“... The film opens,​ as the credits roll down the screen, with shots of present-day downtown Manhattan. The chief angle of vision is on the balcony of an expensive penthouse in Dumbo, as a part of Brooklyn is now called. The name recalls Walt Disney, of course, but like many New York neighbourhoods (SoHo, Tribeca) has a more literal or lettered source in the words ‘down under the Manhattan Bridge overpass ...”

“... Wes Anderson’s​ new film, Asteroid City, is like a cartoon without the toons. It’s true that the alien who descends (twice) into the picture looks like a drawing of a long-legged human tadpole. Similarly, the desert where much of the film is set looks less like an actual landscape than a sketch of somebody’s idea of such a place, complete with squiggled humps serving as mesas ...”

“... French moralists​ are not usually moralisers. They explore moral ground by turning its difficulties into aphorisms. They are because they think; they are frightened by the eternal silence of infinite space; they remind us that hell is other people. Or they make movies. Among the early works of Éric Rohmer are Six Moral Tales. Among his late works are Tales of the Four Seasons, which take the notion of moral experience for granted ...”

“... It’s​ tempting to think of Past Lives, Celine Song’s haunting (and haunted) first film, as a work in search of a story. In the end, though, it’s exactly the reverse. The story is there but the characters can’t live it. They can’t let it happen and they can’t let it go. ‘What a good story this is,’ one of them says at a certain point ...”

“... Rodrigo Moreno’s​ The Delinquents has taken a while to reach us. Its premiere was at Cannes in May 2023. The fate of the film imitates, in a way, its main theme. It’s about getting lost, or not getting lost enough. It has been described as a heist movie and a comedy. These labels are appropriate only if every bank robbery is a heist, and if we call films comedies when we can’t think of another word to describe them ...”

“... The bad year​ in Bertrand Bonello’s dizzying film The Beast is 2025. That’s when everything went wrong. By 2044, the latest date in the movie, the world is steady again and much improved. The bots are in charge and humans have only humble clerical jobs where their mistakes will not matter much. The bots are human in their fashion, a long way from being mere machines ...”

“... Towards the end​ of Levan Akin’s shape-shifting movie Crossing, a character says that she has begun to think of Istanbul as ‘a place where people come to disappear’. She has strong personal reasons for the thought, having travelled from Batumi in Georgia to look for her sister’s transgender child, who left home long ago, chased out by an angry father ...”

“... In​ a recent interview Sean Baker said he likes to resist purely ‘grey and drab’ moments in life or movies. ‘Even when I’m going through hard times, I still see colour.’ This is literally true of the palette of his films and especially of the scenes at Brighton Beach and Coney Island in his new movie, Anora, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year ...”

“... What’s​ new? An old song begs our pardon for asking that. Guillermo del Toro’s new film, Frankenstein, is too busy to bother with such a query, but it’s aware of its own prehistory. It knows, for example, that if we ask AI how many films about Frankenstein there have been it will say it doesn’t know for sure, but there are more than four hundred ...”

“... The​ title seems a little tame if you haven’t seen the movie. L’Histoire de Souleymane: Souleymane’s Story (or History). For once the problem or the fun has nothing to do with the double meaning of the French word histoire. It just feels as if the director of the film, Boris Lojkine, and his co-writer, Delphine Agut, could have worked a bit harder ...”

“... We may have​ mixed feelings about the title of Steven Spielberg’s new movie, Disclosure Day. Doesn’t it sound a bit legal? How close is ‘disclosure’ to its apparent synonyms ‘revelation’ and ‘exposure’? Spielberg invites us to dismiss these worries and enjoy our liberal selves. When, about halfway through the film, a character talks about ‘full disclosure’, meaning a sort of triumph, he is looking forward to a spectacular, worldwide explosion of revealed meaning and trust in the unknown ...”

“... not a mystery, because it doesn’t have a solution, only multiple, intimated causes. The plot of Michael Haneke’s Caché, on the other hand, is a mystery, because it has several solutions, all dull. The dullest is the one the director himself seems to prefer: there is no solution, and only unsophisticated viewers will worry about such things, instead of ...”

“... superiority, however, is not the end of the story. The fact that both androids are played by Michael Fassbender, one as a stiff, friendly American guy and the other as the imitation of Peter O’Toole he had already perfected in Prometheus, adds to the riddle. And here, as in so many science-fiction movies, the decision to have the character of a robot ...”

“... directly and by anagram to the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail: Richard Leigh and Michael Baigent, who recently sued Brown’s publisher for plagiarism and lost. The third author, Henry Lincoln, didn’t sue. The book itself is mentioned in large capitals, and Teabing comments on it pedantically (‘their fundamental premise is sound’). Of ...”

“... abnegation is too much to expect of any director with two expensive stars on his hands. Remember Michael Mann’s thriller Heat, where Robert de Niro and Al Pacino get together for a totally inconsequential conversation just so we can see them together before they return to their posts on opposite sides of the law. The stars have to share serious screen ...”