Film Freak Central

Ghosted (2023) + The Mother (2023)

GHOSTED
ZERO STARS/****
starring Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, Mike Moh, Adrien Brody
screenplay by Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick and Chris McKenna & Erik Sommers
directed by Dexter Fletcher

THE MOTHER
**/****
starring Jennifer Lopez, Lucy Paez, Omari Hardwick, Joseph Fiennes
screenplay by Misha Green and Andrea Berloff and Peter Craig
directed by Niki Caro

by Walter Chaw Two new entries in the woman-warrior subgenre of action pictures find a pretty abysmal knock-off of Knight and Day in the Ana de Armas vehicle Ghosted (with villain Adrien Brody doing a weird accent) and a pretty fair knock-off of Hanna in the Jennifer Lopez vehicle The Mother (with villain Joseph Fiennes doing a different weird accent). The one is ultimately a half-assed romcom, the other a grim survivalist ex-military Stella Dallas melodrama. They share a queasy desperation, as well as a sense that they've lapped their respective sell-by dates by at least a full creative cycle. It's that feeling where you recognize someone at the party who hasn't been invited, and they know you know but no one wants to say anything. The best modern iterations of this kind of movie are Renny Harlin's The Long Kiss Goodnight and James Cameron's Aliens. I wonder if my overall fatigue with the genre isn't a product of my searching for those highs again in the intervening, largely disappointing decades. Part of me feels like I should celebrate non-IP attempts at mature actioners--but the rest of me feels like I'd rather be watching something that doesn't suck. It's the eternal struggle.

Renfield (2023) + Sisu (2023)

RENFIELD
*½/****
starring Nicholas Hoult, Nicolas Cage, Awkwafina, Benjamin Schwartz
screenplay by Ryan Ridley
directed by Chris McKay

SISU
**½/****
starring Jorma Tommila, Aksel Hennie, Jack Doolan, Mimosa Willamo
written and directed by Jalmari Helander

by Walter Chaw Chris McKay is an able director still looking for a project that isn't an embarrassing high concept. His years on "Robot Chicken" and "Moral Orel" demonstrate a strong sense of timing and a willingness to offend the status quo, but so far--between The Lego Batman Movie, The Tomorrow War, and now Renfield--McKay has only been tasked with shepherding a few expensive (if laboured and overburdened) cows to pasture. Renfield is both a workplace comedy and a Raimi-esque slap-stick splatter ("splat-stick?") flick in which bug-eating vampire familiar Renfield (Nicholas Hoult) attends codependency support groups to listen to other people complain about toxic relationships. It seems his boss, Dracula (Nicolas Cage), is a raging narcissist, and Renfield, after centuries of servitude, has finally had enough. There's a parallel plot, too, involving a crime family led by imperious Bellafrancesca Lobo (a slumming Shohreh Aghdashloo) and her asshole son, Tedward (a not-slumming Ben Schwartz), running amuck while dedicated cop Rebecca (Awkwafina) and her FBI agent sister Kate (Camille Chen) try to bring them down.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023) + Champions (2023)

DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: HONOR AMONG THIEVES
**½/****
starring Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Regé-Jean Page, Hugh Grant
screenplay by Jonathan Goldstein & John Francis Daley and Michael Gilio
directed by Jonathan Goldstein & John Francis Daley

CHAMPIONS
**½/****
starring Woody Harrelson, Kaitlin Olson, Ernie Hudson, Cheech Marin
screenplay by Mark Rizzo, based on the Spanish film Campeones written by David Marqués & Javier Fesser
directed by Bobby Farrelly

by Walter Chaw I like squad movies, always have. Heists, war, impossible missions, underdog sports teams, collections of samurai or cowboys, miscreants or heroes, misfits generally and specialists sometimes. When it came time to make a sequel to Alien, Walter Hill understood James Cameron's pitch as exactly this formula the great Howard Hawks had perfected: the squad film. I think it works as well as it does because the requirement to craft three-dimensional heroes is lessened in favour of reliable, audience-pleasing character types. Each player has a skill--a personal Chekhov's Gun, if you will. It'll only be a matter of time before they use it. Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley's Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (hereafter D&D) is one recent example of the squad flick; Bobby Farrelly's Champions is another. Both are about bands of social outcasts who learn to appreciate how their respective skills complement one another along the way to greater lessons about the world and its navigation. One sees a team of Special Olympics athletes led by an unctuous, quippy white guy; the other sees a team of nefarious and/or magical ne'er-do-wells led by an unctuous, quippy white guy. Only one of them, though, dares to deviate from the winning-means-everything formula, measuring its victory in the celebration of a friend's sense of self-worth and confidence. Which is not to say that one film is significantly better than the other, or even that they have different aims, ultimately. Rather, I only mean to suggest that the degree to which one is lauded and the other derided probably has a lot to do with internalized bias and very little to do with any meaningful distinctions in what these movies substantively are.

Dragonslayer (1981) - 4K Ultra HD + Digital Code

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

****/**** Image B- Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Peter MacNicol, Caitlin Clarke, Ralph Richardson, Chloe Salaman
screenplay by Hal Barwood & Matthew Robbins
directed by Matthew Robbins

by Walter Chaw When I first reviewed Matthew Robbins's Dragonslayer upon its DVD release 20 years ago, I said the picture could be read as an allegory for the passing of the 1970s and, with it, the auteur-driven New American Cinema, which was losing favour to the blockbuster mentality that dominates Hollywood production to this day. The directors were the wizards, tied to their decrepit and pain-ridden dragons, and they were, in 1981, up against the reality of an administration perpetuated by a myth of American exceptionalism that would serve as a course correction from the predominantly downbeat, paranoid films of the previous decade. I don't know that I've gotten any smarter in the years following my initial assessment of a work that has been dear to me since I saw it as a terrified eight-year-old, cowering beneath my seat in the long-defunct and paved-over Lakeside Twin, but I do know I've gotten measurably more pessimistic about our prospects. I think you can know things are broken when you're young (and 29 didn't seem so young at the time, but it is) without knowing how irreparably broken they are. And you can feel hopeless without knowing just how hopeless. When I watch Dragonslayer in 2023, I see a work about the rise of Christofascism and the prosperity gospel, about governments we trust to protect us making deals with monsters to enrich and empower themselves at the expense of the people who rely on them, and about the steady eradication of belief that there are any heroes left with the will or the wherewithal to save us.

John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023)

***/****
starring Keanu Reeves, Donnie Yen, Bill Skarsgård, Laurence Fishburne
written by Shay Hatten and Michael Finch
directed by Chad Stahelski

by Walter Chaw The John Wick franchise is two things: a fantasy world with rules and consequences for breaking them, and a series of films crafted with extraordinary care and meticulous attention to detail. Both qualities are front and centre in John Wick: Chapter 4 (hereafter John Wick 4), the one allowing the other to be emotionally satisfying, the other allowing the one to be viscerally pleasing. The toast given when its characters drink is literally "Consequences!"--and, of course, our hero always shows up in an impeccably tailored bulletproof suit, 42-Regular. Given that the delicate surface tension of our society's maintenance relies on the decorum of its members, and given the last few years of seeing it all fall to shit before a treasonous wave of deplorables, this franchise is a glossy distillation of an American's dream of justice as the offshoot of morality rather than the promise of it providing smoke for cupidity. There's order in the world; you just aren't allowed to see it. It makes sense in this way that, for all their neo-noir trappings, the John Wick movies are traditional westerns: the great American genre employed to tell the myth of the United States. And it makes sense the eidolon for the better angels of Generation X is the eternally sweet Keanu Reeves, who, even when he's promising to kill everyone like a seen-it-all Sam Peckinpah mercenary, is only doing it because his dog died. Both he and John Wick are essentially simple in a complex world.

65 (2023)

*/****
starring Adam Driver, Ariana Greenblatt, Chloe Coleman, Nika King
written and directed by Scott Beck & Bryan Woods

by Walter Chaw Bryan Woods and Scott Beck's 65 is a straight-line exercise: You are familiar with where it begins, you are familiar with where it ends, and you are familiar with the line it travels. It starts with a man of action mourning a lost child. He has an opportunity to become a surrogate father to a kid who has lost her parents. Their time in our company ends with them jetting off to further adventures. If it's true there are only one or two stories in the Western canon, then it's not about the what but the how. The how of 65 is piew piew piew lasers and rrrrraaaawr rwar rwaaar! dinosaurs. When I was in elementary school, my best friend and I decided the greatest movie ever would involve aliens fighting dinosaurs, because, as children, we were undemanding of our entertainment to do anything beyond satisfy the most simplistic desires of our pea-sized lizard brains. We kept spending eighty 1980s dollars on Atari 2600 games because we could imagine they looked good. It was during this period that I saw most of the terrible movies I still love unconditionally for their ability to remind me of how much more promise the world seemed to hold back then. I even have an Atari 2600 connected and in working order. I've been grateful to have grown out of being that easy to please, though now I can't think of a single reason why.

