Film Freak Central

The Pope's Exorcist (2023)

½*/****
starring Russell Crowe, Daniel Zovatto, Alex Essoe, Franco Nero
screenplay by Michael Petroni and Evan Spiliotopoulos
directed by Julius Avery

by Walter Chaw Right off the bat, I feel I must warn you that no popes are exorcised in this film. The prospect of Russell Crowe reading the rites over a levitating, pea-soup spewing Franco Nero, shuttled in to play the Pope in Julius Avery's The Pope's Exorcist, is incredibly juicy, so I get why they would attempt to mislead audiences in this way, but it's terribly dishonest. The cruellest blow, however, is that in place of Franco Nero in his dotage doing a spider-walk downstairs and pissing himself in his papal robes before a drunken astronaut (which, let's face it, once I hit 82, I can't promise that won't just be a Tuesday), we get Crowe, as real-life exorcist Father Gabriel Amorth, riding a Vespa through the streets of Rome, no doubt in search of an espresso, a gelato, spaghetti, and his portly, Vespa-riding twin for the Guinness Book photo shoot. It bears mentioning, too, how Crowe straps on the world's most offensive Mario Bros. accent to free poor little Henry (Peter DeSouza-Feighoney) from demonic possession. Why is Henry in Rome? Because his mom, Julia (Alex Essoe), is renovating a building, which happens to be the primary reason anyone moves to Italy. (See also: Donald Sutherland's character in Don't Look Now and Genevieve Bujold's character in Obsession and Diane Lane's character in Under the Tuscan Sun.) There's probably a piece to be written about how our perception of Italy is of a beautiful place the Italians have neglected, but now that P.J. O'Rourke, who once wrote, "Italy is not a third world country but nobody told the Italians," is dead, I don't know who'll write it.

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

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

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

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

Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore (2022) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

½*/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Eddie Redmayne, Jude Law, Ezra Miller, Mads Mikkelsen
screenplay by J.K. Rowling & Steve Kloves
directed by David Yates

by Walter Chaw I have watched and reviewed the first nine films in the Harry Potter franchise, skipping the first Fantastic Beasts sequel (though I think I saw it), and for my sins, here I am returning for the eleventh installment with nary a memory of any of them except that I liked the one directed by Alfonso Cuarón. And while I'm glad chief screenwriter Steve Kloves has secured his retirement a few hundred times over, I do lament that the writer-director of The Fabulous Baker Boys and Flesh and Bone didn't make more of those kinds of movies in his nearly 40-year career. Such is the suppurative contagion of the IP age that the best minds of my generation are destroyed by the madness, starving hysterical naked--as Ginsberg might describe them--as they drag themselves through bales of ignominious piffle during their prime creative years. Is this garbage really the best use of Kloves? Of Jude Law? Of Mads Mikkelsen, Katherine Waterston, or Eddie Redmayne? The only person who deserves this mess is Ezra Miller, let's be honest, though even Miller--if one can disregard the harm they inflict on seemingly every other human being in their orbit--is a gifted performer who's also and obviously too good for this. These movies aren't socially destructive in the sense that there's something offensive about them thematically--mainly because there's not a lot about them thematically. They're all second acts in competing Telenovelas: breathless melodramas in which one thing bleeds into the next like cells ravaged by Ebola. There's no hope for an end to the suffering so long as there's money to be squeezed thick from its black buboes: another amusement-park attraction, another opportunity to be relevant in an era where tentpoles are the only currency. Was a time a film with ten sequels was regarded as a cheap joke. That time is now.

One Fine Morning (2022)

Un beau matin
***/****
starring Léa Seydoux, Pascal Greggory, Melvil Poupaud, Nicole Garcia
written and directed by Mia Hansen-Løve

by Angelo Muredda "You can be for and against at the same time," a woman says of her capacity to vote for Emmanuel Macron while supporting the young activists who agitate against him early in Mia Hansen-Løve's One Fine Morning. That seemingly throwaway statement about holding contrary feelings and priorities in tension speaks to Hansen-Løve's ambivalent ethos in her latest and most affecting work so far. Translator Sandra (a sublimely sad-eyed Léa Seydoux) finds herself pulled in two directions at once over the course of about a year, between her ties to her ailing father, Georg (Pascal Greggory), a philosopher whose neurodegenerative disease now necessitates full-time care, and the promise of a new affair with the married Clément (Melville Poupaud), a cosmo-chemist from her past who she meets again in a chance encounter at their kids' school. Though it's largely par for the course for Hansen-Løve's cinema of minor-key, semi-autobiographical middle-class family chamber dramas, One Fine Morning feels like a refinement rather than a mere retracing of thematic and aesthetic steps, gelling into a moving, novelistic array of scenes from a life in motion, where old and new frequently collide.

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.

The Banshees of Inisherin (2022)

****/****
starring Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Kelly, Kerry Condon, Barry Keoghan
written and directed by Martin McDonagh

by Walter Chaw I lost a friend this year. Not to death but to no longer having anything of value to offer him, what with time getting short. I understand that. It's happened before for different reasons, and while it's tempting to say it's not my fault, sure, it's my fault. All you need to love in this world unconditionally are your kids, and, well, the last time my late parents told me they loved me, I was nine years old. I remember that because every few years, I've had reason to wonder when it stopped and what exactly I did to deserve it. The myth of family is just that; I think there's a reason people like me build their own families. The only thing unconditional is the love a dog has for you, and people abuse dogs all the time. I have friends who are enervating to me as well, and I wonder if my loyalty to them has everything to do with knowing the pain of being left by the side of the road by the people I have loved--and not wanting to inflict that on anyone else. The fashion of the moment speaks of this as "ending the cycle" of abuse. I'm drawn to artists like Kendrick Lamar who use poetry and what appears to be an extraordinary vulnerability to lay bare their struggles. Even as I write this, I'm noticing the pain I have in the middle knuckle of the third finger on my left hand. I've put down millions of words in the past 20 years, going through multiple keyboards and laptops in that time. I was driven by an obsession not to be forgotten, although I'm losing track of why that matters. The longer I go, the more it seems a blessing to slip beneath the surface, and then it's done. I have a heaviness in my chest sometimes that feels like a stone, worn smooth and round, sitting right there on my sternum. Time is getting short for me. Some days it feels a lot shorter than others. I wonder how small the iris of my perception will become as the possibility of works I'll complete dwindles to not one more. That's it, then someone else closes the cover of your last notebook.

