Film Freak Central

TIFF 2019: Joker

**/****
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Zazie Beetz, Frances Conroy, Robert De Niro
written by Todd Phillips & Scott Silver
directed by Todd Phillips

by Bill Chambers Two moments that soar: in the one, Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), having just shed the last vestments of propriety, dons the complete outfit of his alter ego Joker--the green hair, the white face, the purple suit--for the first time and does an impromptu dance to Gary Glitter's stadium staple "Rock and Roll Part 2" on an empty stairway in Gotham City. In the other, stand-up comic Joker achieves his dream of guesting on "The Murray Franklin Show". The former is great because the music is at once non-diegetic and clearly prodding Joker; it's one of the few times we're indisputably inside his head, and, naturally, he's soundtracked his grand entrance like he's the star pitcher coming out to wow the crowd in the sixth inning. (Phoenix is arguably the first actor since Cesar Romero to accept that Joker isn't just a psychopath, he's also a complete dork.) The latter distinctly reminded me of Phoenix's standoffish appearance on Letterman while he was in the throes of shooting the mockumentary I'm Still Here, but the reason the sequence works is that it's legitimately suspenseful watching Robert De Niro's Murray Franklin harangue Joker on live television, stoking a burning fuse. De Niro's presence is of course a nod to Martin Scorsese's The King of Comedy, in which he's an aspiring comedian so desperate to do his act on "The Jerry Langford Show" that he stalks and eventually kidnaps the titular Jerry (Jerry Lewis). Despite that legacy casting, a particularly baleful De Niro is morbidly implausible as a talk-show host of legend, yet his proto-Morton Downey Jr. is defensible in that it looks ahead to the rise of today's angry pundits. Unlike his ingratiating contemporaries (Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin, Jerry Langford)--period markers, including the cheesy glitz of "The Murray Franklin Show"'s set design, suggest the film takes place circa 1980--Murray seems to be jonesing for conflict. Incidentally, De Niro's head hasn't been this square since Midnight Run.

TIFF 2019: A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

***/****
starring Tom Hanks, Matthew Rhys, Enrico Colantoni, Chris Cooper
written by Micah Fitzerman-Blue & Noah Harpster
directed by Marielle Heller

by Angelo Muredda Marielle Heller follows the biting character drama of Can You Ever Forgive Me? with a refreshingly non-traditional biopic about a decidedly warmer public figure than Lee Israel in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, the second film about Fred Rogers in the past year and certainly the more interesting one. An aesthetic and dramatic curiosity, where a more timid hagiography in the mood of Morgan Neville's celebrated documentary Won't You Be My Neighbor? might have sufficed, Heller's take, starring a perfectly modulated and near-uncannily cast Tom Hanks (his decidedly non-Rogers gut aside), treats the children's broadcaster not so much as a person with a life story worth profiling, but as a contagion for radical ways of sublimating anger in children and adults alike.

TIFF 2019: The Twentieth Century

***½/****
starring Daniel Beirne, Sarianne Cormier, Mikhaïl Ahooja, Catherine St-Laurent
written and directed by Matthew Rankin

by Angelo Muredda Matthew Rankin makes good on the promise of his singular shorts in his rambunctious and beguiling feature debut The Twentieth Century, a ten-part portrait of the famously uncharismatic but long-serving Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, played to milky-white, moony-eyed perfection by Dan Beirne. A wildly inventive dramatization of the formative pre-office days of the nation's only P.M. to host seances with his dead dogs (as most students of Canadian history will remember), the film makes bold use of the formal language of early cinema as well as the seemingly diametrically opposed Canadian penchants for shame and degeneracy.

Telluride 2019: A Hidden Life

****/****
starring August Diehl, Valerie Pachner, Matthias Schoenaerts, Bruno Ganz
written and directed by Terrence Malick

by Walter Chaw Terrence Malick's A Hidden Life takes its title from George Eliot's Middlemarch:

...for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

I've read that over and over since watching the film to realize the more I do, the more it feels cool, soothing against my tongue as a tonic does, or an oath devoutly felt. It's a roadmap to a life lived faithfully to an ideal rather than enslaved to other considerations, venal or material--and the way I think most sensitive, intelligent, moral beings wish to live, had they only the means to do it. Especially if they don't. Freedom shouldn't be something we afford, but rather something we can't afford to be without. A Hidden Life is an ecstatic telling, like Malick's The New World, of the life of a real person. In this case, of Austrian saint Franz Jägerstätter (August Diehl), beatified in 2007; his martyrdom is told here in a manner half like The Passion of Joan of Arc and half an imagistic adaptation of William Cullen Bryant's "Thanatopsis." It's heartbreaking in its beauty, immense in its sadness, and so topical as to be all but unbearable. The tragedy of us is that this story will always be topical.

Telluride 2019: The Climb

***/****
starring Michael Covino, Kyle Marvin, Gayle Rankin, George Wendt
written by Kyle Marvin & Michael Covino
directed by Michael Covino

by Walter Chaw Michael Covino's The Climb paints a portrait of male friendship through a series of clever, tightly-scripted vignettes that depict the buddies in question at several points in their lives. It opens with Mike (director and co-writer Covino) and Kyle (co-writer Kyle Marvin) riding a bike up a steep grade--the perfect opportunity for Mike to confess to the less-in-shape Kyle that he's had an affair with Kyle's fiancée. It's a funny conceit carried by Mike and Kyle's rapport: Kyle, furious, can't quite catch up with Mike to kill him; Mike admitting that was the plan all along. The film then jumps forward to a funeral, a Christmas party (where Kyle's mom (Talia Balsam) says everything except what she means when recruiting a drunken Mike into her plan to separate her kid from the woman, Marissa (Gayle Rankin), whom everyone hates), a wedding, and so on, until finally lands it at a place where it becomes clear that despite the ever-changing circumstances of their lives, Mike and Kyle's friendship, like all good friendships, stayed exactly the same.

It: Chapter Two (2019)

***½/****
starring James McAvoy, Jessica Chastain, Bill Hader, Bill Skarsgård
screenplay by Gary Dauberman, based on the novel by Stephen King
directed by Andy Muschietti

by Walter Chaw Calling the monster "It" suggests some BigBad that should not be named in polite company--molestation, suicide and depression, abandonment, abuse (domestic or otherwise)--and Andy Muschietti's It: Chapter Two (hereafter It 2) covers each of those bases, literally, along the way of what turns out to be a painfully sensitive metaphor for how the things that happen to us in childhood dig their talons into how we function as adults. Not unlike the pointedly named It Follows, It 2 is a horror film about our personal and collective loss of innocence and the many ways we unsuccessfully suppress our trauma: "It" always escapes the containers we put it into--an idea illustrated explicitly at one point in the film as a thing too big for the rituals we use to tame it magnifies in the Jungian sense and explodes in the Freudian, laying waste to our carefully-cultivated gardens. It's possible to outgrow a fear of clowns--a lot less likely that we'll ever outgrow the litany of disasters that fed the fear of clowns in the first place. My mom is dying. Dealing with it has unearthed all of these memories I'd hidden away, of our relationship and of my childhood. I'm not armed. Neither are the "losers" of It 2.

Telluride 2019: Parasite

****/****
starring Song Kang-ho, Lee Sun-kyun, Cho Yeo-jeong, Choi Woo-shik
screenplay by Bong Joon-ho, Han Jin-won
directed by Bong Joon-ho

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik) has a plan. He lives with his family at the end of an alley on the bottom-level of a tri-level apartment building--meaning they're halfway underground and the drunks have a tendency to pee right outside their windows. Ki-woo's dad, Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho), insists on leaving the windows open anyway. He likes the fresh air. Ki-woo's buddy Min (Park Seo-joon), a University kid as smooth as Ki-woo is rumpled, gives the family a large, decorative river rock mounted on a base. You know, for luck. He also gives Ki-woo a reference for a gig as an English tutor to a rich girl, Da-hye (Jung Ziso), whose neurotic mom, Mrs. Park (Jo Yeo-jeong), is desperate to maintain her own household's equilibrium, such as it is. Most of that involves managing Da-hye and Da-hye's hyperactive little brother, Da-song (Jung Hyun-jun), who, between pretending to be a Native American launching plastic arrows at housekeeper Moon-gwang (Lee Jeong-eun), does the usual things a hyperactive little kid does. His mom thinks he's a genius, but she worries about that thing that happened to him in first grade when they found him catatonic and foaming at the mouth. "When they're that age, you have fifteen minutes," she says. She's never been the same. Ki-woo, meanwhile, is sick of living in poverty--his entire family is out of work in a brutal economy. His plan is that once he's inculcated himself into the Park family household, he's going to get the rest of his family jobs there, too.

