Thinking Aloud About Film: Tarik Saleh and The Cairo Trilogy

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Richard and I were so excited after seeing Eagles of the Republic (2025), that when we learned that it was the third film in a trilogy, we made a point of seeing the other two: The Nile Hilton Incident (2017) and Cairo Conspiracy/ Boy From Heaven (2022). José went even further and also saw his first live action film, made in Sweden, Tommy (2005), and, at least up to now, the only feature film he’s made in the US: The Contractor (2022). Thus the podcast encompasses all of his live-action feature films (he also made Metropia (2009), an animated film) and spans a twenty-period.

Saleh is the offspring of an Egyptian father and a Swedish mother. The Nile Hilton Incident  was set to be filmed in Cairo but Saleh was given a week to flee the country before shooting started. Thus the trilogy is a critique of Egypt that could not be made in Egypt. The films are genre piece — and are satisfying on that level; you don’t need to know anything about Egypt or Egyptian culture to enjoy them — but are also serious films about morality, ethics, the extent of corruption, and the limits otherwise good people are willing to go to in order to prosper or even survive. In the podcast we discuss this and contrast with his earlier Swedish film, fascinating in that it makes the gangster’s girlfriend the central figure in a genre piece, and his later American film, in that it points to the limits on free speech currently imposed on American cinema.

 

Aside from all of this, we also linger to appreciate the beauty and expressiveness of the mise-en-scène and encourage everyone to see these marvellous works.

Eagles of the Republic is currently on distribution (I saw it at the MOCKINGBIRD)

The Nile Hilton Incident is available on MUBI

Boy From Heaven/ Cairo Conspiracy is available to see on BBC i-player.

 

The podcast may be listened to here:

The podcast may also be listened to on: Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zWZ7Egdy6xPCwHPHlOOaT

and on itunes here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/first-impressions-thinking-aloud-about-film/id1548559546

 

José Arroyo and Richard Layne

THE CONTRACTOR (Tarik Saleh, 2022)

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At the moment, for the US to lecture any other country about freedom of speech has become a joke. THE CONTRACTOR (2022) is a good examples of American cinema’s limits on critiques of the state, limits that have always been there but now seem more exposed. Tarik Saleh’s most famous works, the Cairo Trilogy, are scathing, funny, dark critiques of the Egyptian State’s culture of corruption that could only be made outside Egypt (the financing is an amalgamation of Swedish, Danish, French and other moneys). THE CONTRACTOR  is Saleh’s only American film and it suffers for being so.

James Harper (Chris Pine) a veteran of various duties is discharged from the army, without pension or medical benefits, for taking steroids necessary for him to overcome injuries incurred on previous tours of duty and continue in the army.The first part of the film overeggs this injustice, showing us Harper as a devoted family man, a regular churchgoer, from an army family dedicated to the service for generations.How does he now provide for his family? By becoming a private contractor. He gets lots of offers but doesn’t want to become a mercenary. Mike (Ben Foster), his best friend, tells him of Rusty Jennings (Keifer Sutherland), who runs a private militia but for the Department of Defence. They pay less, work around the law, but for righteous causes.

When Harper goes to see Rusty, Rusty tells him, ‘We gave them our minds, bodies and spirits and they chewed us up and spit us out. Left us with fear, rage, uncertainty, disillusionment, a sense of abandonment, betrayal and finally a sense of self-loathing and guilt, as if somehow everything that happened to us was our own goddamn fault,’ It’s a great speech and I suspect Sutherland took on the role primarily to be able to say those words. But the film chickens out after that, compromises, and turns routine.

Harper might as well have turned mercenary and gone for the cash because this para-governmental operation is just as dirty as any other. The mission involves stealing a scientific formula that they’re told is harmful but the scientist (Saleh regular Fares Fares) in fact had invented a vaccine that he wanted to make available for free. Harper ends up killing a good man, a family man who believed in science and wanted to contribute to the social good to that mutinational pharmaceutical companies may continue to make money. He’s been lied to, chewed up and spit out just as in the army. In fact, his operation now sets out to kill him: he’s become a loose end. Harper succeeds in getting back home only to find  the  best friend he thought dead is alive and well. Did the man whose life he’s already saved twice betray him? They, eventually team up and get rid of Rusty so that Harper may be reunited with his family.

The film’s action is serviceable, the critique muted. The sub-plot about relations between fathers and sons, sentimental and extraneous. It’s not as funny, sharp or dark as Saleh’s other work. The ending should be much bleaker than it is. But THE CONTRACTOR is not a conventional action thriller either. I liked it a lot more most. It’s interesting to see Pine and Foster reunited after HELL OR HIGH WATER (David Mackenzie, 2016). Eddie Marson has a lovely moment as the head of a half-way house who tragically takes in Harper at a critical juncture; and the individual shots, framings and compositions are just as imaginative as we’ve come to expect from Saleh. But the script is neither fish nor fowl; the film, a work that doesn’t’ live up to its intentions. American cinema can do a muddy critique of something vaguely governmental or paramiltary but can’t seem to critique directly much less surgically, as we see so clearly in Saleh’s other works. I don’t think the fault is with Saleh or the cast.

