Film Freak Central

The Witch (2016) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

The VVitch
****/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Nelson, Kate Dickie, Harvey Scrimshaw
written and directed by Robert Eggers

by Walter Chaw Robert Eggers's The Witch details a young woman's coming-of-age as a thing of wonder and, to her Puritanical community, an incalculable and infernal threat. It has analogs in any number of films dealing with female sexuality, unlocking avenues for critical dissection. It parallels Osgood Perkins's extraordinary February (a.k.a. The Blackcoat's Daughter), rhyming it in not just tone but denouement, too, as young girls dance with the devil literally and metaphorically, and find it good. It parallels Jaromil Jireš's Valerie and Her Week of Wonders in its tale of budding sex and the surreal phantasmagoria that explodes in the imagination around such a thing. It parallels Park Chan-wook's Stoker, which shares a scene of illicit bliss and similarly decodes the incestuous loathing coiled in the belly of Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt. Speaking of Hitchcock, The Witch parallels The Birds, where the intrusion of a woman's heat makes things odd. There's a moment in The Birds where heroine Melanie Daniels is confronted by a group of women who accuse her of causing Nature to go weird, while in The Witch, a family alone in the American pre-colonial wilderness blames eldest daughter Tomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy) for the same thing. In both cases, they're right. The misfortune generally begins with menstruation or codes for the same--a blot of red on white cloth, a mention in The Witch that Tomasin has begun her period and thus should probably be sent to live with a different family as a servant in order to protect...well, not herself, anyway.

Hell or High Water (2016) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Jeff Bridges, Chris Pine, Ben Foster, Gil Birmingham
written by Taylor Sheridan
directed by David Mackenzie

by Bryant Frazer Cops and criminals may clash on desolate West Texas landscapes, but late capitalism is the real enemy in Hell or High Water. The film declares its intentions in an elaborate opening shot that follows a weary-looking woman arriving for work in the morning as a 1987 Chevy Camaro circles the parking lot in the background. (Her right wrist is in a brace, probably to fend off carpal-tunnel syndrome, that occupational hazard of retail clerks and bank tellers everywhere.) The camera catches three lines of graffiti on the side of a building--"3 TOURS IN IRAQ BUT NO BAILOUT FOR PEOPLE LIKE US"--as it dollies past before panning around more than 270 degrees to the left and pushing forward as our working woman heads towards the front of the Texas Midland Bank. Clearly visible through an architectural frame-with-a-frame created by the camera move are inlaid brick patterns in the shape of three crosses on a wall across the street. Just like that, director David Mackenzie establishes, first, the idea that the men in that blue Camaro are up to no good; second, the current of economic desperation driving screenwriter Taylor Sheridan's story; and third, the religious posturing that offers an alternative to existential despair, with roadside churches, TV evangelists, and Christian radio offering a relentless white-noise stream of piety on demand to an American underclass with nowhere left to turn.

Hidden Figures (2016) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monáe, Kevin Costner
screenplay by Allison Schroeder and Theodore Melfi, based on the book by Margot Lee Shetterly
directed by Theodore Melfi

by Walter Chaw Theodore Melfi's Hidden Figures is so inextricably bonded to the rote motions of awards-season biographical uplift melodrama that it functions as proof of a template studios give to directors who won't kick too much about art and individuality and expression and all that high-falutin' stuff. Better, it's proof of an attachment that fits onto the Studio sausage press ensuring that all the mashed and salted discards are extruded in the proper proportion into the collective cow gut. Hidden Figures is the story of three African-American women in the 1960s who go to work for NASA's Mercury program in the days after the Sputnik launch. It talks about how they're brilliant but forced to pee in segregated bathrooms; how they're proud family women but treated like second-class citizens or worse. It positions a white man of power who sees their value all the way through to letting one of the ladies be a co-author on a report she seems to have written herself. It has the end-credits thing where pictures of the real women whose stories the movie ostensibly tells are shown with titles detailing the horrific shit they endured to get their names on a building. Well, one of them anyway. It even has that thing in movies about numbers where there's a lot of running to try to make math exciting to watch. What it doesn't have is any lingering impact whatsoever: no gravitas, no surprise, no interest, nothing. The only thing to say about Hidden Figures, really, is that if you spend time praising it, you're being patronizing--and that is the very definition of irony.

Collateral Beauty (2016) - Blu-ray Disc

ZERO STARS/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras F
starring Will Smith, Edward Norton, Keira Knightley, Helen Mirren
written by Allan Loeb
directed by David Frankel

by Walter Chaw Collateral Beauty is the conversation you had that one time with the stupidest person you've ever met, in that it's so stupid it poses an existential problem for you. It happened to me once when, as a bartender, one of the waitresses asked me with concern how she could transform the Coke float she'd ordered into the Sprite float the customer had ordered. I didn't know. I still don't. And not having the answer to a question posed by the stupidest person you've ever met is horrifying. It's like you come home one day and your guinea pig greets you with a zen kōan. It's Kafka's great unwritten tale. It's Collateral Beauty: a question with no answer posed by the stupidest movie ever made. Really, the only solution is to dump it out and start from scratch. Collateral Beauty is about grief, sort of, and gaslighting, and it's shot like a visit to Whole Foods in the sense that it's burnished with a classy patina and full of pretty people you'd like to be. Then you get to the checkout lane and it's too much but you're too embarrassed to put anything back. Also the food tastes like ass.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

Rogue One
***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Felicity Jones, Diego Luna, Ben Mendelsohn, Alan Tudyk
screenplay by Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy
directed by Gareth Edwards

by Walter Chaw A deep cut for Star Wars fanatics, Gareth Edwards's Rogue One: A Star Wars Story also happens to be the single most topical fiction of 2016, talking as it does--in bold, melodramatic strokes befitting a space opera--about the importance of rebellion in the face of fascism. "Order," says Empirical stooge Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn). "Terror," corrects brilliant weapons engineer Galen (Mads Mikkelsen). And the representative of the fascist regime smiles, as though it were all just a matter of semantics, this idea that terror and order are opposite sides of the same devalued coin. He's engaged in a kind of political double-speak, in gaslighting--things that until this year were the scourge of banana republics and other backwards backwaters. The Empire that Krennic represents needs Galen to help them complete their Death Star superweapon, with the '80s-era Reagan/Thatcher rationale that overwhelming destructive deterrents are the only way to truly keep the peace. Galen is compelled to cooperate to keep his daughter, Jyn (Felicity Jones), safe and anonymous in the protection of violent revolutionary Saw (Forest Whitaker). The rest is Jyn's quest to clear her father's name by stealing plans for the Death Star and delivering them to a fractured resistance that isn't entirely sure if it wouldn't be a good idea to give the Empire a chance. You know, maybe they won't do all the things they said they were going to do?

20th Century Women (2016) - Blu-ray + Digital HD

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Annette Bening, Elle Fanning, Greta Gerwig, Billy Crudup
written and directed by Mike Mills

by Walter Chaw Mike Mills's 20th Century Women is beautiful for the way that it listens. It hears how people talk, and it lets them. It watches the way people interact and allows that to speak volumes for them. It's a film, like so many lately, about communication. There's a moment, late, where a young man--a boy, really--says to his mother that he's an individual: "I'm not all men, I'm just me." And she says, "Well... yes and no." It's a beautiful exchange, performed exquisitely, timed perfectly. It's sublime, not the least for being smart and dead-on. Kind and pointed and impossibly eloquent about certain uncomfortable truths, 20th Century Women is an invitation to have ultimate conversations about how we ruin our children with our best intentions and how that has always been so and will always be so. In multiple interludes, Mills speeds up the film, blurring the action with lighting effects and throwing in archival images while including narration like "the world is very big." It is. The picture holds to the idea that the world is incomprehensible and that we're acted on by forces we cannot control--and at the end of it, after we're gone, it goes on without having known we were there. There's a certain piquancy to that that needs to be earned, and is earned.

