Movies I Watched - February 2026
Aside from the Evangelion movies, these were all watched as part of the Super Saturday Movie Club.
Feb 7 - Army of Shadows (1969)
An extremely tense masterpiece about the French Resistance in WW2. I had watched the director Jean-Pierre Melville's Le SamouraĂŻ (1967) beforehand, and while I did enjoy that one, I found it a bit too flat and unemotional for my tastes. This one is vibrant and explosive, the prosaic quality of the filmmaking only enhances how much these are just human being caught in the great machine of war. The last shot is so poignant, it feels literary in the way some books struggle to achieve, not to speak of movies. 10/10.
Feb 14 - Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
I had watched this before on Wednesday, May 13, 2020. I was a bit trepidatious to bring this one for the movie club, as I had watched it when I was only beginning to watch movies seriously. In hindsight, I should not have worried. I had somehow forgot that this movie is painterly to the extreme, with plenty of frames that look like someone brought a camera to the Renaissance. The acting is flawless, the shots are beautiful, it makes you forget what music sounds like only to bring it with a vengeance. And it doesn't beat you over the head with what it is trying to say either, which I appreciate. 10/10.
Feb 21 - Saloum (2021)
A very interesting thriller that unfortunately falls off severely on the second half. It concerns these legendary mercenaries who end up stuck in a mystical region of Senegal, but it doesn't let the characters breathe quite enough. The camera goes from interesting and dynamic, with plenty of colours and creative shots, to a monochromatic shakefest for reasons that I don't understand. Could have been a barnburner, but there is still quite a bit of sauce in here. 7/10.
Feb 24 - Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance (2009)
I had watched the first Evangelion Rebuild long ago, on Sunday, March 19, 2023, and had not thought much of it. It was an abridged version of Neon Genesis Evangelion without much of the charm, but it was technically still all there. I thought to myself, surely they'll expand on this later, right? They have more to say here, to go in a direction that the anime could not.
This second Rebuild proved me wrong. Silly, stupid, pointless, and shallow this was another recapitulation of Evangelion bled of all charisma. Gone are the little moments of humanisation that interspersed the original show, we only get one and it sucks. Characters soliloquise their motivations at the screen like a student's play. This is the worst Hideaki Anno movie I've watched to date, it is amateurish garbage.
Much like a serial killer wearing the face of your lover, however, every so often you get glimpses that remind you of what Eva was and meant for you, so I can't say it's irredeemable, but it does make me not want to watch it anymore.
The soundtrack is invasive and starts and stops at bewildering moments, the directing is scattered with the camera lingering in weird places, the animation is stilted and inhuman with characters moving in strange ways, the fights are floaty and pointless, never before has an Evangelion looked more like a bad tech demo.
Had this been any other film series, I would have dropped it in this movie and never come back, but being Evangelion, I got curious as to what it would become. I wanted to believe that Anno has a soul inside of him that would prevent him from squeezing out more cynical slop like this. 3/10.
Feb 26 - Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo (2012)
He did not. The third Rebuild movie felt like a pointless waste of space on my SSD, borderline not even worth to pirate this thing. It looks better than 2 but it's all in service of overdesigned nonsense that flashes on the screen for seconds at a time. The story seems confused as to what it is, given that it features flashbacks with scenes from the anime that never happened in this series, and that's my main problem with it: this movie might have worked if these were the same characters from Neon Genesis Evangelion... but they're not. They're facsimiles of the original thing that are so badly-made that they feel like mockery. And this isn't me saying it either, the little Evangelion anniversary thing even poked fun at it.
Asuka spends 14 years and is still the exact same hothead with no character development - the character traits which we thought were a good representation of teenage angst now revealed to be a badly written personality. Mari parachuted in the middle of the story and has done nothing since. The entire relationship with Kaworu is sped past with a few montages. Rei is barely a character. There's a moment when Shinji goes to talk to her and simply can't think of any subject other than "What is going on" and 'Sure been a long time huh". We're to believe these two have a bond so deep it could break the world.
The soundtrack is borderline nonsensical, mostly triumphant classical music that plays without any rhyme or reason. The directing is confused and choppy, jangling keys in front of an audience that cannot be trusted to linger in one shot for longer than a few seconds.
With this, these rebuilds are proof that all the budget in the world cannot buy good taste. 2/10.
Feb 27 - Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time (2021)
The only reason this isn't the best of the Rebuilds is because 1 still has enough Evangelion in it to feel closer to the anime.
This movie had me there at the start. I genuinely thought it was going to be a massive middle finger to all the fans who had hoped for bombast and magniloquence: just the three broken teens relearning how to be people by touching grass, a broken world but we live on. Instead, the Rebuild mythos comes crashing in and derails everything, drains it of any redemptive power it might have, and remind you of how pointless this whole movie series is.
Ultimately, this movie cannot shake away the fact that these characters just aren't very interesting. This isn't the Asuka we know, who was an adolescent with issues - this is an Asuka pushing 30 who somehow still acts like a child. They just didn't give anyone the time to breathe. So in the end, when they provide closure to these characters, it ultimately rings hollow.
What do I care if this version of Asuka gets closure? Half the shit I remember of her doing and which I liked about her hasn't happened. Same with Shinji, same with Rei, especially same with Misato and Ritsuko, who haven't even been the same characters at all. It is a movie - a series of movies - that cannot stand on its own two legs. It is a dark mirror of Neon Genesis Evangelion that cannot let it go nor live with it.
As to the rest: the fights are stupid and take too long, have next to no context, and put god-awful animation to work for some of the busiest and most overdesigned angels we've seen yet. A human being seems to have sat back down in the writer's chair but it still suffers from mediocrity. The soundtrack is schizophrenic as always, and the directing is repetitive. Why even bother to animate something if you hate it so much that you can't even find an interesting angle to film it from?
It seems Anno tops off the Evangelion franchise with a message for the fans to go out into this world and touch grass. You know what would have been the best way to do that? Not making these bad movies. 4/10.
Feb 28 - Tokyo Twilight
A deliciously bleak movie of urban isolation and how people can feel alone and adrift even when surrounded by the whole world. Like Nathan said after he watched it, no one was sympathetic to Akiko and considerate of her personal choices and struggles, so even though the literal text of the movie is that she was wrong (given Takako's diagnosis at the end), I would rather read it as her being ultimately misunderstood.
There is a scene at the end where a woman waits in a train for someone, and it gave me such a deep and terrible feeling in my chest, it reminded me of David Lean's Brief Encounter (1945). And this isn't even to mention how this movie is shot, with a still and sophisticated rigidity that puts you of mind of being just a fly on the wall, watching the lives of these people unfold. There is no bombast or drama, just the cold eye of the director - our cold eye - gazing at these characters as they unravel. I look forward to watch more YasujirĹŤ Ozu movies. 9/10.
Also, it was at this movie that I realised that the program I use to watch movies, MPV, allows you to save a screencap with the S key, so the next entries will feature prints I saved myself rather than taken from the internet.
