Authors: Walter Chaw Archives - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Lucy Liu in Presence: Not just a subpar Led Zeppelin album anymore

Presence (2025)

January 24, 20252025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Drama, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Lucy Liu, Chris Sullivan, Callina Liang, Eddy Maday
written by David Koepp
directed by Steven Soderbergh

by Walter Chaw The subjective camera is nothing new, of course. 1947’s Lady in the Lake is a largely failed Raymond Chandler adaptation in which Philip Marlowe is the camera, while director RaMell Ross cannily attaches the technique to a critic-proof project in the current Nickel Boys. First-person shooter (FPS) video game enthusiasts are more than familiar with the concept, and purveyors of porn know that VR-ready stereoscopic smut has its own niche market. Everything “new” is ancient, in other words, and the experience of Steven Soderbergh’s Presence at times reminded me of playing the first-person, text-based INFOCOM games of my childhood: floating in and out of scenes; picking up bits and pieces of information and trying to cohere them into an unrevealed storyline. Horror aficionados will certainly have moments of déjà vu here, what with the camera being yoked to a predatory point-of-view. (Halloween, I’m looking at you.) Which is to say that Presence definitely pulls the odd pleasure-lever in my lizard brain, not that it’s good. Funny, because even Soderbergh himself has said he never thought a “POV” film could work because you don’t get to see the reaction of the protagonist–but then he goes ahead and makes Presence anyway…and cheats.

Blind man sitting with his daughter in a movie theatre as the lights go down in Demons

Demons (1985) + Demons 2 (1986) – 4K Ultra HD Discs

January 22, 20251980s, 2025, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Dario Argento, Horror, Italy

Dèmoni
**½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A
starring Urbano Barberini, Natasha Hovey, Karl Zinny, Fiore Argento
screenplay by Dario Argento, Lamberto Bava, Dardano Sacchetti, Franco Ferrini
directed by Lamberto Bava

Dèmoni 2… l’incubo ritorna
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring David Knight, Nancy Brilli, Coralina Cataldi Tassoni, Virginia Bryant
written by Dario Argento, Lamberto Bava, Franco Ferrini, Dardano Sacchetti
directed by Lamberto Bava

by Walter Chaw It’s one of the best horror premises ever: A mysterious figure (legendary director Michele Soavi, doing double duty on screen and off as creep and AD, respectively) hands out invitations for a movie premiere to beautiful teens, pimps and their hookers, and other manifold riffraff in the Berlin Underground. The venue is a mysterious theatre, “Metropol,” that no one’s heard of before, and when the curtain goes up, it’s for the pleasure of a dozen or so cinephiles down for a show and maybe some sordid adventure. Then the demons come. Setting a horror movie in a cinema is nothing new, of course (the meta implications of it are too delicious to resist), but I like how the moviegoers in Lamberto Bava’s Demons–these marks, these fools–have been sucked into the freak tent without even having been mesmerized there by an able barker. Turns out, some of us don’t need a showman to pique our curiosity. Turns out, even though we should know better than to show up at a party we’re invited to by some guy in a metal mask on the subway, caution goes right out the window now and again. Maybe I can relate because, for as risk-averse as I am, this is the sort of provocation I could be vulnerable to under the right–which is to say wrong–circumstances. (“Sure thing, friend-o, I’ll watch your movie.” God knows I’ve agreed to worse.) Maybe this is the perfect metaphor for being a film critic in a festival setting: stuck in an auditorium with the creators and no easy way to escape if things go pear-shaped.

