Criterion: Finishing the First Hundred Spines

I’ve been fascinated by the Criterion Collection since roughly the early 2000s.  I can’t put my finger on exactly how early I started paying attention to them but I can say I remember a time when there were less than 200 DVDs in the collection and that means I’ve been looking at that list of early titles for the better part of 25 years and I’ve particularly had a sort of fixation on the first 100 films that managed to get a spine number.  These selections were in many ways just as random as any other section of the collection.  I’m sure there were certain obvious titles like Seven Samurai or The 400 Blows or The Seventh Seal that they licensed quickly in order to make their brand clear but then there are other selections that seem to just be random quirks of licensing availability like “Fishing With John” or The Most Dangerous Game that seem to be borderline worthy of the collection at all.  Anyway, through the sheer amount of time I’ve had I’ve actually seen most of the movies from this span of the collection but I never made a concerted effort to check them all off, in part because the film Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom was sitting there at number 17 and I wasn’t just going to casually watch that thing to check it off a list.  Well, I did finally get that out of the way earlier this year and that leaves me with just six movies left to watch to say I’ve seen the first 100 Criterion spines and I think I’m going to try to do that this month.  Should be fun but I will note that there’s a reason I haven’t been rushing to see some of these so we’ll have to see if any of them are more to my taste than I expected.

Spine #38 Branded to Kill (1967)

Seijun Suzuki is a director I’ve long had trouble with.  If you dig into my Letterboxd account you’ll find a one star review of his film Tokyo Drifter (which is Criterion spine #39, and is thus presented as a companion piece of this) and I have my doubts that I’d stand by that review if I watched it again, partly because I’m a much kinder grader these days and partly just because I’m more inclined to admire the audacity and filmmaking that someone like Suzuki brings to the table even if it doesn’t speak to me and that’s kind of where I am with this next film of his.  In fact I’ve had a bit of a journey with this film as well.  Way back when, when I was just getting into cinema I tried watching this because I liked the title and thought it had cool cover art on the OG Criterion DVD but I think I only made it about twenty minutes in before turning it off, baffled at what I was watching.  That feels weird in retrospect, it’s certainly a weird movie but I’ve seen much weirder in the years since and I would have thought there was enough sex and violence here to keep me interested even if the storytelling was chaotic and the editing was kind of Godardian.  In fact, understanding the wave of global “New Wave” filmmaking was going on in the late 60s is kind of essential to understanding this.  The story, which is at its core just standard crime thriller hokum, is decidedly not the point.  This is more about style, one could call it “pure cinema” and it’s become influential in various ways.  The basic story (which, granted, is not the point) bears some clear similarities to David Fincher’s The Killer and that scene in Ghost Dog where someone gets shot through his sink pipes comes from this.  So, I am more equipped to process this now but… I don’t know, I think I’m still kind of allergic to this director.  The whole thing is just so chaotic and while it’s consistently “cool” I still like there to be a bit more of a backbone to the movies I watched so I’m glad that the best elements of this movie have been mined by other more conventional films that work better for me.
**1/2 out of Five

Spine #50 And the Ship Sails On (1983)

Long ago I’d been warned off of Federico Fellini’s late works with the rule of thumb that was handed down to me being that 1974’s Amarcord was sort of the end of his plateau and that it was mostly downhill from there.  That being said one of the earliest Fellinis in the criterion collection by spine number is this film he made in 1983, well outside of the ostensible imperial phase and having finally seen it I’m starting to question the advice I was given or perhaps speculate that I over interpreted it back when I heard it because this has a lot going for it.  The film is set on an ocean liner setting sail right on the eve of World War I and it’s kind of meant to look at the decadence and frivolity of the bourgeois classes of the per-war era.  The film feels a bit aimless in its opening sections (which probably could have used some cuts) but the film comes to life in its second half once the ocean liner is forced to rescue a bunch of Balkan refugees from a shipwreck, much to the disgust of the rich people on board who think that sailing with these people is beneath them.  That starts a neat conflict but this isn’t necessarily some Marxist tract about class conflict and is instead more of an almost nostalgic elegy to a more innocent time (albeit on with its blind spots) and this reminded me a lot of Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel to the point where I suspect it was a direct influence.  For that matter the visuals here, which involve a lot of elaborate and knowingly sets and costumes and hair stylings also give me pretty big Wes Anderson vibes, that sense of colorful whimsy is definitely there.  So by the end of the film I was pretty into it but that slow first half does weigh it down for me a bit and I can also see why this maybe felt a bit out of place coming out in the year of our lord nineteen eighty three and might have felt a bit like Fellini almost doing a pastiche of his circus-like style, but on the other hand maybe he was just being taken for granted, not unlike the aforementioned Wes Anderson is today.
***1/2 out of Five

Spine #71 The Magic Flute (1975)

Ingmar Bergman was a very prolific filmmaker with something like forty films under his belt which you’d think would keep him awfully busy but he actually had a whole other career working as a stage director around Sweden.  Those two careers finally collided late into Bergman’s film career when he opted to make a film out of a production of Mozart’s opera “The Magic Flute.”  This is kind of a tricky film to categorize because it’s essentially a filmed version of a stage production but I don’t think the production in question was ever actually performed in front of an audience and that this was actually all staged for the camera even though everything that’s artificial about the theater is front and center.  The sets are clearly matte painting type things and there aren’t any “VFX” here (one of the first things we see is an attack by a dragon, which looks like a dude in a mascot suit) but the staging clearly choreographed with the camera in mind and we get a full array of close-ups and whatnot which can only be captured if you are unconcerned with getting A/V equipment in the way of an audience.  So this kind of is and isn’t a different beast from, say, the kinds of “pro-shoots” you see of Broadway productions and the like.  The production here in general seems pretty charming but it should be noted that “The Magic Flute” itself is kind of famously a lighthearted and kind of silly opera bolstered by music by an over-qualified composer and I can’t say I got particularly wrapped up in the storytelling here.  I’m also not going to say I’m terribly qualified to assess the skills of the various performers here, to be frank opera singing all kind of sounds the same to me.  So this movie was probably never really going to be “my jam” but if you are into opera the filmmaking here is quite well done and I can see why this might be something of a gold standard for how to film a stage production.
*** out of Five

Spine #77 And God Created Woman (1956)

Many years ago, before there was a Criterion Channel and even before there was a FilmStruck, the Criterion Collection tested the streaming waters by licensing some of Janus’ movies out to a sub-channel on the then fairly new streaming service Hulu.  Notably at that time you could sort movies on that service by different criteria like alphabetical sorting or sorting by run time and most notably sorting by popularity.  I remember this because when I sorted Hulu’s Criterion movies by popularity the number one movie was not one of the stalwarts like Seven Samurai or The Seventh Seal, no, it was Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman.  Why?  Almost certainly because the thumbnail had a naked woman on it.  I don’t remember the number two movie when ranked by popularity but it appeared to be popular for similar reasons.  But in many ways this is appropriate because despite whatever artistic merits the film had it likely became famous in the first place because of a salacious title and advertising campaign.  This is a movie that would have been considered very sexually open and salacious, probably even within European cinema, when it came out back in 1956 but there are still certainly limits to how much skin is in this (likely to the disappointment of many a Hulu user in the late 2000s.)  The film opens with a scene of Bridget Bardot tanning nude in the sun but you only see her from the side and the film uses angles and strategically placed objects throughout to avoid ever entirely showing you the most explicit of body parts.  Still, the sexuality baked into this story (about an eighteen year old orphan getting into a strange love triangle with two brothers) is daring unto itself and it especially brought to life by problematic fave Brigitte Bardot, who was married to Vadim at the time, and this movie was her big breakout as an international sex symbol and really pops from the screen whenever she’s on it here.  Vadim also brings some style to the proceeding, shooting the film in Technicolor widescreen, which was probably a slightly unconventional choice for this type of movie during this era and that brings a degree of professionalism and legitimacy to the whole thing.  Vadim would divorce Bardot shortly after the release of this film and eventually married Jane Fonda and made Barbarella with her which suggests that this guy had quite the aptitude for wooing iconic women who are out of his league and a unique interest in, uh, displaying them to the world.  He’s definitely not one of the greatest talents of the golden age of world cinema but he’s an interesting enough side figure of the era and this movie holds a similar status; something worth knowing about but probably not one of the greats itself.
***1/2 out of Five

