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

One Battle After Another (2025)

September 29, 2025Posted 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

September 28, 2025Posted 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

September 24, 2025Posted 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

September 22, 2025Posted 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

September 17, 2025Posted 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.

David Jonsson and Cooper Hoffman, fg, in The Long Walk

The Long Walk (2025)

September 15, 2025Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Stephen King, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Cooper Hoffman, David Jonsson, Charlie Plummer, Mark Hamill
screenplay by JT Mollner, based on the book by Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman
directed by Francis Lawrence

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. My least favourite thing is to go after something I mostly agree with, made by people who seem well-intentioned despite failing to recognize their dangerous biases. Francis Lawrence’s The Long Walk nails who we are right now: a nation that leads the world in pride and trails the field in things to be proud of. A nation crowdfunding life-saving healthcare while bankrolling genocide. A nation where dozens of billionaires control the same amount of wealth as the millions of everyone else. Last I checked, the thing America laps every other industrialized country at is the percentage of our adult population that believes in angels. Throughout The Long Walk, the cartoonish Major (Mark Hamill), channelling the spirit of Sgt. Rock, lets loose with jingoistic statements about the greatness of these United States and how it will one day, through a baptism of blood and the violent suppression of generations of hope and self-worth, be great again. It’s “IRONIC” spelled out in blazing letters across a dystopian sky, like the fireworks that greet our heroes after their long walk–but what is irony when it’s just the facts? What is satire when we are beyond satire?

Amanda Seyfried, arms spread wide in ecstasy amid a crowd of followers

TIFF ’25: The Testament of Ann Lee

September 13, 2025Posted in2025, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, Musical, TIFF, UK

Ann Lee
***/****
starring Amanda Seyfried, Thomasin McKenzie, Lewis Pullman, Tim Blake Nelson, Christopher Abbott
written by Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet
directed by Mona Fastvold

by Angelo Muredda Speaking at the press conference following the Venice world premiere of Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee, co-writer and second-unit director Brady Corbet, Fastvold’s husband, illuminated the couple’s fruitful creative partnership, which also yielded their co-screenwriting duties on 2024’s The Brutalist. “We firmly believe,” he said, pointing to Fastvold’s ownership of and final cut on the film, “that you can only serve one master at a time.” To say nothing of the film’s numerous aesthetic and thematic echoes of Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, not to mention those of their previous project, Corbet’s comment is an interesting critical pathway into an often impenetrably busy, ambitious work that, when one breaks it down, is about both a marriage in tension and a husband working in service–far more glumly than the gregarious Corbet–to his spouse’s singular vision of the world. Pricklier than the more awards-friendly The Brutalist, though vulnerable to the same structural imbalances and ambiguity, The Testament of Ann Lee is a pleasantly odd text: a rich, overstuffed period musical that makes a grand figure of its impossibly marginal fringe subject.

Adult sisters lying on bed in an emotional embrace

Telluride ’25: Sentimental Value

September 13, 2025Posted in****/****, 2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Denmark, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Telluride, Turkey, UK

Affeksjonsverdi
****/****
starring Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Elle Fanning
written by Eskil Vogt
directed by Joachim Trier

by Walter Chaw Joachim Trier is my favourite living director. Through his work, I’m seen, and in being seen, I am less lonesome, less self-loathing. For a while, anyway. When he finds value in the melancholy heroes of his films, riddled though they may be with depression, prone to stupid mistakes and debilitating anxiety though they are, he finds value, somehow, in me. The first movie of his I saw was Oslo, August 31st, which opens with druggie-in-recovery Anders (Anders Danielsen Lie) filling his pockets with rocks like a Danish Virginia Woolf and, on the first night of a day trip away from rehab, walking into a lake. He fails to kill himself, however, as he’s failed at everything else. I’ve failed in the same way. It’s hard to explain what that feels like if you haven’t experienced it. He’s 34. An old friend tells him he’s got a fresh start and should make the most of it, but he tells her it’s too late. All of his friends have transitioned into the next part of their lives while he’s been stuck in place with his addiction, anchored down by the dead, flat weight of his unmet potential. What kind of life is left for someone who was only ever really good at self-sabotage? What kind of next step is there for someone afraid to take the first one? Oslo, August 31st is one of the very few movies ever to nail what depression feels like. Sadness? Sadness is easy. Despair is easy. Hard is feeling like you’ve disappointed everyone who ever believed in you. Or they will be disappointed, given enough time. Hard is knowing you’re the problem. It’s the last day of summer. I’ve never felt so old.

