Disability Archives - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

TIFF ’25: The Ugly + The Furious

October 15, 20252025, 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.

Christopher Abbott with a flashlight peering through a barred window in Wolf Man

Wolf Man (2025) [Collector’s Edition] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

June 9, 20252025, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Disability, Drama, Horror, Ireland, New Zealand, Werewolf

**½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Christopher Abbott, Julia Garner, Matilda Firth, Sam Jaeger
written by Leigh Whannell & Corbett Tuck
directed by Leigh Whannell

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. In his 2020 book Phases of the Moon: A Cultural History of the Werewolf Film, author Craig Ian Mann charts the evolution of werewolf mythology from the Middle Ages on to show how the metaphorical purpose of werewolves shifted with each new epoch. In medieval times, they were sinners wearing their transgressions on the outside; during the Inquisition, they were presented as witches in disguise. Enlightenment dismisses the werewolf as religious hokum, but it comes roaring back in the Romantic period as a psychological concept indicating our tempestuous natures, and cinema is born soon enough afterwards to freeze this take in amber. In movies, werewolves are typically a Jekyll-and-Hyde conceit in which the bestial side of some hapless schmo is temporarily unleashed. The particulars change, of course. Sometimes, a bite portends a transformation, one usually governed by the lunar cycle. Sometimes, the werewolf infection is an inherited curse. Sometimes, as in Sam Katzman’s ten-cent wonder The Werewolf, it’s a matter of science gone awry. The zeitgeist, too, can alter our perception of the werewolf, and periodically renew its currency. 1957’s I Was a Teenage Werewolf, for instance, reflected the moral panic over juvenile delinquents, as Mann notes, while 1985’s Teen Wolf was, in its incoherent way, another of the decade’s cautionary tales about getting high on your own supply.

Life After still featuring Elizabeth Bouvia surrounded by men in suits

Life After (2025)

May 5, 20252025, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Disability, Documentary, Hot Docs

***½/****
directed by Reid Davenport

by Angelo Muredda “I’ve done what I can, and the quality of my life is over,” 26-year-old disabled woman and assisted dying cause célèbre Elizabeth Bouvia says in archival footage of her 1983 legal fight to refuse medical care in the opening moments of Reid Davenport’s Life After. Bouvia, Davenport shows us through a montage of the media frenzy around her case–which largely evaporated once her petition proved unsuccessful–became a rallying point for the assisted dying cause, represented by an activist attorney from the Hemlock Society (whose more palatably named successor group, End of Life Choices, is later seen clashing with disabled activists in Congress) and given fawning news coverage for her frequently cited physical attractiveness and disarming affect. That the frank, direct, and relatable Bouvia made for good TV, as evidenced by a condescending “60 Minutes” update from 1998 in which Mike Wallace casually muses about the tension between her lingering prettiness and the ongoing cost to the taxpayer of her daily care, is not in dispute. But to what extent, Davenport wonders, can a disabled euthanasia activist who didn’t die, whose WIKIPEDIA page cryptically lacks either new details about her life or a conclusive date for her death, as Bouvia’s does when Davenport sets out to find her, truly be said to have no quality of life if she continued to live it?

Jack Quaid with a knife through his hand: "No more Mr. Knife Guy."

Borderline (2025) + Novocaine (2025)

March 28, 20252025, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Disability, Horror, South Africa, Theatrical

BORDERLINE
***½/****
starring Samara Weaving, Ray Nicholson, Jimmie Fails, Eric Dane
written and directed by Jimmy Warden

