Mauro_Lanari

(Mauro Lanari) Is it really the same Carnahan from "The Rip"? If this is a movie about hope, I dread to think what he would have directed on despair, pessimism, or nihilism: a work akin to those of Haneke, P.T. Anderson, or Lanthimos? Maybe "Sirāt"? 3½

(Mauro Lanari) One of those cases where the plot is supplanted by ideology. Three characters: one woman and two men. As has now become customary, she's a 50-year-old top-model superheroine (Theron self-produced the movie), the other two are an expendable and a serial killer with no explanation. And so it goes. Not for me, though.

Why is it being claimed that Mossad is blackmailing Trump with the Epstein files, while Ghislaine Maxwell played a no less pivotal role, and Trump has reportedly tapped a woman, Pam Bondi, to lead the Department of Justice and defend him before the House Oversight Committee? In other words: why the emphasis, political even more than media-driven, placed on the scandal's male figures? Is it a counter-bias rooted in toxic masculinity, misandry, neo-feminism, the lingering effects of #MeToo? In today's context, Freida McFadden's 2022 novel might still make some sense, but this 2025 adaptation, a Lyne YA flick or a tripled "Gone Girl" (Fincher 2014), certainly doesn't. And these days, the vengeful conspiracy between the two women and the female investigator is far too reminiscent of the barbarity of ICE squads or the introduction of the unilateral death penalty thanks to Ben Gvir's gentle persistence. At least we have an extraordinary cosmological discovery: parallel universes exist, and Feig inhabits one of them. 3½

(Mauro Lanari) Dormant action hero, reawakened, redeemed: with a little girl or a pet? Better both. Darker than usual for cinematography, laconicism, and Chopin's "Nocturne" on the soundtrack, it's a mint that prints the same banknote, hoping it won't go out of circulation but rise to an archetype as much as John Wayne's bi-expressiveness, or at least to a meme like the recently deceased Chuck Norris.

(Mauro Lanari) Premiered at Cannes, the fact that, rewatching it a dozen years later, I only remembered the first 20 minutes (up to the daughter's toy) proves that the screenplay's paroxysm, with its increasingly implausible twists nearly every minute, works against it. It reaches the point of nullifying the significance of the script, the characters, and the film itself, unless it's taken as a rather unfunny dark comedy on Murphy's Law within an ACAB context. 5½

(Mauro Lanari) Unresolved and undecided on which direction to take: whether to veer toward noir or prefer a comedy of errors. The direction chooses to leave it vague, and the movie suffers as a result: a muddled psychological thriller that lacks the vivacity and pace needed at least to entertain, remaining unfinished "in the theme it sets out to explore, namely the mental alienation of the protagonist Jodie Foster.

(Mauro Lanari) A metropolitan noir that closes with a glimmer of light: glow or glare? Layton doesn't venture to guarantee his protagonists any hope: he stops short, perhaps wisely, dividing them between the nonviolent and the others. The former are fragile, torn, uprooted, devoured by loneliness; with a sixth sense, they recognize each other in seconds, bonding, empathizing, and trying to help each other as best they can. An atypical movie, incomparable to Ferrara's gangster fare, Friedkin, Mann, or Refn's "Drive" (2011): this humanity of Route/Highway 101 and the Los Angeles backdrop is anything but Marvel-esque, partly predisposed to solidarity and mutual aid, captured by a cinematography not sparkling or neon-lit, but grainy and desaturated. With a greater dose of Witz ("I peed." "Your pee's sitting down now." "That's three minutes of my day." "Jesus, that's sexy"), it would have recalled Benton's "Nobody's Fool" (1994), but the pain accumulated in their lives is now too much, and it no longer gets that far.

(Mauro Lanari) Bullet Plane or Wick with Sully, Tarantino's pulp isn't the problem and even less the remedy: it's one of the symptoms of a specific, epochal syndrome. Ask yourselves why you feel such a furious need to switch off your brain.

