Film Freak Central

Fantastic Fest '16: S is for Stanley

***½/****
directed by Alex Infascelli

by Walter Chaw Emilio D'Alessandro was the only delivery driver courageous enough to brave a rare London blizzard to deliver a giant phallus to the set of A Clockwork Orange sometime in the last half of 1970. An aspiring Formula 1 racer and jack of all trades, Emilio caught the eye that day of one Stanley Kubrick, American expat and obsessive-compulsive who happens to be one of the handful of undisputed geniuses in the auteur conversation. Moved to London at this point and destined to die there in 1999 after the first industry screening of his last film, Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick hired Emilio essentially by writing him notes on index cards and Post-Its and steadily, some would say monstrously, dominating his life to the extent that it strained Emilio's marriage and caused him to miss the moment of his father's death. It would be easy to make a documentary like Alex Infascelli's S is for Stanley from that perspective: the madman in his laboratory, unwitting Igor fettered to his noisome wake. Harder is what Infascelli actually does, which is understand that the story here isn't about one odd duck, but two...and of a feather to boot. I love the moment where Emilio remembers his wife (they're still together) complaining that Stanley calls day and night: When he told Kubrick about it, Stanley proposed that the solution was to install a separate line in Emilio's house so that they could leave Emilio's wife out of it altogether. Emilio went for it.

The Neon Demon (2016) - Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Elle Fanning, Karl Glusman, Jena Malone, Keanu Reeves
screenplay by Nicolas Winding Refn and Mary Laws & Polly Stenham
directed by Nicolas Winding Refn

by Walter Chaw There's a quote from The Right Stuff I love that I thought about constantly during Nicolas Winding Refn's The Neon Demon: "There was a demon that lived in the air." I found in it something of an explanation for, or at least a corollary to, the picture's title, in that the demon in The Right Stuff refers to the sound barrier while the demon in Refn's film refers to, perhaps, soft obstructions of other kinds. Artificially lit. Poisonous. The quote continues with "whoever challenged [the demon] would die...where the air could no longer get out of the way." The first film I saw by Refn was Valhalla Rising, an expressionistic telling of the Odin myth--the part where he spent time on Earth (went missing, basically) before returning--that touches on the scourge of Christianity and how that relates to feeling lost, or losing what you believe in. Valhalla Rising led me to Bronson and to Pusher and then I followed Refn through Drive, which talks about the difficulties of being male, and Only God Forgives, which talks about the difficulties of being a son. Now there's The Neon Demon, completing a trilogy of sorts by talking about the difficulties of being a girl becoming a woman and an object for men, eviscerated in certain tabernacles where women are worshiped as ideals and sacrificed to the same. It's astonishing.

Fantastic Fest '16: Raw

Grave
****/****
starring Garance Marillier, Ella Rumpf, Rabah Naït Oufella, Marion Vernoux
written and directed by Julia Ducournau

by Walter Chaw A spiritual blood sister of Claire Denis's Trouble Every Day, Julia Ducournau's feature debut Raw is a crystallization of the last couple years' steady creep towards unabashedly gyno-centric fare. Kimberly Peirce's unfairly derided Carrie, which Raw references in one of its canniest, funniest moments, gathers monstrously in the rearview as a film doomed to have been just ahead of its time--literally hours away from being justly hailed as harbinger of a period of Furiosas and Reys, of It Follows and The Witch and The Green Room and more. As genre fare, Raw is as raw as it could be, the tale of a vegan first-year veterinary school student named Justine (Garance Marillier) who is submitted to a series of cruel hazing rituals that introduce her to body-image issues, existential crises, eating disorders, and the taste of sweet, sweet animal protein. You know, freshman year. Ducournau captures it all beautifully: the horror of being away, of surrendering to the higher university mind, of experimenting with drugs and drink and sex and becoming a full inhabitant of the desires and fears that will fuel the rest of your life. There's a scene early on where Justine visits a doctor (French writer and director Marion Vernoux) that reminds of the sequences in Jacob's Ladder where Jacob visits his angelic chiropractor. It's shot differently from the rest of the film. It's brighter. The film will never be this bright again.

Dead-End Drive-In (1986) - Blu-ray Disc

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Ned Manning, Natalie McCurry, Peter Whitford
screenplay by Peter Smalley, from a story by Peter Carey
directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith

by Bryant Frazer Australia's signature entry in the cinematic encyclopedia of dystopian hellscapes will always be the Mad Max series, and rightly so. But if you dig just a little deeper into the corpus of down-and-dirty genre movies from Down Under, you'll discover this B-grade entry from Aussie action impresario Brian Trenchard-Smith, which daydreams about confining rebellious youth culture to a dusty prison camp way out on the edge of town. Trenchard-Smith is best-known abroad for 1983's BMX Bandits, an early Nicole Kidman feature widely available for home viewing in the U.S., and his corpus comes with the Quentin Tarantino seal of approval. Dead-End Drive-In isn't great cinema, but it has some well-executed stuntwork that bolsters a speculative premise just goofy enough to catch the imagination.

Fantastic Fest '16: Fraud + Belief: The Possession of Janet Moses

FRAUD
***½/****
directed by Dean Fleischer-Camp

BELIEF: THE POSSESSION OF JANET MOSES
**½/****
directed by David Stubbs

by Walter Chaw The line between documentary and fiction filmmaking is blurry. Better--more accurate--to say there's no difference at all: that documentary is just a genre in and of itself. Documentaries are products of points of view, of editing, of premise. You could film someone reading a phone book, but even that's a choice. Where to put the camera; why do it in the first place? Consider the Heisenberg Principle as well, this notion that the nature of anything changes once it's observed. Documentary as "truth" is an interesting philosophical question. It's sold as such, used politically, manipulated to serve purposes contrary to the idea of objective reality, but documentaries are never objective. Indeed, they challenge the very idea that the product of any endeavour could be truly objective. It's an interesting phenomenon in our technological wasteland that video "evidence" of malfeasance has proven inconclusive in courts of law. Replays in professional sports have only muddied the playing field. Everything is subject to interpretation and the product of someone's decision made somewhere along the way.

Fantastic Fest '16: Sweet, Sweet Lonely Girl + A Dark Song

SWEET, SWEET LONELY GIRL
*½/****
starring Quinn Shephard, Susan Kellermann, Erin Wilhelmi, Frances Eve
written and directed by A.D. Calvo

A DARK SONG
**/**
starring Catherine Walker, Steve Oram, Mark Huberman, Susan Loughnane
written and directed by Liam Gavin

by Walter Chaw Self-consciously a throwback to supernatural softcore lesbian exploitation as indicated by the films of Jean Rollin and, specifically, James Kenelm Clarke's The House on Straw Hill (with bits of Pawel Pawlikowski's My Summer of Love in there), A.D Calvo's Sweet, Sweet Lonely Girl has a pretty good feel for time and place, but not much more than that. It's the definition of slight. Adele (Erin Wilhelmi) is a bit of an outcast. Gangly and awkward, she's sent away to be the helper for her mysterious shut-in of an aunt, Dora (Susan Kellermann), at Dora's decaying Victorian manse. One day Adele sees a beautiful girl at the market, Beth (Quinn Shephard), strikes up a friendship with her that evolves into a love affair of sorts, and discovers herself at the same pace that everything begins to fall apart with Dora. It's a recognizable tale of feminine agency told better, directly and indirectly, as recently as Osgood Perkins's February (now The Blackcoat's Daughter) and Robert Eggers's The Witch. Sweet, Sweet Lonely Girl begs comparisons because it begs them explicitly. Its soundtrack is AM Gold featuring choice cuts from Rod Stewart and Crystal Gayle as well as a few nice slices from Starbuck, and the film itself is a mix-tape in every way.