Pamela Anderson in The Last Showgirl: Don't use the stairs if Nomi's around, girl

The Last Showgirl (2024)

January 13, 20252024, 2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Pamela Anderson, Brenda Song, Kiernan Shipka, Jamie Lee Curtis
written by Kate Gersten
directed by Gia Coppola

by Walter Chaw The distaff The Wrestler, Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl is a showcase for Pamela Anderson, reborn in middle age as a serious actor after a career spent being the butt of jokes, the object of desire, and the sufferer of violations to her privacy and dignity. Not to rob her of agency by painting her as strictly a victim–the fact is, Pamela Anderson and the choices she made in how she presented herself in the entertainment industry had everything to do with the dictates of our still-unresolved/perhaps unresolvable systemic, representational biases. Sure, her stolen sex tape was the first of its kind in the early days of so-called celebrity “leaks,” but she made the decision to star in the legendary beefcake-and-jiggle showcase “Baywatch”, didn’t she? To be the PLAYBOY cover girl not once, but 13 times? It’s complicated, and I confess that while I never thought poorly of her, I never thought much about her, period. That’s me, to my shame, being patronizing and lacking empathy and curiosity. Of late, Anderson has stopped wearing makeup in public appearances and redirected the focus to her love of gardening. (She has a show on HGTV.) She’s our Kim Novak: unfairly underestimated, even derided, for her appearance in her prime, finding a measure of redemption by not asking for it, making no apologies, and refusing anymore to fit herself into the molds created for her by the appetites and prejudices of others.

Jude Law aiming a gun in The Order: This time...Dickie came prepared.

The Order (2024)

January 12, 20252024, 2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Crime, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

***/****
starring Jude Law, Nicholas Hoult, Tye Sheridan, Marc Maron
screenplay by Zach Baylin, based on the book by Kevin Flynn & Gary Gerhardt
directed by Justin Kurzel

by Walter Chaw Justin Kurzel makes films about bad, broken men and the cultures that cultivate them, and he excels at this. His True History of the Kelly Gang is one of the great neo-westerns, while The Snowtown Murders is already a cult classic for true-crime reenactments of small-town atrocities. The only other person working so dedicatedly in this arena is S. Craig Zahler. The difference is that Zahler’s films leave me feeling filthy, disgusted with myself and everyone else. Unlike Kurzel, Zahler doesn’t deal in “based on real events” currency. Rather, his nihilism is founded on more uncomfortable insights into masculinity. Zahler’s films are about you and me; there’s no chance to separate ourselves from his loathsome and violent men. It’s that space in Kurzel’s films, the ability to say, “Sure, that happened once, but it’s over now,” that allows us to look at his subjects as apart from us. Kurzel’s films are gripping for sure, even powerful, professional and superlative technically, but not soul-sickening–not indictments of who we are and what we will allow. While he may pinion the Other with merciless clarity, he’s on the side of the angels. Society is restored in Kurzel’s films, one way or another. Zahler’s, on the other hand, offer us no good guys or a future worth living.

“The 50 Best Films of 2024,” by Walter Chaw

December 31, 20242024, 2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best-of Lists, Blog

The 50 Best Films of 2024 title graphic featuring Lea Seydoux against a greenscreen

by Walter Chaw I’ve spent decades predicting the fall, but when the fall came, I certainly didn’t feel like doing a victory lap. When the pandemic shut down everything for a while, I realized that my worst fears had come true, and then, for the first time in as long as I could remember, my depression quieted like a rash that’s lost its savagery. Respite, because my worst fears weren’t looming anymore–they’d finally arrived. All that was left to do was find a new way through. Is this why apocalyptic scenarios have been so seductive for us the last few years? It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.

Nosferatu (2024)

December 20, 2024****/****, 2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Vampire

****/****
starring Bill Skarsgård, Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp, Willem Dafoe
inspired by the screenplay Nosferatu by Henrik Gallen and the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker
written for the screen and directed by Robert Eggers

by Walter Chaw

The hysteric female can be viewed as a ‘flipped’ version of the male paranoiac; while the male represses his fears about the nature of his sexuality, the female’s hysterics seem to circle around her inability to direct her sexuality as she pleases, or her desperation to maintain her purity. It is difficult to consider female hysterics in the Gothic in the Freudian sense of repression, however, since her sexuality is repressed from without, as well as within. Much of the time, the Gothic female is both literally and figuratively kept in a cage, crypt, cell, or cave in which she does not have the choice of how her sexuality will be exploited.
-Dr. Wendy Fall (The Coherence of Gothic Conventions. NY. Arno Press, Rev 1980)