TIFF 2019: Pain and Glory + Varda by Agnès

Dolor y gloria
***½/****
starring Antonio Banderas, Asier Exteandia, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Penélope Cruz
written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar

Varda par Agnès
****/****
directed by Agnès Varda

by Bill Chambers Salvador Mallo is first seen in hydrotherapy for his scarred back, lost in an underwater reverie. The lapping waves trigger a memory of his mother (Penélope Cruz, who must have a painting of herself rotting away in the attic) washing clothes in the river when he was just a boy. Played by Pedro Almodóvar discovery and muse Antonio Banderas, Salvador is an informally retired film director who dresses like Almodóvar, resides in Almodóvar's real-life apartment, and suffers a litany of ailments--spinal problems, tinnitus--much like Almodóvar's own. The kinkiness of Almodóvar's work has always made it seem personal and confessional, but with Pain and Glory he moves into the roman à clef territory of Bob Fosse's All That Jazz--although Pain and Glory is considerably more chill, treating even picking up a heroin habit in middle age as less self-destructive than incorrigible. Salvador is introduced to the drug while making amends with Alberto Crespo (Asier Etxeandia), star of his acclaimed Sabor ("Flavour"). Alberto is a long-time junkie; Salvador once held this against his performance in Sabor but no longer does, because time has altered his perception of it. The two agree to do a Q&A at a screening of the film's restoration, which, uh, doesn't quite go as planned but does lead to Alberto putting on an unpublished play that Salvador wrote, which leads to Salvador briefly reconnecting with Federico (Leonardo Sbaraglia), the old lover the play is about. This spurs him to be proactive about his health: Salvador realizes that he needs to get back to making art, because sharing this one story with others has turned out to be so much more rewarding than wallowing in nostalgia.

TIFF 2019: The Goldfinch

*/****
starring Ansel Elgort, Oakes Fegley, Aneurin Barnard, Nicole Kidman
screenplay by Peter Straughan, based on the novel by Donna Tartt
directed by John Crowley

by Angelo Muredda How do you solve a problem like The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt's infinitely Instagrammable, stridently "literary" Pulitzer Prize winner? That's the riddle behind Brooklyn helmer John Crowley's flop-sweating adaptation, which strives to be faithful to an unruly text but has little formal bombast of its own to justify the second pass. Chasing after a serious tome of dubious merit, the sort of thing that has been called Dickensian largely because it involves a male orphan at the mercy of kind strangers, the nouveau Goldfinch--not to be confused with the so-named painting its protagonist snatches from the rubble of a terrorist attack at the Met in both versions--gets all the warmed-over thematic pronouncements and outré stock characters of the novel and none of the confidence. That makes it one of the most conspicuously flat prestige failures in recent memory, a film only a festival audience paying for the honour of seeing Nicole Kidman gingerly waving up to the balcony could love.

TIFF 2019: Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Portrait de la jeune fille en feu
***½/****
starring Luàna Bajrami, Noémie Merlant, Adèle Haenel, Valeria Golino
written and directed by Céline Sciamma

by Angelo Muredda "If you look at me, who do I look at?" young noblewoman and bride-to-be Héloïse (Adèle Haenel) asks of Marianne (Noémie Merlant), the artist tasked with painting her marriage portrait, midway through Céline Sciamma's beautifully conceived if somewhat airless Portrait of a Lady on Fire, a historical romance that would easily replace Call Me by Your Name as the swoon-inducing queer love story du jour (with a comparably stunning ending) for youths to share memes from on Tumblr, if Tumblr weren't moribund. That moment of a living art object impishly talking back to the woman who is ostensibly capturing her for posterity works as both quippy wordplay and thematic key. Like much of the Cannes-awarded screenplay, one of the Alejandro González Iñárritu-chaired jury's numerous astute picks, that exchange is doing double-work in a film that's earnestly invested in raising the question of what kinds of lives are representable, and in exploring the tenuous line between lovers from different stations as well as portrait artists and their objects of study.

Telluride 2019: The Aeronauts

ZERO STARS/****
starring Felicity Jones, Eddie Redmayne, Himesh Patel, Anne Reid
written by Jack Thorne
directed by Tom Harper

by Walter Chaw If you would've thought that a film about the early days of meteorology would be deadly and ridiculous: good call. Tom Harper's The Aeronauts imagines plucky meteorologist James Glashier (Eddie Redmayne) as a starry-eyed dreamer certain that one day humans will predict the weather badly in front of bluescreens. In pursuit of this, he enlists the aid of tragic hot-air balloonist (well, not hot air at that time--gas of some sort) Amilia Renne (Felicity Jones), a fictional character standing in for the real James Glashier's erstwhile ballooning companion, Henry Tracey Coxwell. See, all the names are hilarious: the Glashier that will not melt damn the torpedoes, the pretty flying "wren," and in real life there was a "Coxwell." Anyhow, Amelia, named after the other woman pilot you know the name of, is a showman, arriving late to the launching grounds riding on top of her carriage (can you imagine!) with her trick dog and her magic voice that carries several football pitches in every direction with no magnification. You can tell from the start that James doesn't approve of her showboating, except that the way the film is structured--as a series of flashbacks detailing their relationship--it's clear that James has sought her out because of her draw as a public attraction. You can tell from the start, too, that the real vertical ascent is the friends they'll become along the way.

Telluride 2019: The Report

**½/****
starring Adam Driver, Annette Bening, Ted Levine, Jon Hamm
written by Scott Z. Burns, based on the article "Rorschach and Awe" by Katherine Eban
directed by Scott Z. Burns

by Walter Chaw The very definition of "nutritious cinema," The Report details the process of writing and the struggles to publish the Senate oversight report on CIA torture tactics during the Bush II administration. The directorial debut of screenwriter Scott Z. Burns, a frequent Steven Soderbergh collaborator, it's dry as a soda cracker and full of the deep shadows of an All The President's Men but without, alas, much of the kineticism. The problem with movies like this is that the key audience for them probably doesn't have a lot to learn from the revelations therein. What remains, then, is a procedural exercise with a known resolution that starts to feel repetitive at the same time it starts to feel depressing. Adam Driver is typically good as Senate analyst Daniel Jones, driven by the events of 9/11 to pursue a career in intelligence. Over the course of five years working as part of a small team for Sen. Diane Feinstein (Annette Bening), he uncovers a narrative within the CIA that torture does not produce good information, that there was precious little oversight over the agency, and that although the Obama presidency abolished "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques," it was deeply interested in keeping Jones's report out of the public eye.

Telluride '19: Judy

*½/****
starring Renée Zellweger, Jessie Buckley, Finn Wittrock, Michael Gambon
screenplay by Tom Edge, based on the stageplay "End of the Rainbow" by Peter Quilter
directed by Rupert Goold

by Walter Chaw One problem with hagiographies is that when bad things happen to the sainted subject, it comes off as maudlin and self-pitying. Another problem with hagiographies is that they're boring, since they're largely impenetrable to anyone not already in the choir. Take Rupert Goold's Judy, for instance, a hagiography of one of the two or three most biographied figures from Hollywood's golden age, Judy Garland: Mickey Rooney's erstwhile song and dance partner, Dorothy Gale, gay icon, mom to Liza (and Lorna and Joey), and deeply troubled trainwreck who died of a barbiturate overdose at the tender age of 47. She's played by Renée Zellweger in the film with an eye towards puckish grit and mawkish imitation, imagining a character instead of a person in a movie designed to do exactly the same thing. What's assumed, though, is that people will know going into the film why Judy was essentially homeless as Judy opens; how she thought a run at the Hippodrome (then the "Talk of the Town" nightclub) in the City of Westminster, London might rescue her financial calamities; and what it was exactly that made her so appealing to so many for so long. That's a lot of assumptions and, you know, fair enough, because I can't think of anyone else who'd possibly be interested in Judy, anyway.

