Ben Whishaw lounging in bed and smoking: Marmalade and cigarettes, baby

Peter Hujar’s Day (2025)

Posted in2025, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Drama, Esoterica, Germany, Spain, Theatrical, UK

***/****
starring Ben Whishaw, Rebecca Hall
screenplay by Ira Sachs, based on the book Peter Hujar’s Day by Linda Rosenkrantz
directed by Ira Sachs

by Angelo Muredda Celebrated New York portrait photographer Peter Hujar becomes the subject of a distinctive portrait himself in Ira Sachs’s Peter Hujar’s Day, a gentle, minor-key experiment in memorializing the everyday. Anchored by a puckish performance from Ben Whishaw, who spends most of the time platonically seducing his interrogator–Hujar’s friend, author Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall)–and, by extension, the spectator listening in like a fly on the wall, the film lovingly recreates not a day in Hujar’s life but his languid recalling of it the day after.

Lee Byung-hun raising a plant pot over his head: "But can you do *that*, RFK Jr.?"

No Other Choice (2025)

Posted in****/****, 2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, South Korea, Theatrical, Thriller

어쩔수가없다
****/****
starring Lee Byung-hun, Son Yejin, Park Hee-soon, Lee Sung-min
screenplay by Park Chan-wook, Lee Kyoung-mi, Don McKellar, Jahye Lee, based upon the novel The Ax by Donald E. Westlake
directed by Park Chan-wook

by Walter Chaw I was a fan of Donald Westlake from a young age. It was his Parker books, of course, the gateway drug to his other meticulously crafted crime novels. I always liked him more than Ed McBain and Elmore Leonard, admiring his invisible prose, that magical ability he shares with Stephen King to write things that read as if they were written without the intermediary of text. Straight into the vein and doesn’t leave a mark. I kept up with Westlake through college and beyond. I read The Ax the year I moved in with the girl who became my wife. Based on the title, I was expecting Westlake’s inevitable transition into splatterpunk–a hardcore slasher, perhaps. What I got was a wry takedown of capitalism uncomfortably close to the reality I was choosing by settling down, getting married, and getting a job working for someone else. I didn’t see the connection then, but I’ve thought about The Ax off and on over the past 28 years. Still married, two kids college-aged, several recessions, bailouts, disastrous administrations… A series of jobs where I shot up the ladder before stepping off because I couldn’t reconcile what was required to succeed with the image I had of myself as a person. Every time I hit rock bottom, The Ax was waiting with that shit-eating, “toldja so” grin.

Jennifer Lawrence holding a baby while sitting on a porch with Robert Pattinson: "Little JD here just loves the couch for some reason"

Die My Love (2025) + Keeper (2025)

Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Esoterica, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

DIE MY LOVE
***½/****
starring Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson, LaKeith Stanfield, Sissy Spacek
screenplay by Enda Walsh & Lynne Ramsay and Alice Burch, based on the novel by Ariana Harwicz
directed by Lynne Ramsay

KEEPER
***½/****
starring Tatiana Maslany, Rossif Sutherland, Birkett Turton, Eden Weiss
written by Nick Lepard
directed by Osgood Perkins

by Walter Chaw A woman’s body is the battleground we savage, collateral damage in the litigation of collective fear: battered, bloodied, stripped of dignity and individuality. Every religion is founded on the control of it, and most secular bans are, too. A woman is blamed for our knowledge of good and evil, a woman’s beauty for the Trojan War. The opening of a woman’s “box” unleashes all the evils of the world. It is the incubator of our anxieties, the beginning and the end, the salvation and the sin. Her body is the rich, fertile black of the richest loam, and when blood and semen fall upon it, monsters grow. It’s always a trap, and very seldom a person; always a fatale, never merely a femme. It is the Grail, and men, the knights errant in thrall to it. Small wonder that so many of our horror films are about a woman’s body and the florid, manifold violations men visit upon it. More still are about women proving both stronger and stranger than men could ever begin to imagine. No wonder the malleability of flesh, the perverse elasticity of skin, like a scrim stretched between states of being, is where we centre our notions of identity and nurse our fetishistic fascinations. We magnify and romanticize their difference. We make a woman’s body an object of worship, a golden calf that, if we regard it as such, suddenly becomes the core of four of the ten Old Testament Christian Commandments instead of only three. Six, if we also consider her body property to be coveted and stolen.

