Bootlicker Blues

Yes (2025) - Lapid As the bombs are falling in Tehran by US/Israeli military, which, by all indication, seems like another Middle Eastern conflict that won't end well- if it ends at all, comes Nadav Lapid's searing satire about an artist sucking up to a militaristic, patriotic fervor of a nation, in order to have a good life, even if it means leaving his conscience at the door. Just like his previous two films, Synonyms and Ahed's Knee, Yes is a semi-biographical and unapologetically angry film.

The film's frenetic, energetic first half is all about debauchery - endless drug and booze fueled dance parties for the rich and the powerful, set to EDM. Y (Ariel Bronz), a pianist and his dancer wife Yasmin (Efrat Dor) are there to entertain them with sexy dance moves and crazy antics. They make no bones about their depravity and humiliation in the hands of these people who rule the State of Israel.

In one scene at the pool party, Y goes on a bender, drowns and gets revived for their entertainment. Another, Y and Yasmin tongue fuck an old rich lady in her ear until she comes. They go home to their small Tel Aviv apartment to tend to their toddler son, after a depraved party after another. But they can't escape from daily news reports on their phones of bombs and destruction in Gaza, even while walking through the beautiful, pristine beaches of Tel Aviv as a backdrop - people are jogging and laughing and colorful paragliders jigjagging the bright blue skies.

In light of the October 7th, Y is tasked to compose a new national anthem to stir up the patriotic sentiment of the nation. This will be his and his family's ticket out. But where could they go?

The energetic tempo of the first half gives into a screeching halt as Y dyes his hair blonde and sneaks out to the desert for "inspiration" to compose his assignment. There he meets his ex-flame, Leah (Naama Preis), now begrudgingly in charge of running the IDF social media team. Their disdain of what's going on is mutual. They share their war time anecdotes from their parents' generation in WWII - "how could they go on living while atrocities are committed?", of course their parents were talking about old Europe during genocide of the Jewish people. The irony is not lost on Y and Leah as they watch smoke billowing over Gaza from a hill near the border. In a long monologue, Leah recites the atrocities committed by Hamas on Oct. 7th. Yes, what happened that day is horrifying. But everything the Netanyahu government did afterwards made everyone in the world hate them. 'Where could we go? Everybody hates us.' They conclude.

Conceived before the October 7th Massacre in 2023, and revised continuously throughout until the release at Cannes in 2025, Yes is a loud satire that reflects the uncomfortable present that the artistic community find themselves in a rock and a hard place, in an increasingly military fascist state.

The cringey inducing literal circle-jerk bootlicking scene might be too abrasive and over the top, the satire of Yes is way too close to home to be funny. Y and Yasmin know it too. It's written in their agonizing faces and actions, fully acknowledging their cowardice and pain of others, while trying to escape their predicament by turning blind eye to what's going on around them. It's an obnoxiously pointy and honest, yet sad film.

Yes opens 3/27 in New York and 4/3 in Los Angeles with national rollout to follow.

Curiosity

The Secret Agent (2025) - Mendonça Filho To filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho, Recifé, the capital city of Brazil's northwest region where he grew up, is what Fenyang in Shanxi Province means to Jia Zhangke. Like Jia, Mendonça Filho, has been chronicling the changing times, in both real and fictional stories of his beloved region. After series of critically acclaimed films in and around Recifé, he comes up with The Secret Agent, a sun-lit neo-noir/political thriller taking place in 1977, which makes a great companion piece to Pictures of Ghosts (2023), his documentary about history and cinema in Recifé.

Mendonça Filho, using the meticulously recreated old Recifé as a backdrop for a story about a man on the run, trying to navigate the place where daily violence and corruption are rampant under the country's military dictatorship.

As Marcelo/Armando (Wagner Maura) arrives in a dusty, desolate gas station on the outskirts of the town, he finds a dead body lying on the ground, partially covered with rocks and cardboard boxes. The proprietor of the station is completely nonplussed by the bullet riddled body. Since all their resources are tied up for the carnival, which is just wrapping in town, cops won't come until Ash Wednesday, he says to Marcelo. But soon the cops arrive, not for the body, but to shake up Marcelo for bribery. From the beginning, the filmmaker lets us know that violence and death are everyday occurrences for the citizens of Recifé with corruption in law enforcement normalized.

Armando under alias, Marcelo, is welcomed by a propriator Donã Sebastiana (Tânia Maria) of a building complex doubling as a refugee hideout. It is slowly revealed that Armando was a university researcher who rubbed a powerful company head and now a high ranking government official, Ghirroti (hailing from Sao Paolo), the wrong way. They met in 1974 and had a blowout, due to Ghirroti's attitude towards what he deems as country hicks (Armando and his research team) and his extreme southern arrogance. Now Ghirroti wants to eliminate Armando and send two assassins (a disgraced ex-military and his stepson) from the south.

