Film Freak Central

Burning (2018)

****/****
starring Ah-in Yoo, Steven Yeun, Jong-seo Jun
screenplay by Oh Jung-mi & Lee Chang-dong, based on the short story "Barn Burning" by Haruki Murakami
directed by Lee Chang-dong

by Walter Chaw When she was seven, she fell into a dry well and spent a day there, crying up into the round sky until he found her. She's Haemi (Jong-seo Jun), maybe 20 now, working as a live model with a bare midriff, standing on a busy street, dancing next to a prize-wheel and giving out "tacky" things to, predominantly, men buying raffle tickets from the pretty girl. He is Jongsu (Ah-in Yoo), of the perpetually slack expression. He doesn't remember the well, nor rescuing her from it, nor the day he stopped her in the street on the way home from junior high to tell her she was ugly. "It's the only thing you ever said to me," she remembers. "I had plastic surgery. Pretty, right?" she asks him, but it's rhetorical. They fuck in an awkward, desultory way, with him looking at how the sunlight bounces off a tower in downtown Seoul, into her tiny apartment. (She's told him he'd be lucky to see it.) He goes back there to feed her cat while she's in Africa, and masturbates absently to the afterimage of her picture as he stares out the window. When she returns from her trip, it's on the arm of sexy, urbane Ben (Stephen Yeun). Ben likes Haemi because she cries--he doesn't--and can fall asleep whenever and wherever. He enjoys her guilelessness. "What's a metaphor?" Haemi asks Ben. Ben smiles in his empty way and tells her to ask Jongsu. Jongsu is, after all, an aspiring writer. "[Ben]'s the Great Gatsby," Jongsu tells Haemi--young, wealthy, and mysterious. Jay Gatsby is a metaphor. Jongsu says that Korea is full of Gatsbys.

BHFF '18: Boo!

*/****
starring Jaden Piner, Rob Zabrecky, Aurora Perrineau, Charley Palmer Rothwell
written by Luke Jaden & Diane Michelle
directed by Luke Jaden

by Walter Chaw Luke Jaden's feature-length hyphenate debut (he co-wrote the script with Diane Michelle), Boo! is an insular family drama framed against a chain-letter premise involving one religious family's decision not to participate in paying a Halloween prank forward. What follows are a lot of jump scares and some on-the-nose dialogue that could have benefited, I think, from more workshopping. The problem is that the picture wants very badly to be about the toll of religious fundamentalism on the development of children (a well-taken point, of course), but it becomes the proselytizer itself with its straw-man of a bible-thumping patriarch, James (Rob Zabrecky), set up to bear the brunt of the film's sins. His constant references to the "good book" feel unnatural, rehearsed, what a movie evangelical would say. When his wife Elyse (Jill Marie Jones) reveals a tragedy in their past and her unwillingness to go to James at a point of crisis because of what he would say, it raises the question of how it is these people ended up together in the first place and why, exactly, Elyse has fallen from the flock, if in fact she's done so.

Hold the Dark (2018)

****/****
starring Jeffrey Wright, Alexander Skarsgård, James Badge Dale, Riley Keough
screenplay by Macon Blair, based on the novel by William Giraldi
directed by Jeremy Saulnier

by Walter Chaw "There's something wrong with the sky," someone tells Russell (Jeffrey Wright). They wonder if he's noticed it. Jeremy Saulnier's Hold the Dark is about mythologies--how they explain the capricious chaos of the world in terms understandable, using images that are universal to us. Mother, father, child, dark, blood, fire. He tells all of this complex story of revenge, betrayal, and the hunt in these broad archetypal strokes; it's a film written on a cave wall, and at the heart of it what are a movie and a cinema but images animated by a flicker to be told in the company of others? Hold the Dark is beautiful and spare in the way that only things told in primal, innate gestures can be, and its setting, an arctic Alaskan wilderness (played by Alberta, Canada), reflects that austerity. When there is dialogue, it's doggedly insufficient to the task of description and explication. Russell is a wolf expert and talks about how he sees a pack eating one of their young--something called "savaging" that happens when the environment is wrong in some way. It seems counterintuitive to devour the young, but sometimes, Hold the Dark suggests (without saying it), it can be an act of love.

TIFF '18: High Life

***½/****
starring Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, André Benjamin, Mia Goth
screenplay by Claire Denis, Jean-Pol Fargeau, Geoff Cox
directed by Claire Denis

by Angelo Muredda If you took Twitter's word for it after the gala premiere of Claire Denis's High Life, which was apparently conceived in an off-the-cuff conversation with Vincent Gallo about life at the end of the world and briefly tinkered-with in the earliest days of its inception by Zadie Smith, you'd think the singular French filmmaker abandoned all her instincts to make an edgy sci-fi sex farce with the dildo chair from Burn After Reading. What a relief, then, to discover that High Life is indeed a Claire Denis film. A step removed from the spoiler-saturated breathlessness of the first hot takes, one finds something every bit as rattled and mournful a late work as Paul Schrader's First Reformed, and, like Trouble Every Day, no less structurally elusive or visceral than the rest of her oeuvre for being a work of genre.

TIFF '18: Climax

**½/****
starring Sofia Boutella, Kiddy Smile, Romain Guillermic, Souheila Yacoub
written and directed by Gaspar Noé

by Angelo Muredda It's hard out here for a Gaspar Noé hater. The France-based Argentine arthouse trickster surprised even himself at Cannes when his latest, Climax, got positive notices from some who had previously written him off as a snotty provocateur. (Noé has reliably yielded some of the finest mean criticism out there: Consider Mark Peranson likening Enter the Void, in his Cannes dispatch from 2009 for CINEMA SCOPE, to "Entering the void of the cavity that is Gaspar's brain.") Climax, by contrast, was supposed to be as innovative, fun, and watchable as his previous attempts at in-your-face fuckery were punishing.

FrightFest '18: Incident in a Ghostland

Ghostland
**½/****
starring Crystal Reed, Anastasia Phillips, Emilia Jones
written and directed by Pascal Laugier

by Walter Chaw Pascal Laugier, if he had made no other film than Martyrs, would still have made Martyrs: the cornerstone picture of the short-lived New French Extremity and one of the most startling (and nigh-unwatchable) films about faith ever made. It would be remarkable as the second half of a double-feature with Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc--maybe as part of a trilogy with Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ. Mad Mel's Passion of the Christ would fit in there, too. Make a weekend of it with Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew--martyrdom and ecstasy and the cinematic arts. Laugier's follow-up, The Tall Man, failed in comparison to Martyrs, as it must. He was briefly attached to a Hellraiser reboot with Clive Barker's blessing (of course with Barker's blessing: Martyrs is a film made by a Cenobite), but the franchise is cursed and it fell through. Folks have been waiting for Laugier to make another masterpiece. Incident in a Ghostland isn't it, but like The Tall Man it's a strong, technically-proficient genre exercise that deals in an interesting space with at-times striking images. Laugier is one of the only filmmakers who makes me queasy. His films aren't kidding around.

FrightFest '18: Summer of '84

Summer of 84
**½/****
starring Graham Verchere, Judah Lewis, Caleb Emery, Rich Sommer
written by Matt Leslie & Stephen J. Smith
directed by Francois Simard, Anouk Whissell & Yoann-Karl Whissell

by Walter Chaw From the first strains of Le Matos' Tangerine Dream-influenced score (borrowed most heavily from Risky Business, for some reason), even before the Class of 1984 title font tells it to you raw, you know that Summer of '84, from Turbo Kid helmers Francois Simard, Anouk Whissell, and Yoann-Karl Whissell (collectively known as RKSS), is going to be another '80s throwback flick. That's not bad in and of itself, but it comes with some built-in pitfalls. "Stranger Things", for instance, the setting is all it has going for it and it doesn't even get the vernacular right, whereas something like It well and truly knows the notes and hears the music, too. Summer of '84 falls somewhere between these two contemporary touchstones. It spends most of its time as a high-concept movie that rumbles along with cozy familiarity and an exceptional cast, and then in its last five minutes, it discovers its purpose and nails the landing. Pity that it didn't find its feet sooner. A greater pity, perhaps, that it didn't get another pass through the typewriter.