Nightbitch (2024) + Babygirl (2024)

December 14, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Mystery, Netherlands, Theatrical, Thriller

NIGHTBITCH
**/****
starring Amy Adams, Scoot McNairy
based on the novel by Rachel Yoder
written for the screen and directed by Marielle Heller

BABYGIRL
**/****
starring Nicole Kidman, Harris Dickinson, Antonio Banderas, Sophie Wilde
written and directed by Halina Reijn

by Walter Chaw I’m sick of watching films about unhappy, beautiful, rich white people. You’ll forgive me. Maybe one day, I’ll regain the appetite to try to relate to the existential malaise they suffer in the face of their extraordinary privilege, their boring sex lives, their quotidian successes at the tops of various social ladders. To the winners go the spoils, as they say, but at least have the discretion to be grateful or, failing the urge to whine, the decency to be entertaining. In 2024, when the United States chose fascism on the back of a wave of populist xenophobia and white nationalism, I admired mid-life performances from Demi Moore and Pamela Anderson in mediocre but vaunted films rueing the loss of their legendary beauty in a culture that made them famous for, at least in part, their legendary beauty. Once objects of desire, they’ve come to have regrets. Me, too. I played my part in dehumanizing them in my time. It’s complicated.

SDAFF ’24: Ben and Suzanne: A Reunion in 4 Parts + Stranger

November 29, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Netherlands, Norway, Romance, San Diego Asian Film Festival

BEN AND SUZANNE: A REUNION IN 4 PARTS
***/****
starring Sathya Sridharan, Anastasia Olowin
written and directed by Shaun Seneviratne

STRANGER
局外⼈
**½/****
starring Jin Jing, Liguo Yuan, Baohe Xue
written and directed by Zhengfan Yang

by Walter Chaw There’s a sense of suspension in hotel rooms, a weight accrued from the parade of temporary occupants, somehow–cosmic luggage left behind. There’s possibility in hotel rooms. You can be who you want to be and someone else will clean up after you, make it seem like you were never really there, prime the pump for the next in line. There’s freedom in that, and threat, too, a practical reminder that you are temporary and once you have gone, the world will, by design, rush to fill the space you abandoned. Shaun Seneviratne’s Ben and Suzanne: A Reunion in 4 Parts begins in a guest suite and ends in a series of hotel rooms as nebbish Ben (Sathya Sridharan) visits his girlfriend Suzanne (Anastasia Olowin), who’s away on a three-month business trip in Sri Lanka. She works for a program that’s ostensibly for the development of small, women-run companies, but lately it’s devolved into the odious task of collecting loans for the bank. “I only went to the bank because of you,” says one of Suzanne’s clients as she’s asking for more time to recover from the ravages of the pandemic, and I thought of Darth Vader on Cloud City telling Lando to pray he doesn’t alter the terms of their agreement further. Suzanne’s task, already ugly, is made uglier by the fact that she’s a white woman and all of the women who trusted her are brown. This isn’t what the film is about, though in time you realize it’s at the base of what everything’s about.

SDAFF ’24: Viet and Nam

November 26, 2024****/****, 2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Philippines, San Diego Asian Film Festival, Singapore, Vietnam

Trong lòng đất
****/****
starring Phạm Thanh Hải, Đào Duy Bảo Định, Nguyễn Thị Nga, Lê Viết Tụng
written and directed by Trương Minh Quý

by Walter Chaw They find one another in the earth and the pitch black more by instinct, I think, than by feeling. Like animals born in the dark and orienting themselves towards heat. We are all born in the dark, guided by need and the mysterious vicissitudes of subterranean rivers and tides. Because Truong Minh Quy’s Viet and Nam is a love story, it’s first about lovers meeting and then about how their identities flow into each other like mercury, in constant flux and only ever itself. When Viet (Dao Duy Bao Dinh) and Nam (Pham Thanh Hai) are twined together, there’s a memory of wholeness they represent–a solidity their country has never really enjoyed, annexed and colonized as it has been since its inception. They are a memory of something that never was, a dream of completion. In the credits, they’re listed as “Viet/Nam,” and over the days we spend with them, they try to uproot themselves from the trauma and division of the ground that grew them. But disconnecting yourself from the place that is your history and culture is like learning to fly by lifting yourself in defiance of gravity.

