Film Freak Central

SDAFF '23: In Water

물안에서
Mul-an-e-seo
***/****
starring Ha Seong-guk, Kim Seung-yun, Shin Seokho
written and directed by Hong Sang-soo

by Walter Chaw I've been thinking a lot about my dad lately, It's the time of year when he died, and though I'm terrible with dates, my body seems to remember. I usually think my moods must have something to do with autumn and the change in the weather--but I love the autumn, the smell of rotten leaves, the halo around the moon, the chill. And then I remember. Korean master Hong Sang-soo reminds me of my dad, too. It's how he's so irritatingly self-assured, I think. So mulishly iconoclastic. My dad never really listened to anything anyone else told him. Sometimes that worked out for him; often it didn't. But the path of his life was defiantly his. My dad was learned, extraordinarily well-read in books written in languages I can't read, and tortured. He's been gone twenty years this year. Is it the "china" anniversary for death, as it is for marriage? Are the traditions the same, or do we fail to memorialize loss in the same way? My dad's death is almost old enough to drink. When I was much younger, I would ask him big questions--life, the universe, everything--and he would answer with quotations and philosophies: aphorisms, fables, poems. I don't remember anything about them except that they made me feel frustrated, mocked a little, and left to worry my thoughts alone like a cat with a tail of yarn. And now he's gone.

SDAFF '23: Cobweb

거미집
Geomijip
**½/****
starring Lim Soo-jung, Oh Jung-se, Song Kang-ho
written by Kim Jee-woon, Yeon-Shick Shin
directed by Kim Jee-woon

by Walter Chaw Kim Jee-woon is such a fine technical director that, for a while, the slapdash of his behind-the-scenes, Living in Oblivion insider piece feels like a meticulously orchestrated machine where every piece hits its mark instead of what I think is intended: silly slapstick arising from sloppy improvisation. There might be a path charted for this picture, but it all plays a little like Calvinball. What I like least is how many edits are timed to various shrieks: the last refuge of the desperate and the wayward. Screams of comic frustration, screams of theatrical fear, screams of manufactured ecstasy, screams of the righteous artist at war with a corporate machine trying to grind him down. Such is the plight of Kim (Song Kang-ho), a director labelled as a peddler of pop "content" who, wounded for the last time by a table of smug film critics, rewrites the ending to his latest endlessly-replicable soaper and, swimming upstream, seeks to wring two extra days from a fickle cast under the nose of state regulators suspicious about the sudden change in direction in a state- approved and financed picture. Kim Jee-woon handles the meta, film-within-a-film conceit by shooting Director Kim's magnum opus in Universal Horror black-and-white while leaving his studio-bound escapades in vivid, drawing-room colour. The picture he's making looks to be a Hitchcockian thriller of some kind--a metaphor for the labyrinthine cobweb the truly inspired must navigate in order to realize their vision.

Telluride '23: All of Us Strangers

****/****
starring Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Jamie Bell, Claire Foy
screenplay by Andrew Haigh, based on the novel by Taichi Yamada
directed by Andrew Haigh

by Walter Chaw What if I could? What if I did and they were there, my parents as I remember them when I was 12, and I was not so fixed in time and grief? When I was a child and needed them even though I thought I didn't, but now, as the old man who knows I still do. What if I went to the place where I grew up and rang the bell and they answered it, and I could tell them the things I had done that would make them proud of me? And the things I never could tell them because I was afraid they'd reject me again for everything I could've helped and everything I couldn't. I can see them in the living room. I can see them in the kitchen. What if they, knowing how short the time had gotten, could tell me what was in their hearts so I didn't have to wonder? Was there love there that had hardened? Or had it retreated to an armoured place to protect it from breaking? In Andrew Haigh's All of Us Strangers, a man tells his new lover how something awful happened to him once, but it's okay because it was a long time ago. His lover corrects him: "A long time ago" doesn't matter when you're talking about terrible things. "Oh," the man says, and quieter, "oh."

TIFF '23: Seven Veils

***/****
starring Amanda Seyfried, Rebecca Liddiard, Douglas Smith, Mark O'Brien
written and directed by Atom Egoyan

by Angelo Muredda Atom Egoyan hits his stride again in Seven Veils, a playful and self-reflexive backstage drama about the re-staging of a Canadian Opera Company production of Richard Strauss's Salome, which Egoyan, lover of complicated matryoshka-doll narrative structures and intertextuality, has twice mounted for the same company, first in 1996, then in February of this year. Footage from both of those versions becomes the obscure scene of the crime in the film, where director Jeanine (Amanda Seyfried, reuniting with Egoyan after the underrated Chloe) is in the challenging process of remounting a production previously directed by her mentor and apparent groomer Charles, who integrated cryptic home movies of her ritualistic abuse at the hands of her father into the original work--video elements that, of course, were also foregrounded in Egoyan's stagings of the opera. While Jeanine is wrestling personal and professional demons to get the remounting into shape and dealing with her conservative minders at the COC, who'd rather she discard her aesthetic changes and relegate her incendiary director's note to a blog or a podcast (where, you can almost hear Egoyan snickering, it'll never be heard), props master Clea (Rebecca Liddiard) is documenting her behind-the-scenes work on her humble iPhone, inadvertently capturing another sex crime that makes her both a survivor and a potential power player.

Telluride '23: El Conde

***½/****
starring Alfredo Castro, Catalina Guerra, Paula Luchsinger, Diego Muñoz
written by Guillermo Calderón & Pablo Larraín
directed by Pablo Larrain

by Walter Chaw El Conde is the bitterest of farces: a satire of excess and great evil that uses vampirism as a blunt metaphor for the forces that sap places and entire peoples of their share of a nation's fortunes. Always timely, Chilean director Pablo Larraín turns his attention to his country's last bogey, Augusto Pinochet, who, with the support of the United States government, staged a brutal coup in 1973 and consequently ruled Chile with an iron hand until 1990. Among the disastrous programs initiated by his regime? Abolition of all trade unions--an act that seems specifically pointed, given the millions poured into this project by Netflix. The country's wealth tanked as Pinochet's exploded. At the time of his death in 2006, over 300 criminal charges were left pending against him. Larraín speculates that Pinochet staged his death to avoid continued persecution and is, in fact, a centuries-old vampire who once fed on the blood of Marie Antoinette. The image of a young Frenchman licking her blue blood fresh from the guillotine's blade is, in a tidy nutshell, critique of thaumaturgical contagion: hereditary wealth and power, distilled into the tastes of a vampire so smitten by the tang of royal blood that he steals the Queen's head and keeps it in a jar as a fetish object. When he seduces a young nun in the present day of the film, he first makes her dress up like Antoinette and is dismayed when she shows not just disinterest in the onanistic trophy he uses as a reference for her costume, but actual disgust.

