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Yahoo
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘The Last One for the Road' Review: A Pleasant Italian Gem on Drinking Buddies, Aging and Wistful Flavors of Life
There is a kind of sadness that comes from living in a restless state of FOMO — or fear of missing out, as the acronym goes. The experiences you'd squander if you didn't show up to an occasion, the next song you wouldn't hear if you left a party too early and so on. In Italian filmmaker Francesco Sossai's loose-limbed and quietly enchanting sophomore feature 'The Last One for the Road,' lively 50-somethings Carlobianchi (Sergio Romano) and Doriano (Pierpaolo Capovilla) seem to have invented the perfect cure for FOMO by cheating it perpetually. To these penniless and amiably drunken men, every boozy beverage is always the last one — truly, for real this time, the last one — until the next one that usually comes right after. To them, the party is never quite over. Thankfully, Carlobianchi and Doriano never come across as leachy, intoxicated creeps (the way hard-drinking older men like them could be in real life) and there is a storybook quality to the duo's tipsy and bickering friendship: It's almost like their bromance is marriage, Italian style. Their everlasting merrymaking might seem warm and fuzzy at first glance, but in truth, there is a gloomy undercurrent to their existence, hiding just beneath the surface. The olden days seem to have slipped away from them rapidly. And the financial crisis of 2008 has probably been rough on them as a pair who burned through whatever cash they possessed. If only they could dig up the sizable chunk of money that their old friend buried somewhere in town before he left for Argentina. Maybe they will one day, right after that last drink. More from Variety Oliver Laxe's 'Sirat' Sold by the Match Factory to Slew of International Territories After Cannes Jury Prize Win Jeremy Strong Says Serving on Cannes Jury Was 'Like "Conclave" With Champagne' and Celebrates Palme d'Or Winner 'It Was Just an Accident': It 'Changed Me' Cannes Awards: Jafar Panahi Vindicated With Palme d'Or for 'It Was Just an Accident,' Marking Sixth Consecutive Cannes Win for Neon Written by Sossai and Adriano Candiago (and loosely born out of some of their real-life experiences), 'The Last One for the Road' grasps its lead characters' aging-related anxieties acutely and insightfully, amplified during the years that you can be considered neither old nor young, like the '70s-born Carlobianchi and Doriano. All of a sudden, you realize that things you could swear happened about 10 years ago are vintage events of three decades past, and time slows down for no one. So who could blame the two for desperately trying to hold onto the present? While Sossai doesn't exactly dwell on this sadness, its subtle presence still infuses his unassuming feature with a melancholic quality, a wistful aura that brings to mind the fable-adjacent films of Alice Rohrwacher. The soulful and aching atmosphere of Rohrwacher's films is similarly at the backdrop of Carlobianchi and Doriano's escapades as they bar hop, exchange random stories (maybe real, maybe made-up), share life advice with everyone in their orbit, narrowly escape the police like getaway drivers across modest yet impressive chase scenes and order that final drink that will be anything but. On the background of their ceaseless journey is the glorious Venetian plains, landscapes and settlements that seem to be stuck in a transitionary space, like Carlobianchi and Doriano, somewhere between urban and pastoral. The smartest thing any old(er) person could do is pass on their earned wisdom to the young. While Carlobianchi and Doriano often have a hard time remembering the lessons they have learned and revelations they landed on (they drink incessantly, after all), they do exactly that by taking under their wing the young Giulio (Filippo Scotti), an architecture student who's adrift and intrigued. Though more agile and adventurous in its structure early on, 'The Last One for the Road' assumes a more conventional tone as the trio team up across a rowdy yet harmless road trip. The reflective themes the film has been playing with gradually lessen a touch too — it feels rather trite when the movie dedicates a significant amount of time to the older duo advising Giulio on women, eventually enabling a hook-up for him. The confident smile the until then timid Giulio wears on his face as a result is equally cliched. Beautifully shot on film stock, 'The Last One for the Road' still has plenty to offer elsewhere, especially in Sossai's portrayal of different architectural structures during the central trio's road trip. Mansions and modern buildings alike enrich the characters' impromptu and varied itinerary, and some inspired instances of inventive flashbacks that braid together the past and the present display filmmaking panache. Meanwhile, the effortlessly off-the-cuff rhythms of the script recall Richard Linklater's conversational films with characters organically bonding and speaking their mind. (A silly observation about who might have invented shrimp cocktail is especially funny with a nostalgic wink at the '90s.) When it