Film Freak Central

Deadly Virtues: Love.Honour.Obey. (2015) - VOD

*½/****
starring Megan Maczko, Edward Akrout, Matt Barber, Sadie Frost
screenplay by Mark Rogers
directed by Ate de Jong

by Alice Stoehr "You cannot fight," explains the villain to his rope-bound prisoner. "Your only chance of survival comes from compliance." This lecture is the starting point for Deadly Virtues: Love.Honour.Obey. [sic], an erotic cat-and-mouse thriller that takes place over a long weekend in a suburban English home. Said villain is Aaron, an intruder played by handsome French actor Edward Akrout. He has a sparse moustache and a head of unkempt hair, locks of which fall dashingly across his forehead. The camera adores him. Megan Maczko, playing Aaron's prisoner Alison, receives far less flattering treatment. She spends much of her screentime tied up and in some degree of undress, her face contorted with faint disgust, eyes averting her captor's gaze. Like Akrout, she has to look hot, but hers must be a hotness coloured by mixed emotions and performed under duress. As her co-star murmurs the lion's share of the dialogue, Maczko needs to indicate reluctant arousal blossoming into full-on emotional liberation. She fails, but so would any actress, because the film's greasy sexual politics set her up to fail. Meanwhile, the third member of the cast--Matt Barber, as Alison's husband Tom--has to squirm in a bathtub and howl as Aaron mutilates Tom. He acquits himself adequately, especially given paltry lines like, "Did you touch my wife?" and, "I can't have anyone else inside you."

Point Break (2015) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras F
starring Édgar Ramírez, Luke Bracey, Teresa Palmer, Ray Winstone
screenplay by Kurt Wimmer
directed by Ericson Core

by Walter Chaw Not enough can be said about Kathryn Bigelow's action sense. The honkytonk slaughter sequence in Near Dark, from the first moment (when the vampires crest the hill) to the last (when the lone survivor defenestrates), is a triumph of design, of score--including the high lonesome tones of a George Strait classic on the jukebox--and editing and execution. It's that perfect economy of ideas-into-motion that indicates her cult classic Point Break, too--that, paired with absolutely perfect casting, from Keanu Reeves's Everybody's All-American football hero-turned-FBI dude Johnny Utah and Patrick Swayze's blissed-out charismatic leader all the way down to Gary Busey and Lori Petty, the best supporting staff a film about a surf-zen cult-cum-bank-robbing crew could ask for. It's a lovely marriage between ludicrous high-concept and the period immediately following the 1980s, which found the country in a reflective mood, perched there on the verge of upsetting the primacy of film for the coming digital age. Bigelow's Point Break was a showcase for practical stuntwork and, philosophically, a nice metaphor for the excess of the "greed is good"/City on the Hill period drawing to a close. The bad guys rob banks to pay their way to enlightenment. Of course it all ends in tears.

Anomalisa (2015) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
written by Charlie Kaufman
directed by Charlie Kaufman & Duke Johnson

by Walter Chaw Writing about a Charlie Kaufman film, if you do it honestly, is writing about yourself. I've said before and it helps me to repeat it that I don't really understand Kaufman's films but that they do understand me. Kaufman is the most important, innovative voice in American cinema since Orson Welles, and though he has enjoyed more autonomy in expressing that voice than Welles, I would argue that the seven years separating his directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York, and this follow-up, a stop-motion collaboration with Duke Johnson called Anomalisa, suggest that it's not as easy as it should be. Certainly the journey that Anomalisa has taken is far from conventional, from Kaufman play written under the pseudonym "Francis Fregosi," through a Kickstarter campaign, through the general challenge of making an adult-themed animation in a country that sees animation as a genre not a medium, to now this tour of festivals, looking for distribution. The play was introduced as part of a Carter Burwell project titled "Theater of the New Ear". It was a late replacement on a Kaufman/Coen Bros. double-bill when the Coens "dropped out" at the eleventh hour, and this unknown Fregosi's piece took its place.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) - Blu-ray + DVD + DigitalHD

Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens
***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Max Von Sydow
written by Lawrence Kasdan & J.J. Abrams and Michael Arndt
directed by J.J. Abrams

by Walter Chaw I was four when I saw Star Wars. It was the first time I'd seen a film in a theatre; it was the first film I'd seen, period. I didn't speak a word of English. It was overwhelming, and I'm discovering, after watching J.J. Abrams's Star Wars: The Force Awakens (hereafter Star Wars 7), that it imprinted itself on my DNA. Thirty-eight years later, I collect the toys my parents couldn't afford to buy me when I was a kid--the ones I played with at friends' houses, when I pretended to be Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) as a child of immigrants doing his best to fit into a society that promised blond and blue-eyed messiahs. My office is full of these toys. They are fetishized relics for me. I hold them and they possess a totemic value. The curve of a molded plastic stormtrooper's helmet reminds me of the department store where I looked at it through the packaging--and of my delight at my mom one day buying me one, which I opened on the way home in the backseat of the family car.

The Hateful Eight (2015) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras C-
starring Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Bruce Dern
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

by Walter Chaw Quentin Tarantino's eighth film, The Hateful Eight, features eight hateful people trapped in a small space during a blizzard. The hullabaloo surrounding its release has to do with the production shooting in an extinct widescreen format (70mm anamorphic) and putting up a lot of money so that it can be screened accordingly in select theatres. A few critics have misidentified its vistas as belonging to Wyoming (it was filmed in Telluride, Colorado), which is understandable given that only about five minutes of the 187-minute running-time is spent outside. There hasn't been a Tarantino feature until this one that I haven't loved; I believe he is our finest working film critic. He understands things about the movies he pulls from--that certain traditions of Japanese and exploitation filmmaking are strongly feminist, that blaxploitation was initially empowerment before it was instantly gentrified, that the best slave narratives involve legacies of violence, which is why Lalee's Kin and Django Unchained have a biological connective bridge. I've learned more about movies from watching Tarantino than I have from watching Godard, who's actually trying to teach me something. I think the Kill Bill saga is a remarkable statement about motherhood. I find his dialogue to be distinctive and sometimes exhilarating. I struggled with disliking The Hateful Eight for each of its 187 minutes. It's the first time I've ever understood the popular criticism of Tarantino as self-indulgent, nihilistic, misogynistic, even racist. I don't agree with every charge, but I do get it now. It's the first time, too, that I was troubled by a plot point in his film: there's someone in the piece who hates Mexicans, see, but when we get a flashback to this person engaging with a Mexican, we see that this is a fallacy. I can't figure out if this was intentional; I fear that it wasn't. I fear, more, that this is evidence that for the first time Tarantino has lost control of his screenplay. I also finally felt the loss of Sally Menke, who was his Marcia Lucas. I hope it's not a harbinger of things to come.

In the Heart of the Sea (2015) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

*/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Chris Hemsworth, Benjamin Walker, Cillian Murphy, Brendan Gleeson
screenplay by Charles Leavitt, based on the book In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick
directed by Ron Howard

by Bill Chambers In the Heart of the Sea is Ron Howard's water movie, just like Backdraft is his fire movie, Far and Away is his earth movie, and Apollo 13 is his air movie. It's also his first fish movie since Splash, suggesting that Howard is retracing his steps in a career reboot that began with Rush, his first car movie since his directorial debut, Grand Theft Auto. But one waits for history to repeat itself with some sign of accrued wisdom beyond obvious markers like technical proficiency. In fact, in its show-offiness and ersatz emotionalism, In the Heart of the Sea seems the less mature film next to Splash, which has a formal self-control and hints of real pathos despite a fantastical premise that sees a landlubber falling in love with a woman who's secretly a mermaid. (It's the first film to seize on Tom Hanks's Jimmy Stewart quality, as well as the rare one to tap into his anger.) There's hardly a genuine moment in In the Heart of the Sea, and a framing device only exacerbates the problem by adding another layer of dramatization to something that already plays like a big-budget History Channel re-enactment.