Nocebo (2022)

**½/****
starring Eva Green, Mark Strong, Chai Fonacier, Billie Gadsdon
written by Garret Shanley
directed by Lorcan Finnegan

by Walter Chaw Lorcan Finnegan's Nocebo would fill an interesting double-bill with Jaume Collet-Serra's Black Adam, both violently rejecting the interventionist and exploitative tenets of colonialism (traditional and neo-). The reasons these films at opposite ends of the production spectrum might manifest within days of each other in 2022 are cynically self-evident, perhaps, but it doesn't lessen the fascination of their parallel genesis. The world is being destroyed by unfettered, voracious capitalism in ways so obvious that even widgets extruded from the intellectual-property mill are compelled now to occupy the same sociopolitical spaces as an independent film. I don't know that it's possible to qualify this development in that while it seems like progress, history has a way of reducing revolutions almost instantly to T-shirts and freshman dorm-room poster-ganda. Capitalism is undefeated. I loved Vivarium, Finnegan's previous film, a great deal, mainly because it played out manifold variations on its philosophical theme: to what extent does biology determine behaviour? Nocebo is similar in that it, too, asks a question about guilt and vengeance, then works over through multiple approaches to the answer before landing on the same conclusion that notions of good and evil are arbitrary distinctions imposed on innate compulsions. A mother will be compelled to avenge her child because a creature is obliged to reproduce itself. Anything else is merely obfuscating chantilly on an intrinsic cake.

Halloween Ends (2022)

***½/****
starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Andi Matichak, Rohan Campbell, Will Patton
written by Paul Brad Logan & Chris Bernier & Danny McBride & David Gordon Green
directed by David Gordon Green

by Walter Chaw I think the point, if not the pleasure principle, of franchise entertainments is the illusion of ownership over them, the obsessive knob-polishing of arcane knowledge not so very different, in many cases, from the pursuit of doctorate degrees in the liberal arts. You dedicate your life to learning so much about an exceptionally narrow field of study that you eventually come to a place where you know a lot about a little and not much about the rest. This monocultural--and, in most cases, monotextual--training tutors one in identifying deviations from the mean, so that what was joy in discovery becomes jealous taxonomy in defense of the tiny corner you've painted yourself into. The point of it all, ultimately, is to complain. When a totem such as John Carpenter's Halloween arrives, it carries with it the inspiration for epistemological/maniacal cults: entire fields of worship in which the limited revelations provided by a singular text serve as the foundation for religion. Hungry for more tablets, new installments are met with jeweller's glasses and tests of fidelity to the one true Word. The complaining, in other words, starts immediately. Is this new version of the Golden Calf walking the right way? Is it behaving as it should? Slow, not fast, or fast, never slow? Is it savage enough? Is the hero worthy? Is the lamb worthy of the blade? Each new film in any long-running series that earns enough each time out to warrant a continuation receives the scrutiny attending the unearthing of a new book of the Bible. Sources are vetted, false prophets are suspected, bloody debates are had in the town square, and finally, it's either the grudging acceptance into a growing canon or a casting off into the wilderness. The complaining is the point. It solidifies a community like the negging built into Evangelical outreach missions, and it's instant. The only thing verboten is if the franchise threatens the fragile identities of the high priests of its insular cult of personality.

TIFF '22: The Eternal Daughter

***½/****
starring Tilda Swinton, Carly-Sophia Davies, Joseph Mydell, Alfie Sankey-Green
written and directed by Joanna Hogg

by Angelo Muredda Joanna Hogg follows up her autobiographical The Souvenir films with a formal digestif in The Eternal Daughter, which filters her usual thematic preoccupations with memory, space, and creation born of loss through the appropriate genre container of English ghost stories, with style and warmth to spare. A gently spooky, dryly funny, and mournful B-side to those films, as well as a companion piece to her earlier texts where personal relationships are tested away from home in rented villas (Unrelated) and cottages (Archipelago), the film stars Hogg's childhood friend and frequent collaborator Tilda Swinton, who reprises her Souvenir role as an older version of patrician mother Rosalind while also standing in for her own daughter, Honor Swinton Byrne, as Rosalind's daughter Julie, a filmmaker who routinely mines her personal life in her artistic practice. Eager to finally learn more about her buttoned-up mother--and, Rosalind suspects, spin new work out of her stories--Julie treats Rosalind (and her dog) to a memory-jogging birthday stay at a mansion from her youth that's now a deserted, mist- and foliage-enshrouded hotel occupied only by the brusque night clerk (brimming with eat-the-rich intensity by Carly-Sophia Davies) and kindly late-night groundskeeper (Joseph Mydell). The women exchange sad stories and pour over the stingy four items on the menu in the seemingly haunted hotel while the days and nights wear on, unceremoniously marked by their routines of dog-walking, pill-taking, and tiptoeing late at night amidst the mysterious sounds of an open window rattling in the wind.

Telluride '22: Aftersun

***/****
starring Paul Mescal, Francesca Corio, Celia Rowlson-Hall, Brooklyn Toulson
written and directed by Charlotte Wells

by Walter Chaw My parents are dead; my in-laws, too. Us outliving them is how they would've wanted it, and that's the wonder of surviving, isn't it, that this is what happens when everything works out? My dad has been dead for 19 years now, and that anniversary is coming up soon. I'm bad with dates, but my body seems to remember, and I can feel him retreating in my memory. I can't really recall what his laugh sounded like anymore. We weren't the kind of family that took home movies. I'm careful not to disturb the pile of dead leaves that is my childhood, though, because what if there's nothing in the middle of all those paper-thin fragments? Charlotte Wells's Aftersun is about trying to piece together who your father used to be once he's gone: dead or dead enough; it's never clear which it is in Wells's movie, but it hardly matters. We can glean a traumatic event has shaken Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall), who turns to a small pile of old DV videotapes she took as an 11-year-old on a trip to Greece with her dad in search of answers to questions she doesn't know how to ask. The questions the film itself asks are elliptical, elusive, as diaphanous as the images Wells puts together to present the insubstantial nothing that's left over after all this time. I'm reminded of childish experiments with microscopes, looking at a housefly's wing under magnification to find hundreds of opaque cells joined in an unknowable order, a jumble, that doesn't give any insight into the bigger picture, much less its function. Viewed in microcosm, anything is just confused nothing.

Telluride '22: Empire of Light

*/****
starring Olivia Colman, Micheal Ward, Tom Brooke, Colin Firth
written and directed by Sam Mendes

by Walter Chaw While I know the "light" of the title refers to the light that carries a film from carbon arc to silver screen in a grand Art Deco theatre called the "Empire," what it more accurately refers to is Empire of Light's puffed-up inconsequence. Whatever one thinks of Sam Mendes's films (and I think not much of them if I can help it), Mendes is not the first director who swims to mind when it comes time to tackle questions of racism, "crazy" women, and institutional misogyny. Particularly not when it's all wrapped in awards-trolling prestige, couched in the merry, glad-handing fuckery of "movies can bring us all together, and so can ska-punk pioneers the English Beat--and let me read to you the last stanza of 'Death's Echo' by Auden, here, my hand, child."