NOVOCAINE
*/****
starring Jack Quaid, Amber Midthunder, Ray Nicholson, Matthew Walsh
written by Lars Jacobson
directed by Dan Berk and Robert Olsen

by Walter Chaw Samara Weaving is the best Bruce Campbell since Bruce Campbell. They even worked together on the “Ash vs Evil Dead” show. Her timing is impeccable, her control over her physicality and facial expressions prodigious. She seems to have emerged specifically to anchor horror slapsticks like the second coming of Mabel Normand: a screwball Venus on a meshuga clamshell. Her short filmography is already heavy with cult classics like The Babysitter, Ready or Not, Guns Akimbo, and Joe Lynch’s fantastic Mayhem–each savvy enough to highlight Weaving’s charming, self-deprecating sense of humour. In another time, she would’ve given Lucille Ball or Carol Burnett a run for their money. She’s the dream improv partner, a champion bull rider. I don’t think there’s a scenario she wouldn’t seem unnatural in–no situation you could ask her characters to overcome that is too absurd. She’s a unicorn: the great beauty men think they might have a chance with and women don’t entirely resent. In her very small cameo in Babylon, she provides a tantalizing glimpse into what that film could have been with her in the lead instead of the ego doppelgänger to her id, Margot Robbie. Not good, mind you, but at least well-cast.

A Different Man (2024)

October 7, 20242024, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Disability, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

***½/****
starring Sebastian Stan, Renate Reinsve, Adam Pearson, John Keating
written and directed by Aaron Schimberg

by Angelo Muredda Speaking at a recent Lincoln Center screening of his new meta dramedy A Different Man for New Directors/New Films, Aaron Schimberg suggested the project was inspired in part by the loaded reaction to his depiction of disability in Chained for Life, his previous film. Chained for Life cast Adam Pearson, an actor with neurofibromatosis, as an actor with the same condition playing a sanitarium patient in a dodgy European arthouse film-within-the-film about a mad surgeon restoring his disabled charges to normalcy through radical experimentation. Some critics, Schimberg claims, wondered whether it might not be inherently exploitative to cast Pearson and other visibly disabled actors–many of whom, like Schimberg (who has a cleft palate), had facial differences–in a send-up of disability tropes about deformity and beauty. Others would surely have balked at the opposite approach, were he to have burlesqued disability by hiring non-disabled actors to star in a postmodern examination of the aesthetic and ethical traps of disability on film. Why not split the difference and make everyone unhappy with his follow-up, Schimberg thought, by pitting Sebastian Stan, a non-disabled actor playing a disabled protagonist in search of a cure, against Pearson as his obnoxious frenemy–a disabled man as gregarious and comfortable in his own skin as Stan’s character is desperate to crawl out of his?

TIFF ’24: The Brutalist

September 9, 2024Authors: Angelo Muredda, Disability, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, TIFF, UK

**½/****
starring Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Alessandro Nivola
written by Brady Corbet & Mona Fastvold
directed by Brady Corbet

by Angelo Muredda “I’m not what I expected, either,” Hungarian-Jewish architect Laszlo Toth tells the first of many resentful hosts he’ll encounter in his new land early in Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, a super-sized historical epic that, despite its flashy, roguish presentation, tells a fairly old-fashioned story of capitalism funding, then strangling, art, interwoven with a fable about the ethnic roots of American innovation dying in a soil poisoned by white supremacy. It’s a good line, ably delivered by Adrien Brody in a nimble performance that flits from the depths of prostration to the confident delivery of treatises on the utility of brutalist architecture. Like a number of the film’s pronouncements concerning the titular artist (whose name, as fictionalized art-world stars go, is at least as good as Lydia Tár’s, evoking the Australian geologist who took a hammer to Michelangelo’s Pietà in 1972), it’s also a thematic tease. Protracted in length but paced like it’s in a hurry to get someplace, The Brutalist is prone to such dashed-off expositional asides about the self-alienation that ostensibly drives its protagonist, who would otherwise remain something of a cipher apart from his strong feelings on the literal and figurative endurance of concrete.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)

May 22, 2024****/****, 2024, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disability, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