Creed (2015) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Michael B. Jordan, Sylvester Stallone, Tessa Thompson, Phylicia Rashad
screenplay by Ryan Coogler & Aaron Covington
directed by Ryan Coogler

by Walter Chaw I love this movie. I do. It's not perfect. The love interest is underbaked and the fight choreography of the final match is unfortunately disjointed. But I love this movie--unconditionally, I guess. The story goes that Ryan Coogler, the young director of Fruitvale Station, pitched Sylvester Stallone on the idea of rebooting Rocky with Apollo Creed's son. (Something the Indiana Jones series needs to do with a grown-up Short Round, by the way.) The auto-critical analysis of the film is that it's essentially a father/son intrigue, which lends some insight into the Rocky/Mickey relationship of the original Rockys, and there are enough references to same to gratify the cultists. What I liked most about Stallone's willingness to take a shot on a fresh idea from a minority perspective--this is the first instalment of one of his two venerable franchises to not spring from a Stallone-written script--is that it feeds into the idea of Stallone as an auteur maybe, a canny cultural anthropologist definitely. Every Rocky, every Rambo, is distinctly a product of its time. I don't feel qualified to talk about this, but to the extent that I understand the theory, I'm sold.

The Good Dinosaur (2015) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

***/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B+
screenplay by Meg LeFauve
directed by Peter Sohn and Bob Peterson

by Walter Chaw Arlo (voiced by Raymond Ochoa) is the runt in a frontier family of stylized dinosaur herbivores who struggles to live up to the example of towering Poppa (Jeffrey Wright) on the family farmstead. He's clumsy, though, and easily frightened, and when he finds himself incapable of killing a mammalian vermin (Jack Bright), he unwittingly causes the death of his father. Arlo joins forces with the vermin, eventually, dubbing him "Spot" (he's a little orphaned human boy) and relying on him to forage sustenance for him in the wild world outside. Spot, in return, relies upon Arlo for protection in the film's final set-piece as Spot is set upon by a flock of fundamentalist pterodactyls. Pixar's The Good Dinosaur is, in other words, a horror western about a frontier bespotted with monsters and monstrous ideologies, set right there at the liminal space--as all great westerns are--between the old ways and the encroaching new. It's far more disturbing than has generally been acknowledged and, in being disturbing, it offers a tremendous amount of subtext layered onto a deceptively simple story. It posits an Earth where the dinosaur-ending comet misses impact, leading to millions of years of evolved adaptations and ending, as the film begins, with the emergence of homo sapiens on schedule, but skittering around on all fours and howling at their saurian masters. The Good Dinosaur is an existential horrorshow.

The Intern (2015) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras D+
starring Robert De Niro, Anne Hathaway, Rene Russo, Anders Holm
written and directed by Nancy Meyers

by Bill Chambers Back to back, literally, Robert De Niro made Mean Streets, The Godfather Part II, Taxi Driver, 1900, The Last Tycoon, New York, New York, The Deer Hunter, Raging Bull, True Confessions, The King of Comedy, and Once Upon a Time in America. Brazil, The Mission, Angel Heart, Midnight Run, Goodfellas, Cape Fear, This Boy's Life, Casino, and Heat punctuate his next ten years as a working actor. So I've never really felt the urge to bash De Niro for his late-period career choices, which are mostly about maintaining a standard of living, funding entrepreneurial bids, and mellowing with age. (This is not a man who owes us anything.) And his persona--whatever it is, can we agree that his most volatile roles inform it?--has not been so debauched by decades of ham that there's not a bit of a subversive kick to seeing him play Mary Poppins, complete with luggage though sans umbrella, in Nancy Meyers's The Intern.

Annual Professional Commentary on the Oscar Nominations (2016 edition)

by Bill Chambers

BEST PICTURE
The Big Short = sure
Bridge of Spies = um...
Brooklyn = yay
Mad Max: Fury Road = yay
The Martian = always nice to see a musical comedy get nominated
The Revenant = sometimes you eat the bear...
Room = whatevs
Spotlight = yay

Film Freak Central's Best of '15

by Walter Chaw 2015 was an interesting year for me.

Apples vs. Oranges: On the Burt Reynolds and Frank Langella Memoirs

BUT ENOUGH ABOUT ME: A MEMOIR
FFC rating: 6/10
by Burt Reynolds and Jon Winokur

DROPPED NAMES: FAMOUS MEN AND WOMEN AS I KNEW THEM
FFC rating: 10/10
by Frank Langella

by Bill Chambers Burt Reynolds and Frank Langella are very different actors (Burt could not have pulled off Dracula, nor would Langella have ever looked at home behind the wheel of a Trans-Am) and, as it happens, very different writers, yet in 2015's But Enough About Me: A Memoir and 2012's Dropped Names: Famous Men and Women As I Knew Them, respectively, they've taken a similar approach to memoir by reminiscing about, in Langella's words, "the transient company of many remarkable people." Langella sticks to the rich and famous while Reynolds broadens his repertoire to encompass his father, various civilian friends, and a horse, but a more significant distinction is that, with one exception, everyone Langella writes about is dead, whereas quite a few of Burt's players are still alive. It sometimes makes But Enough About Me read like an open letter--one with decidedly Nixonian overtones in a passage listing every person who stood by Reynolds when it was rumoured he had AIDS. (If you're not on it, fuck you is the subtext.) If Langella is by definition the more vulturous of the pair, he's also the superior anthropologist, a keener observer, and, comparatively-speaking, a born humorist, vividly caricaturing his subjects so that even the most reviled of them (Anthony Quinn, Lee Strasberg) will seem worthy of the contempt. Here's how Langella introduces his chapter on Strasberg:

Concussion (2015)

*/****
starring Will Smith, Alec Baldwin, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Albert Brooks
written and directed by Peter Landesman

by Walter Chaw Peter Landesman's deeply compromised Concussion so shockingly exposes and excoriates the negligence of the NFL in protecting its players that it's constantly advertised during NFL games. The whole thing feels like a redacted security document: It's choppy, skips over entire plot points, short-sells the issues, and gives equal time to celebrating the beauty and the glory of football as it does to how football turns a scary percentage of its players into confused, manic, suicidal zombies. Save for a few minutes spent with Pittsburgh Steelers centre Mike Webster (David Morse), living in a truck and gluing his teeth into his head with superglue, we don't get much of a glimpse at the symptomatology of "CTE," the repeated-trauma disease discovered by Nigerian-born Dr. Bennet Omalu (Will Smith), who's introduced listing off his accomplishments to declare himself the "smartest person you've ever probably met or will probably ever meet." Concussion is what Spotlight would have looked like had it been made by Cardinal Law: you know, some stuff happened, but the Catholic Church is MAJESTIC. To be fair, we don't get much of a glimpse of anything--not even the romance between Omalu and his ward-cum-lover-cum-spouse (Gugu Mbatha-Raw, so astonishing in Belle and Beyond the Lights; welcome to the mainstream, Gugu!), which is treated in a curious, epileptic shorthand. She's a homeless refugee. She's very religious. Oh, now they're dancing and, um, fucking, and married and, wait, pregnant and married. Wait, now she's doing that wife-in-Bridge of Spies thing where she's protecting the family and... And Concussion is terrible.

