Memoria (2021)

Director Apichatpong Weerasethakul's movie, an almost plotless stringing together of quiet, painterly and occasionally long and perfectly still moments, defies conventions and easy categorisation and is absolutely hypnotic, about a Canadian (Tilda Swinton) in Bogota, Colombia who wakes one morning to the sound of a strange earthy thud and then starts to experience oddities in her interactions with her sick sister, whom she is visiting, and in her blossoming friendship with a sound engineer named Hernan.

★★★★☆

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A Quiet Place II (2020)

The start takes audiences back to "Day One" when the extremely sound-sensitive creatures first land on Earth, an arresting sequence that has debut director John Krasinski demonstrating Shyamalan-at-his-best flourishes, but long before the audience is satisfied with this backstory and before any point to it is established, the movie abruptly gives way to three concurrent story threads in the present, post-the original movie, in which three different characters simply walk heel-to-toe on three different sand tracks to three different destinations, hardly enthralling and full of directorial looseness, with the alien threat along these boring paths not much more worrying than if, say, you were hiking in an area inhabited by wild dogs (but wild dogs that, although certain to appear at each significant landmark, only turn up in ones or twos, never more, irrespective of how much noise you make).

★★☆☆☆

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Blow Out (1981)

A movie sound guy becomes an earwitness to the death of a US politician, and his sound recordings of the incident suggest an assassination, in Brian De Palma's classic but very ugly, masochistic thriller starring John Travolta.

★★★★☆

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