A Waning Desire to Blow S--t Up: FFC Interviews Pete Travis

I was five minutes late because I'm a chronic screw-up but Pete Travis couldn't have been more patient or forgiving. I'm doubly impressed by his zen calm when he tells me he starts shooting another feature in four days. I assume out loud that doing press at a film festival is the last thing he needs, but he says he's grateful for the respite from a constantly-ringing phone. Later Travis, who gives off a major Ben Mendelsohn vibe in person, will compare big-budget filmmaking to lying on the beach; if we'd ordered drinks, I would've had what he's having.

Travis came to this year's TIFF with his follow-up to the sensational Dredd, the London-set City of Tiny Lights, in tow. Starring the charming, ubiquitous Riz Ahmed, it's about a detective (Brits, including Travis, favour the term "gumshoe") whose search for a missing prostitute brings him in touch with his own tragic past. It's a conventional hard-boiled whodunit--the genre has survived by being incorruptibly formulaic, allowing it to comment on modern times by throwing into relief our changing mores and values--with one glaring exception: only one of the main characters is white. It's fascinating how deceptively fresh this makes it feel. My major complaint after the movie was over was that it retreats from those Chinatown places that would give it resonance beyond its enlightened casting (screenwriter Patrick Neale, adapting his own novel, scaled back on his book's doom and gloom considerably), but upon spending some time with Travis, I came to see the optimism of City of Tiny Lights as deeply personal to a serene and hopeful man.

We spoke on September 15, 2016 at the Azure Restaurant & Bar in the InterContinental Toronto Centre.

Fantastic Fest '16: Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (2016)

*/****
starring Eva Green, Asa Butterfield, Chris O'Dowd, Samuel L. Jackson
screenplay by Jane Goldman, based upon the novel by Ransom Riggs
directed by Tim Burton

by Walter Chaw The right material and collaborator can bring out the best in Tim Burton, but it's mostly a one-way street. Before it soured, his work with Johnny Depp compelled because of the pathos Depp imported into projects like Edward Scissorhands and Ed Wood. When Burton lands the right material, as he did with Sondheim's Sweeney Todd, he's capable of masterpieces. I would argue that his most personal picture by far, the only one that plumbs the exquisite gulfs of loneliness and disconnection suggested by his other pieces, is Batman Returns. There's a scene in it where Bruce Wayne drinks soup, recoils that it's cold, then digs in again without hesitation when told by his long-term keeper that it's supposed to be. Bruce is a broken clockwork and wholly dependent; it's a fascinating read of the Batman character. Burton's Catwoman is the purest representation of the gender injustice that results in her mania and rise to power. The film is a spiritual predecessor to Burton's poetry collection The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories, the contents of which speak of misbegotten births, misunderstood childhoods, and unimaginable betrayals that lead to lonesome deaths. These themes are always on the periphery of Burton's films. I wonder if as he's gotten more monolithic whether they don't become commensurately more difficult to tease out.

Fantastic Fest '16: Salt and Fire

½*/****
starring Veronica Ferres, Michael Shannon, Gael Garcia Bernal, Volker Zack Michalowski
written by Werner Herzog, based on the story "Aral" by Tom Bissell
directed by Werner Herzog

by Walter Chaw There's an early moment in Werner Herzog's misbegotten Salt and Fire where three scientists wander through an abandoned terminal in a Bolivian airport, scored by a cacophonous, disturbing Ernst Reijseger composition, that finds Herzog on comfortable, familiar ground. His films are at their best when they combine this kind of displacing, disquieting music against scenes of the mundane. Later, as his DP Peter Zeitlinger pans across the flaking spines of an ancient book collection, and again when Zeitlinger takes in the staggering scope of Bolivia's Uyuni Salt Flat, Herzog finds his rhythm as chronicler of unknowable mysteries and philosopher of intimations of immortality. The film would have been better without dialogue. A scene right around the mid-point where scientist Laura (Veronica Ferres) and mad industrialist Matt Riley (Michael Shannon) have a conversation about children in front of a crackling fire would have been transcendent silent. The planes of Shannon's and Ferres's faces, lit by flickers of orange, are suggestive of extraordinary depths and tensions. When they're forced to say things like "the tragedy is when men are afraid of the light," it tends to make it all gravid and unintentionally hilarious. When Michael Shannon is incapable of landing a weird line, imagine how the others fare.

Goats Crossed, Bridge Closed

by Walter Chaw We've decided to get rid of our comments section here at FILM FREAK CENTRAL. We kept it for longer than we should have, I think. Our world isn't getting any better. It's getting a lot worse. I stopped engaging with our commenters a while ago. I've come back a couple of times in the last few years, but for the most part it's just been this thing that festers, this thing in the basement that gibbers to itself. I've asked friends to not tell me what's being written about me in there. I'm a lot happier not knowing.

The Magnificent 7 (2016)

**½/****
starring Denzel Washington, Vincent D'Onofrio, Peter Sarsgaard, Chris Pratt
screenplay by Nic Pizzolatto and Richard Wenk
directed by Antoine Fuqua

by Walter Chaw That there isn't more of a conversation around Antoine Fuqua's The Magnificent 7 beyond the usual wag-talk about the relative merits of sequels and remakes speaks to something like cultural progress, for what it's worth. The popular criticism of Star Wars: The Force Awakens is that it's derivative and took "no chances." My response is that the heroes of the film are a young woman, a young black man, and a Guatemalan--all in a franchise that set back the racial conversation by about thirty years with its astonishingly tone-deaf prequel trilogy. The Force Awakens, in other words, took a hell of a lot of chances, particularly in consideration of the vile blowback Paul Feig's Ghostbusters suffered for having the temerity to recast a well-remembered bro-fave with women. The Magnificent 7 takes a few chances as well by recasting John Sturges's well-remembered bro-fave Kurosawa remake with Denzel Washington (in the Yul Brynner lead), Byung-hun Lee (possibly the biggest star in Asia), Tlingit/Koyukon-Athabascan actor Martin Sensmeir, and Mexican actor Manuel Garcia-Rulfo. The press junket made a lot of this multi-culturalism and there's a passing reference to it in most reviews of the picture, but like The Force Awakens, the prevailing attitude is that The Magnificent 7 is derivative and that's that. It is that, but that's not all it is.