all starts feeling a bit repetitive, a dash of suspense lifts up the movie with the trio teaming up for a petty con while sipping luscious daiquiris. You don't leave 'The Last One for the Road' with the feeling that you have seen something life-affirmingly original. But there is still a sense of disarming comfort in the film's down-to-earth demeanor, and Giulio's rewarding if predictable arc. In one of the movie's many casually paced scenes, Carlobianchi and Doriano have ice cream in a flavor they didn't intend to eat, anticipating a bitter taste, but getting something sweet instead. Right then, they could also be talking about the aromas of their own lives, but in reverse. And that's the spirit of 'The Last One for the Road' in a nutshell: eager to feed its audience something sweet when all else seems bitter. Best of Variety The Best Albums of the Decade
Yahoo
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Militantropos' Review: Austere Anti-War Doc Employs Formal Control in an Impassioned Defense of Ukraine
Billowing gray smoke intermingles with moody cloud cover, while scores of grim-faced Ukrainian citizens watch the skies, arms folded. The visual opening salvo of 'Militantropos,' directed by Yelizaveta Smith, Alina Gorlova and Simon Mozgovyi, could be the opening scene of a Hollywood disaster movie, albeit one of the more dour and serious-minded sorts. Moments later, we're at a train station and the visual reference switches: Huddled masses are being evacuated from Kviv to Vienna with their suitcases and children. We're setting up a heartfelt period drama, perhaps. And then, in close-up, a bulldozer turns over rubble, and a family photograph is glimpsed in the debris, a tattered symbol of what has been lost. The makers of 'Militantropos' seem well aware of how the visual touchstones of war have been borrowed or appropriated by cinema, and their film loops us back around again, confronting us with the source images. The neologism that gives the film its title, coined for and by this film, is defined on-screen as 'a persona adopted by humans when entering a state of war.' Such textual musings return periodically and are part of a toolbox of techniques aligning this doc with formally experimental work, despite ripped-from-the-headlines subject matter which might lead you to expect a more standard-issue approach. More from Variety 'The Last One for the Road' Review: A Pleasant Italian Gem on Drinking Buddies, Aging and Wistful Flavors of Life 'A Poet' Review: Simón Mesa Soto Crafts a Hilariously Absurdist Fable About Trying to Lead an Artistic Life Oliver Laxe's 'Sirat' Sold by the Match Factory to Slew of International Territories After Cannes Jury Prize Win Written with Maksym Nakonechnyi, the director of the bleak drama 'Butterfly Vision,' 'Militantropos' repeatedly considers the effect of war on children. The bubble any parent tries to build for their child is always temporary, as the illusion that the world is for the most part a benign or even magical place must inevitably be dismantled — but whether that dismantling is a gradually managed part of growing up or the quick and brutal consequence of events beyond the parent's control is brought home here with vivid urgency. A school where children have been forced to stay, with artwork on the walls — some of which are normal kids' drawings and others of which depict bombings — gives a grounded sense of place to the horrific childhoods endured by young Ukrainians. This film's anthropological interest in how people are shaped by an ongoing immersion in a state of war is simultaneously deeply personally felt and conveyed with a sense of analytical remove. Perhaps that's partly the consequence of having been directed by a group: There's a balance and care here that is likely the consequence of collaboration and conversation between three director-editors also known as the Tabor Collective. One imagines that some of those conversations must have involved the ethics of aestheticizing war. It's certainly a relevant talking point here. Do beautiful images of an ugly thing risk conferring some sort of palatability to that ugliness? It's a very specific version of the age-old debate about whether cinema tends to glamorize what it depicts. In the case of 'Militantropos,' it matters a lot who is doing the depicting: People who are living the reality of war over an extended period of time are arguably entitled to discover beauty where they find it. Hope springs in unlikely places, including in a grove of cherry blossoms that fill the screen toward the end of the documentary. Despite its aesthetic virtues, 'Militantropos' ultimately captures the dreariness of military engagement: the bloodless greys and muted khakis, the palette leached of all life and humanity. Crucially, when guns fire and bombs detonate, the documentary eschews the language of cinema: The filmmakers don't zoom in for a slow-motion shot of a man's face grimacing as he dies. You can't always quite tell what has happened, and there is no on-screen devices to help orient us in the mission. There may not even be a mission, as the feeling of senseless intermittent destruction remains palpable throughout 'Militantropos.' Best of Variety The Best Albums of the Decade