Fernando, Armando's adorable young son, has been raised by his grandfather Alexandre (who is based on the real life film projectionist who was featured in Pictures of Ghosts), but longs to live with his fugitive father. Armando is in Recifé not only to retrieve his son back but to find out about his mother's past since she was from the region. With the help of underground resistance network against military dictatorship, he gets assigned a job in an ID issuing government facility in town, which also happens to be in the same building as the police station, lead by corrupt cop, Euclides. Armando needs to juggle and pit the unsuspecting police and assassins against each other while he waits for the new passport to arrive.

Tall and bearded Wagner Maura is effortlessly sexy with his sad eyes in his fugitive ways. And the film's filled with memorable characters and faces. Udo Kier shows up in his last role as a reclusive German Jew partaking in the wild street carnival.

As with all other Mendonça Filho films, the geopolitics of Brazil, the class struggles, regional culture and personal memories all vividly intersect in The Secret Agent. The title gives Armando's story an air of hero's tale full of intrigue and curiosity. It also has a lot to do with the pulpy cinema tradition and telenovelas which the filmmaker was brought up in. There's an urban legend story brought to life in a man's leg discovered in a shark's stomach and police trying to cover it up. There's a sequence of a severed leg moving around and attacking unsuspecting people participating in cruising sessions in the public park at night. Also the significance of the American influence in pop culture is everywhere - Jaws was playing in theaters in 77 in Brazil, so was Omen and Chicago's If You Leave Me Now is on the radio all in the backdrop of seedy and dangerous Recifé in the 70s.

With Bolsonaro and the ultra rightwing factions of the Brazilian political spectrum being in charge not far from the collective memories, The Secret Agent is about rebuking anti-intellectualism by having university researchers both past and present the heroes of the film which is also very pertinent in our own political climate. Slow at revealing the plot and not spoon feeding the audience with all the information and backstory, the film beckons at your curiosity to find out more about the not too distant past of checkered Brazilian history. Definitely one of the year's best.

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.

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.

Revenge and Morality

It Was Just an Accident (2025) - Panahi Jafar Panahi's new film, It was Just an Accident, starts with a roadside accident at night: a family on a trip back home, runs over a dog with their car. The father stops, gets out of the car, and determines the dog is dead. It was an accident. But his young daughter keeps egging on, "you killed him," even with the father protesting that the road was underlit and her very pregnant mother saying that these things happen all the time in life. With the sustained damage from the accident, soon the car breaks down. The father will need to take it to the garage. So begins the ominous foretelling of the simple, yet rivetting and deeply humanistic morality tale.

The garage owner Vahid is spooked when the father shows up to his garage to get his car fixed. Vahid is gripped in complete fear. He doesn't want to show his face or have his voice heard to this customer. Next thing Vahid does is pretty shocking: he stalks the man - follows him home, and when he gets a chance, knocks the man unconscious and kidnaps him and puts him in his van. It turns out that Vahid thinks the driver of the car is an intelligence officer, Eghbal, who tortured him in prison. It was the dragging sound of his peg leg, as he approached the garage, a giveaway. In a fit of rage, Vahid digs a hole in the desert, in an intention of burying his former torturer alive. Eghbal, tied, blindfolded and covered in dirt in the ground, vehemently pleads that Vahid is soley mistaken, that he is not the man Vahid says he is. Blind folded while being tortured in prison, Vahid now is unsure if he got the right man, and wants to confirm if this man is the right 'Peg Leg' maybe by asking fellow former political prisoners. Via a bookseller friend, Vahid seeks out a wedding photographer Shiva and her subjects - the soon-to-be-married couple, and later, Hamid, a hot headed blue-color worker who was also in prison, who says he can positively identify their Peg-Leg the torturer.

With all of them in the van, as it often does in Panahi films, It Was Just an Accident becomes a road movie of sorts. They discuss the morality of killing a man while their torturer is inside the box they are sitting on, gagged and tied, in the van. What makes them any different from the torturer who threatened and abused them, if they do the same? If they kill him, are they any better than Eghbal?

To make matters more complicated, Eghbal's daughter calls his phone, to inform that her mother fainted while pregnant. Now the crew has to take Eghbal's wife and daughter to the hospital and have the baby delivered safely.

Panahi, in this slow-burn thriller, brings up the concept of morality and justice in Iran. And he reveals how the totalitarian regime inflicted upon political dissenters from all social strata, an unspeakable collective trauma - constant threat of death with a noose around their necks for hours while standing on the platform, imminent sexual violence against young women and physical torture that crippled them. After being released from his jail sentence and years of house arrest in 2023, the prolific Iranian filmmaker doesn't shy away from being bluntly critical about the totalitarian regime of his country, while showing ordinary people's humanity not being lost. It Was Just an Accident is a riveting and beautiful film.

Act of Remembering

A Useful Ghost (2025) - Boonbunchachoke Cinema, capturing moving images in time and space, projecting them and promising endless reanimation, is the ghostliest of all media. Ghosts, in literature and films, in large part, have been staple stand-ins for the unfinished businesses. With that in mind, Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke's feature debut, A Useful Ghost tells a very queer ghost story within a story about the importance of remembering. Set in modern day Thailand, the layered film takes the traditional Asian vengeful ghost story horror trope, but told with a great deal of deadpan humor. It suggests that remembering the dead, in our exploitative neoliberal world on the brink of environmental catastrophe, can be an act of resistance.