Fantasia Festival '18: The Vanished

**½/****
written and directed by Lee Chang-hee

by Bill Chambers A hit in its home country of South Korea earlier this year, The Vanished is a nominal ghost story in which a high-profile corpse disappears from the morgue. On the case is Detective Woo Jung-sik (Kim Sang-kyung), a washed-up alcoholic with the requisite Tragic Past (his fiancée was killed a decade earlier in a hit-and-run), which has put a pretty big chip on his shoulder for perps who might be getting away with murder. Like, say, college professor Park Jin-han (Kim Kang-woo), the "trophy" husband of the missing dead woman (Kim Hee-ae), who was the CEO of a pharmaceutical company. Woo thinks Park killed his wife--which he did, using a fantasy anaesthetic untraceable after death--and has a reason to hide the body. Park, meanwhile, secretly fields taunts from his late wife that convince him she somehow survived. Because Park has connections, Woo is working against the clock to prove his guilt, and what unfolds does so over the course of one dark and stormy night in something resembling real time. The Vanished looks to be a fairly straightforward remake of a Spanish thriller unseen by me, Oriol Paulo's 2012 The Body, which is surprising since its increasingly byzantine revenge plot feels uniquely South Korean (think Oldboy lite), as does the fluid mix of tones and genres. It's also fairly engrossing and unpredictable, the satisfying albeit more pretentious version of John McTiernan's forgotten whodunit Basic, in which John Travolta tries to solve a murder on a Panama military base during a hurricane: Like a lot of SK cinema, it gets a bit bathetic in the homestretch with its distended mourning of fictional characters who don't really represent anything other than pieces on a chessboard. That being said, the whole thing might have more gravity if baby-faced Kim Sang-kyung better matched his character's shabby profile. Some time's gone by since he played the hotshot young partner in Bong Joon-ho's police procedural Memories of Murder, but evidently not enough. A simple solution might've been not to ascribe so much world-weariness to him and instead show that the grief driving Woo isn't something that's made him old, but rather frozen him heartbreakingly in amber. Fantasia Fest 2018 - Programme: Selection 2018

You Were Never Really Here (2018) - Blu-ray + Digital

****/**** Image B+ Sound A
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Judith Roberts, Ekaterina Samsonov, Alessandro Nivola
screenplay by Lynne Ramsay, based on the book by Jonathan Ames
directed by Lynne Ramsay

by Walter Chaw It opens with a child's voice saying that he must do better. It's dark. The first image is of a man trying to breathe inside a plastic bag. This is your everyday Joe (Joaquin Phoenix), and this is how director Lynne Ramsay lets us know that he's disturbed. We know he's dangerous, too, because she shows him cleaning the head of a ball-peen hammer and flushing bloody towels down a hotel-room toilet in a visceral call-back to the nightmare's resolution in The Conversation. All of You Were Never Really Here is a nightmare: a vision of the United States presented by a foreign artist who sees America in the truest way since Wim Wenders's pictures about violence, Edward Hopper (whom Ramsey uses as a touchstone, too), and the state of the American dream state. When she evokes "Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1" (a.k.a. Whistler's Mother), capturing Joe's mother (Judith Roberts) in profile through a window as her son goes to collect some bounty, it's sad in the ineffable way that great art can be in just a pass, a glance. Ramsey's picture is about the toll of violence on the violator and the victim in equal measure. In moments, she recreates Michael Mann's urban veneers--nowhere more so than during the title sequence, whose soundtrack evokes not only that halcyon period in the '80s when Tangerine Dream seemed to be scoring all the best movies, but also the band specifically in how their best scores were about the repetitive urgency of work. Jonny Greenwood's music for You Were Never Really Here provides subtext, texture, and emotional geography. It reminds of Jon Brion's work on Punch-Drunk Love. In a lot of ways, that PT Anderson film, in its discussion of a disturbed and volatile young man finding purpose and acceptance, is this picture's closest analogue.

Hereditary (2018)

**½/****
starring Toni Collette, Alex Wolff, Milly Shapiro, Gabriel Byrne
written and directed by Ari Aster

by Walter Chaw There's a feeling nagging at the back of my head that writer-director Ari Aster doesn't have another round in his chamber--that Hereditary, his feature-length debut, is a canny Frankenstein's monster of great horror moments sewn together expertly onto the trunk of Ordinary People. What I'm saying is that it literalizes the familial demons of Ordinary People, and in so doing diminishes them. It's a cheap, mean cop-out. It's an altogether ignoble thing for supernatural horror to be the literal, not metaphorical, explanation for familial dysfunction. There's a definite lack of ownership involved here, and the tremendous cast is thus betrayed by the film in which they find themselves. Reckless, feckless, the very definition of nihilistic, Hereditary is a marvellous technical achievement that feels too much like a calling card and too little like the cri de cœur I think it'd like you to believe it is. Even in the middle of its harrowing ending (and it is harrowing, don't get me wrong), there was a moment I stepped out of the film for a second to admire how "clean" it felt: a movie about the worst things you can ever imagine that I'd feel pretty good recommending to people. I was reminded of an interview with the late Jonathan Demme conducted around the time of The Silence of the Lambs where he talks about finding the line beyond which you'd lose the audience for being too frank in your depiction of atrocity. Hereditary is calculated in the same way. It's the movie about the unspeakable that everyone can agree on; the Matterhorn ride at Disneyland, renamed "My Mother Never Loved Me." It's a fun ride, but it leaves a weird aftertaste. In many ways, Hereditary is the quintessential horror film of the Trump administration.

Get Low (2010)

**/****
starring Robert Duvall, Bill Murray, Sissy Spacek, Lucas Black
screenplay by Chris Provenzano and C. Gaby Mitchell
directed by Aaron Schneider

by Walter Chaw Affable, warm, kinda boring, and decidedly minor, Aaron Schneider's Get Low doesn't really do anything wrong so much as it presents as an edgeless, inconsequential, protracted encounter with someone you feel you should be interested in but mostly want to politely usher out the door. It's a conversation killer: a movie about a performance, a particular kind of calling card bespeaking comfort with name actors who might be capable of delivering an awards-season prestige picture for a splinter company interested in a medium-return on a small investment. That's it. At the least, for what it's worth, Get Low operates with a great deal of compassion for its small-town denizens, resisting the easy shot at their provinciality in favour of something more along the lines of a Sling Blade. On that note, this South is neither as ugly nor as impoverished as Billy Bob's.

Escape Plan (2013) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jim Caviezel, Amy Ryan
screenplay by Miles Chapman and Arnell Jesko
directed by Mikael Håfström

by Bryant Frazer Escape Plan, a breezy prison-break yarn with a sci-fi gloss and cursory nods to post-9/11 geopolitics, would scarcely merit a footnote in the career histories of everyone involved if not for its rare alignment of celestial bodies: Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger in leading roles, playing gently against type in a wry bromance that adds just enough spirit to freshen up the overly familiar action proceedings. Sly is Ray Breslin, a security consultant who specializes in breaking out of penal facilities in order to demonstrate their flaws to the people operating them--mostly, it seems, federal maximum-security prisons. When the CIA asks for Ray's help stress-testing an entirely new kind of facility designed to incarcerate Very Bad Men (they're referred to as "the worst of the worst" and terrorists is the implication), it's not clear whether it's the sizable cash payday or the implied challenge of the assignment that he finds most tempting. Either way, he's in. Trouble is, the offer wasn't on the level. We learn that his client intends to prove the prison is escape-proof by keeping Breslin entombed within its walls, ignoring his safe words, smashing his GPS tracker, and using his own how-to-build-a-prison rulebook against him. Just when all seems lost, the conversational advances of fellow inmate Emil Rottmayer (Schwarzenegger) suggest the beginning of a beautiful friendship--and maybe a way for Breslin to bust both of them out of the big house.