Light Years: FFC Interviews Bernard Rose

Walter Chaw interviews Bernard Rose,
director of TRAVELING LIGHT

I met Bernard Rose a few years ago when I flew him and his 35mm answer print of Paperhouse out to Colorado for a special screening of the film. Not long after, he returned with Tony Todd for Candyman and a rousing post-film discussion that teased a reunion for the director and actor, which has come to fruition not once but twice since then. I'm still keeping my fingers crossed for the Candyman sequel that sees Helen as the bogey; perhaps the idea of a white lady academic gentrifier is already scary enough. During that first visit, Rose and I spent a couple of hours in a bar discussing Tolstoy, which, besides being bracing under any circumstance, is an exceedingly rare event outside of academia. It's been one of the honours of my life to encounter brilliant creators and to benefit so richly from the association. When I learned that Rose and Todd had picked up a camera, taking to the streets of Los Angeles in the dark days of the pandemic to shoot a new, experimental project inspired by Luis Buñuel called Traveling Light, I was grateful for an excuse to interview Rose. Of course the film is iconoclastic, challenging in the best way and a time capsule of a particular moment that already seems a hundred years ago and fading. We began our conversation by talking about the massive--and largely unexamined--psychic toll of the last two years on the human race.

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.

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

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

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

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

The Seed (2022) - Shudder

**½/****
starring Lucy Martin, Chelsea Edge, Sophie Vavasseur
written and directed by Sam Walker

by Walter Chaw A spirited if familiar body-horror comedy, Sam Walker's hyphenate debut The Seed showcases a sharp, clean writing/directing aesthetic that doesn't do anything particularly novel but does the old stuff with verve and economy. Here, a trio of pals decamps to a mod-mansion in the middle of nowhere to watch a once-in-a-lifetime meteor shower. At least, that's why "geek-hot" Charlotte (Chelsea Edge) is there. Her influencer buddy Deidre (Lucy Martin) is on hand to livestream the weekend's events, while yoga instructor Heather (Sophie Vavasseur) wouldn't say no to a few new clicks for her business, either. The sunbathing, margaritas, mild eruptions of personal grievance, and almost-immediate interruption of cell service are all taken care of in the first 10 minutes. Then it's on to the uncomfortably-close meteor shower that leads to them wondering if "it's supposed to do that?" Probably not. Suddenly a thing falls into the pool, starts gooping, is fished out by our heroes (lest Heather's dad "kill" her), and, of course, resolves itself to be a very stinky alien. "I think God took a shit in your pool, Heather," observes Diedre, the mean one. The rest of the film is what happens when this divine excrement wakes up.

The Lover (1992) [Collector's Edition] - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras A-
starring Jane March, Tony Leung, Frederique Meininger, Arnaud Giovaninetti
adapted by Gerard Brach, Jean-Jacques Annaud, based on the novel by Marguerite Duras
directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud

By Bill Chambers

"What must have happened is: I try it on just for fun, look at myself in the shopkeeper's glass, and see that there, beneath the man's hat, the thin awkward shape, the inadequacy of childhood, has turned into something else. Has ceased to be a harsh, inescapable imposition of nature. Has become, on the contrary, a provoking choice of nature, a choice of the mind. Suddenly it's deliberate. Suddenly I see myself as another, as another would be seen, outside myself, available to all, available to all eyes, in circulation for cities, journeys, desire. I take the hat, and am never parted from it. Having got it, this hat that all by itself makes me whole, I wear it all the time."

That's author Marguerite Duras in the opening pages of her best-selling 1984 memoir L'Amant, describing the "brownish-pink fedora with a broad black ribbon" she wore as a girl of 15-and-a-half. If you remember anything about Jean-Jacques Annaud's eponymous 1992 feature-film adaptation The Lover (apart from its prurient reputation, that is), chances are it's that hat, which actually captures some of the mythic quality Duras is getting at in the above-quoted passage. Watching the recent Holler, I realized that when I think back on it, I will likely remember it not as a movie about scrappers living in poverty but as the one with the girl in the Steve Zissou-esque red-knit beanie. Hats are incredibly cinematic, bestowing story and subtext on an actor's face. Yet while the hat that 19-year-old newcomer and former teen cover girl Jane March wears in The Lover may strike the right note of self-assurance, the pigtails sticking out from under it combine to give her an Anne of Green Gables look that hardly contradicts "the inadequacy of childhood," and I think that's deliberate. From the get-go, she's not just exotic fruit, she's forbidden fruit. The Lover takes a short, discursive book without dialogue typical of the Hiroshima mon amour screenwriter and almost miraculously extrapolates a linear, if episodic, framework from it, but it leans into the sordid details that Duras almost glosses over.

Moonfall (2022)

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

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

No Time to Die (2021)

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

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

Finch (2021)

*½/****
starring Tom Hanks
written by Craig Luck and Ivor Powell
directed by Miguel Sapochnik

by Walter Chaw No movie with Tom Hanks can be entirely bad, especially when that movie marries Hanks favourites Apollo 13 and Cast Away--two films in which our Jimmy Stewart is asked to be ingenious when everything goes wrong. In Finch, he is Finch, an engineer in the post-apocalypse after a solar flare has shredded our ozone layer, wreaking havoc on our crops and allowing the sun to fry people instantly. Time has passed since then, it seems, and there are few signs of life left in St. Louis other than Finch and Finch's dog, Goodyear. Like Hanks's volleyball buddy, the dog is named for a product and, because we've all read I Am Legend, we know that Goodyear is vital to Finch as the last link Finch has with not just the former world, but his own humanity as well. Oh, the humanity. Finch really loves the Don McLean song "American Pie" and, testament to Tom Hanks's titanic charisma and reservoir of goodwill, we like him anyway. We forgive him for Chet; we can forgive him for "American Pie." As the film opens, he's singing "American Pie" and scavenging for goods at the local dollar mart, meaning this is a Chloe Zhao movie all of a sudden though thankfully not for long.