Training Day (2001) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

**½/****
DVD - Image A Sound A Extras B+
4K ULTRA HD - Image A+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Denzel Washington, Ethan Hawke, Scott Glenn, Eva Mendes née Mendez
screenplay by David Ayer
directed by Antoine Fuqua

by Walter Chaw In Antoine Fuqua and Dominic Sena's race to become David Fincher, Fuqua, with his colour-bleached urban noir Training Day, pulls slightly ahead. Essentially a feature-length version of the Fuqua-helmed video for Coolio's "Gangsta's Paradise," Training Day is dankly lit, grim, and edited with a veteran music-video director's need for speed (though there are considerably fewer cuts than those found in Fuqua's previous efforts Bait and The Replacement Killers). So smooth and accomplished is the harsh vérité look of the piece that the sun-drenched streets of Los Angeles are as much a player in the film as its leads. But the striking cinematography, sharp screenplay by David Ayer, and undeniable chemistry between Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke aren't enough to disguise that Training Day is one bravura performance away from being the umpteenth rote grizzled vet/greenhorn rookie policier. (With a healthy dash of Casualties of War tossed in for that Captain Bligh/Mr. Christian dynamic.)

Shotgun Wedding (2023) + You People (2023)

SHOTGUN WEDDING
½*/****
starring Jennifer Lopez, Josh Duhamel, Jennifer Coolidge, Lenny Kravitz
written by Mark Hammer
directed by Jason Moore

YOU PEOPLE
***/****
starring Jonah Hill, Lauren London, David Duchovny, Eddie Murphy
written by Jonah Hill & Kenya Barris
directed by Kenya Barris

by Walter Chaw Jennifer Coolidge, 61, plays the mother of 50-year-old Josh Duhamel in Jason "Pitch Perfect" Moore's abominable-in-pretty-much-every-conceivable-way Shotgun Wedding, and her being 11 when she had him isn't even the worst of it. Honestly, this is the kind of movie where it would've been funny if they'd made a joke out of that somehow (like maybe how Steve Coulter, who plays his dad, would've been 12), and Coolidge has exactly the befuddled, oversexed MILF persona to pull it off. I don't know, I didn't write this shit. Coolidge is Carol and Coulter is Larry. Their son Tom is a total loser recently released from a minor-league baseball team, which only makes sense because he's on the AARP mailing list. Has he been trying to make it to "the show" for 30 years? One of these Crash Davis things, I guess. Just kidding: Crash was 33; can Tom even tie his own shoes anymore without getting winded? Because I'm turning 50 this year, and let me tell you, I cannot. Tom is marrying Darcy (Jennifer Lopez), who spends every other sentence mobbing Tom for each of his groomzilla decisions--decisions he has to make, because Darcy is disengaged from the entire process and resents having to have a wedding at all, since one of the first things she said to him when they started dating was that she didn't want a fancy wedding. Tom will eventually apologize for not listening to her, but if the intent is to make this about Tom learning to be a better partner, I must confess I would stop listening to someone as passive-aggressive and monstrously belittling as Darcy. Maybe Tom has a humiliation kink. That would explain why he played minor-league baseball for 30 years and probably votes Republican. It's not my place to judge that, I'm just observing it.

Avatar: The Way of Water (2022)

½*/****
starring Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Kate Winslet
screenplay by James Cameron & Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver
directed by James Cameron

by Walter Chaw The discourse leading up to James Cameron's Avatar: The Way of Water (hereafter Avatar 2) has been largely about how although the first Avatar is the second-highest-grossing film of all time, it hasn't left much of a mark on popular culture. It's a take derided for the evidence of the numbers and the emergence of a theme-park attraction, though I do wonder if its cultural impact isn't like that Song of the South ride "Splash Mountain," which is only just now, finally, closing in early 2023. I don't know that the vile myth of the happy enslaved person made much of a mark on popular culture, either, insomuch as it is, itself, already and essentially popular culture. Maybe Avatar didn't make much of a "cultural impact" because it didn't introduce any new ideas into the ecosystem while profiting from a few antiquated ones. In the interim between Avatar's release in 2009 and this first of four promised sequels, a lot has changed in terms of cultural tolerances--even if, systemically, things have not only not improved but regressed. Maybe the problem with Avatar is the same one that any stories about first contact with a technologically less sophisticated alien culture share, given how our historical templates for these narratives involve genocide and the pillaging of natural resources. When a white person tells a story of a white man saving an indigenous culture from other white men, however, I start to worry about what kind of fetish is being indulged, and to what purpose/at what cost. What's not in doubt is that Avatar 2 will make bank, because whatever kink is being indulged in white-saviour narratives has proven a durable and profitable one in a white nationalist state. That's one way to look at it, anyway.

Bullet Train (2022)

*/****
starring Brad Pitt, Joey King, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Sandra Bullock
screenplay by Zak Olkewicz, based on the book by Kôtarô Isaka
directed by David Leitch

by Walter Chaw I have so many thoughts about David Leitch's Bullet Train, and I don't think a single one of them coheres with any of the other ones. This is most likely a product of general exhaustion, or a lifetime misspent on excess consumption of media colliding now in middle-age with my becoming somehow the go-to for Amer-Asian-splaining of representational issues in American cinema. Like the whole "whitewashing" thing going on around Bullet Train, which is based on a popular Japanese novel by Kôtarô Isaka, who is pleased people like Brad Pitt and Brian Tyree Henry are in this big-budget Hollywood adaptation because it raises his profile internationally. Sony Pictures, whose parent company is Japanese, has already come out saying the same stupid shit about how much they wanted to honour the Japanese source material by hiring the best actors for the project--who happen to be Not Japanese--while Asian-Americans are rightfully outraged about the same stupid shit because of how much damage this ingrained corporate "wisdom" continues to wreak on the Asian-American community. If we continue to pull on this thread, we find Isaka has stolen the entire premise and execution of his book from Guy Ritchie and Quentin Tarantino, who, as we know, have stolen their things from British New Wave gangster flicks on the one hand, Asian cinema on the other--Asian cinema that has its roots in, what, Kurosawa? Whose favourite filmmaker was John Ford? And who was ripped off by Italian guy Sergio Leone, who was ripped off by Sam Peckinpah, who was ripped off by Hong Kong legend John Woo, who was ripped off by everybody for a while there. There's a scene in Bullet Train where Brad Pitt and Brian Tyree Henry, both playing hitmen, fight each other in tight quarters that is awfully reminiscent of Jackie Chan. Another scene recalls Louis Leterrier, who probably learned it from Jet Li--and neither Chan nor Li is Japanese, of course.

Prey (2022)

****/****
starring Amber Midthunder, Dakota Beavers, Dane DiLiegro, Stormee Kipp
screenplay by Patrick Aison
directed by Dan Trachtenberg

by Walter Chaw There is a complete lack of pretense to Dan Trachtenberg's Prey--lack of pretense being one of the emerging traits of a filmmaker whose two films so far (both stealth sequels, both tremendously ethical towards their source materials) are lean genre exercises that feel like minor miracles in a landscape studded with sodden, high-profile disasters. Neither a puzzlebox nor a legacy sequel requiring a spreadsheet and an encyclopedic knowledge of a quarter-century of lore, Prey tells a particular, standalone story in an economical way. It's a coming-of-age period piece with shades of Mel Gibson's Apocalypto; what I'm saying is it means business. Set in the Northern Great Plains in 1719, it follows a spirited young Comanche woman, Naru (Amber Midthunder), as she tries to prove herself as a hunter under the shadow of her brother, Taabe (Dakota Beavers), a gifted bowman and all-around badass who has a stranglehold on the admiration of their tribe. When she follows an all-male hunting party in search of the mountain lion that has attacked one of their people, one of the young men asks her why she's bothered, given that they don't need a cook out there in the wilderness. But she sees things they miss in their arrogance and desire to impress one another. Like the skinned rattlesnake left by a path, or the footprint bigger than anything that should be in this place. The boys discount the latter as nothing to worry about, lest they be seen as cautious and thoughtful--as feminine, like Naru.