(Mauro Lanari) She wants to hide her bisexuality, yet she has sex with her lesbian lover while leaving the window curtains open: this is the level of (im)maturity of a middle-aged woman as told by a guy who still hasn't learned how to write a screenplay.

(Mauro Lanari) "The new film by Sam Raimi unfolds between satire and a moral apologue" (Andrea Fornasiero). We weren't looking for the Wertmüller of "Swept Away" ('74), the DeVito of "The War of the Roses" ('89), or the Reitman of "Six Days, Seven Nights" ('98), but even less this level of stomach-churning cynicism where the cruelest, pardon: the most monstrous, wins: the multiple murderer, masterfully portrayed by McAdams. "The lackluster screenplay was not written by Raimi along with his brother but is the work of the far less equipped Mark Swift and Damian Shannon" (Raffaele Meale). Maybe so. 4½

(Mauro Lanari) Yankee Army veteran, pater familias, Presbyterian churchgoer: not in that order, but still God, Country, Family. What's so strange about his behavior? I'll leave you the pleasure of rooting for him. 4½

(Mauro Lanari) Noé closes his trilogy on drug addiction ("It's a life among drugs. We're really almost slaves to drugs", words that will later take on their true metaphorical value: "Ageing or smack, which to choose?") with a further katabasis, that of a married couple who start the day toasting to life while sitting on their terrace in the morning light. They align with the statistical norm of not suffering agony simultaneously: she falls ill worse than him, and psychophysical care becomes unidirectional. It feels like Haneke's "Amour" (2012) stripped of conciliatory aestheticism or consoling sweetness (the dove taking flight when Anne dies, identical to Roy Batty's in the 1982 "Blade Runner": will we ever free ourselves from animism?). This time, the Argentine director seems to box himself into a dementia movie like any "The Father" (Zeller 2020), dissolving the universality of the message, at least until she throws her husband's book notes down the toilet, his "drug" along with the mistress who, after twenty years, is leaving him. "I don't throw away my past": a desire that's hit a dead end. Her Alzheimer's has even more devastating consequences for the husband's heart disease, and the circle closes, the screen's dividing line becomes continuous interaction: from agony, only more agony can be born. The ash-grey of the urns is the final non-place to inhabit. 7½

(Mauro Lanari) An unconventional spy story: it opens with Goya's painting "Saturn Devouring His Son" on a one-year loan from Spain to the United States. About halfway through, a sharp edit reveals the identity of the (no longer) mysterious agent, and the film shifts gears, adopting the feel-good movie formula with the building and rebuilding of emotional bonds. As an Amazon Prime Original production, its originality is limited to the grainy, sandy cinematography of Iberian and Latin American locations, which leaves some of the few action scenes feeling muddled.

(Mauro Lanari) It begins this way: how is it that, during 13 years in an induced coma, the medical robot trimmed Grace/Gosling's nails but not his hair and beard? How does the protagonist recover so quickly from muscle atrophy, even though the ship's computer warns him? Once you accept this is a colossal Hollywood toy built around a galactic buddy movie, you lower your expectations and can keep watching. If 2 out of 3 of the Earth crew and 23 out of 24 of the alien crew died on the outbound journey, why would Grace's eventual return to Earth be any less risky? He might learn from past mistakes (as explained in Weir's book), but the film says nothing about it, not even the cause of the two humans' deaths. Finally, do we need the sci-fi hypothesis of astrophages on the Petrova line to predict a global population collapse by 2100? No, yet another weapon of mass distraction. Nolan's "Interstellar" (2014) had the merit of starting from a real crisis. 6½