TIFF '16: Water and Sugar: Carlo Di Palma, The Colours of Life

Acqua e Zucchero: Carlo Di Palma, i colori della vita
***/****
diretced by Fariborz Kamkari

by Bill Chambers This is an illuminating if less than revolutionary documentary about a cinematographer who's more of a DP's DP than a consensus Great among film buffs. (Google "greatest cinematographers" and Carlo Di Palma doesn't even number among the sixty thumbnails in the banner at the top.) Perhaps the reason is because he spent so long in the weeds with Woody Allen (from 1986 until his retirement from fiction features in 1997), whose movies are statistically ephemeral; perhaps it's because Di Palma is a key figure specifically in Italian cinema, which seemed to exhaust its cultural cachet as art films became outmoded there. Inspired by an exhibit devoted to Di Palma curated by his widow, Adriana Chiesa Di Palma, Water and Sugar: Carlo Di Palma, The Colours of Life--a title derived from a late-film anecdote about Carlo as a young boy that packs an emotional punch I wasn't quite expecting--sees Adriana poring over his papers and videos, interviewing her husband's colleagues and admirers, and wistfully recalling their marriage. Surprised herself by the vitality of his contribution to the cinematic arts (it sounds like he didn't talk shop much at home), she makes for an ideal entrée into the filmmaker's oeuvre: she knows the titles and the people involved (sometimes personally), but not well enough to be disenchanted with them.

TIFF '16: A Quiet Passion

****/****
starring Cynthia Nixon, Jennifer Ehle, Jodhi May, Keith Carradine
written and directed by Terence Davies

by Walter Chaw Terence Davies doesn't make a lot of movies but he does make masterpieces fairly regularly. A Quiet Passion, a biopic of the notoriously reclusive Emily Dickinson, is his latest. His portrait of the "Belle of Amherst" captures the poet (Cynthia Nixon, transcendent) as a woman who finds no succour in the petrified pieties of her rigid New England society, turning inwards instead to the dubious pleasures of family and verse. She looks for approval from both. Her father (Keith Carradine) suffers her streak of rebellion. There's the sense that he sees in her the continuation of his own modest progressivism, indicated by the quiet approval he gives to his children's mockery of his silly sister (Annette Badland), his acceptance of Emily's rejection of a religious education, and his indulging of Emily's desire to write in the small hours of the night. One senses that these witching hours are her room of one's own. The tableaux of Emily swaddled in the purple cocoon of night is not just a romantic notion, but evocation, too, of Davies's deep consciousness of colour in his pictures, pointing to how these early, idealistic moments are contrasted by the sick yellows, whites, and browns that populate the period after her father's death. He breaks that mourning with an impressionistic interlude that opens upon a green bower, then Emily bathed in firelight in something like the physical/spiritual ecstasy that would be denied her--that she perhaps denied herself for fear and self-loathing--all her life. He closes a door on her, slowly. It's a passage that expresses the tension of the film's title: Emily finds deliverance only upon a deeper metaphysical implosion.

The Emotional Weather Report

by Walter Chaw The road home is always shorter, so I find an excuse to stop on the way.

TIFF '16: Sadako vs. Kayako

**/****
directed by Kôji Shiraishi

by Bill Chambers A professor (Masahiro Komoto) teaching a course on urban legends beseeches his class to get him a copy of the cursed video that summons Sadako, the vengeful spirit of Ringu and its sequels/prequels (this is the seventh film in the Japanese iteration of the series)...and also to buy his book. Not long after, the tape surfaces, and a young woman who watched it dies in the midst of joking with her co-workers about all the inexplicably terrifying things that have happened to her since. Needless to say, Sadako vs. Kayako has a sense of humour about itself--how could it not, given that what its title promises is like herding cats: Sadako only visits those with a working VHS player and Ju-on: The Grudge villainess Kayako never leaves the house. In parallel storylines, the professor and one of his students (Aimi Satsukawa) inherit the Sadako curse and the Grudge place beckons a teenage girl (Tina Tamashiro) who's moved in next door, although Sadako is the de facto star of this show. While the film might not be a conventional entry in either franchise, it's very much in a Japanese tradition, that of kaijū eiga movies featuring experts who sic monsters on other monsters, old-lady-who-swallowed-the-fly-like, when their other defenses prove ineffectual. No cities are levelled here, though.

Telluride '16: Short Films

by Walter Chaw

Dirt */**** (d. Darius Clark Monroe) One of those time-loop conceits that opens with a guy burying a body and ends with...no, not telling. Dirt has an issue with editing and looping, the fallout being that image overlaps noise, confusing function. It's possible to do this meaningfully; it's also possible to junk it up so completely that every transition begins with unnecessary obfuscation. That's what's happened here. Dirt isn't promising, but it is brief.

Female Prisoner Scorpion: The Complete Collection - Blu-ray Disc

Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion (1972)
***½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Meiko Kaji, Natsuyagi Isao, Rie Yokoyama, Fumio Watanabe
written by Fumio Kônami and Hirô Matsuda, from the manga by Toru Shinohara
directed by Shunya Itô

Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 (1972)
****/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Meiko Kaji, Kayoko Shiraishi, Fumio Watanabe, Eiko Yanami
written by Shunya Itô, Fumio Kônami and Hirô Matsuda, from the manga by Toru Shinohara
directed by Shunya Itô

Female Prisoner Scorpion: Beast Stable (1973)
***/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Meiko Kaji, Mikio Narita, Koji Nanbara, Yayoi Watanabe
written by Hirô Matsuda, from the manga by Toru Shinohara
directed by Shunya Itô

Female Prisoner Scorpion: #701's Grudge Song (1973)
**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Meiko Kaji, Masakazu Tamura, Toshiyuki Hosokawa, Sanae Nakahara
written by Fumio Kônami, Hirô Matsuda and Yasuharu Hasebe, from the manga by Toru Shinohara
directed by Yasuharu Hasebe

by Bryant Frazer One of the most audacious debuts in cinematic history is rookie Shunya Itô's expressionist rape-revenge saga, the Female Prisoner Scorpion trilogy. These three films, released in the 11-month period between August 1972 and July 1973, elevate Japanese studio Toei's series of "pinky violence" sexploitation films with daring, theatrical visuals reminiscent of the bold work that got Seijun Suzuki fired from Nikkatsu and a subversive sensibility that could be described as genuinely feminist. Of course, Itô's studio bosses didn't have art in mind. Loosely adapted from a popular manga, the first Scorpion was conceived as a gender-swapped take on Teruo Ishii's popular Abashiri Prison film series, on which Itô had worked as assistant director. Moving the story from a men's prison to a women's prison accommodated sensationalized images of nudity and sexual violence, which even major Japanese studios were relying on in the early 1970s as a way to compete with American imports. But Itô talked his screenwriters into throwing out their derivative original script and starting anew. He also convinced Meiko Kaji, a rising star thanks to her appearances in the popular Stray Cat Rock movies about Japanese youth street culture, to take on the title role. (Kaji arrived at Toei from Nikkatsu after the latter studio diverted its production resources to so-called "roman porno" softcore in an attempt to compete with the popularity of television.) The results are singular. Itô's flamboyant visuals created florid showcases for Kaji's riveting screen presence, especially her oft-deployed 1,000-yard stare--a stone-cold, daggers-to-your-eyeballs glare of the type seen elsewhere in only the most unnerving of horror films. Itô and Kaji turned out to be an electrifying combination.