Linda Schuyler in a chair in a nicely appointed living room being interviewed

TIFF ’25: Degrassi: Whatever It Takes

September 12, 2025Posted in2025, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, TIFF

**/****
directed by Lisa Rideout

by Bill Chambers For my brother’s birthday a couple of years ago, I bought him an officially licensed novelty T-shirt for The Zit Remedy‘s “Everybody Wants Something Tour” that he continues to wear proudly for the, well, novelty factor. Talk about kitsch heaven, if you’re a Canadian of a certain age. But as I watched Degrassi: Whatever It Takes, Lisa Rideout’s new and decidedly uneven documentary about the television institution that spawned The Zit Remedy (among other fictional acts, including Drake), I began to worry I’d erred in giving money to the Degrassi Industrial Complex, whose genesis dates back to 1979, when Linda Schuyler adapted the children’s book Ida Makes a Movie into a short subject that was shot on, dun dun dunnn, De Grassi Street in Toronto. Ida Makes a Movie later became the retroactive pilot for “The Kids of Degrassi Street”–itself a dry run for “Degrassi Junior High”, which is when Schuyler’s dogged vision of a TV show that’s all Afterschool Specials finally hooked the zeitgeist. Everybody wants something they’ll never give up, indeed.

TIFF ’25: The Fence

TIFF ’25: The Fence

September 10, 2025Posted in2025, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Directors: Claire Denis, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, France, TIFF

***/****
starring Isaach De Bankolé, Matt Dillon, Mia McKenna-Bruce, Tom Blyth
screenplay by Claire Denis, Suzanne Lindon, and Andrew Litvack, based on Black Battles with Dogs by Bernard-Marie Koltès
directed by Claire Denis

By Angelo Muredda A sparsely populated construction site in West Africa becomes the locus of a nocturnal power struggle between Black labourers, white occupiers, and the land that rejects the latter like a virus in Claire Denis’s The Fence, an eerie postcolonial thriller where the subaltern not only speaks but compels, standing at the gate of the white occupiers’ ill-acquired homes and enterprises. Adapted from French writer Bernard-Marie Koltès’s 1979 play Black Battles with Dogs, the film comfortably slots into Denis’s oeuvre alongside her earlier works examining the uneasy presence of white settlers in Africa, even as its commitment to the symbolically freighted, dialogue-heavy text makes it, to its detriment, talkier than her usual work. Although it often threatens to devolve into a stilted filmed play, The Fence thrums along to its own strange rhythm on the strength of its magnetic cast, a quartet of polarized opposites bumping into one another in close-quarters, and Denis’s sensitivity to the particular sensory experiences of her characters, each feeling acutely out of place in an uncanny space that one longtime settler assures a new arrival is “very real.”

Devilishly handsome George Clooney standing a few feet away from a giant George Clooney poster

Telluride ’25: Jay Kelly

September 9, 2025Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Italy, Telluride, UK

*/****
starring George Clooney, Adam Sandler, Riley Keough, Laura Dern
written by Noah Baumbach & Emily Mortimer
directed by Noah Baumbach

by Walter Chaw Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly wants to be two things. It wants to be Cinema Paradiso, and it wants to be George Clooney’s All That Jazz–a hagiography for the temple of film on the one hand, a self-lacerating reflection on the cost of stardom on the other. A tightrope, in other words, requiring an abiding, all-consuming, some might even say sloppy love of movies paired with a genius-level creator. You see the problem. I have admired many of Baumbach’s works, both individually and in collaboration with Wes Anderson, but I’ve never found any of them to be particularly in rapture over the transformative potential of film as a medium. I have admired much of George Clooney’s work, but have never found him to be a once-in-a-lifetime talent with a deeply troubled backstory like, say, Bob Fosse. The closest analogue to Jay Kelly is actually Mr. Holland’s Opus.

Telluride ’25: Hamnet

Telluride ’25: Hamnet

September 7, 2025Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, Shakespeare, Spielberg, Telluride, UK, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Emily Watson, Joe Alwyn
screenplay by Chloé Zhao and Maggie O’Farrell, based on O’Farrell’s novel
directed by Chloé Zhao

by Walter Chaw There is so much acting in Hamnet. So much. The most acting. A host, a bounty, a feast. Remember Denzel Washington’s Fences? It makes Fences seem subtle and reserved–even dignified, if you can imagine, which I could not. Hamnet is heavy with acting in the sense that brood cows are heavy with young in late July, teats pendulous and bellies stretched like unrefrigerated yogurt capsules whose live colonies have boomed under torpid, incubated petrie-dish conditions. Miserable. Suffering. Ridden with monologue and gesticulation. The term “to the rafters” doesn’t begin to cover it, given how the great abundance (embarrassment, superfluity, profusion, glut) of acting in Hamnet is directed at the very heavens themselves, forsooth, screeched in the key of rent flesh and ripped bodice to the bowed ears of weary Danish gods. What is a stage that is only proscenium? Hamnet is the answer now and going forward.