****/****
starring Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Burke, Alyla Browne
written by George Miller, Nico Lathouris
directed by George Miller

by Walter Chaw In matters of vengeance, the Greeks had it all figured out. Their God of such things was a tripartite Goddess: Alecto (“unceasing”), Megaera (“grudging”), and Tisiphone (“avenging murder”), collectively called the “Erinyes.” Hesiod gave their parentage as the Titan Ouranos and Gaia: When Ouranos was castrated by his son, Cronos, three drops of Ouranos’s blood fell to the fertile soil of Mother Earth, impregnating her with his resentment and rage. Other sources describe the Erinyes’ parentage as Night and Hell. The Romans renamed the goddesses the Furiae, and now George Miller houses them in the slight frame of his Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy). Furiosa, who births herself from the dirt and, over the course of a too-short 150 minutes, pursues her vengeance like the “darkest of angels” her nemesis, Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), dubs her. He asks her, “Do you have it in you to make it epic?” He already knows she does. Furiosa is the very definition of epic. It’s a treatise on how archetype remains the blueprint for our behaviour, and in its absolute simplicity, it has a sublime power. Furiosa is born of our rage to avenge the death of the world. She reminds me of a Miyazaki heroine, and the film itself is as obsessively detailed, thought-out, and functional as a stygian Miyazaki fantasia. If it’s opera, it’s Wagner. As a film, it may be George Miller’s best.

Night Swim (2024) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD

May 1, 20242024, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Disability, DVD, Horror, Thriller, UK

*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Wyatt Russell, Kerry Condon, Amélie Hoeferle, Gavin Warren
screenplay by Bryce McGuire
directed by Bryce McGuire

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Welp, it’s come to this: a haunted swimming pool. There was a slasher movie set in a public pool (2001’s The Pool), and pools have been at the centre of some seriously creepy set-pieces in films ranging from the original Cat People to the remake of Cat People, from Let the Right One In to the remake of Let the Right One In. As far as definitively haunted swimming pools go, however, the only precedent I can think of is in Poltergeist III, and that one came in a package deal with a haunted skyscraper so it’s a bit of a cheat. Swimming was the only form of physiotherapy that didn’t feel like penance when I was growing up. Before my family put a pool in the backyard, I would swim at my next-door neighbour’s place or the rehabilitation centre where I took swimming lessons as a child. At one of those lessons, I broke my arm, but it didn’t scare me off pools–it scared me off swimming instructors. One evening, on vacation with my parents in Florida, I swam in the hotel pool, and every time I went below the surface, a pretty girl followed me down. We would bob there near the bottom, staring at each other within kissing distance through a veil of chlorine. Not a word ever passed between us; it was strange and wonderful. The pool has since become my respite from screens. I don’t know how to meditate, although I suspect that’s what I’m doing in there. Swimming has always seemed to liberate me mind, body, and spirit. I’m sentimental about swimming pools, in other words, and looked forward to Night Swim, the new film from horror megaproducers Jason Blum and James Wan, ruining them for me.

When Evil Lurks (2023)

October 8, 2023****/****, 2023, Argentina, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disability, Horror, Theatrical

Cuando acecha la maldad
****/****
starring Ezequiel Rodríguez, Demián Salomón, Luis Ziembrowski, Federico Liss
written and directed by Demián Rugna

by Walter Chaw I felt like there was a hand pressing down on my chest during Demián Rugna’s When Evil Lurks, a horror film so vicious and uncompromising I wasn’t always sure I could finish it. I’ve seen it three times now, not because I’ve become desensitized to its lawlessness, but because it’s so well-constructed that I’m drawn back to it despite the anxiety it inspires. There’s comfort in the thrall of an artist who’s in complete control of his medium. When Evil Lurks is Rugna’s fifth film, and I don’t think it’s too soon to declare him an important filmmaker and a true innovator. I’ve never seen what he does in the horror genre before; I’d call it experimentation, except that it works on a more than theoretical level. Between this and his previous picture, Terrified (2017), he has deconstructed the familiar, reconstituting it into a beast that feels new and dangerous. When I take a shower now, it’s not Psycho or The Seventh Victim that comes to mind, it’s the long opening sequence of Terrified in which a man traces the source of a strange thumping in the middle of the night to something unspeakable happening to his wife in the bathroom for what must have been hours. There’s nothing new about locating terror in intensely personal private spaces, but there’s a revolution in having the idea to mate Martyrs with Poltergeist.