Personal Shopper (2016)

****/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Lars Eisinger, Sigrid Bouaziz, Anders Danielsen Lie
written and directed by Olivier Assayas

by Walter Chaw There's a brilliant song by Patty Griffin called "Every Little Bit" that, among other piquant turns of phrase, includes the lyric "I still don't blame you for leaving, baby, it's called living with ghosts." At around the 30-minute mark of Olivier Assayas's Personal Shopper, our survivor Maureen (Kristen Stewart) tells a confidante she had made a vow with her late twin brother to make contact from beyond the grave should one pre-decease the other. "And then?" he asks. "I guess I'll live my life and let it go." Then a long, gliding shot of Maureen riding her moped through the Parisian nighttime scored to simple, haunted strings that are augmented towards the end of the sequence by percussion, which reveals itself to be a pencil against parchment. Maureen works as a personal shopper for a German fashionista who never seems to be home. In her off moments, she helps her brother's "widowed" girlfriend Lara (Sigrid Bouaziz) try to suss out if his ghost is unquiet and lurking in the house they shared. Maureen's a medium, you see, or at least she and her brother played at being mediums--a morbid pastime informed by a heart ailment, unpredictably mortal, shared by the siblings. A doctor warns her against any strenuous activities or emotions. She'll suffer both before the end.

Allied (2016) - Blu-ray + Digital HD

**/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B
starring Brad Pitt, Marion Cotillard, Jared Harris, Simon McBurney
screenplay by Steven Knight
directed by Robert Zemeckis

by Bill Chambers

"Back in those days I was much more of a taskmaster. I would make my actors hit those marks and always be in their light, and now I've kind of--I don't care as much anymore. I wouldn't allow there to be a camera bobble in any of those films. If the camera jiggled one frame, I'd have to do the take again. But nowadays, audiences are so different. I don't think they appreciate the attention to detail. Maybe subconsciously they feel it, maybe they don't. Having a perfectly composed shot doesn't matter if you are watching it on an iPhone, does it? You wouldn't see it."

That's Robert Zemeckis, speaking to We Don't Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy author Caseen Gaines. When I first read those words, I have to admit I had a little moment of "Dylan goes electric" heartbreak, because the precision craftsmanship of Zemeckis's films had always been a comfort. Then I reread them, taking into account the resounding shrug that greeted both his lengthy detour into motion-capture animation and his subsequent return to live-action (Flight), and his sour grapes became considerably more pungent. Many filmmakers relax their standards as they get older; few make a point of announcing it. Fewer still do so with spite. If the prolific Zemeckis is fatigued, he shouldn't pass the buck: it's hard-won--I can't begin to imagine the intensity of effort it took to pull off, say, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, or Death Becomes Her. When he belittles the iPhone he gives away his age (62 at the time), but he also sells himself out, as someone who's been at the forefront of the digital revolution for decades. Of course, between his waffling commitment to 3-D and MoCap and his punking of a nation's kids in a 1989 TV special in which he claimed that Back to the Future Part II's hoverboards were a real technology suppressed by parents' groups, it's hard to take Zemeckis at his word.

Moana (2016) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

**½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B
screenplay by Jared Bush
directed by Ron Clements & John Musker (co-directed by Don Hall & Chris Williams)

by Walter Chaw Arguably, the only place it really matters in terms of the diversity tango in Disney's new animated musical Moana is in the songwriting and voice-acting, and so although there are only white people directing (four credited directors) and writing (eight credited scenarists), find Opetaia Foa'i and Lin-Manuel Miranda behind the music and Dwayne Johnson and Auli'i Cravalho behind the Pacific Islander characters. This is progress. Also progress is what seems, to this non-Polynesian, like a real effort to not appropriate a culture so much as represent its mythology, tied as it must be to a narrative about a young woman, Moana (Cravalho), a stout Disney heroine of that certain mold for whom adventure calls, declaring her independence from the patriarchy. We've seen her before, is what I'm saying, but she's neither sexualized nor given an aspirational mate/therapeutic marriage. Progress. I'll take it. There's even a moment where demigod Maui (Johnson) makes a crack about Moana being in the Disney canon. Progress? Self-awareness, at least. I'll take that, too. What's unfortunate is that for everything that's very good about the film, there's something very familiar. The argument should probably be made that familiarity is the sugar that helps the medicine of its progressive elements go down. It worked for The Force Awakens.

The Girl with All the Gifts (2016) + Logan (2017)

THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS
***/****
starring Gemma Arterton, Paddy Considine, Glenn Close, Sennia Nanua
screenplay by Mike Carey, based on his novel
directed by Colm McCarthy

LOGAN
****/****
starring Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Richard E. Grant, Dafne Keen
screenplay by Scott Frank & James Mangold and Michael Green
directed by James Mangold

by Walter Chaw Movements start this way, with one or two events that could be thought of as coincidence in response to some greater trend in our culture, perhaps--or, more likely, in response to some greater corruption. I've long referred to movies, especially genre movies, as indicator species in our cultural swamp. They're the first to show evidence of introduced toxins; at minimum, they're the first major art form to disseminate warnings widely. Jordan Peele's sleeper hit Get Out is just the latest in a recent spate of pictures that have caught the zeitgeist. Test the theory: would it have been as popular in another time? Movies are not unlike Percy Shelley's "dead thoughts... Like wither'd leaves" carried on divine winds to quicken new births. It's a florid reference to justify an unpopular concept. Not religious in any way, I find sublimity in the idea that human hands work in concert sometimes, and the close study of their products can provide insight into the world as it is, not simply as it was. Find in James Mangold's Logan and Colm McCarthy's more or less contemporaneous The Girl with All the Gifts (hereafter Girl) complementary, near identical concepts executed in largely the same way--proof for me of a body politic reacting in concert to poison. As grim as they are (with Logan actually verging on vile and mean-spirited), they are nonetheless to me evidence of at least some collective immune response. Artifacts of resistance left for the anthropologists. Despite their apparent nihilism, they are proof, as referenced explicitly in Girl, of hope.

Rules Don't Apply (2016) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

*/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras C+
starring Warren Beatty, Annette Bening, Matthew Broderick, Lily Collins
screenplay by Warren Beatty
directed by Warren Beatty

by Walter Chaw The title refers to Howard Hughes, I think, and becomes a song its ingénue sings a couple of times over the course of the film. Moreover, it refers to Warren Beatty at this point in an extraordinary career that began in the New American Cinema and that wave of Method actors filling in the spaces left behind by the Golden Age. He was impossibly beautiful, and played against it whenever he could. He was whip-smart. Unabashedly political. Unapologetically a legendary philanderer who made perhaps his greatest single impression on my generation with a surprise cameo in then-girlfriend Madonna's documentary monument to herself, Truth or Dare. Any investigation, though, finds that Beatty is a definitive voice of a definitive moment in the cinematic history of the United States. It's been fifteen years since his last film as an actor, twenty as a director. In the meantime: rumours and speculation about this long-gestating production--his dream project, the culmination of a storied career behind and in front of the camera. And now here it is, Rules Don't Apply, and it's exceedingly uncomfortable, a film that leaves Beatty, acting here as co-star, director, producer, and credited screenwriter, exceptionally vulnerable. As capstones go, it's an interesting one.

