Anders Danielsen Lie), she tells him that she is 80 percent crazy. While Agnes is married and has an adorable son, Nora is single and lonely.

At their mother's funeral, the sisters encounter Gustav again after a long while. Gustav, who hadn't made a film in 15 years, has a new script that he has written for Nora and begs her to star in it. It will take place in the house the girls grew up in. It's slightly based on the life of his mother, who was a resistance fighter during Nazi Occupation and was tortured in prison, who later killed herself- but also about Nora and a lot of other things. Nora flat out refuses and doesn't want to do anything to do with him.

By chance, Gustav finds a Hollywood Starlette, Rachel Kemp, being enamoured by one of his old films at his retrospective in France, decides to work with him for the part that he wrote for Nora. It being a Trier film, the scenes where they bond- an old artist and the Hollywood movie star with her entourage in tow, come across as not cliché, but sweet and endearing. But as the rehearsal goes along, both Gustav and Rachel slowly realize that she is not the right fit.

As usual, it being a Joachim Trier film, Sentimental Value is not about one thing, but about a lot of things, so not just the house or any inanimate objects that we have feelings towards - parents, siblings, history, art, trauma, loneliness and most importantly, love. Something that AI can never reproduce or emulate, at least not yet. It is yet again, a beautifully written (co- written by Trier's long time writing partner Eskil Vogt), nuanced film that you come to expect from one of the most literary filmmakers of our time. And also, it's beautifully acted as well. Reinsve is phenomenal as Nora, a damaged stage actor. Skarsgard has never been better, as Nora's semi-estranged dad, and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas as Agnes, the younger sister of Nora, is also great. Add Elle Fanning as a good natured Hollywood starlette and Danielsen Lie in a small role.

The strongest moments of the film (and there are many), are when the sisters go through things in the old house and reminisce about their tumultuous childhood, they talk about how much they meant to each other and when Gustav plays with Agnes's young son. It's both tender and searingly beautiful.

Sentimental Value is all about finding love and understanding from someone you felt only resentment for most of your life, in the most unexpected way. It's so beautifully written and acted and even surpasses Trier's The Worst Person in the World. It's certainly my favorite film of the year.