cedricdumler

After the Hunt is one of Luca Guadagnino's most compelling works. The film doesn't hand the audience a clear moral stance, and that's exactly its strength. In a moment when many viewers expect films to simplify complex situations, Guadagnino embraces ambiguity, showing characters who are morally grey, self-interested, and deeply human.

At the center is Julia Roberts' character, the only one genuinely trying to act fairly. She listens, mediates, and avoids ideological extremes, yet she is the one punished. Part of her complexity comes from her past, which explains why she endures so much as a mentor and why she reacts with caution, guilt, or self-punishment - her internalized struggle shapes how she navigates the current conflict. When she finally crashes out with her honest opinion, it instantly backfires and turns it into a public accusation against her tied to race, gender, and power dynamics. The film constantly discomforts with displaying narratives and identities being exploited, and moral arguments quickly becoming performative.

Andrew Garfield's character is no hero: manic and self-important. He is compelling, but Guadagnino doesn't let the audience cheer for him outright by sprinkling in off putting demeanor through the whole film. (Which makes it kinda ironic to have Andrew in this role as he's one of Hollywood's most likable and empathetic actors and so far people always rooted for him in his roles). Julia Roberts is phenomenal, and Ayo Edebiri's performance is intentionally irritating, which is the point making her brilliantly real.

The film's exploration of inner psychological tension is striking. The dialogue around "rottiness" captures it perfectly: women often internalize self-doubt, while men tend to suppress emotions, sometimes with fatal consequences. Guadagnino uses these dynamics to show the human complexity behind behavior, judgment, and self-perception.

The five-year time jump at the end ultimately reveals After the Hunt as warning examination of our cultural evolution over the past years.

The peak of hyper-sensitivity, safe spaces, and mob-driven moralizing, now followed by the inevitable cultural overcorrection on all fronts political, social, and corporate. Guadagnino illustrates a pendulum effect: extremes lead to counter-extremes, and balance is fragile. The film is not anti-progress, not anti-victim, it's a cautionary tale about excess, about how genuine issues can be weaponized, and how moralism can become a blunt instrument.

The whole thing is expertly crafted; Guadagnino's camera work again is incredible, as is Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross's score. I loved all the intense close-ups and the beautifully moody grading.

Albeit way to long (could've been a 100 minute masterwork) a tense, timely, and intellectually sharp film that refuses to simplify or comfort, and is stronger for it. Guadagnino challenges the audience to think, feel, and question (an approach that's reminiscent of Alex Garland's Civil War) - exactly what contemporary cinema should do.

8/10.

Most filmmakers today are terrified of letting an image breathe. Terrified of wide shots, of duration, of trusting space, movement, and the audience's eyes. And then there is James Cameron: proudly flaunting them, because when you have frames like these, why wouldn't you?

Avatar: Fire and Ash is not a neat film. It's not streamlined, not minimal, not particularly interested in being tight. It is overflowing. Bursting with ideas, images, emotions, spiritual symbols, mythic echoes, technological bravado and old-school storytelling tropes. And I genuinely wouldn't have it any other way.

What Cameron is doing here feels increasingly rare, maybe extinct once he's done. This is an auteur blockbuster, fired from the last remaining cylinders of a filmmaker who still believes cinema can be myth, spectacle, spirituality and pop entertainment at the same time. Avatar 3 (theoretically Hollywood's last auteur-driven mega-budget project) plays like a man emptying his dreams onto the biggest canvas imaginable.

Yes, it's long. Yes, it's messy. Yes, it repeats beats, motifs, situations. But that repetition is the point. This is old-school filmmaking (Empire Strikes Back / Return of the Jedi, Pirates 2 & 3 logic) where characters are placed in familiar situations to reveal change, not redundancy. Nothing here is rehashed. Everything evolves. Characters react differently. Emotional weight accumulates.

Visually, Cameron once again puts every other studio blockbuster to shame. Nothing looks this refined. Nothing feels this seamless. Nothing immerses you like Avatar. The camera glides endlessly through space, air, jungle, water - never cutting away, never apologizing. The first major set piece is pure eyeball-popping beauty and spectacle. The extended final act is peak cinema, standing among the best choreographed action sequences this universe has ever produced. Watching this in 3D on the biggest possible screen feels non-negotiable.

It's fascinating how spiritual this film is. Even more so than the previous two. Cameron has always been a techno-freak and a pioneer, but at heart he's also an environmentalist, a hippie, a believer (loved that he went Kubrick-space-odyssey-like transcendent with Eywa). Fire and Ash leans hard into that; religious imagery, mythic symbolism, grief, hatred, rebirth, interconnectedness.