(Mauro Lanari) Elementary concepts that don't require overwhelming hermeneutic skills: if to date only a woman can conceive, gestate, and give birth to another (human) existence, any person can do the same with ideas and works, including art. The etymology of hysteria correlates uterus and brain, and this is one of the interpretations provided for the divine cloud in Michelangelo's "Creation of Adam." The film is the adaptation of the 2020 bestseller by Maggie O'Farrell, also co-screenwriter; she has three children and knows both roles well, while Zhao is not a mother. The director has the merit of having been able to translate into an audiovisual code "of rare power, physical and emotional" (Valerio Sammarco), "lyrical and grandiose" (Eugenio Grenna) both the natural and cultural aspects, the first and the last part of "Hamnet," within the Bard's production: comedy and tragedy, stunning sentimental and romantic passion and shàttering, agonizing grief, Eros and Thanatos. Perhaps a slight dip in the central part with a connecting function. I don't believe in aesthetic catharsis, much less in its immortality, but those arms, hands, and fingers stretching out to join chorally with Hamlet's nefarious destiny will be hard to forget. 7½

(Mauro Lanari) The Almodóvar brothers produced this film to tell us in 2025 that La Movida is over and we've moved on to Céline. Better late than never to realize a phenomenon ended three decades ago. In the first half of the '90s, dancefloor music was pure avant-garde: using Rolands, sequencers, samplers, Cubase, and MIDI, artists composed freestyle percussive noise where hits fell on the downbeat, upbeat, 16th, and 32nd notes, featuring killer bass riffs, microtonally dissonant harmonies, and the soul of a Tamla Motown melody at their heart. By '94, The Prodigy had already turned dark with "Music for the Jilted Generation", and the Bristol scene followed suit as Massive Attack transitioned from "Unfinished Sympathy" ('91) to "Mezzanine" ('98): the ecstasy of the smileys vanished, replaced by a triumph of techno taken to the extreme, up to d'n'b tekno stripped down to just a relentless kick, ostinato bass, and increasingly alienated, disturbing electronic timbres. "You don't listen to it. You dance to it": the Edenic oasis had already morphed into a gathering of freak tribes in a trance for a desperate post-apocalyptic requiem, evoking Coppola's Vietnam or Australia's "Mad Max" (the first chapter of which also dates to '79). "Is this what the end of the world feels like?" "No idea what it feels like, Bigui, but the end of the world started long ago". At least we're back to discussing serious matters without aestheticization, in a desert comparable to "Zabriskie Point" (1970) or "Gerry" (2002). In 2023, "Asteroid City" did the same with pitch-black comedy, but by now Wes Anderson is pigeonholed as "the pastel guy who entertains".

(Mauro Lanari) From Berkeley ("esse est percipi") to Melville ("Moby Dìck") and Castaneda, from the Hen kai Pan of **** (fr. 50: "The One and the All") to that of Talbot ("The Holographic Universe", 1991), spanning shamanism, Jungian synchronicity, and entanglement, the concrete evidence of such a concept in historical reality is not abundant. The New Testament posits two options for the relationship between the One and Multiplicity: the "ut unum sint" of John 17:11, 21-23 prefigures a monotheistic pantheosis, while the God "all in [all and] everyone" ([Theos ta] panta en pasin, "[God] all in every thing/being") of 1 Corinthians 15:28 leans toward a polytheistic pantheosis. A priori, the holographic copresence of infinite absolute identities within the all-encompassing singularity of an I is as plausible as the harmonious polyphonic coexistence of the manifold within an absolute We. Yet both cases would only materialize as an alternative to the current course of events. Here, instead, one bounces around Buddhism between animism, karma, reincarnation, and freedom from the "principium individuationis" for nearly three hours across six stories with literally interchangeable characters through parallel editing. The theorem is far less clear than it purports to be, an elephantiasis of spiritual ideas of improbable syncretism, and it's a grueling watch.

(Mauro Lanari) The angelic Ritchson, with his "InstaChurch" YT channel where he talks about his faith and supports the development of Christian films in Hollywood, and here as a US elite soldier? A damn dangerous combo: militarism blessed by God. Quaid at 71 portraying a hard-as-nails sergeant? The most sci-fi element of the movie. "Predator" is from 1987, Hughes is no McTiernan, and the cast headlined by Schwarzy was on a whole different level.

