Esmé's Notes

Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Existential J-Pop Music Video

We start Actually… (2022) aligned with Mizuki Yamashita, as we see a city under construction, cranes peeking through the city skyline, she sees a performance under construction, a rehearsal. She watches her band, Nogizaka46, with the distance of a camera, as if seeing them on the other side of a

Vincente Minelli

Hollywood's Darkest Dream

“Something seems wrong” says Tommy, barely characterised by Gene Kelly. He’s on a hunting trip in Scotland to get away from his noisy and unfulfilling life in the city, and seems as “curiously remote” and “down” as director Vincente Minelli described Kelly being on the set of their final

Nathan Fielder

Nathan For Himself

Nathan Fielder’s new show starts by pointing to itself, “I assume you’ve seen some of my previous work” he asks Kor, the subject of the first episode. Like his previous work, Nathan For You (2013-2017), The Rehearsal (2022-) sets itself up as a reality show parody, though a

David Cronenberg

David Cronenberg's Final Confessional

One of the first things you’ll notice when watching Crimes of the Future (2022), David Cronenberg’s first film in eight years, is how much Viggo Mortensen looks like his director. He plays Saul Tenser, a performance artist with slicked back silver hair and a voice that's reduced to

Jon Bois

A Simple Twist of Fate

The line between a YouTube video and a film might be totally arbitrary, a distinction that will fade in time, reveal itself as drawn only in sand, but like Martin Scorsese’s distinction between theme park rides and cinema, there is a sense of meaningfully different ambitions. Most YouTube videos

Dario Argento

You Want It Darker

Few debuts have ever been as virtuosic as Dario Argento’s, but little surrounds each of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage’s (1970) youthful and precise Hitchockian set pieces, it moves so briskly between them with no real interest in connection, if you thought about it for even a

Frank Tashlin

Jerry Lewis by Frank Tashlin

Despite its storied and respectable history, a love of Jerry Lewis still often feels hard to justify. As a director he only once managed to make all his quirks and flaws align into what would traditionally be called a ‘great film’ in The Nutty Professor (1963), and in the rest

Hong Sang-Soo

Loneliness of the Distant Writer

Grass (2018) starts as so many Hong Sang-soo films have, with a man and a woman sitting opposite one another, captured in unadorned and beautiful digital black and white in another slightly bland modern café, though few of his battle-of-the-sexes escalate so quickly to shouting, usually a lot of Soju

Jane Schoenbrun

Blurring the Line

In the unexceptional desolate American landscapes long left behind by capitalism, where an AutoZone almost registers as somewhere exciting, it’s only natural to recede into the world of the internet, as Casey (Anna Cobb) does, a young teenage girl who posts videos to basically no-one—including many about the

Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger

The Perfect Rom-Com

In the midst of five of their great masterpieces, The Archers (directing team Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger) were held up on the production of A Matter of Life and Death (1946) by a colour film shortage, and so decided to make a smaller, more straight forward genre film, quite unlike

Junta Yamaguchi

The Communal Pleasures of Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes

Long takes and one shot films are supposed to be immersive, a way to trap you in the moment with the characters, but, especially in their most self-consciously virtuosic form, they always draw attention to their own construction; who can deny trying to spot the hidden cuts and often finding

Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Anti-Capitalist Action Movie

Face masks as a symbol of class division seems a very loaded image right now, but in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 2013 short film, Beautiful New Bay Area Project, it shows the luxury of concern the bosses of a factory have compared to their workers who are all about to lose

John Woo

John Woo & The Weight of Violence

John Woo is a director of blunt force, of simple, maybe simplistic emotions, I think it’s fair to say he at least takes the implicit belief system of the action genre as a given. I’ve never been much interested in those themes of honour and brotherhood and in

Robert Eggers

Robert Eggers is an Empty Stylist

The bold, precise and clean shots of Robert Eggers’ first two films, The Witch (2015) and The Lighthouse (2019), claim themselves as confident, as works of self-conscious auteurism, but actually suggest a real limit in vision and deeper insecurity. Where everything must be designed, storyboarded and historically accurate, there’s

Nobuhiko Obayashi

My Fascist High School

School in the Crosshairs (1981) opens with Yuka, played by Idol Hiroko Yakushimaru, waking up to see the world outside her window spinning, as if the room was flying through the sky. She looks out warmly, like this happens everyday. As she heads to school the strip of colour in

Michael Bay

The Sweeter Side of Michael Bay

Apart from the intense collage you expect from Michael Bay—though I did find the drone footage a less inspiring addition to the mix than the low quality go-pro like inserts of Pain & Gain (2013)—the most noticeable thing about Ambulance (2022) is the concessions it makes for these times.

Sean Baker

A Choice Perspective

Sean Baker’s latest film Red Rocket (2021) centres on washed up porn-star Mikey ‘Saber’ (Simon Rex) who returns to his impoverished home town Texas City after nearly two decades with literally only the clothes on his back, desperate to claw himself back up, to become a winner again—a

Abel Ferrara

Image Making in the Age of Covid (and the Internet)

In these precarious times for auteurs, many have had to find new home on the very edges of the system, tinkering away, experimenting on low budget and seemingly minor works that require much more context to be found as major. The first person to come to mind is probably Steven

Domee Shi

Pixar's New Directions

As with last year’s Luca, Turning Red (2022) is working on a much smaller and more personal scale than we have become used to from Pixar, one is about trying to win a small town’s triathlon and the other is about trying to get enough money to go

Tomomi Mochizuki

Quiet Country Café Review

After falling so in love with the first Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou OVA (1998), it’s hard not to be disappointed by Quiet Country Café (2002-2003), another two episode OVA that isn’t so much a follow up to the first as another adaptation of a later part of Hitoshi Ashinano’

Takashi Anno

Peace & Quiet at the End of the World

In Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou (1998) Alpha runs a café that no one ever seems to come to. The owner entrusted it to her and went away “somewhere”, she wonders if he’ll ever come back but it’s not a question we take seriously—of course he won’t—the

Christopher Nolan

Revisiting The Dark Knight

Despite the monstrous hype, Oscar win and firm place at the top of IMDb movie culture, The Dark Knight (2008) is a deeply silly movie, it’s the kind of movie where when a helicopter is falling from the sky, a cop below exclaims “Okay, that’s really not good!

Clint Eastwood

Still Figuring It Out

There was a lot of hype online for Clint Eastwood’s Cry Macho (2021)—the title promised so much from his third or fourth swan song—but despite the expected pleasurable slightness and slow pace, some of that anticipation seemed to diffuse. Certainly it’s nothing like as bold as

Steven Soderbergh

Kimi Review

Angela (Zoë Kravitz) monitors audio logs from the movie’s equivalent of an Alexa or Google Home called a Kimi, checking for errors in its voice recognition. It’s hard to imagine this pays enough for her to live in as huge an apartment she does, often this kind of

Hong Sang-Soo

Distance and Closeness

In In Front of your Face (2021) Hong Sang-Soo continues to strip down; the formal trickery that defined much of his work before hasn’t gone so much as it’s been integrated. In Tale of Cinema (2005) the first thirty minutes turn out to be a film that the