Palme d'Or Parasite deserves it. Unexpected at nearly every turn from start to finish.

Mar-Vellous Captain Marvell is all that, and a cute cat, too.

Shame We went to see BlacKkKlansman on the weekend. There were other choices, but this did seem to be the movie of the moment, one not to be missed. It is surely one of the best things Spike Lee has done and a superior movie overall. I sat through nearly every minute of it rigid with shame. Sure, it's 1979, nearly forty years ago, but as Lee's coda shows, we haven't gotten very far from then. I found it impossible not to cringe throughout, especially sprinkled through as it was with nearly tossed-off references to the present day. America has a long history, much longer than the last forty years, the last fifty, sixty years. The country was built on two hundred years of slave labor and another hundred plus of keeping their descendants from accessing the same privileges as the rest of the country, let alone offering any redress. Yes, Civil Rights Act, etc., but making the equal status official does nothing unless it's properly enforced, unless reparations are made, and unless the fundamental attitudes and prejudices are dealt with. I look at the young people I know and have hope. But I look at the young people I don't, when they appear in the news, and despair. How long, O Lord, how long? (But don't think America is alone. Look at Australia's treatment of its indigenous population and the dog-whistling regarding refugees, let alone the internment camps we send those asylum seekers we capture to. Look at the Windrush generation in Britain. Look at the treatment of refugees throughout Eastern Europe. Look at the Rohingya, the Uyghurs . . . . We all have a lot to answer for in how we treat our fellow humans and how we have treated them for so very long.)

Rift I’ve seen this movie.

Advertising Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri over the weekend. Good story, terrific performances – not least from Sam Rockwell, whom I think I always like, as a performer – and an interesting commentary on at least some aspects of American culture. The ending says something in particular about larger concerns, but they don’t gloss over too much other topical matters. Also attended the St George Open Air Cinema, for Lady Bird, a smallish film, but very well done, very real. It basically hits nearly all the notes that make an adolescence, all the way through. I think Greta Gerwig learned a lot of Noah Baumbach, and that’s not a bad thing.

Redux I wanted to go watch Blade Runner 2049 when it was still in production, and then when it came out I was ambivalent, but I finally broke down and went. It's very good. Long, maybe, but it takes its time and does the story justice. It's a police procedural, really, and police work takes a slow, plodding pace, with punctuations of misdirection and revelation, until the mystery is solved. The sequel also learned a lot from the original's post-production problems: no voice-over, mainly, the thing that bothered everyone until the final director's cut got released on DVD. Anyway, I'm going to have to watch this one again. I think I like it better than the original, although you have to have the first one for context. Maybe that's its particular flaw.

You May See the Doctor Now And it's totally worth it. Doctor Strange is easily in the top tier of Marvel movies: funny, when it needs to be, with especially fun special effects, and a stellar cast, all performing comic book material with fun and brio. I especially like how it treats magic as the manipulation of physical laws as they exist in one dimension in another. It's the String Theory of magic. But anything with Benedict Cumberbatch was going to be good, wasn't it?

Movies Australian movies tend to be very bleak or very silly (much as I enjoyed the last one I saw: Mad Max: Fury Road), but sometimes they're just good. Last Cab to Darwin being an excellent example. Based on a stage play, unlike many other such productions, it's very natural, perhaps because of having the whole of the Outback to be expansive in, but more likely because Michael Caton, as Rex, is just so good. Yes, all the other characters are secondary, yet still drawing on some serious Australian acting talent, so he has to carry the movie, but he does, and it's no mean feat, especially when he's often been a comic actor, perhaps best known for The Castle. Defintely deserves viewing in a cinema.

Grown-ups To make up for all the B-movies I've been seeing (and will attend later this year), we went to see Mr. Holmes last week. Ian McKellan makes a very fine Sherlock, but for all the Holmes of the movie, this is about memory, how it is a trap of shame and an opportunity for redemption. All the players are terrific, and the movie doesn't really falter in any way until the very end, and even then, it hardly matters, and is of a piece with the MacGuffin of the mystery.

Movies The winter blockbuster season continues. Serious movies have to start coming out soon, or my brain will rot. Terminator Genisys continues the fine tradition of unnecessary misspellings, unless it’s just that Skynet’s spellcheck failed in its mission, as its robots usually do, but manages to entertain, largely with its revisions to the original film, playing with alternative realities like a good time-travel movie should. (Did you know that Twelve Monkeys was made into a television show? Neither did I.) The human heroes of the movie have zero chemistry and the villain doesn’t get really villainous until fairly late, but it doesn’t stop moving and Arnie’s as good as he ever was. For a B-movie, it’s not half bad. Call it a B+. Meanwhile, the Marvel juggernaught keeps churning out enjoyable films. Ant-Man , like Guardians of the Galaxy doesn’t take itself too seriously, with decent comical characters, mostly, and gags tossed through to the point where it might as well have been played entirely as a comedy. Certainly the personal-lives plot parallels between the original, Hank Pym, and the replacement he recruits, Scott Lang, are lightly sketched enough to have been dispensed with. I guess it would be asking too much for the sountrack to have been modeled on Guardians. I know I said I was done with comicbook movies, but this is still a movie to see if you’ve got time and a discount voucher, and I had both. So, in another couple of weeks, out comes the latest franchise reboot, with Fantastic Four. Yes, I will go see this.

