Europe

The most honest thing in Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s Hot Spot is its real estate. Variety’s reviewer, no admirer of the film’s plotting, still surrendered to what the production design is doing: Anna Anosowicz builds humanity’s last compound out of existing midcentury brutalist architecture and far older ruins, Greek stones included, dressed with what the review calls superficially futuristic window-dressing. The future, in other words, is not built here; it is scavenged. Not a brave new world but a thriftily recycled one, hanging onto past glories by a thread, and that single design decision tells you more about a civilization run by a rationing AI than any title card could. It is also, en passant, the oldest trick of resourceful production: when you cannot afford to build the future, photograph the past strangely enough and the audience will do the rest. Smoczyńska is working with the biggest budget of her career, and she spends it like a director who remembers not having one. ...

There is a particular pleasure in watching a director who has run two-hundred-million-dollar machinery choose to work small, because everything he does on the small picture tells you what he actually believes about the craft. Martin Campbell, the man who launched two Bonds with GoldenEye and Casino Royale, shot Just Play Dead in the Canary Islands as an independent production, and he names the terms himself without being asked twice: tight budget, tight schedule, delivered on schedule and on budget. Samuel L. Jackson plays a wealthy criminal faking his death to escape the feds; Eva Green plays the wife who prefers the death to be real and the insurance to be hers; everyone else circles the money. In Campbell’s summary of the character logic, nobody has any kind of redemption, they are all trying to knock each other off, and, of course, chaos happened. C’est le bordel, by design, and the design is the interesting part. ...

Nicolas Winding Refn was clinically dead for twenty-five minutes in 2023, on a table, mid-surgery, with two weeks’ warning that this might be how it ended. He has said plainly that the idea for Her Private Hell came when he was dead and came back. I begin there not for the drama but because the origin explains the method, and the method is the story. A director who believed his film career was over returned to features after a decade away and spent his second chance on the least commercial materials available: silence, stillness, a fog-bound artificial city, and a horror plot conducted like opera. Whatever you conclude about the result, nothing in it is an accident of laziness. It is all wagered. ...