Film Freak Central

12 Monkeys (1995) - Blu-ray Disc|4K Ultra HD

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

Twelve Monkeys
***½/****
BD - Image A Sound A- Extras B
4K - Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe, Brad Pitt, Christopher Plummer
screenplay by David Webb Peoples & Janet Peoples, inspired by the film La Jetée written by Chris Marker
directed by Terry Gilliam

by Bryant Frazer Twelve Monkeys is a movie about a moment. Yes, sure, it's a decades-spanning science-fiction tale about time travel, the illusion of free will, and a romance at the end of the world. Yet its defining facet is its repeated, soulful depiction of a few terrible minutes in the life of a young boy who witnesses an event that's tragic in ways he can't comprehend. That's how the story starts and how it ends, the first thing we see and also the last--a child's eyes, open wide, as he is exposed to the spectacle of death, probably for the first time. Although Twelve Monkeys deals with the destruction of human civilization by a lethal contagion, and the plague's aftermath, less of the action centres on the plague itself than on this little boy. Mostly, it's concerned with a man named James Cole (Bruce Willis), who believes he's a time-travelling agent sent back from the 2030s, after a small number of survivors retreat to the safety of underground caves. Liberated from a prison cell for the mission to contemporary Philadelphia (ground zero for the virus release), Cole is trying to discover information about its origins that can be used, decades hence, to help make the earth's ruined surface safe for human habitation. Success means redemption, since Cole would return to his future world a hero. But in an ironic twist, Cole is almost immediately institutionalized; only psychiatrist Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe), a specialist in "madness and apocalyptic visions," and fellow patient Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt), who may be a nascent environmental terrorist, suspect Cole's references to upcoming cataclysmic events may be more than just delusional.

Stephen King: 5-Movie Collection - Blu-ray Disc

THE DEAD ZONE (1983)
****/**** Image C Sound A
starring Christopher Walken, Brooke Adams, Tom Skerritt, Herbert Lom
screenplay by Jeffrey Boam, based on the novel by Stephen King
directed by David Cronenberg

by Walter Chaw Michael Kamen's score for The Dead Zone sounds so much like Howard Shore's work that if I didn't know better... Maybe something about Cronenberg inspires doomed Romanticism in his collaborators. What's sometimes lost in the focus on body-horror in his pictures is how like opera they are--so like opera, in fact, that The Fly was eventually turned into one. Each is in some way about the loss of the self to love and all those elevated metaphors for love like body transformation, breakdown, decay, death. He is a poet of liebestraum. His films are suffused with it, as well as--here's another German term for you--overwhelming waves of Weltschmerz. The Dead Zone was the first Cronenberg feature since 1979's Fast Company not scored by Shore; the two would never be separated again. In a CINEFANTASTIQUE article published at the time of The Dead Zone's release (1983), Cronenberg tells of producer Dino De Laurentiis desiring a "name" composer and discarding Shore before landing on Kamen, then fresh off Alan Parker's Pink Floyd: The Wall. I don't think Cronenberg gave up that kind of control again. The Dead Zone is an adaptation of a Stephen King bestseller and home to one of only a handful of lead roles for Christopher Walken, who's idol-handsome but, you know, off-tempo. A curious affliction for a trained, gifted hoofer, you'll agree. I used to refer to Cronenberg as an insect anthropologist, an alien observer, and that's true, I think. But as I grow older and, minute-by-minute, devastation-upon-devastation, immensely, geometrically wearier, I'm seeing Cronenberg as afflicted by a certain Proustian lost time. The more I know of grief, the more I hear that edge in Cronenberg's voice echoed in my own.

Fantasia Fest '20: The Columnist

*/****
starring Katja Herbers, Bram van der Kelen, Claire Porro, Rein Hofman
screenplay by Daan Windhorst
directed by Ivo van Aart

by Walter Chaw Pity the hot-button Film of the Moment that is still somehow not about very much at all. Such is the fate of Ivo van Aart's The Columnist, which tackles Twitter and online trolling with style to burn and a game cast with nothing much to do and even less to say. Femke (Katja Herbers) is a widely-read columnist who's made some enemies by suggesting that Zwarte Piet is racist and that women should be treated as human beings. Addicted to social media, she makes the fatal error of reading the comments, is driven mad, sort of (I think), and starts murdering her trolls after Googling them. There's something about how she's blocked until after she kills someone, at which point she's able to pump out another widely-read piece about some meaningless piffle that keeps her employed. Worse, she's now under a deadline (haha, see what I did there?) to complete a book--a setup for either escalation or piquant irony, though in the case of The Columnist, it's setup for tepid social commentary made instantly impotent by the hellscape of our current reality.

Rambo: Last Blood (2019) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Sylvester Stallone, Paz Vega, Sergio Peris-Mencheta, Oscar Jaenada
screenplay by Matt Cirulnick & Sylvester Stallone
directed by Adrian Grünberg

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Rambo: Last Blood, hereafter Last Blood, became irresistible to me the moment John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) decided to score his own climactic bloodbath with The Doors' "Five to One," flooding his homemade tunnels with it to taunt and ridicule the small army hunting him. A Kevin McAllister move, one might say. Lyrics-wise, "Five to One" is a little on the nose ("Five to one, baby/One in five/No one here gets out alive, now"), but it's still a deep cut from a band in many ways synonymous with the Vietnam War's acid-rock energy, making it a loaded choice indeed. This was probably the soundtrack to Rambo losing his innocence; what matters is that it could've been. There's a certain frisson, too, that comes with hearing a pop song in a Rambo movie for the first time, at least diegetically. It makes for a set-piece that is, in the context of le cinéma de Rambo, unusually exuberant, and one begins to suspect that without music it would be merely nauseating, maybe unbearable. Indeed, the slickness of Last Blood is the only thing keeping it from being a snuff movie.

Richard Jewell (2019) - Blu-ray + Digital

***/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B-
starring Sam Rockwell, Kathy Bates, Jon Hamm, Paul Walter Hauser
written by Billy Ray, based on the article "American Nightmare: The Ballad of Richard Jewell" by Marie Brenner
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Angelo Muredda You'd be hard-pressed to think of a more fateful intersection between director and biographical subject than Clint Eastwood's Richard Jewell, which crystallizes the venerable American filmmaker's aesthetic and thematic interests of late. The infamous minimalist and chair-scolder--hyped to godly proportions in some corners of Film Twitter for his cool efficiency, scorned as a conservative propagandist by others--has been charged since the film's AFI Fest debut last month with cranking out ill-timed "Trumpian talking points" about the FBI and smearing a journalist's good name after her death. While some of the callouts are fairer than others, the uproar has distracted from the quiet dignity and formal strangeness of the work, which deepens Eastwood's recent interest in unlikely American newsmakers with asterisks beside their names and their acts of heroism by grounding itself in the awkward humanity of an even less immediately palatable figure than the inarticulate, gelato-eating Euro travellers who saved lives in The 15:17 to Paris.