The 39 Steps (1935) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras A
starring Robert Donat, Madeleine Carroll, Lucie Manheim, Godfrey Tearle
adaptation by Charles Bennett, dialogue by Ian Hay, based on the novel The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw Following the success of 1934's The Man Who Knew Too Much, Alfred Hitchcock and his once-inseparable screenwriter Charles Bennett took to adapting John Buchan's 1915 novel The Thirty-Nine Steps as a breathless, sometimes-madcap chase flick employing a MacGuffin of many possibilities. The picture opens at the vaudeville act of one Mr. Memory (Wylie Watson): ask him a question and he'll answer it--a human search engine and the centre of a film dealing with the very Hitchcockian theme of performance and how it keeps at bay, uneasily, the teeming chaos beneath the surface. In the middle of his act, a gunshot rings out and the audience, already unruly, crushes for the exits. Men first, old women--one in particular--trampled in the panic. Hitchcock's cosmology is aligned with Jonathan Edwards's "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," suspended as it were above anarchy and animalism by the thinnest of agreements among men to engage in civilization. I don't think Hitchcock disdains order--I think he mistrusts it. It's the root of his Wrong Man issues, no less despairing in its fatalism than Edgar Allan Poe's expectation/fear of premature burial. The critic Howie Movshovitz gave perhaps the best, certainly the most succinct, summary of Hitchcock's world of Catholic transference and Original Sin: "Everyone's got it coming."

Murder on the Orient Express (2017) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Tom Bateman, Kenneth Branagh, Penélope Cruz, Willem Dafoe
screenplay by Michael Green, based on the novel by Agatha Christie
directed by Kenneth Branagh

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. If he wants two hard-boiled eggs for breakfast, they must be the same size or he can't eat them. It's how he is. He steps in shit and then has to step in it with his other foot so his feet don't feel uneven. He has an illness, some rage for order and symmetry, you see, and while it makes him alone and miserable (though not unpleasant), it also makes him the best detective in the world. Agatha Christie's enduring creation Hercule Poirot, when portrayed in the past by actors like David Suchet, Albert Finney, and, most famously, Peter Ustinov, has been a figure of some mirth: a cheery hedonist, someone at home in books by a legendary (and all-time best-selling) author mostly legendary for being an artifact of another generation. Christie's books were already growing elderly, I imagine, as they were being written. Her Murder on the Orient Express, published in 1934, has about it the musty upright fortitude of something from the 19^th century. It should be no surprise that Kenneth Branagh, whose Shakespeare adaptations represent the first time I understood those plays completely (that "Hamlet" is a political drama, for instance, or that "Henry V" is a coming-of-age piece triggered in part by the tragedy of a mentor relationship long lamented), has interpreted Poirot as a man tortured by the chaos of modernity, and made him ultimately relatable not as a hedonist, but as a man who recognizes that the wellspring of great art is also the mother of justice. "I can only see the world as it should be... It makes most of life unbearable, but it is useful in the detection of crime." Teleos. Balance. And nothing in between.

Red Sparrow (2018)

*/****
starring Jennifer Lawrence, Joel Edgerton, Matthias Schoenaerts, Jeremy Irons
screenplay by Justin Haythe, based on the book by Jason Matthews
directed by Francis Lawrence

by Walter Chaw "Degenerate," a young woman says during class in self-described Russian Whore School, turning away from a surveillance image in which a middle-aged diplomat is seen snuggling a younger man in a car. "Why do you say that," asks her teacher, a frightening harridan out of a Wertmüller fandango played by Charlotte Rampling (who else?), "is it because he's homosexual?" It is. And here he is, dragged into the classroom by scary Soviet guards. The young woman is brought to the front of the class and instructed to fellate him, since what's "between [her] legs" is obviously of no interest to the degenerate homosexual. For his part, the prisoner grunts like an animal as he wrestles his dick out of his pants and does his best to force the girl's mouth onto it. Let's take a moment to consider that Francis Lawrence's ugly, punishingly violent, ultimately despairing Red Sparrow has characterized this gay guy as a sub-vocal animal interested in getting a hummer from this barely-adult woman--and the Russians as subhuman operators interested in training their youth in the art of fucking for the Motherland. It's not despicable to depict bigotry; it's despicable to be bigoted.

All the Sins of Sodom/Vibrations [Joseph W. Sarno Retrospect Series] - Blu-ray Disc

ALL THE SINS OF SODOM (1968)
***/**** Image A- Sound B- Extras B
starring Maria Lease, Sue Akers, Cherie Winters
written and directed by Joe Sarno

VIBRATIONS (1968)
**½/**** Image B+ Sound C Extras B+
starring Maria Lease, Marianne Prevost
written and directed by Joe Sarno

by Bryant Frazer Sex and cinema have a complicated relationship, and sex-film director Joe Sarno understood this better than most. In the U.S., nudity and simulated sex are generally understood as appeals to prurience--and, often, commercially exploitative gestures--but they can be more than that. They have to be, if they are part of a serious film. A filmed sex scene may be arousing, sure, but it's also a vehicle to express character. Depending on performance and visual approach, screen sex can demonstrate frustration and restlessness as easily as romantic contentment; an actor can convey self-loathing instead of, or in addition to, satisfaction. That dicey territory--the sex film that turns you on while treating the action as problematic--was Sarno's turf. Sarno's arrival on the exploitation circuit came during the 1960s, at a time when sex movies were becoming more bold and explicit but before hardcore pornography destroyed the market for simulated sex on screen. A former World War II airman who learned his trade directing training films for the U.S. Navy, Sarno made a name for himself with films purporting to reveal how suburban New York housewives responded to the sexual revolution. By 1967, he had travelled to Sweden to make the first in a series of titles that influenced the direction of that country's erotic film market. Shortly after his debut on the Swedish scene, he made All the Sins of Sodom, Vibrations, and The Wall of Flesh, which were shot back-to-back in the New York studio of photographer Morris Kaplan, whose generosity earned him a producer credit. The first two of those films are included on the Blu-ray release reviewed herein.

Annihilation (2018)

***½/****
starring Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez, Oscar Isaac
written by Alex Garland, based on the novel by Jeff VanderMeer
directed by Alex Garland

by Walter Chaw

'But when we sit together, close,' said Bernard, 'we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory.'
--Virginia Woolf, The Waves

This is what I said. I said, "If you survive, you are this rare thing. We are members of an endangered species, you and I, born with this romance for self-destruction. Most of us don't survive, or survive as something else. But if you do survive, in thirty years, maybe you find yourself across from someone your age now, telling them that there's more to their story if they choose to read on. And it's the most wonderful thing and it's worth the pain of getting there."