Spine #81 Variety Lights (1951)

In 1963 Federico Fellini released what many feel to be his magnum opus: the unusually titled 8½.  That title referred to the number of films that Fellini had made up to that point and that total included a “half film” in part because of this movie, Fellini’s feature debut but one that he co-directed in collaboration with another filmmaker named Alberto Lattuada.  Lattuada is much less famous than Fellini but is he’s still a respected director with some classics like Mafioso under his belt.  It’s not known exactly how the two divided work on this film but at the end of the day it’s generally viewed more as the beginning of Fellini’s career and I’m probably better equipped to view it in that context without thinking too much about Lattuada, and the film definitely feels of a piece with Fellini’s work rather than some exception diluted by some other guy’s contributions.  The film is set in the world of Italian vaudeville and in some ways feels like a bit of a precursor to the circus troupe we see in La Strada, but these characters are given a much less interesting or dramatic plotline.  In a lot of ways this is kind of like one of those “backstage musicals” from the early sound era, but obviously this isn’t a musical and while you do occasionally see the vaudeville style acts they aren’t really meant to be a particular source of entertainment here.  If Fellini hadn’t gone on to be a major artist later on I have my doubts this movie would be particularly widely seen today but that shouldn’t be too much of an insult because it’s still a decent little movie for what it is and was as good of a place for the guy to start as anything.
*** out of Five

Spine #92 A Fiend Without a Face

Criterion has always taken it as something of a mission to represent a large variety of genres and film types, which often leads to some kind of unexpected choices that baffle people who’ve reduced the collection to a certain kind of arthouse cinema.  Right now we’re seeing some bafflement at their decision to release a physical version of K-Pop Demon Hunters but they’ve always been doing stuff like this going back to their infamous decision to put out Armageddon on DVD.  This instinct does not, however, always involve huge budget Hollywood blockbusters like that and it sometimes leads to even more baffling choices, such as the decision to make one of their earliest DVD releases this cheesy science fiction film about sentient brains trying to kill people.  This was one of those unofficially paired releases the company sometimes does alongside spine number 91, which is the much more famous 1958 produced sci-fi/horror B-movie The Blob.  In reality the (future) Criterion release this has more in common with is their “Monsters and Madmen” boxed set (spine 364), which is a collection of four films also produced by Richard and/or Alex Gordon and in retrospect they might have been better off saving this for that.  The film itself is a functional enough B-movie with a lot of the strengths and weaknesses of the form.  It’s an unpretentious production with some fairly stock actors and cheap sets but it notably some kind of interesting (if low budget) visual effects involving stop motion brains (some of them with spinal cords) killing people and that’s kind of neat.  Does the movie belong in the Criterion Collection?  Probably not by my metrics, and I’m not sure I’ve gotten much else from the Godons’ movies either and I’m not sure how much of a renaissance these releases provided for those guys either, so maybe this is just kind of a quirk of one of their programers’ taste, who knows.  Regardless, if you set aside the Criterion baggage this movie is mostly fine for what it is and I’m okay with it.
**1/2 out of Five

In Conclusion

So, I’ve finally crossed off all of the first 100 Criterion spines (including that weird Beastie Boys music video anthology, which I watched all of via Youtube).  Did I learn anything from this?  No, not really.  Ultimately it was just kind of an excuse to watch a grab bag of movies whose titles have been nagging at me for a while and which I wanted an excuse to cross off.  There was definitely some decent stuff here though nothing too revelatory, there are reasons I’d avoided most of them and I can’t say they defied my expectations too much.  And the Ship Sails On… was probably my favorite of the bunch, that definitely clashed with its reputation as second rate Fellini and it did make me a bit more curious to check out some of that guy’s later work, most of the rest of the movie were kind of just what I expected.  I don’t plan on following this up with further explorations of Criterion spine number sets, firstly because there aren’t any other stretches with this few to cross off and secondly just because nothing else in the collection has gnawed at me as much over the years.  This was fun for the most part though.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day(7/30/2026)

There’s been a lot of talk as of late about MCU-fatigue and superhero-fatigue more broadly at theaters and at this point it’s pretty close to undeniable.  Just look at Supergirl, that movie had problems but it wasn’t terrible or even particularly “bad” in my eyes.  If it had come out in 2018 it would have had no problem opening big and doing decent business regardless but in 2026 it flopped hard.  Stuff like Thunderbolts and Fantastic Four: First Steps also struggled so clearly the days in which a Marvel or DC logo ensured a hit are probably done… however, there are complications to this narrative.  There appear to be certain top shelf characters that can still draw crowds regardless of how much trouble their “cinematic universes” are in.  People still showed up for James Gunn’s Superman and they also still showed up for Deadpool Vs. Wolverine.  These movies had most of the “easter egg” stuff these movies usually have but the people making them seem to have understood that these were in some ways “bigger” than the brand and can still put up huge numbers even when people are otherwise disillusioned by the rest of the genre.  It would seem that this dynamic goes double when it comes to the character of Spider-Man, who seems to be particularly bulletproof.  The Spider-Verse films are far and away the most popular animated spinoffs in all of franchise media and the last Tom Holland starring Spider-Man movie broke every record imaginable despite being released during a big COVID surge and by all accounts this new installment is not going to be diminished in the slightest by the waning interest in the rest of the MCU.  But does it deserve that?

This installment begins with something of a time-jump after the ending of Spider-Man: No Way Home, in which Dr. Strange’s spell made everyone forget both that Peter Parker was Spider-Man and also who Peter Parker (Tom Holland) was at all and left him on his own to fend for itself.  It’s now four years later and both MJ (Zendaya) and Jacob Batalon (Ned Leeds) have graduated from MIT and Parker has had to observe their actions from afar while he remains in New York and focuses on his superhero work as Spider-Man and he seems to have pretty successful at this and has even formed a pretty strong relationship with the NYPD (not sure what happened to J. Jonah Jameson).  In some ways this is all great for Spider-Man, but not so great for Peter Parker, who’s alone and stressed and generally not doing great.  This comes to a head after he crashes a house warming party that MJ and Ned throw when they move back to New York and rooming together and he sees that MJ has a new boyfriend.  This drives him so crazy that he comes to learn that it’s throwing off his spider-powers and making the arachnid DNA in him spike and heighten his aggression.  This comes at an awkward time because it’s happening right as Parker finds himself facing off against some unknown threat that appears to be able to possess ordinary people and force them to carry out crimes.