 

José Arroyo

Tommy (Tarik Saleh 2005)

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What happens to gangsters’ girlfriends or wives? In film we see them making pasta, looking after children, held for ransom or shot. Cinema usually use them to create a tension between what they represent and what gangsters do. TOMMY is unusual in making the wife/girlfriend the protagonist. He’s already dead as the film starts. Estelle (Moa Gammel), his partner,  has come home to Sweden to collect his share of the money from a bank heist that netted 4 million euros so she and her daughter can start a new life. But in order to do so, gangland must not know the man they fear is dead.
I was glad to see the film – a combination of noir and maternal melodrama – so clearly focussed on women: wives, daughters, sisters, mothers. The Cairo Trilogy with its focus on power and corruption has little place for them. We see particular types — femme fatales, wives, too-young women impregnated by too-old Imams — and briefly. It didn’t bother me per se but I noted it had the potential to. This film – Saleh’s first live-action feature and second film (METROPIA, his first feature, is an animated film) – is a corrective.
This is also the first film of his I’ve seen that is set in his native Sweden – Saleh is the progeny of an Egyptian father and a Swedish mother who grew up there – and it’s further proof that who makes movies matters. His Sweden is full of people of colour — Turks, blacks, Middle-Easterners; and he’s aware of the tensions between migration and place. There’s a lovely scene at the beginning when our heroine is held by immigration – her husband is wanted for robbery – and the way it’s filmed and edited – the pale blonde faces of our heroine and her daughter in a sea of brown; shots of a young dark-skinned boy looking on that is held just a beat too long — so well communicates that what is happening is the rule for the dark-skinned people and alarmingly exceptional for the likes of her.
The rest is beautifully structured. Estelle stops being treated like a wife/girlfriend at almost exactly 2/3rds through the film, when the gangland gloves come off, and she becomes the hunted. It’s tense, dark, thrilling; and yet it’s not one of those films where women become action heroines. The action is generally enacted by others. Estelle is motivated by fear for her daughter and sister. She’s very beautiful but her looks are never an element she resorts to in getting the money. It’s all wits, smarts and courage; and it’s lovely to see. An excellent genre piece. As you can tell from the poster a noir/maternal melodrama is not something the marketers had much confidence in.
José Arroyo

THE NILE HILTON INCIDENT (Tarik Saleh, 2017)

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THE NILE HILTON INCIDENT (Tarik Saleh, 2017) is a pitch-black Swedish noir, set in Egypt in the days leading up to the 25TH OF JANUARY REVOLUTION in 2011. The film begins in the streets of Cairo as Noredin (Fares Fares), a cop, extorts money from the shopkeepers in his area, just like any old mafia enforcer.  That same evening,  a singer gets killed in a hotel. A Sudanese cleaner sees both the man the singer has been having an affair with and the man who comes in second later to kill her. She’s now a witness. Plus there are also pictures of the before, a couple of having sex. It all  leads to a high-ranking member of government. The film then follows Noredin as he tries to solve the murder, whilst exposing a culture where corruption is like breathing. First, he’s allowed to investigate, then the case is closed, then it gets re-opened again as the various interests map out their possible profit from the case.  No one is ever certain; and no one is completely safe. The question is when does morality revolt? Is it at murder? Of foreigners? Of locals? Of kin?

 

THE NILE HILTON INCIDENT (2017) is the first film in Tarik Saleh’s Cairo trilogy, but many elements I now recognise as characteristic of Saleh’s work are already evident: the theme of corruption, the filming of streets from inside moving cars, the hand-held camera, the expressive play with focus. This is perhaps his most accessible film, as it’s the most traditionally NOIR: the dark streets, whorehouses, songbirds, the moral maze that is the city, its various layers (the homeless, the drug addicts, the foreign workers), the sexual blackmail, corrupt cops,  untouchable upper-classes; the hero whose outward corruption encases a basic decency.

What’s really missing, unusually for noir, is desire. Our hero is a widower, who does drink, and he does have sex with the chanteuse, but what really propels him seems to be a search for justice in a world where none is to be had. A classic existential dilemma.  For his uncle, life is cheap and there’s money to be made. For our corrupt policeman, there has to be something more; and perhaps he finds it in the closing scene, with the people rising on January 25th, beating him short of injury because ‘we’re not like them’, ie, him. There are a couple of nods to Youssef Chahine films (the chase through an external staircase of a modern building, the group prayer on the busy streets). My admiration for Fares has only increased; he’s got that ordinary/ extraordinary quality that all great stars: beautiful in some angles, almost ugly in others, totally at ease and capable of expressing anything. He’s been excellent playing very different characters in each film in the trilogy. A wonderful noir. On MUBI.

