Film Freak Central

Telluride '22: Tár

****/****
starring Cate Blanchett, Nina Hoss, Noémie Merlant, Mark Strong
written and directed by Todd Field

by Walter Chaw Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) is a monster. She's also a genius of surpassing brilliance, which begs the question--as it so often does, although the artist is usually male--of what the connection might be between genius and monstrosity. Artists and athletes get a certain pass for their behaviour. The myth of the difficult genius is a popular one fostered, I suspect, by the "geniuses" themselves to excuse their neurodivergence...or the unchecked privilege and sense of entitlement their preternatural abilities have won them. When Todd Field, who has not made a bad film, though this is only his third in 21 years, makes the genius in question a woman, there is now the possibility the monster is a victim as well. A victim of systemic misogyny who has internalized that misogyny; a victim of a patriarchal collection of values and standards for success that diminish women, one who has figured out how to manipulate and exploit those values for her own advancement. I mean, what choice does she really have? The pathway to fame and success in this culture entails climbing a ladder constructed from the bodies of those who didn't survive the journey. It's dog-eat-dog out there, people tell you--but no one tells you this cannibalism metaphor is more a literal warning than an artful turn of phrase.

Telluride '22: The Wonder

**½/****
starring Florence Pugh, Niamh Algar, Kila Lord Cassidy, Ciarán Hinds
screenplay by Alice Birch and Emma Donoghue and Sebastián Lelio, based on the novel by Donoghue
directed by Sebastián Lelio

by Walter Chaw Sebastián Lelio's The Wonder aspires to the scabrous experimental satire of Lars von Trier's Dogville, down to establishing itself on an open soundstage, but it doesn't quite have that film's intellectual rigour, nor its nihilism. Some would say that's to its credit. I guess I'm glad I didn't feel like swallowing a shotgun after The Wonder, but I do, er, wonder if its effectiveness isn't undermined by its essential hopefulness. I had a similar problem with co-screenwriter/source novelist Emma Donaghue's Room, which treats severe trauma as not only a thing small children don't suffer for some reason, but a thing small children are designed to heal in adults. It's appalling. Evidently, Donaghue is stuck on a theme, as The Wonder is also about sexual abuse and the imprisonment of a young woman. It's also, again, about a child tasked with redeeming the soul of a family and a society. But as the film ends right at the point the real consequences of the atrocities it portrays are about to bloom, we can at least imagine that its happy ending will be marred by the howl of PTSD's florid demons. The Wonder is an improvement over Room as well in the sense that it's a full-frontal attack on the patriarchy and its repulsive handmaiden--organized religion--rather than a somewhat tepid thriller with mishandled social grenades. Any full-bore offensive against systems of oppression, especially one as handsomely helmed and brilliantly performed as The Wonder, has undeniable value. Yet I can't shake the feeling that Donaghue, for all the darkness of her narratives, is mainly interested in the fairy-tale ending.

The Munsters (2022) - Blu-ray Disc

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Sheri Moon Zombie, Jeff Daniel Phillips, Daniel Roebuck, Richard Brake
written and directed by Rob Zombie

by Walter Chaw Rob Zombie only makes movies about families, and he does it with a wife he loves. It's the kind of relationship John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands shared: the iconoclastic, combative director and his muse, living examples of a creative partnership built on mutual respect, come hell or high water. I call Rowlands Cassavetes's "muse," though I think closer to the truth is that their movies feel like watching great jazz musicians play off each other. Without exactly equating one of the greatest independent filmmakers of all time with Rob Zombie, I think Zombie and Sheri Moon Zombie go to some interesting places together they couldn't get to on their own. I can't claim Zombie's for everyone--hell, Cassavetes ain't for everyone, either--but he works on a specific wavelength where if you're hip to it, if you fall into his groove, for his part he never loses the beat. I didn't get it when I first saw House of 1000 Corpses, but from a second viewing of The Devil's Rejects on, I've been ride or die with Zombie. Unlike most, when it was announced he was tabbed to do a reboot of "The Munsters" (which has turned out to be a prequel to the TV series), I was not only not surprised, given his penchant for family stories--I was excited. I wish it were better.