The first three Tom Holland Spider-Man movies were all directed by a guy named Jon Watts but for this fourth film he’s stepped aside and been replaced by Destin Daniel Cretton, who directed Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings for Marvel but who is otherwise known for more character oriented films like Short Term 12.  This reflexes something of a change in tone for the series, which clearly realized that they weren’t going beat Spider-Man: No Way Home (which ended on a duel between three Spider-men fighting several super villains on top of the Statue of Liberty) so it’s pivoting to more of a focus on character arc.  Don’t get me wrong, there’s still plenty of superhero action here, but the film does seem more interested in the growth of the characters who are now twenty somethings instead of teenagers and the filmmaking does try to match the heightened emotional stakes of that.  It’s not exactly clear what income Peter Parker is getting as Spider-Man and how he manages to pay the rent (and I still don’t know if Dr. Strange’s spell erased Parker’s Social Security records) but it is taping into that stress than many a young person feels as they’re forced to “hustle” to establish themselves at a young age and some of the toll this takes on their personal lives, sort of.  Honestly that’s a bit of a stretch, Parker’s loneliness is partly because he’s busy but also because he’s a superhero who “broke up” with his high school sweetheart under the weirdest comic book circumstances possible and still pines for her in a way that’s not healthy.

So I do think this does a decently admirable job of progressing the Peter Parker character but I’m a little less impressed by what it does as just a standard Spider-Man adventure.  For one, I think Destin Daniel Cretton’s visual styling here is generally less fun than Watts’ was.  The film has made the rather annoying decision to be presented in different aspect ratios in different theaters and I feel like some of the framing seemed a bit sloppy as a result.  I also found some of the scenes to feel oddly under-lit and thought some of the action scenes worked better than others.  I also found the film’s finale, which may otherwise have been somewhat impressive, to be oddly similar to another recent MCU movie’s finale in a way that stole some of its thunder.  That said there are definitely some bits of spectacle here that do delivery and I also appreciate that they don’t feel obligated to make this the biggest and most bombastic that Marvel has ever made.  I’d also say that the film has a fairly curious assemblage of characters it’s working with; the film’s ostensible villain played by Sadie Sink is a well-known Marvel character but not one you’d conventionally expect acting as a Spider-Man villain and likely makes more sense here if you take them at face value rather than bringing in outside expectations about them from their depiction in other mediums.  The Punisher, who actually has a pretty big part in this, also seems like an odd addition here at first glance but he does share a common link in the story as another person who’s been stripped of his family and left alone in his crusade against crime and The Incredible Hulk also makes sense here as a character fighting an inner beast he struggle to control; these aren’t just characters selected to set up future MCU movies.

Aside from those cameos, which granted isn’t a small thing, this actually kind of has a different “feel” from a lot of the MCU in certain ways.  Not dramatically different mind you, and not necessarily different in entirely good ways, but kind of different.  The dialogue feels less quippy and the story feels less streamlined, almost feeling more like a short TV run or maybe even more like a series of comic book stories than like a regular three act film.  The film seems to have a more serious tone, which may partly be a conscious choice or may be a byproduct of the jokes that are here just not being as good as they could be, but regardless it makes the film feel a bit different.  Again, whether that’s for better or worse is probably debatable, I kind of missed that MCU-feel but I’m also not sure it can really be recreated at this point, it’s kind of a magic trick we’ve seen to many times so maybe it’s best not to chase it.  The movie we did get though has a lot of cool stuff in it.  The villain’s “line of sight possession” trick is pretty fun and I did remain pretty interested in Peter and his growth as a person.  If the film had managed to make certain twists a bit less predictable and punched up the dialogue a bit I think we may well have had one of the best Spider-Man movie to date but I’ll take what I’ve been given and admire what it’s setting out to do.
***1/2 out of Five

