I’ve been watching a few films in late 2025. Among those I loved the most I want to remember:
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A double tour (Web of Passion) C. Chabrol
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Peeping Tom
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Requiem for a Dream (D. Aronofski, 2000)
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Little Children
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The substance
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La nuit américaine (Day for Night), Truffaut 1973
- Rifkin’s Festival & Coup de chance
I just want to talk about how much fun I had watching them all. Sure, À double tour is fantastic and it deserved a stand-alone post, here.
So, I’ll share some impressions on some others, like the two films with Jennifer Connelly, Requiem for a Dream and Little Children. Later I’ll have one post dedicated to Woody Allen’s Rifkin’s Festival and another to Truffaut’s La nuit américaine. And yet another for The Substance, of all the most recent production, and what a production. That’s quite a plan. But here I’ll just share why they all made my day.
Screenshot from Requiem for a Dream
Requiem for a Dream is a dark movie and it will hit you. Aronofski builds a story around one young man and his mother, who is soon put into the center stage. The man is insecure, son of a provincial suburban community. His future is not an American dream but instead a free money dream which will soon become a nightmare of drugs and lost lives. He drives his girlfriend into this maelstrom, in which dreams are eaten alive. You got it: Jennifer Connelly plays this beautiful, young girl from the provinces–but from an easy-money family. What are their interests and values? She falls in the escape drugs black hole; while the mother falls into a diet trap. All fall into a black-hole hallucination, a descent into hell–and nobody ever gets out of those. The mother is Ellen Burstyn in a memorable interpretation of another American myth: Why All Them Can and I Can’t? Drugs and Diet will take the mind and life of this oldish woman and consume her. Aronofski is a master at painting this character with sour strong satire. Connelly gives one her best acting shows of her life, a destructive youngster who’s addicted to drugs.
The film starts plain and simple, but then tends to grow with darker and darker colors. I found the film disturbing and absolutely hopeless in its views–no optimism possible, there. But I enjoyed it greatly. Then, there is Little Children, a melodrama of two couples and one infidelity. It is a so well constructed story, and so well acted, one remains stitched to the screen. Very good storytelling, featuring the great myth of the American suburban family and escaping out of that golden jail built between the family conventions (including the children) and the enclosed enclave, the gated middle-class communities.
Poster from Little Children
Sure, the pair of Kate Winslet plus Connelly helps!
Screenshot from Rifkin’s Festival, quoting Bergman
The reason why I enjoyed so much Rifkin’s Festival is that it’s a film on cinema. Nobody (that I know of) has ever published any irony on Bergman or Rossellini. But Woody Allen does it with such a grace and love it is an immense fun. Woody talks about cinema and… you’ll see in a next post.
I have left last both Peeping Tom and The substance, one old movie together with a latest production, both terror films. The latter will merit a post of its own soon, since I found it so enjoyable (if you wish) because it quotes other movies–a lot of movies, and I love that game.
Screenshot from Peeping Tom
Peeping Tom is a noir from 1960 about a filmmaker who shoots his victims. A young man, he kills women while shooting a film with them starring, so to speak. A beautiful construction on the act of viewing–a game between us, the viewers of his doings and his victims while he creates and tells a story. A classic that I wanted to watch again.
Truffaut’s La nuit américaine (Day for Night) is my answer to continue with my self-teaching about French films. Chabrol and Rohmer I know and continue to watch their films even if some say Rohmer’s are boring. I find them fascinating. I’ll say this of Day for Night (it’s the technique used by film-makers to shoot a night scene during the day with a dark filter to make it seem like night. This is what’s called Day for Night, or in French, the American Night.
Yet the modern West today does not have the same core values as it did three hundred years ago. We do not need an origin myth that is fundamentally at odds with contemporary Western values such as liberal democracy, the rule of law, and equality of human rights; undeniably rooted in imperialism and white supremacy. If we want to strengthen Western identity around our modern Western values, we therefore need to tear down the myth of Western Civilization.