The Great Wall (2016)

*½/****
starring Matt Damon, Jing Tian, Pedro Pascal, Andy Lau
screenplay by Carlo Bernard & Doug Miro and Tony Gilroy
directed by Zhang Yimou

by Walter Chaw Gloriously, fantastically stupid from beginning to end, Fifth Generation legend Zhang Yimou's The Great Wall is also, you know, not terrible on the grand scale of terrible things. The popular narrative around this picture is the casting of Matt Damon as some sort of "white savior" in a film about China's most notable architectural achievement--except that it's not really about the Wall and Damon doesn't really save anything, though he does put to rest any sort of debate about whether or not he's a credible action star...or even star star. He tries on an Irish accent here that consists mainly of his trying to talk around a marble. That is, when he remembers he's supposed to be doing an accent. It's Kevin Costner-as-Robin Hood levels of comically-horrific, and, just like Costner's Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, The Great Wall is an attempt to grit-up and culturally contextualize some ridiculous rural folktale. The folktale in this instance is Zhang's own classic Red Sorghum, which earned him some trouble upon release because of its depiction of the old men running the Chinese government as senile, corrupt, and perverse. Indeed, The Great Wall depicts Chinese leadership as tradition-bound in a bad way, its "emperor" figure a child hiding behind his throne. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to see the monstrous child in Red Sorghum grown into this pathetic figure of a leader. If the film weren't so stupid, in other words, it would probably have gotten Zhang in trouble again.

Manchester by the Sea (2016) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Casey Affleck, Michelle Williams, Kyle Chandler, Lucas Hedges
written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan

by Walter Chaw Kenneth Lonergan is a brilliant writer who specializes in small interpersonal moments. His plays are extraordinar­­y. The two previous films he directed, You Can Count on Me and Margaret, are masterful portraits of human failure and weakness. He is a poet of imperfection and imperfect resolution. Margaret gained attention for the lengths to which Lonergan fought for a cut that exceeded a contracted-upon two-and-a-half-hour running time. Martin Scorsese, with whom Lonergan collaborated on the script for Gangs of New York, helped facilitate a 165-minute cut that to my knowledge has never been screened. When Margaret finally hit home video after a swell of support from online advocates, the long version had inflated to 186 minutes. I've only seen the theatrical and extended cuts of the film. I love them both. I rarely wish movies were longer; Lonergan's are the exception. That has something to do with his writing, of course, and something to do with his casts, who, to a one, have contributed extraordinary work--perhaps the best work of their careers. Crucially, Lonergan trusts them to deliver his words. He doesn't garnish them with gaudy camera angles, or underscore them with expository soundtrack cues. Mark Ruffalo once said of Lonergan, affectionately, that the playwright was only playing at being humble. For me, however Lonergan is with other people, his humility comes through in the extent to which he allows his actors to do their job.

Silence (2016)

****/****
starring Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver, Tadanobu Asano, Liam Neeson
screenplay by Jay Cocks & Martin Scorsese, based on the novel by Shusaku Endo
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Walter Chaw Martin Scorsese's Silence is Martin Scorsese's Silence. Not Shusaku Endo's Silence. Not Masahiro Shinoda's Chinmoku. Rather than a Japanese perspective, it's told from the perspective of our most notoriously Catholic filmmaker (next to Mel Gibson, but he went to a different church), who, at the end of his life, has found this cap to a trilogy about faith and doubt begun in The Last Temptation of Christ (an adaptation of a novel by Greek author) and Kundun (about the life of the Dalai Lama)--films, each, that explore mystery and land somewhere personal and inherently unknowable, as faith is and should be. It's an essentially Romanticist text, not Humanist like Endo's or doom-laden and progressive like Shinoda's. It's the closest Scorsese's come to truly contemplative since Kundun, and it shares with that film a sense of wonder at the Natural: this Romanticist conceit that the first testament of God is, as it always has been, Nature. Silence is almost a Terrence Malick film in that sense. In every other, it's Scorsese coming to terms with the idea that grace is made manifest only through the actions of its proponents. The title refers not just to the Christian God's notable state when confronted with the unimaginable suffering of His children, but also to Scorsese's own idea of what God wants from His followers. It's not thoughts and prayers in the face of tragedy. Maybe it's humility. Maybe it's service. Or maybe it's just silence..

Live by Night (2016)

**/****
starring Ben Affleck, Elle Fanning, Brendan Gleeson, Chris Cooper
screenplay by Ben Affleck, based on the novel by Dennis Lehane
directed by Ben affleck

by Walter Chaw I like Ben Affleck. I like him better as a director than an actor, but I like him in both roles. Live by Night is his The Postman. I mean that with affection, and I suspect the film will likely gain some critical and cult momentum in a few years' time--but not too much, because Live by Night is not quite stupid enough, strange enough, rough-around-the-corners enough, to really latch onto. What it is, instead, is a throwback to the kinds of movies Taylor Hackford likes to make: glossy, edgeless, overheated prestige entertainments that are sometimes, as was the case with his Proof of Life, more interesting for the publicity drama they create than for the films themselves. If you doubt the Hackford-ness of it, consider the embarrassing amount of time Affleck devotes to "steamy" '80s-era sex scenes, which are made unbearable by the soulful softcore thrusting. For Live by Night, the external mess is the hubbub over whether or not Affleck will direct an anticipated standalone Batman movie to rescue DC and Warner Bros. from their own curious tone-deafness. The spectre of Batman tends to distract from whatever's going on in the film, especially as Affleck continues to evolve physically into a perfect cube. Since you're asking, Live by Night's earnest corniness does suggest that he is probably the right man to guide a rebooted Batman franchise.

Walter Chaw's Top "10" of 2016

by Walter Chaw There are conundrums presented by what I do now for a day job and this moonlight I won't quit. Let me get at that by telling you an old, old story about filmmaker Peter Hedges that is sort of current again because he's acting in a good film out this year called Little Sister. (His son, meanwhile, co-stars in Manchester by the Sea.) When I met Mr. Hedges, it was to interview him for Pieces of April. As per my usual process, I saw and reviewed the movie first, logging it with Bill before going to meet him. The idea behind this is that I never want my work to be coloured by any personal feelings I might develop for the artist over the course of a conversation--for good or for ill. It's not that I don't trust myself to be fair, it's that I don't know how knowing someone changes the environment in my head. I will be fair, but I'm not the same person before I meet someone and after. The world essentially changes when you meet someone.

Hidden Figures (2016)

*/****
starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monáe, Kevin Costner
screenplay by Allison Schroeder and Theodore Melfi, based on the book by Margot Lee Shetterly
directed by Theodore Melfi

by Walter Chaw Theodore Melfi's Hidden Figures is so inextricably bonded to the rote motions of awards-season biographical uplift melodrama that it functions as proof of a template studios give to directors who won't kick too much about art and individuality and expression and all that high-falutin' stuff. Better, it's proof of an attachment that fits onto the Studio sausage press ensuring that all the mashed and salted discards are extruded in the proper proportion into the collective cow gut. Hidden Figures is the story of three African-American women in the 1960s who go to work for NASA's Mercury program in the days after the Sputnik launch. It talks about how they're brilliant but forced to pee in segregated bathrooms; how they're proud family women but treated like second-class citizens or worse. It positions a white man of power who sees their value all the way through to letting one of the ladies be a co-author on a report she seems to have written herself. It has the end-credits thing where pictures of the real women whose stories the movie ostensibly tells are shown with titles detailing the horrific shit they endured to get their names on a building. Well, one of them anyway. It even has that thing in movies about numbers where there's a lot of running to try to make math exciting to watch. What it doesn't have is any lingering impact whatsoever: no gravitas, no surprise, no interest, nothing. The only thing to say about Hidden Figures, really, is that if you spend time praising it, you're being patronizing--and that is the very definition of irony.