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

*/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Nicolas Cage, Pedro Pascal, Sharon Horgan, Tiffany Haddish
written by Tom Gormican & Kevin Etten
directed by Tom Gormican

by Bill Chambers There's a lot I don't understand about Tom Gormican's The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent that has nothing to do with its alleged postmodernism. I don't understand why Nicolas Cage, David Gordon Green, and Demi Moore play "themselves" while Neil Patrick Harris, who plays himself in everything, does not. I don't understand the point of Green playing himself--that is to say, I don't understand the point of the director character being David Gordon Green, since a) he's just an avatar for clout one doesn't necessarily associate with Green, b) his prior relationship with Cage is never excavated or exploited (they made the not-uninteresting Joe together in 2013), and c) it's doubtful that enough viewers will know who Green is to justify the casting. I don't understand Green's reaction to Cage's impromptu audition, either, whether his awed "Jesus" is because he's blown away, appalled, or reacting to an actor--a star--of Cage's calibre grovelling to the director of The Sitter and Halloween Kills. I don't understand why the movie spells Nic Cage's name "Nick Cage": if it's to separate onscreen "Nick" from offscreen "Nic," then why has Nick appeared in all the same stuff as Nic? That "k," like The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent itself, ersatzes Cage. This movie isn't meta or satire, it's the Dollar Store version of an American original.

Lightyear (2022)

**/****
screenplay by Jason Headley, Angus MacLane
directed by Angus MacLane

by Walter Chaw Angus MacLane's handsome-looking Lightyear gets enough things right that it's unfortunate it can't quite shake how its best parts are borrowed from Joe Haldeman's classic The Forever War. It has more problems than that, granted, mainly with how its thin supporting cast fails to give the film the humour and pathos it needs to honour the by-now-familiar "heartwarming tearjerker" Pixar formula. There's not a lot of rewatch value here, alas, and that has everything to do with Lightyear's awkward dialogue and inability to stick the landing--maladies, both, that afflicted co-writer Jason Headley's previous Pixar outing, the similarly disappointing and COVID-doomed Onward. The highlight of the piece is robot cat SOX (Peter Sohn), who provides the film its credulous audience surrogate as well as its adorable animal-sidekick comic relief. By himself, SOX saves Lightyear, though he can't elevate it above the airless jokes and pained delivery. What a shame, considering the movie sets a new bar in terms of the complexity of its digital imagery and animation. With Taika Waititi in the cast, I gotta think they could've hit him up for a quick joke polish.

Jurassic World Dominion (2022)

½*/****
starring Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Sam Neill, Jeff Goldblum
screenplay by Emily Carmichael & Colin Trevorrow
directed by Colin Trevorrow

by Walter Chaw About an hour into Jurassic World Dominion, a nondescript villain--really, the bad guys are all nondescript here, no matter their gender or race--with the admittedly ridiculous name Rainn Delacourt (Scott Haze) is pinned on his back by two dinosaurs eating his arms. Our Dollar Store action figure of a hero, Chad--er, Brad, er...Owen? Our Dollar Store action figure of a hero, Owen (Chris Pratt), screams at Rainn to give up vital information about the location of the emotionless British cyborg clone from the last film, Maisie (Isabella Sermon), who (that?) Owen and his girlfriend/wife/whatever, Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), have since adopted. Rainn, before getting his head torn off tastefully offscreen, spills the beans. Here's my problem: why? Why the fuck would he bother to say anything at all? When this scenario plays out in other films, it's because the person being asked the question hopes they'll be freed once they do. But Owen doesn't control these dinosaurs with his magic dinosaur-controlling hand, and it's not framed as Rainn having a change of heart. It's just a blatant misunderstanding of scenes like this, either on purpose or out of cynical desperation, rigged to move a stalled plot along, damning the characters and all sense along the way. What troubles me the most about it is the presumption that no one will notice or that no one will care once they've noticed. J. A. Bayona loaded his Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom with a shocking amount of social subtext, appropriate outrage, fairytale scale and wonder, even doom. The only thing Colin Trevorrow manages to create with Jurassic World Dominion (hereafter Dominion) is an endurance test of unusual cruelty that, despite its conspicuous bloat, still leans heavily on an extended voiceover prologue and epilogue to try to inject an illusion of plot into aimless, sometimes-vicious, ugly-looking garbage.

Top Gun: Maverick (2022)

***½/****
starring Tom Cruise, Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly, Val Kilmer
screenplay by Ehren Kruger and Eric Warren Singer and Christopher McQuarrie
directed by Joseph Kosinski

by Walter Chaw Joseph Kosinski's Top Gun: Maverick (hereafter Maverick) does everything the Tony Scott original did well a little bit better and doesn't bother with the rest. What drives this legacy sequel is the sobriety with which it addresses the passage of time--the existential horror of being the oldest person at the bar, of all those pictures that look like what you think you still look like, of the toll of watching your children outgrow you while every anchor you have to this world withers and dies. It is, in other words, a spectacular action film and a mature character drama whose closest analogue might be Danny Boyle's T2 Trainspotting--a film that, likewise, took its cue from a showy and popular first film and forged from it a work of real substance and surprising pathos. What's most impressive is how balanced Maverick feels. Its action component is plotted out like an elaborate, aerial heist flick with the stakes obvious and the steps delineated cleanly and simply, so that when it finally comes time to set the dominos in motion and things inevitably go wrong, it's clear how they went wrong. The picture's dramatic component is as carefully metered: the love interest and her expectations; the lost father/orphaned son dynamic and how to salvage it; the old rivals-turned-friends and what they owe each other at the end. Maverick is a clockwork, a model of efficiency and effective storytelling; there are multiple avenues to appreciating this movie. I was afraid a sequel to a macho, homoerotic recruitment video bankrolled by the United States military would have no sense of its silliness. I'm happy to be wrong.

The Northman (2022)

**½/****
starring Alexander Skarsgård, Nicole Kidman, Claes Bang, Willem Dafoe
written by Sjón & Robert Eggers
directed by Robert Eggers

by Walter Chaw That Robert Eggers's latest film proves visually stunning is more expectation than revelation at this point. That it beggars traditional narrative tropes is also no longer a surprise, making The Northman a victim of, of all things, familiarity. There's even a moment about midway through where the natural beauty, the grandeur of the film's settings, works against it: being force-marched through the frankly-ravishing landscape, one slave essentially remarks to another that this place is a shithole. Imagine the claustrophobic vileness of the version of this film Andrea Arnold might have made. Aside from trodding the same frozen ground as the obviously superior Valhalla Rising, The Northman is merely extremely good-looking and very straightforward, for all its mythological underpinnings and ambition to be epic-feeling in terms of its royal melodrama. (No wonder: the ancient Norse folktale it seeks to tell is the basis for Shakespeare's Hamlet.) Sequences like an early coming-of-age ritual in a subterranean mud cathedral promise a picture as surreal and lawless as a Ben Wheatley joint (A Field of England. for instance), but rather than follow that path into Wonderland, The Northman barely reaches for the trippy heights of Eggers's previous film, The Lighthouse, and it's the first of his movies that doesn't require an active viewership. Indeed, the most surprising thing about it is how few surprises it holds.

The Contractor (2022)

***/****
starring Chris Pine, Ben Foster, Gillian Jacobs, Kiefer Sutherland
written by J.P. Davis
directed by Tarik Saleh

by Walter Chaw Tarik Saleh's The Contractor reminds me a lot of Michael B. Jordan's recent attempt at a franchise-starter Without Remorse in that both are the sort of workmanlike action pictures that once kept multiplexes afloat but now occupy a mid-budget niche relegated to streaming services. Its closest analogue might be Amazon's "Reacher" series in terms of its clean action, straight-line plotting, and lantern-jawed "all-American" hero trained to kill and prone to angst over his lethal ways. The Contractor adds some wrinkles in using the plight of veterans returning from service with neither financial nor emotional support while also reserving some criticism for the private, for-profit contractors who send mercenaries into conflict zones for the purposes of ratfucking and wetworks. Mostly, though, it's an able showcase for Chris Pine as a sturdy action hero who is also a non-threatening avatar for the Average Joe demographic: handsome but cool, clever not brainy, self-sufficient but loyal to an old buddy, a good dad and good Christian good at tamping down "girl" emotions and, moreover, good at boom-boom stab-stab.

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

****/****
starring Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, Jamie Lee Curtis
written and directed by Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert

by Walter Chaw When I tell my parents' story to myself, I never tell it as a love story. It's an immigrant story--a typical one, I've come to learn through reading, yes, but mainly through the films of Edward Yang. And it's a story about a broken family, where coldness and mulishness led to lost childhoods, resentments, and, for me, estrangement from my parents to varying degrees throughout my adult life. I became a writer because it was where mental illness and neurodivergence directed me. I needed therapy, and my family didn't approve of that for me. Not even after my suicide attempt. I know my choice of major disappointed my parents, and I think I chose it in part to disappoint them--they who liked to brag about me while doing their best to "break" my sense of self-worth and strip away any pride I had in my accomplishments. I still don't know how to rewire myself to take good news as good rather than as the preamble to a lecture on my stupidity and arrogance. I'm broken. I'm working on fixing it.

