The Violinist prompts a reconsideration of the Singapore Story; New York Film Festival opens with monsters, metafiction and Elizabeth Holmes; and a week filled with Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, Colleen Hoover and Resident Evil asks an old question again: what does a film actually owe its source?
1. Reviews of Singapore Films
Given time to find his voice, an artiste brings the Singapore Story to life — The Straits Times
Raphael Millet compares Ervin Han’s The Violinist with the director’s decade-old short The Violin, finding in their differences an evolution in how Han imagines the “Singapore Story”. The film becomes an argument too for what can emerge when local filmmakers are given enough time to develop their voices.
2. Latest Criticism from Festivals: New York
Godzilla Minus Zero review – spectacular Japanese action continues franchise’s winning streak — The Guardian
Jesse Hassenger finds Takashi Yamazaki unwilling to turn his Minus One sequel into a simple monster rematch. The spectacle gets bigger, but so does its unease around post-war technological optimism, American intervention and what happens when Japan attempts to harness forces it cannot control.
The Day She Returns — Hong Sang-soo — In Review Online
Chris Mello approaches Hong Sang-soo through the problem of familiarity: after enough films, the recurring actors, conversations and structures begin to blur like memories. The Day She Returns is another exercise in repetition whose apparent ordinariness conceals an increasingly elaborate formal game.
The Remotes — John Torres — In Review Online
John Torres stretches techno-noir across 150 minutes without offering the stable pleasures of plot, turning detectives, crimes and suspects into increasingly uncertain propositions. Michael Sicinski finds the film initially frustrating before its opacity becomes precisely the atmosphere to surrender to.
Bitter Christmas — Pedro Almodóvar — In Review Online
Pedro Almodóvar turns autofiction back onto itself: a director borrows from the lives around him for a film whose characters begin resembling their creator. Christian Craig reads the resulting nesting dolls as both confession and defence—an artist admitting the damage caused by transforming life into cinema without promising to stop.
You Can See Everything review – Nathan Fielder’s Elizabeth Holmes doc is a modern masterpiece of deceit — The Guardian
Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim move in with Elizabeth Holmes and her family, ostensibly to document the disgraced Theranos founder’s life. Adrian Horton finds a three-hour hall of mirrors where documentarians and subjects repeatedly attempt to manipulate each other, and greater access only makes the truth harder to locate.
3. Spotlighting New Titles
Tom Cruise Is a Scream—and a Gas—in Digger — The New Yorker
Justin Chang finds Tom Cruise gleefully weaponising his movie-star persona as an oil tycoon in Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s ecological apocalypse. Yet the film’s satire and visual grandeur appear locked in combat: extraordinarily elaborate filmmaking in service of ideas determined to announce themselves.
Cotton Queen review – mystery, matriarchs and magic in pioneering Sudanese debut — The Guardian
Suzannah Mirghani becomes the first Sudanese woman to direct a feature with a film where cotton, colonial inheritance and the futures available to women converge in one village. Its matriarch’s declaration—she decides her own past—becomes a fitting organising principle for a film preoccupied with who gets to write history.
Extra Geography film review – droll coming-of-age story captures the pains of girlhood — Financial Times
Two schoolgirls decide to deliberately fall in love, only to discover that friendship, class and desire are considerably less controllable than their experiment suggests. The FT finds Molly Manners’ debut strongest in its sharp dialogue and its refusal to treat adolescent female intimacy as something simple or easily categorised.
Crushed review – Steve Oram is priestly lead in harrowing Bangkok-set child-abduction thriller — The Guardian
Simon Rumley places a priest searching for his kidnapped daughter inside a Bangkok thriller that keeps threatening to become a revenge film but resists the easy satisfaction. The tension sits instead between spiritual forgiveness and horrors that make forgiveness seem impossible.
Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie review – terrifying and inspiring story of survival — The Guardian
Alex Gibney reconstructs Salman Rushdie’s life before and after the 2022 attempt on his life using Rushdie’s memoir, his narration and intimate footage shot during his recovery. What Peter Bradshaw finds most forceful is not the violence itself, but Rushdie’s continued insistence on literature and imagination after it.
4. Discourse of the Week: What Makes an Adaptation Good?
Virginia Woolf moves from London to Lagos in Clarissa. Resident Evil jettisons the video game’s most recognisable characters while trying to replicate the experience of playing it. Verity tests how much of Colleen Hoover’s lurid machinery survives the screen, while another generation of filmmakers returns to Jane Austen. Fidelity is clearly only one possible measurement—so what exactly are we asking an adaptation to preserve?
What Makes an Adaptation Good? — The New Yorker
Writing earlier this summer amid arguments over The Odyssey, Richard Brody rejects adaptation as a simple spectrum between faithful and unfaithful. Moving from Truffaut to Mizoguchi, Welles, Godard and Nolan, he argues that filmmaking itself is always already an act of adaptation: even an original screenplay has to be transformed into images, bodies and sound.
Clarissa — Arie Esiri, Chuko Esiri — In Review Online
The Esiri brothers relocate Mrs Dalloway to contemporary Lagos while finding cinematic equivalents for Woolf’s movement through memory and consciousness. Robert Stinner argues that the change in geography does not discard Woolf’s concerns with class, gender and trauma, but gives them another political history through which to move.
How Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil stands out from all other game adaptations — The Guardian
Zach Cregger leaves Leon, Claire and other franchise icons behind—and Keith Stuart argues this may make the film more faithful. What it adapts is not plot or character but mechanics: scarce ammunition, fragmented information, increasingly dangerous spaces and the sensation of being an ordinary person trying to survive a game.
Verity film review — this twisty Colleen Hoover adaptation is a convoluted dud — Financial Times
The opposite problem: Verity retains plenty of the novel’s twists, confessions and psychosexual intrigue but still fails to cohere onscreen. Fidelity to incident means little if the translation cannot find a cinematic logic for the material.
I’m so sorry, this new Sense and Sensibility is simply dull — The Times
Hadley Freeman’s complaint against Georgia Oakley’s Sense and Sensibility is not that it changes Austen but that it drains away her comedy. Another measure of fidelity emerges: perhaps an adaptation can alter plot, setting or dialogue freely while still failing if it loses the temperature of the original.
5. Beyond Words
Critics Academy x NYFF Shorts #2 — The Film Comment Podcast
Four emerging critics take over Film Comment to discuss NYFF shorts including Kamal Aljafari’s Masao Adachi Takes a Passport Photo, Camilo Restrepo’s A Stolen Movie and Heather Landsman’s ee. A welcome instance of festival criticism spending sustained time on shorts rather than treating them as a sidebar to the feature programme.
James Gray and Jim Jarmusch on Paper Tiger, the Mafia, and Capturing New York City — Film at Lincoln Center
James Gray and Jim Jarmusch compare approaches to New York, genre, rehearsal and the crime film after Paper Tiger. Their conversation moves beyond the new film into the practical question underlying both careers: how does one make recognisably personal cinema while working inside familiar forms?
Old Movies vs. New Movies: How Avengers: Endgame Encore Beat Brad Pitt, Robert Pattinson, and an Awesome Weekend Movie Lineup — The Big Picture
Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins ask what it means when a rereleased Avengers: Endgame can outperform an unusually busy slate of new films, before moving through Heart of the Beast, Forgotten Island, The Weight and The History of Concrete. John Wilson later joins them to talk about why feature documentary currently feels strange to him.