Telluride '19: Marriage Story

****/****
starring Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver, Laura Dern, Alan Alda
written and directed by Noah Baumbach

by Walter Chaw Another of Noah Baumbach's careful deconstructions of familial relationships, Marriage Story is maybe the best movie of its kind since John Cassavetes and Ingmar Bergman were traversing the same ground. It's a horror film about what happens when a couple decides to divorce and "lawyer up" to protect their interests. At about the midpoint, a kindly attorney, Bert (Alan Alda), muses out loud, and pleasantly, that it doesn't really make sense to bankrupt college funds in the pursuit of what's best for the children of divorce. It's one of dozens of piquant moments in a piece that makes clear it isn't taking sides. Or if it is, it's on the side of a lull in aggressions. In war, after all, there are no winners among the combatants--just casualties, fatalities, and other victims of traumatic misadventure.

Telluride '19: Motherless Brooklyn

*/****
starring Edward Norton, Bruce Willis, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Willem Dafoe
screenplay by Edward Norton, based on the novel by Jonathan Lethem
directed by Edward Norton

by Walter Chaw Edward Norton's twenty-year passion project, this adaptation of Jonathan Lethem's modern noir loses what's affecting about the source material while amplifying, well, Edward Norton. The hero, Lionel Essrog (Norton), is afflicted with OCD and Tourette's. In the book, this means that as his interior monologue is crisp and empathetic, his exterior is kissing people and screaming out anagrams and clever atrocities. In the movie, this means Norton is angling hard for awards recognition playing Rain Man as a gumshoe. I don't mean to be unkind, merely to describe a selfish performance that does very much to attract attention to itself and very little to support a cast that frankly needn't have bothered. It's the worst first date ever--the one where the guy really wants to tell you about himself. Norton's Lionel twitches, grimaces, screams out jibes that are sometimes a little too literary and on-the-mark. He draws attention and that's half the point of it: to create a sensitive, intelligent character appalled by his inability to control his "broken" brain. Yet in an ensemble movie with a Byzantine plot, all it does is suck the air out of the room. There's a shortlist of "unfilmable" novels for any number of reasons (and a few of those, like Under the Skin, were adapted beautifully), but the reasons to leave Motherless Brooklyn free from this sort of literal go are legion.

Telluride '19: An Introduction

by Walter Chaw About 16 months ago, my mom received an 18-month diagnosis--meaning she has maybe two months to live. We'll see. When I broke it to my parents that I was dropping out of the engineering track at college to pursue a degree in English, there was a lot of silence and then my mom said: "Don't write about us." I don't think I honoured her request for even a second. This is the first time I've written about her directly, but I don't believe it's possible to not write your shit. I mean, if you're doing it right. I think if you read my stuff, for whatever reason, with the right eye and the right experience, it wouldn't be difficult to nail what my issues are. They're florid and manifold: beware when hunting monsters and all that.

Gwen (2019)

***/****
starring Maxine Peake, Eleanor Worthington-Cox
written and directed by William McGregor

by Alice Stoehr The place is Wales. The time is the past. The subject is a penniless family of three. Mancunian actress Maxine Peake plays the sallow, unsmiling mother of two girls: little Mari (Jodie Innes) and teenage Gwen (Eleanor Worthington-Cox). They live in a ramshackle farmhouse amid mossy boulders and fields of emerald grass. The sky tends to be thickly overcast; particles of soot get everywhere. Wind rasps the valley and pervades the sound design by Anna Bertmark, whose credits include You Were Never Really Here. The soundscape is much like that of Béla Tarr's The Turin Horse, another film about rural privation on an uncaring earth. Snow falls, thunder cracks, and the family's meagre assets dwindle. This is the starting point for Gwen, William McGregor's flinty debut feature. McGregor started in British television, with shows like "Misfits" and the period drama "Poldark", on both of which he collaborated with Gwen's cinematographer Adam Etherington. The two of them put tremendous discipline into the film's style, shooting across the Welsh countryside in early winter. They apply a rich visual lexicon to this desolate space: focus pulls, slow pans and zooms, reflections in sullied glass. Due to the era's lack of electricity, they favour backlighting, with pale sun penetrating the house's gloom. Night scenes rely on the unsteady and audible flames of candles or torches. It's a world of fog and fire and dirt.

Adam (2019)

**½/****
starring Nicholas Alexander, Bobbi Salvör Menuez, Leo Sheng, Margaret Qualley
screenplay by Ariel Schrag, based on her novel
directed by Rhys Ernst

by Alice Stoehr The first five minutes of Adam offer a concise sketch of its title character. He's an unsuave 17-year-old from a Bay Area suburb; his parents fret over his social life; and he's spending summer 2006 in a closet at his lesbian sister's Bushwick apartment. Screenwriter Ariel Schrag condenses the first 40 pages of her 2014 novel into this prologue, after which the credits accompany Adam's first cab ride through Brooklyn. A montage of murals and graffiti flashes past. Nicholas Alexander plays Adam, his hair floppy, his expression glazed, as a vessel ready to be kiln-fired and filled. (He looks a little like Ice Storm-era Tobey Maguire.) He's the star of this bildungsroman about a young man's initiation into the LGBT community and the glaring fact of his own cisness.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019)

***½/****
starring Zoe Margaret Colletti, Michael Garza, Gabriel Rush, Dean Norris
screenplay by Dan Hageman & Kevin Hageman, based on the series by Alvin Schwartz
directed by André Øvredal

by Walter Chaw André Øvredal's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (hereafter Scary Stories) is a dulcet, autumnal picture balanced right there between the endless summers of dandelion wine and the interminable and harsh winters of brutality that lie ahead. A project based on a beloved series of children's books by Alvin Schwartz, it transcends its source by understanding the true function of little nightmares: the stories we tell our kids to begin to toughen them up for lives spent in this hell. Scary Stories unfolds, essentially, in the days between Halloween, 1968 and Election Night (November 5th) of that same year, when Richard Nixon won the Presidency on a date that disrupted 36 years of New Deal expansion. Hubert Humphrey was the Democratic nominee, but only after Bobby was shot (just a short while after Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot); the beheading of the Democratic party's progressive soul was now complete. George Wallace, a piece of shit still somehow not as repugnant as Donald Trump, carried five states that night by promising racial segregation. Old footage of Walter Kronkite delivering the results of the election provides the background for a young woman, Stella (Zoe Margaret Colletti), trying in vain to convince the adults that things are not going to be okay before calling her recently-widowed dad to tell him that all the disappointments of the world are not his alone to carry. It would be instructive to watch Scary Stories as the warm-up feature for Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood. Both occupy the same dream-space, the same halcyon "the past" where everything is possible until it isn't anymore. The surprise is that of the two films, it's Scary Stories that is the less hopeful.

The Nightingale (2019)

***/****
starring Aisling Franciosi, Sam Claflin, Baykali Ganambarr, Damon Herriman
written and directed by Jennifer Kent

by Walter Chaw Philomela was the daughter of King Pandion I of Athens, sister to Procne, who was married to King Tereus of Thrace. After five years apart, Procne asked her husband to fetch Philomela for a visit. During the trip back, he raped her, and when Philomela wouldn't promise to keep quiet about it, Tereus cut out her tongue and left her for dead. She wove the story of the crime into a tapestry, however, and the two sisters, once reunited, boiled Procne and Tereus's son and fed him to Tereus. Upon discovering this, Tereus flew into a rage and the gods changed them each into birds: Procne into a swallow, Tereus into a hoopoe (the king with his crown of feathers), and Philomela into a nightingale, renowned for its song. In literature, the nightingale is associated with truth. John Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" is one of his poems of "negative capacity." The traditional interpretation of it finds the poet falling into a state of death without death, exploring an idea that everything is transient and tends towards decay. It opens like this:

Fantasia Festival '19: Darlin'

***/****
starring Lauryn Canny, Bryan Batt, Nora-Jane Noone, Pollyanna McIntosh
written and directed by Pollyanna McIntosh

Fantasia Festival 2019 runs July 11-August 1 in Montreal, Quebec. Visit the fest's official site for more details.

by Walter Chaw A promising and at times exceptional hyphenate debut, Pollyanna McIntosh's Darlin' continues the saga of Jack Ketchum's feral, cannibalistic Family with this sequel to Lucky McKee's inexplicably controversial The Woman. A few years after her escape from a family of Evangelicals, The Woman (McIntosh) drops off feral child Darlin' (Lauryn Canny) at a Catholic hospital, where Darlin' falls under the kind ministrations of Nurse Tony (Cooper Andrews). It's an interesting conceit that this wild thing, having seen the dangers of living without health care, should leave her charge at an institution peopled by the same society that had previously tried to "civilize" her through imprisonment and rape. Viewers familiar with The Woman will place that Darlin' is the child abducted/freed by The Woman at the end of that film--raised now to be a knowing, hilarious miniature doppelgänger of her guardian. At one point, McIntosh frames the two of them as they stand together surveying the wilderness, their enormous hair making them look like two pine trees in silhouette. It's one of several moments in the film where McIntosh's sense of humour gets free reign. A later scene set in a car as Nurse Tony tries to drive The Woman a few miles is the hardest I've laughed in any movie this year. (See, she's never been in a car.)

Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood (2019)

****/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Al Pacino
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

by Walter Chaw It was a late summer night, humid and low, in the "hill" area of downtown Seattle, outside a coffee shop called "Coffee Messiah" festooned wall-to-wall with tacky tchotchkes featuring our Lord and saviour. I spent a couple of college summers there and in the San Juans with my friend, Keith. I'd met him at a Primus concert where an entire gymnasium had been converted into a mosh pit. We locked onto each other and agreed that if one of us went down, the other would pick him up. We've been friends now for almost thirty years. So we were standing outside Coffee Jesus sometime in the early Nineties with two other friends I'd made through Keith: Sam and Dan. Dan, tall, white, and awkward, was playing around with being a DJ; Sam was a squat Jewish kid with a chip on his shoulder and a lot of hours spent in a gym. A guy walked up to us swinging nunchucks, shirtless and raving. Sam smiled, put his hand out and talked to him until he put his sticks away. The guy clapped us on the shoulder as though we were old chums he'd run into on the street, and left. Sam was our peacemaker and our enforcer. I noticed after it all went down that we'd automatically moved a step behind Sam when trouble came. Sam would go on to law enforcement and a sad, sickening stint as a 9-1-1 operator that haunted him for years after. A groomsman at my wedding and one of the best friends I'll ever have in this life, Sam killed himself last week, and I'll never be alright again. I'll never feel as safe. Not in the same way.

The Doors (1991) [The Final Cut] - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital HD

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

**/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C+
starring Val Kilmer, Meg Ryan, Kevin Dillon, Kathleen Quinlan
written by J. Randal Johnson and Oliver Stone
directed by Oliver Stone

by Bryant Frazer Oliver Stone's lofty take on California psychedelic rock band The Doors begins near the end, with a thickly bearded Jim Morrison--Val Kilmer, delivering a well-practiced but largely soulless imitation of the '60s cultural icon--slouched in a dark Los Angeles studio recording lines of spoken-word poetry. "Did you have a good world when you died?" he demands. "Enough to base a movie on?" The setting is December, 1970, a few months before Morrison voluntarily exiled himself in France--perhaps to dodge a potential prison sentence after his arrest for lewdness on stage--and a little more than six months before his death in Paris. Stone fills all of that in later, but he starts here, not just because the poem Morrison is reading, "The Movie," is too apropos for a filmmaker as literal-minded as Stone to resist, but also because Morrison's demonstrated preoccupation with death and storytelling dovetails so nicely with the film's manifestation of same. Stone includes a formative event from Morrison's early life: His family is driving through the desert when they pass the aftermath of a car accident where an elderly Navajo man is bleeding to death at the side of the road. Young Jim, rubbernecking, locks eyes for an instant with the Native American and, just like that, picks up a fellow traveller. Stone digs the idea. Throughout the film, he has Morrison seeing Native spirits at key moments, dancing at Doors performances, or lurking in the corners of parties. He also gives Morrison a stalker: a mysterious man (an uncredited Richard Rutowski, who later collaborated on the screenplay for Stone's Natural Born Killers), well-built and sometimes nude, who represents death and occasionally materializes at the periphery of the action, not unlike the reaper from Bergman's The Seventh Seal.

Fantasia Festival '19: Astronaut

*½/****
starring Richard Dreyfuss, Lyriq Bent, Krista Bridges, Colm Feore
written and directed by Shelagh McLeod

Fantasia Festival 2019 runs July 11-August 1 in Montreal, Quebec. Visit the fest's official site for more details.

by Walter Chaw The variety of oldsploitation entertained briefly by Steven Spielberg in the 1980s, Shelagh McLeod's Astronaut saves itself from terminal sap by allowing its hero, retired widower Angus (Richard Dreyfuss), a modicum of agency before the end. In that pursuit, the film becomes something like a rebuke of "Google expertise," a defense of experiential knowledge and Boomers, who have, let's face it, fallen a few dozen notches on the Q-meter of late. It seems billionaire Marcus (Colm Feore) has set up a lottery wherein one lucky, publicly voted-upon winner will get a chance to go into space on the first commercial vehicle making the trip. Angus is a couple of decades past the cut-off age and in nowhere near the physical shape to do it, but he enters anyway because it's always been a dream of his. His life on Earth has taken a turn of late: Long-suffering daughter Molly (Krista Bridges) has put him away in a home, while son-in-law Jim (Lyriq Bent) has secretly lost his job doing some shady stuff at the bank where he works. You could say there's something in here about the corruption of the banking industry, the difficulties of the working class, and the problem of Boomers threatening to become a sudden burden all at once on our palliative/hospice care system, too. There's also a rescued-donkey farm for some reason. Maybe it's a metaphor. Maybe it's nothing.

Fantasia Festival '19: Sadako

*½/****
starring Elaiza Ikeda, Takashi Tsukamoto, Hiroya Shimizu, Renn Kiriyama
screenplay by Noriaki Sugihara, based on the novel Tide by Koji Suzuki
directed by Hideo Nakata

Fantasia Festival 2019 runs July 11-August 1 in Montreal, Quebec. Visit the fest's official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers After ushering in contemporary J-horror with Ringu, the first feature-film adaptation of Koji Suzuki's novel Ring, Hideo Nakata directed Ring 2, which was made in response to the poor reception of Rasen, a sequel based on Suzuki's own. Ring 2 doubled the original's grosses, and Nakata tried his luck in Hollywood. But with a stated desire to avoid horror (he didn't want to repeat himself), he couldn't get a bite from the studios (which only want people to repeat themselves)--until fate conspired to put him at the helm of the sequel to Ringu's own American remake, The Ring Two. Nakata nearly quit over the producers constantly foisting rewrites on him, which did not result in a particularly coherent or cohesive film, and the eminence he brought to the project was ultimately used against him by critics. He returned to Japan, where he's bounced around in the years since between film and television, documentaries and shorts, gradually coming to accept his darker creative impulses and the public's appetite for chills. The work, sadly, has suffered from a budgetary standpoint thanks to the Japanese film industry becoming collateral damage in the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, and though the Ring series has persevered through these lean 2010s, it was reduced to schlock (a couple of 3D movies and a Ju-on crossover, Sadako vs. Kayako), dropping all pretense of being anything but a showcase for its black-haired, pint-sized Freddy Krueger in the bargain. For the newest entry, the approach was back-to-basics: Nakata again directs, Suzuki again wrote the source material, and the simplified title, Sadako, unburdens the picture of franchise baggage à la Rambo and Jason Bourne. Bona fides though these may be, what they aren't is a hook; say what you will about the asininity of pitting Sadako against Kayako--at least it's a foundation on which to build a movie.