The Matrix Resurrections (2021) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

½*/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A-
starring Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Neil Patrick Harris
screenplay by Lana Wachowski & David Mitchell & Aleksandar Hemon
directed by Lana Wachowski

by Walter Chaw I guess I wouldn't mind that The Matrix: Resurrections (hereafter Matrix 4) is so stupid if it didn't spend so much of its bloat trying to explain itself. Just let it go. If you're riding with the same plot as Space Jam: A New Legacy, own it--run with it, for fuck's sake. Exposition is always a delicate if necessary evil, but here it's particularly undignified. It's Glen from Raising Arizona explaining his Polack jokes. The plot of Matrix 4 is essentially that conversation with the guy who's way too stoned who has this great idea for a Matrix sequel. "Okay, okay, see, Neo is--haha--NEO is Mr. Anderson again and--haha, check it--he's like this programmer dude, real boring piece of shit, and he made a game back in 1999 called 'The Matrix', and yo, yo, yo, wait, wait... What if Trinity was The One, too?" You've heard of the concept of "raising all boats"? Well, an hour of deadening exposition devoted to explaining a plot this contrived, this smug and half-cocked, this simultaneously convoluted and simplistic, sinks the boat--sinks all fucking boats. Good poker players have confidence and chill; not only does Lana Wachowski have a real bad tell, she gives speeches about what she's holding. "Hi, I'm Lana, creator of The Matrix, and I'm drawing on an inside straight." Small wonder Lilly refused to participate in this boondoggle, leaving Lana to recruit their Cloud Atlas partner-in-crime David Mitchell as one of her co-writers. That either of these people kept their names on this is evidence of an almost majestic, feline confidence.

The King's Man (2021) [Ultimate Collector's Edition] - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

*/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Ralph Fiennes, Gemma Arterton, Rhys Ifans, Charles Dance
screenplay by Matthew Vaughn & Karl Gajdusek
directed by Matthew Vaughn

by Bill Chambers Make no mistake, 2014's Kingsman: The Secret Service is reactionary horseshit, but I got a kick out of its shock tactics and couldn't deny that this new chapter in producer-turned-director Matthew Vaughn's career held some unlikely appeal as an alternative if not an antidote to the antiseptic Marvel and faux-gritty DC cinematic universes. The film was tacit confirmation that Vaughn, after courting controversy with Kick-Ass, had embraced his inner Droog: he would now revel in the violence and latent fascism of his favoured crime and superhero fiction--albeit drolly, like a more cartoonish S. Craig Zahler. In retrospect, however, it's probably more accurate to say that Vaughn let muse Mark Millar, who wrote the graphic novels Kingsman and Kick-Ass were based on, Pied Piper him into a brick wall, i.e., the dead-end that is The King's Man, the third chapter in a trilogy that had nowhere to go and so goes backwards to tell an origin story--complete with the dulled edges that tend to happen to adult-skewing franchises as kids become their prevailing consumer. Unlike RoboCop 3 or Police Academy III: Back in Training, The King's Man retains the R rating of its predecessors, though here it feels like the MPA is primarily trying to protect children from boredom.

The Batman (2022)

**/****
starring Robert Pattinson, Zoë Kravitz, Paul Dano, Colin Farrell
written by Matt Reeves & Peter Craig
directed by Matt Reeves

by Walter Chaw I love Matt Reeves. I think Cloverfield is exceptional, that I underestimated Let Me In upon its initial release, and that, for as popular as it was, the Planet of the Apes trilogy--to which he contributed two entries--remains underappreciated for how cogent and incisive a satire it is of the doomed trajectory of our irredeemable state. Reeves appears to be the rare bird who can work within the framework of franchise and intellectual property and still manage to produce largely uncompromised pieces, unbeholden to stock set-ups and happy pay-offs. I had the highest of hopes for his turn at the wheel of the Batman machine: if anyone was going to do a down Batman in defiance of the jealous protectors of a billion-dollar money tree, it was Reeves. Alas, The Batman is overlong, over-serious, poorly-paced, and the first of Reeves's films to show obvious production interference in the sort of narrative post-script--delivered via world-weary Blade Runner voiceover, no less--that is never not embarrassing for its awkward pandering. Any sins of structure can at least be attributed to Reeves and co-writer Peter Craig, who lean heavily on the "detective" part of Batman's "Dark Knight Detective" moniker in an earnest, all-in go at neo-noir. But the grafted-on epilogue suffers an instant, gaudy tissue rejection. It's sap in a movie that, for all its gravid clumsiness, has decidedly not been sap.

Moonfall (2022)

***/****
starring Halle Berry, Patrick Wilson, John Bradley, Donald Sutherland
screenplay by Roland Emmerich & Harald Kloser & Spenser Cohen
directed by Roland Emmerich

by Walter Chaw Between The Day After Tomorrow and the new Moonfall, Roland Emmerich has become our unlikely climate disaster Tierisius: Oedipus's blind seer, dispensing fair warning to a population not paying any attention. In the earlier film, global warming causes a new Ice Age and an exodus of American refugees looking for sanctuary in Mexico, while Moonfall sees the entire west coast flooded and essentially everyone at sea level in the United States trying to get to Colorado. Both ideas are ripe with satiric irony, animated with a sense of gallows humour about how extraordinarily shortsighted American leadership is in the face of obvious signs and portents. Oh, and science, of course, which should have been enough once the evidence of our own eyes somehow proved inadequate. Even Moonfall's ultimate revelation--something about AI and space arks and a running gag about Elon Musk--speaks brilliantly, however intentionally, to our primate desire to conflate the hoarding of generational wealth with genius, when all the wealthy really want to do is escape the rapidly-changing planet they've strip-mined for its resources. All that, plus a broad redux of H.G. Wells's The First Men In the Moon, and, kids, we got ourselves the smart and unpretentious version of Don't Look Up.

John Carpenter's Escape from L.A. (1996) - Blu-ray Disc|4K Ultra HD + Digital Code

Please note that these screencaps are from an alternate source and do not necessarily reflect either of the discs covered herein.

**/****
BD - Image A- Sound B+
4K - Image A- Sound A-
starring Kurt Russell, Stacy Keach, Steve Buscemi, Cliff Robertson
screenplay by John Carpenter & Debra Hill & Kurt Russell
directed by John Carpenter

by Bryant Frazer The 1990s were unkind to John Carpenter: The stock market was booming, there was a Democrat in the White House, and the American horror film was at a low ebb. That was the decade when Carpenter--arguably the best B-movie auteur in the world during the 1980s and certainly the most audacious--lost his mojo. Exhausted from the experience of making two genre classics (They Live and Prince of Darkness) back to back, Carpenter took a couple of years off from filmmaking. When he was ready to work again, he considered making The Exorcist III but eventually settled on an ill-fated Chevy Chase vehicle, the $40 million sci-fi adaptation Memoirs of an Invisible Man, that torpedoed his attempted return to big-budget filmmaking. Carpenter tore through three more projects in the next three years--the Showtime horror anthology Body Bags, the Lovecraft riff In the Mouth of Madness, and a Village of the Damned remake--before deciding to pillage his own back catalogue with a sequel to the dystopian Escape from New York.

Dune (2021) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

Dune Part One
****/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Javier Bardem
screenplay by Jon Spaihts and Denis Villeneuve and Eric Roth, based on the novel by Frank Herbert
directed by Denis Villeneuve

by Walter Chaw I couldn't get through the Lord of the Rings trilogy when I was a kid, but I devoured Frank Herbert's Dune in a fever and read it again immediately. I have a tactile memory of it. Mostly, I was haunted by the frequent use of passages from the diaries, histories, and philosophies of one Princess Irulan, inserted throughout the text to give the book's story a sense of lost time, immense. I wouldn't experience this feeling reading something again until years later when I finally got into Proust, this thing where you read it in the present, but the text is irretrievably past. You've arrived at the dock, but the ferry, impossibly beautiful and decked out with incomprehensible pleasures and mysteries, has left, and it's not coming back. Princess Irulan opens the book by warning us not to be deceived by its hero, Paul, having spent the first fourteen years of his life on a planet called "Caladan"--that his story is inextricable from the fate of a place called "Arrakis." It reminds me of the many epitaphs for T.E. Lawrence. Herbert told his son that he left multiple threads unresolved in Dune so its readers would want to revisit it--return obsessively to it to follow different paths, suggestions, prophecies. I think it's why I've read four or five of the subsequent Dune novels only once and retained so little of the stories they tell and the answers they provide. It's like Arthur C. Clarke's sequels to his 2001: A Space Odyssey novelization: I don't actually want to know what's inside the Monolith.

