May Movie Roundup
Adam's Notes for May 21, 2026
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I have started practicing a new method that’s making me more powerful than ever before. Actually it’s a very old method. Ancient. I’ve begun keeping lists. You laugh. Lists are just things you stick on the fridge or in your phone, you think. Wrong. We have literature because ancient Mesopotamian priests started keeping lists. The second book in one of the greatest works of literature ever written is mostly just a list of ships. You ever meet like a hardcore Maoist or Trotskyist, not like the joke ones, but the ones who know what they’re talking about? Their secret is that they keep lists. For now, my lists are simple. I make two, every night before bed. One is a list of writing-related stuff I want to do the next day, the other is a list of everything else I want or have to do the next day. Usually there’s about fourteen points, though two or three items will be trivially easy to cross off (every day’s list ends with ‘make a list for tomorrow’). I’m never able to cross off everything on the list. That’s not the point. But if I can get five or six things, I’m having a good day. Even more, even better. Fewer things crossed off, I gotta rethink something. It’s proving very effective. I’m wasting less time on twitter, feeling more accomplished, growing more powerful. I recommend it.
Anyway, here’s a bunch of movies I watched recently.
Nine Queens (Nueve reinas) (2000)
Directed by Fabián Bielinsky
Starring Ricardo Darin, Gastón Pauls, and Leticia Brédice
114 minutes
Really great little Argentinean film. A very smalltime conman (he starts off getting caught doing the fast hands asking for too much change thing) gets involved with a more experienced pro, who promises to spend the day showing him the ropes.
After a couple of little scams around Buenos Aires, they hit upon rumours of a forgery of the Nine Queens, a set of stamps from the Weimar Republic that are worth a fortune. They also have a mark: A Venezuelan businessman set to be deported the next day, meaning if he wants to buy the stamps, there isn’t time for a chemical test. There are a lot of great twists that keep the transaction from going smoothly, and their own cut of the loot keeps dwindling as they promise more and more people a cut in exchange for some essential service.
The more experienced conman has a sister and a brother who work at the hotel the Venezuelan stays at: the sister knows her brother’s a scumbag, the little brother doesn’t know, but will. It’s clear one of the two conmen is going to screw the other over—in fact, it’s clear they suspect each other and are working against each other, though we’re never sure how the other is going to betray them. I really liked the first ending, where they manage to get their payday in the form of a cheque only to find there’s been a bank run—what a great ending for an Argentinean film. The second ending, was a little too Hollywood neat. I don’t think it worked. At any rate, I really loved the game of this film, and I’ll need to watch it again soon.
Owning Mahowny (2003)
Directed by Richard Kwietniowski
Starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Minnie Driver, John Hurt, and Maury Chaykin
104 minutes
This one’s about a guy addicted to losing money while gambling, which leads to the obvious problem of what to do when you run out of money, which he solves by embezzling funds from his employer, the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. I personally don’t gamble because I’m bad at math and hate sports, but I’ve known a one or two real gamblers and I know exactly the feeling PSH’s character is getting out of losing, it’s not all that different from the sort of feeling you get when you spend too much time scrolling, playing video games, etc, any repetitive task like that, the dopamine rush makes you feel accomplished even when you’re losing, when you know you’ve hit diminishing returns and you’re wasting your time, and the feeling is constantly weaponized against us because it actually does feel kinda good. Anyway, this is a great film, an honest look at a problem gambler and what he’ll do to get his fix, that feeling of tunnel vision. It’s not romanticized at all, but I worry today’s young problem gamblers won’t get anything out of it because as pathetic as this all is, it’s miles away from today’s app-based gambling. Up there with Atom Egoyan’s Chloe (or is that Montreal?), that one Sara Polley film, and Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie in terms of movies that make Toronto look cooler than it is.
The Mastermind (2025)
Directed by Kelly Reichardt
Starring Josh O’Connor and Alana Haim
110 minutes
Apparently inspired by the crime films of Melville. I can see it, but it reminded me more of the novels of Jim Thompson, the Dimestore Dostoyevsky: an American down on his luck tries something drastic only to find out how much worse things can get. I enjoyed it.
The Last Viking (Den sidste viking) (2025)
Directed by Anders Thomas Jensen
Starring Mads Mikkelsen and Nikolaj Lie Kaas
116 minutes
Mads Mikkelsen plays a slow person who thinks he’s a viking and frequently tries to kill himself by jumping out of windows. His bankrobber brother entrusted him with his last score, now he’s out of jail and wants to find it, but is disturbed that his brother now insists he’s John Lennon, and to retrieve the cash will have to reunite The Beatles. I liked the stuff about how we have to balance reality with the illusions that we allow ourselves and our loved ones, but the stuff from the animated section about a forced equality, I didn’t understand what they were trying to get at. Is this some Scandinavian attempt at an anti-woke thing? Some bit of Danish discourse that eludes me? Or is it because Søren Malling’s character is as delusional as the others, and so of course the metaphor in his book makes no sense?
Suspended Time (Hors du temps) (2025)
Directed by Olivier Assayas
Starring Vincent Macaigne, Micha Lescot, Nine d’Urso, and Nora Hamzawi
105 minutes
The Essayist has made the only good decent covid film. Vincent Macaigne is a natural neurotic, so it makes sense to get him to play an overly covid conscious person in the early part of the pandemic, and I like that it doesn’t drag any culture war bullshit into it. It’s just a very nervous guy, his brother, their girlfriends, a beautiful house in the country, and their various levels of tolerance for each other’s bullshit. Something Knausgaardian about it too, given that it’s the director’s actual home and backstory, so I guess the ex-wife he meets at the end is meant to be his IRL ex-wife, the director Mia Hansen-Løve, etc etc. I wouldn’t recommend seeking this one out, necessarily, but I certainly didn’t consider it a waste of my time, either.
More movies:
Glad you liked "Nueve Reinas", still I'd say one of the best things to come out of Argentine cinema in the 90s. (As a kind of fatuous PS, someone in the US actually remade this as taking place in . . . LA.) Also captured very well the feeling of living in BA at the time, not least that sense of imminent but invisible economic disaster.
If you'd be interested in a follow-up, check out the same director's "El Aura", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Aura_(film)
(Guy died very shortly after making this movie, heart attack while filming an ad in Brazil. Horrific loss.)
"...the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce..."
CIBC is my father's bank (My account is with RBC).