Black Christmas (2019); The Grudge (2020); Color Out of Space (2020)|The Grudge (2020) - Blu-ray + Digital

BLACK CHRISTMAS
**½/****
starring Imogen Poots, Aleyse Shannon, Lily Donoghue, Cary Elwes
written by Sophia Takal & April Wolfe
directed by Sophia Takal

THE GRUDGE
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Andrea Riseborough, Demián Bichir, John Cho, Jacki Weaver
screenplay by Nicolas Pesce, based on the film Ju-On: The Grudge, written and directed by Takashi Shimizu
directed by Nicolas Pesce

H.P. Lovecraft's Color Out of Space
**½/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Joely Richardson, Madeleine Arthur, Tommy Chong
written by Richard Stanley and Scarlett Amaris, based on the short story "The Colour Out of Space" by H.P. Lovecraft
directed by Richard Stanley

by Walter Chaw The horror genre is one that's particularly suited for remakes. At their best, scary stories deal in archetypal images in pursuit of exorcising essential concerns. They're fairy tales, fables. They're warnings carrying lessons for the survivors. I think they're how the bulk of human culture was transmitted and instrumental in our species' survival, offering explanations for why sometimes people don't come home if they're caught out in the night or wander off the trail or split up from the safety of the pack. They talk about outsiders, alien threats, and other invaders infiltrating from without and within: the dangers of transgression and the failures of denial. They are Jungian shadow projections made grotesque by their repression. They grow like obscene toadstools in the soft earth of our subconscious. A good horror story should be remade for every generation. Jack Finney's Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a prime example of a premise made fresh across several decades--each time, each new film adaptation, a different social anxiety grows into its central metaphor, so it becomes a touchstone evergreen in the development of our understanding of the dangers of the greater world. Horror movies, good ones, have something to say. If you listen.

Knives Out (2019) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

***½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Daniel Craig, Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, Christopher Plummer
written and directed by Rian Johnson

by Bryant Frazer Knives Out, a cleverly plotted and star-studded whodunit, is both comfortingly familiar and surprisingly novel--a loving homage to classic English drawing-room mysteries that celebrates its sources while updating their assumptions about class and politics. It might seem strange that, having scaled the filmmaking Everest that is a Star Wars movie with The Last Jedi, writer-director Rian Johnson would immediately retreat into the comfort of an Agatha Christie pastiche. But Knives Out plays directly to Johnson's strengths: his knack for putting a new spin on old tropes and clichés, his facility with actors, and his apparent capacity for empathy. It's a comedy of manners with a marvellously dry wit, exceptionally broad appeal, and a satisfyingly complex (though not convoluted) narrative. No wonder this thing made bank at the box office.

Seberg (2019)

*/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Jack O'Connell, Margaret Qualley, Anthony Mackie
written by Joe Shrapnel & Anna Waterhouse
directed by Benedict Andrews

by Walter Chaw Benedict Andrews aspires to Alan J. Pakula with his paranoid biopic of martyred Nouvelle Vague sensation Jean Seberg but approaches it like Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can instead. His Seberg is a handsome, even slick production with a great cast and a bright period production design where something rougher-hewn, something grainier and consistently darker, might have given it a more appropriately claustrophobic feel. Shot as a prestige movie trying very hard to be About Something, Seberg has the effect of making Iowa-born Jean Seberg (Kristen Stewart) seem shallow and silly, every bit the accidental activist and media-diagnosed hysteric she was portrayed as during her lifetime. Andrews often obscures her with foreground objects to suggest a voyeuristic perspective, allows a lot of repetitive dialogue from Jean about how she knows she's being bugged, and goes so far as to invent a sympathetic FBI agent named Jack Solomon (Jack O'Connell) to confess to his wife (Margaret Qualley) that his agency is engaged in ratfucking Seberg for her support of the Black Panthers. But when your film looks this clean and expensive, the feeling is one of a privileged perspective acting like a tourist for some borrowed righteousness.

Honey Boy (2019) + The Lighthouse (2019)|The Lighthouse - Blu-ray + Digital

HONEY BOY
***½/****
starring Shia LaBeouf, Lucas Hedges, Noah Jupe, FKA twigs
written by Shia LaBeouf
directed by Alma Har'el

THE LIGHTHOUSE
***½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Robert Pattinson, Willem Dafoe
written and directed by Robert Eggers

by Walter Chaw There is a suggestion in Alma Har'el's haunted, raw Honey Boy that the only knowledge forbidden in the United States is that of the self. The picture aligns in that way with Robert Eggers's similarly haunted The Lighthouse; both films deal in a sense with the sins of the fathers becoming the secret trauma of the sons. They diverge, though, not in the process of peeling away layers and layers of sedimentary fragments the everymen of these dramas have shored against their ruins, but in what they discover at the end of their excavations. To my depressed hope, the final image of The Lighthouse, which promises this cycle of suffering is evergreen, ever-returning, and inevitable, sounds something like the truth. At the other pole is Honey Boy, which, in the course of one of its fantasy sequences, offers, of all things, reconciliation. It says that there's hope at the end of all the suffering, that the map actually leads to buried treasure and not just the skeletons of the things left to guard it (their ranks are full but they're always recruiting). I'm not sure I'm compelled by the case it's trying to make, particularly as this story has more to tell, but there's a power to its piquant grace and love and acceptance.

Doctor Sleep (2019) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Ewan McGregor, Rebecca Ferguson, Kyliegh Curran, Cliff Curtis
screenplay by Mike Flanagan, based on the novel by Stephen King
directed by Mike Flanagan

by Walter Chaw Like the book upon which it's based, Mike Flanagan's Doctor Sleep is in constant tension with its legendary progenitors. It's not unlike Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman in that sense: if a film version were ever attempted, it would likewise be dealing with not only the legacy of one of the most revered novels of all time (and I would hazard that The Shining isn't just popular, but great), but one of the most revered film adaptations, too. Just as it's impossible to read Lee's sequel without picturing Gregory Peck as Atticus and Mary Badham as Scout, it's impossible to read Stephen King's Doctor Sleep without imagining entire scenes from Kubrick's The Shining overlaying the text like the memories haunting that film's Overlook Hotel. How, for example, will Flanagan handle the death of beloved Overlook chef and Danny's mentor in extra-sensory perception, Dick Hallorann? In the book, Dick lives. In the film, where he's played iconically by the inimitable Scatman Crothers, he most assuredly does not. Go the one way and piss off King, who's held a grudge against Kubrick and The Shining for decades now; go the other and you're pissing off virtually everyone else by pretending an all-time classic picture never existed.

Terminator: Dark Fate (2019) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Linda Hamilton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mackenzie Davis, Natalia Reyes
screenplay by David Goyer & Justin Rhodes and Billy Ray
directed by Tim Miller

by Walter Chaw There's a moment in Terminator: Dark Fate--the sixth entry in the long-running franchise but a do-over in terms of narrative continuity--where a woman, mortally wounded, gives consent for things to be done with her body after she's gone. It's a small moment, and one that works to move the film's exposition, but it speaks volumes to how carefully the script, by David S. Goyer, Justin Rhodes, and Billy Ray, has endeavoured to be at least partly a conversation about how women are reduced to their physical function and appearance. "He's not here for you, he's here for your womb," says a grizzled Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) to frightened, on-the-run Dani (Natalia Reyes)--but "he," a killer robot from the future called a "Rev-9" (Gabriel Luna), isn't. He's there for something else. The picture opens with Sarah's videotaped therapy session from Terminator 2, in which she recounts her dream of nuclear Armageddon--a reminder of how her carefree party-girl character from the original had transformed through the trauma of losing a lover and escaping a monster from the future, only to be branded crazy by an unctuous male therapist and imprisoned in a facility where we witness her further humiliation and assault. Dark Fate shows what happens to Sarah and her son, the saviour of the future and a target of two assassination attempts, while in hiding in Guatemala, then hops forward into our present to the arrival in a ball of blue lightning of Grace (Mackenzie Davis), who, upon proving her battle-worthiness (and artificial augmentation) against a trio of adversaries, clothes herself in a man's attire even though a woman's is available. Function, the decision suggests, over appearance.