Telluride '22: Women Talking

**½/****
starring Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Ben Whishaw, Frances McDormand
screenplay by Sarah Polley, based upon the book by Miriam Toews
directed by Sarah Polley

by Walter Chaw At the end of the note that opens Miriam Toews's novel Women Talking, she says that her book is "both a reaction through fiction to these true-life events, and an act of female imagination." Sarah Polley's adaptation begins with the same declaration of "female imagination," and it occurred to me finally, after sitting on the film for a couple of weeks before writing on it (and after reading Towes's book for the first time to try to better understand my disquiet), that my problem with Women Talking is mainly one of my own expectations of the text. I expected this to be a galvanizing bit of agitprop: a rallying cry and a soapbox. It was an expectation exacerbated by Polley's intro to the film at its world premiere in Telluride, where she introduced an "army of women" that included 11 cast members and one producer, Dede Gardner, who is the president of Plan B Entertainment, the production company founded by Brad Pitt. Though Pitt, too, is a producer on Women Talking, he was for obvious reasons absent on that stage--the same reasons, I reckon, that led to male characters in the Toews source being pared away for the film. But while it has powerful moments, as any piece of art inspired by a real-life case of mass rape (including the rape of children as young as three) in a closed-off religious cult (aren't they all?) would have powerful moments, Women Talking is a romantic fantasy told from the perspective of a dreamy male narrator who has a doomed crush on a perfect projection of gauzy, unearthly femininity. It's mostly my fault for assuming it was something else.

TIFF '22: Sick

***/****
starring Gideon Adlon, Dylan Sprayberry, Beth Million, Jane Adams
written by Kevin Williamson
directed by John Hyams

by Angelo Muredda The Spring 2020 lockdown gets pulled out of the cultural memory hole in Sick, where vulgar auteurism favourite John Hyams proves himself a capable new aesthetic partner for screenwriter Kevin Williamson's aging Gen-X insights. A satisfyingly nasty and well-executed cold open sets the scene, updating Scream's terrorism-by-home phone set-piece with a killer who's a passive-aggressive texter and summarily dispatching a reluctant young mask-wearer who comes home empty-handed during the great toilet paper drought of April 2020. From there, it's off to a remote country house with actual protagonists Parker (Gideon Adlon) and Miri (Beth Million), the latter more COVID-conscious than her reluctantly isolated social-butterfly friend. Their plan to ride out quarantine in relative seclusion soon falters when Parker's sometimes-boyfriend shows up, paving the way for a worse door-crasher: the athletic, text-happy, black-clad killer from the opening sequence.

TIFF '22: Walk Up

***/****
starring Kwon Hae-hyo, Lee Hye-young, Song Sunmi, Seok-ho Shin
directed by Hong Sang-soo

by Angelo Muredda A winding staircase serves as the connective tissue linking the disparate segments in Hong Sang-soo's Walk Up, a melancholy and self-deprecating profile of the Artist as a Depressive Loner that neatly tracks a middle-aged director's relationships, career, and health across his time spent on the various floors of his building. The prolific filmmaker's latest riff on his usual motifs--among them, social drinking, doppelgängers, and the awkwardness of film culture--sees him in a downcast mood, reflected in the minimalist set-design and black-and-white digital photography, as well as the none-too-hopeful attitude towards making and promoting art in a pandemic.