(Mauro Lanari) Hypertrophic body, fragile mind. A psyche unable to manage its own smashing machine: physical pain, couple relationship, and the bond with a best friend. In a cinéma vérité style, the movie focuses on Kerr's decline after he admits during an interview that he wouldn't know how to react to a defeat, as it's an unimaginable eventuality for him. Unprepared for his own vulnerability, we witness his unstoppable downfall. It's not just a character study, but an emblem of the sunset of American imperialism. The docu-biopic ends serenely: once freed from his addictions (the craving for control and delusions of grandeur, muscular prowess, wealth, trophies, glory, fame, and his wife), the protagonist seems to have found a happy balance. Dwayne takes on a dramatic role, while Emily plays the Playboy pin-up who marries Kerr. Highly cerebral and unengaging, a predictable flop for A24.

(Mauro Lanari) And 3. The latest films by Garland, Bigelow, and Panahi have been belied by current events: in the States, the civil war isn't unfolding as envisioned; the same goes for the risk of WWIII and the attack on Iran. Entrenched in a dimension that has no bearing on our own, authors and festival juries display a disconcerting lack of foresight, looking less relevant than ever. "From afar, you reminded me of that play we saw with just a tree." "'Waiting for Godot'." "It's up to us to take ourselves in hand, no use waiting for a miracle [...] Shiva, we are at war. This is no joke. If you don't kill, you get killed." These are the concrete, pressing moral dilemmas to be resolved not on set, but on the battlefield while appreciating the golden hue of the new White House curtains. Then, someone explain to me why the victims decide to interrogate the executioner or his proxy (the daughter) only at the very end.

(Mauro Lanari) A comparison between the end-of-life experiences of two couples: one quite bourgeois, in the style of Haneke's "Amour" (2012); the other not so much, amidst the snow and frost of a Finland doubling as Minnesota that forces Emma Thompson to get dressed again. The lengths one goes to launch the career of one's 25-year-old daughter, Gaia Romilly Wise. I can already imagine a movie featuring nothing but "nepo babies": the offspring of Sutherland, Hanks, Washington, Eastwood, Kurt Russell, Cillian Murphy, P.S. Hoffman, Jude Law, Hawke & Thurman, Depp & Paradis. An all-sub-stellar cast.

(Mauro Lanari) An underbelly of artists and human beings wounded in mind and body in a biopic dedicated to a tribute band of Neil Diamond, mostly known here only for having composed the Monkees' hit "I'm a Believer" (1966). There's little to listen to in a musical with a single evergreen song; the characters struggle with a destiny that condemns them to the category of losers in an increasingly serious cycle of rises and falls that concludes only with death. Second chances are deadly traps leading from one disaster to the next ("Well, you know, most recovering alcoholics just trade one addiction for another, and music's that for Dad"). A hopeless drama, it can be a source of support like attending a self-help group, at least as long as existence allows.

(Mauro Lanari) It would purport to be a tribute to a certain '70s cinema, from Spielberg ("Duel", 1971) to Carpenter ("Halloween", 1978, and "Christine", 1983). Not that one should always hope for a "Zodiac" (Fincher, 2007), but given its televisual amateurism, this second feature by Skeel isn't a homage, it's an insult.

(Mauro Lanari) "I've been developing an idea about the nature of the infection. We know there is a physical component. Haemorrhage and uncontrolled cell growth. And we know there is a sensory component, pain and terrible disquiet, which the morphine silences. But what if there is a psychiatric component too?" "It contrasts irreparable inhumanity with the hope for a future cured of the infection" (Valerio Sammarco). "It focuses on the inhumanity of the survivors, on a moral and cultural collapse that has distant, pre-pandemic roots" (Enrico Azzano). "It's the now classic post-epidemic apocalypse story in which the main danger isn't the infected but human beings who have lost the concept of civilization" (Andrea Maderna). In other words, Conradian Ian Kelson, being a doctor, can cure the former by pharmacologizing them, but not Jimmy Crystal, Burgess and Kubrick's Alex, complete with a home invasion: perhaps because there would be no antidote for traumatic experiences for which psychotherapy would be ineffective, or because the blond-Aryan, populist, demonic, Satanist fanatical with an epilogue about the Weimar Republic simply has to die on a crucifix? Mercy and salvation on a double track like trains headed for the extermination camps? "Memento mori" and "memento amoris" themselves discriminatory? "It's terrible not just because of how it's written but because of how it's shot. Not even Eli Roth, the least capable of Hollywood's mid-range directors, would have been capable of something so awful and unmotivated" (Gabriele Niola). Nevertheless, the most infernal battle is between Duran Duran, Radiohead, and Iron Maiden.