Elle Fanning and a Predator: "Between Heaven and Elle"

Predator: Badlands (2025)

Posted in****/****, Authors: Walter Chaw

****/****
starring Elle Fanning, Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi, Reuben de Jong
screenplay by Patrick Alson and Brian Duffield
directed by Dan Trachtenberg

by Walter Chaw There are two moments back-to-back in the last 20 minutes of Dan Trachtenberg’s Predator: Badlands that wouldn’t work as well as they do if the rest of the film hadn’t already proven itself so earnest and open-hearted. They’re bellwethers, if you will; canaries in the coal mine. If you’re a basketball fan, you’d call them “heat checks”–the shots a scorer on a heater might take that would be ill-advised at any other point in the game, but because that basket looks like the ocean… The first involves an ally giving a goofy wave when she notices she’s being watched; the second is a celebratory “high-five” between a hand and a foot. Detached from the film, they are perilously close to dad-joke territory. In the context of a movie about families constructed of outcasts, outsiders, and orphans, these gags land with the heft of cathedral bells. They’re the peck on the cheek Leia gives Luke before they swing over the abyss in Star Wars, or Chewbacca scaring the shit out of a little mouse droid on the Death Star. If you like these characters, like them to the point of investing in them, this is the stuff you not only get away with, but which elevates your piece from conventional to sublime. More importantly, it makes this shit fun. As I like to say about corn and cheese in the right proportions: “Son, that sounds like a good plate of nachos.” My kids hate it when I do that. I got a million of ’em.

Jeremy Allen White as the Boss: "I’m a fancy-ass chef, what’s a boy to do?/Locked myself in the freezer, at the end of season two"

Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere (2025)

Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Music, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong, Paul Walter Hauser, Stephen Graham
based on Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, by Warren Zanes
written and directed by Scott Cooper

by Walter Chaw There are a handful of untouchable albums; Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska is one of them. It’s a record that didn’t make a lick of sense to me until it did, and then, once it did, burrowed in, insinuating and close. It occupies a place in my heart with Tom Waits’s Swordfishtrombones and Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush: chronicles of broken men adrift in cold shoals constructed from their own inadequacy, in love with women who deserve better. If you alternate Nebraska with Suicide‘s self-titled debut (itself an all-timer), they play like a double album, given how deeply the one influenced the other. A couple of tracks on the Boss’s project function as sequels to tracks on Suicide‘s masterpiece; another even sounds like a remake. That’s what Nebraska is: a masterpiece–and a conversation. It’s this dark postcard from the edge where Springsteen teetered for a while. He would have fallen in, I think, if he didn’t have this project tethering him to the earth. Nebraska is a chronicle of depression delivered directly from a battered Gibson J-200 into a four-track TEAC 144 Portastudio cassette recorder in the Colts Neck, New Jersey bedroom of some guy who’s at once the most miserable and most successful he’s ever been.

Ellen Greene as Audrey on the set of LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS: Audrey, Too, by Walter Chaw

Audrey, Too: FFC Interviews Ellen Greene

Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

by Walter Chaw I was a full-grown man before I understood completely the grace of Audrey. Audrey, as interpreted by the legendary Ellen Greene in Frank Oz’s big-screen adaptation of the Off-Broadway musical Little Shop of Horrors, one of my beloved films from childhood. Audrey, who saw in nebbishy amateur horticulturalist Seymour the champion of her dignity, the guardian of her heart. Greene was a fixture of Joe Papp’s Public Theater in New York, a place she has described as an egalitarian artists’ studio so full of the gifted that no one was gifted. It’s where she cut her teeth as one of the most ferociously singular performers of her time. I have always been in awe of her absolute commitment to a role, her transparency and extraordinary vulnerability. She has been an inspiration for me to be present and unafraid in my own work, even if it takes a toll. Especially if it takes a toll.

Colman Domingo in Dead Man's Wire/Miles Teller and Elizabeth Olsen in Eternity

TIFF ’25: Dead Man’s Wire + Eternity

Posted in2025, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Gus Van Sant, Drama, Fantasy, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF

DEAD MAN’S WIRE
**/****
starring Bill Skarsgård, Dacre Montgomery, Cary Elwes, Al Pacino
written by Austin Kolodney
directed by Gus Van Sant

