The Current Cinema - David Hare runs through his best films of 2025 - Richard Linklater and Kelly Reichardt star

 Let me start with the two best movies of last year. 

The four screens above show Ethan Hawke in Blue Moon wiping out the set with his performance of Larry Hart in Richard Linklater’s frankly dumbfounding six scene re-imagining of Larrys last Night in Sardi's to horn in for a moment on Rodger's new triumph, Oklahoma! with his new lyricist, the appalling but brilliant Oscar Hammerstein II, and Larry's loss to him. 

 

Coming as this does after watching Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague earlier this year, but made after that one, itself a totally winning and transparently affectionate song to Godard and 1960 from someone who loved and remembers it for those of us who lived through it and remember it too. 

 

With Blue Moon, I think Linklater has confected a six scene Kammerspiel in a single Sardi's set in a remembered 1943 on that night of the Oklahoma! premiere. The first fifty minutes are almost entirely a monologue in what might be the Oscar winner for the year, but it's more than a tribute from me to Ethan Hawke to characterize such a complex and paradoxical genius as Hart with so much finesse, never allowing the gloom and self-pity to overrun the brilliance, nor pure fancy free to undermine the razor sharp ear for dirty truths. His humour stands beyond everything and the delivery is up there in lights at the level of a Hildy Johnson/Ros Russell high speed soliloquy. 

 

Unlike Nouvelle Vague, in which Linklater so brilliantly and lovingly homages the cinephilia and the whole art of mise-en-scene, Blue Moon does a Dreyer-esque containment to the six movement structure of the kammerspiel and orchestrates the rivers of dialogue, all of it brilliant (because perhaps largely reported truth) with the sheer, simple grace of the cinema's most primal tools, slow diagonal tracks, tight close shots to medium close shots. Minimum resort to shot/reverse, constant and regular staging in depth to entail conversations and moveable lighting to encase and amplify the mood 

 

And of course the music. 

 

Kelly Reichardt's new movie, The Mastermind is another total surprise formally from Kelly for me if not quite at the smoothly-paced and endlessly rewarding movie about achievement, her previous Showing Up from 2023 in which the simple but painfully difficult act of creating art succeeds to give its own reward. 

 

The Mastermind spends the first half of the picture simply showing us the unravelling of a man (Josh O'Connor, above) who is both doomed to failure, but who it seems may have no other options in life. After the distinctive slow-cinema tempo of the first half the movie takes off into a catastrophic narrative disconnection for a man, by now alone without any badly needed love except for his remaining friend played by a wonderful John Magaro (with O'Connor, screen below). Magaro may be the last friend he'll ever have.

 

If you've got the patience for Kelly's pacing and quiet, clear headed and endlessly rewarding observational cinema this work satisfied me and moved me very greatly. Up there with Blue Moon for the year. 

 

Not everything in the USA is going to hell in 2025 if these two movies can come out of arthouse/studio streaming funding .

 

…and now some more.

 

Paula Beer, Miroirs No. 3

Petzold’s Miroirs No. 3. Paula Beer, as usual radiant, and joined deftly if too late in the piece by the very appealing Enno Trebs with whom she was coupled initially in Petzold’s last film Afire/Rote Himmel from 2023. That film for me is a masterpiece. If  Miroirs No. 3 doesn’t come near its emotional intensity and impact, I can only think Petzold wanted to make a return to his blurred and displaced/missing identities pictures from earlier titles like Barbara and Phoenix. Regardless, I’ll watch everything he makes.

 

And a callout for del Toro’s big, blousy Frankenstein. What can I say? Oscar Isaac gives a characterization of the doctor that puts him beyond Oscar territory. Like Ethan Hawke, albeit somewhat younger, Isaac really is a dedicated actor’s actor, peerless in appeal - the first movie I watched him in was the Coen’s very fine Inside Llewyn Davis. I also found him/find him totally babe-licious. Never hurts does it? 

 

Oscar Isaac, Frankenstein

Back to Frankenstein, is there anything more wonderful than Del Toro’s sumptuous love for and recreation of the sublime Romantic world of Gothic Horror. Is there any greater genre? And his work continues, with Universal that studio's fantastic transition of 20s Weimar Germany with all its magic and miracle then to America’s and Laemmle’s Universal Studios literally rebirthing the total UfA tradition. Del Toro’s new movie is not his best - I find a few too many gestural narrative steps that seem redundant to the pacing. But who else is doing this stuff anymore? And so well?