(Mauro Lanari) The Bacons devise a cross-class romance with mirrored issues: wealth and poverty, menopause and prostatitis, relational tensions between a husband too old and a daughter too young. A portrait of messy Boomer fragility, torn between tenderness and sexuality, "The Best You Can" suffers from a surfeit of self-indulgent absolution.

(Mauro Lanari) Bekmambetov persists with the desktop movie, directing the worst entry in this genre to date. He confines himself and us within the Aristotelian unities of time, place, and largely action: it's the world from the perspective of Amazon that produces the film, featuring disembodied humans who interact with virtual reality through their devices about 95% of the time. Pratt is immobilized, Ferguson is relegated to close-ups, the supporting cast is odious, and the story unfolds in one of those uncivilized countries where the death penalty is still in force. Stereotypes and chaos come included in the delivery package.

(Mauro Lanari) An absurd film isn't a flaw in itself: once past a certain threshold, you enter experimental cinema even unintentionally. In this sequel, Stalberg reaches heights of narrative fragmentation and cluttered editing that go beyond Malick, who nonetheless follows an underlying logic. Anything but a revenge movie, it reaches an extreme level of hallucinated and hallucinating unpredictability, as if we were inside the PTSD of a protagonist yet still compelled to make the right moral choices. Pleasantly unsettling and, incredible but true, even devoid of protagonists with postpartum depression.

(Mauro Lanari) Post-apocalyptic, thriller, sci-fi? None of the above: an indie survival family flick joining the ranks of all the others, more or less well-made, but by now too many.

(Mauro Lanari) Right after the 22-minute mark, the prostitute tells him: "We're alike, aren't we? I help people physically, and you help people emotionally. But you're just a little more personal." The movie's core is all right here: whether or not to be a lover for hire through acting. A close relative of "Collateral Beauty" (Frankel 2016), a fictional remake of "Family Romance LLC" (Herzog 2019), a human version of the Tamagotchi (it's no coincidence we're in Japan) or of those who today would like to marry a chatbot ("Her", Jonze 2014). You don't get very far if it's true that "lies have short shelf lives". The epilogue tries to reiterate this, though it remains unclear what becomes of the company and what product it could possibly continue to sell. The credits feature a pretty decent track by David Byrne, "Glass, Concrete & Stone" from 2004: I had thought he was no longer capable of it since 1982.

(Mauro Lanari) Silly little (t)rapper questions, a lava flow of aphoristic answers with the presumption of immortality and the anemia of vacuity, architectural symbols from TikTokers on law and heart, power and affections, rationality and love like in a Jane Austen regurgitation. Austere, spartan, and cloistered staging for "inner demons," the "most intimate of dramas" (Giuseppe Fantasia in "Elle Decor," indeed). "You jurists and we military men thought that law and discipline would have divested us of the annoying duty of possessing sensibility": why on earth? "Kieślowski-esque ethical dilemmas": is that supposed to be a compliment? "In praise of doubt": wasn't Carofiglio enough? Not as bad as "Parthenope," but that wasn't hard.

