Fred Hechinger

Preparation for the Next Life

by
Aishe and Skinner stare at each other

As a title Preparation for the Next Life sounds a bit sci-fi, spiritual maybe. But in fact it’s set in the very real world of the immigrant experience, as seen through the eyes of a young Uyghur woman who has arrived in New York on the back of a truck and is now trying to make a go of things without papers. As I type Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are rounding up people all over the USA, so this film, shot in late 2024 and early 2025, couldn’t be more timely. Director Bing Liu is best known for his documentaries, All These Sons and the Oscar-nominated Minding the Gap. He seems keen … Read more

Hell of a Summer

by
Mike

Billy Bryk and Finn Wolfhard met as actors on the Ghostbusters: Afterlife shoot, realised they had similar tastes and decided to write a movie together. Hell of a Summer is the result. It’s an “everyone dies” slasher set at a summer camp where counsellors have assembled before the kids arrive to have some bongs’n’beers before settling down to their more serious duties. Gruesome comic death is the idea, which Bryk and Wolfhard establish in a pre-credits sequence in which a guitar played around a camp fire ends up where campfire guitars should probably end up more often, and both the senior counsellors at this remote place take a one-way journey to eternity. After … Read more

Gladiator II

by
Paul Mescal looking thoughtful

As if made by the “if you like that you’ll like this” algorithm, Gladiator II takes all the bits you liked in the first film and does them all over again, with a bit more blood, a touch less swagger and far better CGI than Ridley Scott could muster in 2000. Scott is again at the helm, with quite a few members of the same technical team from the first film – DP John Mathieson most notably – a couple of the same actors in the shape of Derek Jacobi and Connie Nielsen, and pretty much the same storyline. The original Gladiator opened with a spectacular battle sequence, and so does this film – flaming fireballs … Read more

Human Capital

by
Quint and Drew face off

First-world and real-world problems collide in Human Capital, which started life as an American novel, became an Italian movie (Il capitale umano) in 2013 and then returned to the US in 2019 for this English-language version. How best to describe all three? Bonfire of the Vanities meets The Ice Storm will about do it. In other words a broad spectrum portrait of modern life, with a narrow focus critique of the elite at its core. It starts, as Bonfire of the Vanities did, with a car accident, and then plays and replays the story from the point of view of each of the characters involved. Not the same events, exactly, but a “how … Read more