TIFF '16: Carrie Pilby

*/****
directed by Susan Johnson

by Bill Chambers True story: Carrie, dining alone, catches eyes with a handsome stranger across the restaurant. He confidently strides up to her table and she starts rambling on about how she's flattered but not interested, after which I said, in perfect unison with the handsome stranger on screen, "I was just going to ask if I could borrow your chair." Am I psychic? No, I'm just fluent in Sitcom. Incidentally, this cheap bit of embarrassment humour scored laughs instead of groans at my screening, which suggests that a generation throwing TV away has blinded them to its hackneyed standbys. (It also suggests these tropes are adapting to new habitats rather than dying off.) If only it were an isolated moment, but Carrie Pilby is stuck in such well-grooved territory that it's mindlessly anachronistic at times, like when the title character, a present-day 19-year-old girl with a smart phone, uses the Personals to get a date like the prototype for her New York neurotic would have once upon a time. There's old-school--which she most certainly is--and then there's, y'know, Amish. British expat Carrie (Bel Powley) is an extremely young Harvard grad living like a hermit off her father's dime in NYC. She's pretentious ("Van Goff," "Franny and Zoë"), uptight, sarcastic, entitled. Urging her to be more accommodating of people, a shrink friend of the family (Nathan Lane) prescribes a to-do list that translates to "find a boyfriend," outlining as it does a plot trajectory destined to climax on the cinema's emblem of the romantic pinnacle, New Year's Eve. Disappointing that gender-shuffling the Woody Allen and Manic Pixie Dreamgirl archetypes--the charming Cy (William Moseley), conveniently situated next door to Carrie, plays the didgeridoo when he's not using it as a bong--leads to the same dead-end happy ending; that the evil suitor (Colin O'Donoghue) is just another '80s ski-movie douchebag destined to be quelled by a punch to the face; that Carrie's defenses are reduced to a lot of Freudian baggage. Looking like regional advertising (only Powley's Bette Davis eyes are of aesthetic interest), Carrie Pilby is as synthetically directed as it is written, and the performers struggle. Programme: Special Presentations

Telluride '16: The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait Photography

**½/****
directed by Errol Morris

by Walter Chaw Towards the end of Errol Morris's fitfully-fascinating portrait of legendary large-format Polaroid photographer Elsa Dorfman, The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait Photography, Dorfman, looking at one of the dozens of snapshots she's taken of the late Alan Ginsberg, says that maybe the true life of a photo isn't revealed until the subject has died. It's the emotional fulcrum of this brief piece, as the now-79-year-old Dorfman looks back on a lifetime of pictures taken while she went from being a single "New York Jew" without direction to a hob-nobber among the Greenwich Village crowd. Ensconced at Morris's bequest in her studio's backroom, she's dwarfed by a cluttered drafting table on the one side and rows and stacks of archived portraits on the other. As she opens each cabinet, Morris captures the delight and surprise of her rediscovering the "discards" of her customers (they pick one to keep; the other she dubs "the B-side" and ferrets away), reading the detailed captions she's left on them.

TIFF '16: Prank

**½/****
directed by Vincent Biron

by Bill Chambers The retainer, the indifferent pompadour, the Cookie Monster table manners--it's obvious that Stefie (Étienne Galloy) doesn't have an image to protect. When two older-looking teens, Martin (Alexandre Lavigne) and Jean-Se (Simon Pigeon), invite him to participate in a bit of "Jackass" performance art (they need his phone to film it), Stefie discovers something about himself, I think: that he was lonely. Joining them on subsequent pranks, he has nothing to offer creatively but does assume the voice of the group's conscience, however muted. Often he himself is persuaded to ignore it by his desire to impress Martin's girlfriend, Lea (Constance Massicotte), who indelicately soaks up the attention of the new kid. TIFF's official guide compares Prank to Harmony Korine, but it's gentler than his work despite some scatological moments and a similar elevation of mischief to a higher calling, and it's rarely surreal for surreal's sake. There is much talk of doing drugs but a lot of it is bluster, and although they're chased by police at one point, the gang's stunts are strictly of the "Just for Laughs" variety. It might appear as if Stefie's fallen in with a bad crowd, but he doesn't exactly seem like someone who was on the road to becoming valedictorian. I like that Stefie is finally so unexceptional. Average kids have to come of age, too, even in movies. Admittedly, Stefie is so unburdened by biographical details--his mother's invisible when they allegedly go to the county fair together while he's high, he freely comes and goes at all hours without any parental interference, and he betrays no pretense of a school life--that Prank often feels underwritten. This is the feature debut of a short-film director (Vincent Biron) who doesn't always see the forest for the trees, but there are some exquisite vignettes, including one long shaggy-dog of a joke with a brutally funny pay-off and a running gag where Jean-Se recounts the plots of movies like Predator and Bloodsport to an enraptured Stefie as Biron cuts to paintings, presumably by Jean-Se, lovingly depicting the scenes he's describing. I thought about how my nephew wants to hear all about my favourite films but doesn't necessarily want to watch them, and how I love to oblige; Prank gets that the true appeal of old movies for most teenagers today is as campfire mythology--in the meantime, they're content with practical jokes on YouTube. I really want those paintings, by the way. Programme: Discovery

Telluride '16: Wakefield

½*/****
starring Bryan Cranston, Jennifer Garner, Jason O'Mara, Beverly D'Angelo
screenplay by Robin Swicord, based on the story by E.L. Doctorow
directed by Robin Swicord

by Walter Chaw Angry businessman Howard Wakefield (Bryan Cranston) tunes in and drops out when, after chasing a raccoon into the unused attic of his garage, he decides to live there for a few months, spying on his wife Diana (Jennifer Garner) and their twin "budding adolescent" girls (as E.L. Doctorow, author of the story upon which this is based, calls them). There's a 1990 Jan Egleson film called A Shock to the System that sees a Howard Wakefield type played by Michael Caine mordantly, hilariously deciding to take control of his life through a series of carefully-planned murders. Robin Swicord's Wakefield aspires to be an updating of this but is hampered by the fact of Robin Swicord. Take the moment where Howard watches his long-suffering spouse dump his dinner on top of a bag of garbage in their driveway. Cut to the next day, with Howard opening the lid and looking down at it. Flashback to Diana dumping the dinner on top of a bag of garbage in their driveway. Yes, Swicord is so literal-minded and inept that she has offered gaffed viewers a flashback to a scene that just happened.