Blade Runner 2049 (2017) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Ryan Gosling, Harrison Ford, Ana De Armas, Jared Leto
screenplay by Hampton Fancher and Michael Green
directed by Denis Villeneuve

by Walter Chaw Denis Villeneuve's Blade Runner 2049 is oblique without inspiring contemplation, less a blank slate or a Rorschach than an expository nullity. It's opaque. There are ideas here that are interesting and inspired by the original film and Philip K. Dick source material, but they've all been worked through in better and countless iterations also inspired by the original film and Philip K. Dick. The best sequel to Blade Runner is Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, with a long sidelong glance at Under the Skin, perhaps--and Her, too. All three films are referenced in Blade Runner 2049 without their relative freshness or, what is it, yearning? There aren't any questions left for Villeneuve's picture, really, just cosmological, existential kōans of the kind thrown around 101 courses taught by favourite professors and at late-night coffee shops and whiskey bars. Yet as that, and only that, Blade Runner 2049 is effective, even brilliant. It's a tremendous adaptation of a Kafka novel (a couple of them), about individuals without an identity in tension against a faceless system intent on keeping it that way. It has echoes of I Am Legend in the suggestion that the future doesn't belong to Man, as well as echoes of Spielberg's A.I. and its intimate autopsy of human connection and love, but it lacks their sense of discovery, of surprise, ultimately of pathos. This is a film about whimpers.

The Car (1977) - Blu-ray Disc

*½/ **** Image B+ Sound B Extras B
starring James Brolin, Kathleen Lloyd, John Marley, Ronny Cox
screenplay by Dennis Shryack & Michael Butler and Lane Slate
directed by Elliot Silverstein

by Bryant Frazer America's love of the open road collided with its suspicion of out-of-state license plates in The Car, a risible 1977 thriller about a muscle car on a killing spree. The Car was conceived as a cash-in--an easy riff on Jaws with the working title Wheels(!)--but it earned a reputation for genre silliness that made it a staple of late-night TV line-ups in the 1980s. Shot mostly in the Utah desert, The Car follows sheriff's deputy Wade Parent (James Brolin) as he investigates a series of mysterious hit-and-run killings involving bicyclists, a hitchhiker, and a mean-looking, black Lincoln Continental. It's a low-octane concept even for genre knock-offs, and despite the traditional framing of organized law enforcement as the heroes of the piece, there's not a lot of detective work required. The Car shows up; the Car runs someone over; the Car drives away, blasting its horn triumphantly. It's not until it takes a special interest in Wade and his schoolteacher girlfriend, Lauren (Kathleen Lloyd), that the deputies concoct a plan to lure it out of town and into a trap, using Wade as bait.

The Snowman (2017)

*/****
starring Michael Fassbender, Rebecca Ferguson, Charlotte Gainsbourg, J.K. Simmons
screenplay by Peter Straughan and Hossein Amini and Søren Sveistrup, based on the novel by Jo Nesbø
directed by Tomas Alfredson

by Walter Chaw Tomas Alfredson's The Snowman, an adaptation of the seventh in Jo Nesbø's literary crime series, treats its narrative as gestural performance art: a suggestion of a suggestion of genre. When it's fascinating, it operates with a certain dream logic, where one thing leads to another thing senselessly, nightmarishly, the dreamer buoyed along powerless to affect his own fate within the larger, obscure narrative. Harrison Ford famously complained that Blade Runner is a movie about a detective who doesn't do any detecting. The Snowman is a movie about a detective who can't do any detecting because there isn't any connective tissue. No matter what the teasing notes left by its serial killer claim, there are no clues. It's very much like Andrew Fleming's own abortive attempt at a franchise, Nancy Drew, which is also alien in its behaviour, acting like a movie would act if it were made by a sea cucumber. Consider a scene in The Snowman that pushes the story to its conclusion: there's a revelation, a key piece of evidence or something, and a location, and the heroine, Katrine (Rebecca Ferguson), stands up at her desk. A male colleague, who was sitting in a cubicle across from Katrine, suddenly teleports to the balcony above her as she leaves. He asks if she's all right. The better question would be if there was so little footage shot that every bit of it was used, continuity be damned. The great Thelma Schoonmaker was brought in at the eleventh hour, presumably at the behest of executive producer Martin Scorsese (once slated to direct the film), in a presumed attempt to save the project. Schoonmaker, for everything she's great at, was never that great at continuity under the best of circumstances. Something Scorsese played around with in Shutter Island. Something that occasionally turns The Snowman into a Gertrude Stein piece.

Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

***½/****
starring Ryan Gosling, Harrison Ford, Ana de Armas, Jared Leto
screenplay by Hampton Fancher and Michael Green
directed by Denis Villeneuve

by Walter Chaw Denis Villeneuve's Blade Runner 2049 is oblique without inspiring contemplation, less a blank slate or a Rorschach than an expository nullity. It's opaque. There are ideas here that are interesting and inspired by the original film and Philip K. Dick source material, but they've all been worked through in better and countless iterations also inspired by the original film and Philip K. Dick. The best sequel to Blade Runner is Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, with a long sidelong glance at Under the Skin, perhaps--and Her, too. All three films are referenced in Blade Runner 2049 without their relative freshness or, what is it, yearning? There aren't any questions left for Villeneuve's picture, really, just cosmological, existential kōans of the kind thrown around 101 courses taught by favourite professors and at late-night coffee shops and whiskey bars. Yet as that, and only that, Blade Runner 2049 is effective, even brilliant. It's a tremendous adaptation of a Kafka novel (a couple of them), about individuals without an identity in tension against a faceless system intent on keeping it that way. It has echoes of I Am Legend in the suggestion that the future doesn't belong to Man, as well as echoes of Spielberg's A.I. and its intimate autopsy of human connection and love, but it lacks their sense of discovery, of surprise, ultimately of pathos. This is a film about whimpers.

Telluride '17: Loving Vincent

*/****
written by Dorota Kobiela, Hugh Welchman, Jacek Dehnel
directed by Dorota Kobiela, Hugh Welchman

by Walter Chaw I love stop-motion animation. William Blake referred to the "infernal method," talking about etching plates with acid and how each print of his work would be touched by him, the artist, to better imbue it with life. Stop-motion animation to me is evidence that there's something to the idea of a transference of vitality through human contact. It's why I was curious about Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman's insane Loving Vincent, a feature-length film composed of over 65,000 hand-painted oil paintings, animating Van Gogh's most famous paintings and making characters of his subjects. It's a fascinating experiment, the product of one of those late-night bull sessions fuelled by cigarettes and whiskey where aspiring artist-types and freshman cosmology students get profound with one another. Consider Loving Vincent to be the cold reality of the morning after. Over 100 artists laboured over 10 years to essentially make a tedious rotoscope cartoon held together, barely, by an embarrassing screenplay dependent on loads of exposition and a repetitive flashback device. It's an endurance test of rare sadism.

mother! (2017)

****/****
starring Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Ed Harris, Michelle Pfeiffer
written and directed by Darren Aronofsky

by Walter Chaw Darren Aronofsky's mother! seeks to explain the ways of God to Man in an allegory of the monstrousness of the creative impulse that plays at once as apologia and barbaric yawp-cum-mission statement; imagine if Aronofsky adapted Paradise Lost. It's The Giving Tree and Harlan Ellison's "Try a Dull Knife" as told by Buñuel and Ken Russell: a marriage of essential truth with exceptional excess--a work of genuine arrogance and pretension. The picture aspires to answer large questions, to lay bare the heart of the artist, and it has as few apologies to offer as it does fucks to give. It's unpleasant to the point of unwatchability--an instant entry into the films maudit hall of fame, predicting a popular failure and critical evisceration that are at least in part something Aronofsky must have expected, given how dedicated mother! is to destroying pleasure, to refusing the breast that its unnamed female protagonist (we'll call her X, in honour of Joan Fontaine's similarly anonymous heroine from Rebecca), played by Jennifer Lawrence, offers her infant in one of the multifarious religious tableaux that litter the piece. In fact, were the film a river to be crossed, the stones you'd step on would all be depictions of holy martyrs and Madonnas. In this way, it resembles Children of Men--even through to its long urban war and siege sequence, which mother! replicates during its feverish conclusion. It resembles Viridiana, of course, and The Exterminating Angel. It resembles all the great symbolist films because it's one of them.