Telluride '23: Fallen Leaves

Kuolleet lehdet
***½/****
starring Alma Pöysti, Jussi Vatanen, Janne Hyytiäinen, Nuppu Koivu
written and directed by Aki Kaurismäki

by Walter Chaw I adore Aki Kaurismäki, the deadpan, live-action Bill Plympton of Finland, who tells his small stories, little romances and tiny tragedies, with a style one might call rigid but that for me plays like the legacy of Fassbinder carried through into our dotage. (Mine and his, had he lived.) Kaurismäki's latest film, Fallen Leaves, reminds me a lot, in fact, of Fassbinder's winsome Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), about a young Tunisian immigrant who falls for an older cleaning lady in West Germany. Its story of star-crossed lovers, separated by culture and generation, race and creed, is presented with the kind of simplicity that's all the more emotionally lacerating for its reserve. Fassbinder's slow, mannered pace allows his actors to find their breath, to expand into the skins of their characters so that we register every minute change in expression, every tightening of the skin by the eye, every roll of the muscle in the jaw when a small slight lands like a blow. Kaurismäki's pictures engage in the same slowing-down, the same understated dialogue, the same complexity of emotion.

Telluride '23: Poor Things

****/****
starring Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef
screenplay by Tony McNamara, based upon the novel by Alasdair Gray
directed by Yorgos Lanthimos

by Walter Chaw Ex Machina by way of Anaïs Nin, Yorgos Lanthimos's Poor Things is a libertine exercise-cum-fable about the hypocrisies of politesse and the occasional eruptions of collective sexual hysteria designed exclusively for shackling women to proverbial bits and millstones. It is the final of three films in 2023 that use Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as a launchpad for progressive genre explorations, locating in the novel's stitched-together creature a fulsome metaphor for the indignities afforded the spirit encased in prisons of rotting flesh. Rather than quibble about the merits of one over the other, watch all three (Bomani J. Story's The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster and Laura Moss's Birth/Rebirth being the other two) in any sequence to witness the unfolding of an extended treatise on gender and racial politics delivered with brio, invention, wicked intelligence, and bracing creative courage. It's possible to make a movie of a lecture, but it's more effective to make dangerous, even experimental, art from which all manner of lecture and examination will eventually be constructed. The former is the province of creators limited by their fear and ignorance, the latter of mad scientists inordinately confident in the ability of their cinematic children to find a way through the rubble of a drowned and ruined world. I don't know that these three films are the best three films of the year, but they're among them, and certainly, they comprise an uncanny trilogy for a period in which the United States has stripped women of their bodily autonomy at the moment of a suspiciously-timed rise in fascist white nationalism and its handmaiden, Puritanism. They're doing it in the open: raising a flag of moral panic waved by Evangelical fucknuts pushing hard for an Apocalypse they hope will consign everyone else on this burning Earth to a damnation born of their perverse, onanistic fetishism.

Telluride '23: Fingernails

½*/****
starring Jessie Buckley, Jeremy Allen White, Riz Ahmed, Luke Wilson
written by Christos Nikou, Stavros Raptis, Sam Steiner
directed by Christos Nikou

by Walter Chaw If you ever wondered what a tuneless Yorgos Lanthimos rip-off would look like, Christos Nikou's Fingernails has your answer. It's lifeless, pointless, idiosyncratic in the basic, formula-bound way non-idiosyncratic people imagine idiosyncrasy to be like, and it staggers around trying to make sense of its internal logic before it's too late--but it's too late. There's no plan here that makes sense, only a high concept that sounded smart one night and a trillion-dollar corporation desperate for something to fill the voracious maw of its content extruder. Fingernails is the stupid-person's version of Dogtooth, substituting an explicitly violent and sexual fable for the dangers of oppressive belief systems with a conspicuous nothing-burger that, not knowing what it's about or how to be about it, is predictably a dumpster fire that thinks it's about the indomitability of love yet in execution is about nothing. The movie has going for it three of the very finest actors working right now in Jessie Buckley, Riz Ahmed, and Jeremy Allen White--and it has going against it a script that feels like a first draft, desperate direction, and a technical presentation that, at least in its festival incarnation, was marred with flaws that exacerbated the impression the film's brand is "undercooked." Everyone deserved better.

After Hours (1985) [The Criterion Collection] - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray Combo

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

****/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Griffin Dunne, Rosanna Arquette, Verna Bloom, Thomas Chong
written by Joseph Minion
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Walter Chaw Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) is an asshole. Let's get that out of the way. He's doing a shitty, half-assed job of training the new guy, Lloyd (Bronson Pinchot), in his daytime cubicle hell when Lloyd confesses that his dream isn't mastering the antiquated data-entry system at their non-descript job, but to start a publication where struggling writers might find an outlet for their work. Paul doesn't bother hiding his...not disdain, but complete disinterest in what Lloyd's saying, finding himself distracted by the romance of sheaves of financial documents being moved from one desk to another before standing up and walking away. Paul is detestable. He is The Company rep Carter Burke (Paul Reiser) from the next year's Aliens, the prototypical yuppie who shows up for a late-night booty call with a stranger in Soho wearing dress pants and a button-down shirt and tie. He is the American Psycho. Paul could give a shit about the voice of the oppressed looking for a creative outlet to contribute to the collective pool of art. He's all about numbers. He is the reincarnation of North by Northwest's unctuous, mercurial ad-man Roger O. Thornhill, whose monogram is "ROT." (The "O" stands for "nothing.") After Hours, much like North by Northwest, becomes a nightmare of commodification in which numbers are the source of dehumanization and disassociation. The only reason we really like Paul at all is that we can empathize with his desire to go to bed with 1985 Rosanna Arquette.