TIFF ’25: The Secret Agent

TIFF ’25: The Secret Agent

September 5, 2025Posted in2025, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Brazil, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Mystery, Netherlands, Thriller, TIFF

O Agente Secreto
***½/****
starring Wagner Moura, Gabriel Leone, Maria Fernanda Cândido
written and directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho

By Angelo Muredda “He had a good voice,” an archivist muses to her colleague about a historical subject whose life under autocratic rule she’s been piecing together from audio cassette recordings and newspaper clippings late in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent. A chronicler of the gentrified streets, gated communities, and forgotten movie theatres of his northern hometown of Recife (which he has commemorated in films past, from his 2011 debut feature Neighbouring Sounds–partially shot in his own family home–to his death-tinged 2023 documentary Pictures of Ghosts), Filho appoints these contemporary junior scholars sifting through the detritus of the waning days of Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1970s as his authorial stand-ins. Taken as they are with colourful stories culled from a mess of poorly indexed sources, they’re also analogues for the spectator’s own entanglement with Filho’s equally anecdotal and sprawling work, which is attuned to the chorus of precarious, distinct voices that make up his hometown.

Telluride ’25: Ballad of a Small Player

Telluride ’25: Ballad of a Small Player

September 2, 2025Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, Germany, Mystery, Telluride, Thriller

½*/****
starring Colin Farrell, Fala Chen, Deanie Ip, Tilda Swinton
screenplay by Rowan Joffe, based on The Ballad of a Small Player by Lawrence Osborne
directed by Edward Berger

by Walter Chaw Edward Berger follows up Conclave, his empty, showy relevance-grab of an Executive Suite remake, with Ballad of a Small Player, a similarly grandiose gambling flick that aims to reboot Peter Bogdanovich’s masterpiece Saint Jack but succeeds mainly in resurrecting the Ghosts of Orientalism Past. Gambler, conman, and small player of the title Lord Doyle (Colin Farrell) staggers through the slick gunmetal and neon streets of Macau looking for games of Baccarat like James Bond Man with a Golden Gun-ning for trouble. He meets his Waterloo in a supernaturally lucky old crone who never loses a hand because she’s riding shotgun to a hustler from the spirit world. It’s not as interesting as it sounds. After hitting a gambler’s rock-bottom, Doyle falls in with conscience-burdened casino manager Dao Ming (Fala Chen), who, in true Celestial lotus-blossom fashion, offers herself as a sacrificial moral lamb for a wayward gwielo trying to walk the straight and narrow.

Telluride ’25: The Theatre That Only Exists for Four Days

Telluride ’25: The Theatre That Only Exists for Four Days

September 1, 2025Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Film Festivals, Telluride

by Walter Chaw Even though it’s painted a bright, canary yellow, there’s a hole-in-the-wall Mexican joint in Gunnison called Anejo Bistro & Bar that you would miss unless you were right on top of it. I stopped there with my friend this year on our way to the Telluride Film Festival–a seven-hour trip I’ve traditionally made on my own but maybe wouldn’t have made at all this year if not for her. The drive has become harder. The build-up to it, the anticipation-into-fear. I carry trauma from a bad accident years ago while driving over Vail Pass in the dead of winter, exacerbated by a horror film of a ride back from Telluride in the first throes of a second, maybe third round of Covid in 2022. Both experiences have made extended drives over curved passes spanning stories-deep drops triggers for my anxious equivocation. Add how, as I age, I become less and less desirous of breaking routine, even if counting the days until my death has lately become a perverse fascination for me. I am trapped in this prison of my quotidian days. I know this is a first-world problem.