Joy (2015)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro, Edgar Ramirez, Bradley Cooper
screenplay by David O. Russell
directed by David O. Russell

by Walter Chaw After demonstrating with his last few movies that he's not Martin Scorsese, David O. Russell has decided to kill two birds with one stone by demonstrating that he is neither Wes nor P.T. Anderson, either. In Joy, he proves that marrying Wes Anderson's whimsical solipsism with P.T. Anderson's Pynchon-esque biographical sketches is an amazingly stupid thing to do--one of those science experiments in '50s B-movies that everyone knows is a bad idea except for the idiot doing the splicing. Yes, Joy is that bad. When it's not being unbearably twee, it's perving on Jennifer Lawrence like von Sternberg on Dietrich. But Joy ain't no Blue Angel, and while I like Lawrence fine, I guess, Russell is sure as hell no von Sternberg. What I'm saying is that Russell is a terrible, glitchy director with a thing for Lawrence that he manifests by shooting her walking towards the camera with sunglasses, without sunglasses, with a wig and without a wig, in slow-motion or at normal speed, in daytime, nighttime; he lights her with the sun, with spots, with discretes, from below, and especially from behind--all in a kind of PENTHOUSE glamour. The only part of Joy that isn't unwatchable is a sequence shot precisely like identical sequences in P.T. Anderson's Magnolia, where an obviously tense Bradley Cooper, playing QVC programming director Neil Walker, shows the titular domestic goddess Joy (Lawrence) around the studio. I take it back, those were pretty bad, too. The only thing preventing Joy from being the worst movie of the year is that Pixels happened.

The Good Dinosaur (2015); The Revenant (2015); The Hateful Eight (2015)

THE GOOD DINOSAUR
***/****
screenplay by Meg LeFauve
directed by Peter Sohn and Bob Peterson

THE REVENANT
***½/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, a bear, angry junketeers
screenplay by Mark L. Smith & Alejandro G. Iñárritu
directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu

THE HATEFUL EIGHT
**/****
starring Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Bruce Dern
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

by Walter Chaw Arlo (voiced by Raymond Ochoa) is the runt in a frontier family of stylized dinosaur herbivores who struggles to live up to the example of towering Poppa (Jeffrey Wright) on the family farmstead. He's clumsy, though, and easily frightened, and when he finds himself incapable of killing a mammalian vermin (Jack Bright), he unwittingly causes the death of his father. Arlo joins forces with the vermin, eventually, dubbing him "Spot" (he's a little orphaned human boy) and relying on him to forage sustenance for him in the wild world outside. Spot, in return, relies upon Arlo for protection in the film's final set-piece as Spot is set upon by a flock of fundamentalist pterodactyls. Pixar's The Good Dinosaur is, in other words, a horror western about a frontier bespotted with monsters and monstrous ideologies, set right there at the liminal space--as all great westerns are--between the old ways and the encroaching new. It's far more disturbing than has generally been acknowledged and, in being disturbing, it offers a tremendous amount of subtext layered onto a deceptively simple story. It posits an Earth where the dinosaur-ending comet misses impact, leading to millions of years of evolved adaptations and ending, as the film begins, with the emergence of homo sapiens on schedule, but skittering around on all fours and howling at their saurian masters. The Good Dinosaur is an existential horrorshow.

Pan (2015) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

***½/**** Image B Sound A Extras C
starring Hugh Jackman, Garrett Hedlund, Rooney Mara, Levi Miller
screenplay by Jason Fuchs
directed by Joe Wright

by Walter Chaw Paired with Hanna, his take on the Little Red Riding Hood story, Joe Wright's Pan suggests that the director's closest career analogue is that of J.J. Abrams. Wright's askew take on Anna Karenina hints at a sympathetic penchant for ebullient reinterpretation--no less so his adaptations of Atonement (by an author essentially making a career of taking a piss) and Pride & Prejudice, which, in its sparseness and emotional economy, could stand alongside Andrea Arnold's magnificent Wuthering Heights. Hanna, his best film, achieves at least a portion of its greatness through its bull-headed perversity. No premise is too fanciful to be presented seriously by Wright. In Pan, when we're introduced to the pirate Blackbeard (Hugh Jackman), a Fury Road's collection of orphan miners sing-chants "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in obeisance to their monstrous overlord. It's something born of Brian Helgeland's anachronistic A Knight's Tale and of Terry Gilliam in its antic set design and costuming and of David Lynch, even, in a sequence where Blackbeard dons a mask aboard his flying ship to breathe deep something that resembles the Spice. There's another sequence in which a pirate ship, a 16^th-century galleon, engages in midair with a trio of British Hawker Hurricanes (I think) defending Mother England against the German blitz before breaking through the clouds for a brief, weightless moment.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)

***½/****
starring Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Max Von Sydow
written by Lawrence Kasdan & J.J. Abrams and Michael Arndt
directed by J.J. Abrams

by Walter Chaw I was four when I saw Star Wars. It was the first time I'd seen a film in a theatre; it was the first film I'd seen, period. I didn't speak a word of English. It was overwhelming, and I'm discovering, after watching J.J. Abrams's Star Wars: The Force Awakens (hereafter Star Wars 7), that it imprinted itself on my DNA. Thirty-eight years later, I collect the toys my parents couldn't afford to buy me when I was a kid--the ones I played with at friends' houses, when I pretended to be Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) as a child of immigrants doing his best to fit into a society that promised blond and blue-eyed messiahs. My office is full of these toys. They are fetishized relics for me. I hold them and they possess a totemic value. The curve of a molded plastic stormtrooper's helmet reminds me of the department store where I looked at it through the packaging--and of my delight at my mom one day buying me one, which I opened on the way home in the backseat of the family car.

Blind Chance (1987) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

Przypadek
***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Boguslaw Linda, Tadeusz Lomnicki, Marzena Trybala, Monika Goździk
written and directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski

by Bryant Frazer Before Krzysztof Kieslowski became the standard-bearer for the latter-day European art film with ravishing portraits of unspeakably beautiful women living their lives under unutterably mysterious circumstances, he was a gruff but adventurous chronicler, in both documentary and narrative films, of lives lived in the rather more drab surroundings of communist Poland. Well, money changes everything. It was the arrival of funding from Western sources that bestowed the gift of abstraction: Beginning with the internationally-celebrated The Double Life of Veronique in 1991, it made Kieslowski's expressions of ennui beautiful. But in the 1980s, Kieslowski had less time for beauty.

Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

***½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, Alec Baldwin
screenplay by Christopher McQuarrie
directed by Christopher McQuarrie

by Walter Chaw At some point, sneakily, wonderfully, Tom Cruise became our Jackie Chan. It happened when the storyline shifted away from his essential ickiness--the Scientology thing, the Katie Holmes thing, and all the attendant nightmare gossip--and onto his fearlessness and absolute willingness to perform his own stunts wherever possible. (I realize of course that said storyline may never shift for some.) There were murmurs when he did the rock-climbing in the second Mission: Impossible flick--the one where he recruited John Woo, who was at the time the best action director on the planet. Those murmurs turned to grudging admiration once it was revealed that Cruise let himself be suspended for real outside the Burj Khalifa in Brad Bird's superior Ghost Protocol; and now, with Christopher McQuarrie's fleet, intelligent, immanently professional Rogue Nation, for which Cruise hung from an airplane in flight and held his breath for six minutes, Cruise's bravado is a big part of the draw.