ETERNITY
*½/****
starring Miles Teller, Elizabeth Olsen, Callum Turner, Da’Vine Joy Randolph
written by Patrick Cunnae & David Freyne
directed by David Freyne

by Bill Chambers Bill Skarsgård finally butts up against the limits of his versatility as he lamely channels Michael Shannon in Dead Man’s Wire, Gus Van Sant’s first feature since 2018’s Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot. (Most recently, he worked on Ryan Murphy’s “Feud: Capote vs. The Swans”, directing six of its eight episodes.) Both are based on true stories, an enduring kink of Van Sant’s going back to 1995’s To Die For, which riffed on the Pamela Smart case with a satirical bent that hasn’t really resurfaced in his docudramas since. But when, late in the game, Dead Man’s Wire develops something like a comic edge, it feels like Van Sant might be heckling the material out of boredom, if not something more problematic. The film dramatizes the 1977 kidnapping of mortgage broker Dick Hall (Dacre Montgomery) by Skarsgård’s Tony Kiritsis, who tied a 12-gauge shotgun to Dick’s neck and held him hostage for three days at his rathole apartment in Indianapolis. He believed that Dick and his wealthy father, M.L. Hall (Al Pacino), were waiting for him to fall behind on his mortgage payments so they could poach a valuable piece of property he owned, and he demanded the Halls give him $5 million in damages as well as–and this was the sticking point, according to the film–a full-throated apology in exchange for Dick’s life.

Aziz Ansari and a winged Keanu Reeves outside a Denny's: "No one can be told what Denny's is, you have to see it for yourself."

Good Fortune (2025)

Posted in2025, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical

*/****
starring Seth Rogen, Aziz Ansari, Keke Palmer, Keanu Reeves
written and directed by Aziz Ansari

by Walter Chaw Comedians can be great educators. They speak truth to power. They needle inconsistencies and hypocrisies to light like splinters coaxed from the body politic. Charlie Chaplin. George Carlin, of course. Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce, Lucille Ball, Mary Tyler Moore–just the beginning of a roll call of storied court jesters attached to naked emperors. There are good modern examples, too, even ones who didn’t perform in Riyadh at the discretion of a homicidal regime fond of public beheadings, dismembering American journalists, and, you know, brutally punishing women who dare to challenge the status quo. And then there’s Riyadh headliner Aziz Ansari, who has made a career of playing the most irritating side character in other people’s stuff, parlaying whatever fame that earns a person into the smart, at times surprisingly raw three-season dramedy “Master of None”. There’s some depth to Ansari, it appears, despite his being the weakest part–whinging, facile, fast-talking, insincere–of his own strong project. Orson Welles famously said about Woody Allen:

"All the Voices That Are Frightening." by Walter Chaw (stark white text against black background)

“All the Voices That Are Frightening.”: FFC Interviews Lizzie Borden

Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

by Walter Chaw Lizzie Borden’s Working Girls (1986) was foundational for me. Looking for titilation as a young teen in the VHS age, I found instead a sensitive, uncompromising, unfiltered look at sex work as a blue-collar profession that portrayed sex workers as human beings. Neither revelation should be startling, but for a 13-year-old raised in a culture (two cultures) in which women are largely treated as objects for my consumption, it hit me like a thunderbolt.

After the Hunt group setting: Garfield and Friends

After the Hunt (2025)

Posted in2025, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Crime, Drama, Italy, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Julia Roberts, Ayo Edibiri, Andrew Garfield, Michael Stuhlbarg
written by Nora Garrett
directed by Luca Guadagnino

by Angelo Muredda SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. “It happened at Yale,” an onscreen caption proclaims at the start of Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt, a handsomely-mounted but undisciplined culture-war sampler platter. The film is the unruly if rarely boring child born of the intellectual marriage between the Guadagnino who saw Dario Argento’s Suspiria and imagined a 150-minute adaptation about postwar Germany and longtime actor and first-time screenwriter Nora Garrett, who told BUSTLE that After the Hunt was inspired by her time in a pair of online philosophy courses in the early days of the pandemic about “how to live morally in what often feels like an immoral world.” What exactly happened to inspire a feature-length reflection on morality is not defined with much precision in After the Hunt, which prefers to raise an assortment of questions about race, gender, and privilege in higher education with the nuance of an edgelord podcaster thinking out loud rather than look directly at a concrete example of those mechanics at, say, Yale. But if a low-stakes psychological thriller about well-dressed academics in immaculate cream suits and rumpled chambray shirts with not one but two beautiful minimalist apartments is what you’re after, you could do worse.

Rebecca Ferguson on the phone: “No, I don’t want gluten-free crust, we’re all about to be incinerated anyway.”