Wicked (2024)

November 25, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Fantasy, Iceland, Musical, Romance, Theatrical

Wicked: Part I
*½/****
starring Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande-Butera, Michelle Yeoh, Jeff Goldblum
screenplay by Winnie Holzman and Winnie Holzman & Dana Fox, based on the musical by Winnie Holzman and Stephen Schwartz, from the novel by Gregory Maguire
directed by Jon M. Chu

by Walter Chaw It’s fairly obvious to me why the Broadway musical turned Hollywood blockbuster Wicked is a tween sensation, and though the curmudgeon in me wants to scoff, I don’t begrudge its success. It’s gently anti-fascist; its broad metaphors for race and sexual orientation are righteously inclusive; its peculiarly catchy songbook full of otherwise unexceptional belters takes no unnecessary risks that might alienate or offend; and its mean-girl/makeover anchors are reliable bedrock for its ice cream-and-taffeta target audience. Lamprey-ed onto a beloved intellectual property (the 1939 film, not the books, which are still waiting for adaptations perverse enough for L. Frank Baum–Return to Oz notwithstanding), Wicked is a laboratory creation machine-tooled to tweak the unearned tingle like a twigged-out harpist flailing against hormonal strings. Misunderstood heroine? Handsome prince of unusual depth? Popular girl with hidden complexity? As a guy who grew up with and is still a sucker for Allan Moyle’s Pump Up the Volume (which, with an infinitely superior songbook, follows essentially the same narrative trajectories), who am I to harsh a nation’s mellow? I won’t even ask why they keep painting Black women green in multi-million-dollar franchises. Margaret Hamilton, The Wizard of Oz, okay, “uncle,” you win. Why aren’t the Munchkins little people anymore? Kidding. Not kidding, but kidding.

SDAFF ’24: Love Lies + Dead Talents Society

November 20, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Hong Kong, Horror, Romance, San Diego Asian Film Festival, Taiwan

LOVE LIES
我談的那場戀愛
*/****
starring Sandra Ng, Cheung Tin Fu, Stephy Tang
written by Hing-Ka Chan, Miu-Kei Ho
directed by Miu-Kei Ho

DEAD TALENTS SOCIETY
鬼才之道
*/****
starring Chen Bo-lin, Gingle Wang, Sandrine Pinna
written by John Hsu, Kun-Lin Tsai
directed by John Hsu

by Walter Chaw I want to grant that comedy is difficult to translate. But it’s not impossible–there are enough examples to the contrary to make this a specious argument–so I’m willing to give Hong Kong film Love Lies and Taiwan’s Dead Talents Society the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they play better in their native cultures and tongues. Maybe they’re better with an audience–some films are, you know. Or maybe not. Maybe this middlebrow, low-aspiring, derivative dreck receives the same kind of derision everywhere and we’re not so different after all. It’s not a matter of cultural superiority, mind; in suggesting the delicacies of humour can be lost in translation, I’m not saying that Chinese people are incapable of detecting garbage when presented with it. I have to tell you, though, that both of these films are multiple nominees at this year’s Golden Horse Awards (frickin 11 for Dead Talents Society by itself)–our cultures are not so far apart when it comes to giving out movie awards. I’ll also acknowledge some personal bias in reviewing Asian pictures: a toxic brew of barely understood self-loathing and the deep-rooted desire not to be lumped in with behaviours that could be coded as racially humiliating or even, at times, identifying. It’s like using the word “honoured” around white people: I try not to do it. This is a long way of saying Love Lies and Dead Talents Society are technically well-made films that vibrate at frequencies I can, incongruously, neither hear nor tolerate. Your mileage may vary.