José Arroyo

THE CAIRO CONSPIRACY/ BOY FROM HEAVEN (Tarik Saleh, 2022)

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THE CAIRO CONSPIRACY/ BOY FROM HEAVEN (2022) is the second in a trilogy of films that culminates in EAGLES OF THE REPUBLIC, the film that so excited me last week. This one confirms that Tarik Saleh is a major filmmaker. The film begins with the contention that there’s always been a struggle between Church and State in Egypt, and that the state has always attempted to control the Al-Azhar, which the movie depicts as a combination of university but also seat of religious power. When the Grand Imam dies, the NSA (National Security) gets involved to secure the election of a new religious leader that is more in tune with the President’s policies. Adam (Tawfeek Barhom), a young and innocent student from a provincial family gets drawn in to all the political machinations within the Al-Azhar and in the country at large.

 

Cairo through a car

 

This is a tense conspiracy thriller, with murder and threats of violence at every corner, and with the type of Jesuitical discourse so common to all religious hard-heads. Will Adam’s genuine faith, goodness and smarts save him from all the evil forces hand-stringing him?The film has a wonderful contrast between the city — noisy, dirty, usually captured from inside a moving vehicle (I think because Saleh wasn’t allowed to film in Cairo proper) –and the neat, orderly and imposing linearity of the mosque/university; one dark and dirty, the other white, clean, natural light on the mosque’s white marble. Anyone familiar with Medieval History, Phillip Pullman’s novels (THE GOLDEN COMPASS), or any depiction of Vatican politics (CONCLAVE) will be familiar with the structures of this world.

The mosque

The Mosque

As to the visuals, nothing is careless. There’s a section of the film where Adam, the young hero, is directed to become close to the Muslim Brotherhood. In his first attempt (a) he’s far away from the group in a wide long-shot with the camera on the ground; as he gets closer  to being accepted (b), the camera lifts, the distance shortens, the shots get narrower; until when he’s successfully infiltrated the group (c), his face occupies the larger part of a group of  faces, with his occupying half the frame, the others out of focus. Finally (d), in a different type of framing, he’s an indistinguishable member of the group.  And this is just one example of how this film tells its story visually. It’s brilliant.

The film is also very moving. One feels for this boy caught in this web that is beyond his control, constantly threatened with his and his father’s life, for things that are not of his doing. How will he get out? At the beginning of the film, the father smells the hands of Adam’s brother, notices that he’s been smoking, and belts all of their hands. Each is responsible for the other; the actions of one, affect all. This is a theme this wonderful film develops to the end. Fares Fares is superb as the NSA operative pulling the strings. It’s on BBC Iplayer and I highly recommend. Richard and I will be podcasting on the trilogy soon.

Rhyming beginning an end:

More examples of the visuals, the brilliance of framing and composition, the sheer imaginative beauty, each with its own purpose, may be seen below:

José Arroyo

 

The Christophers (Steven Soderbergh, 2025)

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THE CHRISTOPHERS is an exercise in style, with a half-baked script by Ed Solomon (MEN IN BLACK, CHARLIE’S ANGELS, The BILL AND TED films ) with under-developed themes on aging, celebrity culture, art, the relationship to one’s past, and a moral reckoning with one’s actions. None of these are satisfyingly dramatised. The story concerns a once famous painter and acerbic television critic, Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen), who exhibited two sets of paintings of Christopher, his then lover, to great acclaim. There’s another set, half-finished, in the attic. His greedy worthless children (Jessica Gunning and James Corden, beautifully cast) plot to have Lori Butler (Michaela Cole) a victim of Sklar’s judgment and already known to have forged one of his paintings, to be hired as his assistant, and finish off the third set of Christophers so they can be sold for a fortune after his death. The camera dollies in and out, constantly mobile as Sklar monologues, uninterested in the views of Butler, who glowers at him impassively and judges. The whole drama revolves around how the relationship between the two artists, young and old, successful and not, develops. The issue of race is not explored, rather mystifyingly, as it’s another, obvious, antinomy. One can understand why it’s good for Soderbergh to keep active, try new things, and keep directing these exercises. Why the audience should go watch them is less clear. McKellen and Cole would be part of an answer; and it is funny in spots. It has been getting very good reviews but I didn’t find it worth going to a cinema for. The print I saw it in was overly dark, grey and washed out. I’m not sure if that’s the film itself or the projection. Soderbergh did the cinematography (under the name of Peter Andrews). I didn’t actively dislike this. McKellen and Cole make it worth seeing. i just didn’t see the point of it. And I’m not surprised at the lack of business. I’m sure it will all look better on TV.