The Truman Show (1998) [25th Anniversary] - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

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

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Jim Carrey, Laura Linney, Noah Emmerich, Ed Harris
written by Andrew Niccol
directed by Peter Weir

by Walter Chaw The Truman Show appeared during a period when we were taking a hard look at how quickly and thoroughly we had given our lives over to technology, bracing for the Y2K bug to drop airplanes out of the sky and launch nuclear arsenals. The cruel irony of successfully averting disaster is that the morning after, having learned nothing, we redoubled our efforts to sell ourselves to our things. Introspection is like a nightmare upon waking: If it doesn't disappear on its own, you do your best to wave it away. Orwell's 1984 didn't predict how we pay subscriptions for the right to be surveilled constantly, every detail of our lives documented surreptitiously for corporate information harvesters and publicly through social media, where we manufacture the best versions of ourselves to entertain, and shame, others. We line up around city blocks for the right to plant the world's most sophisticated tracking devices on ourselves; there is a fundamental, exploitable flaw in our programming. We overestimated the extent to which we desired anonymity, underestimated our longing to matter and our vulnerability to flattery. Our will to power through influence, evolutionarily favoured, is the suicide pill encoded into our hardware. In our pursuit of a self to proliferate, technology allowed us to redraft our image and curate our environments. The films at the end of the millennium--Pleasantville, Dark City, The Matrix, and The Thirteenth Floor, to name a few--are warnings about what happens when we project our subjectivity upon the world. Perhaps none cautioned more definitively than Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman's Being John Malkovich, which has the balls to literalize the horror of living among undifferentiated versions of the self in a simulation of the outside that is merely an interpretation of an eternity of insides.

Boston Underground Film Festival '23: Spaghetti Junction

*/****
starring Cate Hughes, Cam McHarg, Eleanore Miechkowksi, Tyler Rainey
written and directed by Kirby McClure

The Boston Underground Film Festival runs from March 22-March 26, 2023. Click here for more info.

by Walter Chaw A spirited, earnest, decidedly kitchen-sink pastiche of John Carpenter's Starman, Kirby McClure's Spaghetti Junction sports a game cast engaged in a scattershot project too distracted to land. I found it to be a lot like talking to someone on cocaine. Which is to say, I don't think it's about nothing, only that whatever it's focused on for a moment is the most important thing there ever was--but then the moment passes, supplanted by the actual most important thing there ever was. You can follow it, but I'm not convinced the juice is worth the squeeze. Recent amputee August (Cate Hughes), trying not to be a burden to struggling single-dad Dave (Cameron McHarg), is doing her best to get along with rebellious older sister Shiny (Eleanore Miechkowski). Dad wants Shiny to take August with her everywhere, but Shiny just wants to be alone with her loser boyfriend, Antonio (Jesse Gallegos). Though Dad's motivated by guilt over the car accident that took August's foot, August is eager to move on with mastering her prosthetic and trying to be seen whole... At least, that's what I think is motivating her. As Spaghetti Junction doesn't really articulate the point, I wonder if it was avoided on purpose. Bolstering the read of this as a disability melodrama, Antonio does call August a "cripple" out of frustration at her being a persistent cockblock, but she's not there to hear it and Shiny doesn't object, so...whatever you take from the disability subplot of the film, if there is one, depends on whatever inference you're willing to make from the information provided.

Boston Underground Film Festival '23: Nightsiren

The Nightsiren
***½/****
starring Eva Mores, Iva Bittová, Jana Oľhová, Juliana Oľhová, Natalia Germani
written by Barbora Namerova, Tereza Nvotová
directed by Tereza Nvotová

The Boston Underground Film Festival runs from March 22-March 26, 2023. Click here for more info.

by Walter Chaw Tereza Nvotová's Slovakian folk horror Nightsiren joins films like Robert Eggers's The Witch (2015), Lukas Feigelfeld's Hagazussa: A Heathen's Tale (2017), Igor Legarreta's All the Moons (2020), and Goran Stolevki's You Won't Be Alone (2022): gynocentric celebrations of the power of women and the lengths to which patriarchal social systems seek, and have always sought, to suppress it. A glance at the Republican docket in the year of their asshole of a lord, 2023, finds it full of extraordinary, unseemly interest in women's bodies--their reproductive capacity, their allure to troglodytes raised to see women as objects to be owned and mastered, their perceived unfitness in a world most-of-the-way destroyed by the jealous rule of "qualified" men. What these films have in common besides a woman as their centre are the overlapping, parallel superstitions of a range of countries, each fabricated as pretense (and then codified into law) to injure women: socially, physically, mortally if necessary. What's different about Nightsiren is how the cries of "witch," the public excoriations and publicly-sanctioned mortifications, happen in the present--in the wilds of a modern Slovakia that feels ancient for its remoteness but eternal for the extent to which "difficult" women are blamed for the plague and end times promulgated by the bestial cupidity of men. Dress it up however you like, but we've only evolved the ways we pretend at civilization--and even then, not much, and not consistently. Is it progress that we've essentially stopped pretending? We are only shaved apes, so we act accordingly.

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.

White Noise (2022)

*½/****
starring Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle, Raffey Cassidy
written by Noah Baumbach, based on the book by Don DeLillo
directed by Noah Baumbach

by Angelo Muredda "Everything was fine, everything would continue to be fine, would eventually get better, so long as the supermarket did not slip," says professor Jack Gladney midway through White Noise, Don DeLillo's satire of contemporary middle-class American family life tested by catastrophe. DeLillo's protagonist is marvelling at the grocery store's capacity to endure unaffected in the face of a transient disaster that's hit his charming town, impressed by how the so-called "airborne toxic event" that's blown through (and now over) his community has, if anything, only enhanced the store's unnaturally perfect wares, which always seem in-season no matter the time of year. He could just as well be marvelling at the elasticity of DeLillo's novel, which holds up in the face of the ongoing global catastrophe it prefigures in many ways, a pandemic that briefly forced westerners to interrogate their insulation from the kind of suffering they normally watch on television.

Babylon (2022)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Diego Calva, Jean Smart
written and directed by Damien Chazelle

by Walter Chaw If it were only vile, only repulsive, it still would have been a disaster lacking insight and honesty, but at least it wouldn't also be afflicted with bathetic false modesty wet down with spasms of cheap sentiment. Damien Chazelle's back to his old tricks, in other words, with Babylon, a "love letter" to the end of the silent era in Hollywood presented with a child's understanding of history, obviously, not to mention human relationships, aspirations, behaviour, everything. It's a stroke fantasy made by a 13-year-old boy, meaning it's soaked in excreta without much evidence of anything like experience animating it--the movie made by the antagonist of Monty Python's "Nudge Nudge" bit, who, at the end of 10 minutes of naughty entendre, wonders rapturously what it might be like to touch a woman's breast. I loved Chazelle's last film, First Man: Sober and introspective, it found the soulfulness in an engineer's deadening grief over the loss of a child. His other three films, this one included, are a trilogy of desperation to be taken seriously as a great auteur, a great historian of jazz and Hollywood, and an artiste of the first calibre. Alas, he doesn't know the difference between being celebrated for his worst instincts versus fighting for his best ones. At the end of Whiplash, La La Land, and now Babylon, the only thing he's successfully communicated is that he's seen Singin' in the Rain, if not entirely understood it. It should take less than eight hours to accomplish that.