The 355 (2022)

½*/****
starring Diane Kruger, Penélope Cruz, Jessica Chastain, Lupita Nyong'o
screenplay by Theresa Rebeck and Simon Kinberg
directed by Simon Kinberg

by Walter Chaw There's a moment early on in Simon Kinberg's execrable The 355 where Lupita Nyong'o, playing cyber-security expert Khadijah, is walking on a pier swarming with commercial fishermen, tailing a bad guy by holding her phone up like she's looking at her phone camera while it's recording him. After the third or fourth time they've locked eyes, she declares, with total seriousness, that she's been "made." No fucking shit you were made. If Lupita Nyong'o were walking along holding up a phone and staring at me from six feet away, I like to think I'd notice. Later, the reason given for Colombian psychologist Graciela (Penélope Cruz) tagging along on a very dangerous mission is that some dead guy's phone has been locked with her fingerprint. Because I'm able to remember that Khadijah is a cyber-security expert, and given that Graciela's fingerprint-bearing finger is sitting right there, I'm wondering why someone else's fingerprint couldn't be assigned to the phone. I'm also wondering where Sebastian Stan's CIA agent Nick found a crisp white T-shirt that doesn't stain when you spill coffee on it. That's some NASA shit, probably the technology everyone should actually be fighting over. Then there's the conversation where Graciela's son, over the phone, asks for "Duvalins," and Graciela responds, "Yes, I will bring you your favourite candy," which...okay, level with me--which one of them needed to know that Duvalins is candy? The first thing is a problem with direction; the next a script issue; the next, direction again; and the last another script issue. Meaning that while there might be enough blame to go around, I'm gonna put the bulk of it on co-writer/director Kinberg.

The Matrix Resurrections (2021)

½*/****
starring Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Neil Patrick Harris
screenplay by Lana Wachowski & David Mitchell & Aleksandar Hemon
directed by Lana Wachowski

by Walter Chaw I guess I wouldn't mind that The Matrix: Resurrections (hereafter Matrix 4) is so stupid if it didn't spend so much of its bloat trying to explain itself. Just let it go. If you're riding with the same plot as Space Jam: A New Legacy, own it--run with it, for fuck's sake. Exposition is always a delicate if necessary evil, but here it's particularly undignified. It's Glen from Raising Arizona explaining his Polack jokes. The plot of Matrix 4 is essentially that conversation with the guy who's way too stoned who has this great idea for a Matrix sequel. "Okay, okay, see, Neo is--haha--NEO is Mr. Anderson again and--haha, check it--he's like this programmer dude, real boring piece of shit, and he made a game back in 1999 called 'The Matrix', and yo, yo, yo, wait, wait... What if Trinity was The One, too?" You've heard of the concept of "raising all boats"? Well, an hour of deadening exposition devoted to explaining a plot this contrived, this smug and half-cocked, this simultaneously convoluted and simplistic, sinks the boat--sinks all fucking boats. Good poker players have confidence and chill; not only does Lana Wachowski have a real bad tell, she gives speeches about what she's holding. "Hi, I'm Lana, creator of The Matrix, and I'm drawing on an inside straight." Small wonder Lilly refused to participate in this boondoggle, leaving Lana to recruit their Cloud Atlas partner-in-crime David Mitchell as one of her co-writers. That either of these people kept their names on this is evidence of an almost majestic, feline confidence.

Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021)

**½/****
starring Tom Holland, Zendaya, Benedict Cumberbatch, Marisa Tomei
written by Chris McKenna & Erik Sommers
directed by Jon Watts

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Peter Parker (Tom Holland), having just been outed to the world as Spider-Man by a dying Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal), finds himself besieged by press and angry mobs mistaken in their belief that Mysterio was a very handsome hero. This pushes Peter into hiding with his Aunt May (Marisa Tomei), girlfriend MJ (Zendaya), and bestie Ned (Jacob Batalon). The kids need guards when they go to school (why are they still going to school?) and are trying to focus on applying to MIT because they're all three of them brilliant, in case you've forgotten. Recognizing the toll of his exposure on the people who have remained loyal to him, Peter asks Dr. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) to cast a spell on the universe so that people forget him. How this might be achieved in the age of social media and pocket cameras is dismissed as "magic," which is also how it's explained that a hole in the multiverse opens up, allowing a bunch of villains and other versions of Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield) to cross over into this one's reality. At least the film has the self-awareness to constantly call out the facility of "magic" as a catch-all, layering its characters' incredulity in a running joke about a "wizard's dungeon" and one character's "You have magic here?" As wit goes, it ain't much, but I'll take it.

No Time to Die (2021)

****/****
starring Daniel Craig, Rami Malek, Léa Seydoux, Christoph Waltz
screenplay by Neal Purvis & Robert Wade and Cary Joji Fukunaga and Phoebe Waller-Bridge
directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Cary Fukunaga's No Time to Die, the twenty-fifth canonical James Bond film, is the best one since Peter Hunt's On Her Majesty's Secret Service and for many of the same reasons. One could hazard that the similarities, a vulnerable Bond chief among them, comprise the guiding principle behind this picture, with its multiple call-outs to Fleming's books--On Her Majesty's Secret Service, in particular, along with its downbeat, mortal sequel You Only Live Twice, the last Bond Fleming completed himself. In the latter, 007's boss, M, uses the same Jack London quote to eulogize the presumed-dead superspy ("The proper function of a man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time") that his screen counterpart (Ralph Fiennes) uses to eulogize Bond in No Time to Die. It ends with Bond, initially dumbstruck by grief over the death of his wife in the previous novel (On Her Majesty's Secret Service), now stricken by amnesia and about to abandon his impregnated wife--the child a development Fleming never got to bring to term, but who finds her fruition in Fukunaga's film. At a late point in No Time to Die, two combatants reaching the end of their struggles agree that the only reason to live is to leave a legacy. I find it touching that this film brings a small and precious note of Fleming's to life, so many years after his death.

SDAFF '21: Time

殺出個黃昏
***/****
starring Chung Suet-ying, Lam Suet, Patrick Tse, Petrina Fung
screenplay by Ho Ching-yi, Lam Ka-tung
directed by Ricky Ko

by Walter Chaw Ricky Ko's Time is perched a little uneasily between broad slapstick and heartfelt melodrama, and while arguably these are the two modes that define Charlie Chaplin's shtick, the delicateness of that balance is one explanation for why there's pretty much only the one Charlie Chaplin. Its Chinese title meaning something like "take a hit out on twilight," Ko's flick opens with some throwback Hong Kong action as a trio of hired killers show their stuff in colourful, comic-book-interstitial-aided, '70s-era vignettes: the master of the Karambit Knife, the master of the barbed chain-whip, the portly getaway driver/comic relief--roles each played at some point in their prolific careers by Hong Kong legends Patrick Tse, Petrina Fung Bo-Bo, and Lam Suet, reprised here after a fashion as the film flashes forward to catch up with them well into their dotage. Chau (Tse) uses his knife skills now to slowly, very slowly, slice noodles into broth at a hole-in-the-wall cafe; Fung (Bo-Bo) fronts a lounge act at a geriatric disco; and Chung (Lam) whiles away his hours in the company of an in-call prostitute he hopes one day to marry. Fung's the only one of them, really, who isn't all but waiting to die. When Chau gets replaced by a noodle-making robot, Fung offers him a job--a hit, in fact, a last call to glory that Chau answers by practicing his knifing on a log. He's still got it: slowed considerably, but not squeamish about murder for hire. Turns out, his target is an old woman who just wants to get it over with.

Eternals (2021)

*/****
starring Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, Kumail Nanjiani, Angelina Jolie
screenplay by Chloé Zhao and Chloe Zhao & Patrick Burleigh
directed by Chloé Zhao

by Walter Chaw Chloé Zhao's follow-up to her Oscar-winning Nomadland is one of those movies that is more interesting to talk about than to watch--which, in the final analysis, may be the poet laureate of South Dakota's most distinctive auteur hallmark. Despite that it's the twenty-some-odd instalment of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Eternals is defiantly a Chloé Zhao picture, and the amount of subversion required to make it so highlights both MCU overlord Kevin Feige's desperation to shake the diversity monkey off his back and his fatal lack of understanding of women creators at the most rudimentary level. In theory that doesn't matter much if all these folks are asked to do is direct the parts that aren't generic action scenes, committee-generated in the house style and dropped into the middle of whatever flaccid drama is possible under the narrative conditions like dead paratroopers into a live warzone. What you see in Eternals is a result of what feels less like a partnership with its attendant compromises than like a quiet war waged in the spaces between a boss who thinks he knows what's happening and a hired gun who's pretty clever about having her way no matter the amount of oversight. By the third or fourth laborious exposition dump by the least comfortable, least seasoned and natural actor in the loaded cast (that would be 14-year-old Lia McHugh), it's pretty clear that Zhao's empathy for unaffected performers rambling in lingering magic-hour landscapes has won the day. Good one, Zhao.

