Mubi Monday: Die My Love (2025)

I can easily see why director Lynne Ramsay wasn't initially keen to work on this film, which looks at the disintegrating mental health of a young woman after the birth of her child. Ramsay previously gave us the ultimate look at that kind of thing in We Need To Talk About Kevin. That also had an exploration of nature vs. nurture though, whereas this is all about someone losing their own identity, and healthy love of life, piece by piece. It has motherhood in the mix, but it's really more about how we can sometimes give too much to other people in relationships that then leave us without enough energy to properly take care of ourselves. Sometimes that is the fault of the other people, especially if they keep demanding too much of your time and attention. Sometimes it is a fault with the person who wants to keep busy and serve others while avoiding any time that could lead to some introspection.

Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson are, respectively, Grace and Jackson. The two of them move into a home left behind by Jackson's deceased uncle. It needs a lot of work done to it, but it at least feels like a good home for them to start their family. Jumping forward slightly, Grace is left at home a lot with their young son, Jackson is often working away, and things start to sour quicker than a carton of milk left on the windowsill on a scorching summer day.

Based on a book by Ariana Harwicz, Ramsay has done well to collaborate with Enda Walsh and Alice Birch on the screenplay, but quite possibly did even better to assemble a cast who all had faith in her process and were up to the challenge of portraying their characters in a convincing and natural way. The screenplay works well in terms of the structure and the strong thematic core running all the way through it, but the film works as well as it does thanks to the lack of vanity shown by Lawrence and co.

LaKeith Stanfield isn't given much to do, sadly, but is as welcome as ever in his supporting role. Nick Nolte and Sissy Spacek get moments that easily remind you of how great they are, but everything steps up a level when either Pattinson or Lawrence are onscreen, with the latter particularly strong delivering a performance that could arguably be considered the best of her career. It is, however, a performance much better than the film that she's in.

I really like the work of Ramsay. She's been delivering one fantastic film after another for almost the entirety of her directorial career. Die My Love is good, and it tries to walk a line between the many clouds and the infrequent silver linings, but it doesn't ever do enough to become great. Whether due to the source material (which I am unfamiliar with, sorry) or her own choices, Ramsay feels a bit undecided about where exactly she wants to take the characters. She also blurs reality and fantasy in a way that works against the potential impact of various moments in the third act, which is a stark contrast to the way she has handled such a blurring in her previous features.

There's still a lot to enjoy and appreciate here, and many others have heaped a lot of praise on this already, but it feels like the weakest film yet from Ramsay. Perhaps she was right to be hesitant when initially offered this opportunity. It certainly feels as if she doesn't have the confidence and instincts here that have served her so well elsewhere. 

6/10

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Mubi Monday: Mickey 17 (2025)

It should be obvious to many by now, but Bong Joon Ho isn't really interested in subtlety any more. His most recent movies, as great as they are, are a long way from his superbly uneven and nuanced Memories Of Murder. I still love pretty much everything that he does, but I also know that I don't mind when the lack of subtlety is so front and centre in a way that may put off others.

Mickey 17 is all about the titular character (played by Robert Pattinson), an expendable who is used by a deep space vehicle to take on the tasks that will result in death. Whether being exposed to dangerous amounts of radiation, being placed in environments that may contain elements harmful to humans, or just exploring terrain that is unstable and could house dangerous alien creatures . . . Mickey's your man. Whenever he dies, it's not long until he is simply "printed out"again, his memories uploaded into his brain, and made available for the next dangerous task. He's ended up with this life (these lives) due to being put in a sticky situation by a bad friend, Timo (Steven Yeun), but at least he has moments of happiness with his partner, Nasha (Naomi Ackie). Things become tricky, however, when the latest Mickey is assumed dead and a new Mickey printed out. Mickey 17 and Mickey 18 are both aware that there are strict rules against multiples, but maybe they can figure out a way to take turns dying while they piece together a relatively full life.

Based on a novel, "Mickey 7", by Edward Ashton, this is darkly comedic sci-fi fare with plenty to say about the exploitation of workers, the ways in which those in power continually keep those below them pitted against one another, and the hypocrisy and arrogance of those who decide to make a life elsewhere without proper planning or consideration for the territory they are invading. As you can imagine, it feels very timely, and some may not appreciate how closely it aligns to some current world events. It doesn't help that Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette play their characters, Kenneth Marshall and Yifa, as arrogant idiots who would happily ruin lives and entire ecosystems just to keep maintaining their image of confident leadership. They're definitely doing what is asked of them, but the broad comedy of their performances is at odds with the real and awful repercussions we can see right now because of someone who works in almost exactly the same way. 