Gemini Man (2019) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Will Smith, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Clive Owen, Benedict Wong
screenplay by David Benioff and Billy Ray and Darren Lemke
directed by Ang Lee

by Walter Chaw Many stories are like this, about how heroes reach an age where a younger doppelgänger shows up on the scene to establish their reputation at the expense of the old Alpha. As hairless primates fond of the Oedipus story, we're attracted to this tale of the son becoming the father. When a phantom Marlon Brando frames Superman Returns thusly in that film's prologue, it's stated so magisterially it rings with the heft of cathedral bells. What Ang Lee's Gemini Man presupposes is: what if the young gunslinger looking to make his mark is a literal clone of the old gunslinger? It's kind of an intriguing idea, if you think that cloning someone from DNA and a surrogate uterus will result in shared skills and memories--like those stories about identical twins marrying women with the same name and knowing when the other is in danger or some shit. It's considerably less intriguing when its premise relies on this but, knowing that's stupid, then tries to shoehorn in a ton of exposition and backstory to explain what should probably have been left unexplained. At the mid-point of Gemini Man, when what millions of dollars of advertising have already spoiled needs to be explained, it's poor spook Danny (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) left to mouth the "you just need an egg!" explanation. Better if said explanation were that they'd figured out some way to clone someone and then implant the training. Oh, never mind.

Annual Professional Commentary on the Oscar Nominations (2020 edition)

by Bill Chambers The following is an anti-hate satire.

A Long Time Ago in a Cutting Room Far, Far Away.... - Books

A Long Time Ago in a Cutting Room Far, Far Away: My Fifty Years Editing Hollywood Hits―Star Wars, Carrie, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Mission: Impossible, and More
FFC rating: 8/10
by Paul Hirsch

by Bill Chambers "You know what's a great cut?" I said to the editor of my student film--or he said to me, I can't remember now. Conversations frequently began this way in our cluttered editing room, a glorified broom closet we'd decorated with, among other things, a life-size cardboard cutout of Mr. Spock and the poster for Sam Peckinpah's Cross of Iron. Anyway, the answer to that rhetorical question was the opening of Casualties of War: a stark cut from black to a shot inside a subway car, where Michael J. Fox, the movie's star, is Where's Waldo?-ed amongst the passengers. The other person enthusiastically concurred; it was an incredible bonding moment between us, realizing we'd each recognized the power of this relatively obscure and deceptively simple moment. Since Paul Hirsch had edited so many Brian De Palma films, including his then-recent Mission: Impossible, we assumed it was his handiwork. (Smart-phone technology for checking these things instantly did not yet exist.) A different De Palma veteran, Bill Pankow, cut Casualties of War, as it turned out, but our misapprehension sparked a discussion of the legitimate work of Paul Hirsch, who soon became the patron saint of Casa Spock. Hirsch had edited the kinds of films us Gen-X cinephiles internalized like radio hits, and even though we were cutting a dopey little student film, we aspired to his rhythmic grace, which remains somewhat overshadowed by sheer popularity when it comes to his biggest credits (Star Wars, Footloose, Planes, Trains & Automobiles).

Black Christmas (2019); The Grudge (2020); Color Out of Space (2020)

BLACK CHRISTMAS
**½/****
starring Imogen Poots, Aleyse Shannon, Lily Donoghue, Cary Elwes
written by Sophia Takal & April Wolfe
directed by Sophia Takal

THE GRUDGE
***/****
starring Andrea Riseborough, Demián Bichir, John Cho, Jacki Weaver
screenplay by Nicolas Pesce, based on the film Ju-On: The Grudge, written and directed by Takashi Shimizu
directed by Nicolas Pesce

H.P. Lovecraft's Color Out of Space
**½/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Joely Richardson, Madeleine Arthur, Tommy Chong
written by Richard Stanley and Scarlett Amaris, based on the short story "The Colour Out of Space" by H.P. Lovecraft
directed by Richard Stanley

by Walter Chaw The horror genre is one that's particularly suited for remakes. At their best, scary stories deal in archetypal images in pursuit of exorcising essential concerns. They're fairy tales, fables. They're warnings carrying lessons for the survivors. I think they're how the bulk of human culture was transmitted and instrumental in our species' survival, offering explanations for why sometimes people don't come home if they're caught out in the night or wander off the trail or split up from the safety of the pack. They talk about outsiders, alien threats, and other invaders infiltrating from without and within: the dangers of transgression and the failures of denial. They are Jungian shadow projections made grotesque by their repression. They grow like obscene toadstools in the soft earth of our subconscious. A good horror story should be remade for every generation. Jack Finney's Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a prime example of a premise made fresh across several decades--each time, each new film adaptation, a different social anxiety grows into its central metaphor, so it becomes a touchstone evergreen in the development of our understanding of the dangers of the greater world. Horror movies, good ones, have something to say. If you listen.

1917 (2019)

*/****
starring Dean-Charles Chapman, George MacKay, Daniel Mays, Colin Firth
screenplay by Sam Mendes & Krysty Wilson-Cairns
directed by Sam Mendes

by Walter Chaw Paul Fussell wrote what is for me the definitive book about WWI. It's not an exhaustive history à la Martin Gilbert's authoritative volume (or the countless other masterpieces and approaches the conflict has spawned from authors such as Robert Graves, Barbara Tuchman, and Erich Maria Remarque, not to mention the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen), but Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory was my gateway to understanding how war has influenced our outlook on the world and our interpretation of it. From the start, Fussell goes deep on the notion of war as "ironic action," giving a close reading of a passage from Edmund Blunden's Undertones of War, in which a young lance-corporal cheerfully fixes tea in a shelter as the author walks by. A shell drops, the author breathes a sigh of relief at the near miss, but a cry calls him back to a scene of carnage as the lance-corporal has been reduced to "gobbets of blackening flesh." Just at that moment, "the lance-corporal's brother came round the traverse." He offers further examples, for instance the mother driven to madness by two of her three sons being killed in a doomed push and then, once the third has been targeted for salvation by his commanders, news that a shell has detonated, leaving only one man dead (guess who) and all of his compatriots unscathed. Irony, Fussell argues, was the only way, post-Battle of the Somme, for shell-shocked survivors to impart the screaming, existential absurdity of freshly-mechanized war's indescribable atrocity. WWI defeated the peculiar innocence evinced by the prophylaxis of language immediately prior to its screaming nihilism. Reality had shifted for us in a season of impersonal death--our language and means of expressing the same with it.

"The 50 Best Films of 2019" by Walter Chaw

2019 will be defined for me by two things--one is interesting, the other is not. The "not" is that my friend Sam killed himself. He used a gun. Sam and I disagreed about guns. He had been in various levels of law enforcement, retired to be a 9-1-1 operator, found himself traumatized after his service, and moved across the country to be closer to his young daughter and ex-wife. To be a dad, you know. Sam owned a lot of guns, but in the last couple of years, he began to ask me about statistics and troubling trends. Mass shooting events devastated him--as they devastated all of us, before we got used to them--and the doctrine and culture in which he was raised started to show its limitations as a strategy for species survival.