Honey Don’t! (2025)

Honey Don’t! (2025)

August 26, 2025Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coen Brothers, Comedy, Crime, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Margaret Qualley, Aubrey Plaza, Charlie Day, Chris Evans
written by Ethan Coen & Tricia Cooke
directed by Ethan Coen

by Walter Chaw Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke have a mission, and that mission is apparently to make affected, arch neo-noir “comedies” showcasing angry cunnilingus and the sense of humour that, in tiny doses, gave Ethan’s collaborations with his brother Joel a soupçon of bitterness. Without what seems to be Joel’s humanism to leaven what appears to be Ethan’s misanthropy, the residue left at the bottom of this cup is bitter to the point of repugnant. Flying solo, Ethan comes across as the kind of kid who inflates a toad to pop it with a slingshot for yuks. In some ways, Honey Don’t! is a definitive film for our era of nihilism, this generation of people becoming dead inside. It’s an endurance challenge, our Freddy Got Fingered, a sociopath by any other name. Remember that scene in Fargo where the wife tries to run away from her captors with her hands tied behind her back and her head covered by a hood? How she stumbles around in a confused circle before tripping and falling, causing kidnapper Steve Buscemi to laugh uproariously? Imagine an entire movie that is just that. Cruel. Mean. Tying-tin-cans-to-a-dog’s-tail mean. It’s aggressively nasty in a way I find punishing, and it’s scary because I suspect Coen and Cooke have enrichment on their minds. I think they’re doing this to force the “normies” to put some respect on alternative lifestyles. I think they’re doing it because they think the way to do that is to push our noses into our own sick.

Little boy in clown makeup at the back of an underlit classroom: "There's always a class clown."

Weapons (2025)

August 12, 2025Posted in****/****, 2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical

****/****
starring Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, Alden Ehrenreich, Amy Madigan
written and directed by Zach Cregger

by Walter Chaw Zach Cregger’s Weapons is joy. It’s nostalgia without an obvious antecedent, capturing the phenomena of “hiraeth” for a sensibility raised on weird pulp and Halloween. If nostalgia is the last deposit with cultural veins still rich enough to mine, this is the way to do it. Weapons is the best Ray Bradbury adaptation there has ever been; while it’s not actually based on any of his stuff, one could argue it shares roots with 1962’s “Boys! Raise Giant Mushrooms in Your Cellar!”, 1948’s “The October Game”, and 1952’s “April Witch”. There are infernal images here snatched from modern sources as well. In its general (sub)urban chaos scene, it rivals the incomparable opening 10 minutes of Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead reboot. In its after-hours-in-familiar-places dread, it mirrors Tobe Hooper’s Salem’s Lot and the indelible midnight classroom set-piece from Demián Rugna’s When Evil Lurks. But the engine driving it, that coalesces these tantalizingly familiar bits and pieces into a toothsome meal, is the same thing that animates Stephen King’s work: a clever and nimble manipulation of the uncanny. Comedians (Cregger co-founded the comedy troupe “The Whitest Kids U’Know”), the good ones, boast that same gift for inserting the absurd into the mundane. The line between horror and laughter is so slight, there almost isn’t one. In Weapons, it’s the clown where your wife should be, dinner guests who don’t ever speak and refuse to leave, the obvious witch showing up for a parent/teacher conference. Terrifying in the moment, but funny…should you survive. Weapons made me feel like I was a seventh grader ripping through It over a long weekend in the fall of 1986 again. As with most things made only for me, I suspect it has delights for everybody.

J-Lo with an intact horse

The Cell (2000) [Limited Edition] – 4K Ultra HD

August 3, 2025Posted in2000s, 2025, 4K Ultra HD, Arrow Video, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Esoterica, Germany, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A+*
starring Jennifer Lopez, Vince Vaughn, Vincent D’Onofrio, Marianne Jean-Baptiste
written by Mark Protosevich
directed by Tarsem Singh

by Walter Chaw It’s a collision of travel-worn ideas, this movie–a tired serial-killer thriller married to Dreamscape–and the wear shows whenever someone mouths their ration of exposition like a toothless shut-in gumming their daily soup-soaked toast. Yet Tarsem’s The Cell is also a collection of astonishments, visions so startling and sticky they linger like the midnight-carnival sequence in Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn: a hellish gallery adjacent to Clive Barker’s nightmare mosaics of violated flesh. Portions of it were inspired by the techniques perfected by the Catholics during the Spanish Inquisition, and no one knows invasions and perforations of the body like the Catholics. Now imagine Eiko Ishioka designing the costumes for this infernal Mass; Howard Shore composing the score; and Tarsem (a.k.a. Tarsem Singh), a Desi-American artist steeped in the eye-popping iconography of the Hindu pantheon, pulling the strings. Even the supporting cast (Jake Weber, Dylan Baker, James Gammon, Dean Norris, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, and so on) is a murderer’s row of total bangers, albeit tasked with the most serviceable roles. There’s too much talent here for the story at hand. It’s like inviting the 1927 Yankees to play in a beer-league softball tourney.