Fantasia Festival '19: The Art of Self-Defense

**/****
starring Jesse Eisenberg, Alessandro Nivola, Imogen Poots, Steve Terada
written and directed by Riley Stearns

Fantasia Festival 2019 runs July 11-August 1 in Montreal, Quebec. Visit the fest's official site for more details.

by Walter Chaw Riley Stearns's The Art of Self-Defense is the easier-to-digest version of a Yorgos Lanthimos film, but only star Jesse Eisenberg knows it. He's in The Lobster; everyone else is in an ironic-slopping-over-into-arch indie exercise that presents toxic masculinity and rape culture as something with a potentially upbeat outcome. It's a fairy tale, in other words--the kind sanitized for your protection, although the occasional flashes of ultra-violence suggest that it was something darker in an earlier conception. What remains is a sometimes mordantly funny social satire that loses first its steam in its middle section (when a post-workout massage doesn't pull the trigger it should have pulled), then its nerve with a resolution that actually feels pandering and weak-willed. The picture wants very much to console, yet there's no consolation. I guess the real lesson learned is that the temperature of the room isn't real interested in hearing how everything's going to be all right. The key moment left hanging is a confrontation in a parking lot with a random dude who slaps a bag of groceries out of our hero's hands. It's aggression from nothing, humiliating for a character we've come to like, and evocative of a greater world outside where it's already too late: The monkeys run the monkey house, and they're rabid and hungry. Manufacturing a happy ending from this mess is insulting.

Fantasia Festival 2019 - Our coverage begins

Overture, curtains, lights,
This is it, the night of nights
No more rehearsing and nursing a part
We know every part by heart
Overture, curtains, lights
This is it, you'll hit the heights
And oh what heights we'll hit
On with the show this is it

Tonight what heights we'll hit
On with the show this is it

Fantasia International Film Festival runs from July 11^th to August 1^st in Montreal, Quebec.

Crawl (2019)

***½/****
starring Kaya Scodelario, Barry Pepper, Morfydd Clark, Ross Anderson
written by Michael Rasmussen & Shawn Rasmussen
directed by Alexandre Aja

by Walter Chaw Haley (Kaya Scodelario) swims in college. She's good. But Alexandre Aja's economical, fierce Crawl opens with Haley coming in second in a freestyle leg. Although she takes it in stride, while talking to her sister and infant nephew a little later she makes snapping gestures with her mouth that hint at some intensity driving her and perhaps seeping into her familial relationships. A quick flashback shows a younger Haley being coached by dad, Dave (Barry Pepper), who tells her not to give her competitors the pleasure of seeing her cry. He reminds her that she's an "apex predator." The script, by the team of Michael and Shawn Rasmussen, is a marvel of spartan efficiency. It's a bear trap. The prologue sets up in just a few brief strokes that the film will be about perseverance, programming, family...and apex predators.

Bumblebee (2019) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C
starring Hailee Steinfeld, John Cena, Jorge Lendeborg Jr., John Ortiz
written by Christina Hodson
directed by Travis Knight

by Walter Chaw Travis Knight's Bumblebee is a tone-perfect amalgamation of The Love Bug and The Iron Giant. It is, in other words, both a throwback summer programmer (perhaps mistakenly released during the Christmas season) and a sophisticated parable about coming of age in a divided America. It casts Hailee Steinfeld as Charlie, a gearhead who loves her car more than she's interested in fielding the advances of the awkward neighbour kid pining after her. And then it has her dealing with the loss of a parent as she finds her way through an already-difficult period in a young person's development. It wisely hires Knight, who at Laika Studios produced the unexpectedly sensitive and introspective ParaNorman and Kubo and the Two Strings (the latter of which he directed), and screenwriter Christina Hodson (the woman entrusted with upcoming films about Harley Quinn and Batgirl), with uncredited contributions from Kelly Fremon Craig, writer-director of the sensitive The Edge of Seventeen, which also starred Steinfeld. In placing gifted, effortlessly diverse people before and behind the camera and then watching as the lingering hostility around the misogynistic, racist, xenophobic Michael Bay cock operas that have made the Transformers franchise to this point disgusting and toxic just melt away, Bumblebee becomes a prototype for the modern reboot. It's amazing how the right choices among topline talent make all the work of not only avoiding offense, but also providing uplift, seem a magical side-effect rather than some laborious and arcane undertaking. (It's the difference, for instance, between Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel.) Knight's Bumblebee is the Transformers franchise as it should have been from the start: on the one hand a nostalgic, sometimes exciting, often hilarious story about the coming to earth of sentient machines engaged in perpetual war who can camouflage themselves as terrestrial vehicles and appliances--and on the other, a clever parable about how the toys (and cars) we grow up with sometimes provide the guardrails for how we view accountability as we get older. By the end of Bumblebee, the girl and her 'bot arrive at the mature--and, more importantly, healthy--decision to move on from each other. Another franchise after The Last Jedi making the daring suggestion that living in the past is death.

Ophelia (2019)

**/****
starring Daisy Ridley, Naomi Watts, George MacKay, Clive Owen
written by Semi Chellas, based on the novel by Lisa Klein
directed by Claire McCarthy

by Alice Stoehr A century ago, English animator Anson Dyer adapted Hamlet into a one-reel satirical cartoon. A couple of years later, Danish actress Asta Nielsen played her melancholy countryman, recontextualizing him as a woman. Since then, filmmakers have transposed the Bard's source material into the beer industry, the animal kingdom, and (on several occasions) the corporate boardroom. Film history, in other words, is full of revisionist precedent for Ophelia, which begins with its title character floating in a brook as she intones in voiceover, "You may think you know my story... It is high time I should tell you my story myself." Daisy Ridley--Rey of Star Wars fame--stars as this strong-willed young woman, done up like a Pre-Raphaelite painting with long red tresses. Quick with a turn of phrase, she registers unease in her hazel eyes and indignation in her jaw. Her Ophelia would rather go for a swim than attend to the queen, and the other ladies-in-waiting tease her for her coarseness. Screenwriter and "Mad Men" alum Semi Chellas, working from the 2006 YA novel by Lisa Klein, retells Hamlet's tragedy from the women's point of view. She begins decades before the play, with Polonius's arrival at Elsinore and his daughter's courtly education. The film builds into a Shakespearean Revenge of the Sith, depicting Hamlet's meet-cute with Ophelia, his growing rivalry with his uncle, and his rage when he learns of his father's death. At each turn, new twists reshape a familiar story.

Spider-Man: Far from Home (2019)

*/****
starring Tom Holland, Samuel L. Jackson, Zendaya, Jake Gyllenhaal
written by Chris McKenna & Erik Sommers
directed by Jon Watts

by Walter Chaw Burdened by the need to be the epilogue to Avengers: Endgame, Jon Watts's Spider-Man: Far From Home (hereafter Far from Home) trundles along awkwardly, lurching like an overburdened, top-heavy beast of burden bearing an unwise payload of poorly-packed goods. Its pacing is atrocious-approaching-deadly, and there's a notable lack of chemistry and timing between the leads made that much more glaring for the gloriously fleet and endlessly inventive Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which immediately precedes this film on the Spidey timeline. Compared to the most leaden entries in the MCU, Far from Home doesn't look any better, either. It leans into the teen comedy of Spider-Man: Homecoming with little success and, like it, can only be a teen comedy for half the time anyway--the other half given over to world-building in an endless slog of soapy Act 2s.

Us (2019) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital

*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Lupita Nyong'o, Winston Duke, Elisabeth Moss, Tim Heidecker
written and directed by Jordan Peele

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Get Out was an instant classic that appeared at the spearhead of a new blaxploitation movement. It introduced terms and concepts into the lexicon ("Now you're in the sunken place"). It attacked race relations with intelligence and, save one tonal slip at the end, maintained an almost unbearable tension throughout. Its signature image of a black face, frozen in terror, the path of a single tear tracing its way down one cheek--you see it three times, on three different characters in the film--encapsulates the black experience: outrage held forever in abeyance, voices stolen by the ruling culture, along with lives and potential lives. Get Out won its writer-director Jordan Peele accolades and the type of laurels (the next Spielberg!, the next Hitchcock!) that, the last time they were handed out (to one M. Night Shyamalan), did the recipient no real favours. And where Get Out asked the question of what Peele's limits were, Us answers it immediately--and decisively enough that it feels almost cruel. Us has a couple of vaguely interesting ideas it fails to develop, a few set-pieces it fails to pay off, and a central metaphor--literal upper and lower classes being tethered together along some socially-engineered psychic conduit--that it has no real idea what to do with. The two choices for any conversation about Us, then, are to continue treating Peele like a holy, anointed savant/prophet until he makes The Happening (to the extent that Us is not already The Happening, let's face it), or to say that Us is at best disappointing and at worst just plain bad.