Little Women (2019)

**/****
starring Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Meryl Streep
screenplay by Greta Gerwig, based on the novel by Louisa May Alcott
directed by Greta Gerwig

by Walter Chaw Halfway through Greta Gerwig's rejiggering of Louisa May Alcott's beloved and stultifying classic of marrying well, the four March women gather in their attic to play dress-up in a homegrown drama club. Their purpose that day is to inaugurate honorary March sister Laurie (Timothée Chalamet) into their ranks, and the energetic, excited babble of children playing at theatre and democracy rises to the rafters as a joyful noise. The appeal of this Little Women, I think, is that it tries very hard to maintain this level of energy throughout; and the ultimate failure of this Little Women is that its reasons for doing so are inspired less by genuine exuberance than by calculated, maybe even arch, affectation. This little play-within-a-play is like Hamlet's play-within-a-play: it's the key. Gerwig's adaptation is careful in constructing an image of itself of progressiveness and metatext without risking enough to actually be critical of its text and, by extension, itself. It has its cake and eats it, too, because they deserve cake, goddamnit, and who are you to tell them they shouldn't have any? I mean, honestly.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019)

Star Wars: Episode IX -The Rise of Skywalker
*/****
starring Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, Adam Driver, Billy Dee Williams
written by J.J. Abrams & Chris Terrio
directed by J.J. Abrams

by Walter Chaw J.J. Abrams's Star Wars IX: The Rise of Skywalker (hereafter The Rise of Skywalker) is a breakneck, National Treasure-style quest flick so intent on the prize that it takes its eyes off the goal. It's slick and frictionless, offering nothing to hold on to and holding on to nothing in return. In it, our heroes rattle off facile one-liners and play around with childish surface emotions as though they were experiencing them for the first time. There aren't any stakes, and because of that most of the dialogue centres around how everything is very desperate and the Last Time and run! hurry! don't look back!, but looking back is really all it does. By turns dishonourable and irritating, it plays on fond nostalgia with invasive, clumsy fingers, undoing the considerable goodwill engendered by a trilogy series that began with the same director, hitting the right notes to resurrect the franchise in The Force Awakens--and continued with a genuine auteur piece in Rian Johnson's The Last Jedi that seems a unicorn in an increasingly fearful marketplace. Those films, whatever their flaws, were for fans that had grown up in the last forty-two years: the one for their remembered joys, the other for their grieved losses. This one's for an algorithm.

Editor's Choice: The Year in Blu-ray (2019)

by Bill Chambers I learned to appreciate the benefits of streaming this past October when I became so fatigued from illness that getting up to load a disc may as well have been trekking across the Sahara. (It really put the "physical" in physical media.) Then Disney+ launched, and "Maclunkey" happened--a startling reminder that streaming content can change at the drop of a hat depending on corporate or creator whim. It remains a struggle to fight complacency, though, given that a) the screener pool is drying up and b) even the cheapest disc will probably set you back as much as a month's subscription to a streaming service. In short, I wouldn't call this a definitive or comprehensive list of the year's best discs by any stretch, merely the best among those I had an opportunity to audit. But FILM FREAK CENTRAL will never stop championing physical media, for a variety of "because"s:

In Fabric (2019)

****/****
starring Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Hayley Squires, Leo Bill, Gwendoline Christie
written and directed by Peter Strickland

by Walter Chaw Peter Strickland's In Fabric is more Luca Guadagnino than Mario Bava, but there's connective tissue enough in both to ascribe a specific parentage. It understands that element of giallo that equates surface glamour, a certain luxurious hedonism, with various forms of infernal consumption. There's a culinary maxim about how you eat with your eyes first (and there's a correlation between eating and sex, of course), so the first way to read In Fabric is to say that it's a beautiful film, truly rapturous at times, to the point of being almost tactile. It reminded me in that way of the great Kim Jee-woon film A Tale of Two Sisters, which was so interested in colours and textures that you could almost feel them in the back of your eyes. Another way to look at In Fabric is as a spoof, a comedy that's consistently amusing and often hilarious, that takes as its central object of scorn the idea and practice of Capitalism as it's metastasized into a potentially world-ending cancer. Possibly the best way to read In Fabric, though, is as a continuation of the themes advanced by Gadagnino's Suspiria: women as unimaginably powerful and, for that, terrifying and essentially unknowable to the men who would try to destroy them.

Richard Jewell (2019)

***/****
starring Sam Rockwell, Kathy Bates, Jon Hamm, Paul Walter Hauser
written by Billy Ray, based on the article "American Nightmare: The Ballad of Richard Jewell" by Marie Brenner
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Angelo Muredda You'd be hard-pressed to think of a more fateful intersection between director and biographical subject than Clint Eastwood's Richard Jewell, which crystallizes the venerable American filmmaker's aesthetic and thematic interests of late. The infamous minimalist and chair-scolder--hyped to godly proportions in some corners of Film Twitter for his cool efficiency, scorned as a conservative propagandist by others--has been charged since the film's AFI Fest debut last month with cranking out ill-timed "Trumpian talking points" about the FBI and smearing a journalist's good name after her death. While some of the callouts are fairer than others, the uproar has distracted from the quiet dignity and formal strangeness of the work, which deepens Eastwood's recent interest in unlikely American newsmakers with asterisks beside their names and their acts of heroism by grounding itself in the awkward humanity of an even less immediately palatable figure than the inarticulate, gelato-eating Euro travellers who saved lives in The 15:17 to Paris.

Polyester (1981) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A-
starring Divine, Tab Hunter, Edith Massey, Stiv Bators
written and directed by John Waters

by Bryant Frazer For anyone who kept up with John Waters's gleeful forays into poor taste during the 1970s, Polyester, released at the dawn of the Reagan era, must have seemed like a change-up. It was hardly a big-budget affair, but it felt posher than the earlier, low-budget features that earned him his (dis)reputation. Those movies were filmed on grungier 16mm in the belly of Waters's Baltimore hometown, but Polyester was shot on 35mm and set in the suburbs. Famed actor-in-drag Divine was once again in front of the camera, but instead of the usual outsider role, he was playing squarely against type as neglected housewife Francine Fishpaw--and sharing star billing with 1950s/'60s heartthrob Tab Hunter. Waters introduces Francine by having his camera glide into the Fishpaws' home and up the stairs (the director's first-ever Steadicam shot) to find her dressed only in bra and girdle, bathed in a golden-hour glow, as Hunter croons lines from the title tune (lyrics by Debbie Harry): "You know about abundant women/Well, this girl only aims to please/Outside there's a load of noisy neighbours/Upstairs there's a Polyester squeeze."