Home Video Round-Up 7/20/2026

The Sheep Detectives (6/24/2026)
	The Sheep Detectives is one of those movies that seemed to be based on such a silly idea that you had to wonder if there was actually something to it as no one would go through all the work of getting funding for it unless there was actually some passion behind it.  Sure enough the film has been much better received than the average family movie about talking farm animals and I can see why but there are some limits to how enthusiastic I’m likely to be about it.  The film sets what is essentially your typical British cozy mystery story on a farm where a beloved farmer/shepherd is poisoned and while the human investigators initially believe this to be a natural heart attack, but his sheep (who unbeknownst to the humans are intelligent and can talk amongst each other) who’ve been privy to various murder mysteries which the shepherd has been reading aloud to them for some reason, think he was actually murdered and want to nudge the detective towards the culprits.  So… it’s Knives Out meets Babe.  Insomuch as it works it probably because it takes its job pretty seriously: it seems to have put some thoughts into what being a sentient sheep is like in this world and gives them something of a culture and while this isn’t the most meticulous mystery ever constructed they do seem to have taken the mechanics seriously enough to impress the average viewer of a non-sheep related BBC mystery of the week.  The film also has a pretty decent cast and is shot well enough and is probably about as well done as this sort of thing was ever likely to be.  That having been said there are still some pretty big leaps of logic necessary to make this concept work (I cannot believe this dude was really reading entire novels out loud to animals) and there’s a degree of extreme “nicecore” at work here which had its limits for me. *** out of Five
How to Make a Killing (7/2/2026)
One of the better indie flicks of the 2020s was the film Emily the Criminal, which felt like a smart dramatic turn for Aubrey Plaza and I was interested to see if its director John Patton Ford would also go on to bigger and better things but he seems to have hit a pretty big roadblock right out the gate with this rather misguided modernized take on Kind Hearts and Coronets of all things.  I suppose that both this and Emily the Criminal are on some level movies about people turning to crime in order to “get theirs” out of unfair systems but “Emily” is a drama while this film is (I think) supposed to be a satire, albeit not a very funny one.  That’s kind of where this loses me as Kind Hearts and Coronets is supposed to be a rather absurdist story complete with Alec Guiness playing each one of the relatives that the protagonist tries to bump off including a woman.  This movie on the other hand clearly isn’t supposed to be taken entirely seriously but it isn’t going for jokes either and it’s not doing anything as nutty as that Alec Guiness thing.  The film also isn’t exactly going to hit that “eat the rich” zeitgeist either because Kind Hearts and Cornets isn’t really about someone who takes issue with the oppression of the rich so much as he feels entitled to his own piece of the generational wealth pie and is willing to kill to get it for entirely selfish ends.  I think I might have been a bit more generous to this if I was less familiar with its source material but as a remake I found it pretty misguided even if there are moments of wit to it here and there.  Ultimately it’s pretty inessential work and my hopes for this John Patton Ford guy have certainly descended. **1/2 out of Five
Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice (7/5/2026)
	Really?  We’re still making cheap Tarantino ripoffs in the year of our lord twenty twenty-six?  I suppose more specifically this is a Tarantino ripoff crime movie that collides with a science-fictiony high concept in that it’s a movie about a gangster guy who travels back in time six months using a time machine a friend invented (the details of which are not dwelled upon) in order to undo a set of actions he regrets, resulting in two versions of the same guy running around the movie doing stuff.  That’s a concept that could be fun in the right hands but these are very much not the right hands; this movie is positively obnoxious and feels like it was both written and directed by a fourteen year old.  It has most of the hallmarks of annoying bro filmmaking like obvious needledrops, flippant violence, and indulgent plot twists and most of this maybe could be okay if done with style and craft but it’s not.  We get a couple of okay action scenes eventually but most of the movie is pretty flatly shot and it also sports a mediocre cast and dialogue that isn’t as clever as it thinks it is.  The film ended up going straight to Hulu, which isn’t always the kiss of death these days but it seems eminently appropriate for this movie which mostly made my eyes roll. *1/2 out of Five
Outcome (7/15/2026)
Jonah Hill’s directorial debut, mid90s, was kind of different than I might have expected from him.  It wasn’t really a comedy and instead this Kids-like look at troubled youths in a skater subculture.  It wasn’t a great movie but it was an interesting debut and showed some clear promise.  His follow-up is closer to what I might have expected from Hill, and not necessarily in a good way.  That’s not to say this is a straightforward comedy though… it has larger pretentions than that.  The film is essentially a show-biz satire, which is a genre that’s pretty over saturated generally and you have to wonder if Hill was attracted to make it because he was jealous that friend and occasional collaborator Seth Rogen had achieved such success “The Studio” also on AppleTV+ and wanted in on the action.  As such he made this movie about a movie star (played by Keanu Reeves) whose personal life is a hot mess and who’s recovering from addiction and is trying to make amends with various people.  I don’t think Reeves is particularly well cast here, obviously he can convincingly play a movie star but I’m not sure I believed him as this messy addict and when the movie is trying to be funny he doesn’t really deliver.  “Trying to be funny” is kind of a key term there as I’m not really sure how much of a satire this was even supposed to be as it’s a big jumble of tones that Hill isn’t really able to navigate.  When I say this is closer to what I might have expected from him it’s because it’s well known that he’s become rather obsessed with “therapy” as of late, going so far as to have made a documentary about his psychologist and getting in trouble for sending a bunch of passive aggressive therapy speak texts to one of his exes.  This definitely feels like a movie made by someone who feels like it was made by someone who’s made having gone to therapy their personality.  The whole movie just feels really undercooked and meandering despite actually being quite short and it really doesn’t amount to much of anything.  Do not recommend at all. *1/2 out of Five
Propeller One-Way Night Coach (7/20/2026)
	I have a running list on Letterboxd ranking every original movie ever released on the Apple TV streaming service, which isn’t too hard so far as they only put out new stuff every couple of months and there’s less than fifty of them to date.  That means that I sometimes find myself watching some stuff I normally wouldn’t give the time of day to including this vanity project from John Travolta, who produced, wrote, directed, and narrated this film which is also based on a children’s book that he wrote back in the 90s and is clearly rooted in his aviation hobby.  This is one of those movies like A Christmas Story that’s being narrated by an adult who’s reminiscing about his childhood and trying to use that to get into a kid’s perspective of some possibly otherwise mundane events.  In this case we’re looking at a kid in the early 60s who’s excited to be going on his first flight as he joins his mother in flying cross country and because they’re doing this on propeller planes rather than jets this involves a bunch of stops along the way.  Along the way there are some interactions with other passengers that are of middling interest but more than anything this kid just really really loves airplanes for whatever reason and totally nerds out about them the whole way.  Needless to say this is an incredibly self-indulgent project on the part of Travolta and I’m sure it’s very meaningful to him, to anyone else… not so much.  That having been said the thing is so upfront about what it is that it’s a little hard to be too mad at it, like, I knew what I was getting into when I hit play.  Travolta also had the decency to have the movie only be one hour long instead of stretching this rather thin premise beyond that, which is appreciated, but also note that that’s quite the backhanded compliment. *1/2 out of Five

The Odyssey(7/16/2026)

Warning: Review contains spoilers, including spoilers for film specific adaptations

Roger Ebert wrote a lot of very memorable positive reviews and many memorable negative reviews in his career but one that stands out notably in my memory was a decidedly mixed review: his review of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.  Ebert nominally liked the film and gave it a “thumbs up” on this TV show but his review of the film seemed a littled… bummed.  He admired the film’s many technical achievements and anticipated that audiences would love it but he seemed a little at odds that the tomes he remembered as being these kind of quaint British children’s stories being turned into these kind of bombastic modern action movies focused on battle scenes and visual effects.  Back in 2001 I thought this review was crazy, I loved those movies then and I love them now and I also think Ebert (who readily admitted he was going off hazy youthful memories of the books) was maybe misremembering some of their more martial elements.  I still don’t exactly “agree” with that review but over the years I’ve come to realize that he sort of did have a point: I might very much like the modern action movie take on the material that Jackson took but it was a choice to make those movies that way and I’m not sure they are entirely in the spirit of the source material, which is indeed a bit more laid back than what we see in that film series.  I was reminded of this when I learned that The Odyssey was going to be getting a big budget adaptation by Chrisopher Nolan, a man I don’t necessarily think of as being a natural fit for the material.  The Odyssey is, among many other things, certainly an adventure story of epic proportions but in the wrong hands it could well be turned into something that was only that while missing a lot of the strange little tangents that make it special in much the way Wolfgang Peterson’s Troy (a movie that inspired Ebert to quip “Homer’s estate should sue”) is widely seen as a misbegotten and compromised take on The Illiad despite some cool fight scenes.  My fears about this weren’t exactly unfounded, I suspect Ebert would have been mixed about this film as well, but… I mean, there’s a reason I wasn’t on Ebert’s side on that one.

I don’t think Homer’s “Odyssey” needs a lot of introduction, if you live in the western world and received an even half decent education there’s a good chance you read it in school.  Indeed my main exposure to it came from 10^th grade English class (Robert Fagles translation) and have some nostalgic memories of the video we made as a final project on the book in which we Odysseus and Poseidon hash out their differences on an episode of the Jerry Springer Show.  That having been said, I did read that as a student doing homework and while I didn’t dislike the book I’m not going to pretend that it sparked some deep fascination in my fifteen year old self or that it turned me into a dedicated classicist.  I remember the broad strokes of the book but not all the details and I’m not going to claim to be an expert who can spot every single decision that Nolan made while turning this work into a film but I did feel like I remembered more about it than I expected to and will make the comparisons I can.

Before I get into what Nolan changed though I’m kind of in awe of just how much Nolan was able to include.  The Odyssey isn’t exactly the longest book in literature of anything, my old copy is about five hundred pages and that’s a verse translation, but it’s an eventful text filled with sections that are iconic elements of our cultural heritage that you can’t just casually omit.  Not too long ago they made an entire two hour feature that only covered the last few chapters of the poem so the notion that Nolan would be able to fit all of it into just three hours seemed pretty wild, and yet, he kind of pulled it off.  Just about every famous episode that I remember from the book is in here plus some events from The Iliad that are brought up in flashback and a couple of new elements are even added and yet the film does not really feel rushed or overly dense.  Nolan has also maintained the poem’s non-chronological flashback structure, which isn’t exactly surprising given that Nolan has long been known for structural trickery but his commitment to maintaining that is impressive given how much else is on his plate and for the most part he pulls it off without missing much.  There are some events that maybe get somewhat short shrift here or there with the sections on Calypso’s island in particular feeling fairly abridged despite some decent work from Charlize Theron in the role of the nymph in question, but for the most part Nolan managed to compress these events surprisingly successfully.