TIFF '17: Suburbicon + Bodied

SUBURBICON
*½/****
starring Matt Damon, Julianne Moore, Oscar Isaac, Noah Jupe
screenplay by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen and George Clooney & Grant Heslov
directed by George Clooney

BODIED
*½/****
starring Calum Worthy, Jackie Long, Charlamagne Tha God, Anthony Michael Hall
written by Joseph Kahn & Alex Larsen
directed by Joseph Kahn

by Bill Chambers The best parts are obviously the Coens' and the worst parts are obviously director George Clooney and co-writer Grant Heslov's. Trouble is, the best parts aren't that great and the worst parts...yikes. A period piece set in the Eisenhower era, Suburbicon centres around the eponymous suburban development (that the title isn't just a pun unto itself is the first red flag, to borrow one of the movie's pet phrases), which has controversially allowed a black family to breach this all-white neighbourhood. Next door, horn-rimmed patriarch Gardner Lodge (Matt Damon) lives a pleasant life with his little-leaguer son (Noah Jupe), wheelchair-bound wife (Julianne Moore), and sister-in-law Margaret (also Moore). (One of them's blonde, like the other Elvis in Kissin' Cousins.) One night, while Jupe's Nicky is lying in bed listening to the radio, a pair of thugs (Glenn Fleshler and Alex Hassell) breaks in and holds the family hostage. Everyone is chloroformed, but Mrs. Lodge's system can't handle it, and Gardner is left a widower. When the home-invaders are caught and put in a police line-up, Nicky can't figure out why his father won't positively ID them. They have very recognizable faces, after all. Using the Coen Brothers' casting director, Ellen Chenoweth, Clooney populates the frame with the sort of memorable oddballs you see in their films, actors who seem like they're always being looked at through a wide-angle lens.

Telluride '17: Wonderstruck

**½/****
starring Oakes Fegley, Julianne Moore, Michelle Williams, Millicent Simmonds
screenplay by Brian Selznick, based on his book
directed by Todd Haynes

by Walter Chaw I like the way Todd Haynes's Wonderstruck moves. It glides from one vignette to the next, one setting to another, one era to a previous one. It shifts from a 1977-set Times Square scored by that Deodato disco remix of "Also Sprach Zarathustra" (the one Hal Ashby used for Chauncey's first stroll in Being There) to a silent movie where a deaf/mute girl (Millicent Simonds) looks for her mother (Julianne Moore), a silent film star who's apparently left her behind for the bright lights, big city. Based on Brian Selznick's children's novel, just like Martin Scorsese's Hugo, Wonderstruck suffers from the same problem as Scorsese's film: mainly, that it's based on a kid's book that's mostly pictures and therefore plotted around a central twist neither surprising nor instructive. It is simultaneously too much for what it is, and not enough. I still like the way Wonderstruck moves, though, as Haynes stakes his claim again as the king of winsome nostalgia, telling the story of poor little Ben (Oakes Fegley), who's just lost his mother, Elaine (Michelle Williams), but not before (in flashback) she's refused to tell Ben who his father is. She does, however, make him interested in David Bowie before she goes, so it could be worse.

Atomic Blonde (2017)

*½/****
starring Charlize Theron, James McAvoy, John Goodman, Toby Jones
screenplay Kurt Johnstad, based on the graphic novel The Coldest City, written by Antony Johnson and illustrated by Sam Hart
directed by David Leitch

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Essentially No Way Out with less hot sex but better action sequences, David Leitch's Atomic Blonde is a lot of truly dreary Cold War spy intrigue interrupted periodically, but not often enough, by the good stuff. It proposes the antiquated notion that collusion with the Russians is treason in having heroic MI6 agent Lorraine (Charlize Theron--Mr. F after all, all this time) take ice baths and try to figure out who mysterious mole "Satchel" is in the last days of East Berlin. Her contact there is skeezy Percival (James McAvoy) whose handlers fear has gone a bit "feral" in the field. We're introduced to him trading Jim Beam and blue jeans for information and waking up with two girls (two!) to pick up Lorraine at the airport. There's also a French spy named Delphine (Sofia Boutella) who offers up a Sapphic love interest for Lorraine and ends up the way that lovers end up in spy movies. Leitch, an uncredited co-director on John Wick, brings the same style of kinetic, close-in martial arts and, eventually, gunplay of that film, but missteps badly by, among other things, making this about more than avenging a dead dog. Without an emotional charge--and there isn't enough of one generated by the loss of two of Lorraine's lovers--there's no real sense of emotion or energy in the action scenes. They're super cool, don't get me wrong (at least they are until Leitch decides at the very end to overuse slow motion), but they lack motivation and investment. But that's the least of Atomic Blonde's problems.

Madhouse (1981) - Blu-ray Disc

There Was a Little Girl
**½/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Trish Everly, Michael Macrae, Dennis Robertson, Morgan Hart
screenplay by Stephen Blakley, Ovidio G. Assonitis, Peter Shepherd and Robert Gandus
directed by Ovidio G. Assonitis

by Sydney Wegner The final frames of Madhouse are a title card with a George Bernard Shaw quote: "...life differs from the play only in this...it has no plot, all is vague, desultory, unconnected till the curtain drops with the mystery unsolved." In that instant, in one of the most beautifully-executed "middle-finger to my haters" moves in cinema, criticism of Ovidio G. Assonitis's 1981 clusterfuck is rendered irrelevant. Sneaking that in at the end rather than putting it at the beginning is doubly hilarious, as you've just spent an hour-and-a-half trying to grasp onto this ungraspable thing, only to have all your hard work flushed away in a second. If your movie doesn't make sense, it's because living doesn't make sense; case closed. Our own plots are never resolved, people flit in and out of our lives without us ever truly knowing them, our familial relationships are tangled and it's sometimes impossible to figure out where any animosity began. We think we understand people, but it's rare that we truly do.

Ghost in the Shell (2017) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

**½/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras C+
starring Scarlett Johansson, 'Beat' Takeshi Kitano, Michael Carmen Pitt, Juliette Binoche
screenplay by Jamie Moss and William Wheeler and Ehren Kruger, based on the comic "The Ghost in the Shell" by Shirow Masamune
directed by Rupert Sanders

by Walter Chaw Emily Yoshida, in an article for THE VERGE addressing the outcry over the casting of Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell, has the last word on the topic as it pertains to anime in general and Mamoru Oshii's seminal original in particular (an adaptation of a popular manga to which most casual fans in the West won't have been exposed). She provides a stunning, succinct historical context for Japanese self-denial and the country's post-bellum relationship with technology, then writes a review of this film in which she systematically destroys it for its essential misunderstanding of the source material. I agree with every word. I learned a lot. And I still like the new film, anyway. I think Ghost in the Shell is probably fascinating in spite of itself and because the environment has made it dangerous for pretty much anyone to discuss what its critics (not Yoshida, per se) wish it did. I like it because its production design is beautiful and I like it even though it's basically a RoboCop port that takes the American attitude of being horrified by technology rather than the Japanese one of being largely defined by it. It's puritanical. It was interpreted, after all, by a country founded by Pilgrims. Ghost in the Shell often doesn't know what to do with the images it's appropriating, and when push comes to shove, the dialogue falls somewhere between noodling and empty exposition. Still, there's something worth excavating here.