TIFF '21: Dune

Dune Part One
****/****
starring Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Javier Bardem
screenplay by Jon Spaihts and Denis Villeneuve and Eric Roth, based on the novel by Frank Herbert
directed by Denis Villeneuve

by Walter Chaw I couldn't get through the Lord of the Rings trilogy when I was a kid, but I devoured Frank Herbert's Dune in a fever and read it again immediately. I have a tactile memory of it. Mostly, I was haunted by the frequent use of passages from the diaries, histories, and philosophies of one Princess Irulan, inserted throughout the text to give the book's story a sense of lost time, immense. I wouldn't experience this feeling reading something again until years later when I finally got into Proust, this thing where you read it in the present, but the text is irretrievably past. You've arrived at the dock, but the ferry, impossibly beautiful and decked out with incomprehensible pleasures and mysteries, has left, and it's not coming back. Princess Irulan opens the book by warning us not to be deceived by its hero, Paul, having spent the first fourteen years of his life on a planet called "Caladan"--that his story is inextricable from the fate of a place called "Arrakis." It reminds me of the many epitaphs for T.E. Lawrence. Herbert told his son that he left multiple threads unresolved in Dune so its readers would want to revisit it--return obsessively to it to follow different paths, suggestions, prophecies. I think it's why I've read four or five of the subsequent Dune novels only once and retained so little of the stories they tell and the answers they provide. It's like Arthur C. Clarke's sequels to his 2001: A Space Odyssey novelization: I don't actually want to know what's inside the Monolith.

Lady of the Manor (2021) + Copshop (2021)

LADY OF THE MANOR
½*/****
starring Melanie Lynskey, Judy Greer, Justin Long, Ryan Philippe
written and directed by Justin Long & Christian Long

COPSHOP
**/****
starring Gerard Butler, Frank Grillo, Alexis Louder, Toby Huss
screenplay by Kurt McLeod and Joe Carnahan
directed by Joe Carnahan

by Walter Chaw The first perky, jaunty violin strokes in the oppressive score announce exactly the kind of garbage Justin and Christian Long's Lady of the Manor is going to be: self-satisfied, high-concept comedy that apes Neil Jordan's High Spirits and Jared and Jerusha Hess's Austenland while entirely wasting Melanie Lynskey and Judy Greer. I would watch Lynskey and Greer in anything--and Lady of the Manor tested me sorely, immediately, repeatedly. Its execution is '80s VHS Screwballs quickie tossed together with cheap gags, an overreliance on fart and dick jokes, exaggerated in-camera effects, and skits that fall flat and don't stop falling for at least ten or twenty beats after they've died. They were dead before they got there. There are montages that are just expository scenes strung together and there's a running gag where Greer is asked to shake her head disapprovingly while Lynskey sucks on a bar of soap and shrugs. There's another where Greer makes "silly" faces in a mirror for a long, long time to demonstrate how she misses her friend and also how maybe she's loosening up, and it's unbelievably painful to watch someone so brilliant and naturally hilarious shoehorned into a square hole as stolid and unforgiving as this. Admittedly, it takes actual talent to make something this terrible. I mean, you can't do it accidentally.

Malignant (2021)

***½/****
starring Annabelle Wallis, Maddie Hasson, George Young, Michole Briana White
screenplay by Akela Cooper
directed by James Wan

by Walter Chaw James Wan's Malignant is spectacularly, unabashedly fucking nuts. Not nuts in a random way, nuts in the way Oliver Stone's The Hand is--or, more to the point, Brian De Palma's Sisters. It's what the Dario Argento The Phantom of the Opera should have been: not entirely giallo, not without elements of high opera; a classic "madwoman" picture as well as a possession movie. Also, that voice on the phone from Black Christmas, and also a loving homage to Stuart Gordon, and also... Malignant is a joyful mishmash that plays like a NOW That's What I Call Music compilation for horror fans. It's the North by Northwest of delirious genre fare: Bava if you want it, the most gothic Hammer if it pleases you, complete with a Universal Monsters monster I kind of can't believe someone hasn't done before. I'm not giving anything away by saying the cosplay is going to be lit.

Fantasia Fest '21: Prisoners of the Ghostland

*/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Sofia Boutella, Nick Cassavetes, Tak Sakaguchi
screenplay by Aaron Hendry, Reza Sixo Safai
directed by Sion Sono

by Walter Chaw A theory I've been kicking around about certain pre-made, fast-fashion auteur demimondes like, say, Sion Sono: there are those who are anointed cult filmmakers because they have idiosyncratic tastes; and there are those without any real taste who aspire to be cult filmmakers because they've figured out that idioscyncracy can be marketable and have thus taken it on as an affectation. The former make films the only way they can make them, driven by a purity and persistence of vision; the latter make stuff like Prisoners of the Ghostland, because they've seen films by the former and wonder what could be so hard about that? It's why Sono's work is only spoken of in reference to other films and filmmakers, or even to earlier entries in his own filmography, back when he was doing what he felt was right rather than what he thought he should. Prisoners of the Ghostland is a facile affectation, in other words, a slapdash collection of somebody else's cool without a genuine, native bone in its body. Douglas Adams includes instructions for how to fly in his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books: you fall and miss. You can't fly on purpose, you see. You can't make a camp movie on purpose, either. It took me three tries to get through Prisoners of the Ghostland. 102 minutes of someone not meaning it is incredibly boring.

Beckett (2021) - Netflix

*/****
starring John David Washington, Alicia Vikander, Yorgos Pirpassopoulos, Filippos Ioannidis
screenplay by Kevin A. Rice
directed by Ferdinando Cito Filomarino

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. It's obvious what Ferdinando Cito Filomarino is after with Beckett: a 1970s paranoia thriller in the Three Days of the Condor vein. And it's just as obvious that he misses the mark. Beckett isn't even a prestige knock-off version à la the Peter Hyams remake of Narrow Margin. Lots of reasons for its failure, chief among them that it doesn't have a point of view; landing somewhere in the junction between a "wrong man" thriller and a film about a truth-seeker finding more truth than he bargained for makes it all seem arbitrary. To be clear, not arbitrary in the sense that what's happening to our heroes is meaningless (a capricious universe is the fodder, after all, for great paranoia)--arbitrary in the sense that the film itself has no real reason for being, and that's a hurdle very little art can overcome. It's a hurdle that not even great cinematography (by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom) and a Ryuichi Sakamoto score can ameliorate. Instead, they underscore how top-heavy it all is. Great cast, too, scenic locales--everything top of the line. But there's nothing mooring it to relevance, despite all its arched-eyebrow pipe-smoking about the state of Greece and American interventionism.

The Suicide Squad (2021)

***½/****
starring Margot Robbie, Idris Elba, John Cena, Viola Davis
written and directed by James Gunn

by Walter Chaw James Gunn's The Suicide Squad is weird. It's explosively, hilariously gory, profane, ridiculous, and, best of all, lawless. As much as I love Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy, the darkness--the grittiness--he brought to the DC Universe has proven difficult to shake due to its commercial success. In contrast, The Suicide Squad looks and acts a lot like the Adam West "Batman" TV series, a piece fully embracing the elasticity of both its mediums and, though it seems silly to say, one bracingly unafraid of literal colour. I also felt this way about Gunn's still-dour-but-colorful-by-MCU-standards Guardians of the Galaxy--but this film feels very much like something, from character and production design down to the choice of members for the titular squad, allowed to be whatever it was going to be, damn the torpedoes. Have I mentioned that it's weird? It's exquisitely strange, and not just because of the obvious ways in which things are strange, but because it says the bad guys are the colonial-/meddling-minded United States, the military-industrial complex is reliant on the enslavement of the carceral state, and the best test of manhood is not facility with firearms and sociopathy. A billion-dollar IP that isn't trying to skate the middle line of absolute, frictionless equivocation? Weird, right?