TIFF '22: EO

***½/****
starring Sandra Drzymalska, Lorenzo Zurzolo, Mateusz Kościukiewicz, Isabelle Huppert
written by Ewa Piaskowska, Jerzy Skolimowski
directed by Jerzy Skolimowski

by Angelo Muredda A donkey meets the dregs of human civilization and comes out worse for wear in Jerzy Skolimowski's EO, a sometimes whimsical but ultimately gnarly animal-rights fable that earns its righteous closing exhortation against the factory-farming industry and anyone who tacitly endorses it by eating meat. Though thematically indebted to animal odysseys as disparate as Au Hasard Balthazar, The Incredible Journey, and War Horse, EO is at once more formally adventurous in its endlessly roving camera and psychedelic set-pieces and more dispiriting than even the Bressonian incarnation of this subgenre, ultimately coming off like a noble beast's ground-level vision of the horrors of Come and See.

See How They Run (2022)

**/****
starring Sam Rockwell, Saoirse Ronan, Adrien Brody, David Oyelowo
written by Mark Chappell
directed by Tom George

by Walter Chaw TV director Tom George's feature debut See How They Run is a Wes Anderson shrine decorated with screenwriter Mark Chappell's theatre-brat deep cuts, which ultimately just leads one to ask what of it is its own. Set around a murder that takes place at the time of the 100^th performance of Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, complete with original cast members Richard Attenborough (Harris Dickinson) and Deila Sim (Pearl Chanda), the whole thing is a twee exercise in medium shots, split screens, and not much else. George and his production designers are gifted at creating clean, period-cozy environments, but all those acres of slick really do is demonstrate how money can buy a talented team of costumers and craftspeople in the pursuit of a recognizable veneer of prestige and quality. What it doesn't do, at least in this case, is provide the courage and the vision--perhaps it's experience and wisdom--to tell a story that isn't all surface pleasures. The real problem is that See How They Run has nothing to say about the world, about people, or, frankly, about Agatha Christie or murder mysteries. It doesn't even have all that much to say about itself. It's more the elderly Catskills chic of "Only Murders in the Building" than the genuine social revisionism of Knives Out. It has its opportunities; it mostly ignores them. It's a choice, and your mileage may vary.

TIFF '22: The Eternal Daughter

***½/****
starring Tilda Swinton, Carly-Sophia Davies, Joseph Mydell, Alfie Sankey-Green
written and directed by Joanna Hogg

by Angelo Muredda Joanna Hogg follows up her autobiographical The Souvenir films with a formal digestif in The Eternal Daughter, which filters her usual thematic preoccupations with memory, space, and creation born of loss through the appropriate genre container of English ghost stories, with style and warmth to spare. A gently spooky, dryly funny, and mournful B-side to those films, as well as a companion piece to her earlier texts where personal relationships are tested away from home in rented villas (Unrelated) and cottages (Archipelago), the film stars Hogg's childhood friend and frequent collaborator Tilda Swinton, who reprises her Souvenir role as an older version of patrician mother Rosalind while also standing in for her own daughter, Honor Swinton Byrne, as Rosalind's daughter Julie, a filmmaker who routinely mines her personal life in her artistic practice. Eager to finally learn more about her buttoned-up mother--and, Rosalind suspects, spin new work out of her stories--Julie treats Rosalind (and her dog) to a memory-jogging birthday stay at a mansion from her youth that's now a deserted, mist- and foliage-enshrouded hotel occupied only by the brusque night clerk (brimming with eat-the-rich intensity by Carly-Sophia Davies) and kindly late-night groundskeeper (Joseph Mydell). The women exchange sad stories and pour over the stingy four items on the menu in the seemingly haunted hotel while the days and nights wear on, unceremoniously marked by their routines of dog-walking, pill-taking, and tiptoeing late at night amidst the mysterious sounds of an open window rattling in the wind.

