Gemko Quibi: November 2025

As a reminder: These are brief (though they always wind up growing longer and longer) thoughts on films that I'm revisiting mostly just because it's been at least 20 years and I’m feeling nostalgic and/or want to have a rating for them. Mostly stuff that's about to be removed from a streaming service to which I subscribe, so far. See the original post for a fuller explanation. (I'm now throwing in repeat viewings of more recent films as well; those generally used to get no additional words unless my opinion significantly changed or something new occurred to me.)

Nikita (1990, Luc Besson): 61/100

Previously seen: ca. April 1991, San Jose, CA (Camera One).

Original opinion: Here's a postcard I sent to a friend back then (demonstrating once again that I used semicolons in casual correspondence even as a very young man). The screenplay I mention was actually finished on 23 October 1991 and wound up getting me into NYU a few months later.

Now: Way cool. Not much on substance, but it looks really good. Parillaud makes Nikita so obnoxious in her initial pseudo-punk incarnation that I found myself resisting the film for a while, but the sheer sadism of her first assignment, in which she finds that her designated escape route was bricked up long ago (thereby forcing her to fight her way out), gets you firmly on her side, and it's pretty smooth sailing thereafter. Not surprised to discover that there've been a couple of TV spinoffs, as this kinda feels like an extended introduction to some series or franchise. Dragged down a bit by Eric Serra's grating score ("Who composed this? Oh, fuck, same dude who did GoldenEye") and a weak shoulder-shrug ending. Just double-checked and yes, this was my very first time seeing Jeanne Moreau in anything, though you can kinda tell that part's being played by a legend.

ADVENTURES IN TRICKY TRANSLATION: At one point, English subtitles have the handler played by Tchéky Karyo (R.I.P., first of several consecutive memorial viewings this month) ask Nikita "How's it going?", to which she replies "I wish it had gone," which is so lame that I went back and listened to what they actually said. "Ça marche, les études?" "J'ai mal aux pieds." That's more or less "Training [or studies] going well?" "My feet hurt," playing on the double meaning of the French verb marcher, which you probably can work out without assistance. I might've suggested "How's it coming?" "I wish I were going," which still isn't great but at least doesn't clang quite so loudly.

ANAL-RETENTIVE TITLE CORNER: Obviously this film's known as La Femme Nikita in the U.S. (Did Samuel Goldwyn add those two words to make sure, back when the Cold War was still on, that American audiences knew the film was French and not Russian? Guess that must be why.) I'd forgotten that its onscreen title is simply Nikita, and since that's not really in a foreign language (requiring no translation), I feel obligated to go with it.

Rambling Rose (1991, Martha Coolidge): 69/100

Previously seen: ca. September 1991, San Jose, CA (Century 24).

Original opinion: Very favorable. Didn't make my contemporaneous top 10 list, but I included it among my next 10, alongside the likes of Terminator 2 and Poison. Also had Lukas Haas among my five Supporting Actor picks. (Was surprised that Laura Dern wasn't among my Actresses until I saw who was: Davis and Sarandon in Thelma & Louise, Alison Steadman in Life Is Sweet, Juliet Stevenson in Truly, Madly, Deeply, and—most of you will have to trust me on this one—Judy Davis in Impromptu. Tough lineup to crack.)

Now: Doubt you could show a teenage boy masturbate an adult woman to orgasm today, even out of frame (as Coolidge shoots it here). More than that, there's no way that a 2025 adaptation of Willingham's novel (unread by me) would present Rose as so morally weak and piteously needy—even the overly blunt line at the end that's meant to explain/exonerate her ("Girls don't want sex. Girls want love") would now be charged with denying female sexual agency. So I'm glad this film got made at a time when it could be a big ol' psychodramatic mess, pulling no punches about a teen boy's thoughtless hormonal curiosity and giving Dern a fantastic opportunity to play against type as a slow-witted creature of pure impulse who doesn't so much ramble as get battered around by emotions she doesn't fully understand and can't entirely control. Makes for a fascinating contrast with her mother (R.I.P. #2), who starts out Southern Imperious but eventually gets one barn-burner of a monologue roasting the men who want to solve Rose’s problems by lobotomizing her. Discomfiting in mostly good ways. Still not a fan of the John Heard bookend sequences, though.