SDAFF '22: The Fish Tale + Stellar: A Magical Ride

Sakana no Ko
½*/****
starring Hayato Isomura, Kaho, Non, Yuya Yagira
written by Shirô Maeda, Shûichi Okita, Sakana-Kun
directed by Shûichi Okita

STELLAR: A MAGICAL RIDE
**/****
starring Heo Sung-tae, Lee Kyu-hyung, Son Ho-jun
written by Bae Se-yeong
directed by Kwon Soo-kyung

by Walter Chaw Sakana-kun lands somewhere between a Temple Grandin for fish and, oh, let's say a Bill Nye the Science Guy for, uh, fish. A Japanese television/YouTube personality, an illustrator (of fish), an honorary professor of fish and a national ichthyologist who is sometimes asked to testify at Japan's House of Councilors committee sessions about the importance of assuming a piscine point of view in matters of environmental importance, Sakana-kun--whose name means "Mr. Fish," leading me to suspect it's maybe not his real name--is a cultural curiosity who trafficks in Japan's peculiar penchant for extreme, aggressive, borderline-hostile slapstick adorable. I have no doubt he's well-intentioned and useful in a Crocodile Hunter sort of way, an ambassador for the wild kingdom who, if The Fish Tale, a film based loosely on his autobiography, is to be believed, has turned his profound neurodivergence into a profession. (Join the club, Sakana-kun, amiright?) I do wonder about a couple of things in regards to The Fish Tale, though: first, the way neurodivergence is made into a fairytale Forrest Gump-ian superpower that deflects aggressions micro- or otherwise; second, how the picture casts a woman, model/singer Non, as Sakana-kun (named Mibou in the film), which feels like an attempt to further exoticize our hero by making his gender itself a challenge to the normals. I will say that as a member of a minority in the United States with its own set of specific challenges, one thing I understand to be universal amongst minorities is the desire to be considered neither exceptional nor deficient: the Goldilocks mean of not superhuman, not inhuman, just merely human.

SDAFF '22: No Bears

****/****
starring Naser Hashemi, Reza Heydari, Mina Kavani, Bülent Keser
written and directed by Jafar Panahi

by Walter Chaw Jafar Panahi's No Bears is about imprisonment--a topic near and dear to the Iranian filmmaker's heart, as he has been, and is currently, a prisoner at the discretion of Iran's fascist government. First sentenced to six years in prison in 2010 for making films critical of the regime (a conviction that included a 20-year ban on filmmaking of any kind), Panahi spent that time under house arrest but was finally physically imprisoned in July of 2022 for raising a fuss on behalf of director and fellow prisoner-of-conscience Mohammad Rasoulof. Through clever subterfuge, Panahi has continued to direct new movies during his ban, of course--good ones, perhaps none so good as his latest, in which he plays himself, looking for a little peace and a wifi signal in a remote border town. He's directing a film by proxy, watching from his laptop as his AD, Reza (Reza Heydari), listens to his instructions regarding blocking, camera, even performance, transmitted across a physical and emotional distance through Reza's earbuds. "It's not the same without you," Reza tells Panahi; the energy is off with Panahi working through a surrogate. He can't pinpoint how, exactly, and Panahi, as he portrays himself, isn't one to make an awkward situation more comfortable. He listens more than he speaks. He waits for people to finish, then gives them an extra couple of seconds to regret what they've said. I've seen Werner Herzog do this in his documentaries, too--letting the camera run long past the point at which decorum would dictate relief from scrutiny. Panahi now lives under constant surveillance, after all, so why should any of his subjects suffer less?

Brooklyn Horror Film Festival '22: All Jacked Up and Full of Worms

*/****
starring Phillip Andre Botello, Sammy Arechar, Betsey Brown, Trevor Dawkins
written and directed by Alex Phillips

by Walter Chaw A sub-, sub-, sub-genre of exploitation flicks--stuff like Jim Hosking's The Greasy Strangler--has cropped up seemingly out of nowhere in mainstream-adjacent spaces where it appears the only aim, or goal, is provocation. I watched The Greasy Strangler with irritation and impatience until a scene in which two characters shrieked "potato chips" at each other in incomprehensible accents broke me into helpless hysterics. I don't know if it's funny or its full-throated dedication to battering all defenses finally just worked. For what it's worth, the movie went back to being irritating and trying for me almost immediately. I have a different response to Jackass, a chaos agent provocateur that ultimately strikes at the heart of some real and touching truths about not necessarily healthy male relationships, but possibly the healthiest most male relationships are allowed to be. Nevertheless, there are similarities between stuff like it and The Greasy Strangler. Both proceed because there must be something that is next, not because there is a narrative that demands it or characters with motivations leading organically to another sequence. In that way, these films are not unlike life in all its arbitrary bullshit and oft-times malignant-seeming causes and potentially tragicomic effects. Exaggerating random vicissitudes as filtered through sentient existence could conceivably be considered satire at best or, you know, knowledge of some kind that might prove useful in providing perspective to those looking for meaning and structure in the universe. What I have trouble with is how often this stuff feels like the parts of Kevin Smith films--which is all of Kevin Smith's films now--that are puerile and embarrassing. Feature-length shit-monsters from Dogma.

TIFF '22: EO

***½/****
starring Sandra Drzymalska, Lorenzo Zurzolo, Mateusz Kościukiewicz, Isabelle Huppert
written by Ewa Piaskowska, Jerzy Skolimowski
directed by Jerzy Skolimowski

by Angelo Muredda A donkey meets the dregs of human civilization and comes out worse for wear in Jerzy Skolimowski's EO, a sometimes whimsical but ultimately gnarly animal-rights fable that earns its righteous closing exhortation against the factory-farming industry and anyone who tacitly endorses it by eating meat. Though thematically indebted to animal odysseys as disparate as Au Hasard Balthazar, The Incredible Journey, and War Horse, EO is at once more formally adventurous in its endlessly roving camera and psychedelic set-pieces and more dispiriting than even the Bressonian incarnation of this subgenre, ultimately coming off like a noble beast's ground-level vision of the horrors of Come and See.