Thankfully, aside from the silliness provided by Ruffalo and Collette, everyone else is much better. Again, I don't blame those two stars, but they're apparently hampered by the direction of their performances. Pattinson has no such problems, and has a lot of fun in his multiple roles, specifically when he gets to show a marked difference between the two most recent Mickeys. Yeun is enjoyably sneaky, Ackie is a nice mix of tough and caring, and the rest of the supporting cast includes such familiar faces as Tim Key, Thomas Turgoose, Anamaria Vartolomei, and Patsy Ferran, some getting a fair amount of screentime and some just popping up for all-too-brief moments.

As expected, there's also some consistently excellent editing work and FX work throughout, as well as production design that creates a realistic world in which the building farce can unfold. It's all in service to the themes that Bong Joon Ho is exploring, and it's a shame when the tone occasionally clashes with the grime and verisimilitude of the onscreen world, but it's also loaded with little details that complement the main characters and their journey.

Not wholly satisfying, it spins so many plates that some inevitably fly off and smash before being quickly replaced, but Mickey 17 is still the kind of thing I would rather see ahead of another empty blockbuster with CGI distractions making up for a lack of any real substance.

7/10

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The Batman (2022)

Here are some things that Matt Reeves seems to really like, based on what he presents to viewers in The Batman. "Something In The Way", by Nirvana, Seven, putting a camera as close to someone as possible so you can be right beside them as they grapple hook up to a roof/BASE jump off a building/crash a car/etc, Seven, Zodiac, and . . . Seven. Oh, and shots of people riding motorbikes. If you took out every moments of someone riding a motorbike here than you might have a film that would clock in at a much more reasonable runtime, instead of the hefty three hours we get.

Here's the story, boiled down to essential elements. Batman (Robert Pattinson) is being given the runaround by Riddler (Paul Dano), a criminal determined to expose the secrets of Gotham City. As he tries to get information from the underworld that essentially rules Gotham, Batman deals with Penguin (Colin Farrell), Carmine Falcone (John Turturro), and is helped in his investigative work by James Gordon (Jeffrey Wright) and Catwoman (Zoë Kravitz). People are placed in deathtraps, forced to admit to their weaknesses and crimes, and a whole master plan is in place, with the Riddler moving pieces around the city, perhaps including the Batman himself.

There's a lot to like here, a lot that is easy to enjoy if you're a fan of Batman (and so many people are). Despite the darkness of the colour scheme, it's often a visually impressive film. The score is decent, although hampered by those that have come before it, and Reeves and Peter Craig have crafted a screenplay that attempts to provide a perfect mix of the cerebral and the visceral. The biggest problem is how often it defers to past movies, be they other Batman movies, Seven/Fight Club/Zodiac, or Taxi Driver (you could say that the entire finale of this film shows a real rain coming along to wash away the scum).

The pacing of the film is helped by the action set-pieces. They're generally of a high standard, although that close-up camera trick spoils a number of moments, and it's good to see consistency in the way Batman uses skill, strength, and confusion to take on groups of henchmen. There’s nothing new here, and it would be nice to have a Batman/Bruce Wayne who isn’t wrestling with his own guilt and self-doubt for a while, but it is given, for the most part, a decent makeover. I didn’t personally like the reinterpretation of the Riddler, nor do I think a tiresomely inevitable cameo bodes well, but it all works within the film that Reeves set out to deliver.

The cast are, by and large, almost perfect. Pattinson has to be a bit too dour as Wayne, although he doesn’t spend a lot of screentime without the mask and cape on, but he really suits the Bat attire, and has a good voice that doesn’t wander too far towards Bale-growl territory. Dano is disappointingly underused, seen largely through phone screens and computer monitors, but his performance is excellent, and he is allowed to believably posit himself as someone much smarter than everyone around him. I have seen people say that Farrell is also underused, but I think his character is crucially involved in a number of moments that help him make an indelible impression. Wright is a perfect choice for Jim Gordon, and Kravitz stands out as the best Catwoman since Michelle Pfeiffer played the role so memorably back in Batman Returns (I like Anne Hathaway, I just don’t think she was as good when asked to portray this particular character in The Dark Knight Rises). Strong, athletic, smart, sexy, and believing she has extra lives to make use of, Catwoman is once again a very believable and viable yin to Batman’s yang (get your mind out of the gutter), and Kravitz is perfect for the role. Turturro makes a great Falcone, the criminal kingpin who controls so much of the city, and the famous Alfred is played this time around by Andy Serkis. As good as he is in the role, Serkis has to play a character who is basically forgotten, aside from a few small scenes, which feels strange in a film with so much runtime to fill.