Telluride '16: Manchester by the Sea

****/****
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.

TIFF '16: Certain Women

***/****
starring Laura Dern, Kristen Stewart, Michelle Williams, Lily Gladstone
screenplay by Kelly Reichardt, based on stories by Maile Meloy
directed by Kelly Reichardt

by Bill Chambers I hate miserablism. I decided Kelly Reichardt wasn't for me after seeing Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy, and a few minutes of Meek's Cutoff, because even though they're about deeply unhappy people, their total void of humour bothered me. Relentless self-seriousness is teen angst, and incredibly unbecoming when the people on screen are adults and the filmmakers are, too. There's a moment near the beginning of Certain Women where Jared Harris sobs "Nobody understands how fucking miserable my life is!" (or something to that effect) that could be a panel from the MAD MAGAZINE parody of Reichardt's work, and I nearly fled the theatre until Laura Dern's reaction to Harris's wailing produced some titters in the audience, alerting me to the possibility that I had missed something crucial by not watching Reichardt's movies in public. Perhaps solitude blinds one to any levity in films about gloomy guses and lonesome outcasts. Be that as it may, Certain Women is definitely not as grim or hopeless as Old Joy, et al, despite its absence of anything resembling a conventional happy ending.

Sully (2016)

**/****
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.

TIFF '16: Elle

***/****
directed by Paul Verhoeven

by Bill Chambers The first thing you hear in Elle, after Anne Dudley's giallo-worthy (and, thus, slightly misleading) overture, are some violent sex noises, but the first thing you see is a cat, a good ol' Russian blue, who is watching his owner get violated with daunting ambivalence. Meet the director. Migrating from his native Holland to France this time, Paul Verhoeven has made a movie fascinated with rape at either the best or worst cultural moment he could have chosen. Michèle (Isabelle Huppert) is depicted being raped several times over the course of the film by the same ski-masked stranger; my own reaction was a complicated gnarl of disgust and desensitization that led to more disgust. Eventually, I think, Michèle's relationship with her attacker becomes S&M in all but name, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Michèle is a well-to-do Parisian with a videogame company that seems to specialize in hentai (meaning you also get to see tentacle rape, Verhoeven-style). Family members--including a mother (Judith Magre) who's into much-younger men and a layabout son (Jonas Bloquet) who's fallen under the spell of a pregnant gold digger (Alice Isaaz)--orbit in close proximity despite her abrasive candor, which at one point finds her telling her friends and puppyish ex-husband (Charles Berling) about her rape over cocktails after work. They worry, but because she's the alpha dog, they probably don't worry enough.

Telluride '16: Into the Inferno

**/****
directed by Werner Herzog

by Walter Chaw About 20 minutes of Werner Herzog's 104-minute Into the Inferno is recycled footage from his own Encounters at the End of the World. Another 20 is a strange diversion into the discovery of a hominid skeleton in Africa featuring a particularly excitable paleoanthropologist. This leaves roughly an hour for the cultural/anthropological examination of cults sprung up around active volcanoes the movie promises, and at least a portion of that is devoted to the amazing footage captured by the late Katia and Maurice Krafft, who, like Kilgore on the beach, never thought they could be killed by the fire. They were. It's the kind of gallows revelation that is the purview of Herzog's mordant documentaries. He is at least as good at this as he is at his more traditional fictions. But Into the Inferno seems tossed-off and unfocused, and not even a partnership with affable British vulcanologist Clive Oppenheimer can help Herzog ground this material. A previous incarnation of the filmmaker would find him stealthily building a profile of a man who spends his life staring into magma pools, perched at the edge of pyroclasmic calamity. This Herzog interviews a few chiefs of island cultures, the most fascinating of whom has decided that an American airman lives in the lava and will one day emerge to shower the villagers with a bounty of consumer goods.

Telluride '16: Una

**/****
starring Rooney Mara, Ben Mendelsohn, Riz Ahmed, Tara Fitzgerald
screenplay by David Harrower, based on his play "Blackbird"
directed by Benedict Andrews

by Walter Chaw Theatre director Benedict Andrews makes his feature-film debut with the best Patrick Marber stage adaptation that isn't from a Patrick Marber play, Una. (The play is actually David Harrower's "Blackbird", adapted for the screen by Harrower.) It's kind of a low bar, let's be honest. Una is about Una, who, as a 13-year-old child, is raped by Ray. But young Una (Ruby Stokes) thinks that she loves Ray (Ben Mendelsohn), and Ray, a sick fuck, is sure that he loves Una. This is Lolita told from the point-of-view of Controversial Playwright: Harrower stirs the shit and Andrews does his best to expand what's probably a one-room drama into a warren of warehouse offices, an apartment, a dinner party, and lots of flashbacks. The strategy appears to be a lot of walking around and then stopping to exchange twenty pages of gravid dialogue. The best things about Una (and they're fantastic) are Rooney Mara, who plays the title character as an adult, and Mendelsohn. Mara is growing on me, and if Mendelsohn has ever given a bad performance, I can't remember it. These two have a genuine fission in their interplay that makes it all feel dangerous. When Ray turns tender at the end, smoothing 28-year-old Una's hair and telling her she was the only 13-year-old he's ever been attracted to, there's a beat--maybe two--before you hear what he's saying.

Telluride '16: Arrival

****/****
starring Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker
screenplay by Eric Heisserer, based on the story "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang
directed by Denis Villeneuve

by Walter Chaw Based on a humdinger of a Ted Chiang short story called "Story of Your Life," Denis Villeneuve's Arrival, while changing a detail here and there, distils the emotionality of the story, honours the science of it, and goes places the premise naturally indicates that it might. It clarifies without simplifying. It posits as its hero Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams, who has never been better), a brilliant linguistics professor enlisted by the military to try to communicate with the things in the giant spacecraft that have appeared in twelve different locations around the planet. Not all of them, mind--just the ones in Montana. The others are their problem. Arrival suggests that the first complication of this story of our lives is that there are pronouns other than "us" in matters of international import. It reminds of The Abyss in its tale of an alien arrival that requires human cooperation, but whose purpose doesn't appear to be to coerce a response through a show of force. They just hang there, waiting for us to learn their language. That's an important point. It's something to think about.

Telluride '16: La La Land

*/****
starring Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, Finn Wittrock, J.K. Simmons
written and directed by Damien Chazelle

by Walter Chaw Damien Chazelle's La La Land is sort of like Down with Love and also sort of like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, derivative in the way that things are derivative when they have no real knowledge of or even maybe affection for the things from which they ostensibly derive. At the least, the picture demonstrates no real knowledge of the Hollywood musical. It's homage in the same way that "Stranger Things" is homage. It's beard oil, suspenders, and craft beer: The Movie. It's homage the way that putting a tutu on a dog pays homage to ballet. When something is this familiar, its set-pieces need to be extraordinary. Howard Hawks understood this. Vincente Minnelli, of course. Stanley Donen? Stop yourself. Yes. When Chazelle does the two or three blow-out sequences meant to dazzle, all they do is seem psychotic. The best thing about his Whiplash is arguably its editing. (It won the Oscar.) Now imagine Brigadoon cut like that. Consider the scene in La La Land that ends in a swimming pool, camera spinning deliriously around in a circle like something drowning or getting death-rolled by an alligator. It's intended to be ebullient; it feels panicky and hallucinogenic. It feels like that scene in Seconds where Rock Hudson joins a bacchanal in a grape-stomping vat. Seconds wasn't a good musical, either.

