[EXPRESSO] The Last Viking (2025) | Brother Pepper

One thing i didn’t quite expected from cinema in the future is to spawn a “Beatles-borne/like” kind of subgenre, and i’m not even talking about the 4 upcoming films about the band by Sam Mendes, or Across The Universe. i’m talking about having the Beatles be the instrumental catalysts of unrelated films, for example Danny Boyle’s 2019 film, Yesterday, where a mediocre singer found himself isekai’d into a world where the Beatles never existed, while he does remember their songs.

Again, it’s a Doofenschirmz situation, it is weird it happened at least twice, this time for the sake of crime comedy, the Norwegian-Danish The Last Viking.

A criminal, Anker, after having paid his 15 years sentence for a bank heist, he comes home, planning to retrieve the loot as he had his autistic brother Mandred hide the money underground in a place they knew… problem is Manfred now believes himself to be John Lennon (among other things), so Anker has to deal with this and try to play along, travelling together to some childhood places of theirs in order to eventually make him remember where he hid the money.

Which might mean having to get the “Beatles” back together.

Obviously this leads Anker to confront his rooted family traumas and his difficult relationship with his brother Manfred, and the movie to tackle the themes of mental health, happiness, perception,, but also – and especially – acceptance of one self, finding solace in our own “madness” in face of a delusional reach for complete, unrealistic “real sanity” , through a lot of surreal bizarre characters, grotesque situations, and plenty of dark comedy.

And i do mean dark comedy, it’s funny and hearthwarming in the end, but even for a Nordic black comedy it can get so bleak to be almost depressing.

[EXPRESSO] If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (2025) | My (Speed) Tube

Definitely an A24 release, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is a classic tale for the ages.

Linda isn’t just a mother, she is a psychotherapist that has to tend to her daughter, whose eating disorder has her eating through a tube in her stomach, bringing her daily to a daycare center, while her husband is constantly away due to his job as a ship captain.

She is already stretched beyond her limits, but then one day their apartment’ roof cracks open due to a water pipe collapsing, creating a huge hole and flooding their home, forcing Linda and her daughter to move to a squallid motel in the time being.

Making things even worse, Linda is aggravated by not only becoming even more of a drunkard, repairmen that vanish hence extending their stay at the motel, the medical staff attending to her daughter trying to get Linda to committ properly, one of her patients coming off even crazier than before, among other things pushing Linda well beyond any semblance of a breaking point long since gone.

It’s a fever dream depiction of parental stress, but while Linda is gunning for the “worst mother of the year” award hard as fuck, is also impossible to not emphatize with this woman that is really trying but its also unbelievably flawed and a complete mess of a parental figure, tearing herself apart trying to still cling to reason despite her destructive tendencies, commenting in how often even the safety nets for mental health issues are just not enough.

There are is some horror like-imagery, i guess because it’s a A24 film, though the film it’s just an almost surreal (but not quite) fever dream, an uncomfortable cavalcade into disaster that’s hard to look away from, thanks to Rose Byrne’s incredible performance.

[EXPRESSO] Nuremberg (2025) | Nazi Turnabout

A historical court drama about the behind the scenes of the Nuremberg trails, where the surving architects of the Nazi regime are put on trial for crimes against humanity for the Holocaust.

An army psychiatrist, Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), is tasked with looking after the mental well being of Hermann Goering (Russell Crowe), Hitler’s second in command, alongside the other surviving Nazi hierarchs, while the Allies investigates and discuss why this trial should be even done in the first place.

Kelley, also hoping to write a book about the vents (and in turn maybe understand the psychological proceeding that led the Nazis to previously unseen amount of efficient evil), forms a bond with Goering…

While one might argue this comes at the right time, when we’re seeing history on the verge of repeating again (for the worse), one might say it’s a bit too little and that maybe, given the current geopolitical state, we should have skipped the trial, but this just isn’t that kind of film.

This is an old fashion history drama that’s fairly unpretentious and uninterested in being artsy or provocative, as it mostly wants to educate people while entertaining them, and basically exists as a vehicle for actors to try and get an Oscar out of it.

Not necessarily “bad bait” when it gives us a really outstanding performance by Crowe as the charimastic yet subtly manipulative Goering, as he and Kelley have this “Hannibal-Lecter-Graham” style relationship going on, though Malek’s performance (while not necessarily bad) just isn’t as good as Crowe’s, and oddly the sequences at the stand are kinda brief, despite the build up to them.

That said, it also goes by swimmingly, despite it’s 2 hours and 40 minutes runtime, so it’s good, even if old fashioned, but not necessarily lesser for it.

Final Verdict: Expresso

[EXPRESSO] After The Hunt (2025) | Woke Chungus Season

Luca Guadagnino’s new movie is out here as well, After The Hunt.

The plot sees a philosophy professor at Yale finding herself in a thorny situation when, close to receiving a professorship in the teaching subject, a student of hers confesses that the professor’s assistant raped her, but him denies the accusation and rebukes of the student also blatantly plagiarizing her thesis.

It’s a battle of optics-vs-ethics, academy drama and also a bout of pretending that the movie its actually trying to present the characters so you won’t be able to label anyone as “right” or “wrong”, as the script so obviously takes sides it’s almost funny in how paper thinly disguises what it actually thinks, like if we have high profile actors discussing philosophy it will have make movie and dialogue smart.

Even more intellectually insulting are the weak attempts to backpedal towards the end, with the rushed as hell epilogue set 4/5 years laters that feels like it realized last second this is all old hat, and not really worth rediscussing when the current situation is so much worse … not that the epilogue itself helps in anything but making the whole thing even more of a farce.

Also, it’s confusingly toothless for a Guadagnino directed film, that should be provocative and uncomfortable but feels comforting as in, this is reheating the #metoo talking points in a meandering, meaningless and way too late to the party fashion it’s almost “cute”.

If it wasn’t so goddamn boring and shallow, heck, i had my issues with Eddington but even that was more entertaining and aware of the themes and events of the recent past and how they factored in the current sociopolitical scenarios.

Some great performances mean little when the film feels engineered for fishing nominations more than anythin else.