Eagles of the Republic (Tarek Saleh, 2025)

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EAGLES OF THE REPUBLIC is my first Tarik Saleh film. I knew nothing about the film or the director when I saw it yesterday. But I returned home so elated from the film that I looked him up, found that the film is the third in a trilogy; and promptly ordered the other two: BOY FROM HEAVEN/ (AKA CAIRO CONSPIRACY, 2002) and THE NILE HILTON INCIDENT, 2017) all starring Fares Fares. What gave me so much pleasure initially was the mise-en-scène. It’s not just every frame a painting, but every shot beautiful to look at, expressive, feeling direct and propulsive, but conveying various things at once. Saleh takes my least favourite shot in contemporary cinema, a steadycam following the protagonist from the back, and makes it tense, sad, poetic. Here the camera is focussed on the neck, like the protagonist is a target, in front of him everything is out of focus, unclear, dangerous, difficult to manoeuvre, entrapping. And that’s just one example. It’s like reading a novel and finding a beautiful sentence one wants to underline, to return to and savour. If one could underline passages in films, this one would be full of ink.
The film is about state corruption and about how even the most powerful artists are limited in the ways they can resist it. Here Egypt’s most famous actor George Fahmy (Fares Fares) is asked to star in a biopic of Egypt’s real-life authoritarian President (Abdel Fattah el-Sisi). He initially and very tactfully refuses but then finds he’s lost his trailer at the studio, his next film’s been given to another actor, his favourite co-star has been blacklisted, and, the clincher, something might happen to his son if he doesn’t. So he does. It’s a world in which, as one character says, ‘principles are like AIDS’. And yet he can’t stop being himself; an artist who even forced to act against his will can’t stop trying to make the dreck better, more truthful, more entertaining. He also can’t stop himself from chasing women, even the most powerful general’s wife, and hopping from frying pans to fires. The film’s achievement is to evoke the arbitrary deadlyness of authoritarianism — it can destroy your life when least expected, at someone else’s will for the most minor reason — whilst doing so with a light hand: it’s a funny, sexy, film. The deadly authoritarianism is what people live under but people are still humans looking for sex, love, a laugh, a solution to particular circumstances, all the while knowing that a mere word, overheard or mis-interpreted by the powerful, can alter or end one’s life.
EAGLES OF THE REPUBLIC is also a cinephile film, in love with Egyptian film history, and also cleverly citing a broader cinematic culture (from Antonioni to De Mille, via Riefenstahl). Saleh is the son of an Egyptian immigrant and a Swedish mother, who was himself forced to flee Egypt in 2015, just as he was about to begin filming THE NILE HILTON INCIDENT. EAGLES OF THE REPUBLIC is a film that couldn’t be made in Egypt. It’s also a film that couldn’t be made in the US today (and Trump’s America is ripe for such filming if people weren’t so afraid). At a time where being famous is seen as a superpower, the film tells us that even superpowers have their limitations. At the end of the film, George has survived and is gambling with people next to some rubble on the outskirts of Cairo. But his co-star has been killed for not wanting to offer sexual favours to generals, his manager tortured and executed for being gay, he’s survived an attempted coup, exchanged his principles for the life of his son. If as the film says, citing Becket, ‘words are the clothes thoughts wear’, the film’s Egypt is a place where you have to be super-careful about your wardrobe.
It’s a thrilling film to see; and an important one. It was nominated for the Palme D’or and won all kinds of Swedish Film Awards. I was sad to be the only person in the audience watching it; and there’s perhaps more to say about how films have lost their place in the cultural conversation. But that will have to wait for another time.
Jose Arroyo

The So Blue Marble by Dorothy Hughes, 1940

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Continuing my reading of Dorothy B. Hughes novels with her first, THE SO BLUE MARBLE, which features as many murders as IN A LONELY PLACE but in a much lighter vein. This one is as if Cole Porter or Astaire and Rogers became enmeshed in a series of murders in upper crust Manhattan on the eve of WWII. It focuses on Griselda Satterlee, a former film star turned fashion designer who goes to New York for a break, borrows her ex-husband’s apartment, only to find that she’s become prey to those who think she knows where an oh so blue and ever so valuable marble might be. Does she?Certainly, her ex once had it in his possession.  There are three beautiful sisters, a pair of very polite and very deadly European twins, one of them involved with the youngest sister, two top box office film stars, one Columbia Professor, an ex-husband who may not be an ex for long, and lots and lots of murders. They’re all searching for that shiny blue marble because, when opened, it reveals a map that will lead to untold wealth. Naturally, they all have their reasons for wanting it. Corpses pile up with a certain nonchalance: none is in itself sufficient to halt a trip to The Stork Club or El Morocco. An elegant, witty, mystery

 