20th Century Women (2016)

****/****
starring Annette Bening, Elle Fanning, Greta Gerwig, Billy Crudup
written and directed by Mike Mills

by Walter Chaw Mike Mills's 20th Century Women is beautiful for the way that it listens. It hears how people talk, and it lets them. It watches the way people interact and allows that to speak volumes for them. It's a film, like so many lately, about communication. There's a moment, late, where a young man--a boy, really--says to his mother that he's an individual: "I'm not all men, I'm just me." And she says, "Well... yes and no." It's a beautiful exchange, performed exquisitely, timed perfectly. It's sublime, not the least for being smart and dead-on. Kind and pointed and impossibly eloquent about certain uncomfortable truths, 20th Century Women is an invitation to have ultimate conversations about how we ruin our children with our best intentions and how that has always been so and will always be so. In multiple interludes, Mills speeds up the film, blurring the action with lighting effects and throwing in archival images while including narration like "the world is very big." It is. The picture holds to the idea that the world is incomprehensible and that we're acted on by forces we cannot control--and at the end of it, after we're gone, it goes on without having known we were there. There's a certain piquancy to that that needs to be earned, and is earned.

Sully (2016) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Tom Hanks, Aaron Eckhart, Laura Linney
written by Todd Komarnicki, based on the book Highest Duty by Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger and Jeffrey Zaslow
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Walter Chaw An elderly film by an elderly filmmaker for an elderly audience, everybody's favourite says-appalling-things old bastard Clint Eastwood directs the guy everyone can agree on, Tom Hanks, in a rah-rah hagiography of Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, the most uncomplicatedly heroic figure in the United States in the last...how long ago was Abraham Lincoln? 151 years? If you don't know, Sully landed an airplane with 155 passengers on it in the Hudson River when bird strikes disabled both of the plane's engines. Multiple dream sequences have Sully imagining what would've happened had he turned his plane over populated areas. 9/11 is referenced often--explicitly and obliquely. An applause-geeking closing title card informs that lots of New Yorkers helped rescue the passengers from the water after the splashdown because New Yorkers are good and America is great, raising the question, Mr. Eastwood, if it needs to be "great again." Maybe it's all gone to hell since 2009. The timing is interesting. Let's call it that.

Paterson (2016)

****/****
starring Adam Driver, Golshifteh Farahani, Barry Shabaka Henley, Masatoshi Nagase
written and directed by Jim Jarmusch

by Walter Chaw My Pocket Poets edition of William Carlos Williams's Kora in Hell: Improvisations has the worn, faded, ineffably-dusty feeling of a paperback printed on low stock from a certain period. The back cover tells me there was once a day it could be had for $1.25. I've read it probably a hundred times, though I can't say I ever read it sequentially. This was the first year, as it happens, that I read The Art of War sequentially. I regard both texts as reference books: for the winning, for the existing. The kind you open to a page and read carefully, and then you put the book down next to you and look at the world differently for a moment. I have favourite passages from each. This is one of them from the Williams:

Slugs (1988) - Blu-ray Disc

**/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B+
starring Michael Garfield, Kim Terry, Philip MacHale, Concha Cuetos
screenplay by Ron Gantman, based on the novel by Shaun Hutson
directed by J.P. Simon

by Bryant Frazer "I recognize terror as the finest emotion," Stephen King wrote in Danse Macabre, his 1981 book-length rumination on horror and storytelling, "and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find I cannot terrify him/her, I will try to horrify; and if I find I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud." That's where the late Juan Piquer Simón (or J.P. Simon, as it became anglicized) must have found himself on the set of Slugs. The native Spaniard was only so-so as a director: He was technically competent, with a decent eye for composition, but he wasn't so adept with English-speaking actors and had no real knack for generating suspense or escalating tension. Fortunately, Simón is pretty good with the gory stuff. And that's why, decades later, his Slugs still crawls tall as a minor classic for creature-feature completists.

A Monster Calls (2016)

**½/****
starring Sigourney Weaver, Felicity Jones, Lewis MacDougall, Liam Neeson
screenplay by Patrick Ness, based on his novel
directed by J.A. Bayona

by Walter Chaw Tears are easy when the subject is the loss of a loved one. They come even when you don't particularly like the vehicle that inspires them. In the case of J.A. Bayona's A Monster Calls, the tears are for the most part earned by its generally uncompromising nature and the elegance of its animated interludes. They're so good, in fact, that I spent much of the movie's remainder wishing it were all animated in the same style, which is cribbed from artist Jim Kay's watercolour illustrations for the Patrick Ness novel upon which the film is based. The animated sequences are representations of the titular monster's stories. Voiced by Liam Neeson, he has three of them to tell little Conor (though only two are animated), with the expectation that when he's through, the boy will tell one back to him. Conor (Lewis MacDougall) has summoned the monster (a cross between Groot and an Ent), he thinks, so that the monster can heal Conor's ailing mother (Felicity Jones). Alas, the monster serves a different purpose. The animated portions remind in feeling and abstraction of Brad Bird's incomparable The Iron Giant--a film that is itself based around the death of a loved one and the need for the survivors to recover. The live-action portions, the best of them, remind of Bernard Rose's melancholic Paperhouse, but the sum is a bit less than its parts.

Passengers (2016)

*/****
starring Chris Pratt, Jennifer Lawrence, Michael Sheen, Laurence Fishburne
written by Jon Spaights
directed by Morten Tyldum

by Walter Chaw The problem with Passengers isn't that it's appalling. The problem with Passengers is that it doesn't have anything to say about being appalling and so proceeds to do stuff with levers and buttons while the lockstep narrative soldiers through to a weird cameo and a happy ending, sort of. Think The Wizard of Oz if it never pulled back the curtain, leaving Dorothy dead and her friends vivisected by an army of newly under-employed flying monkeys on their next impossible mission. It's an artifact that's more interesting, in other words, as an example of corporate groupthink in matters of consumer art--of how Kathleen Kennedy talked about women being "unready" to direct her blockbusters when Morten Tyldum gets the keys to the kingdom for directing mathematicians running around in The Imitation Game (actually, Passengers kind of makes her point), and how retrograde sexual attitudes are still and always the default panic position. Watching it, I was reminded of a brilliant Nell Scovell article published right before the election about how Trump Tower is in a strange state of disrepair: a broken elevator, empty trophy cases, a public garden eternally under construction. There's something about immense hubris we like to see take on water. It's the premise for Douglas Adams's prehistoric PC game "Starship Titanic", where you find yourself the lone entity on a malfunctioning passenger liner. Adams, needless to say, handled it better.

Editor's Choice: The Year in Blu-ray

by Bill Chambers The reason film and physical media are prematurely pronounced dead every few weeks is that the mainstream keeps narrowing, limiting the visible spectrum of both industries. Studios remain halfheartedly committed to Blu-ray Disc but, as this Top 10 list incidentally shows, it's really become the domain of boutique labels restoring and annotating studio-neglected fare, capitalizing on streaming's short-term memory and populist leanings while inspiring devotion among connoisseurs. Please note that I limited my selection process to titles I've personally audited and would endorse anyway, with or without frills. Some of these may be reviewed in full at a later date.