A House of Dynamite (2025)

Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Streaming, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Gabriel Basso, Jared Harris
written by Noah Oppenheim
directed by Kathryn Bigelow

by Walter Chaw Stanley Kubrick tried to tell the story of Dr. Strangelove straight until he realized how funny the end of the world is, especially as it will inevitably be ushered in by the stupidest people on the planet. See, playing a game where the only winning move is not to play defines its contestants as idiots. Indeed, there’s an essential hilarity, a baked-in hyperbolic overreaction, to just the idea of a nuclear apocalypse that makes it surprisingly difficult to frame the premise as serious drama. The movie that might come closest is Roger Donaldson’s Thirteen Days, but only in its DVD incarnation under the short-lived “infinifilm” imprimatur, which branched to extracurricular documentary or archival materials that made watching the film very much like attending an entertaining and informative seminar on the Cuban Missile Crisis. By itself, it’s light in the britches: a Kennedy-impersonation contest with a stolid Kevin Costner along for the ride. Yes, the made-for-television movies The Day After, The War Game, Threads, and Testament are uniformly excellent, but they’re focused on the aftermath of nuclear apocalypse. Ditto the not-made-for-TV When the Wind Blows, The Quiet Earth, and On the Beach.

The Ugly/The Furious

TIFF ’25: The Ugly + The Furious

Posted in2025, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, China, Crime, Disability, Drama, Film Festivals, Hong Kong, Martial Arts, Mystery, Thriller, TIFF

THE UGLY
*½/****
starring Park Jeong-min, Kwon Hae-hyo, Han Ji-hyeon, Shin Hyeon-bin
written by Yeon Sang-ho, based on his graphic novel Face
directed by Yeon Sang-ho

火遮眼
**½/****
starring Xie Miao, Joe Taslim, Yang Enyou, Brian Le
written by Frank Hui, Lei Zhilong, Tin Shu Mak, Kwan-Sin Shum, Aidan Parker
directed by Kenji Tanigaki

by Angelo Muredda In his 2007 book Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation, Ato Quayson suggests that disability “short-circuits” the protocols of representation, throwing into crisis all kinds of formal and thematic properties as a text struggles to account for its disruptiveness. If there’s a prize for the most aesthetic nervousness, or for a text whose nervousness about how to depict disability all but causes it to self-destruct, it ought to go to Train to Busan director Yeon Sang-ho’s dispiriting The Ugly. A slow-burn procedural mystery-thriller about a documentary crew and a son in arrested development getting to the bottom of a historical murder, The Ugly is thrown into a full-blown panic attack by the aesthetic challenge posed by something as simple as depicting its disabled characters moving through the world.

Wahlberg. The caption reads, "Make this quick, I have a 4am shower and then prayer and then a 4:30 shower and then family time"

Play Dirty (2025)

Posted in2025, Action, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Streaming, Thriller

½*/****
starring Mark Wahlberg, LaKeith Stanfield, Rosa Salazar, Tony Shaloub
written by Charles Mondry & Anthony Bagarozzi
directed by Shane Black

by Walter Chaw It took me 72 hours to finish Shane Black’s Play Dirty, his long-gestating take on Donald Westlake’s Parker novels (written under his nom de plume, Richard Stark), which adapts no particular one of the 28 published but rather attempts to transplant the general vibe of the series into a complex, violent heist concept set in the current day. I can maybe get behind the idea of it. Especially since it began life as (or at least shares a title with) the legendary–and legendarily discarded–script for Lethal Weapon 2. You know, the one that Black, after getting paid a then-record six figures to write it, was asked to make less sadistic. A skosh lighter on the misanthropy, perhaps; a soupçon more likely to support a burgeoning franchise by, oh, not killing off the star, let’s say. I like Shane Black, for all his lapses in judgment and vile bedfellows. I think he has a way with hard-R action, and I’m a fan of his patter, his dense verbal humour, whose frat-boy sensibility I could rationalize until now. I’m starting to think it’s a reflection of someone not entirely capable of growing up. In other words, Black is feeling like an indictment of me, this child of the Blockbuster, holding on too long to my affection for one of my obnoxious uncles.

