Don’t Look Down

Sometimes a movie doesn’t fit nicely within a genre box. In today’s case, the film touches on bizarre sci-fi dialogue, brings forth some satirical dark comedy, plenty of drama and thrills, and centers on a crime... in other words, it’s another unique vision from Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster; The Favourite) – titled Bugonia (2025). . . inspired by the 2003 South Korean motion picture Save the Green Planet! by Jang Joon-hwan. Falling down the rabbit hole with Teddy (Jesse Plemons – Hostiles; Game Night) and his autistic cousin/helpful sidekick Don (Aidan Delbis – an excellent amateur casting of an autistic man), they have done copious amounts of research on the recesses of the internet into an alien species called the Andromedans – that are supposedly secretly residing amongst us while pulling the puppet strings.

It’s hard to believe that the Christmas comedy Just Friends (2005), directed by Roger Kumble, is celebrating its twentieth anniversary already this year. Not a big success at the box office at the time (only earning 50.9 million), it has slowly built a bit of a cult status over the last two decades. Though not received particularly well by critics at the time either, its joyous comedy, romantic elements, and Ryan Reynolds centred ensemble cast make for a most entertaining watch each and every holiday season.

There are so many things that go into making us who we are as individuals – from our parents and our past experiences, to our job and where we live, with even something as simple as our name becoming a big part of forming our identity as a human being... but, if those things are taken away from us, how might someone prove who they are when there is no evidence of what is being claimed. Infusing post-war themes within a kidnapping/murder mystery melodrama with film noir motifs, My Name is Julia Ross (1945), directed by Joseph H. Lewis (Gun Crazy) and based upon the novel “The Woman in Red” by Anthony Gilbert (the pen name of Lucy Beatrice), entraps us in the strange predicament of the titular character... though no one is calling her by that name. Following Julia Ross (Nina Foch) in post World War II London, England, she is in a rather difficult predicament – as she falls behind on her rent, she can find no work no matter how hard she looks.

Taking place over a most pressing twenty-four hour time period, director Arnold Laven’s film noir crime thriller Vice Squad (1953) – sometimes known as The Girl in Room 17 and based on Leslie T. White’s 1937 novel “Harness Bull”, places the viewer inside the police captain’s office as he tries to solve numerous complex problems occurring in Los Angeles. After a cop gets fatally shot in the back while a car is being stolen in the middle of the night, Capt. ‘Barnie ‘ Barnaby (Edward G. Robinson – Double Indemnity; Illegal) starts the day off with even further complications when he gets a tip from a desperate rat with a long rap sheet, Frankie Pierce (Jay Adler – The Killing; Illegal), suggesting a bank robbery could be happening any time...

The immense love for Dario Argento’s visually mesmeric horror film Suspiria (1977) has in some ways overshadowed that it is actually part of the Three Mothers Trilogy – a thematic grouping more akin to the Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy from Edgar Wright than a more traditional franchise. Both written and directed by Argento, Inferno was released three years after the original... for those curious, the long delayed bookend, The Mother of Tears, only came to life in 2007. Carrying forward a similar vibe and flair as the first feature, Inferno, instead of being set in Germany, takes place between New York and Rome. Starting in the Big Apple, young poet Rose Elliott (Irene Miracle) seems to be living quite the life for someone so young... as the apartment she resides in would even make the cast of Friends jealous.