Once Were Warriors (1994, Lee Tamahori): 47/100

Previously seen: 5 March 1995, New York, NY (Angelika).

Original opinion: 2½ stars out of four. I launched my website five months later and wrote a quick one-sentence review: "Not terribly subtle, nor (apart from Rena Owen's work) very compelling."

Now: Owen is indeed quite good, but she's trapped in a miserabilist piledriver that's all women getting punched repeatedly in the face at prizefighter force and being driven to suicide by family-friend rape and just generally inhabiting a testosterone-poisoned nightmare. Temuera Morrison (who I've only just now discovered has been playing Boba Fett and various other Fetts all over the Star Wars universe for decades, even briefly had his own spinoff TV series) gets one strong scene demonstrating how a serial abuser can smooth-talk his way back into the victim's good graces, but he also does a whole lotta bug-eyed glowering and belligerent yelling that, however accurate the behavior, just isn't dramatically interesting to me. Tamahori (R.I.P. #3) directs with muscular energy, and the milieu was certainly revelatory for an American viewer who'd learned of Maoris just 18 months or so earlier via The Piano. Ultimately, though, this isn't much more than two hours of hard-to-endure punishment that finally culminates in "Enough."

Sinners (2025, Ryan Coogler): 73/100

Previously seen: 6 May 2025, Oxnard, CA (Century Riverpark). I was in Africa when it opened, so it took me a couple weeks.

Original opinion: 73/100. Reviewed it for y'all.

Now: I've grown increasingly disenchanted with the device of opening your movie on something splashy and then flashing back to the narrative's actual beginning. It can work beautifully, of course (Sunset Boulevard and Brick spring immediately to mind, no doubt there are a zillion others), but here, for example, I don't feel like we need Sammie showing up at church bloodied and scarred, clutching his guitar neck. Feels a bit cheap. On the flip side, this time I appreciated even more how seductive Remmick's solidarity pitch is ("You ain't safe here. No matter how many guns or how much money. They gonna take it from you when they want"; love that we naturally make an incorrect assumption about what "You ain't safe here" means, until he continues), and marveled at e.g. the moment when Mary screams in horror upon seeing [SPOILER] get staked in the heart by request—she's now part of the assimilated Borg-style villain, but that plays exactly as if she's still one of our identification figures. Very savvy.

Afterglow (1997, Alan Rudolph): 39/100

Previously seen: 28 August 1997, New York, NY (press screening, Sony screening room—first film I ever saw there).

Original opinion: Two stars out of four. Wrote an "In Brief" review on my site at the time, recycled that into an EW capsule nearly a year later.

Now: I was wrong to place so much blame on miscast actors—this is just a bad script, heavy on petty sniping that's devoid of wit or insight. That's Ed, the younger half of this quartet gets fairly devoured by the legendary-old-pro half, possibly by design. Jonny Lee Miller in particular comes across like a body-swapped 10-year-old poorly mimicking adult behavior as learned from TV sitcoms. And you'd think Rudolph would be above writing a sexually frustrated housewife who throws herself at the handyman. Had completely forgotten that Christie was Oscar-nominated for this performance, which seems improbable—not because she isn't good, but just because really, that many AMPAS voters actually saw Afterglow?

Pulse (2001, Kiyoshi Kurosawa): 86/100

Previously seen: 7 September 2001, Toronto, ON (Varsity 4); 26 February 2002, New York, NY (Walter Reade); 3 November 2005, New York, NY (press screening, I believe at Magno, have a memory of talking to Matt Zoller Seitz afterward while waiting for the F train).