Macbeth (2015)

***½/****
starring Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, Paddy Considine, David Thewlis
screenplay by Todd Louiso & Jacob Kokoff and Michael Leslie
directed by Justin Kurzel

by Walter Chaw In a season awash in Terrence Malick shrines, Justin Kurzel's Macbeth has the temerity to evoke Andrei Tarkovsky instead. Maybe certain moments from Akira Kurosawa's Kagemusha, married to the saturated minimalism of Tarkovsky's Stalker. It's beautiful, in other words. Stunning enough that its self-consciousness is just another approach to centuries-old material, and a comfortable part of the whole. There are two approaches left to Shakespeare, I think: to acknowledge the centuries of intense scholarship around the canon that has uncovered the archetype (mostly Jungian, sometimes Freudian) mooring the tales, or to ignore them. This Macbeth understands that the Scottish Play is splashed red--all passion and portent and looming storms flashing low on the horizon. Every incident is portent. I mumbled along with the "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" speech that I memorized for extra credit in eighth grade and marvelled at how Kurzel rolled it into a greater thematic conversation about the lust between these two people, Macbeth (Michael Fassbender) and his Lady (Marion Cotillard). It's as interesting an interpretation as Ethan Hawke's Melancholy Dane pondering choices in the aisles of Blockbuster Video. Muting the dialogue, swallowing it as Fassbender does here (or burying it, as in the various battleground sequences--Banquo (Paddy Considine) calls out his warning choking on blood and dirt), has the effect of placing the words of the story as secondary to its indelible images. It's Macbeth as mythology, seeking to explain how eternity metastasizes in the space between a couple who have lost a child.

Krampus (2015)

**/****
starring Adam Scott, Toni Collette, David Koechner, Krista Stadler
written by Todd Casey & Michael Dougherty & Zach Shields
directed by Michael Dougherty

by Walter Chaw I used to have a collection of short stories edited by Isaac Asimov, The Twelve Frights of Christmas. Ramsey Campbell's "The Chimney" is anthologized therein, and though it's not directly a Krampus story, it's sort of a Krampus story and was, at least, the first time I'd been introduced to the concept of something like an anti-Santa. It's a great story. Michael Dougherty's Krampus is not great, but with all the lulls and jokes misfiring, it does give you plenty of time to think about other things. (I didn't like his Trick 'r Treat either.) What works about the film are its first twenty minutes or so, where Dougherty seems to be setting up an unpleasant, nasty little commentary on the commodification of Christmas. There's trouble, though, when the parts of your movie that work are the parts that compare best to Jingle All the Way. I'll say, too, that there's genuine delight in the appearance of weird snowmen on the lawn during a blizzard blackout, stranding a shitty family alone with their thoughts while a German alpine demon lurks about outside--as well as hope, however self-deluding and fleet, that Dougherty's going to pay off the early abduction of the second-most sympathetic child of six. Alas, it's ultimately as compromised as Trick 'r Treat. The last five minutes are a masterpiece of playing both sides against the middle and pandering to an intended middlebrow audience. Like its PG-13 rating, Krampus is a devil's bargain between horror film and family film. It's the kind of thing that only really worked when it was Gremlins.

Tales from the Crypt Presents Demon Knight (1995) [Collector's Edition] + Tales from the Crypt Presents Bordello of Blood (1996) [Collector's Edition] - Blu-ray Discs

Demon Knight
***/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras A
starring Billy Zane, William Sadler, Jada Pinkett, Brenda Bakke
written by Ethan Reiff & Cyrus Voris & Mark Bishop
directed by Ernest Dickerson

Bordello of Blood
*/**** Image B Sound C+ Extras A
starring Dennis Miller, Erika Eleniak, Angie Everhart, John Kassir
screenplay by A.L. Katz & Gilbert Adler
directed by Gilbert Adler

by Walter Chaw I didn't have HBO as a kid. Didn't even have cable. When I went over to friends' houses, I would spend a lot of time wanting to watch MTV to try to catch up on all the popular culture I was missing. "Remote Control", the first Jon Stewart show, "Dream On", "The Kids in the Hall"--each of them represent gaping holes in my pop education. Lump in the Walter Hill-produced "Tales from the Crypt" anthology program with that group of things I knew about but only by title and reputation. My first exposure to the EC Comics-inspired/adapted-from show was through reprints of "Tales from the Crypt" and "Strange Tales" comics during the early-'90s industry boom. Then Ernest Dickerson's fantastic Tales from the Crypt Presents Demon Knight (hereafter Demon Knight) satisfied every single expectation I had of something seeking to honour the ghoulish, sometimes puerile depravity of William Gaines's seminal source material. It's as gory as it is corny and smart as hell for recognizing that those were the only requirements. Doesn't hurt that the practical-effects work is goopy and inventive. Oh, and the cast is exceptional.

San Andreas (2015) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

**/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Dwayne Johnson, Carla Gugino, Alexandra Daddario, Paul Giamatti
screenplay by Carlton Cuse
directed by Brad Peyton

by Bryant Frazer Back in the 1970s, Hollywood thrillers broke a sweat trying to depict a single terrible event--just one burning building, overturned luxury liner, or airship disaster. These days, the imagery has gotten a lot more freewheeling. Armed with powerful computer algorithms that generate cartoonish eruptions of earth, fire, wind, and water, today's VFX supervisors have a mandate to make bad things happen on screen--all of the bad things, preferably at the same time. In San Andreas, the terrible, horrible, no-good very bad day includes a disintegrating Hoover Dam and a container ship that cartwheels end-over-end into the Golden Gate Bridge. Skyscrapers collapse in on themselves, generating 9/11 flashback clouds of dust and debris that blast through city streets. A tsunami and its attendant flooding sends murky water pulsing through the floors of submerged high-rises, trapping helpless victims inside like goldfish behind glass. It would all be a little hard to take if the visual effects were more convincing (they're cartoonish) or the action scenes at all naturalistic (ditto), but director Brad Peyton isn't especially ambitious. His operative aesthetic is purely Theme Park.

Creed (2015)

***/****
starring Michael B. Jordan, Sylvester Stallone, Tessa Thompson, Phylicia Rashad
screenplay by Ryan Coogler & Aaron Covington
directed by Ryan Coogler

by Walter Chaw I love this movie. I do. It's not perfect. The love interest is underbaked and the fight choreography of the final match is unfortunately disjointed. But I love this movie--unconditionally, I guess. The story goes that Ryan Coogler, the young director of Fruitvale Station, pitched Sylvester Stallone on the idea of rebooting Rocky with Apollo Creed's son. (Something the Indiana Jones series needs to do with a grown-up Short Round, by the way.) The auto-critical analysis of the film is that it's essentially a father/son intrigue, which lends some insight into the Rocky/Mickey relationship of the original Rockys, and there are enough references to same to gratify the cultists. What I liked most about Stallone's willingness to take a shot on a fresh idea from a minority perspective--this is the first instalment of one of his two venerable franchises to not spring from a Stallone-written script--is that it feeds into the idea of Stallone as an auteur maybe, a canny cultural anthropologist definitely. Every Rocky, every Rambo, is distinctly a product of its time. I don't feel qualified to talk about this, but to the extent that I understand the theory, I'm sold.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2 (2015)

***/****
starring Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Donald Sutherland
screenplay by Peter Craig and Danny Strong, based on the novel by Suzanne Collins
directed by Francis Lawrence

by Walter Chaw The first four hours of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2 (hereafter Hunger Games 3.2) are interminable. Because I barely remember anything from any other movie in this series (I had to go back and reread my reviews, not just to refresh my memory, but to affirm that I'd even seen the previous films), everything that wraps up loose threads, the two (count 'em) times characters are forced to give Biblical genealogies to the probable delight of ardent fans, the deadening nonsense involving love triangles, all that jazz, is exactly like watching paint dry. It's bookkeeping. They could just be moving their lips and making smacking noises. I like how the late Philip Seymour Hoffman handles these scenes: chin to the chest, looking for all the world like he's counting minutes. It's not unlike that part of The Sound and the Fury (which is my favourite book, by the way, so I'm not really complaining) that most people skim. And for good reason. Moby Dick has one, too. I'm saying this in the vain hope that you lay off in the comments section. Oh, I also still hate the silly Dickensian names. They're stupid and desperate.