Paula Beers in a red convertible, looking skeptical

TIFF ’25: Miroirs No. 3

Posted in2025, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Film Festivals, Music, Mystery, Thriller, TIFF

Mirrors No. 3
***/****
starring Paula Beer, Barbara Auer, Matthias Brandt, Enno Trebs
written and directed by Christian Petzold

by Angelo Muredda Not content to have already put his stamp on Vertigo with 2014’s postwar noir Phoenix, where an Auschwitz camp survivor and cabaret performer who’s undergone facial reconstruction surgery finds herself remade into the image of her former self by the scoundrel husband who sold her out to the Nazis, Mirrors No. 3 sees Christian Petzold delivering a lower-key riff on Alfred Hitchcock’s masterwork. An uncanny, tragicomic European idyll that improbably takes equal inspiration from Vertigo, Final Destination, Mulholland Drive, and Hansel and Gretel despite largely being set on sun-kissed porches and in open garages, Mirrors No. 3 is a beguiling, singularly strange picture that could only have been made by the simultaneously heady and easygoing German auteur.

Xin in The Sun Rises on Us All, Johnston in Obsession

TIFF ’25: The Sun Rises on Us All + Obsession

Posted in2025, Authors: Bill Chambers, China, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, TIFF

日掛中天
***½/****
starring Zhilei Xin, Songwen Zhang, Shaofeng Feng
written by Shangjun Cai, Nianjin Han
directed by Shangjun Cai

OBSESSION
***/****
starring Michael Johnston, Inde Navarrette, Cooper Tomlinson, Megan Lawless
written and directed by Curry Barker

by Bill Chambers In Shangjun Cai’s masterful The Sun Rises on Us All, Meiyun (Zhilei Xin, deservedly feted at the recent Venice Film Festival) is a wannabe influencer who sells dropship clothing out of a crappy little outlet in a Guangzhou mall. Newly pregnant by her married boyfriend Qifeng (Shaofeng Feng), she’s a woman in her late thirties with the lifestyle of someone considerably younger, suggesting an interruption in the past that will soon be confirmed. While at the hospital for a prenatal checkup, Meiyun spots a man she recognizes, Baoshu (Songwen Zhang), who’s recovering from gastrointestinal surgery after being diagnosed with stage 4 stomach cancer. There is palpable tension between them, but Meiyun cares about him, and as he needs somewhere to convalesce, she makes room for his dour ass in her cramped one-bedroom. He’s such an unpleasant guest that it’s easy to feel sorry for Meiyun, whose romance with Qifeng is complicated enough. Indeed, you could go so far as to call Baoshu and Meiyun’s on-screen dynamic S&M, although it’s not always him doing the S and her doing the M. (When Baoshu goes on a mini-hunger strike, for instance, Meiyun literally slaps sense into him.) But as the details of their shared history come to light, our sympathies begin to shift–or, more to the point, even out.

DiCaprio on a pay phone in sunglasses: "Hello, ICE tip hotline? Baba Booey!"

One Battle After Another (2025)

Posted in****/****, 2025, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: Paul Thomas Anderson, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

****/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro, Regina Hall
written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

by Walter Chaw One Battle After Another feels like contraband. It’s the sort of movie the Ministry of Culture would ban before offering the position of Head of the Ministry of Culture to its director. A Fritz Lang situation, if you will, where a nation-under-siege’s Best shoot their shot before being silenced or recruited–or they escape in the last crepuscular years before the curtain finally drops. It’s impolite. It’s outraged about what’s obviously outrageous and outspoken at a time when most everyone else is stunned into silence or cowed into surrender. It’s as sick of the bullshit as you are. A miracle, then. Or it feels like a miracle, anyway. Depending on how things go, we could eventually be talking about it the way we talk about Marcel Carné’s Children of Paradise. Do I exaggerate? If I do, it’s only by degrees. We are all in this pot together, and it’s hotter than you think. Not noticing has brought us to where we are: bright red and just south of parboiled. Do you notice? Paul Thomas Anderson does.

Bald white Emma Stone leashed around the neck and wrists

Telluride ’25: Bugonia

Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Crime, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Ireland, Sci-Fi, South Korea, Telluride, UK