Fences (2016)

*/****
starring Denzel Washington, Viola Davis, Stephen Henderson, Mykelti Williamson
screenplay by August Wilson, based on his play
directed by Denzel Washington

by Walter Chaw Denzel Washington's Fences is movies as medicine. Not the sugar-coated, easy-to-swallow kind--the castor oil/barium enema kind. The toxic-herbal-brew kind my mom used to try to make me drink but, you know, I'd rather be sick. Fences is based on August Wilson's venerated, Pulitzer- and Tony-winning play, which has been in the works as a feature since 1987, when Eddie Murphy bought the rights and then couldn't bring it to fruition after Wilson publicly pronounced that he would be displeased if the material found its way into the hands of anyone but a black director. Paramount was given a list of names that included the person who should have directed this movie, Spike Lee, but ultimately they offered it to a white guy, Barry Levinson. Levinson passed because, among other things, Wilson's own adaptation of his play did not seem to him to successfully bridge the gulf between theatre and cinema. If Levinson was smart enough to pass because the script was ponderous and stagebound, that explains why Lee was never attached to the project: Lee is way smarter than Levinson. It's the impossible errand, this Fences thing. Wilson, being the figure he is, was not the sort of person whose opinion you ignored, nor the sort of person whose work you rewrote. So the project died. And then Denzel Washington was brought on board, insisted on doing a Broadway run to live inside the play for a while, and now, five years after that, here's his Fences. And it's just exactly as godawful as you'd expect it to be.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)

Rogue One
***½/****
starring Felicity Jones, Diego Luna, Ben Mendelsohn, Alan Tudyk
screenplay by Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy
directed by Gareth Edwards

by Walter Chaw A deep cut for Star Wars fanatics, Gareth Edwards's Rogue One: A Star Wars Story also happens to be the single most topical fiction of 2016, talking as it does--in bold, melodramatic strokes befitting a space opera--about the importance of rebellion in the face of fascism. "Order," says Empirical stooge Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn). "Terror," corrects brilliant weapons engineer Galen (Mads Mikkelsen). And the representative of the fascist regime smiles, as though it were all just a matter of semantics, this idea that terror and order are opposite sides of the same devalued coin. He's engaged in a kind of political double-speak, in gaslighting--things that until this year were the scourge of banana republics and other backwards backwaters. The Empire that Krennic represents needs Galen to help them complete their Death Star superweapon, with the '80s-era Reagan/Thatcher rationale that overwhelming destructive deterrents are the only way to truly keep the peace. Galen is compelled to cooperate to keep his daughter, Jyn (Felicity Jones), safe and anonymous in the protection of violent revolutionary Saw (Forest Whitaker). The rest is Jyn's quest to clear her father's name by stealing plans for the Death Star and delivering them to a fractured resistance that isn't entirely sure if it wouldn't be a good idea to give the Empire a chance. You know, maybe they won't do all the things they said they were going to do?

The BFG (2016) + Pete's Dragon (2016) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

Roald Dahl's The BFG
**½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Mark Rylance, Ruby Barnhill, Penelope Wilton, Jemaine Clement
screenplay by Melissa Mathison, based on the book by Roald Dahl
directed by Steven Spielberg

PETE'S DRAGON
***/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Bryce Dallas Howard, Oakes Fegley, Wes Bentley, Robert Redford
screenplay by David Lowery & Toby Halbrooks
directed by David Lowery

by Bill Chambers An inverse E.T. written by that film's screenwriter, Melissa Mathison, The BFG is in some ways archetypal Spielberg. It's another child-led picture to follow E.T., Empire of the Sun, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, and The Adventures of Tintin, featuring more of Spielberg's weird hallmark of colourful food and drink (Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Hook, Jurassic Park). But Spielberg just isn't that guy anymore, even if he always will be in the public imagination (it happens to actors...and it happens to directors, too), and The BFG has the same 'you can't go home again' quality that plagued Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It would be inexplicable within the recent arc of his career if not for the precedent of Tintin, which gave him an appetite for impossible camera moves that can really only be sated when the sets are virtual, as they are for much of The BFG. I can't help thinking of Spielberg's story about how the alien-abduction sequence in Close Encounters of the Third Kind wasn't working until he went back and added shots of the screws on a vent cover turning by themselves; he thrives in that margin of error, like when he let a sick Harrison Ford shoot the swordsman in Raiders of the Lost Ark and stumbled upon one of the most iconic moments in cinema. The amount of previsualizing necessary to make something like The BFG shrinks that margin considerably, and all foresight and no hindsight makes Steve a dull boy.

Nocturnal Animals (2016)

**½/****
starring Amy Adams, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Shannon, Aaron Taylor-Johnson
screenplay by Tom Ford, based on the novel Tony and Susan, by Austin Wright
directed by Tom Ford

by Walter Chaw It opens with an already-notorious slow-motion consideration of a gallery of morbidly-obese women in tiny cowboy hats, naked and holding sparklers while gyrating to Abel Korzeniowski's moody, derivative score. Not long after, someone will comment how, as an art installation, it's a withering indictment of junk culture, in response to which our ostensible heroine Susan (Amy Adams) intones, "Junk. It's all junk." As self-awareness goes, this is as hollow as the rest of Tom Ford's Nocturnal Animals, a dirge of shallow introspection and sanctified ugliness that is, as it happens, a pretty trenchant critique of the landscape that would normalize a Trump presidency. Consider that the installation isn't "junk" so much as the kind of conversation people of a certain intuition might have about the limitations of media to sell something biology rejects. It's a tentative salvo into the nature/nurture debate and the extent to which popular culture can influence the innate. The answer? It can, a little. More often, it merely gratifies/reflects the base. Calling it "junk" reveals a specific attitude that the only thing obese women are capable of representing is over-consumption and, in the sparklers and hats, a sad sort of patriotism. Tom Ford has a message. I get it. It's gotten away from you. The signifier is greater than the sign.

War Dogs (2016) - Blu-ray Disc

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Jonah Hill, Miles Teller, Ana De Armas, Bradley Cooper
screenplay by Stephen Chin and Todd Phillips & Jason Smilovic, based on the ROLLING STONE article "Arms and the Dudes" by Guy Lawson
directed by Todd Phillips

by Walter Chaw Like The Big Short before it, Todd Phillips's War Dogs is a breezy, loose, "for dummies" gloss on recent history that says for all the things you thought were going to hell in the world, you don't know the fucking half of it, buddy. It details how W.'s administration, after being accused of cronyism in making Dick Cheney's Haliburton wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of wealth with the gift of bid-free defense contracts, opened the floodgates by essentially giving every unscrupulous asshole on the planet the opportunity to bid on defense contracts. In that pursuit, our government set up an "eBay" list where major arms dealers could pick off the larger contracts, and dilettantes and arms "day-traders" could, from the comfort of their basements, sell the United States military a few thousand handguns. War Dogs adapts a magazine article about two assholes in particular, David Packouz (Miles Teller) and Efraim Diveroli (Jonah Hill), who made a fortune, then made a terrible mistake when they decided to traffic a hundred million rounds of defective Chinese AK-47 ammo by disguising it as Albanian stock. Actually, their mistake is that Efraim is a psychotic loser so pathological in his incompetence that even the U.S. government had no choice but to do something about it. It's a level of obviousness matched by the film in moments like one in the middle of the game where Efraim screams "fuck the American taxpayer!" OK, yes, we get it.

Rules Don't Apply (2016)

*/****
starring Warren Beatty, Lily Collins, Alden Ehrenreich, Annette Bening
screenplay by Warren Beatty
directed by Warren Beatty

by Walter Chaw The title refers to Howard Hughes, I think, and becomes a song its ingénue sings a couple of times over the course of the film. Moreover, it refers to Warren Beatty at this point in an extraordinary career that began in the New American Cinema and that wave of Method actors filling in the spaces left behind by the Golden Age. He was impossibly beautiful, and played against it whenever he could. He was whip-smart. Unabashedly political. Unapologetically a legendary philanderer who made perhaps his greatest single impression on my generation with a surprise cameo in then-girlfriend Madonna's documentary monument to herself, Truth or Dare. Any investigation, though, finds that Beatty is a definitive voice of a definitive moment in the cinematic history of the United States. It's been fifteen years since his last film as an actor, twenty as a director. In the meantime: rumours and speculation about this long-gestating production--his dream project, the culmination of a storied career behind and in front of the camera. And now here it is, Rules Don't Apply, and it's exceedingly uncomfortable, a film that leaves Beatty, acting here as co-star, director, producer, and credited screenwriter, exceptionally vulnerable. As capstones go, it's an interesting one.