Detour (1945) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Tom Neal, Ann Savage, Claudia Drake, Edmund MacDonald
screenplay by Martin Goldsmith, based on his novel
directed by Edgar G. Ulmer

by Bryant Frazer Among legitimate Hollywood classics, Detour is about as threadbare as they come: a small film, shot on a shoestring over a handful of days (between six and 14, depending on whose accounting you believe) at a Poverty Row film studio. And yet, the finished product is uniquely compelling. As a crime thriller, it's notable for the absence of gunfights, chase scenes, double-crosses, and back-stabbings. What it's lacking in film noir's usual narrative detail or expressionistic flourishes is compensated for by its overarching preoccupation with determinism and a healthy contempt for fate. Amplifying and accompanying the slow-building sense of despair and helplessness is an internal-monologue-in-voiceover that's unrelentingly dreary and self-pitying, even for noir. Detour isn't remotely sexy or exciting, though it is amply dour and uncomfortably personal--disturbing, even, in its spare vision.

Howard the Duck (1986) [Limited Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Lea Thompson, Jeffrey Jones, Tim Robbins, Ed Gale
written by Willard Huyck & Gloria Katz, based on the Marvel Comics character created by Steve Gerber
directed by Willard Huyck

by Bill Chambers If you'll indulge me, as I recall it was at my local Sunrise Records that I first laid eyes on the egg with the hatched beak chomping on a cigar, which became as emblematic of Howard the Duck, albeit not as iconic or enduring, as the gleaming bat symbol would become of Batman three summers later. It was on the cover of a 12" EP of the movie's title track, performed by Dolby's Cube featuring Cherry Bomb, a fictitious band consisting of actresses Lea Thompson, Liz Sagal, Holly Robinson, and Dominique Davalos, who did all their own singing. (Thomas "She Blinded Me with Science" Dolby wrote and produced their songs.) When I flipped the jacket, I encountered a photo spread of Thompson in rock-'n'-roll leathers and big, crimped hair, and I reacted how any 11-year-old boy hot for Marty McFly's mom would: I begged my dad to buy it for me.

Toy Story 4 (2019)

***/****
screenplay by Stephany Folsom and Andrew Stanton
directed by Josh Cooley

by Walter Chaw Much like AI, Steven Spielberg's similarly fascinating, similarly imperfect spiritual collaboration with Stanley Kubrick, Josh Cooley's Toy Story 4 asks questions about creation and the responsibility of the creator to the created. Toy Story 4 is itself the product of a chimeric parentage, this being the third sequel to a franchise that is to Pixar what Mickey Mouse is, or once was, to Pixar's parent company, Disney. Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks) is a modern archetype of the sort described by Barthes: an image, a sign, encompassing an entire history of meaning for members of a sympathetic culture. It means one thing by connoting a multitude of things. The Toy Story films rely on the shared human experience of creating totems in the endless fort/da exercises we engage in as children. Inanimate objects are imbued in that way with our expectations of our parents and our disappointments with them, too, as we re-enact events real and play out dramas imagined. They are practice and we invest them with the payload of our souls; the root of the term "animation," after all, is that literal investment of a soul, and so many of our creation mythologies--Prometheus, Eve, the Golem--consider the lives of the lifeless. The Toy Story films are disturbing because they occasionally cause us to question our moral responsibility to things we gift with life only to abandon emotionally, if not always physically. (A quick scan around my office finds it to be a plastic chapel of toys I couldn't buy as a child.) They are disturbing because they speak to ideas of free will vs. predestination that apply to us--created beings, perhaps, programmed along certain paths and predilections certainly. Toy Story is epistemological theology.

Men in Black: International (2019)

½*/****
starring Chris Hemsworth, Tessa Thompson, Liam Neeson, Emma Thompson
written by Art Marcum & Matt Holloway
directed by F. Gary Gray

by Walter Chaw Banking on the idea that no one has seen Tomorrowland, F. Gary Gray's atrocious Men in Black: International (hereafter MiB4) begins three years in the past on a steampunked-out Eiffel Tower, where our titular alien hunters, Agents T (Liam Neeson) and H (Chris Hemsworth), battle an alien threat to the world called "The Hive." Flashback twenty more years to when young Molly (Mandeiya Flory as a kid, Tessa Thompson as an adult) saves a little CGI alien, inaugurating a lifelong fascination with the Men in Black, then flash-forward twenty...three (?) years to Molly applying for the FBI and CIA before she somehow finagles her way into MiB headquarters and wrangles an internship with Agent O (Emma Thompson). Said internship involves going to London and partnering with the philandering, James Bond-ish Agent H, who gets out of a sticky situation by fucking an alien squid thing. (We're a long way from the will-they/won't-they? flirtation of Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes, Dorothy.) The idea of modelling this movie on the James Bond conventions is fine in a we're-out-of-ideas sort of way, I suppose, but then MiB4 becomes the very worst Hope/Crosby "Road" movie ever made, which is an extremely low bar because those movies were terrible.

The Dead Don't Die (2019)

½*/****
starring Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Tilda Swinton, Tom Waits
written and directed by Jim Jarmusch

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Near the end of Jim Jarmusch's The Dead Don't Die, Centerville police chief Cliff Robertson (Bill Murray)--probably named after legendary everyman actor Cliff Robertson just because--intones to his deputy Ronnie Peterson (Adam Driver)--probably named after legendary Formula 1 driver Ronnie Peterson just because--that Jim Jarmusch is a dick. He's responding to Ronnie's revelation that Jim has let him read the entire script while only letting Cliff read certain scenes. Luigi Pirandello did shit like this in his exhausting, wall-breaking, self-referential stuff. He believed the actor would inevitably break with the text and so, in his most famous play, "Six Characters in Search of an Author", he has them reject their script and question their existence. A forerunner to the Theatre of the Absurd, Pirandello was held in some esteem (and met with an equal amount of suspicion) by Mussolini--you can read into the rebellion of his fictional characters from their fictional circumstances a hint of his true allegiances. It's timely, given our current fascist circumstances, for Jarmusch to evoke Pirandello, I guess, and other modern examples like Daffy Duck's "Duck Amuck" short and Grant Morrison's "Coyote Gospel" one-shot in the late-'90s Vertigo run of "Animal Man" support the playwright's case for immortality. But it's hard to get too excited when the execution is this pleased with itself. The conceit (much like when Moriarty became sentient on the Holodeck in that one episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation") is ever in danger of pomposity and self-parody. Jarmusch, who already mucks around in narrative grey areas--such as conceiving of a poet/bus driver named Paterson who lives in Paterson, NJ and reveres a book of poetry by William Carlos Williams called, that's right, Paterson--doesn't need to get so granular about it. The Dead Don't Die plays an awful lot like Jarmusch explaining Jarmusch to a slow child.

Dark Phoenix (2019)

***½/****
starring James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Jessica Chastain
written and directed by Simon Kinberg

by Walter Chaw So downbeat it plays like a dirge, or a riff on Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" (which Dylan described as ten pages of self-loathing prose "vomit" that needed to be set to music), Simon Kinberg's Dark Phoenix ain't got nothing and so's got nothing left to lose. Subject to numerous delays and a now-notorious reshoot in response to Captain Marvel beating them to the proverbial punch with a space-set finale, it is, against all odds, a tidy, thematically-succinct capper to Fox's X-Men saga--which, at its best, was always explicit about how these films were metaphors for not fitting in, not being accepted for what you were born as, and the importance of building families when your biological ones turn out to be frightened and faithless. Bryan Singer handled the first two instalments before leaving to do Superman Returns. Those three films--X-Men, X2: X-Men United, and Superman Returns--comprise a trilogy of mythologies for disaffected loners, brutalized by disappointment and betrayal, looking within themselves for value in a universe that sets them eternally, pointedly apart. There's an interesting paper to be written on why the radioactive Singer was so good at telling these kinds of stories. Or maybe not so interesting. After Brett Ratner's pitiful conclusion to the original trilogy, X-Men: The Last Stand, the series began to play with its timelines in exactly the same way reboots of the comics do--jumping ahead decades, sending series favourite Wolverine back in time to stop a mutant genocide--and consequently delivered a few gems along the way in X-Men: Days of Future Past, The Wolverine, and Logan. In the battle between continuity and quality, I guess I don't care if these characters never seem to age.

