Thursday, January 9, 2025

A Real Pain starts and ends at the same spot. Two cousins, David (Jesse Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin), as close as brothers, attempt to heal their generational trauma and their relationship with each other by flying out to Poland to visit their late grandmother's house. But most trips abroad, no matter the weight of transformation we place on them, start and end at the same spot. Usually, it's an airport terminal hall.

The real test of how much we've been transformed only occurs once we've reentered the quotidian cycle of our lives. Yet Eisenberg, also the film's writer and director, makes a provocative choice here. We never find out what happens next. A Real Pain is a film that's really an ellipsis. That's where it derives its tender power.

Read the full review here. 

Out this week: 

There's a trio of award-nominated (and award-worthy) performances to seek out: Kieran Culkin in Jesse Eisenberg's comedy drama A Real Pain (****), Angelina Jolie as the magnificent opera star Maria Callas in Pablo Larraín's Maria (****), and Nicole Kidman in the very sexy Babygirl (****). 

A little more under the radar, but still worth your time, is Magnus von Horn's bleak and elementally frightening tale of impoverishment and motherhood, set on the eve of World War I, The Girl with the Needle (****). 

Written by Clarisse Loughrey

In the cinema of kink – Secretary (2002), The Duke of Burgundy (2014), or, at its nadir, Fifty Shades of Grey (2015) – there's often a pattern of the learned and unlearned, the assured and unassured, and not always in a way that correlates directly to the dynamic of dominant and submissive. It's often sexuality as the experience of the naif, taken by the hand and led into a private world, the halls of pleasure already constructed and defined by another.

Babygirl is different. Dutch writer-director Halina Reijn, also behind 2022's amusingly nihilistic slasher Bodies Bodies Bodies, has made a BDSM film rife with fumbling uncertainty. Yet it's no less sexy, unabashedly and giddily so, thanks in great part to its committed leads, Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson.

Tech CEO Romy (Kidman) is deeply in love with her husband, Jacob (Antonio Banderas), but sexually unfulfilled. She'll fake her orgasm, sneak off into a dark room, and masturbate to BDSM porn. She knows what she wants, but won't accept it. She's a submissive in denial. But Samuel (Harris Dickinson), the new intern she embarks on an affair with, isn't exactly a connoisseur in the art, either. He's got a strong opening play – he sends her a glass of milk at the bar, covertly watches her down it in one gulp, and then whispers "good girl" on the way out – but starts to falter in the bedroom. "Maybe take your clothes off?" he suggests. They've both eagerly consented to the arrangement, but the question is: what happens next?

Reijn is interested in the conflict between the subconscious and the conscious, and cinematographer Jasper Wolf's camera reflects that prickly sensation with a sort of slick casualness, as if we're overhearing everything from the corner of an executive party. Romy wants her sex life to reflect her "girlboss" persona, in which she's always on top, even in the bedroom (in fact, that's exactly where we first find her). But she's practically been made speechless by her own shame, which means the first moment of revelation arrives as a wave of existential terror. Facedown on the floor, on the verge of tears, she whispers, "I can't, I'm gonna pee, I don't want to pee", seconds before she climaxes in a series of grunts so animalistic you could only trust an actor as fearless as Kidman to deliver them.

Read the full review here. 

A document of where I've gone and the things I've seen 

Saturday, 4 January
I visited London's The Design Museum, which currently hosts two cinema-adjacent temporary exhibitions: Barbie: The Exhibition and The World of Tim Burton. The first has a couple of props and costumes from Greta Gerwig's 2023 film, while the second is a delightful mix of both the filmmaker's vast repository of sketches and paintings, alongside a small(ish) collection of props and costumes. Both are a must-see for respective fans. Pink and black do look good together. 

 Monday, 6 January 

I attended an early screening of Babygirl. Cheers to Nicole Kidman for downing an entire glass of milk in honour of the film at the gala for The National Board of Review. 

Wednesday, 9 January 

I attended an early screening of Robert Zemeckis's high-concept, time-spanning drama Here. You can read my thoughts on it next week. 

A detail from a costume featured in Tim Burton's 'Sleepy Hollow' 

In Se7en, faith has never seemed more perverse. There's a light-up neon cross over a bed, in the apartment of a serial killer (Kevin Spacey) who believes he's been commandeered by a higher power to enact revenge on an unsalvageable city. In David Fincher's genre-shifting crime drama, both its detective hero, William Somerset (Morgan Freeman), and its villain ultimately agree on the same vital point. The city is sick.

And it's not something to be so easily waved away by Somerset's junior, David Mills (Brad Pitt), as the work of "crazies". Or of social aberrations. No, it's a deeper infection, and it stains every frame of Fincher's film, which has the appearance of having been lathered in a thick coat of grease (achieved through something called a bleach bypass, which entails partially or wholly skipping the bleaching step during the processing of colour film, leaving behind the silver in the emulsion).

"How can I bring a child into a world like this?" Somerset wonders, in one of the film's rare, tender moments. He's been invited to a coffee shop by Mills's wife, Tracy (Gwyneth Paltrow), who's just found out she's pregnant, but can't bear the life her husband's invited her into to. Even their pleasant, little apartment, a supposed haven against the metropolitan storm, rattles every five minutes from the sound of the subway. The terrible revelation at the heart of Se7en isn't, really, what's in the box. It's the knowledge that the one who committed such a brutal act isn't the devil, nor any illogical, supernatural entity. As Somerset warns, "He's just a man."

'Se7en' screens at Cineworld Cinemas on 10 and 14 January as part of its Fincher Season. 

Cynthia Erivo attends the Evening Standard Theatre Awards at The Savoy Hotel on November 17, 2013 in London, England.

(Photo by Ben A. Pruchnie/Getty Images)

With a new Wolf Man film on the horizon, I'll be turning back to the classics, and to George Waggner's 1941 take on the tale, The Wolf Man. 

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