Unextinction As far as I can tell there are two reasons for Jurassic World: reboot the franchise and make a lot of references to past giant-monster movies. It’s entertaining, certainly, and pretty much gets right into the whole running-and-screaming thing, but what I really enjoyed were the references to King Kong, Jaws, etc. That must have been fun for the filmmakers. I think I need to see a French movie, as a palate cleanser, before Ant Man comes out.

Insane Mad Max: Fury Road is MADNESS! It's beyond good. ZOMG! Tom Hardy channels all the best of Mel Gibson, Charlize Theron is the best two-armed actress playing a one-armed hero you could ever hope for (and more), and George Miller has finally made the Mad Max movie he's always wanted. Unmissable. Yes, it's one big car chase with really loud music and practically no dialog, but it all works, all hangs together. While it feels at first as if it's started in the middle, it has: in the middle of the ongoing heroic epic of Max Rockatansky in the wastelands of the petrochemical-based capitalist extremities when it's finally all gone to hell. And redemption is only possible by sacrifice, which Max enacts to the purest merging of Joseph Campbell and the New Testament, a Moses/John the Baptist merger to Imperator Furiosa's Virgin Mary/Jesus combo. Yeah, a Jesus motif, as so often happens in the movies, but in full action hero mode to boot, driving out the money changers, or the crazy dictatorial war lords controlling the water, anyway. I may not have left this one as jazzed as from a Bourne movie, and more deaf, but it was still an absolute thrill ride.

Sequels It’s a truth universally acknowledged that the sequel to a successful movie is never as good as the first instalment, or it’s even better. Avengers: Age of Ultron falls somewhere in the middle. It’s very entertaining, certainly, if a bit long, but also full of what has become, effectively, stock-standard sequences. There are attempts to develop the characters, a little, but they don’t add all that much depth. Yes, they are comic book characters, so depth is only ever going to go so far. That scene as the team are walking up to a farmhouse highlights the silliness of it all: you are immediately reminded that they are all wearing rather ridiculous costumes out in the world. Looks like Halloween for some seriously embarrassed grown-ups. Ultron himself was something of a disappointment. Sure, James Spader was perfectly cast as the voice of the mechanical monster, but the physical representation probably should not have had lips or expressive eyes, and probably shouldn’t have been making quite so many jokes or using contractions. The purity of Ultron was always what made him most monstrous, after all. Vision was also rather too human; it was inevitable that Scarlet Witch would have her powers reimagined (“probability hexes” was always a bit of a struggle, so telekinesis and telepathy work a bit better); and where did Falcon fly in from? Never mind, it’s all a set up for a spin-off franchise, West Coast Avengers here we come. Joss Whedon will be remembered better for Buffy than for anything he’s accomplished so far on the big screen, but we can hope.. With the trailers for “Ant Man” and the reboot of “Fantastic Four”, and having sat through this film, I think I’m about over the super hero movies.

Gritty A Walk Among the Tombstones is a not half-bad adaptation of the Lawrence Block novel, but half of it is the rest of the Matthew Scudder series, and that's at least part of how the movie fails, ultimately. Liam Neeson falls in and out of his hard NY accent, and his team-up with the street kid, TJ, is, as every critic bothering to deal with it has mentioned, inexplicable and ultimately pointless, but my issues are somewhat different. The book left Scudder slightly off the hook for the vengence required by the end, but also left him open in the series to something darker than it had otherwise painted him to be. The movie tries to do the same, to a point, but ties the revenge to his past in a way that makes him out to be incapable of the redemption his sobriety would otherwise. So we're left wondering who Scudder is, without any questioning by Scudder, as is more characteristic, at least to this point in the series, of the literary PI. I'm surprised, a little, that it's taken this long to make even one of these novels into a movie. Neeson is perfect (barring the accent), and the movie captures much of NYC as a lived place. They could have started earlier and had a franchise, but I don't think we're going to get that, but if nothing else, I think I'll go back to the books before long.

Real and Unreal Very different recent movie viewings over the last week or so. First, Birdman, with Michael Keaton, a magical-realist story of a washed-up action hero trying to do a serious Broadway play, and maybe losing his mind in the process. Even though the setting is limited in scope, swirling around on itself as the characters move through the theatre and sometimes the bar next door, it's well-paced and keeps you moving right with it. The music, just drums, is sometimes intrusive, but not too often. And the titles are a throw-back to the sixties, when titles design was an integral part of movie-making much more so than is common now. Probably not for everyone, although it seems everyone is going to see it, as I keep overhearing people talking about it. That is most likely a function of just how good it is. Then Selma, which we saw at the St. George Bank Open Air Cinema. Rain poured in the hour the gates opened, but most of us didn't show up until well after. These are always top movies, first-runs, and a pleasant enough evening. The first time we went, high winds kept the screen from rising, but the second year was a treat. Selma can't be described that way. This is a tough movie to watch, and I kept flashing to Eric Garner and Ferguson Missouri. So much progress and so little changed. The performances are all of the highest quality, as is every other aspect of the film. I can find nothing to fault in it, except maybe that the actor playing George Wallace doesn't quite fit my rememberance of the man, whom I picture more like Edward G. Robinson. Funny what memory will do to pictures like this one. This is, however, one of those films that everyone will praise and many fewer will see, but it should be watched like the Best Picture it in many ways deserves to be.