Eternals (2021)

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

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

Telluride '21: The Electrical Life of Louis Wain

**½/****
starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Claire Foy, Andrea Riseborough
screenplay by Simon Stephenson & Will Sharpe
directed by Will Sharpe

by Walter Chaw Will Sharpe's The Electrical Life of Louis Wain is not quite the sentimental, broadly-appealing quirk-fest you might be fearing, largely because it has a strong sense of its own absurdity and maybe even a respect for how tired we are of this crap. Though it stars Benedict Cumberbatch, the patron saint of biopics about iconoclasts like Louis Wain, its most valuable player is, as is so often the case with her, Claire Foy. She plays Emily Richardson, nanny for the younger Wain sisters and, after a funny courtship, the happily-ever-after'd Mrs. Wain. This is a bit of a scandal, their nuptials, because Louis is a gentleman and Emily is working-class, but they're happy, and while they remain childless, they do adopt a cat. That's unusual, since housecats weren't really a thing in Victorian England. So infatuated are the Wains with their fur-baby that Louis, an inventor and illustrator and maybe a genius, starts drawing cats doing people things, partly to pay the bills and partly to distract himself from the fact that Emily is dying of breast cancer. Another complication? Louis is so hopeless at managing his affairs that he's neglected to copyright his paintings, and a cottage industry of Wain's cats springs up without benefiting him in the slightest.

Halloween Kills (2021)

**/****
starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Judy Greer, Andi Matichak, Anthony Michael Hall
written by Scott Teems & Danny McBride & David Gordon Green
directed by David Gordon Green

by Bill Chambers Depending on your perspective, Halloween Kills, David Gordon Green's follow-up to his 2018 Halloween, is the third Halloween II, or the second Halloween III, or the twelfth entry in a long-running serial with a compulsion to press the reset button. Though other horror franchises have splintered into manifold continuities (you'd need Ancestry.com to sort out the various branches stemming from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre), Halloween is unique in that it's not (just) a cash cow getting milked to death by new content farmers--no, a fairly consistent chain of ownership has made a habit of calling a mulligan whenever the consensus is that they've strayed too far from the beaten path. After a failed bid to rebrand as an anthology with the John Carpenter-backed Halloween III: Season of the Witch, whose reputation has since been reclaimed, the series resurrected Michael Myers and his Ahab, Dr. Loomis, only to fly too close to the sun with Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers. Halloween H20 followed, and in bringing back Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode, Michael's sister, it wallpapered over the events of Halloweens III through VI. Then Halloween: Resurrection undid all of that movie's goodwill, so Rob Zombie wrote and directed a remake of the first film. Zombie returned for a sequel that was roundly rejected despite being the ne plus ultra of Halloween movies for the misfit fans like myself, and the unlikely team of Green and Danny McBride took the reins, making the somewhat unconventional decision to do a legacy sequel to Carpenter's 1978 original alone, again with Curtis but without the early retcon that Laurie and Michael are related.

TIFF '21: Wrap-up

by Bill Chambers I've been covering TIFF for, gulp, 25 years now. If I didn't expect to mark this silver anniversary in the confines of my living room, I have no complaints. Some of the show ponies were geoblocked for Canadian press or offline altogether, but although I'm fully vaccinated, I wasn't about to risk transmission or stew for hours in a mask to see the May-December romance Dear Evan Hansen, or another remake of Dune, or a Secret Steven Soderbergh Screening that turned out to be, lol, Kafka, which is almost as good a prank as moving Best Actor to the end of the Academy Awards ceremony. I did at least get to stream my white whale, Jane Campion's The Power of the Dog, so no regrets. No regrets, no complaints.

Telluride '21: Encounter

**/****
starring Riz Ahmed, Octavia Spencer, Janina Gavankar, Rory Cochrane
screenplay by Joe Barton and Michael Pearce
directed by Michael Pearce

by Walter Chaw It's possible that Michael Pearce's Encounter is its own worst enemy. The opening hour or so is remarkable stuff: tetchy, kinetic, terrifying--the honourable sequel in spirit to Philip Kaufman's Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where insects become the vectors of an alien virus that appears to change our DNA and, with it, our behaviour. Such a smart idea for an era in which more and more people are coming around to the idea that fully half of us at any one time are mindless animals powered by the pleasure principle and the selfish cell and little else. They would watch us die without a flicker of recognizable empathy. Nothing is real to them unless it happens directly to them--there is no evidence save that of the flesh, of their flesh, that could compel them to care about the suffering of another human being. Not even care--nothing could compel them to acknowledge that suffering was possible. They are empty of imagination, devoid of personality; they are essentially alien things neither malign nor beneficent. And there is no better explanation for their existence among us than what Encounter at first appears to be getting at: the government is aware that an unknowable influence has taken over half the population, and it's only a matter of time before the rest of us succumb. Delicious. Pearce's treatment of it is delicious, too, as uncomfortable and alive as William Friedkin's Bug, paired beat-for-frantic-beat with an extraordinary performance by Riz Ahmed, who might be incapable of providing any other.

TIFF '21: Mothering Sunday

**/****
starring Odessa Young, Josh O'Connor, Sope Dirisu, Olivia Colman
screenplay by Alice Birch, based on the novel by Graham Swift
directed by Eva Husson

by Bill Chambers An orphan groomed for servitude, young Jane (Odessa Young) is a maid in the employ of aristocratic couple the Nivens in post-WWI England. Jane is quiet, dutiful, mindful of the cloud of sorrow hanging over her employers, who lost a child to the war. (We infer that it's left Mrs. Niven (Olivia Colman) catatonic and Mr. Niven (a grizzled Colin Firth) a babbling mess as he tries to fill the silences.) Jane is also, we glean from inserts of word prompts from her notebooks, a listener, hoarding material for some writing project we see her working on years later, boyfriend Donald (Sope Dirisu) close by to serve as a sounding board. Mothering Sunday, the UK version of Mother's Day, arrives and the Nivens give motherless Jane the day off, which she spends in bed with the neighbours' son, Paul (Josh O'Connor), who appears to have counted his blessings upon returning from the battlefield and refuses to risk disappointing his parents by breaking off his engagement to a woman of means for a maid, despite his obvious affection for Jane. Eventually, Paul takes off to go meet his fiancee, leaving Jane to explore the big empty house alone. Jane, au naturel, ventures downstairs and becomes particularly taken with the vast library, her lack of clothing critical to breaking down the hermetic seal of the rich and making all this profoundly hers. This show of somewhat transgressive behaviour feels transgressive in itself, partly because the movies have gotten so chaste lately and partly because, through a COVID lens, nudity is an especial act of hubris. It's mesmerizing, these few minutes of Mothering Sunday.

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.