Telluride '16: Moonlight

***/****
starring Trevante Rhodes, André Holland, Janelle Monáe, Mahershala Ali
screenplay by Barry Jenkins
directed by Barry Jenkins

by Walter Chaw Barry Jenkins's sophomore feature is lovely. It deals with ideas of masculinity and black culture with sensitivity and a dedicated Romanticism. It's buoyed by a trio of remarkable performers--all playing the same character, Chiron, at three different stages of his life: troubled child, troubled teen, and troubled adult. They share mannerisms. They have the same vulnerable quiver to their lip. I don't know how Jenkins and his team put that together, but there it is and it's among the most affecting things I've seen in a film. It's overwhelming. Visually, Moonlight reminds me a lot of David Gordon Green's similarly lyrical George Washington. It captures a certain reflective poetry in the poverty and privation it depicts. There's a moment in the second section, "ii. Chiron," that finds the teen incarnation (Ashton Sanders), all elbows and gawkiness, alone on a beach with his only friend, Kevin (Jharrel Jerome), looking up at the stars and discovering for a second who it is that he really is. Jenkins demonstrates patience with medium shots. He frames the boys against the water before them and the city behind them like Eliot's hero, in liminal spaces, experiencing catastrophic change.

Elevation

by Walter Chaw Telluride rests in a valley on the Western side of Colorado. It sits at 8,750 feet. You have to cross Monarch Pass (elevation approximately 12,000 feet) to get there from where I live, a six-and-a-half hour drive away. If you're doing it right, you walk everywhere in Telluride, taking the free gondola service over the longer stretches up and down the mountain, and feeling the sharp constriction in your chest when your body, even one acclimated to a mile above sea level, discovers there's noticeably less oxygen to breathe at such great heights. I wonder if mild hypoxia has something to do with my euphoria while I'm here. I am the best version of myself at the Telluride Film Festival, even as the festival itself continues to subtly decline by inevitably becoming more beholden to middlebrow interests and tastes at the same pace it now sells out the highest level of ticket package they make available. Not the ones you can buy off the website, the ones you secure through $100,000 donations.

The Jungle Book (2016) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

**½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Bill Murray, Ben Kingsley, Idris Elba, Neel Sethi
screenplay by Justin Marks
directed by Jon Favreau

by Bill Chambers Confession: As a child, I used to fantasize about live-action versions of the Disney animated features--especially Pinocchio and Sleeping Beauty, because of the design extremes in those films. Thinking back on this, I was at a loss to explain why my kid brain--which had a bottomless capacity to suspend disbelief--wanted to see a "real" purple-and-black dragon spit green flames at a "real" prince, or a "real" wooden boy sprout donkey ears, until earlier this week, when a piece of clickbait unveiling the "real" Lumière and Cogsworth from the upcoming Beauty and the Beast jogged my memory: ghoulish curiosity. "Ghoulish curiosity" is, I believe, the unspoken draw of this recent spate of live-action Disney remakes, starting with 2010's Alice in Wonderland, which doubled down by promising the Tim Burton rendition of that world. The reason Alice Through the Looking Glass tanked, Johnny Depp's recent toxicity notwithstanding, is that we've seen all the freaks in that tent; true fascination lies the way of Dumbo, another Tim Burton joint. (I have a pretty good idea of what the circus stuff will look like, but I'm dying to see that elephant fly.) Jon Favreau's The Jungle Book got us there via the truly perverse notion to remake one of Disney's animal-driven musicals in live-action. Of course it opened big ($103M, in friggin' April!), just like of course the RNC scored higher ratings than the DNC. But if the latter rewarded our cynical rubbernecking, Favreau transcended it.

Don't Breathe (2016)

***½/****
starring Jane Levy, Dylan Minnette, Daniel Zovatto, Stephen Lang
written by Fede Alvarez & Rodo Sayagues
directed by Fede Alvarez

by Walter Chaw Fede Alvarez is the real deal. He made a short film in 2009 called Ataque de Panico! and from it scored a gig directing the fantastic Evil Dead reboot. He has a clean style and a respect for the cinema as a narrative vehicle. What he introduces he inevitably pays off (Chekhov would approve), and he has a way with the camera that's as witty as it is wise. Consider a moment in his new film, Don't Breathe, where he introduces a workshop with a playful, loping push-in on a giant hammer, then pulls back to find one of our heroes where he was, rooting around below. Odd to say about things as extreme as Evil Dead or as unbearably tense as Don't Breathe, but Alvarez's pictures are delightful. They trigger a giddy response. They are knowing, ingratiating in that way that a secret shared between connoisseurs can be ingratiating. It's that feeling you feel when you're watching a movie by someone you trust won't make a hash of it. In just two features, Alvarez has earned that trust and more.

I, Madman (1989) - Blu-ray Disc

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A
starring Jenny Wright, Clayton Rohner, Randall William Cook, Steven Memel
written by David Chaskin
directed by Tibor Takacs

by Walter Chaw I like just about everything about I, Madman. It's a pastiche picture coming at the end of the slasher era that cobbles together bits of De Palma and "Tales from the Darkside", tosses in some wonderfully cheap stop-motion effects, and stars the incomparable '80s dreamgirl Jenny Wright. Truly, it has everything. Wright is Virginia, a used-bookstore cashier (even her job is a super-nerd's idea of a dreamgirl's job) addicted to lurid pulps (sigh!) who is, as the film begins, reading a nasty thing about a "Jackal Boy" monster created in the unwitting womb of an unfortunate victim. Virginia's cop boyfriend Richard (Clayton Rohner) disapproves of her reading habits because of the states they send her into, but, Virginia being Virginia, she persists. She becomes obsessed with tracking down a volume called I, Madman, written by a certain Malcolm Brand (Randall William Cook). It's about a nutter who gets dumped because of his displeasing features and so he cuts them off. Alas, slicer's regret has Brand attacking women in an attempt to take back the missing pieces of his face. Turns out Brand isn't writing fiction, but memoir, and Virginia's interest in him has attracted him to her through the pages of his book.

Barbershop: The Next Cut (2016) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras D
starring Ice Cube, Cedric the Entertainer, Regina Hall, Nicki Minaj
written by Kenya Barris & Tracy Oliver
directed by Malcolm D. Lee

by Walter Chaw It's hard for me to find entry into Malcolm D. Lee's Barbershop: The Next Cut (hereafter Barbershop 3), because the topics it broaches are generally topics I only intersect with philosophically. I hear about the gun violence in Chicago, I see gang violence portrayed in films like Boyz N the Hood and Colors and more recently David Ayer's ugly End of Watch, and I do my best to be empathetic to horror stories about children shot in their beds as crossfire collateral. I see pictures of what Detroit looks like and read what I can about dystopias that make RoboCop's vision of the Motor City seem naive now. I agree entirely with the Black Lives Matter movement. I wonder why it is that even video of atrocity does little to bring rogue officers to justice. I wept when Dallas policemen were ambushed while protecting Black Lives Protestors' right to rage. I felt righteous fury along with the protestors in Ferguson. Charleston, and the graceful response by the church during funerals to mourn their dead, broke me apart. One of my best friends is black; I resist saying that because it's what non-black people say to pardon their racism. I watched both O.J. Simpson miniseries. And I realize I am entirely unsuited to speak to the black experience in the United States. It's not my place. I don't know anything.