Howard the Duck (1986) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

**½/**** Image B- 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.

Jungle Cruise (2021)

**/****
starring Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, Edgar Ramirez, Paul Giamatti
screenplay by Michael Green and Glenn Ficarra & John Requa
directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

by Walter Chaw For a film based on a theme-park attraction without a point of view or anything to say, Jungle Cruise is as good as it could possibly be, i.e.: fine. It reaps whatever benefits one could from the star power of Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt without giving them something to do, and it seems to belong to the Aguirre, The Wrath of God cinematic universe, which is, you know, unexpected. There's a moment somewhere in the middle of it where Blunt's character, Lily, asks Johnson's Frank a personal question and then listens. She's an actor of tremendous empathy and clarity, and although, in these moments after finishing the movie, I can't for the life of me remember what they were talking about, I do recall thinking how nice it would be if Blunt got more roles in which she might play a human being. For now, she's a plucky scientist two years into WWI who is denied admission into stuffy scientific societies because she's not only a woman but a woman who wears pants. What Lily wants to do most is find a mythical tree blossom in the Amazon that bestows eternal life, making Jungle Cruise a part of The Fountain's cinematic universe, too, which is likewise unexpected. The person she hires to help her is Frank, of course, and the bad guy who wants the blossom but for nefarious reasons is German Prince Joachim (Jesse Plemons). Oh, the other bad guy who wants the blossom is Aguirre (Edgar Ramirez), a centuries-old conquistador doomed to jungle purgatory. It doesn't matter.

Godzilla vs. Kong (2021) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

½*/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C+
starring Godzilla, King Kong, Alexander Skarsgård, Demián Bichir
screenplay by Eric Pearson and Max Borenstein
directed by Adam Wingard

by Walter Chaw Godzilla is a reaction to America's attack on two civilian targets with nuclear weapons in the same way the current American superhero cycle is a reaction to 9/11. King Kong is an offshoot of Edgar Wallace's sledgehammer racist "Sanders of the River" tales, which he parlayed into early drafts of the screenplay that eventually became 1933's King Kong. Though it's possible to make a Godzilla or a King Kong movie without these ghosts of American war crimes, colonialism, and racism haunting it, Adam Wingard's Godzilla vs. Kong (hereafter GvK) ain't it. Not when these two giant metaphors for the poison of American exceptionalism destroy Hong Kong, a Chinese city the British only recently returned to the Chinese, before banding together to fight a Mexican-American's Japanese-piloted robot dinosaur. The film is a mess, an ideological jumble and a disaster of narrative that reduces its able cast to half exposition dump, half glazed reaction shots. It doesn't have anything to say and even in the worst of its predecessors, this was never the case. GvK isn't interested in ecology, in arms proliferation, in sociopolitical struggles--and failing all the big things it's not about, it's also free of parental issues, a romantic subplot, a compelling villain, or, indeed, a compelling hero. It's a giant nothing-burger. And that's without mentioning this new craze of writing a perfect minority child to teach the growed-ups how to get in touch with their better natures.

Full Metal Jacket (1987) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc. Click any image to enlarge.

****/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B-
starring Matthew Modine, Adam Baldwin, Vincent D'Onofrio, Lee Ermey
screenplay by Stanley Kubrick, Michael Herr, Gustav Hasford, based on Hasford's novel The Short-Timers
directed by Stanley Kubrick

by Bryant Frazer It's obvious from the beginning that Stanley Kubrick loves R. Lee Ermey. Loves him. Though Ermey is only the fourth-billed actor in Full Metal Jacket, Gunnery Sergeant Hartman may as well be the star of the show. He's described in Gustav Hasford's source novel as "an obscene little ogre in immaculate khaki." His barked insults and obscenities dominate the first section of the film--a tour de force showing how Hartman wears down (and, supposedly, toughens up) a barracksful of U.S. Marine draftees, blasting away at their natural aversion to aggression and reprogramming them as soldiers. Kubrick was lucky to find him; a Vietnam War vet and former Marine Corps drill instructor, Ermey brings an irresistible combination of outrageousness and authenticity to the part. Hartman could have come across as an unlikely caricature but for Ermey's ferociousness.

Riders of Justice (2020)

Retfærdighedens ryttere
***/****
starring Mads Mikkelsen, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Andrea Heick Gadeberg, Roland Møller
written and directed by Anders Thomas Jensen

by Walter Chaw Dogma 95 vet Anders Thomas Jensen has a particular interest in oddness. Characters, especially, in Jensen's films as writer and director are given to sometimes-extravagant eccentricity, fueled by traumas Jensen declines to sanitize that are often exacerbated by intelligence worn as an unwelcome birth defect. Consider the menagerie at the centre of Jensen's Men & Chicken, an updating in a way of The Island of Dr. Moreau reconfigured as a "light" family drama in the Danish countryside. Mads Mikkelson stars in that one, too, playing a chronic masturbator who finds out that his father has been splicing his own sperm with animal sperm in an attempt to... Well, look, it's an interesting piece about social norms and how an inability to assimilate culturally leads to these islands of misfit boys. Jensen is interested, specifically and obsessively, in what happens when physical and mental mutations stunt emotional and social development. Though no one would want the crown, he is the poet laureate of the incel state.

Indiana Jones: 4-Movie Collection - 4K Ultra HD + Digital

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD discs. Click any image to enlarge.

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (1981)
****/**** Image A- Sound A
starring Harrison Ford, Karen Allen, Paul Freeman, Ronald Lacey
screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan
directed by Steven Spielberg

INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM (1984)
***½/**** Image A+ Sound A
starring Harrison Ford, Kate Capshaw, Ke Huy Quan, Amrish Puri
screenplay by Willard Huyck & Gloria Katz
directed by Steven Spielberg

INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE (1989)
**½/**** Image A Sound A
starring Harrison Ford, Sean Connery, Denholm Elliot, Alison Doody
screenplay by Jeffrey Boam
directed by Steven Spielberg

INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL (2008)
**½/**** Image A+ Sound A
starring Harrison Ford, Cate Blanchett, Karen Allen, Shia LaBeouf
screenplay by David Koepp
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Bryant Frazer Paramount has reissued the first four Indiana Jones films on 4K UHD disc in a box set with vouchers for digital copies of the tetralogy. (For a detailed review of the movies proper as well as their 2012 Blu-ray counterparts, our own Walter Chaw has you covered. (The star ratings above are his, the letter grades are mine.)) The new 4K scans capture the camera negatives in all their Panavision glory. Grain is quite present and the image sometimes goes a wee bit soft, especially in shots that were optically printed (i.e., titles, dissolves, wipes, and the like), but it's never inappropriate or distracting, and I didn't notice any obvious compression-induced flaws. Many of the special-effects shots look better than ever, as the original elements have been recomposited digitally to fix thick matte lines, imprecise rotoscopes, and similar technical holdovers from the analog domain.

The Tomorrow War (2021)

**½/****
starring Chris Pratt, Yvonne Strahovski, J.K. Simmons, Betty Gilpin
written by Zach Dean
directed by Chris McKay

by Walter Chaw Not to be confused with Joe Haldeman's classic 1974 novel The Forever War, Chris McKay's super-stupid The Tomorrow War doesn't bear up under the slightest prodding yet demonstrates an admirable agreeability to "sciencing the shit out of" part of its solution while dealing, however rotely, with its father/son and father/daughter abandonment themes. Pratt, whose Q-meter stock has fallen because of a few public missteps, proves an affable presence as science teacher-cum-future soldier Dan Forester, enlisted by future soldiers into fighting the tomorrow war against thorn-tossing, bugbear monster things dubbed "White Spikes." See, in 30 years or so, humans are down to their last half-million and need people from the past to bolster their ranks. But doesn't that create some temporal anomaly problems? I'm very glad you asked. Yes, it does. That's why they only recruit people who are going to die within a decade anyway, which is either an incredibly stupid plan in its looseness or an incredibly cynical plan that presumes none of these people will procreate again within the next 10 years--or, you know, otherwise do something that will fuck with the future in an unexpected way. Maybe they've accounted for all that and simply don't share. Or maybe it's like that Mark Hamill anecdote about how his hair should have been filthy and wet for a scene shot out of sequence but meant to follow the trash-compactor escape in Star Wars: As Harrison Ford sagely informed him, "Kid, it ain't that kind of movie."

