Welcome back to Cinema Year ‘25, a monthly review supplement. September’s new releases delivered three major filmmakers at their peak of bombast. Words by Blaise Radley, Esmé Holden, and Ben Flanagan.
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Afternoons of Solitude (Albert Serra, 2024, Spain)
Oh, bullfighting—that most noble of bloodsports, in which the stakes are high and the odds are fair and even. The worst case scenario for the torero: he is rammed and gored and bleeds to death (the latter of which is all but an inevitability for his quarry). The best case scenario for the bull: he takes one of those fuckers down with him.
Afternoons of Solitude (a first documentary outing for director Albert Serra) is compelling for refusing to merely reinforce such a viewpoint. Serra doesn’t shy away from the barbarism and crude talk of the corrida, sticking tight to the action in medium close-ups from a ground level view, but he’s also acutely aware that to the liberal audiences typical of film festivals and art centres—as typical as a certain right wing crowd are at the bull fights, braying for blood outside the frame—such images will only validate their pre-existing values. And Serra wants more than that.
The subject of Afternoons of Solitude is Peruvian matador Andrés Roca Rey, arguably the best at what he does in the world. Not that Serra tells us that directly. Shuttled to and from fourteen different corridas, we learn little of Rey outside of the ring—no talking heads, no archive flashbacks, his name only gleaned from his entourage of cuadrillas. He talks solely of the bulls and of their temperaments, as the cuadrillas effuse about him endlessly; he’s the summit, he has balls the size of the arena, he’s the truth, he’s a superhero. Surrounded by such wanton violence, the locker room talk, though amusing, can be a tough swallow.
And yet, and yet... If you can look past the immense cruelty and machismo of their practice, even for just a moment, past the performance that is part-ballet dancer, part-Mick Jagger pout, with chest puffed and buttocks extended, you might find a brief glimmer of something out of time and unfamiliar. As Serra put it in a Q&A at the ICA, something “spiritual”. Rey may be a butcher, but his craft and form have a compulsive rigor, each restaging of the ring in conversation with the hundreds of years of bullfighting before him. The friction that creates internally between revulsion and a repressed intrigue is what makes Afternoons a difficult pill to swallow. In the words of one vegan audience member, “You corrupted me.” BR
Honey Don’t (Ethan Coen, 2025, USA)
Watching Honey Don’t leaves one only with questions, the first, among many, being: why is it like this? Why did Ethan Coen and his wife and co-writer Tricia Cooke decide to shift the tone, in the second of a planned trilogy, so harshly? Why go from the silly and snappy Drive-Away Dolls (2024) to something so dour and joyless? Did they think this story had enough pathos to overcome the fact that it’s a detective film without any real mystery?
…and can Margaret Qualley really pull off a flatly brooding detective? Or is the problem one more of scripting than casting? Did they not think it worth it to establish who she is or what her relationship is to the place where she lives? Was I only supposed to realise half-way through, at the sight of a stray iPhone, that the film is set in modern day and that it’s Qualley who is the anachronism with her retro (but also clearly modern designer) outfits and her landline phone? And how does that anachronism play into the film’s themes? Does the film even have themes?
Is it about lost people and the places they end up going? Then why make that almost entirely peripheral—centered on characters it hasn’t felt natural to mention—to the main narrative? Is it either satisfying or fittingly anti-climatic that the Chris Evans as sex-cult-leader plot is resolved arbitrarily and completely away from the rest of the action? (And is this sub-South-Parkian critique of religion really good enough for 2025?). Is it a shrug of nihilism or just a shrug of disinterest? After all: could this script feel any more like a first draft?
So, if the film spends so little time developing its characters, ideas or settings, what does it spend its time doing? How does eighty-nine minutes feel so long? In a different way to Drive-Away Dolls, Honey Don’t is asking: what does a film really need to do? What can be got from a work made sans effort? But does it have an answer to that question? If the film is self-consciously minor (it wouldn’t be the first time for a Coen’s film, would it?), then what does it get from working in that space? What is the point of being both slight and joyless? Why even make the film at all if it has nothing to say and has no fun saying it? Why not stay home instead? Or, in a single question: why? EH
One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025, USA)
*Spoiler warning*
For better and worse, Paul Thomas Anderson has always relied on the grand gesture to close his films (There Will Be Blood’s bowling alley, Phantom Thread and The Master’s BDSM confessions, Boogie Nights’ cock). These muscular conclusions often inspire a great critical fervour, the viewer punched by punctuation marks.
In One Battle After Another, two and a half hours of breakneck pace is almost undone in the final moment. Leo learns to take selfies as his daughter goes to a protest with ‘American Girl’ playing in the background—less a song than a commodity, Petty’s anthem used in too many films to count and reinterpolated by The Strokes in their own end-of-history rock pastiche. Viewed in isolation, this is a moment of grand sarcasm, right? Right?
But Anderson takes it seriously. If this ending was meant to be an ironic note about revolution being subsumed by technology and pop culture (as the source novel Vineland insists), then where has such a point of view been throughout the film? Like Leo, rather than Teanna, Anderson relents to the sentiment of parenthood (a cornball beartrap for male artists everywhere), but forgets to wink at it. He takes the avatars of his own children too seriously. As such, the revolution becomes an act of self-actualisation and familial inheritance from a filmmaker who wants for nothing.
For the record, there are many things to admire about this very fine film: Those blown-up close-ups, especially Regina Hall’s tearful face which pulls a Faconetti from the reaches of The Wayanverse. The rigorous and yet free-associative opening act, underscored by zio-apologist Johnny Greenwood’s sustained piano playing. Ukraine-fetishist Sean Penn’s performance of military libidinal obsession with subjugating its own subjects taps into Pynchon, as does Leo’s Rocketman codename.
So if we close on the selfie, then Leo’s growth moment is turning off The Battle of Algiers to look at his phone. Celluloid reels rejected in favour of the instagram sort. More fool us, for believing Anderson’s gambit that Hollywood product can be genuinely radical. BF