TIFF '21: Benediction

***½/****
starring Jack Lowden, Peter Capaldi, Gemma Jones, Ben Daniels
written and directed by Terence Davies

by Angelo Muredda Queer melancholia and stifled antiwar resistance collide in Terence Davies's Benediction, a luxurious and achingly blue profile of First World War poet Siegfried Sassoon. Ever the personal filmmaker no matter the period he's recreating nor the artist he's profiling, whether it should be Emily Dickinson (A Quiet Passion) or himself (Of Time and the City), Davies finds the perfect irascible surrogates in Jack Lowden and Peter Capaldi as the younger and elder Sassoon, respectively. The one is vital but in danger of being flattened by military hypocrisy and transient love affairs with a rotating cast of men doomed to early deaths and loveless marriages, while the other has settled into his surly senescence, despite a late-in-life turn to Catholicism in search of some kind of permanence. ("You could get something unchanging from dressage without the guilt of Catholicism," sniffs his son.)

Telluride '21: The Power of the Dog

****/****
starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons, Kodi Smit-McPhee
written by Jane Campion, based on the novel by Thomas Savage
directed by Jane Campion

by Walter Chaw There is about Jane Campion's work the air of the poet, and indeed there may be no better interpreter, translator, or adaptor of poetry than another poet. Her body of work is, to a one, in the thrall of the rapture of language: what words are capable of when arranged properly, powerfully. Campion demonstrates mastery of both what is spoken and what is seen, how words delivered with exquisite, just-so composition and deadly-true execution become, at the moment of their sublimation, images in the mind like witchcraft with no physical intervention in between. Music in the eye. Of all the easy and obvious examples in her work--the imagistic, rapturous biography of John Keats (Bright Star), the voice of the voiceless in The Piano, the shockingly immediate illumination of Kiwi author Janet Frame in An Angel at My Table--the one that springs to mind most easily and often when I'm describing Campion's work is the reaction of New York City English teacher Frankie, played by Meg Ryan, as she contemplates the words of Lorca printed on a literacy campaign poster in a subway car in Campion's In the Cut. She looks upon them as a sinner looks upon the gallery of saints illuminated in the coloured windows of old cathedrals. Words are a rapture, a vehicle, and Campion, with her training as a painter, proves through the medium of film to be the premier painter of words. Loathe to make such pronouncements, I nonetheless spend most days thinking of Campion as my favourite living director and other days thinking of her as my favourite of all time. She is an artist.

TIFF '21: Dash Cam

Dashcam
*½/****
starring Annie Hardy, Amar Chadha-Patel, Angela Enahoro
written by Gemma Hurley, Rob Savage, Jed Shepherd
directed by Rob Savage

by Bill Chambers Rob Savage's Host dared to suggest our new digital fortresses were inadequate shield against the old insecurities and became a cultural phenomenon as a result. There had been movies like it (Unfriended and its sequel, for instance), but the pandemic subtext gave its core premise--a haunted Zoom call--mass appeal, and having the actors play "themselves" à la Blair Witch added a veneer of documentary credibility. With Dash Cam, his much-anticipated follow-up (and his first film for horror factory Blumhouse), Savage again sets things against the backdrop of COVID and continues the neo-realist conceit of giving the lead the name of the actress playing her, but he's in murkier conceptual territory here, tipped off by the early and frequent abandonment of the titular gimmick. Real-life musician Annie Hardy, from the band Giant Drag, stars as a version of herself, seemingly the worst version of herself (though I gather her online persona is somewhat controversial), an MC who hosts BandCar, "the Internet's #1 Live Improvised Music Show Broadcast from a Moving Vehicle." At the beginning of the film, Annie abandons her L.A. apartment and feline roommate for an extended stay in England with former bandmate Stretch (Amar Chadha-Patel). Boarding the plane, she turns out to be the type to let their mask droop below their nose. It's the first real hint of an impulse to troll that is reflexive bordering on pathological and seems to particularly flare up around the socially conscious or anyone who tells her "no." In the case of Stretch, these are one and the same, and after she manages to alienate him completely, she steals his car and looks for trouble in London (which is really as simple as not wearing a mask), broadcasting it all for the amusement of her followers and sometimes their tips.

Telluride '21: Cyrano

***½/****
starring Peter Dinklage, Haley Bennett, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Ben Mendelsohn
screenplay by Erica Schmidt, based on the play by Edmond Rostand
directed by Joe Wright

by Walter Chaw There's a scene in Joe Wright's derided Pan where Nirvana's anthemic "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is stirringly transposed into an indentured/enslaved orphans' lament. I thought to myself that Wright had a musical in him if he wanted, and here it is, this umpteenth adaptation of Cyrano (de Bergerac), which I fought against for a little while and then went along with. I had a similar experience with Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge, where an old idea presented in an earnest and earnestly gonzo way lives or dies by our investment in the chemistry of its central pair and the melancholy embedded in the thought that every love story is a tragedy eventually. It doesn't hurt, of course, that Aaron and Bryce Dessner of The National wrote the songs and score for this musical reimagining of Rostand's fable. They are the band I have seen the most times in concert. They were my kids' first experience at Red Rocks--we planned it that way, planting the seed maybe for somewhere down the line when they will look back and understand why the band's stories of loss, regret, and the briefness of all things spoke to me so loudly.

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.

The Green Knight (2021) + Pig (2021)

THE GREEN KNIGHT
****/****
starring Dev Patel, Alicia Vikander, Joel Edgerton, Ralph Nelson
written for the screen and directed by David Lowery

PIG
****/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Alex Wolff, Adam Arkin
written and directed by Michael Sarnoski

by Walter Chaw A thing has no value if there is no risk of losing it. A treasure is only that if there are hobbits. If you're a parent and you've done everything right, and everything goes exactly as it should, your children will know the exquisite pain of your death. The story for us all ideally has the tang of misadventure to it and a sad ending full of irony. It is a great fable without a moral, wrought with temptations--though hopefully, when the curtain falls, free of too much regret. The key to navigating the labyrinth of the Rose Poet's medieval romance "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" is perhaps in its prologue, where it presents the history of the founding of England from the Fall of Troy through to Aeneas's further stories: his conquests and foundings, sure, but also the inevitable decline of his line. A popular version of this history around the time that "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" would have been written holds that Brutus of Troy is the grandson of Aeneas, exiled from Italy because, in fulfillment of a prophecy similar to the one that doomed Oedipus, he accidentally killed his father with an errant arrow. In the course of his wanderings, this Brute, the product of a cursed line beset with hubris and tragic folly, becomes the first king of what would be called England.

