2025 Letterboxd in Review Part II

In which I share some of my Letterboxd reviews from this year.

The Naturalist Western

The New World opens with a young woman diving into an ocean of pristine blue water. She is naked. The water is clear. The mangroves are teeming with life. This is nature untouched by western man.

No one shoots nature quite like Terrence Malick. He’s the sort of director to have a screen icon like Christopher Plummer delivering a masterclass performance which wouldn’t get captured on film because his camera was pointed at a bird sitting on a twig.

But actors can be directed. Nature does not give us that authority. When composing his shots a nature photographer must submit themselves to the chaos of real life not the clockwork choreography of film sets. Malick reveres nature. This is why few filmmakers can capture its beauty the way he does. His film makes us appreciate the beauty of wilderness. And mourn its colonisation.

After two acts in the wild the camera suddenly cuts to an English garden. The grass cut to uniform heights. The trees trimmed into artificial shapes. They’re arranged neatly in rows. This is the garden of Eden which Judeo-Christian society has sought so hard to create. After 2 and a half hours surrounded by the beautiful chaos of nature, to walk through the beautiful order of an English garden feels obscene. We feel for our hero. It’s like she’s been transported to a dystopian future. What powerful filmmaking, to take something we see everyday, and make us look at it in a completely different way. To take something we otherwise admire and make it horrify us. This is the genius of Malick.

Our hero opened this film by diving into an ocean as naked as the day she was born. By the end of the film she is walking through a royal court filled with artificial looking people, and she is covered up by multiple layers of stuffy clothing. At one point she admires a caged racoon who, like her, was brought from the Americas to be studied.

As she talks to her Uncle, we realise that the New World the film title refers to isn’t the land that Columbus “discovered”. It is the land that western man built. A world in which nature has been colonised. Her dystopian future is our mundane present.

We live in the New World.

What’s Up Doc?

When I was around 13 or so I had the habit of waking up around 4.30 AM and watching tv before I went to school. One day I randomly switched onto an opening credit sequence where a marionette was singing Largo al Factotum. I was intrigued. On this particularly morning I was still a little drowsy and I ended up drifting back and forth from sleep. In my dream state I mistook this screwball flic for an operatic gangster film of Godfather proportions. Each time I awoke and witnessed the latest turning of the screws, with Sylvester Stallone running around in farcical fashion, I became increasingly confused, much like our characters throughout the film.

Years passed and that hazy memory turned nostalgic. That strange film held a deeply personal allure. The fashion of the 20s. Art deco buildings. The culture of Italian Americans in New York, that magical cocktail I’d mixed up by watching too many mafia movies and reading too many Marvel comics. An impossible fantasy of Italy: opera, the ruins of the Roman Empire, fine cuisine and Silvana Mangano. All filtered through the lens of Looney Tunes madness.

This was a movie I’ve been chasing my whole life. A theatrical experience that somehow captured all those things I try to recreate every time I cook pasta and listen to Rhapsody in Blue.

This morning I was filled with a strange inclination to finally watch it (Oscar I think it was called?) the whole way through. But I’m nothing if not pragmatic. There was no way it could live up to my hazy memories. In fact I’d checked out the reviews once and it seems to have landed with a dud upon its initial release. The stage was set for this to be a huge disappointment.

And then the Italian Stallion walked on stage, accompanied by a delicious Kirk Douglas cameo.

It seems Oscar was a part of ol’ Sly Stallone’s attempts to diversify his film roles. A theatrical comedy to show off his acting chops. Adapted from a stage play by director John Landis, that master of subtle cheekiness, the film certainly retains its staginess. Most of the actors are up to the challenge, especially Tim Curry and Marissa Tomei. Except for ol’ Sly who is visibly out of his depth. He spends the whole film out of breath, perhaps because of all the running around, but also because he’s having trouble with the dialogue.

And that’s part of the movie’s charm. The farce is not as clever as something Neil Simon might have contrived. And it doesn’t contain the satire of Oscar Wilde. Most people probably won’t even find it funny.

But I was giggling and slapping my thighs the whole way through. I felt generous with my laughs because the world of this movie was exactly that thing I’d been dreaming of since I was a kid. A dream this film had a major hand in forming.

The movies we hold most dear are the ones that speak specifically to us. We have a connection to them because we connected with it at the exact right time in our life, because we connect it to some special feeling we can relive every time we rewatch it. This is one of those.

Two thumbs up.

One Step at a Time and One Battle After Another

Absolute f***in’ A. As in P…T…A!