Domino (2019)

***/****
starring Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Carice Van Houten, Eriq Ebouaney, Guy Pearce
written by Petter Skavlan
directed by Brian De Palma

by Alice Stoehr When Brian De Palma was 17, relates Julie Salamon in her book The Devil's Candy, he tried to prove his father was having an affair. "All summer long he recorded his father's telephone calls," she writes. "On more than one occasion he climbed up a tree outside his father's office and snapped pictures of him and his nurse." Though perhaps too pat as an origin story, this experience--oft-repeated by biographers, as well as the director himself--haunts his filmography. From Dressed to Kill to Blow Out to Snake Eyes, his characters and camera fixate on audiovisual evidence. They foreground how film itself can act as documentation, to either reveal or distort the truth. These same preoccupations shape Domino, his thirtieth feature and the first he's directed since 2012's Passion. The espionage thriller, penned by Norwegian screenwriter Petter Skavlan, intertwines three sets of characters as they bound across Western Europe. Christian (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) is a Copenhagen cop who sees his partner's throat slit in a set-piece modelled after the opening of Vertigo. He seeks vengeance against the assailant, Ezra (Eriq Ebouaney), who's blackmailed by a handler at the CIA (Guy Pearce) into tracking down the same ISIS cell that beheaded his father. It's tawdry material, nesting two revenge narratives and plenty of terrorist intrigue inside a film that's under 90 minutes long.

Starfish (2019)

**½/****
starring Virginia Gardner, Christina Masterson, Eric Beecroft
written and directed by A.T. White

by Alice Stoehr Leadville, Colorado is a couple hours' drive from Denver. Ensconced among the Rockies, it has the highest elevation of any American city. The town's forbidding winter serves as the backdrop for the apocalyptic horror of Starfish. Essentially a one-woman show, the film stars actress Virginia Gardner (of last year's Halloween) as Aubrey, a DJ with tousled blond hair and a mustard sweater. She's visiting for the funeral of her friend Grace, whose loss devastates her and sets a pervasively wistful tone. That night, she sneaks into Grace's apartment, immersing herself in what are now keepsakes: her vinyl collection, her yellowing letters, her surviving pet jellyfish and turtle. Fernanda Guerrero's production design is precise and analog, suggesting a place where dust has recently begun to settle. Aubrey peeks through an antique telescope and sees a neighbour's window, this distant vertical block in a sea of darkness. A man and a woman strip, then climb into bed together. "Perv," laughs Aubrey. Later, she lies on her late friend's couch and stares up at the wooden ceiling, where she envisions that same couple superimposed as she tries to masturbate. The first quarter of the film abounds with these lonely details. A slow zoom into an old TV's convex screen reveals Aubrey's faint reflection as she talks to her mom on a curly-corded landline. Eventually, she falls asleep, and the plot begins in earnest.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019)

*/****
starring Kyle Chandler, Vera Farmiga, Millie Bobby Brown, Ziyi Zhang
screenplay by Michael Dougherty & Zach Shields
directed by Michael Dougherty

by Walter Chaw Everyone is really stressed out in Michael Dougherty's dreadful Godzilla: King of the Monsters (hereafter Godzilla 2), the crass follow-up to 2014's Godzilla, Gareth Edwards's lovely, Spielbergian reboot of the storied Toho franchise for the American market. Everyone here starts at about a 9, temple-veins popping and spittle flying--the undercard attraction to the titanic title bouts between immense CG phantoms. For his part, everyman wolf biologist Mark Russell (Kyle Chandler) starts at "Nicholson in The Shining" and ramps up to "Pacino in Heat" before settling down somewhere near status quo William Petersen for the remainder. That little muscle in Chandler's jaw gets a good, clenched workout. Mark is called onto the scene because his ex, batshit Dr. Emma (Vera Farmiga), has spirited away their high-strung daughter, Madison (Millie Bobby Brown), who's designed an electronic doohickey called "Orca," the better to talk to all the giant monsters people have discovered across the globe. Operation of said doohickey appears to involve standard smartphone skills, so the necessity of pulling Mark out of the wilderness to help track down Emma is suspect. He's certainly scream-y and agitated about the whole thing.

Aladdin (2019)

*/****
starring Will Smith, Mena Massoud, Naomi Scott, Marwan Kenzari
screenplay by John August and Guy Ritchie
directed by Guy Ritchie

by Walter Chaw The elephant in the room vis-à-vis Guy Ritchie's new, live-ish action Aladdin is the recasting of the all-powerful Genie with Will Smith after the untimely death of role-originator Robin Williams. Whatever their relative comedic talents, the figure of the Genie is one of essential servility: an almighty being nonetheless bound to the whims of whoever possesses his lamp. Street urchin Aladdin (Mena Massoud) acquires said magical lamp and promises the Genie he'll use one of his three wishes to set the genie free from eternal servitude--a promise Aladdin almost reneges on once he spends some time enjoying the pleasures of omnipotence and the attentions of comely Princess Jasmine (Naomi Scott). The elephant in the room is that Will Smith is black--and casting a black man as a slave, in a Disney movie, no less, is fraught, almost impossibly so. I mean, The Toy-fraught. The tangle of implications this casting raises drowns out nearly every other consideration. Lest there be any nuance to the situation, in their very first interaction Genie tells Aladdin that Aladdin is his "master." The rest of the film is essentially Genie helping Aladdin, Hitch-style, woo a pretty girl while hoping that once that's over and done with, the Genie himself will be enslaved no more. When Genie's eventually freed, his shackles fall off his arms, he shrinks, he loses his blue pigment in favour of Smith's natural complexion, and he puts the moves on handmaiden Dalia (Nasim Pedrad), who's been wanting to bang Genie for the entirety of her existence in the movie. It has an unbelievable amount of emotional weight--more than anything the film itself has earned through its narrative.

Crank (2006) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

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

**½/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Jason Statham, Amy Smart, Jose Pablo Cantillo, Dwight Yoakam
written and directed by Neveldine/Taylor

by Bryant Frazer A mere 13 years have passed since Crank tumbled roughly onto multiplex screens, but the film has not aged particularly well. In 2006, its down-and-dirty action aesthetic seemed almost futuristic, thanks to filmmakers Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor and their embrace of portable HiDef cameras, death-defying handheld camerawork, and aggressive, boundary-pushing visual style. But cinematic techniques have moved on, with ever-more-agile digital cameras making it easier than ever for action mavens to get tack-sharp images from impossible angles. Crank's stuntwork, much of it performed by the stars themselves, remains impressive, but it's pretty small beer compared to the latest instalments in state-of-the-art action franchises like Mission: Impossible and John Wick, which share Crank's daredevil aesthetic but eschew its rude, HDCAM-level physicality in favour of spectacular digital cinematography fit for enormous IMAX screens.

John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum (2019)

***/****
starring Keanu Reeves, Halle Berry, Laurence Fishburne, Ian McShane
screenplay by Derek Kolstad and Shay Hatten and Chris Collins & Marc Abrams
directed by Chad Stahelski

by Walter Chaw As the novelty wanes and the universe expands, the John Wick franchise becomes less fleet, though its pleasures, when they arrive, have lost little of their joy. I think of these films, three of them now, as describing the arc of the great Hollywood Musical actors, the Fred Astaires and Gene Kellys, the Liza Minellis and Ginger Rogers and Judy Garlands, who would enliven whatever inanimate book in which they were mired with their irrepressible stagecraft and charisma whenever the spotlight caught them. John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum (hereafter John Wick 3), in other words, is a slog of mythology linking galvanizing action sequences that are meticulously choreographed, unapologetically brutal, and graceful in every way the picture's story and dialogue are not. They're so good, really, that it hardly matters what the movie's about--so good that it's fair to wonder why they're working so hard at trying to pull coherence out of this premise instead of just offering vague excuses to arm the graceful, lanky, morose hero and drop him in the middle of bad situations. I mean, do they know it's not necessary? Is the world-building mumbo-jumbo a meta-joke on a media landscape now dominated by three or four dynastic storylines?