Fantasia Festival ’23: New Life

August 8, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disability, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Thriller

**½/****
starring Tony Amendola, Hayley Erin, Sonya Walger, Nick George
written and directed by John Rosman

by Walter Chaw I respect the directness and simplicity of John Rosman’s New Life, the way it addresses a double-edged problem through two women in separate storylines who represent the point and counterpoint of a debate without an easy answer. How does one balance the individual good versus the interests of the collective? Easy enough to say that any individual must be sacrificed for the sake of society until one humanizes the individual. Plenty of films tackle this question: John Frankenheimer’s The Train measures the value of a man’s life against a priceless work of art; Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s extraordinary 28 Weeks Later and Breck Eisner’s remake of The Crazies wonder how many people must be sacrificed for the greater good, no matter how heroic the lengths they’ve gone to survive. New Life‘s stakes are similarly big, although its focus is smaller–the “Trolley Problem” where one of the hero’s choices is to kill a person she likes in order to save a planet full of strangers. Complicating it all is that the hero herself, Elsa (Sonya Walger), is afflicted with a progressive neurological disorder, meaning her time is limited regardless of what she chooses. If she does the difficult thing, in other words, she’s not even doing it for herself.

Hot Docs ’23: Angel Applicant

May 4, 20232023, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Disability, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

***/****
directed by Ken August Meyer

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs from April 27-May 7, 2023. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

By Angelo Muredda Swiss-German surrealist Paul Klee becomes a guardian angel for a chronically ill artist in search of a disabled ancestor in Ken August Meyer’s documentary Angel Applicant, a playful and affecting memoir of the filmmaker’s progress with systemic scleroderma–the same rare autoimmune disease with which Klee was posthumously diagnosed. Self-deprecating and puckish, Meyer walks us through the indignities and aesthetic possibilities of his bodily transformation with a mix of observational footage of himself in and out of hospitals and clinics and magical-realist dramatizations that see him replaced with a lifelike doll whose rigid body stands in for his stiffening skin and joints. He weaves an examination of Klee’s late style into these diaristic musings on illness, pain, and creation in spite of both, drawing inspiration from the artist’s prolific output in his final years living with scleroderma. In the process, Meyer openly wonders if Klee’s turn from intricate to bold lines and surrealist images of disjointed bodies in pain–modernist pieces deemed “degenerate art” by Hitler–might serve as a model for his own uncertain path forward.

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

April 8, 20232023, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Disability, Drama, Fantasy, Iceland, Sports, Theatrical, UK, VOD

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.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) [2-Disc Ultimate Edition] – DVD|4K Ultra HD

April 4, 2023****/****, 1970s, 2023, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Tobe Hooper, Disability, FFC Must-Own, Horror

****/****
DVD – Image A Sound A Extras A+
4K UHD – Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Marilyn Burns, Paul A. Partain, Edwin Neal, Jim Siedow
screenplay by Kim Henkel and Tobe Hooper
directed by Tobe Hooper

by Walter Chaw If we start from the position that Sally (Marilyn Burns) is burdened from the get-go by two misfit monsters, then we can look at Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as not only a keen autopsy of a particular moment in our country’s history (circa 1974), but also a profoundly sensitive look at social prejudices and the toll said prejudices take on the human social organism. More than the typical rise-of-the-bumpkins horror conceit, it is, along with John Boorman’s Deliverance from two years earlier, the classic example of a film that isn’t about what it’s ostensibly about. Look at the assiduous reduction of wheelchair-bound outcast Franklin (Paul A. Partain), a character who remains for the efforts of Hooper and Partain (apparently so irritating in real life that his cohorts were relieved by his on-screen demise) one of the most unapologetically irritating and pathetic figures in film and find noteworthy not that a handicapped person is allowed to be a self-pitying asshole, but that we’re not let off the hook (as it were) for our own prejudices. Franklin is an anchor–and we’re glad that he’s dead, too.