A Cure for Wellness (2017) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras D+
starring Dane DeHaan, Jason Isaacs, Mia Goth
screenplay by Justin Haythe
directed by Gore Verbinski

by Walter Chaw Gore Verbinski's A Cure for Wellness is lurid unto beautiful, exquisite pulp, just barmy enough to attract a cult and just smart enough to deserve it. The central conceit is that humans are only really good as biological filters for pollutants; in place of the batteries of The Matrix, the film sees people as distilleries for some sort of immortality potion. The process kills them. I learned when I was young that rabies is a kind of fear of water: its sufferers die of thirst even surrounded by water. The old, rich, white/white-collar victims of A Cure for Wellness entomb themselves in an alpine sanatorium invested in hydrotherapy in hopes of feeling, you know, better. Their sickness is of the soul, alas. The irony of the water cure offered by their ostensible saviours is that the patients become desiccated, mortally. There seems to be a message in there about how the illness of soulless acquisition is self-inflicted, and the amount expended in solution only exacerbates it. Money is bad. The making of it is incestuous, perverse, and insatiable. It's a strange thing to say in a movie that cost a lot of money, but the point is well taken. Especially now.

Ghost in the Shell (2017)

**½/****
starring Scarlett Johansson, 'Beat' Takeshi Kitano, Michael Carmen Pitt, Juliette Binoche
screenplay by Jamie Moss and William Wheeler and Ehren Kruger, based on the comic "The Ghost in the Shell" by Shirow Masamune
directed by Rupert Sanders

by Walter Chaw Emily Yoshida, in an article for THE VERGE addressing the outcry over the casting of Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell, has the last word on the topic as it pertains to anime in general and Mamoru Oshii's seminal original in particular (an adaptation of a popular manga to which most casual fans in the West won't have been exposed). She provides a stunning, succinct historical context for Japanese self-denial and the country's post-bellum relationship with technology, then writes a review of this film in which she systematically destroys it for its essential misunderstanding of the source material. I agree with every word. I learned a lot. And I still like the new film, anyway. I think Ghost in the Shell is probably fascinating in spite of itself and because the environment has made it dangerous for pretty much anyone to discuss what its critics (not Yoshida, per se) wish it did. I like it because its production design is beautiful and I like it even though it's basically a RoboCop port that takes the American attitude of being horrified by technology rather than the Japanese one of being largely defined by it. It's puritanical. It was interpreted, after all, by a country founded by Pilgrims. Ghost in the Shell often doesn't know what to do with the images it's appropriating, and when push comes to shove, the dialogue falls somewhere between noodling and empty exposition. Still, there's something worth excavating here.

Personal Shopper (2016)

****/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Lars Eisinger, Sigrid Bouaziz, Anders Danielsen Lie
written and directed by Olivier Assayas

by Walter Chaw There's a brilliant song by Patty Griffin called "Every Little Bit" that, among other piquant turns of phrase, includes the lyric "I still don't blame you for leaving, baby, it's called living with ghosts." At around the 30-minute mark of Olivier Assayas's Personal Shopper, our survivor Maureen (Kristen Stewart) tells a confidante she had made a vow with her late twin brother to make contact from beyond the grave should one pre-decease the other. "And then?" he asks. "I guess I'll live my life and let it go." Then a long, gliding shot of Maureen riding her moped through the Parisian nighttime scored to simple, haunted strings that are augmented towards the end of the sequence by percussion, which reveals itself to be a pencil against parchment. Maureen works as a personal shopper for a German fashionista who never seems to be home. In her off moments, she helps her brother's "widowed" girlfriend Lara (Sigrid Bouaziz) try to suss out if his ghost is unquiet and lurking in the house they shared. Maureen's a medium, you see, or at least she and her brother played at being mediums--a morbid pastime informed by a heart ailment, unpredictably mortal, shared by the siblings. A doctor warns her against any strenuous activities or emotions. She'll suffer both before the end.

Allied (2016) - Blu-ray + Digital HD

**/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B
starring Brad Pitt, Marion Cotillard, Jared Harris, Simon McBurney
screenplay by Steven Knight
directed by Robert Zemeckis

by Bill Chambers

"Back in those days I was much more of a taskmaster. I would make my actors hit those marks and always be in their light, and now I've kind of--I don't care as much anymore. I wouldn't allow there to be a camera bobble in any of those films. If the camera jiggled one frame, I'd have to do the take again. But nowadays, audiences are so different. I don't think they appreciate the attention to detail. Maybe subconsciously they feel it, maybe they don't. Having a perfectly composed shot doesn't matter if you are watching it on an iPhone, does it? You wouldn't see it."

That's Robert Zemeckis, speaking to We Don't Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy author Caseen Gaines. When I first read those words, I have to admit I had a little moment of "Dylan goes electric" heartbreak, because the precision craftsmanship of Zemeckis's films had always been a comfort. Then I reread them, taking into account the resounding shrug that greeted both his lengthy detour into motion-capture animation and his subsequent return to live-action (Flight), and his sour grapes became considerably more pungent. Many filmmakers relax their standards as they get older; few make a point of announcing it. Fewer still do so with spite. If the prolific Zemeckis is fatigued, he shouldn't pass the buck: it's hard-won--I can't begin to imagine the intensity of effort it took to pull off, say, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, or Death Becomes Her. When he belittles the iPhone he gives away his age (62 at the time), but he also sells himself out, as someone who's been at the forefront of the digital revolution for decades. Of course, between his waffling commitment to 3-D and MoCap and his punking of a nation's kids in a 1989 TV special in which he claimed that Back to the Future Part II's hoverboards were a real technology suppressed by parents' groups, it's hard to take Zemeckis at his word.

The Initiation (1984) - Blu-ray Disc

*½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Vera Miles, Clu Gulager, James Read, Daphne Zuniga
written by Charles Pratt, Jr.
directed by Larry Stewart

by Bryant Frazer Turning up at the tail-end of the late-1970s/early-1980s slasher boom, The Initiation is another one made with little ambition by people with no special inclination towards horror, but at least it doesn't look down on the genre: Despite the sorority-house trappings, it aspires to a perfectly middlebrow level of quality, like a network movie-of-the-week or mass-market paperback original. That's some kind of achievement for a film that opens with a delightfully ridiculous dream sequence (or is it?) depicting an episode of coitus interruptus involving a little girl with a knife and an intruder who catches on fire, and ends with a half-dozen college kids being tracked down by a serial killer with knives and a harpoon gun. Trouble is, The Initiation works a little too hard to lay a foundation for its killing spree in a drama of dark family secrets. The result is a messy amalgam that doesn't work especially well as a soap opera or a teen sex comedy, let alone as a slasher movie.

Get Out (2017)

***/****
starring Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams, Catherine Keener, Bradley Whitford
written and directed by Jordan Peele

by Walter Chaw It's the easiest thing in the world to make a movie about bigots; it's a lot harder to make a movie about liberals who mean well, but are feckless elites who not only don't make things better, they actually, through their platitudes and paternalistic attitudes, make things worse. It's about money. If anything has been confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt, it's that everything's about money. The villains of Jordan Peele's directorial debut Get Out aren't white people--they're rich white people. (Its closest analogue is Brian Yuzna's Society.) A movie about white privilege, it's a comedian's film in that, like the best comedians, it recognizes some awkward truisms and makes them manifest in a situation that builds on itself. This is a great set. It gets on a roll. Its central riff is a complicated one: rich white liberals are so detached and alien that through their best intentions, they're actively responsible for the continued oppression of minorities in the United States. There was a string of films in 2016 that raised this as a possibility (I Am Not Your Negro and OJ: Made in America high among them), but in Get Out the idea has found its natural home in the horror genre. The bookend to Romero's Night of the Living Dead, it even shares the same set-up for a radical "down" ending. The decision Get Out makes at that terminal crossroads says everything. It's a challenge to the audience to check their own attitudes about how black men are demonized in our culture: abusers of white women, sexually threatening to white men, and murderers of both; angry and bestial.