TIFF '22: I Like Movies

**½/****
starring Isaiah Lehtinen, Krista Bridges, Romina D'Ugo, Percy Hynes White
written and directed by Chandler Levack

by Bill Chambers At the beginning of this pandemic without end, I bought a used camcorder off eBay so that I could digitize the mountains of footage I generated making movies with friends as a teenager. It was a trip down memory lane that confirmed something I'd always suspected and feared: I was a complete tyrant. Make that dick. I was a misfit with control issues stemming from disability and obsessed with movies. Add a video camera to that--at least in the early '90s, when they were still novel--and you get Napoleon. With his black moptop and squat frame, high-schooler Lawrence Kweller (Isaiah Lehtinen) could be a live-action Gene Belcher--but the huge chip on his shoulder and his voluminous clothing sooner bring Ignatius J. Reilly to mind. He's funny in small doses. Certainly the opening scene of film critic Chandler Levack's feature debut I Like Movies is so uncanny I could only laugh. Lawrence and his best friend--his only friend--Matt Macarchuck (Percy Hynes White) have made a silly video for class. The teacher, Mr. Olenick (Anand Rajaram), shuts it off after it fades out, and Lawrence protests that he's skipped the blooper reel and end-credit outtakes. Mr. Olenick asks what their spoof of A Christmas Carol had to do with the assigned topic ("bias in the media"), and Lawrence says, "I just decided I wanted to do something, you know, more personal and from the heart." A classmate, Lauren (Eden Cupid), sticks up for the video by calling it "cute"--a word that only makes Lawrence apoplectic. Everything that comes out of Lawrence's mouth here probably came out of mine during my senior year of English, when I made a movie about Elvis faking his death to hide from Satan and called it a book report on The Great Gatsby.

Telluride '22: Aftersun

***/****
starring Paul Mescal, Francesca Corio, Celia Rowlson-Hall, Brooklyn Toulson
written and directed by Charlotte Wells

by Walter Chaw My parents are dead; my in-laws, too. Us outliving them is how they would've wanted it, and that's the wonder of surviving, isn't it, that this is what happens when everything works out? My dad has been dead for 19 years now, and that anniversary is coming up soon. I'm bad with dates, but my body seems to remember, and I can feel him retreating in my memory. I can't really recall what his laugh sounded like anymore. We weren't the kind of family that took home movies. I'm careful not to disturb the pile of dead leaves that is my childhood, though, because what if there's nothing in the middle of all those paper-thin fragments? Charlotte Wells's Aftersun is about trying to piece together who your father used to be once he's gone: dead or dead enough; it's never clear which it is in Wells's movie, but it hardly matters. We can glean a traumatic event has shaken Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall), who turns to a small pile of old DV videotapes she took as an 11-year-old on a trip to Greece with her dad in search of answers to questions she doesn't know how to ask. The questions the film itself asks are elliptical, elusive, as diaphanous as the images Wells puts together to present the insubstantial nothing that's left over after all this time. I'm reminded of childish experiments with microscopes, looking at a housefly's wing under magnification to find hundreds of opaque cells joined in an unknowable order, a jumble, that doesn't give any insight into the bigger picture, much less its function. Viewed in microcosm, anything is just confused nothing.

Telluride '22: Bones & All

Bones and All
****/****
starring Taylor Russell, Timothée Chalamet, Mark Rylance, Michael Stuhlbarg
screenplay by David Kajganich, based on the novel by Camille DeAngelis
directed by Luca Guadagnino

