High Life

Starting with an astronaut alone on a spaceship with a baby girl, most of High Life is flashbacks on how we got here. You shouldn't go into a Claire Denis film expecting everything to make sense. Though you should expect the camera to spend a lot of time watching the actors doing stuff. But in High Life we eventually get most of the back story. Scientists have come up with a way to transfer some of the energy from a black hole to earth. Unfortunately, the trip to the nearest suitable black hole to set up the system will take a long time, effectively making it a one-way trip. So a crew of convicts serving long sentences is recruited, including a disproportionally large number of sociopaths. There is not much to do in space and the doctor (Juliette Binoche) is experimenting with artificial insemination when she isn't playing with her long hair and flirting with the gardener, Monte (Robert Pattinson). Sex and the lack of sex is an underlying theme in this movie which is more about the crew than the mission.

Which unfortunately means once Denis has killed off almost all the crew and our curiosity about the past has been satisfied there is very little material left for the final act. It feels like the writers didn't know how to finish the film and (at the risk of being lynched by fanboys and girls gnashing their dentures and waving their walking sticks at this comparison) like 2001: A Space Odyssey the plot peters out.

There is one possible further storyline for the film to explore and while it is hinted at near the end as the baby girl grows up, perhaps that idea is too extreme even for Claire Denis.

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Ian rating 2/5

Judy & Punch

I have never seen a Punch & Judy puppet show. I'm too young and/or too far removed from the United Kingdom. It is one of those things that hover on the edge of my cultural consciousness, alongside pantomime, Dune, Engelbert Humperdinck and Halloween. I recognise the name and some of its aspects (such as Punch’s crescent moon-like profile, familiar from Dad's magazines) but not enough detail to understand it.

Set somewhere and sometime in the past, Judy & Punch is a fictitious origin story for Punch & Judy shows and a revenge story for Judy. Punch is a marionette showman with a drinking problem, dreaming of taking the show to the big smoke, his wife Judy is trying to hold things together. The small town they live in has a witch problem. Of course, killing witches does not reduce the number of townsfolk discovered to be witches.

Leaving Punch to look after their baby, a string of sausages on the table and small dog Judy goes out to run some errands. Even a cursory knowledge of Punch & Judy will clue you into what happens next and to Punch's reaction to being confronted. Punch's inability to take responsibility for anything piles up the victims in a dark second act. Here the writer/director's inexperience led to an unsatisfactory third act. Reaching into the hat of worn-out Hollywood tropes, we get quickfire: "resurrection from (apparent) death", "rescue by Ewoks" (a secret society of outcasts living in woods), "wisdom from Yoda" (a wise old medicine woman), "pleasant interlude with the outcasts", "dream sequence", "ignore wise advice to take revenge", "rescue and revenge", "happy ending with idyllic social order established". Though there is a coda where the transition from marionettes to hand puppets is explained.

Underlying the film is an anti-alt-right message. Concentrating on misogyny, on emotional arguments over rational ones, on violence as a solution (though that last one gets undermined in the end).

Ian's rating 2/5

Fly By Night

Do you like your gangland boss to chuckle and gloat over his victims? Do you like your detective to be cool and suave? Do you like to see your protagonists trapped in an impossible situation? Fly By Night ticks all these boxes and more. While there is nothing new in the plot, it more than makes up for that in style and tension. The protagonists are a small family taxi company in Kuala Lumpur which supplements its income with slick an extortion racket that operates below the radar of both the local gangsters and the police ... until a mark unexpectedly escalates things and one of the boys is a sore loser at the neighbourhood casino bring the family to the attention of the owner (played by Frederick Lee channelling Jack Nicholson in a scenery-chewing performance). Meanwhile, Inspector Kamal is lazily circling the family like an inquisitive shark.

Who is who?

It took a few minutes to work out the relationships between the characters at the start of the film and the ending is ambiguous. But otherwise, this is an enjoyable, often funny ride where, like a traditional noir, no-one is good - even the wronged girlfriend. The action scenes are sharp. There is no shortage of violence. And New Zealand gets mentioned a couple of times.

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Ian's rating 3.5/5