Heretic (2024)

November 18, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Hugh Grant, Sophie Thatcher, Chloe East
written and directed by Scott Beck & Bryan Woods

by Walter Chaw Heretic‘s premise is childish wish-fulfillment, an exercise in mental cruelty in which a medium-schooled skeptic challenges a pair of comely young missionaries, hoisting them on their own insinuating, syllogistic petard. And who better to function as audience avatar than Hugh Grant? Rather, this elderly iteration of Grant, crusted over with a shell of sociopathic nastiness, like his brittle accent made manifest in flesh and wool cardigan? Get ’em, you ossified piece of British shit! Grant plays Mr. Reed, a cozy hermit secreted smugly in his richly-appointed hobbit hole who invites Sister Paxton (Chloe East) and Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) in from a God-is-wroth thunderstorm to indulge their desire to share with him the Good News courtesy of the Church of Latter-day Saints. He has a fire roaring, a blueberry pie in the oven, and, allegedly, a shy wife cowering in a back bedroom, so the girls aren’t in a strange man’s home alone with the strange man. The Mission wouldn’t allow that, you see, but Mr. Reed is reassuring. The amiable chatting soon turns to wicked jousting, and the jousting becomes inappropriate and uncomfortable. When Barnes and Paxton try to leave, they find that the front door is locked and their only option is the Stockton prize of lady or tiger. That is, they are offered the choice of two doors–one marked “BELIEVE,” the other “DISBELIEVE”–as their only possibility of escape from his unctuous, patronizing company. Behind one is the back entrance to the house. Behind the other? Tiger or, rather, Tyger, of the “here there be” variety.

SDAFF ’24: Bitterroot

November 15, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival

***½/****
starring Wa Yang, Qu Kue, April Charlo, Gia Vang
written and directed by Vera Brunner-Sung

by Walter Chaw Vera Brunner-Sung’s Bitterroot opens with an epigraph in Hmong: “Please come back to your house spirits and no longer experience pain and sickness come as pure as water and as green as the forest,” it says, with the cadence and intimation of Yeats’s invocation to his peculiar muse in The Stolen Child. (“Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild/With a faery, hand in hand,/For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.”) The one is a plea for a child’s conditional homecoming, cured in the fire of experience and returned somehow to the state of purity the home and the hearth represent. The other is an invitation to oblivion, a rejection of experience into a state of perpetual ignorance–the promise of Eden as a malignant choice (more trick than choice, ultimately) between sentience and non-sentience. In both, there’s an irreducible tangle in the concept of home. Home is either where you are clean or where you learn you are not. I think it’s a matter for the individual to decide if it’s better to live knowing you will die and whether anyone will know you’ve come home after some time in the world.

Red One (2024)

November 14, 20242024, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Family, Mystery, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Dwayne Johnson, Chris Evans, Lucy Liu, J.K. Simmons
screenplay by Chris Morgan
directed by Jake Kasdan

by Walter Chaw I’ve been waiting decades for a spiritual successor to Jingle All the Way, that repugnant ode to materialism gussied up in Yuletide cheer like a corpulent whore from a Victorian stroke-book. Remember that moment in The Rundown where Arnold Schwarzenegger makes a brief cameo to “hand off” his action-king crown to Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson? Turns out it was a monkey’s paw predicting the foolhardiness of them pursuing cush gigs in comic-book franchises and immortality in beloved perennial family holiday classics. How many fingers do monkeys have, anyway? Jake Kasdan’s Red One casts The Rock as humourless man of action Callum Drift. Not humourless like fellow professional wrestler Dave Bautista’s brilliant turn as neurodivergent Drax in Guardians of the Galaxy, humourless like a guy doing a tough-guy bit… and also a dull-guy bit, and, uh, dense, you know–disillusioned, too, because grown-ups don’t love Christmas anymore. Callum, you see, is head bodyguard to Santa Claus (J.K. Simmons) and the leader of ELF, which stands for I don’t fucking know, go watch it yourself. Elite L-something and Fortification or someshit; honestly, we’re both diminished just acknowledging it. Wait, “Enforcement, Logistics, and Fortification.” Fuck. This is humiliating.