A Cure for Wellness (2017)

***/****
starring Dane DeHaan, Jason Isaacs, Mia Goth
screenplay by Justin Haythe
directed by Gore Verbinski

by Walter Chaw Gore Verbinski's A Cure for Wellness is lurid unto beautiful, exquisite pulp, just barmy enough to attract a cult and just smart enough to deserve it. The central conceit is that humans are only really good as biological filters for pollutants; in place of the batteries of The Matrix, the film sees people as distilleries for some sort of immortality potion. The process kills them. I learned when I was young that rabies is a kind of fear of water: its sufferers die of thirst even surrounded by water. The old, rich, white/white-collar victims of A Cure for Wellness entomb themselves in an alpine sanatorium invested in hydrotherapy in hopes of feeling, you know, better. Their sickness is of the soul, alas. The irony of the water cure offered by their ostensible saviours is that the patients become desiccated, mortally. There seems to be a message in there about how the illness of soulless acquisition is self-inflicted, and the amount expended in solution only exacerbates it. Money is bad. The making of it is incestuous, perverse, and insatiable. It's a strange thing to say in a movie that cost a lot of money, but the point is well taken. Especially now.

Fantastic Fest '16: Short Films

Givertaker **½/**** (d. Paul Gandersman)
A nice, compact cautionary tale featuring a novice witch who takes vengeance on her buddies only to find there are Shadowmen living under other people's beds. I wish the lore were better developed, but it's paced beautifully and the young cast is game and lively. I wanted more, and I don't often feel that way.

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

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

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

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

Telluride '16: Short Films

by Walter Chaw

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

Telluride '16: Arrival

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

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

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

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

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

In a Lonely Place (1950) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame, Frank Lovejoy, Carl Benton Reid
screenplay by Andrew Solt, adaptation by Edmund H. North, based upon a story by Dorothy B. Hughes
directed by Nicholas Ray

by Walter Chaw In another time and place, they would've called Gloria Grahame "one sick twist," and the brand would've stuck. There are stories, a few of them true. There's the one about her stepson, and the thing where she keeps getting plastic surgery until her face is paralyzed, which was the alleged goal after Grahame became morbidly devoted to Kuleshov's editing theories. There's the weird book an ex-lover wrote about her last days, Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool, and indeed, her story has been told largely through the men who wanted her, the men who had her, and the men who ruined her. In many ways, she's the quintessential femme fatale of the noir era, not just for the roles she took, but because the roles she took reflected the traps she was in. She's the patron saint of the way we treat women first as objects of desire, then as objects of disgust. Her late moment as the girl who "cain't" say no encapsulates the perversity of Rodgers & Hammerstein, sure, and the sad decline of a woman who confessed at the end of her life that she never quite figured out Hollywood--though it sure looks like Hollywood had her figured. She is one of the great tragic figures of the age, both microcosm and avatar of that wonderland of image-fixers and dream-crushers. For my money, the film that best captures Grahame in her complexity, in all her multifoliate relationships with the world and her millions of voyeurs, is Nicholas Ray's scabrous In A Lonely Place. It's a masculine confession and an apology. It's hollow. Aren't they all.

No Way Out (1987) - Blu-ray Disc

Please note that these screencaps are from an alternate source and do not necessarily reflect the Blu-ray presentation.

***/**** Image B- Sound B Commentary C
starring Kevin Costner, Gene Hackman, Sean Young, Howard Duff
screenplay by Robert Garland, based on the book The Big Clock by Kenneth Fearing
directed by Roger Donaldson

by Walter Chaw I was lucky enough to be 14 in 1987, right at that age where my buddies and I were dropped off at the theatre by our parents for whatever we wanted to see. Because we were generally not well-supervised in such matters, we talked them into buying us tickets for stuff like Hellraiser, RoboCop, Lethal Weapon, Full Metal Jacket, and The Untouchables. My first R-rated theatrical experiences were, in other words, magical. They were gleefully violent, extravagantly so, and the sex... Jesus. The sex in mainstream movies in 1987 was combustible--enough so that it formed the backbone of my onanism for the next several years. I saw Angel Heart this way, and Fatal Attraction of course. Key in there is Roger Donaldson's largely-forgotten but durable political-paranoia thriller No Way Out. Starring Kevin Costner, cementing a legendary winning streak that began a month or two earlier with his starmaking turn in The Untouchables and continued with the dead sexy Bull Durham the following year and the legendarily-chaste Field of Dreams a year after that. Lost in conversations about Costner's stardom during this period is his preternatural ability to be an Everyman sex symbol. Girls loved him, and guys didn't mind because Costner isn't really all that threatening. He sure is likeable, though. When he introduced a note of menace into his nice-guy archetype in A Perfect World, he in fact discovered his perfect role. The problems came when he tried to be something more than that. Cowboy, baseball player, fish-man, all-around all-American? No problem. Attorney, doctor--now we got issues.

Knightriders (1981); Monkey Shines (1988); The Dark Half (1993) - Blu-ray Discs

George A. Romero's Knightriders
*½/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras A
starring Ed Harris, Gary Lahti, Tom Savini, Amy Ingersol
written and directed by George A. Romero

MONKEY SHINES
*½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras C+
starring Jason Beghe, John Pankow, Kate McNeil, Joyce Van Patten
based on the novel by Michael Stewart
written for the screen and directed by George A. Romero

THE DARK HALF
**/**** Image B Sound B Extras A
starring Timothy Hutton, Amy Madigan, Julie Harris, Michael Rooker
based on the book by Stephen King
written for the screen and directed by George A. Romero

by Walter Chaw Knightriders, George A. Romero's very own Fast Company, is another of the earnestly socially-conscious filmmaker's earnestly socially-conscious films, though one without the benefit of a metaphor that holds any kind of water. It doesn't even have an argument that makes sense. It feels like Romero over-identifying with the topic and losing the thread somewhere along the way--and padding the runtime with far too many pedestrian bike stunts. There's something to be said for personal projects (Romero's work seems like it's all personal, frankly), but with that intimacy comes real peril. I will say Romero's Night of the Living Dead is a no-kidding masterpiece. It's one of the best films ever made and perhaps the single most important Civil Rights picture, too. I'm partial to his Day of the Dead as well, for the cleanness of its execution and for the interesting things it has to say about identity and the military-industrial complex. It's fair to wonder, then, if Romero is tied so inextricably to the zombie genre not because (or not just because) of timeliness (and that he essentially invented an entire subgenre with a legion of imitators), but also because without zombies, his stuff is only leaden and clumsy. Without zombies functioning as they do, as both grand bogey and versatile metaphor, Romero's weighed down by a lethal payload of well-meant proselytizing, and just like that the flat artlessness of his films feels less "spartan" on purpose than "affectless" by accident.

Hail, Caesar! (2016) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

Hail, Caesar!: A Tale of the Christ
****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C
starring Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Alden Ehrenreich, Ralph Fiennes
written and directed by Joel & Ethan Coen

by Walter Chaw Halfway through the Coen Brothers' Hail, Caesar!, studio head/fixer Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin playing Jon Polito) stands against the opulent, grand entrance to his golden-age Hollywood movie studio and talks about the coming of the future. There's a scene in a Chinese restaurant where someone pulls out a photograph of a mushroom cloud taken at a freshly-nuked Bikini Atoll and declares, solemnly, that it's a picture of the future. There's another scene where waves crash against a pair of rocks in a direct callback to Barton Fink, the Coens' other golden-age Hollywood homage, outside the bachelor-pad mansion of Gene Kelly-type Burt Gurney (Channing Tatum), who happens to be the head of an enclave of Communists (are there ten?) calling themselves "The Future." The Coens at their best describe spiritual blight. They do it in a lot of ways, across multiple genres. Hail, Caesar! opens with Mannix, a real-life figure in Hollywood tangentially-connected to George Reeves's death (murder? Suicide? Who knows?), in a confessional just a day after his last confession and a day before his next. ("Really, it's too much Eddie. You're not that bad.") Mannix--more fictional than actual, it should be noted, in exactly the same way that O Brother, Where Art Thou? is the most faithful adaptation of The Odyssey there ever was despite having almost no relationship to the literal text--indeed doesn't seem all that bad when most of what he confesses is lying to his wife (Alison Pill) about quitting cigarettes. "It's hard, Father." And he cries. The movie is about spiritual blight, and the sin that Mannix is constantly trying to confess is that he doesn't know what he believes. For me, the Coens are at their best when they tackle this spiritual blight through the prism of artists and their attempts to create. Every artist is a Frankenstein. Every work is a monster.