Vamp (1986) - Blu-ray Disc

**/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Chris Makepeace, Sandy Baron, Robert Rusler, Grace Jones
screenplay by Richard Wenk
directed by Richard Wenk

by Bryant Frazer In concept a little bit After Hours and a little bit An American Werewolf in London, Vamp attempts to transplant some New York cool into a story set in the L.A. underground, where a downtown strip club is staffed by lithesome vampires who prey on losers and outsiders yearning for companionship in the lonesome city. Vamp isn't scary, though it's fairly stylish, thanks in large part to Grace Jones, who flew into Hollywood with an entourage (including artists Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, and Richard Bernstein) to play Katrina, an exotic dancer with an appetite for flesh. While the film is pleasantly weird whenever she's on screen, that's not much of the time. The bulk of it is a laid-back assemblage of moderately clever ideas--a bunch of clockwork gears that never mesh into anything much.

Moana (2016)

**½/****
screenplay by Jared Bush
directed by Ron Clements & John Musker (co-directed by Don Hall & Chris Williams)

by Walter Chaw Arguably, the only place it really matters in terms of the diversity tango in Disney's new animated musical Moana is in the songwriting and voice-acting, and so although there are only white people directing (four credited directors) and writing (eight credited scenarists), find Opetaia Foa'i and Lin-Manuel Miranda behind the music and Dwayne Johnson and Auli'i Cravalho behind the Pacific Islander characters. This is progress. Also progress is what seems, to this non-Polynesian, like a real effort to not appropriate a culture so much as represent its mythology, tied as it must be to a narrative about a young woman, Moana (Cravalho), a stout Disney heroine of that certain mold for whom adventure calls, declaring her independence from the patriarchy. We've seen her before, is what I'm saying, but she's neither sexualized nor given an aspirational mate/therapeutic marriage. Progress. I'll take it. There's even a moment where demigod Maui (Johnson) makes a crack about Moana being in the Disney canon. Progress? Self-awareness, at least. I'll take that, too. What's unfortunate is that for everything that's very good about the film, there's something very familiar. The argument should probably be made that familiarity is the sugar that helps the medicine of its progressive elements go down. It worked for The Force Awakens.

Punch-Drunk Love (2002) [Two-Disc Special Edition] - DVD|[The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

****/****
BD - Image A Sound A+ Extras B+
DVD - Image A+ Sound A+ Extras C+
starring Adam Sandler, Emily Watson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Luis Guzmán
written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

by Walter Chaw Indicated by spacious compositions and a bracing unpredictability, Paul Thomas Anderson's romantic comedy Punch-Drunk Love is a marriage, if you will, between Claire Denis's audacious Trouble Every Day and Steven Shainberg's sadomasochism fairytale Secretary. Here's a trio of films that announce 2002 as a year perhaps best defined by its aggressively non-traditional, hopelessly romantic love stories (toss Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven, Cronenberg's Spider, and Roger Avary's The Rules of Attraction into that mix).

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016)

**/****
starring Eddie Redmayne, Katherine Waterston, Dan Fogler, Colin Farrell
written by J.K. Rowling
directed by David Yates

by Walter Chaw J.K. Rowling is more plotter than writer or editor, more rambling fantasist than disciplined storyteller--explanation there as to why her Harry Potter novels aren't classics so much as very popular stories for children. This also explains why Rowling flinched at the prospect of Harry martyring himself at the end, something the entire series leads up to. Rowling betrays, too, heroine Hermione, the logical successor to Dumbledore's seat, not wife to Harry's drippy buddy. She didn't have the heart, she says, to do the things she should have done, and so produced books you'll grow out of. And quickly. The film adaptations (like Beethoven's Symphonies, only the odd ones are good, and you should skip the first) are uneven largely because they're best when the folks doing the adapting take Rowling's ideas and craft narratives and narrative subtext from/for them--and worst when they try to pack in all those volumes of blandly discursive blather to please a massive fanbase. Asking Rowling herself to write the screenplay for David Yates's Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (hereafter Fantastic Beasts), then, has yielded exactly the expected result: the film is bloated, boring at times, rambling most others; and it's rich with genuine ideas and an honest-to-goodness progressive heartbeat. It's topical, boasts of an extremely able cast it squanders mostly, and acts as a glossy coat sheening over the "real" story, pulsing but drowned, at its centre.

Finding Dory (2016) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
screenplay by Andrew Stanton and Victoria Strouse
directed by Andrew Stanton (co-directed by Angus MacLane)

by Walter Chaw Credit is due Pixar and writer-director Andrew Stanton (co-directing here with Angus MacLane) for wanting to right what I don't know anybody really perceived as a wrong. I remember thinking when I first saw Finding Nemo that Dory's inability to retain short-term memories was a product of her species. In the new Finding Dory, it's revealed to indeed be a mental disability, one that her parents (voiced by Eugene Levy and Diane Keaton) worry over a great deal in a series of flashbacks. They create coping mechanisms for their daughter. They devise a literal shell game so that when Dory (Ellen DeGeneres) inevitably gets lost, she can find her way back home. It's an interesting tactic to take, this mild scolding that what was funny at first is in fact a debilitating, dangerous disorder. And a good portion of the film looks for ways to valorize Dory's condition, to avoid making her the butt of jokes or an object of pity. For the most part, it does this by surrounding her with characters who also have a disability: Hank (Ed O'Neill), an octopus that's lost an arm ("Septipus!" says Dory, "I can't remember, but I can count!"); and Destiny (Kaitlin Olson), a hopelessly myopic whale shark. Lest we forget, Nemo (Hayden Rolence, taking over from Alexander Gould) has a deformed fin, something he flaps at dad Marlin (Albert Brooks) after Marlin says something disparaging about Dory's memory issue.

ICYMI (11/11/16)

Apologies for the radio silence this week. Honestly? No will. We have plenty of stuff on the horizon, though, and in the meantime here are links to our festival reviews of Arrival and Elle, which open in theatres today.

Hacksaw Ridge (2016)

***/****
starring Andrew Garfield, Sam Worthington, Luke Bracey, Vince Vaughn
screenplay by Robert Schenkkan and Andrew Knight
directed by Mel Gibson

by Walter Chaw Martin Scorsese and Mel Gibson are our two most prominent plainly and explicitly Catholic directors. Because Scorsese is the kind of Catholic he is, his films are about questioning faith. Because Mel Gibson is insane, his films aren't. As a result of that, and somewhat unexpectedly, Gibson is the single best case for the auteur theory working in the United States. As the originator and chief benefactor of The Passion of the Christ (the best and worst film of 2004), he can officially make whatever movie he wants, and with Hacksaw Ridge (and Apocalypto before that) he's gone ahead and done just that. Mel Gibson is the single best case for a lot of things. In Hacksaw Ridge, he tells the true story of Desmond Doss (Andrew Garfield), a troubled, severely-abused young Virginian who enlists in WWII as a conscientious objector, refusing to touch a gun, dedicating himself to saving folks as a combat medic. It's essentially a superhero origin story opening the same weekend as another (Dr. Strange)--both films dealing with faith and the consequences of betraying said faith. In Dr. Strange, directed by openly Christian Scott Derrickson, bargaining with morality results in dreadful and unforeseen consequences. In Hacksaw Ridge, because Gibson's religious fervour burns so bright and erratic, all such niceties and ambiguity burn away in allegorical hellfire and literal rains of blood. He's long threatened a sequel to Passion. Here, he's delivered one.

