TÁR begins with it’s credits, it starts at the end. Its a film of perfect poise, measured and considered, but is willing to explode into breathless energy when it needs too. This combines into a subtle and engrossing film, one about downfall, lying and deceit. Cate Blanchett creates a performance that’s as much of a portrait as anything else, she plays the titular Tár, expertly capturing her attitudes and the way she handles her fall from grace. By starting after the events that damn her, the film is able to concentrate more on the way Tár treats others, her attitudes towards her sex and relationships, which helps you build a picture of the events that led here. It’s a work that rewards you for engaging with it, imagining offscreen actions of Tár, musing on her deeper motivations.

Extra shout out to the teaser trailer using Partita for 8 Voices, it’s wonderful composer Caroline Shaw is name dropped in the film too. It’s a wonderful piece of music, I’d recommend giving it a listen. The teaser is incredibly intense and gives nearly nothing away, at the time I only caught the periphery of the marketing, it’s wonderful to see that it’s so good and understand it in a new context.

Continuing to fall backwards though my week, my girlfriend and I watched a video essay by Be Kind Rewind about Michelle Yeoh’s life. This sparked us watching a flurry of movies, Yes, Madam! a 1985 cop drama, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon the 2000 martial arts classic break out hit and Memoirs of a Geisha, a 2005 red flag convention, adaptation and 100% a future maladapted episode. Yes, Madam! is a lesbian tour de force, Yeoh plays a Hong Kong cop with a selection of amazing jumpsuits and jackets with perfect shoulder pads. She kicks and shoots a bunch of criminals, before teaming up with Cynthia Rothrock, who has flown in from the UK to wear the same outfits and kick/shoot the same people. There’s some brief tension between them, with Rothrock not playing by rules and discussion about going off the rails etc. you know how this works. But they quickly sync up, together they’re perfect, looking like an anime duo and fighting like a Mortal Kombat Tag team. The film is non-stop and fun, it’s the girl version of yaoi coded Hong Kong action classic Hard Boiled, it’s not that the main characters of these kinda films fuck of course, their relationships are far more intimate than that. Crouching Tiger, takes Chow Yun-fat from Hard Boiled and teams him with Yeoh. I’d forgotten how romantic this film was, with the two leads sharing an unspoken and painful yearning. It’s just great cinema, with a good sword to love to intrigue ratio.

The topic of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings came up in group chat and my friend Amber confidently announced that it was the best Marvel film ever made. I have latent telephone anxiety, which in the past manifested in counting how many times the phone had rung, promising myself I’d pick up if it reached a certain number. This is perhaps why I had avoided Ten Rings until now, but Ambers assertion required challenging, so I watched the big dumb Marvel movie and it was better than I expected, bits of it were even good. I’ve had a tough time with anything past endgame, the stakes are all messed up and it feels so perpetual. Some films do stick out, but they are kinda converging into an endless TV series. I don’t know if Marvel has a plan and it seems like a million pet projects and references get stuffed into everything, character deaths feel hollow, I have no idea if the random unexpected death of a guy in a cool outfit is relevant, or if he’s coming back as a ghost ninja in some other multimedia project. It feels like a misfocus, something that draws my attention and pollutes the experience. There are some really good fights and it’s (mostly) on a more human scale than I was expecting, I enjoyed that. Michelle Yeoh arrives in the movie about halfway though and kicks a bunch of ass, but adds to this problematic main character tension they have going on. The movie is burdened with main characters, Simu Liu and Zhang Meng’er play a brother and sister, in the text of the film they’re equal in power and importance, but the film concentrates on Liu, building him as its hero. There’s Awkwafina, who’s doing her thing and deserves more than anyone else to be the lead. Tony Leung is doing a bad guy made good made bad thing and is amazing as always. It’s a whole TV series of plot and characters and motivations, you could get seasons worth of content out of it. So it’s crowded, it’s got all this great talent, then cameos then references and setups for other things. Ten Rings is very fun, it is one of the best Marvel films in years, but it would be much better if it also wasn’t one of the most Marvel films.