Spectre (2015)

***/****
starring Daniel Craig, Christoph Waltz, Léa Seydoux, Ralph Fiennes
screenplay by John Logan and Neal Purvis & Robert Wade and Jez Butterworth
directed by Sam Mendes

by Walter Chaw My favourite James Bond movie is On Her Majesty's Secret Service: the first without Sean Connery as Bond, and the first and only featuring Australian model George Lazenby in the role. It's the one where Bond falls in love, marries, and in the end is unable to protect his new bride from her demons. I like it the best because despite a few typically silly Bond moments, it has Bond's Moriarty, Blofeld (Telly Savalas in that film), acting as the spear in our hero's side, and it has Bond attempting to address his own failures as a human being and being taught, essentially, that the world is a cold place. I like it the best because it feels melancholy and hopeless. Bond is psychotic, you see, a serial philanderer and killer given license to do both by a broken state and the illusion of order. He's a rapist in Fleming's novels (and consider the conquest of Pussy Galore in Goldfinger)--literally in some instances, in others just given to taking advantage of women in extremis. It's a very particular ruling-class fantasy punctuated by gadgets and automobiles--film noir, except the code our ambiguous hero plays by is more Humphrey Bogart's from In a Lonely Place than Bogey's from The Maltese Falcon.

Echoes (11/6/15)

Return to Oz (1985, d. Walter Murch):

The Straight Story (1999, d. David Lynch):

Note that there are other Disney movies that begin with the company's name over a starfield (The Black Hole, Toy Story 2), but given Lynch's history of paying tribute to The Wizard of Oz, these two seemed less of a coincidence.

Review Round-Up: 11/6/15

We haven't seen Spectre yet but at Telluride Walter Chaw did cover the prestigious Spotlight, which opens theatrically this weekend. His review.

Nightbreed: The Director's Cut (1990) [Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack] + Lord of Illusions (1995) [Collector's Edition] - Blu-ray Discs

NIGHTBREED
**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras A
starring Craig Sheffer, Anne Bobby, David Cronenberg, Charles Haid
screenplay by Clive Barker, based on his novel Cabal
directed by Clive Barker

LORD OF ILLUSIONS
*½/**** Image B Sound B Extras C+
starring Scott Bakula, Kevin J. O'Connor, Famke Janssen, Daniel Von Bargen
written for the screen and directed by Clive Barker

by Walter Chaw Clive Barker's too-brief directing career, capping his time as the Stephen King-anointed prince of horror ("I have seen the future of horror and his name is Clive Barker," went King's famous endorsement), produced three cult classics: Hellraiser, Nightbreed, and Lord of Illusions. His Hollywood trajectory traces the familiar tale of enfant terrible allowed full reign on his first project, only to find subsequent efforts bowdlerized by non-believers. Director's cuts of Nightbreed and Lord of Illusions have circulated in some form over the years, with fans claiming--particularly in the case of Nightbreed--that masterpieces had been corrupted, hidden from sight. It's the kind of intrigue that forms the basis of much of Barker's work: the hidden grotto, arcane knowledge secreted away, art too beautiful for human eyes. There's something of the fury of H.P. Lovecraft's cult of personality in this--something more of the cosplay phenomenon. Each of Barker's movies evokes the absolute acceptance that outsiders encounter at genre conventions: they are explosions of the internal, actings-out of repressed desires. Find in this explanation of the coda, surprisingly sticky despite the bad pun, to his short-story anthologies: "Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we're opened, we're red." Clive Barker is the Douglas Sirk of splatter.

The Sentinel (1977) - Blu-ray Disc

*½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Chris Sarandon, Cristina Raines, Martin Balsam, John Carradine
screenplay by Michael Winner and Jeffrey Konvitz, based on the novel by Konvitz
directed by Michael Winner

by Bryant Frazer Death Wish director Michael Winner tried his hand at a boilerplate horror flick with The Sentinel, another in the long-running cycle of American horror films that doubled as scary religious propaganda, with the faith of Catholic priests the last bulwark against harrowing incursions by Satan himself on our mortal realm. It's not a good movie, but it has a hell of a supporting cast--Christopher Walken, Eli Wallach, and Ava Gardner, just for starters--and that specific, vaguely gritty time-and-place authenticity that you could only get by shooting on location in New York City in the 1970s. For this type of genre piece, that ensures a small kind of immortality, but Winner, indifferently adapting a best-selling novel and barely directing a lead actress who hates him, brings to it a certain je ne sais quoi that pushes it over the line into the sleazeball hall of fame.

The Food of the Gods (1976)/Frogs (1972) [Double Feature] + Empire of the Ants (1977)/Jaws of Satan (1981) [Double Feature] - Blu-ray Discs

THE FOOD OF THE GODS
**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C
starring Marjoe Gortner, Pamela Franklin, Ralph Meeker, Ida Lupino
screenplay by Bert I. Gordon, based on a portion of the novel by H.G. Wells
directed by Bert I. Gordon

FROGS
**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C
starring Ray Milland, Sam Elliott, Joan Van Ark, Adam Roarke
screenplay by Robert Hutchison and Robert Blees
directed by George McCowan

EMPIRE OF THE ANTS
*½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras C-
starring Joan Collins, Robert Lansing, John David Carson, Albert Salmi
screenplay by Jack Turley, story by Bert I. Gordon, based on the novel by H.G. Wells
directed by Bert I. Gordon

King Cobra
***/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras C-
starring Fritz Weaver, Gretchen Corbett, Jon Korkes, Norman Lloyd
screenplay by Gerry Holland, from a story by James Callaway
directed by Bob Claver

by Jefferson Robbins If THE DISSOLVE had lasted, Keith Phipps's fine recurring genre feature "The Laser Age" might have gotten around to the SF subcategory of Nature Gone Wild--the movies that set animals against humanity, such as The Swarm, Night of the Lepus, Squirm, and Prophecy (The Monster Movie). Distinctly a 1970s phenomenon, as we fretted over the northward migration of killer bees and the health of our DDT-soaked bald eagles, the films usually boasted critters who turned on us bipeds after stewing too long in our toxic effluents, perhaps gaining bestial superpowers as a result. They were cheapies, by and large, although with The Swarm director Irwin Allen tried to pull off the same broad settings and large aging-star cast he'd managed in his previous disaster flicks. As a trope, humanity vs. nature works best in isolation, when solitary heroes or groups of victims are besieged in the sticks, with no outside help forthcoming.

The Rioting Pants: "Me and a Douche and a Bag"

by Bill Chambers Hey, folks: I debated long and hard about whether to post this here and I hope you'll forgive the self-indulgence. This is a recently-posted music video I animated and edited for The Rioting Pants, my brother's band; linking it because it's seasonally fitting, a kind of monster rally inspired by "Scooby-Doo" as well as those Hanna-Barbera videos that used to clog the gaps between Saturday-morning cartoons. It ain't up to the level of Pixar but it is entertaining, in my humble and biased opinion. Be sure to select the 1080p viewing option for the full HiDef experience--I worked hard on those backgrounds!