by Walter Chaw Luca Guadagnino's Bones and All is every single thing I like packed into one film: a swooning gothic romance; a gory and uncompromising cannibal movie; an American Honey middle-American travelogue; and a vision of first love as a consumptive, Romanticist fire. Shot in dirty sepia tones by DP Arseni Khachaturan (if you've not seen Dea Kulumbegashvili's Beginning, Khachaturan's lensing is one of the dozens of reasons you should remedy that), it has about it an atmosphere at once nostalgic for the 1980s, during which it's set, and aware of how the passage of time memorializes everything into unreliable emotional histories. I have no intellectual mechanism for retrieving memories--it's all about the feel. I realized during one scene that a girl, Kayla (Anna Cobb), was wearing a Cyndi Lauper T-shirt, and the impossible tangle of reactions I had made what might happen to her unbearable to contemplate. She became precious to me in an instant. She is somehow part of my history. (A disgusting person will later wear a Dokken tee, and I had a visceral reaction to that, too.)  The picture's needle drops, from Duran Duran's "Save a Prayer" to Joy Division's "Atmosphere" and New Order's propulsive/mesmerizing "Your Silent Face," offer evidence of a creative team who listened to the whole album instead of cherry-picked singles; the music is used as a mnemonic device for oldsters and a gateway drug for their kids. I still remember one doomed summer day in high school that started with my friend picking me up for us to go record shopping, Love and Rockets' fourth album whirring away in his cassette deck, my hand porpoising through the air of my open window--that feeling of being completely alive. So alive. Kate Bush just enjoyed a renaissance--I can only hope the same for Ian Curtis and Bernard Sumner after the Timothée Chalamet hive assimilates this film into their holy doctrine. It's worth appreciating how "Atmosphere" and "Your Silent Face" are both anthems about finding your voice or making a statement through silence (ditto "Lick it Up," off the first KIϟϟ album where they take off their makeup), and so these aren't merely nostalgia triggers. Every element of Bones and All helps to amplify Guadagnino's themes of discovering who you are in the midst of the whirlwind.

Telluride '22: Empire of Light

*/****
starring Olivia Colman, Micheal Ward, Tom Brooke, Colin Firth
written and directed by Sam Mendes

by Walter Chaw While I know the "light" of the title refers to the light that carries a film from carbon arc to silver screen in a grand Art Deco theatre called the "Empire," what it more accurately refers to is Empire of Light's puffed-up inconsequence. Whatever one thinks of Sam Mendes's films (and I think not much of them if I can help it), Mendes is not the first director who swims to mind when it comes time to tackle questions of racism, "crazy" women, and institutional misogyny. Particularly not when it's all wrapped in awards-trolling prestige, couched in the merry, glad-handing fuckery of "movies can bring us all together, and so can ska-punk pioneers the English Beat--and let me read to you the last stanza of 'Death's Echo' by Auden, here, my hand, child."

Telluride '22: Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths

Bardo
Bardo (or False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths)
Bardo, falsa crónica de unas cuantas verdades
½*/****
starring Daniel Giménez Cacho, Hugo Albores, Andrés Almeida, Misha Arias De La Cantolla
written by Nicolás Giacobone & Alejandro G. Iñárritu
directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu

by Walter Chaw I can't tell you how tempting it is to just re-post my review of Birdman for Alejandro G. Iñárritu's Bardo with a neon "BUT MORE SO" flashing over it, given that I've already invested a full three hours in the Mexican auteur's latest altar to unseemly false modesty. (Oscars four and five, here we come.) This one is another technically dazzling cri de cœur featuring a tortured artist caught in the vicissitudes of a midlife crisis. The stand-in for Iñárritu is Mexican investigative journalist Silverio (a wonderful Daniel Giménez Cacho), who returns to Mexico for the first time in years on the eve of his winning a prestigious award from an American institution. This leads to the usual mid-life stuff: a visit with a dead father and a dying mother; a raucous party where his old friends give him shit for exploiting Mexicans and Mexican culture for gringo fame, power, and approval; a magic-realist consideration of a still-born child, resulting in a repulsive gag played like a circus trick in which a newborn is shoved back into the womb; and the exploration of impostor syndrome, which feels increasingly disingenuous with every enormous set-piece ripped off the Film School Mount Olympus. Bardo is Jay Sherman's 8½, and knowing it doesn't excuse it.