The good far outweighs the bad, and a lot of that is thanks to the canny casting, but it’s sometimes hard to view this favourably when it constantly indulges in such obvious plundering and cannibalism. The ending feels especially dull, and familiar, considering how it basically turns a great villain into a sad totem for . . . well, just wait and see for yourself what you think of the “grand finale” and big reveals.

This is a good way to reconfigure the character (although it would have been nice to not keep referring to dead parents as a main plot point again), and I was surprised by how much I didn’t care for the runtime as things moved from one impressive sequence to the next, but it still doesn’t quite equal the best of the Bat-flicks. It’s very good though, despite the flaws.

8/10

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Netflix And Chill: Good Time (2017)

Love or hate the Safdie brothers, and I definitely lean more towards the former, an interesting thing about them is seeing their natural and unrelenting growth as they have moved from short films to small features, eventually getting themselves to a position where they can work with people such as Robert Pattinson and Adam Sandler. There's a connective tissue running through their filmography, it's there in the types of characters that they are most interested and in the way they can build massive amounts of tension from a chain of bad decisions and misfortune, but each work is a building block to create what has ultimately become a very impressive little filmography. Daddy Long Legs is good. Heaven Knows What is better. Good Time and Uncut Gems are tied as their best yet, although both have elements that lose them a couple of points, in my view.

Connie Nikas (Pattinson) embarks on an ill-advised robbery with his intellectually disabled brother, Nick (played by Benny Safdie). Things inevitably don't go too well, leading to Nick being put in prison, and eventually in hospital. Determined to free his brother, Connie comes up with another poor plan. It goes as well as you'd expect. To turn the situation to his advantage, hopefully, Connie starts working with a man named Ray (Buddy Duress) to retrieve a valuable bottle of liquid acid (as in LSD, not the flesh-burning kind) and some stolen money.

Although he has, much like his female co-star, built up an impressive and diverse selection of performances away from the Twilight series, Pattinson does what I think is his very best work here. He's a dangerously dumb guy, taking any small bit of knowledge and figuring out how he can use it to his advantage. Manipulative, weak-willed, and growing increasingly desperate with every wrong turn, he's an unsavoury character who Pattinson manages to keep you rooting for, mainly thanks to his performance and the fact that a lot of his actions are motivated by the need to save his brother. Safdie is equally excellent in his role, a child in a man's body, dangerously unable to change his behaviour even when a threat starts growing around him. Duress is a different energy level, a crook who hopes to make the most of some unexpected good luck, and he helps the film start to gather momentum towards a riveting finale. Jennifer Jason Leigh is wonderful in her small role, a woman that overlooks the worst in Connie because she believes they're both in love with one another, and Taliah Webster excels in her first feature role, playing a young woman named Crystal who ends up helping Connie and Ray.

As well as the spot-on directorial work, Josh Safdie has once again crafted a cracking little script with regular co-writer Ronald Bronstein, but that structure was put in place to allow the actors to improvise their way through numerous scenes. What the film does best is sketch out a kind of criminal underworld that we don't see too often on film. These main characters aren't smooth gangsters or determined professionals. They are people trying to make the most of small, sometimes out-of-the-blue, opportunities. They know enough people connected to others in positions of power, but they will always be very near the bottom of that particular social strata.

There's also another great score by Daniel Lopatin (credited as Oneohtrix Point Never) and the cinematography from Sean Price Williams gives the Safdie brothers the perfect atmosphere throughout their movie. They seem to inspire everyone to have faith in their vision, and that faith hasn't been misplaced yet. It may have taken me too long to get to this one, although I didn't wait when I had the chance to see, and enjoy Uncut Gems, but I'll be trying to prioritise whatever they give us next.

8/10

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Mubi Monday: High Life (2018)

Although I am giving the main credit here to director Claire Denis, and co-writer Jean-Pol Fargeau, High Life is very much a collaborative effort. Well . . . every film is, but it's important to acknowledge the variety of minds at work on various aspects of this one, from novelist Nick Laird to physicist Aurélien Barrau, as well as artist Olafur Eliasson, responsible for the design of the main spacecraft in the film. And the cast all do well to trust the creators as they do their bit in a film that is certainly a very different kind of science fiction adventure.

Which isn't to say it's really all that great. I seem to be at odds with the general consensus on Denis, admiring her work rather than actually enjoying it, and finding myself won over more by something like White Material than Beau Travail. Of course, those are the only ones I can recall having seen. Until now.