José Arroyo

A note on IN A LONELY PLACE (1947) by Dorothy B. Hughes

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Many thanks to Richard Layne and Sergio Angelini for recommending this, which I just finished and liked very much. I wish I’d gotten around to reading it earlier. It would have come in handy when I used to teach the film version. In the novel, the character of Dix (played by Bogart in the film film) is a serial killer, passing as a writer. The novel has a wonderful feel for mood. It’s all darkness, fog, deserted beaches, drive-in restaurants, late-night cinemas,  and the inside of a disturbed man’s head; a man who wants the easy life, has no intention of working if he can help it, and who has trouble finding meaning after the war; he and Laurel (the Gloria Grahame character in the film), recognise each other’s ambitions, incestuous siblings under the mink so to speak, but only one of them is willing to kill for it. There is a fascinating depiction of post-war Beverly Hills, a small town with a lurking darkness, here not attributable to the film industry. The Dix/Laurel coupling is the structural opposite of the Brub/Sylvia, the latter Dix’s old army friend, from the upper class but choosing to work as a cop, and his cool and intelligent wife. The denoument involves Sylvia disguised as Laurel and brings out all of Dix’ psychosis. I learned two words new to me, to have the megrims (to be depressed) and more interestingly, to be stoney, which in the lingo of the day, as per this novel at least, means to be broke. I want to read more Dorothy B. Hughes.

TUNER (Daniel Roher, 2025)

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Lovely to see Dustin Hoffman on a big screen again in TUNER, almost 60 years after THE GRADUATE (Mike Nichols, 1967), and still bringing life, energy and intelligence to every moment he’s in. His scenes with Leo Woodall are reason enough to see the film. Hoffman, as an elderly piano tuner (Harry Horowitz), crackles, teases, loses the thread of his conversation, falls asleep in mid reminiscence. Woodall, as his orphaned apprentice (Niki White), says next to nothing, listens, humours him, ignores him, does his job, looks at him adoringly with those round puppy eyes of his. The film is smart about letting Woodall have the screentime necessary to respond to Hoffman, without dialogue but facially and physically, to show how at ease and loving they are together. It’s a wonderful portrait of intergenerational affection, which would feel out of place in what turns out to be heist film if it weren’t one of its central pleasures and narrative drives.

TUNER is a high concept film: NIki suffers from hyperacusis, a condition that makes his hearing so sensitive it’s destroyed his career as a piano virtuoso but which also means he can open any safe by hearing alone. When Harry falls ill and the bills piles up, Niki goes to work for some Israeli gangsters. The problem with the film is that it can’t quite decide on its genre, so we also get a  comedy (there’s a running gag about rich clients treating the tuners as all-purpose handymen and asking them to fix everything from wifi to plumbing while ‘they’re at it’);  The film is also a romance (Havana Rose Liu is the student composer who Woodall falls for) and a heist film; all pleasurable on their own.

 

TUNER also has really interesting overall commentary on Jewish culture with Jean Reno as the composer in search of the watches left by his grandparents killed in the Holocaust, the shiva for Dustin Hoffman’s character, the casting of Tovah Feldshuh as Hoffman’s wife – ie part of a history; the warmth and humanity of Hoffman and Feldshuh within a particular New York Jewish culture – then contrasted with the brutality of the Israeli gangsters. Ie. this is a film that has a lot, and it being a lot might be the reason why each of the elements feels not quite up to the best, but each is in itself  a pleasure to see, and certainly the scenes with Hoffman are a delight. It’s the one section I wish the film had lingered on longest.

 

The film has perhaps the best sound design I’ve seen this year, allowing us to understand the soundscapes of the city, the contrast to Niki’s experience of it, and the drama that creates. The sound design is also very good at evoking perspective on that sound, types of sound, distance from source, etc. It’s brilliant work, beautifully orchestrated with the other elements  by director Daniel Roher, whose first fiction feature this is. TUNER has some superficial similarities to BABY DRIVER (Edgar Wright, 2017), a much more successful genre piece which also makes brilliant use of sound. But as you can see from the above, they’re very different kinds of films.  I loved seeing TUNER in spite of its faults.

A Way To Die: The Short Films of Coil (Maxime Lachaud and Xavier Laradji, 2025)

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I did make it to A WAY TO DIE: THE SHORT FILMS OF COIL, directed by Maxime Lachaud and Xavier Laradji, at The Mockingbird last night. The film is a not-quite-linear hybrid amalgamation of a brief documentary introducing the short films and videos made by Peter Christopherson (1955-2010) and John Balance (1962-2004), a long-term couple.

 

Christopherson aka ‘Sleazy’ was a member of Throbbing Gristle, credited with creating industrial music and a founder of Hignosis, a design firm credited with the covers of many 70s superstars (Pink Floyd, Peter Gabriel). You might know him best for his video of Tainted Love or the ads he did with Joan Collins for the Bristol and West Building Society. Balance was the co-founder of Coil and publisher of STABMETAL, which focussed on industrial music and the cassette scene of the period.

 

The shorts are filmed in a variety of formats, Super 8mm, 16mm, 1 inch video, etc.  and including ads, home movies, and experimental works that were made in the period that straddles the onset of AIDS and the coming of combination therapy in the late 90s. The individual films aren’t great works of art. But collectively they evoke a period, an attitude and a look– a queer perspective on the AIDS era filmed from within it — that are as powerful as I’ve seen.