Crimes of the Future (2022)

****/****
starring Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, Kristen Stewart, Scott Speedman
written and directed by David Cronenberg

by Angelo Muredda "It's not a completely bad feeling, at least not uninteresting," muses performance artist Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) about his scratchy throat during a quiet moment in David Cronenberg's career-capping Crimes of the Future, a tender affair about listening to and affirming one's aging, sick, and mutable body--contrary to all the pre-hype about walkouts and the director's supposed return to his grimy horror roots. Saul lives with a radical disease called Accelerated Evolution Syndrome, which causes him to rapidly spawn superfluous organs. Surgical and life partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux) removes them on stage in underground live shows that fall somewhere between medical procedures you might gawk at on YouTube and ecstatic religious ceremonies. Saul is a full partner in these sensual spectacles, writhing in an open sarcophagus while Caprice mythologizes his new developments like a curator at a Francis Bacon show. Here, though, Saul is simply taking the opportunity to mind the sensations produced by his latest corporeal work of art, noting his symptoms with the observational humour and delicacy of previous Cronenberg protagonists who double as archivists of their changing forms. It's a trait common not just to scientists spliced with houseflies but to most people living with chronic illnesses.

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 Tragedy of Macbeth (2021)

***½/****
starring Denzel Washington, Frances McDormand, Bertie Carvel, Brendan Gleeson
written for the screen and directed by Joel Coen

by Walter Chaw The Tragedy of Macbeth is a middle-aged lament of the childless, a haunted interpretation of Shakespeare that underscores my belief that the Coen Brothers--in this case, just Joel--are/is among our finest literary critics. Their O Brother, Where Art Thou? unpacks The Odyssey as a collection of regional tales and songs; their adaptations of No Country for Old Men and True Grit demonstrate a deep understanding of not merely the specific works being adapted, but Cormac McCarthy's and Charles Portis's entire bodies of work as well. The Big Lebowski, needless to say, is a brilliant and essential take on Chandler's The Big Sleep. That their planned adaptation of James Dickey's To the White Sea with Brad Pitt hasn't happened yet and doesn't look like it ever will is a genuine tragedy. (The relative failure of their Ladykillers remake suggests this skill may be limited to the transmutation between mediums.) For his solo debut, Joel Coen has taken a German Expressionistic approach, leaning heavily into long shadows and aestheticism that feels like mourning. The film falls somewhere between the mysticism of Kurosawa's Throne of Blood and Orson Welles's incantatory 1948 Macbeth, though it's less wild and windswept than either, reminding in this way of how steeped in superstition and the supernatural was Shakespeare--and how raw, even stripped down, the Scottish Play seems in comparison to the Bard's other histories.

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.

TIFF '21: Earwig + Night Raiders

EARWIG
***½/****
starring Paul Hilton, Romola Garai, Alex Lawther, Romane Hemelaers
written by Lucile Hadžihalilović & Geoff Cox
directed by Lucile Hadžhalilović

NIGHT RAIDERS
***/****
starring Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers, Brooklyn Letexier-Hart, Gail Maurice, Amanda Plummer
written and directed by Danis Goulet

by Angelo Muredda Parenting and being looked after are the stuff of nightmares in Lucile Hadžhalilović's genuinely creepy curio Earwig, which is as visually and aurally arresting as it is inscrutable. A cryptic dance between a man named Albert (Paul Hilton) and his ten-year-old charge, Mia (Romane Hemelaers), the film charts their ritualistic and mostly unspoken interactions in a dingy apartment, making us tense witnesses to an unexplained paternal science experiment conducted under the all-seeing eye of a supervisor who phones in his instructions from offscreen, apparently to prepare the girl for whatever is lying in wait for her. That's about all we know, though Hadžhalilović skillfully hangs this threadbare plot on indelible images while evoking our primitive stirrings of anxiety for the future. No small feat, given how little dialogue there is.

Telluride '21: Spencer

***½/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Sean Harris, Amy Manson, Sally Hawkins
written by Steven Knight
directed by Pablo Larrain

by Walter Chaw The last 12 minutes or so of Derek Jarman's excoriating, experimental The Last of England is just Tilda Swinton armed with garden shears, framed against a stark background, ripping through her wedding dress in a rapture of rage--a resounding rejection (or a prophecy of the inevitable fall) of the tradition and ritual, the future and hope, that marriages represent. The whole film is scenes of atrocity and decay intercut with home movies of the child this bride was, the couple this bride is a part of, and the calamity of the union into which society has forced her, culminating in this exorcism of these ties that bind. It's one of the great exits in Jarman, and The Last of England's afterimage is all over Pablo Larrain's impressionistic Spencer, a biography of three miserable days, from Christmas Eve to Boxing Day, at the end of Princess Diana's tenure. It seeps through especially in a sequence where Diana (Kristen Stewart) dances by herself down the empty halls of Sandringham, an act of rebelling against the norms and controls imposed on her by the misfortune of her station. The scene would play perfectly against the mute wanderings of a grief-stricken Jackie Onassis in Larrain's previous examination of a woman encased--and left adrift--in a patriarchal system of power and exchange, Jackie. They are complementary portraits of the suffocation of empire. Both can be unpacked by Jarman's takedown of Thatcher's England, and all three left me a mess.

Fantasia Festival '21: Hotel Poseidon

****/****
starring Ruth Becquart, Steve Geerts, Anneke Sluiters, Tine Van den Wyngaert
written and directed by Stef Lernous

by Walter Chaw An art director's fever dream, Stef Lernous's Hotel Poseidon is a sequel in spirit to Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro's Delicatessen and a film that would comfortably complete a trilogy with Jeunet & Caro's City of Lost Children. Here, Lernous says that we're all the product of our shadows, those unexamined parts of us shoved into the crannies of our unconscious, and he packs every frame with florid, fulsome, grotesque manifestations of this idea, which is matched by a genuinely exciting dedication to going for it. It's not unlike a David Lynch film in that way, and like Lynch's work, its unpredictability and willingness to do anything make it both very funny and occasionally existentially horrifying. Sometimes in the same moment. Hotel Poseidon is set in a single building bathed in a sickly sepia palette and suffused with themes of submersion. It follows a vignette structure of sorts that finds a different psychodrama, a different element of the subconscious, played out in each room of a decaying apartment hotel. The film is a tour through the unconscious--a Being John Malkovich or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in which each new horror plumbs personal depths of grief, guilt, and shame most of all. (Its closest analogue may actually be Barton Fink.) Hotel Poseidon, in other words, is difficult to describe.