The Nice Guys (2016) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Russell Crowe, Ryan Gosling, Matt Bomer, Kim Basinger
written by Shane Black & Anthony Bagarozzi
directed by Shane Black

by Walter Chaw Shane Black's The Nice Guys is a delightful fusion of John D. MacDonald and Gregory McDonald; if it had a cover, it'd be painted by Robert McGinnis. It's California noir, no doubt, the love child of The Long Goodbye and Inherent Vice, but with the flip social commentary and occasional bouts of ultra-violence found in Carl Hiaasen's Florida noirs. Sufficed to say that Black, who's often spoken of his love for crime fiction, has distilled pulp here and with his directorial debut Kiss Kiss Bang Bang into breezy, post-modern concoctions. The Nice Guys is as smart as it is inconsequential, as brutal and exploitive as it is a commentary on brutality and exploitation. More than anything else, it's a very fine critical pastiche of the kinds of books you read in an afternoon because they're thrilling, socially irresponsible, and afire with misogyny, nihilism, and Byronic macho bullshit Romanticism. But cool, baby, and stylish.

Mister Johnson (1991) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Maynard Eziashi, Pierce Brosnan, Edward Woodward, Beatie Edney
screenplay by William Boyd, based on the novel by Joyce Cary
directed by Bruce Beresford

by Walter Chaw I'm not sure exactly when or why Aussie director Bruce Beresford became the cinematic spokesman for the African experience. It probably, in Hollywood's peculiar racial calculus, had something to do with his appalling Driving Miss Daisy being the Oscar juggernaut that Do the Right Thing was not. Credit Beresford for the years he spent living in Nigeria and the stands he took in films like The Fringe Dwellers to work with an Aboriginal cast against counsel, but something nettles that, with the remake of "Roots" still warm and Beresford and fellow Aussie new-waver Phillip Noyce at the helm of half of its four episodes, somehow Beresford is the acceptable choice to tell these Black stories. This isn't even an indictment of his pictures, mind, but rather an indictment of a system so heavily skewed towards one racial group and gender that whatever the quality of the product, there's a good conversation to be had about the people making it. There's dissonance.

War Dogs (2016)

**/****
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.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984) [Special Edition] - DVD|[Collector's Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai
Buckaroo Bonzai
***/****
BD - Image B+ Sound B+ Extras A
DVD - Image B Sound B Extras B-
starring Peter Weller, John Lithgow, Ellen Barkin, Jeff Goldblum
screenplay by Earl Mac Rauch
directed by W.D. Richter

by Walter Chaw It isn't so much that The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8^th Dimension (henceforth Adventures) is hard to follow, it's that it's hard to assimilate. Once you're drawn into the deadly serious heart askew of W.D. Richter's film, its Gordian plot begins to unravel, its tangled web unweaves, and it becomes clear that the most disturbing thing about this legendarily convoluted camp masterpiece is that it makes perfect sense. That moment of clarity occurs somewhere in the middle of the fourth viewing, and while I can't necessarily guarantee that the trial is worth it for everyone, it was for me. Adventures reveals itself as a commentary on racism, an exploration of Communism in the Reagan era, a surprisingly influential genre piece, and a sly statement on early-Eighties excess and malaise. What I'm trying to say is that the film is holding my brain hostage, and I would like it back.

Just Desserts: The Making of "Creepshow" (2007) [Special Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

**/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B+
directed by Michael Felsher

by Bryant Frazer The market for 1980s horror nostalgia on Blu-ray reaches some kind of saturation mark with the release of Just Desserts, a feature-length documentary on the making of Creepshow, the George A. Romero-helmed, Stephen King-scripted anthology-film homage to EC horror comics. Producer-director-editor Michael Felsher, well-known to home-theatre horror buffs as perhaps the most prodigious creator of the featurettes that show up on genre releases from independent video labels, originally made Just Desserts for a 2007 UK DVD release of Creepshow. Unfortunately, he couldn't get Warner Home Video interested in picking it up for the North American version. One $4,400 crowdfunding campaign later, Felsher himself engineered the BD release of Just Desserts via Synapse Films in the U.S.. That's a great story in its own way--who doesn't like to see an independent filmmaker bypass the studio gatekeepers and give his work a chance in the market? Divorced from its context as a studio-sponsored bonus feature, however, Just Desserts doesn't stand out in any way except its earnestness. It's an excellent example of the cozy, clips-and-interviews format that dominates Blu-ray supplements, and that means it's essentially rote in both form and content. Felsher isn't mounting a critical argument about Creepshow, nor is he placing it in a revealing new context. He's simply flattering the film and its audience.

The River (1951) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A+
starring Nora Swinburne, Esmond Knight, Arthur Shields, Suprova Mukerjee
screenplay by Rumer Godden, Jean Renoir, based on the book by Godden
directed by Jean Renoir

by Walter Chaw There's something ineffable about Jean Renoir's same-named adaptation of Rumer Godden's The River. It has to do with how the light is different in our memories of childhood, the good days and especially the bad, captured here in three-strip Technicolor that understands at last Impressionism as a birthright of film. It's more real than real ever was, the "real" of nostalgia and melancholy and Romanticism. It's not possible to see in any other visual medium, though I confess I've seen it in certain poetry by certain poets. But there are moments--like in the films of Powell & Pressburger, who did their own Rumer Godden adaptation, the socio-sexual horror flick Black Narcissus--where you can definitely see it in cinema. The past, I mean. Not as it was, but as you remember it. The River captures the fear and longing of lazy summers on the cusp, of passing from innocence over to experience, of remembering things you never experienced so that you know you're connected to the entire stream of lives you've lived and lives you haven't, or haven't yet. I don't know how The River does it, but it does.

The Swinging Cheerleaders (1974) - Blu-ray + DVD

***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A-
starring Jo Johnston, Rainbeaux Smith, Colleen Camp, Rosanne Katon
written by Jane Witherspoon & Betty Conklin
directed by Jack Hill

by Bryant Frazer At some point during the free-for-all brawl that climaxes The Swinging Cheerleaders, I remember thinking to myself, "This has got to be one of the most American movies ever made." I was reacting in part to the iconography--cheerleaders fighting policeman fighting college footballers, almost in the manner of a silent comedy, as Scott Joplin plays on the soundtrack--but also to the mood of the film, in which converging themes of corruption and cynicism lead to an eruption of chaotic, comic violence, and open-hearted jocks make way for joyous optimism to prevail.