The Legend of Tarzan (2016) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

***/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras C
starring Alexander Skarsgård, Samuel L. Jackson, Margot Robbie, Christoph Waltz
screenplay by Adam Cozad and Craig Brewer, based on the "Tarzan" stories created by Edgar Rice Burroughs
directed by David Yates

by Walter Chaw David Yates's The Legend of Tarzan is at once a long-overdue, if massively-fictionalized, biopic of George Washington Williams's time in the Congo observing colonial Belgium's abuses of the rubber, ivory, and diamond trades; and it's an adaptation, nay, updating of Edgar Rice Burroughs's first five Tarzan books, with heavy creative license taken but the spirit kept largely intact. Although it's more successful as the latter than as the former, both endeavours are carried through with seriousness and intelligence. It's not a perfect film: the editing is terrible, particularly during the action sequences, suggesting this was probably a longer movie truncated out of fear of diluting the "good" bits. I also don't love the washed-out colour palette that paints everything in a blue gloom--at least not as much as Yates seems to, between this and the last four Harry Potter films. And it bears mentioning that Samuel L. Jackson isn't really an actor anymore and that Margot Robbie arguably never has been. Yeah, The Legend of Tarzan is hard to defend objectively. It does, however, understand the appeal of the Tarzan mythos, answering in grand moments why it is that he's found his way into over 200 motion pictures and dozens more serials and television series (live-action and animated). I should disclaim, too, that I read (re-read, in some cases) all 24 original Burroughs Tarzan novels in the weeks leading up to the picture's release. In other words, I'm a big, giant pulp nerd.

Blood Diner (1987) [Vestron Video Collector's Series] - Blu-ray Disc

**/**** Image B Sound A- Extras B+
starring Rick Burks, Carl Crew, Roger Dauer, LaNette La France
written by Michael Sonye
directed by Jackie Kong

by Bryant Frazer So bad it's good? I wouldn't go that far. But Blood Diner is definitely something--a no-frills pastiche of 1950s disembodied-brain sci-fi potboiler, 1960s Herschell Gordon Lewis splatter movie, 1970s cannibal-cuisine flick, and early-1980s buddy-cop movie. I'm tempted to say it stitches together a Frankenstein's patchwork of genre movies because it has no vision of its own, but that's too glib. If nothing else, 20-something Asian-American director Jackie Kong (Night Patrol) loves L.A.: she wrapped all of those genre influences around a love letter to the city's underground music scene circa 1987, casting punk rockers and rockabilly singers as extras, bit players, and movie stars in a story about a pair of pretty-boy sibling serial killers who run a popular foodie destination on Hollywood Boulevard where the vegetarian dishes are, unbeknownst to patrons, boosted by the presence of human flesh in the recipe.

Lights Out (2016) - Blu-ray Disc

*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras D+
starring Teresa Palmer, Gabriel Bateman, Alexander DiPersia, Maria Bello
screenplay by Eric Heisserer, based on the short film by David F. Sandberg
directed by David F. Sandberg

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. This year's Brian Helgeland Award, named in honour of the man who wrote the Oscar- and Golden Raspberry-winning L.A. Confidential and The Postman, respectively, in the same year, goes to Eric Heisserer, who has somehow written one of the year's best movies about motherhood, Arrival, and one of its worst, Lights Out. Lights Out is not a good movie about anything, really (save perhaps the value of crank flashlights); as with the Heisserer-penned remakes of The Thing and A Nightmare on Elm Street, the Lights Out screenplay is joylessly aspirational in the way of a personal assistant doing menial chores to accumulate credit--the thankless task in this case adapting David F. Sandberg's simple but effective micro-short of the same name. That director Sandberg opted not to write it himself implies the short was intended as a calling-card rather than a proof-of-concept, and his direction of the feature hardly evolves its meat-and-potatoes style. He created a monster and now he's riding its coattails; what Lights Out desperately needs is someone with a vision for the film, not just a career.

Chopping Mall (1986) [Vestron Video Collector's Series] - Blu-ray Disc

*½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras B+
starring Kelli Maroney, Tony O'Dell, John Terlesky, Dick Miller
written by Jim Wynorski & Steve Mitchell
directed by Jim Wynorski

by Bryant Frazer Chopping Mall is not the shopping-centre slasher-movie its title suggests. Here's what you really need to know: It includes a scene where a woman clad in light-blue Playboy panties runs screaming through the spacious halls of the Sherman Oaks Galleria in a hail of laser fire, chased by a killer robot resembling a cross between a Dalek from "Doctor Who" and Number Five from Short Circuit. The opening sequence features Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov in a cameo as their Paul and Mary Bland characters from the cult classic Eating Raoul. The always-game Barbara Crampton, who had just shot Re-Animator, takes her top off. And, like the maraschino cherry on top of a soft-serve strawberry sundae, the great character actor Dick Miller plays a crusty janitor who trash-talks one of the malevolent tin-can tyrants like a Jet giving the finger to Officer Krupke.

Swiss Army Man (2016) - Blu-ray Disc

***½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras A
starring Paul Dano, Daniel Radcliffe, Mary Elizabeth Winstead
written and directed by Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan

by Walter Chaw Bridging the gap between Charlie Kaufman movies, the Daniels' Swiss Army Man is one high-concept conceit carried through to every possible ontological end. It veers, dizzily, between slapstick scatalogical comedy and poignant existential philosophy, doing so with the sort of invention generally credited to silent-film clowns. Open with Hank (Paul Dano), shipwrecked, about to hang himself when he notices the corpse of Manny (Daniel Radcliffe) washed ashore. He looks for signs of life. There aren't any, save the rapid decomposition that's causing Manny to fart. A lot. Manny's farts carry Hank back to civilization, in fact, in a trailer-spoiled motorboat sequence that would be indescribable were it not right there. Like so many things in the film, it's not clear that this is "actually" happening or just a fantasy of Hank's before dying. By the middle of the picture, it's apparent that challenging the border between the cinema real and the cinema imagined is the point. If it destroys that conversation, it allows for a better one about the nature of friendship and honesty, whether it's possible to ever truly be open with another human being and, if it is, whether it would be something welcomed or rejected. Unconditional acceptance is a charming romantic fantasy, but that's all it is.

Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016)

***½/****
starring Elizabeth Reaser, Annalise Basso, Lulu Wilson, Henry Thomas
written by Mike Flanagan & Jeff Howard
directed by Mike Flanagan

by Walter Chaw Because distribution is the ridiculous trash fire it is sometimes, Mike Flanagan, through circumstance, misadventure, and good old-fashioned industriousness, had three films ready for release in 2016: Hush, Before I Wake, and Ouija: Origin of Evil (hereafter Ouija 2). I've only seen Hush and Ouija 2 thus far--it looks like Before I Wake has been delayed yet again--but I can say that when taken with his first two films, the moody Absentia and the excellent Oculus, Flanagan is already at the forefront of the new American horror revolution. His movies are drum-tight. He isn't afraid of the high-concept. He makes smart use of minimal exposition and narrative ellipsis, and he embraces the inexplicable and the uncanny. Better, there is at work in Flanagan's pictures this undercurrent of grief, tied together with the thought that perhaps these intimations of immortality are bound snug with the dementing tortures of unimaginable loss. The supernatural is mainly considered, after all, upon the death of loved ones, and so it is that Ouija 2's Alice (Elizabeth Reaser) makes a living with her two young daughters, Lina (Annalise Basso) and Doris (Lulu Wilson), as a fake spirit medium giving succour to the recently bereaved.