(Mauro Lanari) As amusement park and cruise revenues have been driving the Disney group's turnover more than films since 2022 (60/40%), the new CEO Josh D'Amaro was selected from that area: a theme park in the Emirates and 13 new cruise ships. Lionsgate is also adapting: the more over-the-top this sequel is, the more credible it becomes. This is the key difference compared to 6 years ago. Perhaps before, the crater waters would have been miraculous like those in "Cocoon," but things have changed. An ultimate trashy flick with great contempt for the ridiculous. 4½

(Mauro Lanari) "Bonitzer works on a line of balance between... on one hand the... moral comedy, on the other a meditation... on the idea of truth" (Francesco Puma). A biopic with the editing of the best French cinema, the abductive approach of early Pialat, but while Pialat knew how to gradually draw us into the story and characters, Bonitzer winds in on himself and, at the end of metacinematic reflections as new as Welles' "F for Fake" (1973), leaves us with a young worker who solves the problems of all the protagonists with the heroic gesture of being satisfied with his own misery. Former "Cahiers du cinéma", screenwriter for Rivette, Téchiné, Ruiz, Akerman, Fontaine, and Verhoeven, he exudes a stench of conservatism. The Bresson of "L'Argent" (1983) is from another planet if only for the humility of having adapted a story by Tolstoy. "Poised between contemptuousness and moralism" (Lorenzo Ciofani), "superficial and vacuous even if masked by a useless elegance and refinement" (Tonino De Pace). 4½

(Mauro Lanari) 6½ "Bent to the prevailing conformism of the school where he went to teach, [Michell], thanks to Juan Salvador, becomes an invitation not to resign oneself to the quiet life... rekindling the spirit of breaking the mold" (Giancarlo Zappoli). The penguin is named after the seagull protagonist of Richard Bach's 1970 bestseller in its Latin American edition: "Juan Salvador Gaviota." Personally, I found it a far cry from both that book and "Dead Poets Society" (Weir, 1989). A mantle of melancholy shrouds the movie: the bird acts as a transitional object that receives, without providing answers and much less solutions, confessions of personal dramas, powerlessness, failures, traumas, and crises, like a surrealist figure in a painful choral narrative devoid of catharsis. Coogan's British humor makes it even more jarring, anyone seeking a message of political engagement or even a merely uplifting one will be disappointed, and it's entirely atypical for an A24 production.

(Mauro Lanari) Donner could've directed this back in the last millennium: a stuntman-fest with brawls like a Bud Spencer and Terence Hill movie, but with three differences: a higher budget, even more feel-goodism and a shìtty Gn'R song on the soundtrack.

(Mauro Lanari) A strange movie: whereas the Duffer Brothers knew how to blend the ingredients of the '90s to craft "Stranger Things", Jess Varley employs a similar derivativeness (Spielberg's alien diptych, Cronenberg's "The Fly", the creatures of "Jurassic Park" and Giger, the synth score) for a hasty, unresolved and not as convincing low-budget effort.

(Mauro Lanari) Survivalist home invasion, neo-rural, anti-institutional, or religiously sectarian considering Ashley Judd's leanings, also executive producer here. Either way, a terrible B movie.

(Mauro Lanari) If one must resort to Boyle and The Prodigy to claim one's anti-British identity, something doesn't add up. Hip-hop as international political music? If every single word used to preserve the Gaelic tongue is a bullet, yet the lyrics also incite the use of ketamine, cocaine, and MDMA (rave ecstasy), then best of luck with the revolt of the umpteenth lost generation. Artificial frenzy in a debut fictionalized biopic denouncing who-knows-what.

