The Nun II (2023) - Movie Review

Well, shit. After gradually warming up to the Conjuring Universe, the official threequel The Devil Made Me Do It and the more recent atrocious copycats like The Unholy, The Exorcism Of God, and The Pope’s Exorcist have made me seriously reconsider that position. As much as I have good memories of at least half of these films, the underlying dogma of this entire sub-genre is starting to wear thin on my sensibilities, and the quality of the films themselves isn’t really picking up the slack. Still, I am nothing if not open to being surprised, and the first Nun is still a film I quite liked when I first saw it, so I’m willing to give this one a chance.

The Wonder (2022) - Movie Review

This has the single most peculiar opening to any film I’ve reviewed on here. It’s peculiar because this is a period drama that begins with a shot of the sound-stage that the sets in the film are located on, panning across while Niamh Algar narrates about how this is indeed a film and asking the audience to believe in its story as the characters will. There’s an initial pang of worry that this is insecurity showing through on the director's part, similar to Terry Gilliam’s introduction for the film Tideland that essentially begged his audience to regress back to the mind-state of a child in order to understand what was really going on. But that fades away rather quickly because, oddly enough, this ends up being an ideal introduction to this film on two different fronts.

Benedetta (2022) - Movie Review

I have been eagerly looking forward to seeing this movie and reviewing it. Hell, I’ve been itching for the chance to talk about its director for quite some time. Filmmaker Paul Verhoeven has one of the most fascinating, if not outright legendary, filmographies of any cinema creative I’ve come across. After some modest successes in his native Holland over the ‘70s and early ‘80s, Verhoeven moved to the United States and had one hell of a hot streak. RoboCop, Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Showgirls, Starship Troopers, and Hollow Man, all one right after the other over the course of thirteen years. This is why I love auteur theory: So many of the idiosyncrasies in those films suddenly make a bit more sense once you realise they’re from the same mind.

And after a brief return to the Netherlands for 2006’s Black Book, he has since settled down in France where he put together the immensely uncomfortable (and I say that as someone who sat through Una and The Nightingale) Ella. For as much as I can appreciate the characterisation in that film, it also shows a darker side to Verhoeven’s iconic lack of taste that is not easy to sit through, and not exactly for the best of reasons. As someone with a serious admiration for the man’s work at his peak (Showgirls isn’t a so-bad-it’s-good movie, it’s a legitimately great film, and I will die on that hill), I was truly hoping that his latest wouldn’t be more of the same unpleasantness. And indeed, this is quite a different beast from the likes of Ella.