**½/****
starring Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis, Alicia Silverstone
screenplay by Will Tracy, based on the screenplay by Jang Joon-hwan
directed by Yorgos Lanthimos

by Walter Chaw I don’t know what it’s like to come to Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia fresh, given that it’s a remake of Jang Joon-hwan’s gonzo, lacerating Save the Green Planet!, a film about wild conspiracy theories and the people who drink deep from them that seemed considerably more novel in 2003 than it does in 2025. Now, some pathetic incel white supremacist dufus doing a terrorism is a weekly–soon to be daily–occurrence, making Bugonia a lot like Ari Aster’s Eddington: too late to be a warning and too directionless to offer solutions. What is it, then? Well, it’s sort of like Idiocracy, if Idiocracy came out today instead of 20 years ago, when it was a terrifying prophecy of unusual prescience. I guess the proper term for this exercise would be “past its sell-by date,” but what I think it is, mostly, is a very fine vehicle for Jessie Plemons and possibly a test of how close we are to Lanthimos and Emma Stone finally pushing their luck a little too far and launching themselves into the land of the terminally overexposed. I love that they continue to inspire each other and stuff, though their collaboration is starting to feel like a party where everyone else has left and I have to work in the morning, you guys, please.

Tall Margaret Qualley holding flowers and short Ethan Hawke holding court in Blue Moon

TIFF ’25: Blue Moon

Posted in2025, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Comedy, Directors: Richard Linklater, Drama, Film Festivals, Ireland, Music, Romance, TIFF

***½/****
starring Ethan Hawke, Margaret Qualley, Bobby Cannavale, Andrew Scott
written by Robert Kaplow, inspired by the writings of Lorenz Hart and Elizabeth Weiland
directed by Richard Linklater

by Angelo Muredda Contrasting epitaphs set the tone for Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon, a melancholy tribute to the self-destructive genius of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart, a not especially handsome guy played by Linklater’s decidedly handsome long-time muse, Ethan Hawke. Moments before we see the man’s lonesome onscreen death from pneumonia on a rainy street, a title card offers Hart’s posthumous characterization from a pair of observers: his contemporary Oscar Hammerstein II, who hails him as “alert and dynamic and fun to be around,” and cabaret performer Mabel Mercer, who pronounces him “the saddest man I ever knew.” Hawke’s Hart is both–a charming but embittered barfly in a personal and professional crisis who loves conversation as much as he resents having to make it with perceived dullards like Hammerstein, who, in the film’s timeline, has just replaced him as Richard Rodgers’s creative partner on the verge of their major commercial breakthrough, Oklahoma!.

Christoph Waltz in a top hat in Frankenstein

Telluride ’25: Frankenstein

Posted in****/****, 2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Mexico, Telluride

****/****
starring Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Mia Goth, Christoph Waltz
screenplay by Guillermo del Toro, based on the book Frankenstein; or: The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley
directed by Guillermo del Toro

by Walter Chaw The poetry lives in the father. Do I mean the poetry? I’m not sure. No, I mean the place where this piece breathes and has always breathed is the father. The fathers. I say “poetry” because it’s a term that covers a lot of ground for me. Poetry is something that is ineffable, ephemeral, inexplicably alive. It is ageless and immortal. Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein is about his father and Our Father. Fathers is where the poetry of it lives. It is, itself, poetry. My God, it’s beautiful. Let me explain.

Emily Blunt and The Rock taking a nighttime stroll in The Smashing Machine

TIFF ’25: The Smashing Machine

Posted in2025, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Canada, Film Festivals, Japan, Sports, TIFF

**/****
starring Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, Ryan Bader, Bas Rutten
written and directed by Benny Safdie

by Angelo Muredda The early narrative on Dwayne Johnson’s starring role as veteran mixed-martial artist Mark Kerr in Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine was that it was sure to mark an overdue career reinvention for the wrestler turned actor turned annoying social-media poster. After years of his star power waning in terms of prestige as well as audience appeal–the decline measured in cringe posts about how the “hierarchy of power in the DC universe is about to change” thanks to his appearance in Black Adam (which bombed) and unflattering headlines about how his character in the Fast & Furious franchise was contractually forbidden from losing a fight onscreen (which made him seem not invulnerable but narcissistic)–finally Johnson would develop both the deft comic touch and dramatic depth he’d shown in Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales and Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain. That Johnson is every bit as good as was promised by the PR campaign, as vulnerable and bruised onscreen as he has been aloof and guarded in real life, comes as something of a monkey’s paw situation, given that his fluid and charming performance is one of the only things worth unreservedly recommending in the otherwise fairly standard film. Despite the outcome at the Venice Film Festival, which saw Johnson go home critically lauded but empty-handed while Safdie took the Best Director prize, Johnson’s ascent comes at the expense of his director’s first real draw as an artist–a slightly spiky but mostly unremarkable sports biopic worthy of being in the awards conversation, in the derogatory sense.