Manhunter (1986) [Collector's Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

***½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A
starring William L. Petersen, Kim Greist, Joan Allen, Brian Cox
screenplay by Michael Mann, based on the Thomas Harris novel Red Dragon
directed by Michael Mann

by Walter Chaw Director Michael Mann's third film is the remarkable Manhunter, the second cinematic adaptation of a Thomas Harris novel (the first being 1977's John Frankenheimer-helmed Black Sunday) and the first to feature Harris's dark serial-killer antihero, Hannibal Lecter (spelled "Lecktor" in Manhunter). It is visually lush and possessed of the attention to craft and detail that has become a hallmark of Mann's work; to say that it's superior in nearly every way to the much-lauded and wildly popular The Silence of the Lambs would be something of an understatement.

The Nice Guys (2016)

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

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

The Hateful Eight (2015) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras C-
starring Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Bruce Dern
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

by Walter Chaw Quentin Tarantino's eighth film, The Hateful Eight, features eight hateful people trapped in a small space during a blizzard. The hullabaloo surrounding its release has to do with the production shooting in an extinct widescreen format (70mm anamorphic) and putting up a lot of money so that it can be screened accordingly in select theatres. A few critics have misidentified its vistas as belonging to Wyoming (it was filmed in Telluride, Colorado), which is understandable given that only about five minutes of the 187-minute running-time is spent outside. There hasn't been a Tarantino feature until this one that I haven't loved; I believe he is our finest working film critic. He understands things about the movies he pulls from--that certain traditions of Japanese and exploitation filmmaking are strongly feminist, that blaxploitation was initially empowerment before it was instantly gentrified, that the best slave narratives involve legacies of violence, which is why Lalee's Kin and Django Unchained have a biological connective bridge. I've learned more about movies from watching Tarantino than I have from watching Godard, who's actually trying to teach me something. I think the Kill Bill saga is a remarkable statement about motherhood. I find his dialogue to be distinctive and sometimes exhilarating. I struggled with disliking The Hateful Eight for each of its 187 minutes. It's the first time I've ever understood the popular criticism of Tarantino as self-indulgent, nihilistic, misogynistic, even racist. I don't agree with every charge, but I do get it now. It's the first time, too, that I was troubled by a plot point in his film: there's someone in the piece who hates Mexicans, see, but when we get a flashback to this person engaging with a Mexican, we see that this is a fallacy. I can't figure out if this was intentional; I fear that it wasn't. I fear, more, that this is evidence that for the first time Tarantino has lost control of his screenplay. I also finally felt the loss of Sally Menke, who was his Marcia Lucas. I hope it's not a harbinger of things to come.

Jack's Back (1988) - Blu-ray Disc

Please note that these screencaps are from an alternate source and do not necessarily reflect the Blu-ray presentation.

***/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras B
starring James Spader, Cynthia Gibb, Jim Haynie, Robert Picardo
written and directed by Rowdy Herrington

by Walter Chaw A quintessential dirty '80s thriller, Rowdy Herrington's frankly fantastic Jack's Back follows a Jack the Ripper copycat killer circa 1988 who, it appears, is interrupted during his last murder by earnest, likeable med student John (James Spader), who's quickly dispatched for his erudition. When I saw Jack's Back on VHS in '88, I was shocked by the brutality of John's murder and that it happens about fifteen minutes into the film. Rick (also Spader), John's twin, has a dream of his brother's murder and appears on the scene--to the consternation of John's grieving coworkers--to investigate the circumstances of his death. It's a fascinating conceit, or a silly one made fascinating by Herrington's execution of it and by a dual performance as subtle and compelling, in its way, as Jeremy Irons's turn in Cronenberg's Dead Ringers from the same year. Spader manages the neat trick of being two different people who aren't two easily-distinguishable types. You see the rebellion nascent in the "good" brother; you see the vulnerability in the "bad" one. Silly to say, maybe, but you see elements of one in the other. Spader's interactions with Cynthia Gibb, playing John's co-worker at a free clinic, are radically different from brother to brother, though not theatrically so. More than a thriller, Jack's Back is a brilliant character study.

Allegiant (2016)

The Divergent Series: Allegiant
½*/****
starring Shailene Woodley, Theo James, Jeff Daniels, Naomi Watts
screenplay by Noah Oppenheim and Adam Cooper & Bill Collage
directed by Robert Schwentke

by Walter Chaw Remember those gauzy, halcyon days of youth spent playing "imagination" with your buddies on the schoolyard? Starting nowhere, ending nowhere, structureless? Child-development gurus would say something about how formless mucking-about is the way we first begin to socialize. Dungeons & Dragons made it into something like a communal form of spontaneous storytelling while offering a degree of gameplay and structure. Now Allegiant--the third or fourth (who knows?) film in the Divergent series, based on the third- or fourth-generation YA spin-off trying to capitalize on the Hunger Games-cum-Twilight phenomenon of smushing sci-fi/fantasy together with tween angst--has arrived to make manifest the endless exposition of developmental social psychology. In this one, Tris (Shailene Woodley, with her constantly-surprised blankness) and Four (Theo James) find themselves in a dystopian Chicago, I think, except that later they're taken to a place I believe is also Chicago, or at least Future O'Hare, thus as the characters repeatedly referred to "going to" Chicago, I was never for a moment not confused. I even checked Wikipedia, which confirmed for me that O'Hare is in Chicago. It is. Over the last few movies, which I've seen but don't remember except as a confusion of several franchises identical in my mind, Tris and Four have apparently discovered they're pawns in a game--A GAME, I tell you--involving their genes. THEIR GENES. It's Aldous Huxley, don't you get it?

10 Cloverfield Lane (2016)

***½/****
starring John Goodman, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, John Gallagher Jr.
screenplay by Josh Campbell & Matt Stuecken and Damien Chazelle
directed by Dan Trachtenberg

by Walter Chaw I don't believe that art ever occurs in a vacuum. I believe that movies, no matter their relative quality, speak to the time in which they were created, eloquently or accidentally--sometimes both. In that context, Dan Trachtenberg's 10 Cloverfield Lane, the follow-up to Matt Reeves's badly-underestimated Cloverfield (which itself pairs with Spike Lee's 25^th Hour as the best elegies for 9/11 New York (Reeves's film even more in some ways, in its emulation of Japan's kaiju cycle)), is about the way the frightening underbelly of paranoid American fanaticism has suddenly gained legitimacy and voice in the mainstream. When speaking mournfully of his estranged daughter and how his wife has taken her away from him, survivalist Howard (John Goodman) mutters that some people just can't understand what's in the best interest of their survival. He's shut himself in an underground bunker with the bunker's architect, Emmett (John Gallagher Jr.), like some Egyptian Pharaoh, girding himself against an apocalypse that may or may not be personal. He's also "abducted" a young woman passing by, Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), though Howard would say he saved her from the end of the world. His plan, see, is that the three of them wait out the fallout from whatever seismic event did or didn't happen, as a makeshift family. No touching.