A Useful Ghost starts with our protagonist (Wisarut Homhuan) introducing themselves only as an 'academic ladyboy', having trouble with their vacuum cleaner. A handsome repairman shows up at their doorstep and starts telling an enchanting ghost story. His yarn unfolds in a factory which makes household appliances. A worker dies of an illness at the job and his ghost haunts the place, by taking over various machines and appliances. The owner, Suman (Apasiri Nitibhon), who inherited the factory from her dead husband, has to shut down the factory until the place is exorcized.

In the meantime, Suman's son March (Wisarut Himmarat), a grieving widower, is visited by the ghost of his dead wife, Nat (Davika Hoorne), who died of air pollution related illness, in the form of a red vacuum cleaner. It's not a good sight as March makes out with a vacuum cleaner while the company elders tour the haunted factory. Suman and the elders try to stop this unholy relationship in various ways (including electroshock therapy). They only tolerate their reunion when she becomes useful in driving out other pesky ghosts, just like Suman’s first born gay son whom they accepted- only, when his Australian born husband turns out to be useful as business liaison.

Soon the rich and powerful friends of Suman seek Nat's exorcising service, as they are haunted by the ghosts of people who died in government crackdown under military dictatorship, industrial accident, etc. In turn, they will grant Nat and March to conceive a child through artificial insemination - because ghosts have no legal rights.

At this point of storytelling, our ladyboy protagonist is furious. “Nat is a traitor to the other ghosts!” He only relents at the charm of the handsome repairman as the story continues.

A Useful Ghost speaks volumes about how the neoliberal society operates: the rich and powerful trying to erase inconvenient truths and their misdeeds while only feigning tolerance when it's financially beneficial to them. The electroshock therapy scenes are both hilarious in its absurdity and frightening-- frightening because they are reminders of the sex-conversion therapy pressed upon the young LGBTQ community and also the frequent torture tactics under a military dictatorship.

Boonbunchachoke not only takes the Asian horror trope of a vengeful ghost, but plays with the concept of ghosts both physically and metaphorically to get his message across. He understands the ghostliness of the film medium, as many transition shots resemble overexposed burnt out last frames of a film as they roll out of the film gate of the camera leaving the ghostly image.

The cold, urban liminal spaces mise-en-scene, as well as retro design of appliances, practical effects and deadpan delivery of the actors, all add to the success of this absurdist, yet poignant comedy. Great mix of humor and messaging, A Useful Ghost is an accomplished debut film by a promising director.

A Useful Ghost makes a world premiere in Critics Week section of Cannes 2025.

Existential Angst in Animated Feature

La mort n'existe pas/Death Does Not Exist (2025) - Dufour-Laperriére A group of young activists are about to embark on their plan to kill an industrialist in her remote mansion in the forest. Their aim is to shock the status-quo of powers that be, as the rich and powerful destroy nature without any repercussions. Their actions will make ripples.

But Hélène, a young member of the group, is having second thoughts about the terrorist act she is about to be part of. Their plan plays out with many casualties on both sides, with Hélène, frozen in fear, witnessing all the carnage, especially the graphic death of a young man who professed his love for her.

Before their attack, he hands her a letter in an envelope and she says she would read it after their deeds. As the film progresses, this unopened letter becomes a portal to Hélène gaining her second chance.

The rest of the film is Hélène's internal struggle/dialog that's taking place over idealism, identity and morality. Her opposition is in the form of Manon, one of her fellow activists friends, who might or might not have perished in the attack, to chastise Hélène's indecisions and inaction. With the armed guards as well as wolves on their trail, they hike deeper into the woods.

Artistry in Death Does Not Exist by Canadian-French animator Félix Dufour-Laperriére's is unique and striking. Unlike the multiple animation techniques he deployed in his last film Archipelago (2021), that included some live action sequences and still photos, Death features simply drawn - outlines of the facial features and bodies without any discernible details, except for hairstyles - characters in monochrome (uniformly yellow, green in different tones, etc), and nature and buildings with some other muted colors just to distinguish from one another. There's an elegance in his minimalist aesthetics, and it all serves to showcase the inner turmoil of Hélène and its time bending, dream-like narrative.

The most visually exciting parts are the statues of wolves in the greenhouse of the industrialist's mansion that starts the film with, as their snarling facial expressiones change in the lighting from different angles and and the sequences of cataclysmic event, as Hélène imagines the nature - the waves of vegetation taking over the human civilization, which reminded me of a ferocity and fluidity of many nature themed Miyazaki films.

As the ghost of Manon and Hélène's younger self push Hélène toward the second chance at participating in the assassination and in turn saving the young man she loves, Death Does Not Exist reverts back to the scene of a crime multiple times, with Hélène being still not sure if her action is the right thing to do.

The philosophical implication of a young idealistic woman in the face of violence and remorse at its center, Death Does Not Exist explores hefty subjects in an intriguing and unique way.