Needing Bigger Boats: FFC Interviews Larry Fessenden

illustration by Bill Chambers

It was within the first six months or so of trying this thing out professionally that I reviewed Larry Fessenden's third film (and masterpiece), Wendigo. I was moved, deeply, by its observation of childhood and innocence lost. I was taken by the care of its presentation. It was thematically tight. And technically? On point, including a fantastic stop-motion, practical conception of the titular bogie. It's a lovely bit of myth-making that understands why we make myths in the first place. Years later, when Fessenden directed his "aquatic" film Beneath for basic cable, certain wags would brand it his Jaws--knowing, famously, that Spielberg's maritime yarn was among Fessenden's favourites. The boat they missed is that his Jaws is actually Wendigo: childhood's end; death of the father; the parents' inability to protect their young; and, yes, the creation of myths to contextualize what it could and explain the rest away.

Review Round-Up: 10/16/15

Opening nationally this week are Steve Jobs, about a guy named Steve who's given personalized tasks; and Suffragette, about a T-shirt campaign gone horribly wrong. In case you missed these reviews the first time around, Walter Chaw covered both at Telluride.

The Legacy (1978) - Blu-ray Disc

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Katharine Ross, Sam Elliott, Roger Daltrey, John Standing
screenplay by Jimmy Sangster, Patrick Tilley and Paul Wheeler from a story by Sangster
directed by Richard Marquand

by Bryant Frazer One in a spate of post-The Exorcist, post-Rosemary's Baby potboilers about ordinary people confronting ancient evil in the modern world, The Legacy has an enduring reputation as a big slice of horror cheese and not much else. Certainly, it's derivative--just another old-dark-house yarn set in the English countryside, spiced up in '70s fashion with a sinister, Satanic backstory that never quite clicks together. It's one of the last horror movies to come out in the handsomely-mounted classic style favoured by Hammer before contemporary slashers and body-horror changed the game completely in the 1980s, but what it lacks in originality and coherence it makes up for in comfy genre atmosphere. Co-scriptor Jimmy Sangster was one of the top dogs at Hammer Film Productions (his writing credits include Horror of Dracula and The Curse of Frankenstein) and Welsh director Richard Marquand was a BBC documentarian making his fiction debut (he would go on to direct Return of the Jedi). That's not a world-beating combination, but if you like your occult thrillers played straight, The Legacy's workmanlike style is an asset.

Fantastic Fest '15: Belladonna of Sadness (1973)

****/****
written by Yoshiyuki Fukuda, Eiichi Yamamoto, based on the novel La sorcière by Jules Michelet
directed by Eiichi Yamamoto

by Walter Chaw The completion of Osamu Tezuka's "Animerama," a trilogy of early-'70s erotica initially imagined as a tie-in to that era's "pink films" that eventually applied their boundary-testing to its own form and function, Belladonna of Sadness is the only one of the three pictures to, ironically, feature no direct involvement from Tezuka. Instead, longtime collaborator Eiichi Yamamoto takes the reins and, in this loose adaptation of a non-fiction tract on witchcraft and Satanism, produces the headwaters for everything from hentai to Andrzej Zulawski's Possession. It's a template that parallels Ralph Bakshi's dabbling in ani-porn, a thing that runs on evocations of Roman Polanski in not just its function and form, but also the drawing of its heroine, Jeanne, as the very image of Sharon Tate. The fate of pretty blondes is a primary concern of Polanski's in this period--no less so enacted through this saga of a woman, raped and humiliated before, in the end, like Yeats's Leda, she takes on the power of her patriarchal tormentors to exact precise, poetic vengeance.

Fantastic Fest '15: Short Films

by Walter Chaw

The Babysitter Murders ****/**** (d. Ryan Spindell) For certain artists working in the short-film format, I don't have any idea how or why it is they haven't been called up to the big leagues yet. This speaks as much to my prejudice, obviously: there's nothing wrong with the short form. In literature, many of my favourite writers are best in the short form. In film, though, there's so little real opportunity for distribution that it seems a particular shame when guys like Ryan Spindell have only produced shorts. I'm not complaining (his work is excellent), merely hoping he has the means to continue. Spindell's latest, The Babysitter Murders, is so expertly composited that it would be kind of a shame to dissect it at all. Sufficed to say that it unearths a new place to take Wes Craven's Scream meta funhouse, and does it without a hint of smugness or show-off-y insecurity. It's beautifully paced, conceived, and executed. Look at a cooking scene early on, set to "Fast & Sweet" by Mondo Boys feat. Kestrin Pantera--the way it's shot and edited, the way Elie Smolkin's camera stalks and Eric Ekman cuts it all together. The movie's premise--a babysitter alone on a stormy night when a psycho escapes from an asylum--is as rote as they come, but Spindell, as he did with The Root of the Problem and dentists, finds something new to say. The performances are to a one pitch-perfect and the gore is appropriately horrifying; it's a film balanced in that space between hilarity for its excess and hilarity for its brilliance. I'm out of superlatives. Spindell is one of the finest voices working in genre right now, carving out a niche that's neither self-serious nor self-abnegating. He's full of joy, this one, and his movies are treasures.

Review Round-Up: 10/16/15

In case you missed them, Walter Chaw has covered three of this weekend's biggest theatrical releases--the new Spielberg (Bridge of Spies), the new del Toro (Crimson Peak), and the new Give Brie Larson an Oscar (Room)--as well as the first major motion picture to debut on Netflix, Beasts of No Nation. Happy reading!

Tomorrowland (2015) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

***/**** Image A+ (ultra) Sound A+ Extras C+
starring George Clooney, Hugh Laurie, Britt Robertson, Raffey Cassidy
screenplay by Damon Lindelof and Brad Bird
directed by Brad Bird

Watch Tomorrowland in iTunes

by Walter Chaw Brad Bird's Tomorrowland is a mess and it knows it. It's unruly, barely contained, just this side of completely falling apart. There are many and distracting continuity errors, and though it makes a joke of it, it's clear immediately that the movie doesn't know how to start, much less end. It has an engaging, irrepressible heroine it strands at the moment she should be doing something ("Am I supposed to be...doing something?" she actually asks), and it has a visit to a memorabilia/collectibles store run by unusual proprietors that is packed to the girders with Brad Bird ephemera of the Iron Giant and Incredibles variety. Tomorrowland has hanging about it, in other words, all the elements of disaster: winky meta references, lack of narrative cohesion, desperation-born mistakes, bad screenwriter/Nick-Riviera-bad script doctor Damon Lindelof as Bird's co-author...and yet it's good somehow. Credit Bird, who knows his way around spatial relationships, and credit a simple, plaintive idea that the world can be better if we believe that it can be better. If the sign of a great filmmaker is his ability to make a bad actor seem good, Bird is a frickin' genius for making something Lindelof worked on not an utter catastrophe. It's big and simple and corny in a Lone Ranger, Captain America, Silver Age Superman kind of way--the kind of big and simple and corny I can get behind.