Is everything perfectly written? No. Spider's arc, while conceptually fascinating, doesn't fully land emotionally for me. I felt far more connected to Lo'ak. Some ideas could've used more space, ironically in a film that already has so much of it. But the sheer density of thought here is staggering. Cameron is addressing grief, cycles of violence, identity, racism, environmental collapse, self-destruction - unprecedented in a blockbuster of this scale. Even if not every thread is exhaustively explored, the ambition alone deserves respect.

Cameron frames the conflict itself as something exhausting, circular, and increasingly meaningless. Jake and Quaritch don't just clash, they orbit each other. Again and again. Drawn back into the same confrontations, the same wounds, the same unfinished business. And at a certain point, even they seem tired of it. The film openly acknowledges this fatigue. No matter how justified the hatred once was, no matter how personal, how violent, how deep the scars - endless revenge leads nowhere. Cameron isn't interested in declaring winners anymore. He's interested in exposing the futility of the fight itself.

What's crucial here is that Fire and Ash doesn't frame "evil" as something innate. The truly destructive humans are destructive only as long as they remain distanced - locked away in corporate structures, technology, command rooms, abstraction. As long as they don't have to touch the planet. As long as they can treat Pandora as a resource rather than a living world. Characters like Selfridge can sustain that separation. Quaritch cannot. Once you are inside Pandora, you cannot remain untouched forever. The planet pulls at you. It connects you. It erodes the illusion of control. That's why Quaritch's arc is so compelling. For all his brutality, he cannot fully resist Pandora. None of them can. The irony is beautiful: the man who wages war against this world slowly begins to feel it. Belonging. Community. The quiet gravity of being part of something larger than himself. Pandora doesn't just transform the heroes - it absorbs everyone who truly enters it. And that, more than any plot twist or spectacle, feels like Cameron's ultimate pledge: that separation is artificial, that hatred is unsustainable, and that no matter how hard we try to detach ourselves, our natural connections always resurface.

Avatar 3 feels less like a traditionally structured three-act film and more like observing a world. Your eyes become the camera. You drift through Pandora. That's why I honestly wouldn't have minded another hour. The Avatar films operate outside usual filmmaking metrics. They're allowed to be different. They need to be.

People are quick to feel spoilt. Slower to appreciate the fact that films like this simply won't exist forever. I had this overwhelming sense of gratitude watching Fire and Ash. Gratitude that someone is still willing to pour this much love, labor, money, and belief into cinema.

James Cameron is playing on his ultimate playground here, fusing every genre, technique and obsession he's ever had into a single, monumental saga. And whether this chapter is universally embraced or not, one thing is undeniable:

Nothing else looks like this.

Nothing else feels like this.

Nothing else dreams this big.

9/10.

"The Solid Gold Magikarp". The algorithm doesn't just shape us - it defines what we even call "real."

Eddington grows on me like a slow virus.

At first I thought it was too cold, too restrained, and way too long. But the more I thought about it, the more it revealed itself as one of the most disturbingly precise mirrors of our time - a film not just about division, but born from it.

It begins as this quiet pandemic drama in a small New Mexico town, trying desperately to keep the chaos of the outside world at bay. But that isolation is an illusion. COVID isn't just a global event here - it's the metaphorical leak in the system, the first fracture through which the outside world and its endless digital noise start to seep in. What looks like calm is really containment. Every character stares into their phone, absorbing a million different truths, until the shared one collapses entirely. The town becomes a closed ecosystem ripped open by conflicting realities.

The film's brilliance lies in how Aster stages this breakdown of shared reality through moments that feel painfully small but eerily real. Like that bar scene: Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, and the homeless man outside. One sees a threat, the other sees empathy. Same event, two incompatible truths. It's not about morality anymore; it's about perception itself decaying.

Then there's Brian, maybe the sharpest character in the film - the embodiment of hyper-individualistic, politically opportunistic youth. He joins movements not for belief but for belonging. At first he sides with leftist activists for social and romantic validation; later he reinvents himself as a conservative influencer after tragedy. It's not hypocrisy - it's adaptation. In Eddington, ideology has become content, conviction, a commodity.

Ari Aster ties that all together with opening and closing the film with the data facility. The "Solid Gold Magikarp". "The movie is about a data center being built in New Mexico," Aster said at a Chicago Q&A. That's the key: it's not just a story about algorithmic chaos - it's a story emerging from it.

Compared to One Battle After Another, which is loud, declarative and emotional to the point of manipulation, Eddington whispers. And that whisper lingers longer. OBAO is entertaining and self-righteous, tailor-made for critics who already agree with it. Eddington is smaller, stranger, and harder to market but infinitely more alive.

Both are political, but Eddington examines what politics has become: not belief, not morality, but signal versus noise. Attack & defend.

____________ meta note: Both "Eddington" and "The Solid Gold Magikarp" are real AI anomalies - fragments of nonsense discovered in GPT-3 and GPT-4 datasets. Aster's choice of these names is intentional: the entire film plays like a digital hallucination, a once-self-contained town corrupted by infinite realities bleeding in.

8/10.