 

The men in these movies look like they do in Derek Jarman films like ANGELIC CONVERSATION, young, close-cropped, chiselled faces, slim bodies, and hanted hungry eyes. A very young Marc Almond appears in several instances, with that startling early look that could be so beautiful from certain angles. The shorts have a punk attitude – one of the films is titled ‘The Industrial Use of Semen Will Revolutionise Society Alone’ — with a sensibility inspired by the likes of Genet and Bataille.  An insistence on desire that embraces all the darker elements, and that speaks that urgency through evident layers of self-hatred: men take their clothes off, their bodies lusted for by the camera, only to be hung, beaten, electrocuted, set on fire.

 

One film is of a young man walking through a cemetery, meditating on the friends who have died of AIDS. Desire and suffering are inseparable, in the works as in the period. The passing of time is evident through dress, the wider jeans of the early 80s, Doc Martens, then skinheads and the look of Cazzo film pornstars of the period with even more extreme sexual representation: lots of electro, self-immolation, castration, death. A romantic fatalism where sex and death, Eros and Thanatos, become so united as to be indistinguishable.

 

After Balance died, Christopherson moved to Thailand and continued making music and videos, with no attempt to disguise a colonising gaze on what is meant to be sexual freedom, no awareness that it is so. It is disturbing to see all the undressed Thai boys under the direction – and control– of the by now middle-aged Englishman. But different audiences will find disturbing all the films that are not home movies or ads. Even the Thai work is in keeping with the messy truthfulness, the brave attempts at honesty, at exploring all the recesses of desire, that make for such powerful viewing. The film brought back the period – from a queer perspective – in ways that I found, sad and beautiful, powerful and moving.

José Arroyo

OBSESSION (Curry Baker, 2025)

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OBSESSION (Curry Baker, 2025) is a supernatural horror that is currently being much praised and which I intensely disliked watching. The praise is easy to understand: It’s an imaginatively directed and expressively lit film that takes an old trope (what you wish for now might become your worst nightmare) and adds a new twist (where is consent when another is tricked or bewitched into loving?); it is efficient at creating tension, creeping one out and making audience members practically jump off their seats. An achievement in itself and made more so considering the film’s budget was under $1 million. What I disliked about it was that the source of terror is that old misogynist trope of the unknowable, out of control, hysterical harridan – unleashed. The film begins with a sweet young man (Bear, played by Michael Johnston) unable to tell a girl (Nickki, played by Inde Navarrette) that he likes her; he can’t even do it when she asks him flat out; so he resorts to tricks. One of the reasons the film is so interesting is that it begins with male obsession, then more than suggests that that hysterical harridan is a male projection, something men call up even as it might eventually kill them. It is objectively a very interesting film. I personally couldn’t stomach it because watching that sexist male projection for 97 minutes was hard to take, particularly as played by Narvarrette, very pretty and effectively deployed, to suggests a woman dispossessed of herself, and the male projection that’s possessed her, but in my perhaps solitary view, not quite skilled enough. It might be argued that what I disliked so much about it is due to its effectiveness. Curry Barker is certainly a director to watch.

José Arroyo

A note on IN A LONELY PLACE (Nicholas Ray, 1950)

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What better way to escape the heat and Gay Pride jollities than to slip into a cool cinema to see something dark? IN A LONELY PLACE has the fatalism, the alienation and sadness, the swooney romanticism: ‘I was born when I kissed you; I died when you left me; for a few weeks I lived while you loved me.’ Some of the most memorable dialogue in film history, and this not including its wonderful use of Shakespeare 29th sonnets:

‘When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

And look upon myself and curse my fate…’

 

I still remember reading Judith Williamson’s brilliant analysis of Nicholas Ray’s use of the courtyard that separates the lovers’ apartments. The scene with Hazel Scott singing ‘I hadn’t anyone, till you’ where the way Ray films it — the lovers are enveloped in their own mutual feelings for each other, in their own world of whispers and longings, only for the police to crash in alter their mood, change their world — remains as brilliant as ever. There’s the troubling and enticing masseuse. What is Laurel’s (Gloria Grahame) relationship with her? And of course, Bogart starred and produced. What kind of courage did it take in 1950 to make a film about a violent man who can’t stop lashing out at people, who can’t control his anger, who beats his girlfriends? Even when he’s proven to be innocent of the initial crime that sparks the narrative, he’s still guilty of all of the above, and 1950 couldn’t even package it as PTSD.

The lights accidentally came on at the cinema just a few minutes before the end, just as Bogart was about to strangle Grahame, a bit of a jolt. But even that didn’t alter the the mood. It’s a spellbinding film about loneliness, violence and desire. When the police tell Grahame that Bogart is cleared of the crime, she answers, ‘yesterday this would have meant so much to us; now it doesn’t matter,’ which one doesn’t quite believe. The last line is a killer.