Crimson Peak (2015)

*/****
starring Mia Wasikowska, Jessica Chastain, Tom Hiddleston, Jim Beaver
written by Guillermo del Toro & Matthew Robbins
directed by Guillermo del Toro

by Walter Chaw I love Guillermo del Toro. I love the ethic driving Cronos and The Devil's Backbone and the Frankenstein and Pinocchio myths driving Mimic. I love the Prodigal Son of Blade II, the ferocity, of course, and vision of Pan's Labyrinth, and all of Hellboy II: The Golden Army, my favourite of his films; every frame is wonder. I didn't like Pacific Rim but I did think it was at least all-in and there's something to be said for that. And now here's Crimson Peak, which is just, you know, really bad and for no one. I have a friend who referred to del Toro's book version of The Strain (I've never read it) as arrogant. I didn't understand that, but it tickled during Pacific Rim and has found full flower now in Crimson Peak. There's a point at which someone who is an expert in something can go from teacher to pedant. What begins as a conversation, nurturing and full of joy, becomes patronizing and solipsistic. I myself probably crossed over years ago. Now I have company. Del Toro at his best shares what he loves. At his worst (and Crimson Peak is del Toro at his worst, by a long shot), he believes that he's talking over your head. You couldn't possibly understand. You'll never catch all his references, he says. And suddenly the party's over and he's all by himself in his self-aggrandizing echo chamber of curiosities.

Bridge of Spies (2015)

*/****
starring Tom Hanks, Mark Rylance, Amy Ryan, Alan Alda
screenplay by Matt Charman and Ethan Coen & Joel Coen
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw Steven Spielberg is the great Hollywood pastry tube. He's packed to the brim with sugary, awards-season sweetness, and he extrudes little nuggets of prestige with the greased regularity of a lifelong prune-eater. In his latest bit of machine-tooled calculation, Bridge of Spies, he makes the unintentional statement during his patented unforgivable epilogue that the American public is a disgusting, moronic, animalistic mob ruled by prejudices and the media (which is the foundation of a different, good movie on the subject of Bridge of Spies)--ironic, because it's those very deficiencies in critical discernment, moral certitude, and sophistication that Spielberg has made a cottage career of taking advantage of. If it's true that all films manipulate but we only complain when they do it poorly (and it's more true than not), then let me complain that Spielberg is an absolute visual savant--proof of it in the first ten, wordless minutes of Bridge of Spies (compare it to the wordless section of Amistad)--and an absolute pandering whore in his inability to deliver an ambiguous ending. He's said as much. He's the only living director who could turn out a masterpiece from a Philip K. Dick short story and ruin it with a sunshine double-happiness lollipop of a ridiculous Hollywood ending. But have no fear: Bridge of Spies never threatens to be a masterpiece for even a moment. It's no Munich or Saving Private Ryan--more like The Terminal. Bridge of Spies is decrepit, highly-polished garbage from almost the beginning, with no relief from its elderly ministrations all the way through to the end.

Fantastic Fest '15: Sensoria

**/****
directed by Christian Hallman

by Walter Chaw Swede Christian Hallman's first feature, Sensoria, sports a couple of nice, creepy moments but ultimately adds little to the "we have always been here" subgenre of haunted-house movies. In this iteration, Caroline (Lanna Ohlsson), freshly single and lamenting that her circle of friends consists largely of digital phantoms offering ephemeral support through social media, discovers that her new bachelorette pad is maybe haunted by the ghost of a little dead girl, My (Norah Anderson). Not helping her isolation and increasing paranoia are a pervy landlord and a dotty old lady of the kind that Ruth Gordon would have played once upon a time. Sensoria touches base with films as diverse as Don't Look Now and Dark Water (especially the Walter Salles version--the superior one, in my unpopular view), finding some traction in Caroline's frequent trips to the attic and basement but losing it in plotting so familiar that the only audience for the film has already lapped it a couple of times once it's ready for its revelations. Though Ohlsson is fantastic in a role that demands her centre-screen for the majority of it, Caroline feels curiously underwritten. I never really grokked her loneliness; and then I never felt anything like the maternal warmth that would make sense of the picture's "be careful what you ask for" ending. At the end of the day, it's a fine debut for a director who demonstrates a nice touch with certain closed-room scenarios, yet seems lost when presented with a feature's length worth of space and its attendant requirements.

Aladdin (1992) [Diamond Edition] - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
screenplay by John Musker & Ron Clements and Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio
directed by John Musker & Ron Clements

Portions of this review, including the first four paragraphs, were originally published on October 5, 2004.

by Bill Chambers Jeffrey Katzenberg may have revived the American animated feature while he was at Disney, but only one of the hits his reign yielded is worth a second viewing. Where 1989's The Little Mermaid and especially 1991's nauseating Beauty and the Beast tried to pass themselves off as Golden Age Disney (1937 (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs)-1950 (Cinderella), for argument's sake), before a certain stateliness loosened its grip on the house style, 1992's Aladdin took its cue from Uncle Walt's twilight years, the Sixties, when he was interested in telling--as he geared up to pass the torch, perhaps--mentor stories (The Sword in the Stone and The Jungle Book) and pop culture had finally caught up with his incongruous predilections for psychedelia and bohemianism. It's a risk to emulate the period considered the birth of the studio's Dark Ages, and Aladdin is the least spurious movie of Disney's renaissance because of it.

Pan (2015)

***½/****
starring Hugh Jackman, Garrett Hedlund, Rooney Mara, Levi Miller
screenplay by Jason Fuchs
directed by Joe Wright

by Walter Chaw Paired with Hanna, his take on the Little Red Riding Hood story, Joe Wright's Pan suggests that the director's closest career analogue is that of J.J. Abrams. Wright's askew take on Anna Karenina hints at a sympathetic penchant for ebullient reinterpretation--no less so his adaptations of Atonement (by an author essentially making a career of taking a piss) and Pride & Prejudice, which, in its sparseness and emotional economy, could stand alongside Andrea Arnold's magnificent Wuthering Heights. Hanna, his best film, achieves at least a portion of its greatness through its bull-headed perversity. No premise is too fanciful to be presented seriously by Wright. In Pan, when we're introduced to the pirate Blackbeard (Hugh Jackman), a Fury Road's collection of orphan miners sing-chants "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in obeisance to their monstrous overlord. It's something born of Brian Helgeland's anachronistic A Knight's Tale and of Terry Gilliam in its antic set design and costuming and of David Lynch, even, in a sequence where Blackbeard dons a mask aboard his flying ship to breathe deep something that resembles the Spice. There's another sequence in which a pirate ship, a 16^th-century galleon, engages in midair with a trio of British Hawker Hurricanes (I think) defending Mother England against the German blitz before breaking through the clouds for a brief, weightless moment.

Ghoulies (1985)/Ghoulies II (1988) [Double Feature] - Blu-ray Disc

GHOULIES
**½/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Peter Liapis, Lisa Pelikan, Michael Des Barres, Jack Nance
screenplay by Luca Bercovici and Jefery Levy
directed by Luca Bercovici

GHOULIES II
***/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Damon Martin, Royal Dano, Phil Fondacaro, J. Downing
screenplay by Charlie Dolan and Dennis Paoli
directed by Albert Band

by Jefferson Robbins Not rip-off, not homage, but something in the water. Luca Bercovici's 1985 Ghoulies, from the lo-fi film factory of Charles Band, felt on release like a ploy to frack cash out of Joe Dante's Gremlins from the year before. In fact it had a parallel development, launching pre-production in 1983 under the working title Beasties and formally premiering in Britain in November of 1984. It also boasts a far weirder strain of presentation than Dante's peak, something Lynchian that goes beyond the mere presence of Jack Nance. It has its passel of '80s "teen" types harassed by horrors, sure: the stoner(s), the ladykiller, the nerd--not to mention their attendant ladies, none of whom are given much personality, resulting in a deeply uninteresting film debut for young Mariska Hargitay. But their mannerisms in large part are so outré and alienating, it's at times like watching an underfinanced dinner-theatre preview of 1986's Blue Velvet. And then the dead warlock bursts out of the ground to be attended by a clutch of grody puppets.