Nobody Did It Gone Girl is a long movie, at 145 minutes, but worth all of it, and doesn’t feel long. It moves along at a good pace for a mystery that has no mystery in it, or at least not after you know the gimmick, after which it becomes a pretty good psycho-drama. It’s missing some exposition from the book that might have been helpful, but doesn’t suffer, and some of the emphasis was changed. Neil Patrick Harris was Supporting Actor Oscar-worthy, and the leads, Rosamund Pike and Ben Affleck, were more than just well-cast. Definitely worth the price of admission and one of the best adaptations to the screen I’ve seen. Best Screenplay, too? Could be.

Comics Is Guardians of the Galaxy as good as the trailers, or even the music on the trailers? Yes, it is (and so's the soundtrack, which I picked up as soon as it was available). It is, of course, a movie adaptation of yet another comic book franchise, and a fairly marginal one at that, one I'm not familiar with more than to know the name of the raccoon (Rocket, if you hadn't heard), or that it involves the Marvel universe's intergalactic characters, notably the Kree. It's full of little unreconcilable anachronisms and loose ends, not least being the nearly unintelligible Kree/Thanos subplot, but then again, so what? Sure, Peter Quill, Starlord, has access to spacecraft capable of taking him back to Earth, but why would he do so? Sure, Rocket is a raccoon, but he's smart, fairly talkative, and good with a gun; what's not to like? Groot, Gamora, Drax, well, maybe in the next movie we'll get more out of the latter two. The tree-guy's going to be the tree-guy and apparently not develop much further in his vocabulary than an additional pronoun. And we have the prospect of Awesome Mix volume 2 comprising the sound track in the sequel! Very entertaining, well-performed, very good to look at. Can't really ask for more in a movie and not be churlish, can you?

X-Notes Xmen-Days of Future Past" over the Queen's Birthday long weekend. A nice return to form, although I would have let it end more ambiguously. From the stinger after the credits, it's clear where they're going next, so I only wonder at the composition of the Four Horsemen, Death in particular, originally Angel, only a very minor character in the third of the film series, and last I saw still in possession of his wings. So, 2015 or 2016? Bryan Singer or someone else? Meanwhile, Guardians of the Galaxy was never in my rotation, but how can it be bad if it's got Rocket Raccoon?

Two by Two Last year, Russell Crowe was Jor-El in Man of Steel. The Rabbitohs, of which he is part-owner, issued a limited edition commemorative jersey with the Superman 'S' on it. (No, I did not buy one. There's a limit to fan-boy gear even I will own. Besides, they only have "ladies" and kids left in stock.) This year he's in Noah. Will they do a special rain day match? Wear wet jerseys? Sell wet jerseys? Will mascot Reggie Rabbit come onto the field two-by-two? Will Russell get drunk post-game and fall asleep naked on the pitch? If they win the championship this year, will all the other teams and fans be denied access to the stadium while the climate-change floods rage outside and the South Sydney faithful huddle within, waiting for an opportune moment to send out pigeons and meanwhile subsisting on ANZ Stadium pies and hot dogs? Man, I can hardly wait.

Reviews I try to keep up, but most of the music reviews I read are disappointing in the end, so when I finally broke down and picked up the debut CD from Lorde I was not only greatly relieved to quite like the music but also very impressed. Now I don't know if the sophomore effort will match the excellence on display with "Pure Heroine" but I also don't think I care. This is an artist to follow for a while. It may be that, like many solo acts, Lorde doesn't immediately show the kind of growth that an ensemble act might, the various creatives push against each other to keep things fresh, and it may be the case that the second album is the stuff that didn't make the cut for the first blow-them-away effort, but I don't get that impression here. Lorde shows an independence and a creativity that shows just how deep her artistry goes, how far she'll push herself from the start. Her lyrics are insightful, honest, and poetic, but don't get sappy or shy away from the points she wants to make, without getting in your face. If you can't deal, that's your problem, and fair enough. I've got "Royals" stuck on replay in my head and I'm liking it. Bring it, kid; I'm in it for the long haul if you are. I've seen a lot of movies across a fair swath of genres, often in subtitles. One of my new favourites: The Great Beauty. This has to be one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen on film. It is often terribly funny, but then as often deeply touching, or disturbing, or sorrowful. How do you feel for someone like Jep Gambardella, whose talents have been so beautifully wasted, and who, at the same time, can both recognize this and completely miss it? Toni Servillo is a very expressive actor, his mobile face conveying so much that his words and his silences can belie. The film could be Fellini's but doesn't fail in its modernity. We are dealing with a contemporary, those of us of an age, that is, although I dare say there are many much younger who would do well to heed the message: don't deny beauty when you find it or you deny yourself.