Telluride '22: Good Seconds (An Introduction)

by Walter Chaw The plan was to drop my kid off at school this morning and then do the six-and-a-half-hour drive to Telluride, where, per tradition, I'd hide in the company of dear friends and try to refill tanks that have gotten dangerously low in the interim year. It's an excellent place to do it: Telluride is not only geographically remote, set in a valley after what seems like endless ribbons of winding mountain roads, but emotionally as well--a diving bell in the midnight zone of my depression. I wasn't sure I was going to make it this year--not to Telluride, but at all. My experience of depression is it's a thing I can manage most of the time. Then sometimes and often for no proximate reason at all...I can't.

Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022)

***/****
starring Idris Elba, Tilda Swinton, Pia Thunderbolt, Berk Ozturk
screenplay by George Miller & Augusta Gore, based upon the short story "The Djinn in the Nightingale" by A.S. Byatt
directed by George Miller

by Walter Chaw George Miller's Three Thousand Years of Longing raises impossibly tangled issues around representation in its tale of a "narratologist" who releases a Djinn from his bottle and wishes he would love her as she, instantly, loves him. Based on a short story by A.S. Byatt, part of a five-part cycle that seeks to navigate the rocky wasteland between colonist and colonized, the victor and the appropriated, Miller's picture is a story about a specific point of view that can never be entirely separated from itself. Whatever the best intentions invested in bridging cultural gaps, the process of absorption and reinterpretation tends to result in diminishment. The things that are most precious in our stories are ephemeral and shy. They're like exotic zoo specimens: they don't travel well and, once imprisoned, wither and die. But like anything judged to be rare and, through its rareness, authentic, stories belonging to others continue to be collected, no matter the damage collection does to them. Mulan, Aladdin... The popular conversation around them has swung so completely into their Disneyfication that Niki Caro, the not-Asian director of the live-action Mulan, based on one of China's most-revered folk heroes, said there "is another culture at play here, the culture of Disney." Unlike Mulan, however, Three Thousand Years of Longing is based on a work by a white, Yorkshire-born British woman (a Dame, no less), and I think it's not so much an attempt to colonize 1001 Arabian Nights as it is an ethical adaptation of a piece primarily interested in how the West has sought meaning for itself through the Orientalization of the cultures it's exploited for centuries.

Light Years: FFC Interviews Bernard Rose

Walter Chaw interviews Bernard Rose,
director of TRAVELING LIGHT

I met Bernard Rose a few years ago when I flew him and his 35mm answer print of Paperhouse out to Colorado for a special screening of the film. Not long after, he returned with Tony Todd for Candyman and a rousing post-film discussion that teased a reunion for the director and actor, which has come to fruition not once but twice since then. I'm still keeping my fingers crossed for the Candyman sequel that sees Helen as the bogey; perhaps the idea of a white lady academic gentrifier is already scary enough. During that first visit, Rose and I spent a couple of hours in a bar discussing Tolstoy, which, besides being bracing under any circumstance, is an exceedingly rare event outside of academia. It's been one of the honours of my life to encounter brilliant creators and to benefit so richly from the association. When I learned that Rose and Todd had picked up a camera, taking to the streets of Los Angeles in the dark days of the pandemic to shoot a new, experimental project inspired by Luis Buñuel called Traveling Light, I was grateful for an excuse to interview Rose. Of course the film is iconoclastic, challenging in the best way and a time capsule of a particular moment that already seems a hundred years ago and fading. We began our conversation by talking about the massive--and largely unexamined--psychic toll of the last two years on the human race.

Orphan: First Kill (2022)

*½/****
starring Isabelle Fuhrman, Rossif Sutherland, Hiro Kanagawa, Julia Stiles
screenplay by David Coggeshall
directed by William Brent Bell

by Angelo Muredda "Esther's terrifying saga continues," promises the confusing promotional copy for William Brent Bell's Orphan: First Kill, a listless prequel to Jaume Collet-Serra's impressively nasty thriller Orphan. It says something about the project's existential inertia that even the pitch is muddled about whether the film's diminutive protagonist, played again with an appropriate mix of madame prudishness and girlish optimism by Isabelle Fuhrman, is coming or going. Arriving a whole 13-year-old's lifespan after the original, which famously culminated in the reveal that Esther was not a helpless urchin from St. Mariana's Home for Girls but a short, thirty-something serial killer from Estonia, Orphan: First Kill dilutes rather than develops the deliberately thin mythos of its predecessor, stretching its punchy 30-second exposition dump about her past into 100 minutes of deadweight.