 

And a mention in anticipation of P.T.Anderson’s new gig, One Battle After Another which will be viewed when the UHD disc arrives next week.

 

Also running high, Ozon’s big return to seductively transgressive form with Quand Vient l’Automne. It’s as he were if in radical gay brotherhood with his younger colleague, the great Alain Guiraudie, whose hilariously subversive social undermining takes the bejesus out of French Provincial bovinity in Miséricordia in which only the old Catholic priest seems to get laid.

 

Quand Vient l’Automne

The Goddess knows the world needs all the anarchists and transgressives it can get in these terrible dying days of rotting, corrupt Western Societies.

The Current Cinema and soon streaming on MUBI - Unimpressed by THE MASTERMIND (Kelly Reichardt, USA, 2025

I guess it’s the disconnect…  “You will be the only person in Australia watching that film tonight” said the rueful cinema proprietor when I mentioned I planned to see Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind  that night. Not true. There were six others scattered round the Ritz’s luxurious basement room Cinema 9 at the 6.00 pm session. Still you wouldn’t need many fingers to count the national theatrical box office gross apparently.

Reichardt is a bit of a favourite. Gentle, thoughtful storytelling which on occasions, like Wendy and Lucy,  had me choking up. Certain Women  and Night Moves were among the best of the year. Reichardt did do a fine revisionist western, Meek's Cutoff so there was plenty to hope that The Mastermind  would be an artful attempt to take on a perennially popular genre, turn it on its head and make a movie that had people chortling at its riffs.  Its public trajectory is straight from the competition at Cannes, via the SFF and MIFF (where I’m guessing it cleaned up), a few days in cinemas before it goes to MUBI. That's becoming a well-worn path not just with MUBI but every streaming service trying to get some award kudos. (At least three of the trailers at the Ritz before the movie started had the Netflix logo.)

The Mastermind takes more than a while to give us the whole story of James, a dad looking after his kids, full of ambition, endlessly and secretly borrowing money from his mother and relying on his spouse to keep the family housed and fed via her job in an office. His father is a high-achieving local judge who is constantly on his case about getting real work. 

So for reasons not explained until late in the movie, James enlists the help of three acquaintances in a scheme to rob, in broad daylight, the local art museum of four paintings by a minor artist. (Minor to the extent that I doubt many in the audience will have heard of him.) We are a long way away from Rififi, Ocean’s Eleven, Touchez-pas au Grisbi or The Red Circle. It’s a  world surrounding an incompetent amateur. It has to be set in the 70s because otherwise with today’s CCTV, alarm systems, number plate and facial recognition, the thieves wouldn’t have made it out of the building let alone the neighbourhood.  So the title is ironic. Watching the movie a day or so after a gang, displaying nil levels of violence, certainly even less than on display in this movie, lifted 100million Euros worth of jewellery from the Louvre, a comparison was obvious.

But of course Reichardt isn’t interested in the mechanics of the heist movie. James is quickly identified and the second half of the movie has him on the run, using friends, abandoning his family and, at a somewhat glacial pace and without a plan, eventually trying to flee the country until…ironic ending…of course.

The 70s intrude via the ridiculous cars that Americans designed and drove at that time and the occasional intrusion of some black and white TV footage involving the Vietnam war, Nixon and others.

Does James,as parents used to say, wake up to himself…hard to say… does the movie seem to dabble in longueurs and fitful moments…you bet.

Still, having seen it I sat down and read six pages (six, count ‘em…not including the full page ad with quotes like “Dazzling. A new American gem enlivened by the spirit of 70s cinema” What are they talking about???). The enthusiasm and seriousness was palpable across an interview, a background piece and a full page review. There was also a short endorsement by the editor-in-chief himself. “This is Reichardt’s second look into the art world, following the largely (and criminally) ignored Showing Up (2022), and is up there with her own masterpieces.” 

Didn’t see that… but is it ‘criminal’ to ignore a movie?