SDAFF ’24: A Traveler’s Needs + By the Stream

November 13, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival, South Korea

A TRAVELER’S NEEDS
여행자의 필요
**/****
starring Isabelle Huppert, Kwon Haehyo, Lee Hyeyoung
written and directed by Hong Sang-soo

BY THE STREAM
수유천
**½/****
starring Kim Minhee, Kwon Haehyo, Cho Yunhee
written and directed by Hong Sang-soo

by Walter Chaw At this point, it’s not that one watches a Hong Sang-soo joint so much as one sits with it companionably, like a chaperoned Victorian date, a slightly alcoholic drink in hand to lubricate the passage of unpredictable chunks of awkward chit-chat. Free of exposition or any narrative of consequence, his stuff is just suggestions of hints of scenarios given to his cast of regulars; then Master Hong sits back to watch how the various elements fall into place. There’s occasional magic among the literal obfuscations (one of his 2023 films, In Water, was shot entirely out of focus on purpose), those tiny sparks between people that define human attraction and other sundry frictions. You’re paying such close attention that a hitch of breath or glint in the eye can feel like revolutionary insight. More, you’re so desperate for meaning that you will attach it to gossamer inference, a will-o-the-wisp made of listlessness and… Is it boredom? It’s not free of boredom.

Juror #2 (2024)

November 11, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Clint Eastwood, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Nicholas Hoult, Toni Collette, J.K. Simmons, Kiefer Sutherland
written by Jonathan Abrams
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. If it were the ’90s, this would star Richard Gere, but in 2024 it’s Nicolas Hoult as Justin Kemp, Juror #2 in a murder case involving the death of volatile Kendall Carter (Francesca Eastwood) at the hands of her scumbag boyfriend, James (Gabriel Basso). Justin is a recovering alcoholic and soon-to-be dad, married to faithful schoolmarm Ally (Zoey Deutch), AA-sponsored by defense attorney Larry (Kiefer Sutherland), and shocked to discover during the first day of the trial that he may have been the one who murdered Kendall one dark and stormy night, mistaking her for a deer he struck in the road and subsequently failed to find. If he goes to the judge (Amy Aquino), though, given his history in the cups, he’ll likely face life in prison; but if he doesn’t, an innocent man (innocent of this crime, at least) will be sentenced in his place. What’s a good but flawed man to do? Make a de facto widow of his beloved on the eve of their becoming parents because of an accident that could’ve happened to anyone stuck in an ethical Trolley Test cum The Book of Questions hypothetical? Or keep it to himself, knowing that the world is probably unmoved by the loss of low-aspiring/low-achieving James? It’s a fun parlour game, and Eastwood, 94, has fun playing it.

Here (2024)

November 6, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Robert Zemeckis, Drama, Esoterica, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, Paul Bettany, Kelly Reilly
screenplay by Eric Roth & Robert Zemeckis, based on the graphic novel by Richard McGuire
directed by Robert Zemeckis

by Walter Chaw If it were only vapid, insipid, faux-high-concept middlebrow treacle, then fine, you know, that’s between you and your withered stump of low-aspiring taste. If it were only a terrible concept done terribly, a body-temperature tongue-bath delivered without enthusiasm or interest, well, then, so be it; I have liked too many of Robert Zemeckis’s movies to muster up the energy to go after a genial tapestry of sopping Hallmark platitudes–especially those that make idiots happy. Happy is in short supply, after all. If it were merely mildly pathetic in its desperation to be liked; had it only avoided the deadly sin of also wishing to be relevant, wise, respected. But, alas, Here isn’t just awful by most measurable standards established over 130 years of this medium’s astonishing evolution–it’s didactic and self-satisfied about it. It’s the spiritual offspring of Paul Haggis’s Crash, another The Blind Side packed to the tippy-top with privileged foolishness in which the soft-pedalling of broad melodrama paints over history’s sins for the validation of one miserable, unmotivated white guy’s congenital lack of introspection and imagination. Who could’ve guessed that this film, widely touted as the reunion of Forrest Gump‘s writer, director, and stars, would be a redux of its messages, too? Has it ever occurred to you that you “never know what you’re gonna get” in a box of chocolates only if you refuse to read it?