This is of course not to suggest that there aren’t major changes to be found here because there are, even to fairly famous episodes.  Take the adventure on Circe’s island for example; in the poem Circe is something akin to a queen living in an extravagant castle who’s thwarted because a direct intervention by Hermes and who also becomes Odysseus’ lover as he and his crew spend upwards of a year in her realm before leaving (something that would influence the larger Homeric Cinematic Universe).  Here though she’s played by Samantha Morton and is made to be something more akin to a Pacific Northwest Wicca practitioner living in a modest house, she’s thwarted through more mundane observations by Odysseus, and the Ithacans are happy to leave immediately thereafter.  I’m not complaining about any of this, it’s one of the highlights of the film and the body horror employed to depict that pig transformations is excellent, but it is kind of emblematic of some of the reinvention on display here which in many ways kind of smooths over some of the thornier elements of Greek culture from the poem and perhaps even Christianizes it.   For one, Odysseus is now a much more faithfully monogamous family man than he was in the books but perhaps more importantly it’s illustrative of how the influence of the gods on the story has been greatly transformed.  In the books the gods are always popping up in the story, often in person and just straight up telling Odysseus what to do and why they’re helping him.  Here they act more like Abrahamic gods; they certainly seem to be influencing the difficult waters Odysseus sails and occasionally offer prophesies through elaborate means, but they’re mostly off screen and work in “mysterious ways.”

That scene also plays into a larger thematic throughline of the movie in that Circe’s main motivation is that she assumes the Greek warriors to be a threat rather than someone to be welcomed under the “Law of Zeus” that the characters here keep talking about.  If I recall what my tenth grade English (shout out Ms. Matera!) told me this concept is actually called Xenia and is a sort of ethos of hospitality the Greeks held requiring them to take visitors into their homes and is the code that the suitors are exploiting to basically throw a years-long kegger in Penelope’s basement while Odysseus is away.  Odysseus and his men keep expecting to be greeted as guests under Xenia when they arrive at places like Circe’s home or the land of the Laestrygonians when they are instead feared as threats.  It’s later revealed that Odysseus himself believes this is a sort of karmic retribution for his own violation of the spirit of Xenia when his men used the Trojan horse as a dishonorable means of sacking Troy and unleashing a bloodbath upon it and that much of his demeanor later in the film is the result of guilt if not PTSD around this.  The consequences of this appear to be even larger than the trouble he faces on his own journey; back in Ithaca and later in Sparta we learn that throughout the Greek world there are reports of “people from the sea” sacking different areas, with Ithaca having added pressure to finally crown a king because of this threat.  As modern viewers we know this to be a reference to the “sea people” described in accounts of the famous Bronze Age Collapse that would in fact lead to the fall of Mycenaean Greece, suggesting that action has nearly apocalyptic consequences.

This entire Pandoran take is of course a Nolan invention, I don’t remember Homer’s Odysseus having anything like this same kind of guilt over his actions at Troy and if he did it wasn’t for the same reason and didn’t have the same effect.  This is all finally explained pretty late in the movie and once it’s laid out it makes a lot of what we’ve just seen come together and “click” with the rest of Nolan’s filmography, most obviously with his last movie Oppenheimer, which was of course also about a guy racked with guilt because his genius plan caused mass destruction with long lasting rippling consequences that may well destroy everything he was fighting for in the first place.  This is a little different than the atom bomb though as this is not just a single invention and Odysseus is not someone who passively handed it down to others, he was right their hiding in that Trojan Horse himself and got that blood on his own hands.  His ultimate sin wasn’t giving the world a new weapon (that horse trick is probably not replicable) but breaking a norm that kind of can’t be unbroken, he’s really more in the position of Truman than Oppenheimer but unlike Truman he wasn’t even really in the middle of a particularly just war, in fact this officially posits that the “face that launched a thousand ships” story was just a pretext for Greece to reclaim trade routes from Troy.

Clearly Nolan has some things on his mind about the world changing or the worst because of someone’s decisions given that they were central themes of his two most recent films.  When Oppenheimer came out some people speculated that this had to do with Nolan’s guilt over the mainstreaming of superhero films with his Dark Knight trilogy and how that genre took over Hollywood but frankly I think that’s a little glib.  The over-abundance of superhero films in the 2010s was annoying but I don’t think that’s akin to war crimes and I doubt Nolan does either.  I think this is much more likely to be tied more directly to modern politics both domestically and around the world.  We’re said to be living through the decline of a “rules based order” that’s being rapidly accelerated by stupid and selfish decisions on the part of people like Trump, Putin, and Netanyahu and these things are eroding any soft power that any of the major powers ever had and are eroding any sort of geopolitical trust that ever existed.  More profoundly the shamelessness of these people seem to be inspiring a similar brazenness in a lot of people across all walks of life who seem to be adopting an attitude of “nice guys finish last” and now aren’t even pretending not to be assholes and the world is becoming shittier and shittier because of it.  In the midst of times like these it probably isn’t too hard to see why Nolan would be so focused on dangerous turning points in history and their consequences.  Furthermore I can’t help but see, under this context, the suitors as something of a stand-in for the way bad actors exploit old norms of civility and procedure that were built for more genteel times and may simply serve to keep the good people who still believe in those norms from fighting back to restore order.

So, it’s not too surprising to me to see these very relevant concerns popping up in a movie released in 2026 but was Homer’s Odyssey really the ideal delivery mechanism for them?  There are definitely going to be people who feel this isn’t really that in keeping with Homer’s poem and those people aren’t really wrong, just as Roger Ebert wasn’t entirely wrong about the Lord of the Rings movies having a pretty different tone than Tolkien’s books.  So this probably won’t be one for the classicists, at least not the ones who aren’t pretty open to revisionism, and I’m similarly not sure what people who are completely unfamiliar with this story are going to make of it.  Watching the film’s reception in places like China where I imagine this story is just as foreign as “Journey to the West” is to us may prove interesting.  But the vast majority of the audience for this are going to fall somewhere between those camps and will consist of people (like me) who mostly know this story from either hazy high school memories or maybe from just cultural osmosis and those people are likely to be unencumbered by whatever adaptation reservations I might have and are going to be extremely well served by this movie.  As long as this review is I still don’t really have time to get into every choice Nolan made in putting this thing together.  There are tons of great things here I haven’t even been able to touch on (Matt Damon’s extremely solid movie star performance at the center, the excellent casting throughout, the excellent location scouting, numerous excellent set-pieces, etc) and I have my nitpicks too (Scylla sure sticks out like typical Hollywood CGI creature for a Nolan film, that fight with the suitors at the end could have been a few ticks better, the Travis Scott song in the credits feels a bit “how do you do fellow kids,” etc.) but by and large I’m quite satisfied with it and I think its take on the material is timely and interesting.
****1/2 out of Five

Cinemap: Oceania/Pacific Part 2

About a year ago I got a foothold in watching through films from the handful of Oceania island nations that I hadn’t yet crossed off my Cinemap list.  There were too many countries in the region to cross off all at once so I knew I was only going to be able to cross off one half of the remaining films in one go and leave the rest for another day… that other day has come.  In part one of my oceania tour I looked at movies from Papua New Guinea, The Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Fiji, The Federated States of Micronesia, and Samoa.  That leaves Kiribati, The Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, Tonga, and Vanuatu left to cross off, many of which are even smaller and more remote than the locations from part one but I think I have a plan for how I’m going to tackle each of them.  I don’t think there are any countries here like the Seychelles that will force me to “cheat” too much but I will be seeing some real obscure and hard to find (well, they would be hard to find without the internet) stuff with a couple of exceptions but I will actually be starting with one of the region’s more high profile films.