(Mauro Lanari) In the conclusive scene of "Schindler's List" (1993), the workers give the protagonist a gold ring engraved with "Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire", a famous phrase from the Talmud Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5 embedded within the framework of relativistic ethical indiscernibility: if every existence is a universe, then Schindler vs. Stauffenberg. Schindler saves 1,200 lives and, according to the Talmud, has saved 1,200 worlds; Stauffenberg fails in Operation Valkyrie and doesn't destroy the Hìtler-universe, which continues to annihilate millions of other universes. Then there are the holistic versions ranging from Hinduism to Eranos all the way to Pandora: everyone is part of the Whole since "one equals one." I feel like I've heard that one slightly earlier than the quantum man in "Mr. Nobody" (Van Dormael 2009). For those who find comfort in overestimating daily survival, this is the film for them: there's even a magic room to remind them of their own mortality and resignation as the final act in the grieving process. Sing and dance your troubles away: "The Man Without Qualities", Musil 1930-33. Aronofsky wanted to direct "The Tree of Life (of Chuck)", a sort of encore of "The Fountain" (2006). But it can also be read as solipsistic delirium: "esse est percipi" by Bishop Berkeley, "A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge", §3, 1710.

(Mauro Lanari) Like "Creed," it's neither a sequel nor a reboot, but a handover to a younger cast for a similarly aged audience. The franchise is confirmed, marketing is satisfied: the protagonists of the first two installments reduced to minor roles, Pike to a character actress, Freeman and Ruffalo to cameos, frenetic editing to veil a nonsensical plot, a "commercial illusionism" (Di Nicola) whose only magic was at the box office. Fleischer's worst film so far. Disgraceful.

(Mauro Lanari) "We might have one foot in the grave, the flies might already be buzzing around us but, before croaking and getting taxidermized, we of the old guard believe we still have something to teach you punks". Intergenerational conflict translated into pure metacinema: indeed, why should the younger ones know how to tell the story of old age better? We're in the territory of "The Comeback Trail" (Gallo 2020): gerontophilic action? No: a dark comedy that oozes irony against everyone and everything, but joking, yet not too much. Caan died of coronary artery disease shortly after completing his part of the filming, and then Brosnan shared photos of him on set; Costner and Cranston, who had been interested in starring in it, are thanked in the end credits. A Tarantino stripped and drained of prolixity and excess, the Coen brothers of their debut diptych ("Blood Simple", 1984, and "Raising Arizona", 1987), back when they still seemed to be the forerunners of the Farrellys and before they became champions of the nihilistic intelligentsia. A touching, totally out-of-date sense of modesty. FIAT had no longer been Italian since 2021, and it's a pardonable mistake.

(Mauro Lanari) A tight Carpenteresque action thriller ("Assault on Precinct 13", 1976), scripted not by the award-winning Affleck/Damon duo but by the director Carnahan, who eschews their mushiness to turn in his best film yet. Warning: no trace of postmodernism or shoot-'em-ups here.

(Mauro Lanari) A calligraphic transposition of the primordial androgynous myth described by Aristophanes in Plato's "Symposium", the Hebrew-Christian Bible provides a conjugal version of it: "a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh" (Gen 2:24 || Mk 10:7-8 || Mt 19:5 || Eph 5:31). In his feature-length debut, Shanks also cites the Spice Girls' "2 Become 1" (1996). Split-heart pendants with a zigzag cut for a sharp interlocking indicate the quest for one's soulmate; an equivalent emoji doesn't yet exist. I leave the judgment of the film's quality to you, I'm more interested in recalling that the dyad "dia-ballein" (δια-βάλλειν)/"sym-ballein" (συμ-βάλλειν) has acquired in psychotherapy an antithetical meaning summarized by the Gospel's "You shall love your neighbor as yourself" (Mk 12:31 ∥ Mt 22:39 ∥ Lk 10:27): even before seeking union with a partner, one should seek it within oneself by exorcising one's own inner legion (Mk 5:9 ∥ Lk 8:30). "Southland Tales" (Kelly 2006) closes with this image of self-reconciliation, but no one understood it.

(Mauro Lanari) A strand of austral cinema disregards the need for a logical screenplay, invoking a presumed mysterious and hostile nature of its land. From "Picnic at Hanging Rock" to certain works by Jane Campion and George Miller, up to the "Wolf Creek" diptych, things happen due to a malevolent genius loci. You watch Ashcroft's film hoping that the events will clarify as the minutes pass; instead, the opposite happens. A morbid atmosphere that kicks off with the most striking idea, the involuntary bonze, and then explores the meanders of a nursing home as if it were the delirium of the Overlook Hotel. Some come out satisfied, others with a headache.