Fantasia Festival '21: Giving Birth to a Butterfly

*/****
starring Gus Birney, Annie Parisse, Paul Sparks, Judith Roberts
written by Patrick Lawler & Theodore Schaefer
directed by Theodor Schaefer

Fantasia Festival runs from August 5 to August 25, 2021. For more details, visit their website.

by Walter Chaw Theodore Schaefer's Giving Birth to a Butterfly is in love with doubling and other broad metaphors deployed to speak, Kieslowski-like, to the winsome possibilities of unlived lives. Trapped in a loveless marriage with oaf Daryl (Paul Sparks), Diane (Annie Parisse) is mother to wry Danielle (Rachel Resheff) and a dreamer of a boy (Owen Campbell) who has just brought home a girlfriend, Marlene (Gus Birney), pregnant by another. Marlene needs a place to stay, and against Diane's wishes, everyone's planning to impose Marlene upon Diane's household. It's weird, you know, because Marlene doesn't even seem to want to be there. That's the essential premise of Giving Birth to a Butterfly: that women aren't in charge of their own fate--ever, but particularly when they're in the process of expressing their biology. That is, when they're mothers. The best part of this film is the first part establishing a tense family dynamic, with Diane maybe the only adult in the room. The men and the pre-motherhood teen girl are silly and unmoored to the cold realities of existence.

Siberia (2020) - Blu-ray + Digital

****/**** Image A Sound A
starring Willem Dafoe, Dounia Sichov, Simon McBurney, Christina Chiriac
screenplay by Abel Ferrara and Christ Zois
directed by Abel Ferrara

by Walter Chaw I had a dream when I was very young. A fever dream, while tangled in my parents' bed sheets, delirious and afraid, soaked and burning. I bore horrified witness to a line of bald monks stretching into an impossible black, all awaiting their execution by beheading and various other cranial offenses. I couldn't make out the executioner. I wondered why my parents couldn't see what I was seeing, and in my confusion, I didn't know if they were angry with me or lying to me. Abel Ferrara's Siberia has somehow manifested this fever dream of mine in a sequence where its ex-pat protagonist, the Jack London-ian Clint (Willem Dafoe), rides a dog team through the arctic on his way to a cave carved into the side of a jagged rockface. He passes a village in the midst of some sort of violent cleansing where gunmen force a group of men, naked and bald, into the cold to be executed, one after the other. When I had my hallucination as a child, I couldn't have been more than five or six. I had never, at that point in my life, actually seen a monk. When I finally did, some years later, I felt as though I'd already borne witness to their martyrdom. When you first read Carl Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections, you're confronted with two beginnings--two approaches to what is one of the most profound works of self-examination in the history of Western thought. The first is in the prologue, the next in the first chapter (called "First Years"). In the prologue, Jung writes:

Sundance '21: Strawberry Mansion

****/****
starring Penny Fuller, Kentucker Audley, Grace Glowicki, Reed Birney
written and directed by Albert Birney & Kentucker Audley

by Walter Chaw Strawberry Mansion is very much like a live-action "Adventure Time", perhaps doomed, like Pendleton Ward's existentialist/surrealist masterpiece, to a long road to appreciation as something emotionally incisive rather than something especially but merely unconventional. Of all the antecedents it boasts (add eXistenZ, Alphaville, Tom Schiller's Nothing Lasts Forever, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Douglas Adams's work, and, um, Laura to the mix), however, Strawberry Mansion finally reminds me most of the Oliver Stone-produced miniseries "Wild Palms" in both its literal execution and the low thrum of underlying paranoia about the commodification of dream sleep. The danger is great that a stew as heady as this will be ponderous at best, indecipherable at worst, but it's delivered with a confident, even light touch by co-writers/co-directors Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney. As odd as it seems on the surface, the picture, again like "Adventure Time", has easy-to-argue themes and is guided by what feels like real, cathartic pathos. Strawberry Mansion's aggressive artifice actually enhances its emotional authenticity. I love this film.

Sundance '21: Cryptozoo

*/****
written and directed by Dash Shaw

by Walter Chaw I rail a lot about how animation is a genre in the United States instead of a medium, how the Japanese have it all figured out and we Americans are at least a generation behind. Now here's graphic novelist turned animator Dash Shaw, following up his better--or at least more focused--My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea with the oddly blissed-out eco-adventure flick Cryptozoo. What's clear is that this, more than his previous stuff, is an attempt to ape Japanese director Ujicha's hand-drawn nightmare/cutout style from stuff like the indelible The Burning Buddha Man and Violence Voyager. What Shaw hasn't successfully ported over is Ujicha's kineticism--that sense of propulsive, compulsive, nightmarish energy that confers upon his films a weird, repulsive energy. Watching Ujicha's films is like accidentally touching a sea cucumber. I reached into an opaque bag of Wonder Bread that I found in a cabin once and drew back, in revulsion, a hand covered in bright green slime. That's Ujicha. Cryptozoo is a movie that feels like it was based on one of the breathless stories Juliet and Pauline would have made up over a lazy summer's day in Heavenly Creatures. Just a long string of terribly important things tied together by "and then and then and this and also this" narrative exposition.

Sundance '21: The Pink Cloud

A Nuvem Rosa
***½/****
starring Renata de Lélis, Eduardo Mendonça, Helena Becker, Girley Paes
written and directed by Iuli Gerbase

by Walter Chaw Iuli Gerbase's stunning feature debut The Pink Cloud owes a great deal to the insular psychodramas of J.G. Ballard, landing somewhere in the vicinity of a more specific High Rise in which the fall of society is focused through the decay of a relationship forged in quarantine. It works best as allegory, allying itself with something like Lorcan Finnegan's recent and similarly-pre-pandemic Vivarium, using science-fiction as a launch point to test the tensile strength of the tenterhooks tethering us to one another. The details of the corruption matter less than how we change when our environment changes--or, more specifically, how we fail to.

I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020) - Netflix

****/****
starring Jesse Plemons, Jessie Buckley, Toni Collette, David Thewlis
screenplay by Charlie Kaufman, based on the novel by Iain Reid
directed by Charlie Kaufman

by Walter Chaw The thing I say about Charlie Kaufman films is that I never really understand them, but they always seem to understand me. I suppose there are many ways to unpack his work, but it always only means one thing to me, and I wish I could articulate what that one thing is. If I were able to, I would know something important. Then I wonder if I don't know it already, and I'm just protecting myself from articulating it because the thing that is important to know is also very painful to know. I'm Thinking of Ending Things tells me what it's about when Jake (Jesse Plemons), on an interminable drive home to the family farm with his girlfriend Lucy (Jessie Buckley), tries in vain to recite the first few lines of Wordsworth's Immortality Ode. Lucy interrupts him as he starts to make fun of the long title ("Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood"), asking if he's sure that's not the body of the poem and generally souring the atmosphere enough that Jake gives up. The first lines of the Immortality Ode are:

Requiem for a Dream (2000) [Director's Cut] - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

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

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Ellen Burstyn, Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly, Marlon Wayans
screenplay by Hubert Selby Jr. and Darren Aronofsky, based upon the book by Selby Jr.
directed by Darren Aronofsky

by Bryant Frazer Few films are anywhere near as well made--as fierce and committed--as Requiem for a Dream, which stands as a 20-year-old landmark in an especially fertile era of New York indie filmmaking and one of the most expertly executed feel-bad narratives in the history of popular culture. Darren Aronofsky is a hell of a director, but he's always been a little, well, intense for my taste. He's got vision and passion to spare, and he clearly inspires dedication and devotion from his actors, yet I always feel there's something critical missing from the films themselves. If π is David Lynch without an angle on the truly bizarre and Black Swan is David Cronenberg without the painful psychological acuity, then Requiem for a Dream is John Waters without the sense of humour. I know Waters is friendly with Aronofsky, but imagining him watching this in a dark theatre and positively cackling at its most painfully outré gambits is what helps get me through its pitiless final act.