Vanuatu: Tanna (2015)

Vanuatu is a series of Melanesian islands situated Northeast of Australia (in fact it’s closer to Australia than New Zealand is) but Southeast of the Solomon Islands and North of the French overseas territory of New Caledonia.  In their history they have the rather unusual distinction of having once been colonized by both Britain and France at the same time in some sort of elaborate co-oppressor agreement but despite being double colonized they seem to have preserved a lot of their culture, or rather cultures, more than a lot of places.  That may in part be because they’re particularly diverse, with each of their islands having something of its own identity with slightly different tribal customs.  Most relevant to the film at hand is Tanna Island, the archipelago’s third largest, which is notable for having an active volcano on it which has been turned into something of a tourist attraction.  Like the wider country Tanna Island is a pretty diverse place with various factions including people who live a modern industrialized lifestyle but also people who have retained a more traditional indigenous lifestyle and those people are the subjects of the movie Tanna.  In fact if you’re casually watching the early portions of the movie you might be inclined to think it’s set in the ancient past when it is in fact set in the year 1987.

Tanna is based on a real event that occurred when a pair of traditionalist tribes on Tanna Island were in conflict and as part of a peace process between them a marriage was arranged between the granddaughter of a village elder and someone from the other tribe, but the granddaughter in question has already begun a love affair with another villager and the two of them run off in a sort of “Romeo and Juliet” like story.  The film was made by a pair of Australian directors named Bentley Dean and Martin Butler (the film would eventually be nominated for a Best International Film Oscar under the Australian banner) and both of those directors primarily work in the documentary space and Tanna has a distinct docudrama feel despite being scripted.  The cast entirely consists of non-professional actors from local indigenous tribes and the film employs unflashy and often handheld digital photography for its visuals.  As a basic feat of filmmaking I’m not sure this movie is particularly impressive technically or stylistically and it’s story is fairly simple, however, it’s hard to ignore the fact that this is trying to act as a fascinating window into a unique culture.  You don’t necessarily get some sort of all-encompassing look at how these people live but you do get a neat little peak into it and also get an actual story to follow while doing it.  It’s like if you picked up on Robert J. Flaherty’s style, brought it into the modern day, and did it more ethically.  That’s pretty neat.
***1/2 out of Five

Palau: Islands on the Edge of Time (1996)

Palau is the westernmost Oceania country I’ll be looking at, in fact it’s not entirely clear to me why it counts as Oceania rather than Asia as there are actually further west than parts of Indonesia but they certainly seem to be more historically and culturally similar to the Pacific island nations that tend to make up Oceania.  The nation is East of the Philippians, North of Eastern Indonesia, and North West of Papua New Guinea.  The island initially fell under Spanish influence like its neighbor The Philippians, who briefly sold it to Germany, who then lost it to Japan during the First World War who proceeded to use it as a base for military invasions during the Second World War and once that conflict was over the island entered into a complicated relationship with the United States.  That relationship began with them looking like an overseas territory like Guam for a while but in the late 70s they turned towards independence, which proved complicated (more on that in a second).  Today Palau is still part of a “Compact of Free Association” with the United States alongside the Federated States of Micronesia and the Marshall Islands which involves financial assistance and easy immigration in exchange for a U.S. Military presence in the island via Navy and Air Force bases.  This whole saga is of course at the center of the movie I selected to watch from the country.

Letterboxd only shows eight feature films from the nation of Palau, but one of those is actually a Korean TV show, one is a 3D documentary about coral reefs of which Palau’s is only small part of, and most the rest are shows I have no access to whatsoever.  So the film I went with was this rather dry documentary that runs about an hour and has a decidedly “public television” feel to it.  The film looks at post-war Palauan history from its declaration of independence through their fight to pass a constitution with preservationist characteristics that the U.S. did not approve of up to the (then) present and also includes some peaks into the contemporary lives of some locals.  The film is clearly meant mostly for an audience of outsiders and is meant to be a rough primer of the island nation for people who’ve never heard of it.  To the doc’s credit though it doesn’t much sugarcoat the extent of American quasi-colonialism going on in in the country and is pretty openly advocating for less interference.  So the film’s heart and intellect is in the right place but it’s sure not doing much to liven up the material and make it more engaging for people who aren’t already particularly interested in this material and visually it really doesn’t have much going for it.  It’s quite the “it is what it is” proposition and its audience is going to be fairly limited.
**1/2 out of Five

Kiribati: The Curse (2014)

I’ve always felt that the pacific island nation of Kiribati (which is pronounced like “Keer-eh-boss” despite the spelling) had a really cool flag.  It’s a little wider than most flags and has a rising sun over some waves with a gold bird flying above it.  The sunrise is partly a reference to the fact that the nation straddles the international date line making Kiribati the first nation to wake up every day.  The country also notably straddles the equator meaning they’re the only nation that spans all four of the world’s hemispheres.  That’s partly a function of the fact that Kiribati is a really widely spread country with its westernmost islands not being too far from Australia but its easternmost islands actually being around the same latitude as Hawaii.  So if you drew a circle around Kiribati it would be a very large place but the vast majority of that would be ocean as there are only about 32 islands, most of which are tiny little atolls.  In fact Kiribati is one of the Pacific island nations that’s been heavily endangered by rising sea levels due to climate change with some speculating that large swaths of the population may need to be relocated at some point in the future because of this.  During colonialism Kiribati fell under the British sphere of influence and for many years were known as the “Gilbert Islands,” named after the sea captain Thomas Gilbert, who sailed with another captain named John Marshall who also got an island chain named after him.  In fact the language spoken on the island is still known as “Gilbertese” and that is (I think) the language spoken in the film I’ve chosen to represent the nation.

Like a lot of tiny Oceanian countries there’s really not much of a film industry in Kirbati and Letterboxd only attributes three feature films to the country: a National Geographic documentary about Amelia Earhart, another documentary about an anthropologist who did some work in Kiribati but other work elsewhere, and the film I chose which is probably the most culturally relevant option but maybe not the most watchable option.  The Curse is a film made by an American named Eric Larson, who has helpfully posted the entire film with English subtitles on his personal Youtube channel.  According to the description on that video Larson made the film while stationed on Marakei Island during his time serving in the Peace Corps and that this was ostensibly a project he made on behalf of the Peace Corp to act as a sort of PSA about alcoholism.  I’m not sure what filmmaking background Larson had before making this, if any, but this is plainly very much an amateur production.  It was clearly filmed on consumer grade equipment by people with no real cinematography knowledge to speak of and who have no real ability to even capture natural light on screen.  The cast is made up entirely of non-actors who are being directed by someone with no real ability to channel them towards giving authentic performances and the blunt script does them no favors.  On top of all this the thing has the gall to run a full 112 minutes and it’s quite the chore to sit through.  I’m usually pretty willing to give generous grades to movies in this series that have origins of the “just making any movie is an accomplishments” variety and some part of me feels bad giving a super low rating to something like this which is inoffensive outside of its incompetence, was plainly never meant to be a commercial product, and wasn’t something that any rational person should have felt obligated to sit through the entirety of but… at the end of the day I’ve got to call it like I see it and seeing this was not fun.
* out of Five