Cold Pursuit (2019) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

**/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Liam Neeson, Tom Bateman, Tom Jackson, Laura Dern
screenplay by Frank Baldwin, based on the novel Kraftidioten by Kim Fupz Aakeson
directed by Hans Petter Moland

by Walter Chaw Cold Pursuit features the umpteenth iteration of Liam Neeson's angry white-vengeance avatar and its familiarity drags down Hans Petter Moland's English-language remake of his own In Order of Disappearance, as does the baggage Neeson's carrying around after revealing on the film's press junket that he once stalked the streets of Belfast, hoping a black man would start a fight with him so he could bludgeon him to death. When a white man "confesses" to being racist without initiating a conversation about his path to understanding the innate bias that would have him instantly equate the deeds of one black man with the character of all black men--not to mention instantly turn a woman's victimization and tragedy into a story of his own crisis and redemption--what he's actually doing is providing a racist/sexist dog whistle for thousands of similarly-blinkered white men to say "but for the grace of God" and, "who among us?" Except I've never thought the actions of one minority spoke to the worth, for good or ill, of an entire race. Not even when it seems like every mass shooting in the United States--and there's a new one every couple of days--is carried off by a mediocre white man who's usually angry with women for somehow identifying that he's not worth shit. I have certainly briefly fantasized about killing specific individuals for wrongs done to me or my family, but I have also never carried a weapon to their door in hopes they'd open it. I want to think I represent the majority. When the hordes sharpen their pitchforks in defense of poor Liam Neeson, though, it's cause to wonder.

Hellraiser I II III: The Scarlet Box - Blu-ray Disc

Clive Barker's Hellraiser (a.k.a. Hellraiser) (1987)
**/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras A
starring Andrew Robinson, Clare Higgins, Sean Chapman, Ashley Laurence
written and directed by Clive Barker

Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988)
***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A
starring Clare Higgins, Ashley Laurence, Kenneth Cranham, Imogen Boorman
screenplay by Peter Atkins
directed by Tony Randel

Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (1992)
*/**** Image B Sound B Extras B
starring Terry Farrell, Doug Bradley, Paula Marshall, Ashley Laurence
written by Peter Atkins
directed by Anthony Hickox

by Walter Chaw Pinhead (Doug Bradley) looks menacing, but he's actually just a leather-daddy who seems reluctant, most of the time, to do what other people think is in his job description. There's a scene at the end of the first Hellraiser, the only one written and directed by creator Clive Barker, where Pinhead and his good-time boys and girls ("Cenobites," if you must, an appropriation of another term for "monk") are about to tear heroic Kirsty (Ashley Laurence) apart when she asks for a chance to explain something. Pinhead patiently hears her out. In the sequel, as she's running away, rather than hooking her in place with their literal hooks on chains, Pinhead and his Cenobites send the chain to block her way, instead. They're terrible villains, Cenobites. They're fun to look at--Hellraiser's creature design is, of course, legendary, with Pinhead occupying a privileged place on the Mt. Rushmore of horror bogeys--but more mildly-disapproving Greek Chorus than Iron Maiden. Reason in part, I think, for why they were disastrously made into stock slasher villains in the third film: part wise-cracking Freddy Krueger, part Jason Vorhees rampaging psychopaths. The failure of that metamorphosis and the ensuing wrestling with what role Cenobites should ultimately occupy comprise the minor ups and horrific downs of the seven films (and counting) to follow. Maybe it's in the name. Maybe the idea never was for the Cenobites, these dour, British, monastic, S&M losers, to be avenging angels, but rather for them to be precisely what they are: these drippy scolds who appear at the exact moment you go searching for more outré porn on an unprotected browser. One of a couple of Pinhead's catchphrases doubles as a carnival barker's patter: "We have such sights to show you." His buddies represent that banner of geeks and sideshow freaks. But they're not going to force it on you. In the pantheon of bad guys, they're maybe the only ones who not only need but would like your consent, if you don't mind, please and thanks ever so.

Hot Docs '19: Campo

***½/****
directed by Tiago Hespanha

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 25-May 5, 2019 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers Despite its occasional stop/start rhythm, Campo is a consistently hypnotic audiovisual essay that ventures onto the Herzogian turf of Alcochete, Portugal's Field Firing Range, called "Campo" for short after the Portuguese word for "field." At 7,539 hectares (i.e., around 47 square miles), it's Europe's largest military base--so large that there's room for livestock, including a herd of sheep, to graze on its grass, mostly undisturbed. A series of vignettes alternates drills and wildlife, though these juxtapositions aren't quite that uniform, and oftentimes humans are present in the animal sequences, where they're cooperative and not a blight. (A beekeeper closely monitors a hive to make sure his bees aren't losing their radar like they have been all over the world.) Some scenes smudge the lines of fiction as indicated by this being a training facility, such as when medics labour to stop the bleeding of an allegedly wounded trainee who says, coughing up blood (for effect?), "When my father hears about this, he'll shoot himself." One camera angle, so peculiar it must be intentional, reduces a jeep and the soldiers inside it to action figures straight out of Marwencol.

Long Shot (2019)

½*/****
starring Seth Rogen, Charlize Theron, O'Shea Jackson Jr., Alexander Skarsgård
screenplay by Dan Sterling and Liz Hannah
directed by Jonathan Levine

by Walter Chaw Long Shot sort of wants to be There's Something About Mary and sort of wants to be Broadcast News but mostly it's a Legal Eagles/Switching Channels '80s adult programmer that is deeply embarrassing and often difficult to watch. The fact that we don't make a lot of movies like this anymore, if indeed we ever did, should be indication enough that it's harder than it looks. Long Shot is "Veep" without edge, intelligence, relevance. It takes aim at Fox News and manages to nail the misogyny in a broad, improv-troupe way while failing to capture what it is about the network that has led us to the precipice of the end of the Republic. Yes, no kidding. Long Shot doesn't have anything to say about politics beyond the polite broadsides you hear at middle-school debate tournaments, and though it introduces a vile Rupert Murdoch-inspired media mogul intent on disrupting the American election process, it misses every opportunity to land a blow against him. It's like taking a swing at the ocean as you're falling out of a boat--and missing. The film is a disaster in regards to race relationships and representation, so much so that it's a marvel of lack of introspection that this liliest-white of lily-white movies even attempts to address it. Long Shot is the thing that thinks it's helping but isn't helping at all. It is, in other words, the frontrunner for next year's Best Picture Oscar. You heard it here first.

Hot Docs '19: For Sama

***½/****
directed by Waad al-Kateab, Edward Watts

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 25-May 5, 2019 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda Born out of student journalist Waad al-Kateab's first-person video diary of the early days of the uprising against the Assad regime in Aleppo, For Sama is a startling document of how everything from parenting to the concept of home to the myriad forms of political resistance available to the young and idealistic is rendered uncanny by life under wartime. Co-directed by al-Kateab and Edward Watts, the film is both a daring work of frontline reportage and an appropriately anxious time-capsule message left to be discovered at some later date by al-Kateab's daughter, who is born during the conflict and whose future is ever-threatened by the precarious political status of her parents in the besieged city.

Hot Docs '19: On the President's Orders

***/****
directed by James Jones, Olivier Sarbil

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 25-May 5, 2019 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers A co-production of ARTE France and PBS's "Frontline", On the President's Orders covers a period of relative calm in Duterte's Philippine Drug War, which saw a death toll of 3,000 suspected drug pushers in its first year. In an effort to curtail the amount of bloodshed on both sides, Jemar Modequillo is installed as the new police chief in Manila's Caloocan district, the epicentre of the country's drug-related violence, and sets to work remolding the trigger-happy "wankers" under his command into a constabulary that patrols the seediest streets in search of alleged suspects to haul off to a seriously overpopulated jail. As we see, there is little distinction made between dealers and users (who typically aren't motivated enough to sell drugs), and a profound lack of empathy for addicts in general among members of law enforcement. "Drug users are a nuisance for society. Unless you get rid of a pest, it will get bigger," says the prison warden, Agustin, who gets his jollies out of hurting the detainees and isn't shy about it on camera. 'On the president's orders,' in other words, Modequillo created his own version of ICE, substituting junkies for migrants--and on one level, the film feels as if it's intended as a counterweight to Trump's characteristically mindless praise of fellow media-hating despot Duterte at a 2017 summit in Manila. On another level, like a lot of current documentaries (including the two I've already covered for this year's Hot Docs), On the President's Orders suggests a creative solution to critiquing a subject who's just too overexposed and partisan for any documentarian to have a real shot at being heard. We're in a redux of the Bush era, in that sense.