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:

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

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

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

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

Wonder Woman 1984 (2020) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

WW84
½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Kristen Wiig, Pedro Pascal
screenplay by Patty Jenkins & Geoff Johns & Dave Callaham
directed by Patty Jenkins

by Walter Chaw At some point, someone in some boardroom should have pushed away from the table and asked whether it was a good idea to have a subplot in their new Wonder Woman movie about a person in the Middle East wishing that colonizers would be expelled from occupied territories. (The granting of said wish subsequently leading somehow to nuclear holocaust.) I mean, with or without an Israeli actress in the lead role. Not to say it's not geometrically worse with an Israeli actress in the lead role, because it is. Look, the real wonder of WW84 is that this maybe isn't the worst thing about it. Neither is how flat it looks, or how it starts with 45 minutes of poorly-timed slapstick before shifting into absolutely deadening action sequences, a weird body-possession intrigue, and a horrifying message about how you should never wish for things because everything has consequences attached to it. With so much riding on its shoulders, the burden to be all things to all people has resulted in a vivisected monstrosity of plastic inauthenticity. WW84 additionally has one of the most beautiful people in the world--who's playing an immortal superhero--tearfully proclaim that she wants something to go right for her for once in her life. What I'm saying is, WW84 is a very particular, very limited kind of fantasy gratification that also happens to have fantasy gratification as its needlessly magical plot.

Zoom Generation: FFC Interviews Rob Savage & Jemma Moore

Shudder's Host, directed and co-written by Rob Savage, is this peculiar moment's The Blair Witch Project, a landmark film that provides insight into not just these dark times via the technologies that have evolved from our collective woe, but also how we ourselves have evolved, changed in unexpected ways by the products of our hands. Never so much as to lose touch with what scares us, though. Even the genesis of the project--Host was born of a prank a bored Savage devised to scare his friends on a Zoom chat one evening (a prank posted later on social media, where it gained another half-life)--has its roots in how things that are old-hat (the noise in the attic, the jump scare, the Rear Window effect of being a voyeur to the love and death of loved ones without the power to affect them) don't go away as the tools of our existence change. They adapt. What we've always feared, we fear still. And here we are now with this stuff we've Frankensteined into existence (social media, virtual hosting, Bluetooth, the cloud) without a complete understanding of the doors it'll unlock in our relationship with the universe. We're playing with fire, and Host is a warning no less eloquent for being too late.

Supernova (2021)

****/****
starring Colin Firth, Stanley Tucci
written and directed by Harry Macqueen

by Walter Chaw Tusker (Stanley Tucci) is an author of some minor renown who has a way with a toast and a loving, if sometimes crabby, relationship with his husband, Sam (Colin Firth). Sam is a concert pianist of even more minor renown whom Tusker teases at a diner along the route of a holiday they're taking in the English countryside by telling a waitress that Sam will be glad to sign an autograph for her if she likes. It's clear the poor woman doesn't have the first idea who Sam is, but she's very polite about it. Sam asks why Tusker does things like this when Tusker admits that half the time he doesn't get any joy out of it. Tusker says, "For the other half of the time." In his film Supernova, writer-director Harry Macqueen's script is consistently like this: understated, beautifully observed, intensely human. It's a two-hander with two of the absolute best actors on the planet, so how much script and direction do they need? However much it is, Macqueen gives them just enough. I love the way Sam says "Tusker" like "Tosca," the Puccini opera, but I love it because that's the way, accent or no, your name will evolve with your partner over a life together. It's not a nickname, it's a secret language. After 24 years, no one says "Walter" like my wife says it. It's subtle, but I hear it. I know the contours of it in her voice like I know the curve of her hip when I sleep next to her. The film opens with Sam and Tusker bickering, first about a map, then about what station they're listening to. When Donovan's "Catch the Wind" comes on the radio and Tusker, to cool the tension a bit, cajoles Sam into singing along, well, I fell in love with them. Tusker and Sam are real people.

The Reckoning (2021)

½*/****
starring Charlotte Kirk, Joe Anderson, Steven Waddington, Sean Pertwee
written by Neil Marshall, Charlotte Kirk, Edward Evers-Swindell
directed by Neil Marshall

by Walter Chaw The first film of British director Neil Marshall's I haven't liked, The Reckoning is his contribution to the niche but endlessly rich Witchfinder General horror subgenre. What I've liked about Marshall to this point--from the Hawksian platoon-meets-soccer hooligan bonhomie of his werewolf debut Dog Soldiers through to his reboot of the Hellboy franchise (a widely-derided piece that I found delightfully perverse, gory, and hewing closer to the Mignola source, for better or worse)--is the efficiency and lack of sentimentality driving his narratives. His best-known picture, The Descent, is a triphammer thing, not an ounce of fat anywhere on its body--an instant classic about interpersonal tensions and resentments expressed through collapsing, wet, vaginal tunnels and the monsters that live there. It's a product of a distinct directorial voice that I could trace through all of his pictures. In contrast, The Reckoning could have been directed by anyone and, more to the point, feels a lot like it was directed by its star, Charlotte Kirk, who had a hand in its production and writing. It's a romantic hagiography of Kirk, establishing her as a romance-novel heroine in various carefully-arrayed, soft-focus, medieval tableaux. The Reckoning is not simply bad, it's uncharacteristically bloated and flaccid. Embarrassing, too.

Wonder Woman 1984 (2020)

WW84
½*/****
starring Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Kristen Wiig, Pedro Pascal
screenplay by Patty Jenkins & Geoff Johns & Dave Callaham
directed by Patty Jenkins

by Walter Chaw At some point, someone in some boardroom should have pushed away from the table and asked whether it was a good idea to have a subplot in their new Wonder Woman movie about a person in the Middle East wishing that colonizers would be expelled from occupied territories. (The granting of said wish subsequently leading somehow to nuclear holocaust.) I mean, with or without an Israeli actress in the lead role. Not to say it's not geometrically worse with an Israeli actress in the lead role, because it is. Look, the real wonder of WW84 is that this maybe isn't the worst thing about it. Neither is how flat it looks, or how it starts with 45 minutes of poorly-timed slapstick before shifting into absolutely deadening action sequences, a weird body-possession intrigue, and a horrifying message about how you should never wish for things because everything has consequences attached to it. With so much riding on its shoulders, the burden to be all things to all people has resulted in a vivisected monstrosity of plastic inauthenticity. WW84 additionally has one of the most beautiful people in the world--who's playing an immortal superhero--tearfully proclaim that she wants something to go right for her for once in her life. What I'm saying is, WW84 is a very particular, very limited kind of fantasy gratification that also happens to have fantasy gratification as its needlessly magical plot.