Nauru: Far End of the Sea (2026)

Nauru is another island nation located in the Pacific due northwest of the Solomon Islands and unlike a lot of the other island nations I’m looking at it isn’t an archipelago or collection of island, it’s just a single island.  By size it’s the third smallest country in the world behind Monaco and the Vatican City and by population it’s the third smallest behind Tuvalu and the Vatican City.  Despite that there was a time when the country had immense wealth because it was built on a giant amount of phosphate, which was strip-mined for most of the 20^th Century, which worked well for them until the mine ran dry leaving them with little else to base their economy on and with most of the island interior completely devastated and at present almost everyone lives in the coastal areas and the place is filled with abandoned mining equipment littering the place.  It’s a pretty clear case study in what happens when you ignore environmental concerns and rely entirely on mineral extraction.  As you can probably guess there’s not much of a film industry in Nauru and when I was looking scoping out options to watch from the country I had kind of assumed this would be another situation where I’d be watching some obscure documentary that barely counts as a movie but then conveniently a professionally made Nauruan feature film made just this year showed up on Letterboxd to serve as a representative of the country.

Far End of the Sea is a 52 minute movie that appears to have been funded in large part by the Nauruan government.  I’m not sure exactly what the motives behind its making was as it’s clearly not something that was meant to sell tickets, after all it’s been posted for free on Youtube.  Maybe it’s meant to be some sort of stealth tourism advertisement or maybe it was made to play at a Nauruan history museum or something.  The film was directed by Australian filmmaker Matthew Holmes and is set sometime around the 17^th or 18^th century and looks at a Scottish sailor who washes up on the shores of Nauru after a shipwreck and encounters a Native Nauruan who is something of an outcast within his own village and needs to decide whether to turn this guy over to his elders (for likely execution) or to protect him from a rival tribe and try to help him get off the island.  This is, uh, not exactly the most hard hitting of stories about the encounter between indigenous people and European explorers, in fact I might go so far as to say it’s feel good sentimental fluff but as these things go this isn’t poorly made.  Matthew Holmes is a professional who knows how to make a film and he’s been given a reasonably large budget and shoots the island pretty well.  It maybe says something about how low my standards have become for some of these Cinemap entries that this is all it takes to impress me but, well, sure would have been nice if Kiribati or Palau had funded a glossy advertisement for themselves and as glossy advertisements go this is well done.
**1/2 out of Five

The Marshall Islands: The Sound of Crickets at Night (2012)

The Marshall Islands are a chain of islands located well to the Northwest of Australia and its nearby neighbors and to the East of the Federated States of Micronesia.  The islands were initially discovered by the Spanish, would be named after a British captain who charted them, but it was actually Germany that would colonize them as a “protectorate” in the late 19^th Century only to lose them to Japan during World War I, and it was that act of colonization that would lead them to be the site of several World War II battles and ultimately fall under American control.  This would unfortunately be the backdrop for what they may be best known for at this point; their island Bikini Atoll being used as the test site for several nuclear weapons.  That atoll (which the famous swim suits were named after in questionable fashion) did have a native population who were forcibly removed from their homeland and relocated to other Marshallese Islands with the ostensible promise that they could return some day but the tests proved more permanently toxic than originally anticipated and the place still isn’t really safe for long term settlement today.  That’s a nasty bit of recent history to be sure and the legacy of this event is also notably one of the themes of the film I’ve chosen to look at from the country.

Letterboxd attributes nine feature length films to the Marshall Islands and five of them were directed by the duo of Jack Niedenthal and Suzanne Chutaro with a sixth directed by Niedenthal and two other people, most of these available for free on Youtube on their own Microwave Films channel.  I’ve been burned by these regional “Youtube-caliber” amateur regional filmmakers before but I’ll say this one fell more on the “plucky go-getters” side of the super-indie spectrum and unlike some of the stuff I’ve watched from this series the people making this film had some experience under their belts that made this feel a bit more like a “real” movie despite having been made on a total shoestring.  The film is about an old man who was originally from Bikini Atoll and was haunted by the fact that he couldn’t return and who’s had to send his daughter and one of his two granddaughters abroad and his hoping to save up enough money to reunite the family.  This situation gets kind of upended when they take in an American who washed ashore with amnesia after falling off of a yacht, something the owners of said yacht are trying to cover up… and this guy may also be possessed by some kind of island spirit who’s looking to interfere in the affairs.  So, we’ve got a real plotline here and this isn’t just some dry social realist drama and while this looks like it was shot on fairly inexpensive equipment and stars a bunch of non-actors Niedenthal/Chutaro do have some know-how about how to shoot and pace something like this and the dialogue here isn’t terrible.  I don’t think the magical realist elements of this entirely come together and the movie ends on a bit of a whimper but I was mostly interested in it for the duration of its modest runtime.  That probably sounds like it’s damning with faint praise but I actually am legitimately impressed with what they managed here compared to, say, that I-Kiribati movie I watched.
*** out of Five

Tonga: When the Man Went South (2014)

Most of the countries that I’ve been looking at for this second half of my Oceania journey have been countries of the Micronesian and Melanesian variety but I’m ending on a Polynesian country, which is pacific island region that gets the most attention through media like the Moana franchise.  Specifically I’m looking at Tonga, an island nation located roughly North/Northwest of New Zealand roughly between Fiji and the Samoas.  As an individual nation removed from wider Polynesia they possibly get more attention worldwide for the antics of a guy named Pita Taufatofua, who’s managed to make his way onto the Tongan Olympics team several times and has always arrived at the opening ceremony in dramatic fashion wearing and wearing traditional grass-shirt adjacent leg coverings.  That guy seems cool.  Beyond that Tonga seems like a fairly middle of the road Pacific Island nation with a lot of commonalities to other nearby nations like Fiji and Samoa, both of whom they had contact with during the pre-European contact days through the legendary Polynesian sailing prowess.  Post contact with Europe they actually managed to avoid ever being formally colonized and have maintained a constitutional monarchy that goes back to the 19^th Century, only entering into a “protected status” arrangement with the U.K.  Overall seems like a bit of a feel good story compared to some of the countries I’ve encountered.  Also, which I can’t say they have a big film industry there were more choices for me to choose from with them than there were for some other countries.