Possessor (2020) + Freaky (2020)

Possessor Uncut
****/****
starring Christopher Abbott, Andrea Riseborough, Rossif Sutherland, Jennifer Jason Leigh
written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg

FREAKY
**½/****
starring Vince Vaughn, Kathryn Newton, Katie Finnernan, Alan Ruck
written by Michael Kennedy & Christopher Landon
directed by Christopher Landon

Please take every precaution if you insist on risking your health and that of others to see Freaky in a theatre. Wear a mask (over the nose, too, sport), practise social distancing, and don't be a dick.

by Walter Chaw "You've gone strange on me," Ava (Tuppence Middleton) says to her boyfriend Colin (Christopher Abbott) one morning when he, frisky in the kitchen, reacts to her rejection of his advances with an expression that's impossible to read. Colin has gone strange. He really isn't himself. Ava is the daughter of a wealthy and powerful man, John Parse (Sean Bean), who has earned wealthy and powerful enemies, and though he's surrounded himself with all of the things wealth can buy, including a reasonable level of separation from the rabble, he's vulnerable to the mistakes he's made as the bad father he knows himself to be. I appreciate that his name derives from a word meaning "parts" or, colloquially, a deconstruction of a whole into the small, individual components of which it is composed. Brandon Cronenberg's Possessor has both nothing and everything to do with Ava and John and Colin; it is a multitude I haven't been able to shake for days, and so I watched Possessor a second time to try to exorcise it from me. I don't think it worked. Time will tell. Possessor is a science-fiction film the way Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a science-fiction film, and a horror movie the way Philip Kaufman's Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a horror movie, but what it most resembles is Kathryn Bigelow's nightmare chimera of the two, Strange Days. All of these movies make you sick (heartsick, soulsick, sick-sick), but Possessor has about it the massive, impersonal nihilism of Philip K. Dick. We are cogs in a machine, and the machine is broken. But also it never worked in the first place. The picture is a true fable of our deconstruction.

Blow-Up (1966) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

Blowup
****/**** Image B Sound A Extras A
starring Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles, David Hemmings, John Castle
screenplay by Michelangelo Antonioni and Tonino Guerra (English dialogue in collaboration with Edward Bond), inspired by a short story by Julio Cortazar
directed by Michelangelo Antonioni

by Walter Chaw Michelango Antonioni's Blowup, when it appeared at the end of 1966, marked the confluence of a great many cultural throughlines. Sanctified by the grace of a long theatrical run on the rep circuit in the United States, it all but ensured (with an assist from Mike Nichols's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and that film's gleeful use of the term "hump the hostess") the final death of the antiquated Production Code when audiences disregarded the promise of eternal hellfire and went to see the damn thing anyway. There were other foreign arthouse sensations before it, of course (notably Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, with which Blowup shares some surface similarity), but it was Blowup that felt like the revolutionary bellwether for the rise of the foreign arthouse as something of a genre unto itself. The picture's success was of a moment with the peak of the British Mod period and right there with the birth of America's version of it: namely, the Summer of Love and the concurrent season of assassination. We never quite recovered from that whiplash between love and death. Similarly, film language has never recovered from the teleological disruption of Blowup.

A Matter of Life and Death (1946) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

Stairway to Heaven
****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A
starring David Niven, Roger Livesey, Raymond Massey, Kim Hunter
written and directed by Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger

by Walter Chaw Watching 1946's A Matter of Life and Death while the end of the American experiment is upon us is an amazingly painful thing. The film was conceived in part by hyphenates Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger as a way of cementing the postwar British-American alliance. Accordingly, it ends with a trial in which the United States is celebrated as an inspirational model: a paragon of idealism, humanism, truth. If it ever was those things, it isn't any of them today. The scales have fallen from my eyes, and the movie now plays as an elegy for everything we've lost since 1946--for everything I've lost as I bid goodbye to what remains of my innocence and my optimism that there's anything left in this country that resembles what I had been raised to believe about it. We are divided, hateful, unhealthy, selfish, stupid, and brutal. There's a line from Graham Baker's underestimated Alien Nation I think of often nowadays. Alien immigrant Sam Francisco (Mandy Patinkin), drunk one night, tells his human friend:

Sundance '20: Luxor

***/****
starring Andrea Riseborough, Karim Saleh, Michael Landes, Sherine Reda
written and directed by Zeina Durra

by Walter Chaw In Zeina Durra's Luxor, Andrea Riseborough plays Hana, a British surgeon in Luxor, Egypt on a short leave between horrific assignments first in devastated Syria, then in Yemen. She's shell-shocked, it's clear. She spends her days wandering through the ancient city and allows herself one night to be picked up in her hotel's bar by an unctuous Yank throwing his money around. She lies in her hotel room for hours, trying to nap, and when she does sleep, she wakes to find herself another day closer to some sort of hell. Durra captures her listlessness as a feeling ineffable of being lost but never lost enough. Hana sits by herself at the far left end of a park bench, arms folded across her chest and a baseball cap pulled down low over her stunned expression. She visits a pyramid one day, just another tourist, and overhears a tour guide giving the yokels a taste of the gravid mysticism they're paying for. It all lands as empty for Hana. Hana, who doesn't have anything left inside after all this time bearing witness to the absence of God.