Honey Boy (2019) + The Lighthouse (2019)

HONEY BOY
***½/****
starring Shia LaBeouf, Lucas Hedges, Noah Jupe, FKA twigs
written by Shia LaBeouf
directed by Alma Har'el

THE LIGHTHOUSE
***½/****
starring Robert Pattinson, Willem Dafoe
written and directed by Robert Eggers

by Walter Chaw There is a suggestion in Alma Har'el's haunted, raw Honey Boy that the only knowledge forbidden in the United States is that of the self. The picture aligns in that way with Robert Eggers's similarly haunted The Lighthouse; both films deal in a sense with the sins of the fathers becoming the secret trauma of the sons. They diverge, though, not in the process of peeling away layers and layers of sedimentary fragments the everymen of these dramas have shored against their ruins, but in what they discover at the end of their excavations. To my depressed hope, the final image of The Lighthouse, which promises this cycle of suffering is evergreen, ever-returning, and inevitable, sounds something like the truth. At the other pole is Honey Boy, which, in the course of one of its fantasy sequences, offers, of all things, reconciliation. It says that there's hope at the end of all the suffering, that the map actually leads to buried treasure and not just the skeletons of the things left to guard it (their ranks are full but they're always recruiting). I'm not sure I'm compelled by the case it's trying to make, particularly as this story has more to tell, but there's a power to its piquant grace and love and acceptance.

Universal Soldier (1992) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

**½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B
starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, Dolph Lundgren, Ally Walker, Jerry Orbach
screenplay by Richard Rothstein & Christopher Leitch and Dean Devlin
directed by Roland Emmerich

by Bryant Frazer You might expect an early-1990s T2 knock-off starring Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren to be a bit of a romp, but Universal Soldier is pretty dark from the get-go. It opens with a cut-rate Vietnam War-movie pastiche that has Sergeant Andrew Scott (Lundgren) going on a My Lai-style rampage, stitching human ears into a necklace, executing innocent civilians, and decrying the horrified American soldiers around him as traitors before shooting them, too. Private Luc Devreux (Van Damme) manages to jam his bayonet into Scott's gut, ending his murderous spree but earning a lethal volley of return fire in the bargain. Both men end up bleeding out in the mud before the U.S. military spirits their bodies away and declares them AWOL. Fast-forward 20 years or so, and the government has figured out a way to revive and power up dead soldiers and repurpose them as an unbeatable tactical force. We see these so-called "universal soldiers," including Scott and Deveraux, working as a unit to take out a group of terrorists in an action set-piece that was, impressively, shot at the Hoover Dam. All goes well for a while, until both Scott and Deveraux start recalling their former lives--and remembering they don't like each other very much.

Strangers in Strange Lands: FFC Interviews Andrew Ahn

One goal for minority filmmakers is to no longer be considered minority filmmakers. Failing that, it would be keen to be asked about craft rather than minority identity. As an Asian-American born in the United States of immigrant parents, I'm still trying to sort all that out for myself. There's an Ani DiFranco lyric that's stuck with me from those halcyon grad-school days where she was a constant point of reference for me (and now you know just enough about me). It goes, "Every time I move, I make a woman's movement." Yeah, preach it. Who the fuck knows what we represent to the ruling culture? I'm just over here making shit.

SDAFF '19: To the Ends of the Earth

***½/****
starring Atsuko Maeda, Ryo Kase, Shota Sometani, Adiz Radjabov
written and directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa

by Walter Chaw Kiyoshi Kurosawa's still best known to Western audiences, if he's known at all, as one of the progenitors of the Japanese J-Horror movement, which gained traction in the United States in the years immediately following 9/11. Once the U.S. joined Japan as an industrialized nation experiencing the detonation of a large-scale weapon of mass destruction over a populated area, I think it also took on Japan's cinematic mechanisms for coping: nihilistic horror films where evil comes with neither warning nor explanation--and city-levelling kaiju eiga in the form of a nearly-uninterrupted glut of superhero movies. Kurosawa's twin masterpieces, Cure and Pulse, deal in issues of technophobia and isolation with a painterly eye and a poet's patience. They are among the most frightening films of the last quarter-century, proving perpetually current as our world, and our reality with it, continues to fray. His movies used to feel like cautionary tales; now they feel like prophecy. Pulse, especially, with its tale of ghosts in the machine and airplanes falling from the sky, throbs with an insistent, hopeless melancholy that speaks to the essential loneliness of existence. It's as important a work in its way as anything by Camus or Sartre.

SDAFF '19: Stray Dolls

***/****
starring Geetanjali Thapa, Olivia DeJonge, Robert Aramayo, Cynthia Nixon
written by Charlotte Rabate & Sonejuhi Sinha
directed by Sonejuhi Sinha

by Walter Chaw Its title calling back to both Akira Kurosawa's seminal noir Stray Dog and Taiwanese auteur Tsai Ming-Liang's miserablist masterpiece Stray Dogs, Sonejuhi Sinha's Stray Dolls would fit most comfortably on a double-bill with Sean Baker's The Florida Project. Like it, Stray Dolls is set almost entirely in the impoverished world of permanent-residence motels, where the desperate do their best to grab their slice of the pie. Unlike Baker's film, Sinha's is essentially a crime movie centred on two room-cleaners: rough-and-tumble Dallas (Olivia DeJonge) and her roomie, fresh-off-the-boat immigrant Riz (Geetanjali Thapa), from whom Dallas immediately steals her belongings and holds them as ransom. The price? Riz must steal something from a guest's room that Dallas can turn over for a quick buck. The stakes are high for Riz, who, as we see in the first of the film's cynical turns, has her passport confiscated by her employer, Una (Cynthia Nixon), who immediately, surreptitiously shreds it. Riz is well and truly on her own, more than she knows, even: marooned in a strange land without allies or papers.

SDAFF '19: Lucky Grandma

**/****
starring Tsai Chin, Corey Ha, Michael Tow, Woody Fu
written by Angela Cheng & Sasie Sealy
directed by Sasie Sealy

by Walter Chaw There's no arguing with the craft of Sasie Sealey's Lucky Grandma, nor are there any aspersions to cast on the diversity of its crew and the inspiration of its funding as the million-dollar winner of an AT&T- and Tribeca-sponsored screenplay contest. But its backstory is ultimately more interesting than the film itself.  In the end, it feels like a support system for the star-making performance of its octogenarian lead, Tsai Chin (The Joy Luck Club); it's not serious enough to make much of an emotional impact, was never meant to be an action film, and is just amusing enough to force comparisons with Stephen Chow's depictions of bad-ass grandmothers. In other words, Lucky Grandma sort of trundles along for a while and then stops. Along the way, however, there's that central performance, married to a few fine supporting turns (especially ex-basketballer Corey Ha as a gentle-souled bodyguard) and an end product that looks like it had a budget many times its actual budget. There's promise here as a feature debut.

SDAFF '19: Driveways

***½/****
starring Hong Chau, Lucas Jaye, Christine Ebersole, Brian Dennehy
written by Hannah Bos & Paul Thureen
directed by Andrew Ahn

by Walter Chaw A sentimental film neither cheap nor schmaltzy, Andrew Ahn's sophomore feature Driveways is a rare beast in more ways than that. It's a measured character piece featuring standout performances from Hong Chau, Brian Dennehy, and a kid, Lucas Jaye, who, in his unaffectedness and ease, is one to watch. Along the way, the picture is also a calm conversation about racial tension, economic privation, and mental illness in these United States, following a woman, Kathy (Chau), who's investigating a house left to her by a sister recently passed. It's tempting to dismiss anything that wears its heart so prominently on its sleeve (and so uncomfortable to look at directly sometimes for all the guilelessness), but you come to find that it's maybe the kind of palliative cure for the collective melancholy ailing us right now. Driveways doesn't condescend or try to teach something, it simply exists alongside its characters and gives us, and them, the space to recognize each other. In that, in this day of big entertainments and embittered satires, it's something like a unicorn.