The film I’ve selected is called When the Man Went South, which is set in (mostly) pre-contact Tonga and looks at the conflict between varying factions on one of the islands.  We see this through the eyes of a guy named Flying Fox who’s traveling the island for the first time and stumbles into a war between a western village and an eastern village who hate each other for petty reasons that are supposed to seem arbitrary and absurd to the viewer.  This ties into a sort of satirical bent to the film, which I wouldn’t say I personally found terribly funny but which is certainly trying to take something of a lighter approach to history.  Most amusingly one of these village is in the habit of calling members of the other village “Turtle Fuckers” while in turn inhabitants of that village get called “Parrot fuckers,” a pair of insults that raise anatomical questions.  The film’s dialogue is in the native Tongan language but the film also has an omniscient English speaking narrator who comes in and out kind of inconsistently and the comical take on the conflict probably does more to remove tension than it does to really make interesting points or elicit actual laughter.  So I’m not sure this is entirely successful on a storytelling level and I’d say its visuals are fairly pedestrian but there’s some nice scenery to be found and it’s cool to have a movie taking a look at an indigenous culture in a way that avoids “noble savage” tropes effectively and this is likely a worthwhile watch for anyone interested in indigenous cinema.
**1/2 out of Five

In Conclusion

And with that I’ve completed another continent and have seen a movie from every country in three of the six populated continents.  This was of course the second jaunt I’ve made through this Oceania/Pacific region and between the two I’m struck by the fact that cinema in this region seems to be a bit more intrinsically in touch with pre-colonial traditions than the movies I’ve seen in some other places.  Several of the movies I watched were set in pre-contact eras or very early in the era of contact and several were about people living more or less indigenous lifestyles even into the modern era.  Even the films set more firmly in the world of the present are still about characters who are in various ways trying to keep in through with the tribal ways of yore despite living “modernized” western style life, often involving a sort of magical realism.  That said, obviously there were some pretty janky low budget films I had to dig to find and even among the “real” movies I was able to find they often felt less like capital “C” Cinema and more like earnest nice tries.  Overall it’s a cool region I hadn’t thought much about and it’s cool that some high profile members of the diaspora like Dwayne Johnson have drawn attention to the region as there’s clearly a lot of material to mine from it.

In the next cinemap we’ll return one last time to the continent of Africa to watch movies from the last six African countries that remain gray on my map.

The Invite(7/9/2026)

Warning: Review has some spoilers

The Apatow led boom of R-rated comedies we got in the mid to late 2000s and 2010s is well and truly dead and in the past, and for that matter film comedy in general seems to really be a theme of the 2020s.  You would think that this would be a disaster for the breakout star of that era, Seth Rogen, and yet the guy seems to be doing pretty well for himself.  He might not be able to bring people to theaters in droves when he makes movies like Good Fortune but he has scored successes in more behind the scenes work on movies like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Madness and he’s also been very successful on the small screen with shows like the sitcom “Platonic” or the film industry sendup “The Studio” (for which he just won several emmys).  Perhaps more interestingly he’s come up with ways to insert himself into movies that weren’t necessarily written for him and for which he isn’t necessarily trying to entirely abandon his image but which hue closer to more conventional acting.  I’m thinking of things like Dumb Money, where he’s almost playing a straight man in an irreverent but not fully comedic work, or his work as Steve Wozniak in Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs or his work in Steven Spielberg’s Oscar nominated The Fabelmans.  He’s doing something more than a bit like this with his latest film The Invite, which is certainly a comedy and one where he is in many ways doing his old shtick but in a much more middle-aged and serious minded way that is fairly interesting to watch.

The film takes place largely within the (very large) apartment of a couple in their forties who have been somewhat at odds of late.  Joe (Seth Rogen) was formerly in a modestly successful indie rock band but has now been reduced to teaching music at a not very prestigious college and Angela (Olivia Wilde) appears to be a stay at home mom whose at something of a wits end at the routine she’s fallen into.  The main story begins as Joe comes home and is surprised when it turns out that this is the night of a small dinner party with two of their neighbors, a former firefighter named Hawk (Edward Norton) and his Spanish wife Pina (Penélope Cruz).  Angela insists that she told Joe about this several days ago but he doesn’t remember this and feels caught off-guard, in no small part because he has some beef (possibly born of jealousy) with that couple over the fact that they’ve been making a lot of noise during sex at all hours of the night.  Joe considers using this night as an opportunity to confront them over this but Angela insists that he doesn’t make a scene like that and the following meeting proves to be something of a contrast between these more libertine neighbors and this more uptight couple.

Given that the film only has four speaking roles and largely takes place in one location the film feels a bit play-like and indeed it does have some stagey origins (more on that later) but I wouldn’t say that’s too much of a weakness here like it sometimes can be.  Like a lot of films based on theater it does sometimes strain credulity just how much movement certain character arcs make over the course of a single night but for most of the runtime this isn’t much of a problem and the “hothouse” aspects of it all kind of build up over the course of the evening and things escalate in a believable way.  It’s also notable that Seth Rogen does not feel at all like a square peg put into a round circle here, the film is still very much making use of the brand of comedy he once established and this is very much a comedic film with a lot of the kind of frank sexual dialogue that might have gotten laughs in a movie like Knocked Up in the past but it’s done in a more middle class milieu here and in what is perhaps a more mature context.

Olivia Wilde, who both directs and stars in the film, is also an able scene partner with Rogen and is pretty able to convey how frustrated this woman is while not exactly being blameless for some of her own issues.  Wilde never really formed the identity of a “comedy actress” but did make her directorial debut with the movie Booksmart, which was something of a (very well done) last gasp of that previous wave of R-rated comedy and has brought forward her chops here.  Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz are also kind of delightful and do a pretty good job of bring these free-spirits to life without making them seem like total caricatures, though there are some limits to what this script is going to allow in that regard as these people are in some ways meant to be foils for our main couple (who are the point of view characters for all of this) more than they are their own fully formed characters.  This isn’t to say there isn’t some complexity to them; we do eventually learn some interesting things about their pasts and we do get some glimpse into their own flaws but they ultimately are not the main subject of the movie outside of the contrast.

So what to make of that contrast?  Well, there were a couple of different routes I was thinking this might go down that it didn’t.  I had some suspicion that this may ultimately end up “both sidesing” the two couples’ outlooks and suggesting that Hawk and Pina are secretly just as miserable as Joe and Angela and while there’s some nuance there it ultimately doesn’t do that.  Hawk and Pina’s open-mindedness does end up just kind of does prove to be healthy for them for the most part.  I also suspected that this experience might end up being credited as re-invigorating Joe and Angela’s marriage on its own, which would have been simplistic, and the movie doesn’t really go there either. Alternately I suspected that the experience might specifically drive Joe and Angela apart or perhaps also infect Hawk and Pina with their same negativity, and while this is closer to what happens here that’s not really it either.  Instead the night is painted more as a sort of magnifying glass that clarifies a toxic status quo that the two of them were ignoring all along and while I might have liked the film to have been a bit more subtle about this rather than explaining it all in a literal therapy session, I would say it’s a reasonably smart conclusion to come to.

It should probably be noted that The Invite is actually a remake of a Spanish film from 2020 called The People Upstairs which was written and directed by a guy named Cesc Gay and based on his own stage play.  I don’t think that play was ever staged on these shores nor do I think that film ever got an American release and it would seem that Gay has been more interested in using localization to spread his work as this is actually not the first remake of this property.  In just a span of six years there have also been versions of this made in Italy, Switzerland, France, Czechia, Russia, and South Korea… it’s almost like this has been franchised out as if it were a fast food chain or something and that maybe makes this project feel a bit more mercenary to me than it might otherwise.  However, I think there is space to see this as a bit more personal than that.  Olivia Wilde is someone who recently had a messy divorce that played out across the tabloids and it doesn’t surprise me at all that she has thoughts of how marriages fall apart on the mind.  Of course I have no idea if her own divorce resembles what happens in this movie in any way but it does offer fuel for thought and even if this is entirely dispassionate at the end of the day it’s still a funny and well done film.
**** out of Five