José Arroyo

THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU (Jon Favreau, 2026)

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THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU is dividing audiences. It’s based on a tv show that has already been running for three years and which, perhaps unfairly, I turned off after a few episodes. I think it’s one of the those big-budget movies ($165 million) where most of  the budget must have gone to the producers. It looks embarrassingly cheap and is almost offensively ugly in spite of the evidently excellent design of all the non-human characters. Pedro Pascal who is the Mandalorian wears a mask throughout the movie except for a few minutes so they could just film anyone with the suit. Jeremy Allen’s voice-work as Rotta the Hutt is inexpressive and unmemorable. Grogu, the mini-Yoda, is irritatingly ‘cute’ and his scenes strike me as manipulative and overly sentimental. There never seem to be more than half a dozen extras in a frame, even in the action sequences. Some shots look like a video game, an empty military station with two automated figures walking mechanically in the background. I don’t think it was just me being in a bad mood. I saw Star Wars when I was 15 and have seen all the movies since, even read some of the spin-off novels. I’m not the biggest fan but I like the Star Wars world. Even if the series hasn’t produced a single great movie, it’s certainly produced a great cult. I was ready to like this one. But a feature length-film without human faces, a sitcom view of human relationships, and a world that feels like the production of a 60s B-Movie but with better monsters….It was so dispiriting; you only have to compare the original scenes of Jabba the Hut in RETURN OF THE JEDI to those with his nephews here to see how visually incompetent this film is. It’s good to hear Martin Scorsese voice a street vendor, and it’s always a joy to see Sigourney Weaver, even when she’s wasted in a thankless role, such as here. People warned about what the success of Star Wars would lead to and this is the evidence. Very expensive trash with a plot not worth re-telling, crude characterisations, a primitive view of society and power relations, and pretty standard action sequences. It is perhaps telling that humans appear only as leaders or cannon fodder.  I thought it a film only small children would like but this has turned out not to be the case. I’m curious to know what it is that people love about it.

José Arroyo

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 475 – Exit 8

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Most videogames that receive cinematic adaptations are big – the likes of Uncharted, Minecraft, Sonic the Hedgehog and Resident Evil, all of which have been adapted, some several times, are among the biggest games in history, and their cinematic versions are typically intended to be blockbusters. Exit 8 is not. It is an independent Japanese game made by one person, turned into a low-budget, high-concept, Japanese horror film. And most cinematic adaptations of videogames are not very good. The medium has a long history of failing to translate well to film. Exit 8 makes a success of the transition, finding plenty of space in the slight source material to tell a story about routine, fear of change, and personal improvement.

We discuss what makes the adaptation work and where it might not, think through the story’s internal logic, and, as we did with Godzilla Minus One, remark upon the film’s visual quality given its small budget, asking where all that money goes when Hollywood spends ten times the amount to achieve the same results. Exit 8 is a welcome surprise, particularly to Mike, who really thought it’d be rubbish.

Listen on the players below, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Spotify, or YouTube Music.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 (David Franel, 2026)

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I finally got around to seeing THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA 2 yesterday. It has a script that could sink any ship and direction that never rises above pedestrian but I did like it more than my friends did. It has Meryl Streep and Emily Blunt, who wear fabulous clothes and make every joke work, and I did laugh quite a bit. The mystery in all of this is Anne Hathaway. It’s her vehicle. Like everyone else I fell in love with her in The Princess Diaries (2001). So she’s been an above-the-title star for over a quarter of a century now, with four films coming out this year; and I hope she’s more interesting in them then she is in this one. She is very beautiful of course; she’s very good – she’s always emotionally legible; and she’s got the most thankless part in the film. But even so, she could have brought more zing, a wink or two, some passion. I’d say her earnestness kills her, except of course, here she is, 25 years later, in her own starring vehicle, keeping the thing together while Streep and Blunt buzz, sparkle, and sting around her.

The original Devil Wears Prada ignited Streep’s career as a popular box-office star after an already long career as the prestige star/actress of her generation, admired and awarded but rarely loved until then. The 2006 film is also what brought Emily Blunt to everyone’s attention. Both are delicious here, salty and unafraid. I didn’t mind Stanley Tucci now as much as I did then, when he seemed to have cornered the market with a particularly narrow conception of ‘gayness’, though I did note all the protagonists in this film are given partners and a sex life except him, and it does somehow seem particularly egregious that a film whose filmmakers know is aimed to a considerable extent at a gay audience should think so narrowly and so little of it. But then this is a film about fashion – Streep memorable noted that the clothes in this film are like expensive special effects in Marvel movies – but so badly directed and edited, that it packs it with events and personalities in the fashion world (Law Roch, Donatella, Dolce and Gabbana) yet rarely allows the audience to register who they are. And yet….after all that, there is Streep, Blunt, the clothes, a few good one-liners. There are worst ways to spend an afternoon.

José Arroyo

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 474 – Rose of Nevada

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Seven years ago, we disagreed with the thrust of what Mark Jenkin’s Bait had to say about the world as it is and as it ought to be, but appreciated its expressive strength. It was a film with substance. You could grapple with it. Rose of Nevada broadly conveys the same messages, but, as they derive primarily from the film’s setting and less so its plot, is less forceful and argumentative about them, requiring us to accept them in shorthand and take them as read.