London Has Fallen (2016) - Blu-ray + DVD Combo

*/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras D
starring Gerard Butler, Aaron Eckhart, Alon Moni Aboutboul, Morgan Freeman
screenplay by Creighton Rothenberger & Katrin Benedikt and Christian Gudegast and Chad St. John
directed by Babak Najafi

by Walter Chaw It's a corker. Playing exactly like another instalment in the "Call of Duty" FPS videogame franchise, Iranian-born Babak Najafi's London Has Fallen is a gobsmacking, jingoistic, political exploitation horror-thriller that traffics in contemporary paranoia with unusually exuberant brutality. It loves killing people. Loves it. The picture's packed full of xenophobia and all the other insidious forms of fear infecting our modern apocalypse: hatred of the Other, terror of invasion, terror of the self. It fashions what is essentially another 28 Days Later sequel by recasting the rage zombies as Islamic Fundamentalists, simultaneously creating in the process a recruitment video for bellicose young men in the West wanting to kill Arabs--and one for bellicose young men in the Middle-East wanting to kill Americans. Tidy. London Has Fallen is propaganda with a budget, a few recognizable faces, and some directing chops to boot. I'm equally glad and appalled it exists. I wish I were more surprised that it does.

The Immortal Story (1968) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

Histoire immortelle
***/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Jeanne Moreau, Roger Coggio, Norman Eshley, Orson Welles
written by Orson Welles, from a short story by Karen Blixen
directed by Orson Welles

by Bryant Frazer It's one of those salutary coincidences of movie history that the final narrative film completed by Orson Welles would turn out to be this rumination on an old man's obsession with storytelling. It's not that Welles was exactly elderly at the time (he was 51 when he made it), but there's a matter-of-fact finality to the work that becomes just a touch spooky in retrospect. Commissioned by the French national television agency as a Jeanne Moreau vehicle to commemorate the transition to colour television, The Immortal Story required that Welles work in colour for the first time, catalyzing a fairly dramatic evolution of his style. But it gave him the opportunity to adapt a short story by Karen Blixen (a.k.a. Isak Dinesen), one of his favourite writers, and to work again with Moreau, one of his favourite actors. Less than an hour long, it has remained an obscure film for a variety of reasons, but it's intermittently remarkable despite its modesty.

Scarecrows (1988) - Blu-ray Disc

*/**** Image A- Sound B Extras A+
starring Ted Vernon, Michael Simms, Victoria Christian, Richard Vidan
written by Richard Jefferies and William Wesley
directed by William Wesley

by Walter Chaw Terrible in that plucky way that earnest shoestring products can be terrible, William Wesley's Scarecrows has a few memorable gore moments and a lot of bad dialogue, execrable performances, and senseless exposition. I saw this movie on VHS in high school as part of my weekend ritual of renting a shelf and staying up all night shotgunning the dregs. This led to a few remarkable discoveries, of course--and it led to discoveries like this as well. The hook of Scarecrows is a strong one, taking the somehow-underutilized image of the scarecrow in the horror genre and making a grand bogey of it, but the result is essentially a zombie-cum-spam-in-a-cabin flick featuring a paramilitary group fresh off a heist engaged in a supernatural backcountry rigmarole. Still, the film's greatest crime isn't a bad premise but that it's boring. Really boring. Mainly it's boring because every character acts like an idiot at all times, making it hard to muster much in the way of stakes. That's also why Scarecrows isn't scary or tense, and because I think it wasn't long enough and they ran out of money, there are tons of filler close-ups of scarecrows just sort of, you know, hanging there. Kuleshov or something.

Café Society (2016) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras F
starring Jeannie Berlin, Steve Carell, Jesse Eisenberg, Blake Lively
written and directed by Woody Allen

by Angelo Muredda Woody Allen can't seem to make two consecutive films worth thinking about. Despite an abysmal trailer, pre-emptively dismantled online as insensitive or worse amidst revelations about his personal crimes, 2015's Irrational Man proved a surprisingly gritty respite from Allen's nostalgic euro-tourist cinema of the Aughts. True to its maker's aversion to progress, though, its follow-up Café Society is practically a jukebox-musical treatment of Allen's old (which is to say tired) hits, from the ennui L.A. inspires in native (which is to say white) New Yorkers to the beauty of other periods that aren't the present to romances strained under the weight of vast age discrepancies. Beautifully-lensed and defiantly dumb, it's another testament to Allen's surprisingly incremental growth as a filmmaker in his seventies, at the same time as he continues to atrophy as a writer.

Fantastic Fest '16: Short Films

Givertaker **½/**** (d. Paul Gandersman)
A nice, compact cautionary tale featuring a novice witch who takes vengeance on her buddies only to find there are Shadowmen living under other people's beds. I wish the lore were better developed, but it's paced beautifully and the young cast is game and lively. I wanted more, and I don't often feel that way.

TIFF '16: The Bad Batch; Colossal; Jackie

THE BAD BATCH
**½/****
starring Suki Waterhouse, Jason Momoa, Giovanni Ribisi, Keanu Reeves
written and directed by Ana Lily Amirpour

COLOSSAL
**/****
starring Anne Hathaway, Jason Sudeikis, Dan Stevens, Tim Blake Nelson
written and directed by Nacho Vigalondo

JACKIE
***½/****
starring Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard, Greta Gerwig, John Hurt
screenplay by Noah Oppenheim
directed by Pablo Larrain

by Bill Chambers Three very different #TIFF16 films--a postapocalyptic cannibal western (The Bad Batch), a modestly-scaled kaiju eiga (Colossal), and a period docudrama (Jackie)--form a trilogy in my mind thematically linked by crestfallen female protagonists who discover reserves of strength in dire situations. The Bad Batch is the only one of these movies directed by a woman, though, and dare I say you can tell, not only in how the camera softly caresses Jason Momoa's Olympian contours, but also in the way the framing and blocking of the heroine imply the constant peril of being a woman. Working through the neophyte filmmaker's genre playbook, director Ana Lily Amirpour follows up her vampire movie A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night with this dystopian flick most reminiscent of the Australian strain in terms of vibe/aesthetics, what with its shantytown sets, symbolic names, and obligatory feral child. (The only thing missing is a car fetish.) Winsome Arlen (Suki Waterhouse) is exiled to the other side of some Trumpian fence in Texas with only the clothes on her back and a tattoo that identifies her as an undesirable (or bad batch). Almost immediately she's dragged away to a cannibal camp, where they chop off her right arm. Missing a leg, too, by the time she escapes, she finds refuge--and prosthetic limbs--in the village of Comfort, whose denizens mostly give her space. Time and body-image issues stoke her desire for revenge, however, putting her on a collision course with Momoa's Miami Man, a brilliant sketch artist who's also a fearsome, unsympathetic consumer of human flesh.

Fantastic Fest '16: The Handmaiden

Ah-ga-ssi
****/****
starring Kim Min-hee, Kim Tae-ri, Ha Jung-woo, Moon So-ri
screenplay by Chung Seo-Kyung, Park Chan-wook, based on the novel Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
directed by Park Chan-wook

by Walter Chaw I love Stoker, Korean master Park Chan-wook's updating of Shadow of a Doubt that centres on "young Charlie's" sexual awakening and all the perverse tensions attending that moment in a brittle upper-middle-class Nashville. Married to the swooning, hypnotic camerawork that has been the hallmark of Park's collaboration with DP Chung Chung since Oldboy, it has about it the perversity of a Victorian chamber drama squeezed through the filter of a very Korean take on class and sex--attitudes partly shaped by living in the shadow of one of the two or three most unstable regimes in the world. Stoker is a haunted-house movie without ghosts; a vampire movie without vampires. Its hero is a young woman who dons the raiment of the patriarchy at the end, lets blood on a field of flowers (one of a series of literal and metaphorical deflowerings), and stalks into the world fully-formed and dangerous. Park is best known for his "Vengeance Trilogy," of course, but it's the last film of that cycle, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, that finds itself faced with the kind of moral dilemma that has marked Park's work since. It's arguable that before it, Park was an exploitation filmmaker. A conversant, brilliant exploitation filmmaker, but an exploitation filmmaker just the same. Lady Vengeance, however, deals with the ethics of violence and the toll of retribution on the avengers. It's smart as hell, beautiful to look at, nigh unwatchable. I mean that as praise, for it should be.