SDAFF '19: Just 6.5

Metri Shesh Va Nim
****/****
starring Payman Maadi, Navid Mohammadzadeh, Parinaz Izadyar, Hooman Kiaee
written and directed by Saeed Roustayi

by Walter Chaw With only ten minutes left in its running time, Saeed Roustayi's Just 6.5 introduces a brief musical sting in a film that, up to that moment, had relied entirely on diegetic audio and long, rapid-fire monologues delivered at high volume and intensity for its soundtrack. Said cue highlights erstwhile villain Nasser Khakzad (Navid Mohammadzadeh) drawing a line in the sand in a matter concerning the dispensation of a house he's bought for his parents. It's the fulcrum on which the entire film rests: not whether or not the Iranian state will confiscate a home, but the level of desperation that drives the lower classes into crime--and then the addictive nature of wealth that makes it impossible to retire from crime. As Nasser confesses when asked why he didn't quit while he was ahead, "My eyes were still hungry." The whole film is about the question of class and the possibility of ever climbing from one to the next. Everything in Just 6.5 is a barter at the world's late-capitalism bazaar. For instance, the crazed narco cop on Nasser's tail, Samad (Payman Maadi of A Separation), is dangled a bribe by drug lord Nasser that would essentially vault him into a different circle. It's a boost he needs, we gather from a few tossed-off comments about his kid and a phone call he gets at the worst time that he has to take while the whole world is crowding in around him. He doesn't take it because of "his honour," but he might as well have. It makes no difference.

SDAFF '19: Straight Up

**½/****
starring Katie Findlay, James Sweeney, Randall Park, Betsy Brandt
written and directed by James Sweeney

by Walter Chaw James Sweeney's hyphenate debut Straight Up is a dense, screwball, and occasionally irritating though ultimately rewarding wall of words swirling around and between erstwhile lovers Rory (Katie Findlay) and Todd (Sweeney, a triple-threat here) as they negotiate standard relationship stuff like dating and cohabitation--and not-so-standard romcom fare like Todd's apparent asexuality (which is possibly homosexuality). In its antic vibe and its characters' strategy of obscuring their feelings behind shoals of patter, Straight Up most reminds of Hal Hartley's work. Todd has a thing about fluids, considers sex embarrassing and/or disgusting, and has interests obscure enough--and opinions abrasive enough--that he's having trouble finding someone who will tolerate him, let alone like him. Enter Rory, who, while enjoying sex fine, thank you, talks the same way, thinks the same way, and finds most of Todd's peccadillos to be charming.

SDAFF '19: A French Woman

*/****
written and directed by Kim Hee-jung

by Walter Chaw Kim Hee-jung's A French Woman seems curiously of a piece with other recent films about dislocation and loss, such as Bi Gan's Long Day's Journey Into Night for one, Claire Denis's Let the Sunshine In for another--works at times suffocatingly pretentious but each possessed of pockets of real beauty and the occasional insight. Denis's film works the best of these, largely for the invisibility of its direction. Calling attention to oneself as a director is a high concept that can work sometimes; more often, it's a tactic that neuters emotional involvement, turning the film into an intellectual exercise and a trainspotting diversion. A French Woman follows Mira (Kim Hojung) on the worst night of her life, as she learns in the middle of a crowded Parisian restaurant that her husband's been unfaithful. She leaves to compose herself and suddenly finds herself transported back to a day some twenty years in the past when she first left Korea to pursue life and love in Paris.

SDAFF '19: An Introduction

by Walter Chaw I'm statistically past the midway point, alive for more years than I will be alive for again, and I've spent most of my time denying, being embarrassed by, often hating, who I am. I was born in Colorado in 1973, raised in downtown Golden in a Norman Rockwell postcard of an existence. I walked to school, walked to the little silversmith store my dad owned when it was over, earned pennies at the barbershop on the corner where the mayor, Frank, operated the first chair. I got my money shining shoes and catching flies in the little plastic bags my dad used to put little gems in for his customers.

Doctor Sleep (2019)

***/****
starring Ewan McGregor, Rebecca Ferguson, Kyliegh Curran, Cliff Curtis
screenplay by Mike Flanagan, based on the novel by Stephen King
directed by Mike Flanagan

by Walter Chaw Like the book upon which it's based, Mike Flanagan's Doctor Sleep is in constant tension with its legendary progenitors. It's not unlike Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman in that sense: if a film version were ever attempted, it would likewise be dealing with not only the legacy of one of the most revered novels of all time (and I would hazard that The Shining isn't just popular, but great), but one of the most revered film adaptations, too. Just as it's impossible to read Lee's sequel without picturing Gregory Peck as Atticus and Mary Badham as Scout, it's impossible to read Stephen King's Doctor Sleep without imagining entire scenes from Kubrick's The Shining overlaying the text like the memories haunting that film's Overlook Hotel. How, for example, will Flanagan handle the death of beloved Overlook chef and Danny's mentor in extra-sensory perception, Dick Hallorann? In the book, Dick lives. In the film, where he's played iconically by the inimitable Scatman Crothers, he most assuredly does not. Go the one way and piss off King, who's held a grudge against Kubrick and The Shining for decades now; go the other and you're pissing off virtually everyone else by pretending an all-time classic picture never existed.

Red Heat (1988) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

***/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, James Belushi, Peter Boyle, Ed O'Ross
screenplay by Harry Kleiner & Walter Hill and Troy Kennedy Martin
directed by Walter Hill

by Bryant Frazer The first, pre-credits scene of Red Heat takes place in a Russian banya, a steam bath where hulking, Vulcanian workers in grimy T-shirts labour to shovel wood and coal into massive stoves that keep the water hot and the room steamy. The camera follows a blue-eyed man as he steps into the room, assuming his POV as he surveys the tableau. A whole section of the space is dedicated to barely-clad muscled men pumping iron, and the camera lingers on them. It pans slowly across the room before finding a group of nymphs bathing au naturel, zooming in and reframing, finally deciding it's not interested in them. The blue-eyed man turns his head, catching sight of a figure across the room. It's Schwarzenegger, about one square foot of fabric shy of nudity, striding confidently past the bathing beauties before stepping up into a side chamber and disappearing again into the haze. The next shot catches Arnold in medium close-up, tilting lazily from his calves all the way up his chiselled torso, until it frames him in flattering low-angle portraiture. He is squinting, and he is scowling, and he has an Ivan Drago flat-top. This is peak Arnold. The reverse shot lands, almost hilariously, on a group of a half-dozen nude and nearly-nude bathers, all pink and vulnerable in their skin, gazing back at him, excited or terrified or maybe both. It's as if a god stands before them.

Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound (2019)

**½/****
directed by Midge Costin

by Alice Stoehr "Sound is half of the experience," says George Lucas over a muted excerpt from Star Wars' opening shot. The din of laser artillery and John Williams's score have fallen away, so the director's voice accompanies two vessels drifting in the silence of space. This sequence caps an introductory montage darting from Jurassic Park to The Elephant Man to Lawrence of Arabia in order to sensitize viewers (and listeners) to the intricacies of film audio. Midge Costin leans a lot on such montage in her documentary Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound. They're groupings of iconography à la Chuck Workman, part of her bid to demystify the craft. She structures two-thirds of the film as a rough history via sound-design heavyweights while leaving the rest for anecdotes from other luminaries in the field. Oscilloscopic sound waves are her primary graphic motif. It's instantly accessible, very Film 101. Costin, like the film's writer, Bobette Buster, is a professor at USC. (Lucas and Steven Spielberg endowed her position.) Their work together has all the clarity of a syllabus. The 1992 doc Visions of Light went deep into the art of cinematography; this, decades later, is its ear-oriented counterpart.

Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)

***/****
starring Linda Hamilton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mackenzie Davis, Natalia Reyes
screenplay by David Goyer & Justin Rhodes and Billy Ray
directed by Tim Miller

by Walter Chaw There's a moment in Terminator: Dark Fate--the sixth entry in the long-running franchise but a do-over in terms of narrative continuity--where a woman, mortally wounded, gives consent for things to be done with her body after she's gone. It's a small moment, and one that works to move the film's exposition, but it speaks volumes to how carefully the script, by David S. Goyer, Justin Rhodes, and Billy Ray, has endeavoured to be at least partly a conversation about how women are reduced to their physical function and appearance. "He's not here for you, he's here for your womb," says a grizzled Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) to frightened, on-the-run Dani (Natalia Reyes)--but "he," a killer robot from the future called a "Rev-9" (Gabriel Luna), isn't. He's there for something else. The picture opens with Sarah's videotaped therapy session from Terminator 2, in which she recounts her dream of nuclear Armageddon--a reminder of how her carefree party-girl character from the original had transformed through the trauma of losing a lover and escaping a monster from the future, only to be branded crazy by an unctuous male therapist and imprisoned in a facility where we witness her further humiliation and assault. Dark Fate shows what happens to Sarah and her son, the saviour of the future and a target of two assassination attempts, while in hiding in Guatemala, then hops forward into our present to the arrival in a ball of blue lightning of Grace (Mackenzie Davis), who, upon proving her battle-worthiness (and artificial augmentation) against a trio of adversaries, clothes herself in a man's attire even though a woman's is available. Function, the decision suggests, over appearance.

Jojo Rabbit (2019)

*/****
starring Roman Griffin Davis, Thomasin McKenzie, Taika Waititi, Scarlett Johansson
screenplay by Taika Waititi, based on the book Caging Skies by Christine Leunens
directed by Taika Waititi

by Walter Chaw Taika Waititi's Jojo Rabbit is an instantly divisive film sure to inflame not for being divisive in and of itself, but possibly because it's not divisive enough. It's a feel-good, warmhearted movie about, however tangentially, the Holocaust, earning it immediate unkind comparisons in some quarters to Life is Beautiful; and it's a satire of the simple-minded venality of Nazism and white supremacy, thus earning it kinder comparisons to The Great Dictator. In truth, it's both: it's unforgivably light, given its subject, and it's effectively unfortunately broad in its condemnation of Nazis, though considering Nazis are once again a thing and the "good guys" are advocating for giving them a spot at the ideological table, I mean...can anything be dumbed-down and obvious enough? By the same token, the issue I have with Jojo Rabbit is its essential hopefulness: the belief that people who adopt certain toxic ideas and ideologies can ever change. I think it's possible but exceedingly rare. Jojo Rabbit believes the opposite: that horrible ideas can flare, even flourish, for a time, but that the essential decency of humanity will save us. Waititi is Rousseau. I am Hobbes. Jojo Rabbit only offends me in its suggestion that there are good Nazis worth saving. This is admittedly more my shortcoming than the film's.

Please Stand By

For those who don't follow me on Twitter, some health issues have been keeping me away from my obligations to the site, editorial and otherwise. Updates will (continue to) be sporadic until further notice. In the meantime, check out our festival reviews of current releases, including Parasite, Pain and Glory, Joker, and Judy, and keep refreshing because new content will appear whenever it is humanly possible.

Bill Chambers,
Editor, FilmFreakCentral.Net

Gemini Man (2019)

**/****
starring Will Smith, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Clive Owen, Benedict Wong
screenplay by David Benioff and Billy Ray and Darren Lemke
directed by Ang Lee

by Walter Chaw Many stories are like this, about how heroes reach an age where a younger doppelgänger shows up on the scene to establish their reputation at the expense of the old Alpha. As hairless primates fond of the Oedipus story, we're attracted to this tale of the son becoming the father. When a phantom Marlon Brando frames Superman Returns thusly in that film's prologue, it's stated so magisterially it rings with the heft of cathedral bells. What Ang Lee's Gemini Man presupposes is: what if the young gunslinger looking to make his mark is a literal clone of the old gunslinger? It's kind of an intriguing idea, if you think that cloning someone from DNA and a surrogate uterus will result in shared skills and memories--like those stories about identical twins marrying women with the same name and knowing when the other is in danger or some shit. It's considerably less intriguing when its premise relies on this but, knowing that's stupid, then tries to shoehorn in a ton of exposition and backstory to explain what should probably have been left unexplained. At the mid-point of Gemini Man, when what millions of dollars of advertising have already spoiled needs to be explained, it's poor spook Danny (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) left to mouth the "you just need an egg!" explanation. Better if said explanation were that they'd figured out some way to clone someone and then implant the training. Oh, never mind.

TIFF 2019: Waves

**½/****
starring Kelvin Harrison Jr, Lucas Hedges, Taylor Russell, Sterling K. Brown
written and directed by Trey Edward Shults

by Walter Chaw The first thing I'd say about Trey Edward Shults's Waves is that I'm not entirely comfortable with the idea that this is his story to tell. The tale of the devastation wrought upon a black family by internal and external social pressures is at once obvious in a broad racial sense and relatively superficial in Shults's treatment of it. Narratively, there are no new insights here, although a tremendous cast exhibits truth and grace no matter the shakiness of the picture's framework and genesis. Well into the second decade of the new millennia, however, I guess I'm advocating for stories like this to be told from a different point of view. Failing that, Waves is ultimately a Stanley Kramer melodrama with a banging, transcendent Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross soundtrack/score. It has the best of intentions, no question, but I've seen this story told in this voice before.

Telluride '19: Epilogue

by Walter Chaw There's a scoop in the mountain face on the way back from Telluride, like a bite has been taken from the rock. Below is a clear, blue lake fed by snowmelt, so the water is bitterly cold. I found it by accident. I stop there every year to break up my drive. This year I sat on the beach for a while, stood up a few bleached wood branches into something like a cairn, took my shoes off, dug my toes into the sand, and soaked them for a minute in the water as shoals of fry darted around. I sucked air in through my teeth. I nodded off to the sound of the water lapping and the wind in the grass by the road, and I thought of this passage from The Sound and the Fury:

And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand.

