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Watched on Thursday May 22, 2025.

I seem to be terrible at reviewing anything below a 5* rating and Past lives is no exception. Though ittedly I've only reviewed to films as of May 18th 2025.

I watched this very recently and I don't know if it will or won't stay with me in the long term, but I felt confused by the ending I couldn't understand why what took place, took place. Why do we make choices about love that harm out lives and make us weep when we look back at them.

To set the scene, vaguely, we witness a friendship, a separation, a renewal, a separation and a closure, perhaps.

This is a film about friendship, longing, love, putting away childish things, and I would argue ambition.
I use ambition manifest as career with disappointment, but that's a personal political philosophical position about the nature of power, authority and self and what it can do to love or it's potential.

I know that if we find something we love, we do want to pursue it and there's meaning and value in this, but I've always equally felt that love for a person is always more valuable than love for things be they material or a career.

This film is in many respects about that tension, about the will to ambition and the mess it can leave behind. What happens when we confront that mess and try and frame it as the right decision.

I love this film, but it definitely a film I feel conflicted about, precisely because the film accepts ambition and treating people to some extent as means not ends in themselves. But it's also about culture, difference, values, and philosophies of destiny. It has layers and I suppose as a single forty something man who sometimes feels left behind because I am not ambitious and therefore feel undervalued by the opposite sex I can feel disappointed and frustrated at these social conventions that capture us and guide our decisions to look and judge, to leave behind, to overlook belonging or potential love for other things. This is not to say men don't also prioritise their careers at times. Really humans make decisions that effect others and harm them in enduring traumatising ways. What we see in this film is perhaps how a traumatiser is also traumatised herself by her own decision when confronted with it.

Regardless, it is a wonderful film and in all respects it's poetic and meditative. Well worth watching. Just ignore my trauma response.

Friendship, belonging, and existential deliberation lie at the heart of this gem of an Italian film. It is at once a deeply meditative examination of the meaning and character of friendship shown through what we do and how we do it, and an ode to the greatness and wonder and joy of the natural world.

This is my review of The Eight Mountains, welcome to my favourite film.

The story begins in a village where two children meet and become friends. They are separated by years and divided by their differences, yet through fate or coincidence come together in a shared endeavour to pay respects to the dead in the act of the reconstruction of a mountain hut. And here begins an odyssey of their lives and meaning both together and separate and what binds them together the mountains as a wander manifestation of nature.

I have secret dreams of this kind of simple life, to rebuild a mountain hut, near a forest and near the sea. And I understand the complexities, the pain and the loves of ones life. The mistakes we make that haunt us, the pain of the self, and the laughter and joy of friendship, love and peace that are a relief from ones mind.

This film is all of those things with a wonderful soundtrack and nuanced reflections on what is important. It is all that a life finds in itself, from the struggle to the success, to love, friendship and beyond. We all wait for this really, and I have the patience of the mountains and the hope and longing that this life and love will some day be mine too.

A film with building tension will almost always endure historically better than one that gives you all the detail and let's it play out. Here in The Conclave we find this tension played out in the corridors of power.

The film centres on the death of and renewal of the role of the Pope. With all the drama you can imagine behind the scenes in a talking film. Where the mise-en-scene and being seen or not seen become important. The tensions between allies and politico-philosophical enemies alike is claustrophobic and perfectly executed.

This is no 'action' film and what a relief, the dominance of action genre is killing cinematic nuance. We are drowning in sameness. Thank goodness films like the Conclave continue to be released, despite the obstacles.

To the details, set in the hours and days and weeks after the death of a Pope the cardinals gather to bring renewal to the role in choosing the next man to take the seat of power in a ritual that is centuries of - the gathering and decision making of the secretive yet democratic-ish conclave. We are to bare witness to the intimate and secretive world of the ethics of religious choice and the values of those choosing.

The acting and soundtrack are outstanding, the cinematography though conventional is exceptional and the settings and protagonists equally veer from the grandiose to the humble, from glory to modesty, from greed to in-service-to.

You'll like this film if you can keep your attention, if the thrill isn't all you watch for, and if you respect and value the slow burner. this film does have a twist, but my lips are sealed just like The Conclave.