Black Widow (2021)

**½/****
starring Scarlett Johansson, Florence Pugh, David Harbour, Rachel Weisz
screenplay by Eric Pearson
directed by Cate Shortland

by Walter Chaw You know it's gritty because of the gritty cover song interrupting the bucolic prologue--Think Up Anger ft. Malia J's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" this time instead of Rose Betts's "Song to the Siren." Too on the nose, perhaps, although they're both pretty on the nose, let's be honest. Another clue is a montage under the opening credits that shows rows of little girls abducted not for sex trafficking (because Marvel is more comfortable suggesting sex trafficking than, you know, consensual adult eroticism), but for the purpose of creating a Whedon-fantasy team of Dollhouse assassins. I spent most of my childhood reading comics and have watched and reviewed almost all of the MCU films to this point. I've seen none of the TV/streaming shows and don't intend to remedy that because life is incredibly short and also full to bursting with things I desperately want to see that I still won't be able to, no matter how smart I am at managing whatever time I have left. I have no idea what's going on in Black Widow, and I think that once you get bucked off this horse, there's no getting back on. So here's Cate Shortland's Black Widow, the 24th MCU flick, if only the second centred around a female protagonist--one we know has sacrificed herself for the sake of the least interesting/worthy of her male counterparts, meaning this one takes place in either the past or an alternate timeline or something. It doesn't matter. In the comic-book world, there are new #1s every few cycles that are reboots or speculative storylines or something. It's how they get you to keep buying them. What matters is, the more you humanize this character you've already made abundantly clear you don't really care about, the worse her already-loathsome sacrifice feels.

Army of the Dead (2021) - Netflix

*/****
starring Dave Bautista, Ella Purnell, Omari Hardwick, Garret Dillahunt
screenplay by Zack Snyder & Shay Hatten and Joby Harold
directed by Zack Snyder

by Walter Chaw A band of highly-outfitted soldiers enters a hive of monsters on a rescue mission. Accompanying them is a person scarred psychologically by a fight with these monsters, as well as a representative of an evil corporation that is more interested in harvesting the monsters--not for any humanitarian purpose, but to use as WMDs--than in exterminating them. For a little heroic comic relief, meet the not-completely-ordinary-seeming pilot, who, at a moment of crisis, appears to have disappeared only to reappear once our survivors have lost all hope. That's right, Zack Snyder's Army of the Dead is a remorseless, brazen rip-off of Aliens, down to outfitting a monster-killing badass exactly like Jenette Goldstein's "Vasquez" and to cribbing a few lines from James Cameron's script wholesale. At some point, Aliens apparently became an obscure, seldom-seen relic of a forgotten past ripe for strip-mining in this hotly-anticipated, deeply disappointing and distended genre epic. To be fair, Army of the Dead doesn't only rip off Aliens (which it does remorselessly): it also lifts Richard Matheson's I Am Legend conceit of "who are the real monsters, here?" in conceiving of a zombie civilization attempting to find purchase in the Nevada desert. If you have to steal, may as well steal from the best.

Those Who Wish Me Dead (2021)

*½/****
starring Angelina Jolie, Nicholas Hoult, Finn Little, Jon Bernthal
screenplay by Michael Koryta and Charles Leavitt and Taylor Sheridan, based on the book by Michael Koryta
directed by Taylor Sheridan                     

by Walter Chaw A certain déjà vu occurs with movies that feature what Gregory Peck once referred to as an endlessly replicable script. The hero who has endured trauma and, through the auspices of the film's familiar master plot, is given an opportunity to heal. In the parlance of this formula, perhaps there will be surrogate parents and children, replays--whether in the service of a literal time-loop or a figurative one--of inciting events with the opportunity to redress them, or... Look, I'm trying to find a clever way to say that Taylor Sheridan's Those Who Wish Me Dead is a new movie you've seen at least a hundred times before. It is one in every ten films or so. At its best, it's a cozy throwback to deadening programmers like The Client that saw great casts and decent budgets at the mercy of airport-rack bestsellers adapted by rote and delivered on time. At its worst, it's a meta-game of Scream where the instantly-exhausted viewer can nail major plot points based solely on the casting and the style of swooping once-helicopter/now-drone establishing shot. Maybe that's why there are so many superfluous cuts in this film--like how the introduction of one character to her summer home is split into six separate shots, none of them telling anything more than how she has arrived and managed to unlock the door.

Without Remorse (2021)

Tom Clancy's Without Remorse
***/****
starring Michael B. Jordan, Jodie Turner-Smith, Jamie Bell, Guy Pearce
screenplay by Taylor Sheridan and Will Staples, based on the novel by Tom Clancy
directed by Stefano Sollima

by Walter Chaw A little less than halfway through Stefano Sollima's Without Remorse, ex-Navy SEAL hotshot John Kelly (Michael B. Jordan), decked out in an orange prison jumpsuit, tells his former commanding officer, Lt. Greer (Jodie Turner-Smith), that they fought for a country that didn't love them for the promise the United States represented--and that, somewhere along the way, a contract was broken. Kelly is the blunt object the Daniel Craig Bond cycle identified Her Majesty's finest as: the spiked ball at the end of a medieval pike, all dressed up in fancy gadgets and ritualized dogma, amounting at the end to savagery in patriotic drag. He's not Odysseus in this construct, he's Achilles; his only weakness is that he believed there was ever a contract in the first place. The message is clear in this re-imagining of one of Tom Clancy's lesser-known bits of military/industrial agitprop that should this become a franchise, the thrust of it will be that its rage is righteous...and righteously Black. Simply the name change for Kelly from the source material's "Clark" speaks to the idea of rejecting one name, given by a white person, in favour of a name one chooses for oneself when specific social contracts have been breached. And the moment of Kelly's radicalization, when his home is violated and his life is stolen, likewise assumes a particular racial resonance.

The Virtuoso (2021)

*/****
starring Anson Mount, Abbie Cornish, Eddie Marsan, Anthony Hopkins
screenplay by James C. Wolf
directed by Nick Stagliano

by Walter Chaw 25 minutes into Nick Stagliano's very serious The Virtuoso, our erstwhile The American assassin, the unnamed virtuoso in question (Anson Mount), receives a note inscribed with what appears to be a child's handwriting (it isn't, which is only one reason why it's funny) telling him who his next target will be. As the Virtuoso, in his own second-person narration, lays out some ground rules in a world-weary, Fight Club-aspiring way, we see him burning what is obviously a different piece of paper in the fireplace. One might wonder about the sleight-of-hand happening here: Is Virtuoso, recently traumatized by a job gone tragically (and hilariously) wrong, looking to screw his mentor The Mentor (Anthony Hopkins) by holding on to the Mission: Impossible message intended for self-destruction? Will this slip of incriminating paper be the "check and mate" of a twisty noir's mind-bending puzzle-box? Or is it a simple continuity error they either didn't notice or figured didn't really matter because the audience will be too dazzled by the clockwork precision of the compulsive, extravagant-to-the-point-of-self-satire script? You're smart. When we're done here, you tell me which one it is.

Nobody (2021)

***/****
starring Bob Odenkirk, Aleksey Serebryakov, Connie Nielsen, Christopher Lloyd
written by Derek Kolstad
directed by Ilya Naishuller

by Walter Chaw I spent a lot of my freshman year in college in the shadow of post-trauma from a failed suicide attempt, untreated depression, and what felt like hardwired self-loathing. I looked for fights then and found them sometimes. I am so full of rage and frustration. I am beset by violent fantasies. When I watch videos of people turning the tables on attackers or racists, I wonder if, in the same situation, with the same upper hand, I would be able to stop hitting once I started. Age has mellowed me; my wife and my family have civilized me to some extent, and I don't punch walls anymore, you know? It's just sadness and self-loathing left in the debris, should anyone think to sift through it. I don't think I'm unusual. I think men aren't given the mechanism to express their despair in any way other than through violence and rage, and therein lies the reason everything is broken now and why we're largely beyond repair. We are the pure residue of a vile evolutionary animal. Everything that doesn't make sense makes perfect sense when you consider that we're just shaved apes barely behaving ourselves.

Mortal Kombat (2021)

**½/****
starring Lewis Tan, Jessica McNamee, Tadanobu Asano, Hiroyuki Sanada
screenplay by Greg Russo and Dave Callaham
directed by Simon McQuoid

by Walter Chaw I saw Paul W.S. Anderson's 1995 Mortal Kombat movie on opening night at a two-screen strip-mall theatre in Seattle with my friends Keith, Sam, and Dan. We knew the catchphrases from endless nights playing the game on a Sega Genesis, and we shouted them in jubilant concert like a Catholic callout and response. Since we were also fans of Highlander, the casting of Christopher Lambert as another ageless super-being felt exactly right. We were assholes. It was the best time of our lives. They were my groomsmen when I got married a few years later. Time has scattered us; Sam killed himself a couple of years ago. It all starts feeling like the framing story for Stand by Me. What's left are memories like this, which seem the easiest way now to get a movie project off the ground--a strip-mining of nostalgia that speaks more to a generational experience of loss than to a real paucity of imagination. If it didn't work, it wouldn't keep happening, and our deathless hunger for polyglot mosaics in pursuit of personal white rabbits is symptomatic of our despair.