Looked at Letterboxd to remind myself what I thought about this film. Not a rave...

It is perhaps his biggest swing at mainstream success (even more so than Ad Astra), but Joaquin Phoenix is utterly electric in the lead role, and the night club scenes and car sequence are first rate. It is a very fine film, even if it is not the absolute best Gray film.

I look forward to it! One of his best ever sequences is the car sequence in We Own the Night.

This sounds wonderful. I really can't wait to see it, I am such a fan of James Gray.

Even trying to describe the film in this manner loses so much of what makes if great. The characters, the relationships, the multilingual play. All perfectly constructed by Hamaguchi, and Nishijima gives one of the great performances of the last decade. Drive My Car is a wonderful piece of work.

The main thrust of the film is the relationship between Hidetoshi Nishijima and Tōko Miura as she drives him back and forth from the play he is directing. He opens up about the relationship with his wife. She opens up about her mother. Subtly and with deep emotion. It sounds hackneyed, but it isn't.

The way that Drive My Car introduces and continually returns to Uncle Vanya is perhaps Hamaguchi's greatest achievement. He makes it utterly enthralling. He manages to draw inference and implication to the character's real life, but never states it.

I guess that's why the film connected so strongly with audiences. The film doesn't really make a mis-step. The opening forty minutes are a perfect short film. It is the tone I thought the film would strive for, for the whole 3 hours, but as it broadens out it changes.

Haha - Taylor wouldn't be happy. If he could find his way off his country-sized ranch, he'd have some words for you.

I guess I expected a more mysterious film and was left really moved by how open Drive My Car is. How nakedly emotional. How it uses Murakami and Chekov to deliver catharsis straight, without obfuscation.

The masterful screenplay is Hamaguchi taking the short story of Drive My Car, taking other Murakami elements and drafting in the diamond-hard brilliance of Chekov, and putting it all together, almost vignette-like, that is deceptively intense, before becoming deeply emotional.

At first I was slightly concerned that Hamaguchi had taken the bones of the short story and delivered none of the complexity. By the end of the third hour, I was impressed by how he had rearranged the centre of the story to reach the same moral outcome. A sledgehammer of advice. Right to the face.

I'm a Murakami fan. Of course I am a Murakami fan. I am a man in his forties. We are all Murakami fans.

I continue to be caught off-guard by how Hamaguchi just delivers devastating revelations again and again in the final hour. I guess I was still expecting a film more akin to Burning. Another recent Murakamin short story adaptation, which retained the unknowable essence of his best stories.

I remain deeply impressed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Drive My Car. It has a masterful screenplay. Hamaguchi has taken Haruki Murakami's mysterious short story of near-revenge and made a quiet, intimate epic that abandons mystery for explanation.

And people say the greatest time isn't right now!

Tonight's film

"No hug, eh" "No shit. Fuck off. We're Irish" Edward Burns's Mean Streets. He has those early 2000s Steven Soderbergh lens. An attempt at his David Mamet circuitous script. And a feel that the film came too late and too soon. Mikey and Nicky, and every crime TV show in the last 15 years.

A great one quid from a charity shop purchase. I have another 3 Burns films bought on DVD in the same way ready to watch.