Trailer of the Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars — Mubi.com
When he died in 2022, legendary French New Wave pioneer and lifelong cinematic boundary pusher Jean-Luc Godard was, at the age of 91, still working. His final project, cut short by his death, was a distinctively Godardian, medium-bending, anti-film, film adaptation of Faux Passeport by Charles Plisnier.
The film never moved beyond the planning stage but his collaborators have now presented fragments of Godard’s pre-production work and visualisations of some of his thoughts around the project in this 20-minute-film intended as the first of a planned series of unfinished posthumous film fragments, ideas and images to be released in the coming years.
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot — Prime Video
Before he went on to win critical acclaim as the director of The Deer Hunter and then opprobrium as the egotistical maniac whose hubris destroyed United Artists with the underappreciated epic western Heaven’s Gate, the late director Michael Cimino made his presence felt with this drama.
Starring Jeff Bridges as Lightfoot, a free-spirited drifter who steals a car, and Clint Eastwood as Thunderbolt, the veteran thief with a legendary underworld reputation and a long list of murderous enemies, it’s a deft mix of buddy film, road-trip adventure and light anti-establishment comedy.
Churchill at War — Netflix
A new entry in a heavily overpopulated genre, director Malcolm Venville makes solid use of archive footage, admiring interviews and rousing atmosphere in this docuseries that pays tribute to the man voted the “greatest Briton of all time” and remembered by generations for rallying his nation together in World War 2.
It may be light on examining the darker, less pleasant sides of Churchill’s prejudices and outdated beliefs, but it’s more than successful at reinforcing his heroic wartime status and making a case for the advantages of his kind of old-fashioned leadership skills in a time when the world seems to sadly lack them.
My Brilliant Friend Season 4 — Showmax
The underappreciated but dramatically satisfying adaptation of the novels by pseudonymous Italian author Elena Ferrante comes to a close with this fourth season in which we watch the adult trials, tribulations and joys that come to childhood friends Elena and Lila as they navigate adulthood in Naples during the tumultuous 1980s.
Emperor of Ocean Park — Showmax
An uneven but not unengaging adaptation of the best-selling novel by Stephen Carter. Forest Whitaker does typically commanding work as judge Oliver Garland, whose commendable life and career is revealed to have hidden a dark secret that his son and family are forced to confront after his death, which may have been more nefarious than they are willing to believe.
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