Promising Young Woman (2020)

*/****
starring Carey Mulligan, Bo Burnham, Alison Brie, Connie Britton
written and directed by Emerald Fennell

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

by Walter Chaw Hyphenate Emerald Fennell's feature debut Promising Young Woman trails the same kind of buzz that accompanied David Slade's Hard Candy 15 years ago. Here, that buzz says, is a film that will turn the tables on predators in a meaningful way; it purports to put the bad guys on notice that things are about to change for them: the hunters will now enjoy a bitter draught of their own medicine. Delicious! Unfortunately, like Hard Candy, Promising Young Woman is a sheep in wolf's clothing, a mousetrap made out of wax, good intentions, and the right politics that pulls its punches in absurd, and absurdly consistent, ways. It doesn't help. It doesn't discover a new way to have an old conversation. And at the end of it all, it manufactures an ending in which the authorities it's spent its entire thesis crucifying as ineffectual are relied upon to be the cavalry coming to save the day. Promising Young Woman is the punk that wants very much to be acceptable to the system against which it's rebelling. At least it has some effective performances.

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.

TIFF '20 'Quibi': Another Round; Falling; Spring Blossom

by Bill Chambers To wrap up our TIFF coverage, some 'quick bites' in honour of the fallen streaming service, Quibi. Movies about alcoholism always make me want to drink, so maybe it's true that there's no such thing as an antiwar movie. Thomas Vinterberg's Another Round (***/****), to be fair, makes drinking inviting because it depicts it almost exclusively as a social activity, when few us have socialized in months. Mads Mikkelsen stars as Martin, a high-school teacher in the throes of a mid-life crisis that's jeopardizing his career and putting a strain on his marriage. After confiding his gloomy outlook to three of his colleagues--Tommy (Thomas Bo Larsen), Nikolaj (Magnus Millang), and Peter (Lars Ranthe)--while out celebrating Nikolaj's 40^th birthday, they get to talking about Norwegian philosopher Finn Skårderud, who allegedly believes that human beings would function better with a Blood Alcohol Content of 0.05%. Thus begins an experiment among the foursome to secretly maintain a constant state of tipsiness, which, lo, does yield some positive results, including the adorable runt of Tommy's soccer team, Specs, becoming champ for a day. The first half of Another Round (whose Danish title, Druk, means "binge-drinking") is a bit like watching X-Men discover their superpowers--but, y'know, it's booze, and the four men eventually can't resist drinking past the point of "ignition," leading to domestic strife and even tragedy. For all that, the film is more realistic than moralistic, a feature-length expansion of Reese Witherspoon's credo from James L. Brooks's How Do You Know: "Don't drink to feel better. Drink to feel even better." Mikkelsen is touchingly wistful in a role that's 180° removed from Hannibal Lecter but still counts on his innate combustibility, and the film engages in some hilarious internal debate over whether drinking is good or bad for politics.

Ghost in the Shell (1995) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

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

***½/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B
screenplay by Kazunori Itô, based on the manga by Masamune Shirow
directed by Mamoru Oshii

by Bryant Frazer I'll get this out of the way first: the soul is the ghost and the body is the shell. The title is a reference to Arthur Koestler's book The Ghost in the Machine, which itself refers to a term coined by philosopher Gilbert Ryle to describe the duality of mind and body. The writer and illustrator Masamune Shirow borrowed and altered the phrase for his serialized 1989 manga "Mobile Armored Riot Police", which bore the subtitle "The Ghost in the Shell." I haven't read the manga, but the animated feature it inspired is positively heady with ideas. Ghost in the Shell is a cop movie about robots with human souls. It's science-fiction about the human rights of artificial intelligence. And it's a fantasy about a sexy cyborg who knows how to use a gun. It's all of those things, and it's a disquisition on human consciousness, a meditation on urban loneliness, and also, maybe, a poem about unrequited love. It's extraordinary.

The Personal History of David Copperfield (2020)

**½/****
starring Dev Patel, Peter Capaldi, Hugh Laurie, Tilda Swinton
screenplay by Armando Iannucci, Simon Blackwell, based on the book by Charles Dickens
directed by Armando Iannucci

by Walter Chaw I hate Charles Dickens. I hate what I know about him as a human being. I hate how he writes. I hate his books. To be sure I hated them, I read them all. Because I majored in English and then British Romanticism, I even had cause to study his work--sometimes in great, exhausting detail. I have read volumes of critical studies, been subjected to numerous stage, television, and film adaptations, and had the great displeasure of watching a "colour blind" local production of A Christmas Carol a few years ago that filled me with irritation and upset. I have listened patiently to professors, friends, girlfriends who swore by Dickens; their eyes get twinkly when they talk about him, like they were talking about the Beatles or some shit to someone who maybe just hasn't heard the George Harrison tracks, yet, before forming an opinion. I read David Copperfield on a fancy-bound garage-sale find my parents brought home alongside volumes by Dostoyevsky, Cervantes, and Melville. They were to be my friends through elementary school when I had precious few of the human kind. You could say it was movies and these books that taught me English, and you wouldn't be far off. I still love those other authors. I still hate Dickens.

The Unholy (1988) [Vestron Video Collector's Series] - Blu-ray Disc

**/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras A-
starring Ben Cross, Ned Beatty, William Russ, Jill Carroll
written by Philip Yordan and Fernando Fonseca
directed by Camilo Vila

by Bryant Frazer The Unholy, a moderately-budgeted religious horror drama from Vestron Pictures, is notable mostly for its outsized ambitions. Sure, it has the B-movie elements you'd expect from a late-1980s genre outing with Satanic undertones. There's a troubled, tempted priest, a couple of gory set-pieces, and a phalanx of latex monsters that storm into the final act. But it also boasts moody cinematography, leisurely plot development, and a mini-dream team of character actors. Want to see Ned Beatty and Hal Holbrook play a scene together for the only time in their careers? You want to see The Unholy. How about an elderly Trevor Howard, in his final role, as a blind demonologist? The Unholy is the movie for you. Or the recently-deceased Ben Cross as a Catholic priest with an expiration date of Easter Sunday? You guessed it: The Unholy. It's an unusually earnest variant on those Catholic-themed horror movies that became A Thing in the 1970s, after The Exorcist and The Omen established an audience for lurid horror dressed up with religious themes and prestige names.