Sundance '20: This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection

***/****
starring Mary Twala Mhlongo, Jerry Mofokeng Wa Makheta, Makhaola Ndebele, Tseko Monaheng
written and directed by Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese

by Walter Chaw In Lesothan hyphenate Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese's debut film This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection (hereafter Burial/Resurrection), the fate of a village, soon to be drowned as a casualty of a government dam project, weighs heavily on elderly widow Mantoa (Mary Twala Mhlongo). Mantoa's striking visage suggests an octogenarian Beckett photographed by Jane Bown, perhaps, the lines on her face describing a road map of the places she's been. Her sorrows include a lost husband, child, and brother--to a mining accident, illness, and misadventure, respectively. The one thing tethering her to the ground is the village's cemetery, where all her hopes are interred. The film's introduction, a slow crawl through what vibes as a jazz club as an old man (Jerry Mofokeng Wa Makhetha) sits playing his Sotho lesiba (which makes music that sounds a little like a dirty-water trombone) in counterpoint to his slam poetry-like incantatory recitation of the movie's themes, the whole of it working like nothing more than a grand invocation to the muse. Burial/Resurrection is film as epic poem, and it has moments of truly staggering power. Power it only really loses when it cuts too quickly, cleanly, back to the narrative of the film itself. What would it have been like had it leaned harder into being a stream of images?

In Fabric (2019)

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

True Stories (1986) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
starring John Goodman, Annie McEnroe, Jo Harvey Allen, Swoosie Kurtz
written by Stephen Tobolowsky & Beth Henley and David Byrne
directed by David Byrne

by Sydney Wegner For as long as I can remember, Talking Heads have been my favourite band. They provided the soundtrack to road trips and living-room dance parties; theirs were the cassettes in my first Walkman and my first car. Among the weird stuff my brother and I cycled through during our blessed hours in front of the TV was a VHS collection of their music videos, which we must have played a thousand times. And then there was True Stories, a special favourite, something we never got sick of. I grew up in Austin but lived about ten miles from the centre of town. Our house was on an acre of land surrounded by untamed woods; we spent our time riding bikes and climbing oak trees and rolling in mud. It felt like we grew up in a small rural town, and those first 12 years of my life formed my idea of Texas. Some of my favourite memories are from road trips to visit my grandparents in San Antonio and summers spent camping our way to New Mexico and Arizona, driving for hours through land where the only evidence of civilization was the road we were on. As an adult, when I visited Utah I thought the mountains might fall and crush me. In Washington, the trees formed a picturesque prison. Only in Texas can I breathe. It's a place where the world feels so big and flat that I can almost sense myself hanging onto the edge of the earth. What enchanted me about True Stories so much as a child is, of course, its music and its humour, but also that it captured this openness in a way that felt comforting and beautiful, very much unlike the desolate wasteland Texas appears to be in so many other movies about the state. Sometimes I wonder if it confirmed the Texas I already knew, or helped shape it for me. It never seemed like a coincidence that True Stories was released the same year I was born.

Phenomena (1985) - Blu-ray Disc

Phenomena (Integral Cut) ***/****
Phenomena (International Cut) ***/****
Creepers ***½/****
Image A Sound B+ Extras A+
starring Jennifer Connelly, Daria Nicolodi, Dalila Di Lazzaro, Donald Pleasence
written by Dario Argento, Franco Ferrini
directed by Dario Argento

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. There's an extraordinary quality of dreams attached to Dario Argento's Phenomena. It's the mist that diffuses the light, the sudden foehn windstorms that whip up the trees at night, the logic that links scenes together by theme as opposed to narrative. It's a naturally beautiful film, its photography of "Swiss Transylvania" almost aggressively lush and somewhat at odds with Argento's reputation for extreme, some would say forced, artificiality. I would argue that the way nature is shot in this film is so hyperreal it's actually as surreal as the constructed mindscapes of his more obviously surreal work. Whatever the case, that's not the only expectation Phenomena upends, as, continuing from Tenebrae, the auteur seems to be working out what he's described as a terrible experience (the production of Inferno) and dealing with the fallout and expectations afterwards. Indeed, by all reports, Argento was unusually energized and enthusiastic about this project, and that invention, lawless and largely lacking in any sort of guardrails, is obvious and bracing--even as he, at this point in his career, relies perhaps overmuch on recycling his greatest hits. Still, early on, he has a young woman stand in a classroom to declare "screw the past," which plays as something of a punk mission statement for the singular Phenomena.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

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

****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras C+
starring Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester, Daniel Richter
screenplay by Arthur C. Clarke & Stanley Kubrick, based on Clarke's short story "The Sentinel"
directed by Stanley Kubrick

by Bryant Frazer In 1965, film director Stanley Kubrick and science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke embarked on a remarkable collaboration. Taking an old Clarke short story as their starting point, the duo rewrote it and dramatically expanded its scope, drafting the blueprint for a film to be directed by Kubrick as well as for a novel to be scripted by Clarke. In Clarke's original story, "The Sentinel", astronauts found an ancient artifact on the moon that functioned as a radio beacon, transmitting signals into outer space. The expanded film treatment was many times more ambitious, beginning in the deep pre-history of human evolution and climaxing with a futuristic journey to Jupiter, where one man confronts an unseen alien intelligence--and undergoes transformation and rebirth. More than a science-fiction thriller or space-bound adventure movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey is a meditation on Man's place in the universe that mounts a convincing argument that the sum total of human knowledge gathered over the millennia is insignificant, at best, when compared to the vast mysteries of the greater universe. That sense of scale is demonstrated, vividly, in a climactic sequence that uses colour and sound to depict a wild journey into--a distant realm? Another dimension? A new plane of human existence?

FrightFest '18: Short Film Showcases 1-3 + Miscellany|7 Questions with Filmmaker Chris McInroy

This is a nearly complete overview of FrightFest '18's short-films lineup, though technical issues unfortunately prevented us from screening Catcalls, Puppet Master, and Right Place Wrong Tim.-Ed.

by Walter Chaw

SHORT FILM SHOWCASE 1

We Summoned a Demon ***/**** (d. Chris McInroy)
Funny how the coolest '80s throwback film that isn't It happens to be this short by Chris McInroy, which channels the light ethos of that era, with VHS nasties shock-effects scattered across its brisk, five-minute runtime. Idiots Kirk (Kirk Johnson) and Carlos (Carlos Larotta) attempt a little witchcraft by sacrificing a rooster and playing a record backwards on a plastic portable turntable. They're trying to make Kirk cool so he can ask out "Brenda" for tacos, but it doesn't work. Instead, they summon a demon (John Orr) from a neon-smoked Hell portal they can't control. Or can they? With its crackerjack timing, its tight script, and the effortless control and camaraderie of its leads, We Summoned a Demon works wonders in a short span. DP E.J. Enriquez's lighting schemes make the whole thing look like Michael Mann's The Keep, and, sometimes rare for shorts, the movie knows its length and absolutely murders its landing. Listen for composer Bird Peterson's smooth sax riff when Kirk finds his inner cool. Comedy is hard, guys; We Summoned A Demon is butter. (Scroll down to the end of these capsule reviews for an interview with Chris McInroy.)