Fair enough, perhaps – why make the same film twice? – but the story to which Jenkin’s perspective is here allied is of little interest, and told with insufficient clarity, populated by dull, flat characters whose developments are poorly motivated – if at all. Jenkin is certainly a visual stylist, but he shows little instinct for effective storytelling or direction of actors here, and we question the response Rose of Nevada has received from other critics, which seems inexplicably universal in its positivity.

Listen on the players below, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Spotify, or YouTube Music.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 473 – Project Hail Mary

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In 2015, Matt Damon found himself stranded on Mars in The Martian, an adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel of the same name, and had to improvise unlikely solutions in order to survive and get home. In 2026, Ryan Gosling finds himself stranded in outer space in Project Hail Mary, an adapation of Andy Weir’s novel of the same name, and has to improvise unlikely solutions in order to save Earth and get home. It’s fair to say that we’re on familiar territory here, but who cares when it’s this entertaining?

Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, known for gloriously imaginative and daft comedy, manage the competing tones in Project Hail Mary beautifully, moving easily between wacky discovery, dramatic reveals, and earned sentimentality, and never failing to show care and an instinct for the value of the image – some shots are breathtaking. Like Weir, they’re unafraid to cannibalise their previous work in search of useful ideas, reworking the monkey thought translator from Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs into a computer that allows Gosling’s reluctant hero to communicate with Rocky, the alien he meets. In this and elsewhere throughout, Project Hail Mary shows the same reverence for scientific inquiry and application of intelligence to problem-solving that The Martian did, which is a pleasure in itself.

There’s a huge amount to like here, at least until the long and excessively detailed ending, which sadly drags things down a little. We urge you to see Project Hail Mary while it’s in cinemas – it’s a massive crowd pleaser and one of the most satisfying experiences we’ve had at the pictures in a while.

Amidst all this, we also discuss Gosling’s particular brand of stardom and place in the Hollywood hierarchy in comparison with Leonardo DiCaprio and Timothée Chalamet, between whose names José feels Gosling gets smothered
Listen on the players below, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Spotify, or YouTube Music.

Viva Maria (Louis Malle, 1965)

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VIVA MARIA (Louis Malle, 1965) is the only film I’ve been able to see from The Garden’s Cinema JEANNE MOREAU SEASON, and what bliss it was: buoyant, witty, cuttingly anti-clerical. The audience leaned middle-aged/ elderly and laughed out loud throughout. Conceived as a subversion of the male buddy film and inspired by Burt Lancaster and Gary Cooper in VERA CRUZ. Brigitte Bardot and Jeanne Moreau are showgirls making a living strip-teasing through the colonies and end up leading a revolution that succeeds in liberating San Miguel, a fictional country. Bardot plays the daughter of an Irish revolutionary and is an expert in anything to do with gun-powder. Moreau had been a legitimate actress and mines the classics for speeches declaimed to inspire the masses. Bardot is particularly charming in this kind of farce. She reminds me of Cher in her TV series days: She’s no Carole Lombard but she’s game, up for anything, and extremely charming with it. This light- as-air musical farce is backed up by some heavy-weight talents: producer Oscar Dancingers (VIRIDIANA), Jean-Claude Carrière (who wrote so many Buñuel classics such as THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE; THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE), the great Henri Decoin as dop, Pierre Cardin did the clothes, even Volker Schlöndorff is in the credits as an assistant. It’s the kind of film in which George Hamilton is perfectly passable as a revolutionary; Moreau and Bardot become worshipped by the masses as two virgin Marys and clerical torture devices fall apart mid-way because they haven’t been used since the Inquisition. The slogans of the era crop up everywhere and there’s something delightful about Bardot’s warning that ‘property is theft’. Indeed, it was all delightful and, of course, banned in Texas for the sex and the anti-clericalism.

THE DRAMA (Kristoffer Borgli, 2025)

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In the last week I’ve seen five trailers for forthcoming attractions starring Zendaya: four films (Dune 3, The Odyssey, the new Spider-Man film, The Drama) and the newet season of Euphoria. I’ve never seen it’s like. And if THE DRAMA is anything to go, by it’s going to be her year. She’s glorious in it: beautiful, funny, emotionally transparent, doing everything, and with the luminosity of a true star. Rob Patterson is very good in it also. It’s a romance that starts being charming and glamorous before going into quite dark, socially relevant areas without ever losing sight of it being a romance. A quite original film whose narration weaves in the past, the imaginary and the film’s present whilst keeping control of the tone and the story. I thought I hadn’t heard of its Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli until I remember I had admired DREAM SCENARIO, where Nicholas Cage appears in millions of people’s dreams. THE DRAMA is a funny, spikey film that will lead to much discussion. I recommend.

José Arroyo