Host (2020) - Shudder

***½/****
starring Haley Bishop, Radina Drandova, Jemma Moore, Caroline Ward
written by Gemma Hurley, Rob Savage, Jed Shepherd
directed by Rob Savage

by Walter Chaw I've spoken in front of audiences large and intimate. I've hosted discussions in opera houses, stadiums, and gymnasiums, as well as seminars in classrooms and private homes. When the pandemic hit and I suddenly found whatever teaching or speaking opportunities I was still being offered relegated to "Zoom" meetings, for the first time speaking in public as a professional, I knew anxiety and fear. There's something about it. Is it that everyone is a foot away from your face? I hosted a discussion group recently that had over 100 attendees. On Zoom, that means there are pages and pages of participants you can scroll through as you're talking, and it means that every time someone so much as moves, you're distracted by it. Thrown. Unsettled. Of all the things I didn't anticipate about this odd period in our time together, it's this new horror of engagement. Zoom, the fractured screen it represents, reminds me of that scene in Playtime where M. Hulot visits an old war buddy in an apartment building where an entire wall is made of glass. It's uncanny, wrong, unnatural in a constructed way. It feels like a vivarium, like that old "Twilight Zone" where an astronaut realizes when a wall falls away in his house that he's on display in an alien zoo. I'm afraid to look, because I see more than the subject can see. I'm afraid because I know they see more than I can see, too. I'm afraid because, in these things, I'm having an intimate, face-to-face conversation with dozens of people I can't all see, much less respond to. Zoom is a vampire, and I am drained.

Gladiator (2000) [20th Anniversary] - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A+
starring Russell Crowe, Joaquin Phoenix, Connie Nielsen, Richard Harris
screenplay by David Franzoni and John Logan and William Nicholson
directed by Ridley Scott

by Bill Chambers

"Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?"
-Captain Clarence Oveur (Peter Graves), Airplane!

Ridley Scott's Gladiator is good now. I suppose it was always good, if money and Oscars are indicators of quality, but for me, it was a late bloomer whose virtues have seemingly become more visible since the tide of its success receded. I remember Roger Ebert's review of the film, which he called "Rocky on downers," as one I felt a kinship with. In print and on television, he was especially dismayed by the "shabby" computer-generated Colosseum. The year before, George Lucas had set The Phantom Menace against digital cityscapes, but Gladiator marked one of the first times CGI was used extensively in a non-fantastical setting. (Harping on the Colosseum is a compliment, really, as in all likelihood it means the other products of the mainframe--the flaming arrows, the crowds, the patchwork performance of Oliver Reed--didn't draw attention to themselves.) In a currently-offline article published in 2001, I wrote that "Gladiator provokes meatier discussion as the computer age's first fully dehumanized non-sci-fi film: the late Oliver Reed became a mere mediator for his technologically aided performance, the stony streets of Rome bear an anachronistic (and soulless) patina, and Maximus is the most passive bloodlust-er Hollywood has ever seen, a video game hero on the fritz." Some context: that was me trying to hex Gladiator's chances at the Academy Awards. Needless to say, it didn't work.

Tommaso (2020)

****/****
starring Willem Dafoe, Cristina Chiriac, Anna Ferrara, Maricla Amoriello
written and directed by Abel Ferrara

by Walter Chaw There's something about the late careers of musicians that has, in the middle of all this static Sturm und Drang, moved me in ways I don't know that anything's ever quite moved me before. The new Bryan Ferry, Bruce Springsteen, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Marianne Faithful... So much longing and wistfulness. What's that quote by who's that poet who said something along the lines of how the sum of pain, loss, and time is wisdom? I feel more mortal now than I've felt since I was a suicidal teen--and even then, I believed my tragic surcease of sorrow would feed a grand, romantic storyline. Now that the world has enacted its apocalypse, I don't believe my death would be much more than a bump, a tickle, the noise a bird makes when you hit it with your fender. You don't even slow down if you notice it, but you won't notice it. Even grief, I've found, for all its profundity, is only a caesura in a toneless cacophony. We rumble forward, heedless, encumbered, until the weight of it all crushes us and our decaying bodies are allowed to come to rest at last. That's all. That's all there is.

1984 (1984) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

Nineteen Eighty-Four
****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B
starring John Hurt, Richard Burton, Suzanna Hamilton, Gregor Fisher
written and directed by Michael Radford

by Walter Chaw George Orwell's 1984 is a fabulously paranoid fantasy in which everything predicted has not only come to pass but proven mild in comparison. Orwell himself failed to foresee how Big Brother's intrusion into all aspects of our lives would be a privilege we happily facilitated and paid for at a premium through the acquisition of our manifold devices and subscriptions. Cameras and microphones are recording every aspect of our existence...and that's just the way we wanted it. Capitalism is the most pernicious form of authoritarianism. We are slaves to ease. 1984 is, for all intents and purposes, a plagiarism of Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, a novel written in 1923 and instantly suppressed in Zamyatin's native Russia for being ideologically undesirable. It wasn't published there until 1988 in the temporary spirit of glasnost, though copies of it had been in circulation abroad for decades. Orwell, reviewing We for TRIBUNE MAGAZINE in January of 1947, identified it as one of "the literary curiosities of this book-burning age." "This is a book to look out for when an English version appears," he wrote, and suggested that Aldous Huxley had borrowed from it extensively for A Brave New World. (For what it's worth, Huxley denied the charge vociferously and, having read We, I'd have to agree with him.) Orwell went on to criticize We for lacking political focus in favour of a more general fear of "the machine." So I like to think of 1984, written three years after this review of We, to be Orwell's attempt to correct what he identified as that work's essential flaw rather than a more cynical wholesale lift. I like to think he was driven more by the urgency of the message than by the venality of stolen valour.

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927) [The Criterion Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

THE LODGER: A STORY OF THE LONDON FOG
***½/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras A
starring Ivor Novello, June (née June Tripp), Malcolm Keen, Marie Ault
scenario by Eliot Stannard, from the novel by Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

DOWNHILL (1927)
When Boys Leave Home
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Ivor Novello, Robin Irvine, Isabel Jeans, Ben Webster
scenario by Eliot Stannard, based on the play by Constance Collier & David L'Estrange (née Ivor Novello)
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw Alfred Hitchcock's fifth time at the plate produced his third completed picture, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (hereafter The Lodger), based on a 1913 novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes that was itself based on the 1888 Jack the Ripper murders, which still would have been in the immediate cultural memory of 1927. When first screened, distributor C.M. Woolf proclaimed it incomprehensible, jeopardizing its release until London Film Society founding member Ivor Montagu was enlisted to clear up the mess. In truth, Montagu liked what he saw, advised the reshooting of the darkest scenes, and, with Hitchcock's approval and assistance, discarded a good number of title cards to, in effect, leave the storytelling to the visuals. Producer Michael Balcon, already a supporter, called it good, and the picture allowed the British film industry to finally boast a product that could compete with not merely the artistically-dominant European cinema (France, Germany, and Russia), but also the commercially-dominant American dream factory. Just in time, as it happened. The passage of the 1927 Cinematograph Films Act stipulated that distributors would guarantee at least 7.5% of their total output be British: a number that would increase in increments until it hit 20% in 1936. The skeletal British industry boasted few stars. On the strength of The Lodger and his earlier The Pleasure Garden, Hitchcock was something of a known quantity before much of the British public had even seen any of his films.