House of Games (1987) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

***½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Lindsay Crouse, Joe Mantegna, Mike Nussbaum, J.T. Walsh
screenplay by David Mamet
directed by David Mamet

by Bryant Frazer House of Games pivots on a hand of poker that spirals out of control and reveals itself as more than a mere card game. It's a moral hazard. On one side of the table, holding three of a kind, is Mike (Joe Mantegna), a small-time hood with a big mouth who runs a card room out of the back of House of Games, a pool hall that sits upstairs from a paperback bookstore in downtown Seattle. Across from him, George (the late, great sleight-of-hand artist Ricky Jay, in his first film role), who may or may not have drawn to a trips-beating straight or a flush. Spectating from Mike's side is Margaret (Lindsay Crouse), a psychiatrist (and best-selling author) who stumbled upon the tableau in an effort to negotiate down the debt of a troubled patient (Steve Goldstein), a gambling addict. Impressed by Margaret's apparent fearlessness--when he makes an oblique threat to kill her, she calls him a bully--Mike enlists her help in a scheme that isn't cheating, per se, but does rely on duplicity. Simply put, Mike contrives to leave the room for a few minutes; in his absence, Margaret watches for an indication that George is bluffing and signals Mike, quietly, to call.

3 from Hell (2019)

***/****
starring Sheri Moon Zombie, Bill Moseley, Richard Brake, Sid Haig
written and directed by Rob Zombie

by Walter Chaw 3 From Hell's twin fathers are Sam Peckinpah and Jim Thompson; when Baby (Sheri Moon Zombie) screams "Kill em, kill em all!" in obvious emulation of that iconic early moment in The Wild Bunch, she announces that the picture's setting in a disgusting Mexican villa is not just purposeful, but meaningful and pointed. In scope, the film is better framed as Rob Zombie's The Getaway, which, as may be expected, keeps the surreal, cannibalistic ending from the novel, unlike either of its proper adaptations. Indeed, 3 From Hell is as sordid, violent, base as anything from Peckinpah or Thompson; and an observant a satire of how the world runs on the threat of violence and the promise of sex. Likewise, it's steeped in self-loathing, that sense that everything is in an active state of putrefaction. If The Getaway can be read with profit as a film about the transactional nature of human relationships, Zombie's films are also best considered as detailed, acutely sensitive explorations of human, especially familial, relationships. 3 From Hell is his most pointed statement about the nigh insurmountable cost of existence. The marriage makes sense, as life is never cheap in Zombie's films. In fact, life and the living of it, is really fucking expensive, and no one gets out alive.

Attn: The 27th Annual Vintage Film Festival

Attention classic-film buffs and TCM junkies:

Since FILM FREAK CENTRAL is technically a Canadian website, based in southern Ontario, I wanted to take this opportunity to tell you about the 27^th annual Port Hope Vintage Film Festival. Running from September 27-29, it's a rare opportunity to see classic films--such as Top Hat, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, and La Belle et La Bête (the theme for 2019 is, you guessed it, Famous Cinematic Duos)--on the big screen, at Port Hope's gorgeous Capitol Theatre (pictured above). Proceeds go to the Marie Dressler Foundation, which is raising money this year to provide bursaries for local high-school students. There's even going to be a silent auction where you can bid on movie memorabilia and other ephemera--including some DVDs that may or may not have been donated by yours truly. Further details here!-Ed.

Ad Astra (2019)

**/****
starring Brad Pitt, Liv Tyler, Ruth Negga, Tommy Lee Jones
written by James Gray & Ethan Gross
directed by James Gray

by Walter Chaw James Gray's Ad Astra is the sort of movie people who don't like Terrence Malick think Terrence Malick movies are like. It's overwritten to the point of self-parody in some places (consider a scene aboard a Mars-bound shuttle where our hero's patrilineage is mentioned, reacted to, discussed at length, and then brought up again), with a voiceover that doesn't invite introspection so much as comparisons to Harrison Ford's reluctant Blade Runner exposition. Imagine the version of this film with about a quarter of the lengthy chit-chat--or even one that doesn't mistrust its lead's performance so much that a scene where he's acting out his betrayal isn't underscored with narration: "Goddamnit, they're using me!" It's such a handsome film, with cinematography by Interstellar's Hoyte van Hoytema, that one is inclined to forgive this second consecutive attempt by Gray to make Apocalypse Now, except that it plays unforgivably like a "For Dummies" version of an ecstatic picture. Imagine the Carlos Reygadas version, or the Peter Strickland one (Ad Astra most resembles a super-chatty Berberian Sound Studio). Or just watch the Claire Denis version, High Life, which asks many of the same big questions as Ad Astra without asking them explicitly. Nor trying to answer them.

TIFF 2019: Atlantiques

Atlantique
***/****
starring Mama Sané, Amadou Mbow, Ibrahima Traoré, Nicole Sougou
screenplay by Mati Diop, Olivier Demangel
directed by Mati Diop

by Angelo Muredda Working from her own 2009 short Atlantiques, first-time feature director Mati Diop makes a bold impression with Atlantics. An elegant film that will hopefully lose the ungainly subtitle "A Ghost Love Story" by the time it makes its way to Netflix (where it's bound in the coming months), it's an awfully strong directorial calling card with a distinctive rhythm and point of view, its tactility and sensuousness evoking the work of Diop's former director and mentor Claire Denis without losing its own youthful verve.

TIFF 2019: Uncut Gems

***/****
starring Adam Sandler, Lakeith Stanfield, Idina Menzel, Judd Hirsch
screenplay by Ronald Bronstein and Josh Safdie & Benny Safdie
directed by Benny Safdie & Josh Safdie

by Walter Chaw Enfants terrible Josh and Bennie Safdie follow-up their kinetic crime thriller Good Time with Uncut Gems, another helping of the same packed with so much anxiety and energy that it becomes exhausting a good while before it's done with you. Opening in an Ethiopian opal mine, where a huge-karated black specimen is unearthed in secret by subsistence miners while one of their compatriots wails in agony over a nasty open fracture in his leg, Uncut Gems then cuts to diamond dealer Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler) getting a colonoscopy. When not having the inside of his bowels photographed, he's ensconced in his little retail hole in New York's Diamond District, doing his best to fend off an endless wave of creditors while looking for that one big score. In a recent (i.e., February, 2019) article in INTERVIEW, Patrick McGraw memorably describes that stretch of West 47^th between 5^th and 6^th avenues as "...a composite of fake teeth, cheap cologne, aviators, dyed hair, machismo, self-loathing, and seemingly uncontrollable gesticulating"--a good description of Howard, too, as it happens, as Sandler finally finds a dramatic role the equal now of his finest hour, Punch-Drunk Love. Howard is not unlike Barry, the role he played in P.T. Anderson's film--if Barry had no success managing his sudden fits of manic rage.

TIFF 2019: Sound of Metal

***/****
starring Riz Ahmed, Olivia Cooke, Mathieu Amalric, Paul Raci
written by Abraham Marder & Darius Marder
directed by Darius Marder

by Angelo Muredda It comes as a pleasant jolt that there's a lot to say about Sound of Metal, The Place Beyond the Pines' co-screenwriter Darius Marder's feature debut. On paper, the story of Ruben (Riz Ahmed), a noise-metal drummer and recovering addict who suddenly loses his hearing in the middle of a tour with his girlfriend and musical partner Lou (Olivia Cooke), seems like the stuff of a run-of-the-mill disability melodrama about learning to appreciate life's little pleasures in silence. And though it veers close to something like that message in its final moments, which threaten to put a bow on a rather messy human drama, the film is surprisingly complicated about the new worlds, sensory experiences, and cultures in which Ruben is being initiated.