Bullet Train (2022)

*/****
starring Brad Pitt, Joey King, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Sandra Bullock
screenplay by Zak Olkewicz, based on the book by Kôtarô Isaka
directed by David Leitch

by Walter Chaw I have so many thoughts about David Leitch's Bullet Train, and I don't think a single one of them coheres with any of the other ones. This is most likely a product of general exhaustion, or a lifetime misspent on excess consumption of media colliding now in middle-age with my becoming somehow the go-to for Amer-Asian-splaining of representational issues in American cinema. Like the whole "whitewashing" thing going on around Bullet Train, which is based on a popular Japanese novel by Kôtarô Isaka, who is pleased people like Brad Pitt and Brian Tyree Henry are in this big-budget Hollywood adaptation because it raises his profile internationally. Sony Pictures, whose parent company is Japanese, has already come out saying the same stupid shit about how much they wanted to honour the Japanese source material by hiring the best actors for the project--who happen to be Not Japanese--while Asian-Americans are rightfully outraged about the same stupid shit because of how much damage this ingrained corporate "wisdom" continues to wreak on the Asian-American community. If we continue to pull on this thread, we find Isaka has stolen the entire premise and execution of his book from Guy Ritchie and Quentin Tarantino, who, as we know, have stolen their things from British New Wave gangster flicks on the one hand, Asian cinema on the other--Asian cinema that has its roots in, what, Kurosawa? Whose favourite filmmaker was John Ford? And who was ripped off by Italian guy Sergio Leone, who was ripped off by Sam Peckinpah, who was ripped off by Hong Kong legend John Woo, who was ripped off by everybody for a while there. There's a scene in Bullet Train where Brad Pitt and Brian Tyree Henry, both playing hitmen, fight each other in tight quarters that is awfully reminiscent of Jackie Chan. Another scene recalls Louis Leterrier, who probably learned it from Jet Li--and neither Chan nor Li is Japanese, of course.

Prey (2022)

****/****
starring Amber Midthunder, Dakota Beavers, Dane DiLiegro, Stormee Kipp
screenplay by Patrick Aison
directed by Dan Trachtenberg

by Walter Chaw There is a complete lack of pretense to Dan Trachtenberg's Prey--lack of pretense being one of the emerging traits of a filmmaker whose two films so far (both stealth sequels, both tremendously ethical towards their source materials) are lean genre exercises that feel like minor miracles in a landscape studded with sodden, high-profile disasters. Neither a puzzlebox nor a legacy sequel requiring a spreadsheet and an encyclopedic knowledge of a quarter-century of lore, Prey tells a particular, standalone story in an economical way. It's a coming-of-age period piece with shades of Mel Gibson's Apocalypto; what I'm saying is it means business. Set in the Northern Great Plains in 1719, it follows a spirited young Comanche woman, Naru (Amber Midthunder), as she tries to prove herself as a hunter under the shadow of her brother, Taabe (Dakota Beavers), a gifted bowman and all-around badass who has a stranglehold on the admiration of their tribe. When she follows an all-male hunting party in search of the mountain lion that has attacked one of their people, one of the young men asks her why she's bothered, given that they don't need a cook out there in the wilderness. But she sees things they miss in their arrogance and desire to impress one another. Like the skinned rattlesnake left by a path, or the footprint bigger than anything that should be in this place. The boys discount the latter as nothing to worry about, lest they be seen as cautious and thoughtful--as feminine, like Naru.