Breathless (1960) [The Criterion Collection] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray Combo

October 29, 2024****/****, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, France, The Criterion Collection

À bout de souffle
****/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
starring Jean Seberg, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Van Doude, Jean-Luc Godard
written and directed by Jean Luc Godard

by Walter Chaw Jean-Luc Godard is punk, and Breathless is his Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. If he’d only ever made this one film, it would have been enough: the sneer that launched a thousand film careers–the carbuncular adolescents gathered behind their enfant terrible king seeing a future in taking a giant piss on politesse and convention. Among the filmmakers of the Nouvelle Vague, Godard carried the flag of disaffection first and longest. Like the other young men of his generation, he was force-fed the cinema of France’s American occupiers, who flooded French theatres post-WWII with what they saw as genre detritus: B-movies and cheap melodramas, gangster flicks and westerns, tabloid movies and smoky noir provocations. France the capitulated, the humiliated, the liberated, exploited as a clearinghouse for used Yankee culture that became grist for a generational film movement that came of age having ingested it, working it through their biology in a hormonal stew then expelling it in alien tributes now fawning, now excoriating, always defiantly, well, French. What we sent to France, we got back with an experimental jazz score, a Paul Klee print, and a Sartre quote about isolation.

Twisters (2024) [Collector’s Edition] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

October 24, 20242024, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Spielberg, Thriller

**/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B+
starring Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell, Anthony Ramos, Kiernan Shipka
screenplay by Mark L. Smith
directed by Lee Isaac Chung

by Walter Chaw Lee Isaac Chung’s Twisters is the whistle next to the graveyard, a fascinating companion piece to Adam Wingard’s Godzilla x Kong: the one a spectacle designed to desensitize against our ongoing climate collapse, the other to deaden us against widely-broadcast images of an ongoing genocide. Its only two points of interest are Glen Powell’s sudden ascendance as matinee idol and the astounding majesty of natural phenomena fuelled by man-made climate change–meaning, in its simplicity, the goal is to leave audiences with the dazed satiation one associates with the aftermath of an ostentatious fireworks display: half-deafened, eyes bedazzled, the smell of gunpowder sulphurous in the air. A gut full of barbecued meats and sugared drinks in the American fashion, celebrating our liberation from a monarchy on the back of our God-sanctioned manifest genocide of an Indigenous population. We had fun, but that hangover is a sonofabitch. For me, the best part of Twisters is the extended prologue, where I thought it was going to be a Kiernan Shipka movie.

Smile (2022) + Smile 2 (2024)

October 22, 20242022, 2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

SMILE
***/****
starring Sosie Bacon, Kyle Gallner, Jessie T. Usher, Robin Weigert
written and directed by Parker Finn

SMILE 2
***½/****
starring Naomi Scott, Rosemarie DeWitt, Lukas Gage, Kyle Gallner
written and directed by Parker Finn

by Walter Chaw I was distracted by what I saw as the narrative looseness of Parker Finn’s Smile, based on his short film Laura Hasn’t Slept. I thought it made a bit of a splash for a high concept carried obsessively–the titular smile maybe really just the Kubrick stare: lowered brow, manic grin. Although I admired the craft of it and Sosie Bacon’s star turn as a traumatized shrink with a troubled past seemingly losing her mind in the wake of a patient’s suicide, I dismissed the picture as thin and forgettable. But it nags and tugs, enough so that I started to wonder if I’d judged it too quickly and too harshly. I revisited Smile after watching its sequel; I realized I’d misplaced a few of the story details and flat-out forgotten the rest, and I wanted to give both films a fair accounting. Smile is two things: it’s a short film’s high concept expanded to feature length that may have one too many subplots; and it’s a solemn, principled piece on suicidal ideation and the theory it can be passed on–triggered, if you will–like other mental health crises such as eating disorders. Could someone in recovery from a self-annihilating disorder be pulled back into active crisis through exposure to someone else in the throes of the beast?