Original opinion: B+ at TIFF (from which I wrote only "Let's just say that one of the reasons I'm updating this page at nearly 1AM is that I'm afraid to turn out the light in my hotel room"), then 84/100 on second viewing (when I wrote a longer review, scroll down), bumped to 86/100 in 2005.

Now: Started noting all the elements of this film that creep me the fuck out and within like 10 minutes the list was already prohibitively long. Takefumi Haketa's atonal score. Starting the narrative with zero preamble, characters we've barely met (working on a rooftop greenhouse or something?) discussing a co-worker's odd absence. Blatant rear projection outside the bus windows as Michi rides to Taguchi's place. The somehow unsettling way that she's framed looking at what we'll later learn is the door to a Forbidden Room. (Not sure whether the red tape's already visible, as red's hard for me to spot from that distance. Probably is.) All the distortion caused by huge sheets of plastic hanging in Taguchi's apartment. Taguchi casually picking up the cable with which he'll hang (he hanged? proper tense uncertain) himself, while still chatting amiably with Michi. Again, we're still only like halfway through reel one at this point. Few movies have ever generated so much dis-ease from so little. And while I no longer feel a strong urge to flee during the first Forbidden Room scene (only because I know what happens, or doesn't happen), her slo-mo walk/stumble still made every one of my arm hairs stand on end. (Actually that happened just upon the cut to her standing in the shadows, even though I was steeled for it.) Will allow that some of the expository nature-of-ghosts dialogue can be ponderous, and I forget every single time about that godawful pop song that accompanies the end credits. For fuck’s sake why, Kiyoshi? I might just die, Kiyoshi.

Little Man Tate (1991, Jodie Foster): 45/100

Previously seen: ca. October 1991, San Jose, CA (Century 22).

Original opinion: Found a 1994 rec.arts.movies thread about Mark Isham in which I said "Another fine effort was his score for Jodie Foster's Little Man Tate. I liked his score a lot more than I liked the film itself." (Still own the soundtrack.) And I didn't include the film on a list of nearly 30 honorable mentions for my '91 top 10 list (as written to a friend in February of '92). Probably safe to say mixed at best.

Now: In theory, this should be a slam-dunk subject for me—while I wasn't a child prodigy on Fred's level, my mother declined an elementary-school recommendation that I be skipped from 1st to 4th grade, fearing that it would stunt my social growth to be years younger than everyone else in class. (Instead, I was shuttled once weekly to a special off-site class for gifted students, where we'd be challenged a bit more. This was really necessary because I used to finish every problem/assignment in that year's textbooks for fun during week one and then spend the rest of that entire school year surreptitiously reading for pleasure.) Scott Frank's screenplay, however, seems extremely muddled, at once suggesting that Fred needs intellectual stimulation his working-class mother can't provide and (less persuasively) that Jane's school for pint-sized brainiacs warps developing minds. I guess the idea's to achieve a proper balance, but arriving there via ludicrous scenes like Fred freaking out on a TV show and reciting his public-school classmate's childishly terrible poem about clipper ships (from memory, having heard it once) wasn't the way to go. This is a movie in which Josh Mostel's professor starts off by announcing that Phys 105 is a class on quantum physics, not physical education, and ~85% of the class gets up and leaves. Ha ha! Ha. Foster does a creditable job behind the camera, but no film she's directed since has attracted my attention. Poor instincts there.

Shadows and Fog (1991, Woody Allen): 60/100

Previously seen: 20 March 1992, San Jose, CA (Saratoga 6). Fun fact for New Yorkers: This was among the first films ever screened at the Walter Reade, which opened in December '91. That's the only reason it's designated as '91, in fact; all of its theatrical/festival runs were the following year.

Original opinion: From a letter to a friend dated 6 April 1992: "I understand this movie’s very derivative of German Expressionist films of the ’30s, but I haven’t seen any of those films yet, so I loved it. In case you haven’t heard, it’s Death. Rewritten, of course, but a lot of the dialogue is word-for-word, particularly dealing with the various vigilante factions. I am starting to get annoyed by his use of celebrities in tiny cameos, though. It gets a bit distracting." (He and I knew Allen's plays Death and God well; I performed a 10-minute cut of the latter in high school forensics, with great success.)