(Mauro Lanari) The algorithm starts by mashing "Groundhog Day," "I, Robot," "Flow," "The Towering Inferno," and stalls in an experiment on the mother-child bond (the father, it goes without saying, is expendable). The script doesn't hold water and the simulation's meaning is lost: if the floods are a digitized visualization of emotional involvement, then there has never been a disaster on Earth (in the final scene of the return to our planet, it's still habitable); vice versa, if the disaster really happened, then I don't understand the epilogue.

(Mauro Lanari) The algorithm starts by mashing "Groundhog Day," "I, Robot," "Flow," "The Towering Inferno," and stalls in an experiment on the mother-child bond (the father, it goes without saying, is expendable). The script doesn't hold water and the simulation's meaning is lost: if the floods are a digitized visualization of emotional involvement, then there has never been a disaster on Earth (in the final scene of the return to our planet, it is still habitable); vice versa, if the disaster really happened, then I don't understand the epilogue.

(Mauro Lanari) You learn something new every day: I discovered that on social media, people like me are labeled as "serially bored". Christie+Bond+Poe+Star Wars+the religious hang-ups of a director who's more presumptuous than ambitious, slow to get going, then convoluted and finally overlong, recommended for those who are terrified of novelty and addicted to the rearguard.

(Mauro Lanari) Soderbergh's genius: he seems to aim for the antithesis of "Peeping Tom" (Powell 1960), "The Eye That Saves", but he gets bogged down in Christianity, and in those parts there is no soteriology that doesn't imply a redemption (?) of a sacrificial nature. Therefore Christopher Payne's daughter (a name that says it all), afflicted with athazagoraphobia (a neologism coined by another genius in Greek: the fear of being forgotten should have combined a-, thazo-, and phobos; agora makes no sense whatsoever), has a guardian angel whose wide-angle gaze is lethal, death-bringing, murderous, and demonic. Better to lose him than to find him. "This shìt is so three years ago" refers to Dominic Fike's 2020 song "Come Here".

(Mauro Lanari) There are two types of competition, two categories of sporting and non-sporting format: the noble one that allows for an ex aequo (tie) and the uncivilized one that excludes it. In finals, there's no rationale for not equating the second type with the first: any kind of limit can be imposed (on over-/extra-time, super tie-breaks, or penalty kicks), yet if a single winner is desired, a coin toss is employed, like in fencing, as a last expedient to proclaim the tournament champion: champion of what, luck? Swimming, skiing, cycling, athletics are all clear cases of the noble format, which even allows the finalists to reach an agreement between themselves (Tamberi and Barshim) to share equally the prize money and ranking points. Nihil obstat (no obstacle) to conforming to this first format, under penalty of perpetuating the barbaric gladiatorial games, and Ridley Scott's debut is a wonderful example. On the opposite side: "Highlander" (Mulcahy 1986) but also "Gladiator" itself (2000) plus the 2024 sequel. "Unglücklich das Land, das Helden nötig hat" ("Unhappy is the land that needs a hero", Bertolt Brecht, "Leben des Galilei", scene 12, p. 115, 1943).

(Mauro Lanari) Every era gets the "Dr. Strangelove" it deserves, and this one stands out for its heavy dose of misandry. Aside from the excellent final ten minutes, it's not Trump's America but another portrait, aided by Greenwood's score and dressed in the garb of the twilight Western, of a deranged, unhinged, flipped-out, mad humanity, forgetful of the code words for any clear proposal and, as always, overwhelmed by Hegelian power dynamics. For those who can't get enough. And if it sweeps the Oscars unlike Kubrick, I'd be asking myself some questions.

(Mauro Lanari) Another copy-paste of countless other movies. Why doesn't Nolfi go back to adapting a Dìck short story like he did in 2011?