The Palindrome Film Festival (2 of 2)

Be kind: rewind.

W. blurs the line between satire and biopic, but what else could you expect from director Oliver Stone? This 2008 film is an interesting relic of when we thought George W. Bush was as bad as the Republican party was going to get.

M is a justly influential murder mystery with a young Peter Lorre at his creepy peak and stylish direction that’s decades ahead of its time.

xXx is an early-2000s extreme skateboarder’s idea of what “the next James Bond” should’ve looked like. But the stunts are cool, and if you’ve seen the Fast movies and enjoy Vin Diesel, this is him at his Vin Dieselest.

Here’s a coincidence I was not expecting: a lot of palindrome movies feature some kind of hardened killer-secret agent type. Both Ava and Anna (stylized as ANИA) are a familiar stripe of femme fatale that also appears in Killing Eve: seductive, deadly, and at more risk from her own employers than from anyone she’s been hired to kill. The movie Hanna also shows a younger girl kind of growing into that trope…and it might be worth cheating a bit to include that in the film festival instead: it’s a much better movie than either of the others (and Killing Eve went off the rails after a while).

For the male equivalents, we’ve got xXx and AKA. The latter concerns an undercover cop who befriends a mob boss’s young son. It’s no game-changer, but it’s well-made.

If you only see one Indian film, you could do a lot worse than to make it RRR, a phenomenally successful fictionalization of two real-life Indian revolutionary heroes, who never met in real life (and fought separate revolutions). But in the film, they’re best friends turned tragic enemies turned heroic friends again. As Patrick Williams puts it on Letterboxd, this is “the best movie ever made about fighting colonialism with dance battles and armies of rampaging animals and most of all, friendship.”

X is a horror movie featuring some would-be porno filmmakers in rural Texas who fall prey to an elderly pair of killers. Slasher films don’t get much better than this: it’s a smart, fresh take that came out in 2022 and has already launched a franchise, so far without even bringing anyone back from the dead!

But the most popular palindrome film in America is also the palindromiest one, Tenet. Far from just having a title that reads forwards and backwards, the movie has whole scenes that read forwards and backwards, as a nameless hero tries to prevent the future from revenging itself on the present. It also includes many references to the Sator Square, a famous Latin palindrome design.

Outside its wordplay appeal, aspects of the movie don’t really make sense, and the parts that do make sense are so confusing they make Inception look like a bedtime story. But Christopher Nolan is one of the greatest directors of our age, so even his only real misfire is worth a watch.