Lots of people raved about High Life. It garnered plenty of great reviews, the cast were all applauded for their work (particularly Robert Pattinson, continuing his move further and further away from the vapid vampire nonsense that made him a huge box office draw), so my opinion doesn't really matter, not in the great scheme of things. But it's not going to stop me from sharing it, and my opinion is that High Life is . . . quite interesting, quite good, but never great. I doubt any marketing execs will rush to get a quote from me if they ever make a sequel.

The messy plot revolves around a group of young prisoners on a space mission that is setting out to achieve a number of results. There's a doctor (played by Juliette Binoche) obsessing over creating a child by artificial insemination and, more importantly, there's a black hole to be explored, with the aim of trying to extract energy from it. Both missions have quite an impact on the mental health of those inhabiting the spacecraft, and both missions seem to have a similarly slim chance of success, at various times.

Although there are good moments here and there, Denis spreads them out a bit too thinly throughout the 110-minute runtime. This is a sci-fi film that ultimately isn't that bothered about the true science of the premise, despite the input from at least one qualified expert, but also doesn't do enough with the philosophical side of things to make up for that. Energy, life, youth, punishment, indoctrination, morality, etc, are all explored without any real notion that those making the film have an ultimate point to make.

I would also say that the cast is quite a mixed bag. Pattinson really does well in his role, carrying the film for most of the runtime. There's even a good little supporting turn from André Benjamin AKA André 3000. But those performances are counterbalanced by the . . . varying quality of the turns from Mia Goth, Ewan Mitchell, and an uncharacteristically disappointing Binoche.

There's still enough here to make High Life worth your time, if you have the patience for it. It's a mess, but a mess with some fine ingredients that have been misused by a distracted chef. And the fact that things just get wilder and wilder in the third act, on the way to an effective finale, helps to keep it just above average.

6/10

Probably best to check in here for the movie.

Cosmopolis (2012)

Robert Pattinson plays Eric Packer, a man who wants to get a haircut. He's an extremely rich man (a multi-billionaire, in fact) and could just get someone to visit him at his office, but instead he insists on being driven around town in his stretch limo amidst the chaos that is a Presidential visit, an ongoing protest against capitalism and serious threats on his life. During his trip, he tries to convince his new wife (Sarah Gadon) that they should have some sex, he speaks to various members of his staff, engages in some energetic infidelity and views the turbulent events unfolding around him with a mixture of morbid fascination and cool disinterest.

Written and directed by David Cronenberg, based on the novel by Don DeLillo, this is a movie perhaps best described as Videodrome meets Wall Street with a white version of Driving Miss Daisy. Yes, I know that mixture sounds quite ridiculous, but it's appropriate. It's certainly not a film to watch if you need some great set-pieces and a bit of energy in each scene. This is almost completely cerebral, for better or worse, and demands patience from viewers. Patience that isn't really rewarded in the obvious fashion.

Pattinson is pretty good in the main role, there's a hint of Patrick Bateman about his character but also quite a Charles Foster Kane vibe. Details about how he amassed his personal wealth are teased out during conversations, but not enough to put together a complete picture. He seems like a potential philanthropist one minute and a complete sociopath the next, and Pattinson conveys every facet of his personality while also keeping hold of himself in a very stiff and controlled manner, most of the time. The other people that move in and out of the movie are strangely disconnected in a variety of ways, whether it's through their fleeting appearance and disappearance or the actual nature of the character (Gadon seems to move through the film without letting any of the world around her get within touching distance). Jay Baruchel, Juliette Binoche, Kevin Durand, Samantha Morton, Mathieu Amalric and Patricia McKenzie, plus quite a few others, all do well with their roles, even if they do often feel like characters taken directly from the Packer's overactive subconscious. Paul Giamatti gets to play someone more connected to the actual reality of everyday life than any of the other characters, and he puts in another fantastic performance.

Cronenberg seems to do what he can in this film to push people away. He certainly doesn't make it an easy film to enjoy, but it IS enjoyable. It's a lesser Cronenberg film, that's for sure, but it's still worth a watch if you're a fan of his work. The best, and most unexpected, thing about the film is the humour throughout, often subtle and sly but sometimes completely over the top and surreal. That humour hardwired to the intelligence running through the script allows Cosmopolis to become a bit of a paradox - a film that is hard enough to get through once but may well leave observant viewers wanting to rewatch it.

Equal parts amusing and irritating, this may be a film that you end up absolutely hating. It could also be one that you end up enjoying much more than I did.

6/10

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