Now: 33 years later, I've seen plenty of Murnau and Lang, plus read most of Kafka, and I still like Shadows and Fog more than most seem to. For one thing, it truly looks fantastic—can't think of another riff on German Expressionism (or even an actual example of same) that pushes the visual aesthetic this freakin' hard, shrouding every single exterior shot (on a gigantic forbidding soundstage) in hazy gray murk. And I just plain enjoy the idea of turning Woody's neurotic persona into (essentially) Josef K. and placing him in that cinematic context. Of course, we also get diverted into early-Bergman circus melodrama, plus a brothel scene that has no particular provenance I'm aware of (just Allen being hooker-happy), and Death isn't especially strong on one-liners (which I why I chose to perform God instead). And the revised ending ditches Kafka for an entirely unrelated paean to our collective need for illusions, though I do like Kenneth Mars' magician trapping the killer via various truly impossible magic tricks. As you can see from my rating, I'm right on the good/fair borderline with this one, ultimately tipping toward the latter. But I miss these experiments.

The Third Generation (1979, Rainer Werner Fassbinder): 64/100

Previously seen: 20 February 1997, New York, NY (MoMA, Fassbinder retro).

Original opinion: Unfortunately, I mostly piggybacked onto a friend’s assessment in the relevant email (a group-chat forerunner). “I don’t have much to add to Steve’s comments, except that this film features one of the ten best opening credits sequences I’ve ever seen. Definitely among the best Fassbinders I’ve seen so far.”

Now: Yeah, that pulsing credit sequence (which has to have influenced Noé) rocks. I think Nocturama improved on what follows, though these terrorist-dilettantes are older and significantly less organized, getting distracted before and during their operation rather than afterward while in hiding. Fassbinder’s cavalier attitude toward rape doesn’t exactly thrill me, either, especially when it’s as inessential as this (practically thrown away). Still, the clash of quasi-revolutionary personalities generates sparks, and [SPOILER] being a double agent allows for a bloody third act that doesn’t defy plausibility the way that Bonello’s did for me. (One death’s unexpected abruptness arguably qualifies as pure comedy. Likewise the Carnival disguises, especially since Fassbinder doesn’t bother with any contextualizing.) Vitus Zeplichal, who I know only from this film and Berlin Alexanderplatz (in which he plays Rudi), though he had small roles in others, was an undervalued member of RWF’s ensemble (which of course included the singular Udo Kier, R.I.P. #4; adore his initial curly hair in this one).

The Host (2006, Bong Joon-ho): 78/100

Previously seen: 22 May 2006, Cannes, France (Croisette); 8 September 2006, Toronto, ON (Ryerson). So this was my first time watching it in the United States, even though I’ve owned it on first DVD and now Blu-ray for almost 20 years. Trying to take better advantage of my video library, especially now that I own far more films than I can regularly revisit.

Original opinion: 76/100 at both Cannes and TIFF. I later reviewed it for Nerve .com.

Now: Tiny rating bump simply reflects my enjoying it even more than previously (and also finding it less tonally incoherent—that’s mostly just one early weirdly comic instance of exaggerated collective mourning, which is hard to reconcile with how full-bore grim the movie gets later on). Have watched the initial Han River attack many times since but had completely forgotten such choice stuff from later on as (1) the dude who sells out Nam-il in an attempt to collect reward money giving him a hesitant power salute as he escapes; (2) Gang-du busting out of the trailer in which he’s being experimentally tortured to find all the scientists and military folk having a barbecue; and (3) the hilariously truncated payoff to Nam-joo tending to hesitate before shooting an arrow. Transition from basic mutant-monster movie to pointed sociopolitical commentary about weaponizing fear of a virus remains ungainly at best, but that’s my sole strong reservation. Still can’t believe Once and Atonement kept this out of the Skandies picture roster. (Hell, it finished slightly below The Bourne Ultimatum! Which is admittedly the best of the Bournes, I like that one a lot, but still.)