Suicide Squad (2016)

½*/****
starring Will Smith, Jared Leto, Margot Robbie, Joel Kinnaman
written and directed by David Ayer

by Walter Chaw Ugly garbage that will make a lot of money, David Ayer's Suicide Squad begins where Batman v Superman left off by positing that in a world without its big, mopey, solipsistic, Byronic Boy Scout, there will come a time when the good guys (i.e., us) will need to enlist the help of a bunch of psychopathic mutants and contract killers to protect our way of life. It's a little bit like Escape from New York but not cool and not fun; and it's a little bit like a satire, except that it's more of a documentary. Marvel films are aspirational and DC films in this new cycle are diseased and beaten. Both are bloated beyond repair and slavish to a core fandom they daren't betray, making them essentially unwatchable along their tentpole storylines--though you want less to kill yourself after the Marvel films. The bright light lately has been one-offs and side projects: Marvel's television universe, for instance, has blossomed on Netflix and DC's own TV series "The Flash" and "Supergirl" seem to hear the music. Then, of course, there's Guardians of the Galaxy. The only thing worse than the kernel of an idea at the centre of Suicide Squad is its unlikely choice of writer-director to bring it to life, Ayer, perhaps the most vile, pessimistic filmmaker in the United States, whom Warner Bros. has given the task of appealing broadly somehow with this material: a little softening here, an extra scene/hero moment there after gauging the breakout star from the reaction to early teaser trailers. If you're going to hire Ayer to do this, make it a hard-R and take out the yuk-yuk comedy. He's not funny. He's not for kids. The strain of pleasing dozens of masters shows. It shows in the select mix of fondly-remembered oldies à la Guardians of the Galaxy, and it shows in the flop-sweat of an entire production so badly compromised by its too-big star and its too-threatened masculinity.

Jason Bourne (2016)

*/****
starring Matt Damon, Tommy Lee Jones, Alicia Vikander, Vincent Cassel
written by Paul Greengrass & Christopher Rouse
directed by Paul Greengrass

by Walter Chaw There are two modes in Paul Greengrass's Jason Bourne, his and star Matt Damon's return to the franchise after almost a decade away from it: thudding tedium, and incomprehensible chaos. By this fifth instalment (which follows the Jeremy Renner-starring spin-off attempt, The Bourne Legacy), it all plays a little too much like self-parody. Every time there's a conversation about THE TRUTH now, it feels like a bad SNL skit. I still love The Bourne Identity. Watching it in comparison with the Greengrass films (and with most any modern action movie) underscores exactly how superior is Doug Liman as an action director. Liman shoots an action scene like the dance sequences in Saturday Night Fever: with respect for geography and the skill and physicality of his stunt performers and cast. The car chase through Paris in the original begins with a careful consultation of a map, a few questions about the state of the car, and some light but crucial character development, then proceeds into a nice, clean set-piece that establishes stakes, spatial geometry, and destination in a way that is Friedkin-esque. It's a textbook, as good as the L-train underpass pursuit in The French Connection and the wrong-way freeway chase in To Live and Die in LA.. The Bourne Identity is defiantly classical action filmmaking and that's why it still seems fresh, even though it will be fifteen years old next year.

Café Society (2016)

**/****
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.

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.

Vinyl: The Complete First Season (2016) - Blu-ray + Digital HD

Image A- Sound A Extras B-
"Pilot," "Yesterday Once More," "Whispered Secrets," "The Racket," "He in Racist Fire," "Cyclone," "The King and I," "E.A.B.," "Rock and Roll Queen," "Alibi"

by Bill Chambers A feeling of déjà vu pervades HBO's "Vinyl", and not just because it's so prototypical of the network's taste in weekly dramas. The first--and simultaneously last--ten episodes are a somewhat hellish loop of stylistic motifs, crutches, and tics. Refrains are a musical conceit, and this is a show about the record industry, so maybe there's a thematic defense for the repetition. But with all the imbibing that goes on on screen, "Vinyl"'s periodicities (running out of synonyms!) begin to make most sense as cues to take a shot. This review should provide all the drinking prompts you need while also serving as a post-mortem for the series, which got cancelled just as I sat down to write about it.¹ At the risk of beating a dead horse, here's what went wrong--and, occasionally, right--with "Vinyl".

Star Trek Beyond (2016)

**/****
starring Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Karl Urban, Idris Elba
screenplay by Simon Pegg & Doug Jung
directed by Justin Lin

by Walter Chaw The cultural watershed isn't when it's revealed that Sulu (John Cho) is gay, but rather a moment just before that, when an interracial couple--an Asian man and a white woman--are used as an example of a "good" relationship. I'm Chinese, my wife is a tall redhead. When my kids watch Star Trek Beyond, it'll be the first time they see their parents reflected in a major American tentpole. There are a lot of things wrong with Star Trek Beyond, which at its best is great in the same way that David Twohy's The Chronicles of Riddick is great--and at its worst is bad in the same way the last film in this reboot series is bad (that is, self-conscious and fan-pleasing, torturously so). But when Sulu is given the one, true, rousing hero moment in the piece, it speaks not just to the vision of a multicultural United States that Lin's The Fast and the Furious movies proposed, but also, perhaps, to the real impact of an Asian-American director behind the camera. It makes sense that a Lin-directed Star Trek would make Sulu the hero; I just wasn't expecting to be so affected by it.

Equals (2016)

*/****
starring Nicholas Hoult, Kristen Stewart, Jacki Weaver, Guy Pearce
screenplay by Nathan Parker
directed by Drake Doremus

by Walter Chaw Drake Doremus's Equals is Gattaca and Equilibrium and THX 1138 and Code 46 and Michael Radford's great 1984, all mashed up into an easy to conceptualize and even easier to swallow twenty-something romance that posits simply that love conquers all. It's inoffensive at all times, is only "science-fiction" because there's a blue filter on the lens, and offers so little that is its own that it's easy to miss an exceptional cast doing exceptional work. Equals is another prize example of one of those movies that people will struggle to remember (like Mark Romanek's Never Let Me Go--just like, in fact) or come upon some time later on down the line only to remark how such-and-such is a big star now and how you never knew so-and-so was in this and, hey, how is it they got so many amazing folks in such a blah picture; did it even get a release?

Green Room (2016) - Blu-ray + Digital HD

****/**** Image B Sound A Extras B
starring Anton Yelchin, Imogen Poots, Alia Shawkat, Patrick Stewart
written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier

by Walter Chaw I wonder if Jeremy Saulnier has ever made something that wasn't, in its dark heart of hearts, a comedy. I hadn't considered this before a dear friend suggested it after a screening of Green Room, and it caused me to reassess Saulnier's previous films, Murder Party and Blue Ruin. The labels "hardcore" and "brutal" don't feel exactly right, though his work is certainly both at times. There's a Mel Brooks quote I like that defines tragedy as you getting a paper-cut--it hurts, it's awful, it's terrible--and comedy as somebody else falling into a sewer and dying. Saulnier's films are litanies of horrible, unimaginable calamities befalling generally well-meaning schlubs who are altogether unequipped to deal with them. Murder Party, his feature debut, set the template. Its protagonist is a lonely guy who answers a general invitation to attend a Halloween "Murder Party," where he discovers that he's the only guest and that all of the hosts have decided to murder him. It's the most obviously comic of his pictures, and it ends with a moment of crystal-blue melancholy as it becomes clear that the audience has sutured not just to this guy's guilelessness, but to the loneliness driving him as well. Blue Ruin is a masterpiece of the same sort of mechanics. It's delightful: delightfully funny, delightfully smart, delightfully brutal. The hero of that piece, played by Macon Blair (who has a key role in Green Room), is another nebbish pulled from obscurity to be, briefly, the hero of his own life.