A Brilliant Young Mind (2015)

X+Y
½*/****
starring Asa Butterfield, Rafe Spall, Sally Hawkins, Eddie Marsan
screenplay by James Graham
directed by Morgan Matthews

by Walter Chaw Reminding most of Camp in that it's ultimately more of a zoo for curiosities than an invitation for empathy, here's A Brilliant Young Mind, which posits, among all the Rain Man things it posits about autism, that the Chinese, besides being good at backflips, are very good at math. For the Chinese, you see, math is like art. It says so in this book that was written over the course of a thousand years. For the type of audience that gets off on those Olympics puff pieces where the Chinese are portrayed as opportunistic monsters who sell their children to the national team, it's a special sort of Eurocentric auto-flattery. The implication, see, is that although you're about to lose to the Chinese, they're still morally inferior to you. The Chinese, you understand, don't love their children. And they're good at math. Also, they're sexually naive, you know, because it's not like Asia is horrifically over-populated or anything. Later, a British guy quotes Keats in relation to how if truth is beauty and beauty is truth, then math must be the most beautiful thing of all. It's that kind of movie. The kind of movie with a score of industrious violin pulls and ambitious, then sad, keyboards. It has a moment where the evil dragon uncle of the Chinese mathlympians shouts, in perfect Mandarin, "What are you two doing?" and the film translates it as, "Are you in a relationship?" It's that kind of movie. You'll like it if you're that kind of person.

Fantastic Fest '15: In Search of the Ultra-Sex

A la recherche de l'Ultra-Sex
½*/****
directed by Nicolas Charlet & Bruno Lavaine

by Walter Chaw I saw a hacked anime once--pre-Adult Swim and projects of that ilk--that took place on a flying aircraft carrier and had been re-dubbed so that all the characters were offering different euphemisms for flatulence. My favourite was, "I can't seem to take a step without introducing Mr. Wetty." It lasted about four minutes and I enjoyed a good three-and-a-half of it. Nicholas Charlet and Bruno Lavaine's In Search of the Ultra-Sex is a full hour of R-rated excerpts from classic porn, dubbed to be a Plan 9 from Outer Space thing involving alien plots and the contagion that's made everyone on Earth randy as shit and humping helplessly. It's a way to address the arbitrary madness of porn set-ups, I guess--or it could be, but all the filmmakers do is act silly and hope that we'll want to indulge in that silliness with them. Even if it successfully skewered the arbitrary inanity of porn plots, I mean...to what end? There aren't a lot of fish more sluggish nor barrels much smaller. I went into it hoping for a "How's the Night Life on Cissalda?" and was disappointed but managed to enjoy a portion of it from a purely nostalgic perspective--the same nostalgia I could indulge with the right Google search, as it happens. To its credit, it isn't long. To its detriment, it's longer than three-and-a-half minutes.

Mississippi Grind (2015)

*½/****
starring Ryan Reynolds, Ben Mendelsohn, Sienna Miller, Analeigh Tipton
written and directed by Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden

by Walter Chaw Completely adequate from start to finish, Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck's Mississippi Grind is essentially California Split without the stylistic innovation or sense of sadness and danger. In it, down-on-his luck gambling addict and self-proclaimed "not a good guy" Gerry (Ben Mendelsohn) runs into bon vivant gambling addict Curtis (Ryan Reynolds), who Cheap Thrills Gerry into a series of escalating gambles before whisking him away on a journey to the Big Game. There's a tremendous scene right in the middle with a loan shark played by the great Alfre Woodard that showcases both her immense warmth and her sudden steel. There's also a whore with a heart of gold (Sienna Miller) and a winsome epilogue that suggests, The Wrestler-like, that this big, lovable, broken-down lug just can't get out of his own way, gosh darn it--isn't that a shame? It is. It's a terrible shame.

Fantastic Fest '15: Yakuza Apocalypse

**½/****
directed by Takashi Miike

by Walter Chaw Takashi Miike makes one, sometimes two, sometimes three movies a year, which is not so remarkable as the fact that they're often exceptional. He's as fecund as a Fassbender and hasn't shown signs of the same catastrophic burnout. Even his middling projects have moments in them to recommend--no less so his latest, Yakuza Apocalypse, a return to the Yakuza genre that gave him mainstream credibility (such as it was) and the supernatural horror genre that gave him cult immortality. This one isn't about anything that I could ken, really, but it is technically proficient (as you'd expect), and where Miike generally directs his energies towards the perversity of his escalating violence, in this one he just funnels it all into perversity. It plays, essentially, like a live-action version of his stop-motion The Happiness of the Katakuris. This universe is elastic. He creates a complete cosmology for his Yakuza vampires and the power vacuum created when the beloved boss is murdered by a Django-coffin-clad vampire hunter, then in act three he introduces a chief baddie who spends the first part of the last battle in a giant, felt frog-mascot costume. What Miike's best at is the uncomfortable situation. He presents a roundelay of knitting prisoners, tested by foot-stomps, looking for deliverance. There's an unpleasant rape subplot that we realize by the middle has already been paid off in the picture's opening moments. There's a standard heroic redemption thread that fizzles because we don't much understand the stakes. But what works--the sense of displacement and unease, the sheer audacity of its bloated excess, the fluency of its visual sense of humour--works extremely well. It's a good place holder until Miike produces a sequel to 13 Assassins or Sukiyaki Western Django on the one side or Audition on the other.

Fantastic Fest '15: Man vs Snake: The Long and Twisted Tale of Nibbler

**½/****
directed by Andrew Seklir & Tim Kinzy

by Walter Chaw This is a well-mounted documentary about videogame geek Tim McVey (no, not that Tim McVeigh), who, as a carbuncular teen, once scored a billion points on little-known stand-up game Nibbler--a symbolic victory for its marathon nature (typically a 40-hour run is required for such a feat) and for the rarity of having a machine that would actually tally a ten-digit score. Man vs Snake: The Long and Twisted Tale of Nibbler is ultimately best when it diagrams the essential decency of Tim and especially his impossibly kind and supportive wife, Tina. The film follows along as Tim's record is challenged, first by an Italian upstart and martial-arts expert obsessed with becoming a "war machine," then by closer-to-homegrown challengers, one of whom may or may not have messed with the programming on his personal machine, the better to decrease the physical challenge of the exercise. As McVey repeatedly tries and fails to equal his early success, one is reminded of Everybody's All-Americans struggling to recapture their glory years as captains of the football team. Each time McVey throws a little tantrum and stalks away from the screen, helpless to watch his blisters grow and his reflexes flag, the movie gains in tension. We root for McVey. We see in him, I think, a fundamental human desire for growth, and a late-film revelation that McVey has found a better job suggests there's a real-life analogue to videogame success after all. What injures is the intercutting of declarations that Nibbler marathons are athletic competitions requiring physical training with shots of the game's rotund practitioners (sometimes riding bikes), perched as it is right on the edge of exploitation and the nasty kind of laughter. Worse is the portrayal of one competitor as unhinged and violent, as evidenced by a police video showing him getting the crap beaten out of him by police. In these moments, Man vs Snake bites off more than it can chew. The rest of it is King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters again. Testament to the subject that it hasn't quite out-stayed its welcome.