Felicia’s Journey (1999, Atom Egoyan): 57/100

Previously seen: 18 August 1999, New York, NY (press screening, Magno).

Original opinion: B-minus. Which was a truly crushing disappointment at the time, as Egoyan was then my favorite working filmmaker, coming off three consecutive triumphs. (Would be five, but I just don’t much like The Adjuster.) Reviewed it on my site.

Now: Spent the first half hour or so wondering what my problem had been, so blatantly masterful did every shot and Hoskins’ uncharacteristically avuncular (more like aunt-icular, really; there seems to be no female equivalent of the word) performance seem. Turns out I felt similarly the first time (didn’t read my previous review ’til afterward), with frustration kicking in only as the film relies more and more on flashbacks—largely superfluous in Felicia’s case, overly blunt in Hilditch’s—while spinning its narrative wheels like it’s stuck in a muddy field. No Wikipedia yet in ’99, so I’m only learning now that Trevor’s novel executes an abrupt switch in perspective (from Felicia to Hilditch) following a cliffhanger of sorts (“What happens next is unstated,” says here); Egoyan’s effort to fill that gap is precisely what works least well onscreen, though I also just don’t care for the evangelical aspect (which comes from Trevor). Also now more inclined to agree with my old friend Charles about the score being overly busy/frenetic—Danna’s sort of attempting what Mazurek did in The Mastermind, I think, but these characters aren’t so opaque, don’t need the counterpoint. If you want a demonstration of range, though, just watch The Long Good Friday and Felicia’s Journey back to back.

I Killed My Mother (2009, Xavier Dolan): 71/100

Previously seen: 23 May 2009, Cannes, France (Croisette). This and Dogtooth were the last two films I saw at Cannes that year, on the fest’s final day, and also my two favorites (not counting Everyone Else, which I saw in the Market but was actually a Berlin title). Good save!

Original opinion: 71/100. Addressed it briefly in my final Cannes report for the A.V. Club.

Now: Rare that I thoroughly enjoy a movie with this much screaming (of the “I hate you!” variety), but the volatility fits adolescence, and Dolan does a remarkable job—especially for a teenage* first-time director—of modulating between vitriol and solicitude. He makes some bold structural choices, too, e.g. repeatedly showing Hubert and Antonin hanging out together but not revealing that they’re a couple until Mom finds out (deep into the movie), and then withholding the inevitable confrontation until nearly the end, when she finally deploys her knowledge of the relationship and his orientation as a what-hurts-is-that-you-didn’t-tell-me weapon. Less enamored of his penchant for placing characters side by side and shooting each in a single with tons of empty space, jamming one actor frame right and the other frame left—it works the first time to visually suggest mother/son isolation, but then he keeps doing it irrespective of the emotional context. Rookie jitters, “gotta make it interesting.” Still his best film imo, and evidently he’s now retired (didn’t hear that at the time) so it may well remain so.

* He turned 20 in March 2009, two months prior to the film’s premiere, but was almost certainly still 19 during production.

As a supplement, some brief notes re: movies I bailed on last month. (Just one this month.)

The Things You Kill (Alireza Khatami): Evidently this takes a surprising turn at some point—Michael Sicinski's review notes that it's one of those films that "trusts [its] audience to hang tight and ride out the confusion." Thing is, I wasn't confused so much as just uninterested in the protagonist's various problems (infertility, domestic violence in the family, job insecurity), and experience has taught me that if a filmmaker didn't succeed in making the setup compelling for its own sake, no subsequent narrative and/or tonal shift will fully compensate. (Perhaps the only exception I can think of is Arlington Road, a paranoid thriller in which every element that I found idiotically non-credible ultimately gets revealed as deliberately so.)