Boston Underground Film Festival ’23: Spaghetti Junction

March 27, 20232023, Disability, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Sci-Fi

*/****
starring Cate Hughes, Cam McHarg, Eleanore Miechkowksi, Tyler Rainey
written and directed by Kirby McClure

The Boston Underground Film Festival runs from March 22-March 26, 2023. Click here for more info.

by Walter Chaw A spirited, earnest, decidedly kitchen-sink pastiche of John Carpenter’s Starman, Kirby McClure’s Spaghetti Junction sports a game cast engaged in a scattershot project too distracted to land. I found it to be a lot like talking to someone on cocaine. Which is to say, I don’t think it’s about nothing, only that whatever it’s focused on for a moment is the most important thing there ever was–but then the moment passes, supplanted by the actual most important thing there ever was. You can follow it, but I’m not convinced the juice is worth the squeeze. Recent amputee August (Cate Hughes), trying not to be a burden to struggling single-dad Dave (Cameron McHarg), is doing her best to get along with rebellious older sister Shiny (Eleanore Miechkowski). Dad wants Shiny to take August with her everywhere, but Shiny just wants to be alone with her loser boyfriend, Antonio (Jesse Gallegos). Though Dad’s motivated by guilt over the car accident that took August’s foot, August is eager to move on with mastering her prosthetic and trying to be seen whole… At least, that’s what I think is motivating her. As Spaghetti Junction doesn’t really articulate the point, I wonder if it was avoided on purpose. Bolstering the read of this as a disability melodrama, Antonio does call August a “cripple” out of frustration at her being a persistent cockblock, but she’s not there to hear it and Shiny doesn’t object, so…whatever you take from the disability subplot of the film, if there is one, depends on whatever inference you’re willing to make from the information provided.

Boston Underground Film Festival ’23: The Unheard

March 25, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disability, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

***/****
starring Lachlan Watson, Michele Hicks, Nick Sandow, Brendan Meyer
screenplay by Michael Rasmussen & Shawn Rasmussen
directed by Jeffrey A. Brown

The Boston Underground Film Festival runs from March 22-March 26, 2023. Click here for more info.

by Walter Chaw I consider myself a fairly boring, credulous person who nevertheless, based on a couple of experiences I can’t explain, believes in ghosts and is disturbed by stuff like the Electronic Voice Phenomenon, not to mention the tenuous wisdom of playing with Ouija Boards. Jeffrey A. Brown’s The Unheard catches me right in my irrational fears with its story of Chloe (non-binary actor Lachlan Watson, playing the role of a young woman here), who returns to the isolated Cape Cod of her youth a decade after losing her hearing there from a case of meningitis. Her mother vanished around the same time. She was once thought to be a runaway, but it’s looking more likely that she was the victim of an active serial killer. At least, that’s what Chloe’s hallucinations, for lack of a better word, intimate in the flashes of clarity they offer between the white-noise blatting from the closed-circuit television at her house in Cape Cod. She’s come back to clean up the old place, make peace with her ghosts, and recover from an experimental treatment for her hearing loss from earnest, hopeful Dr. Lynch (Shunori Ramanathan). She hasn’t, I don’t think, thought things all the way through.

One Fine Morning (2022)

February 10, 20232022, 2023, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Disability, Drama, France, Germany, Romance, Theatrical, UK

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.

Crimes of the Future (2022)

June 3, 2022****/****, 2022, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Directors: David Cronenberg, Disability, Drama, Esoterica, France, Greece, Horror, Sci-Fi, UK

****/****
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.

Saboteur (1942) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

May 22, 20221940s, 2022, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, Disability, Espionage, Road Movie, Thriller, War

*/**** Image A Sound B Extras C
starring Priscilla Lane, Robert Cummings, Norman Lloyd, Otto Kruger
screenplay by Peter Viertel, Joan Harrison, Dorothy Parker
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw When I think of Saboteur, which isn’t often, it’s as the first American project Hitchcock developed largely without his beloved assistant Joan Harrison, who left after co-writing the first draft (seeing in the opportunity to produce The Phantom Lady her chance to wriggle out from under Hitch’s shadow), and, maybe more significantly, without his most essential collaborator, wife Alma Reville, then away in New York with their daughter Pat, who had just won the lead role in a play. They left creative absences Hitch tried to fill–disastrously, I think–with Algonquin Roundtable alumni Peter Viertel and Dorothy Parker. (If there’s a case to be made about the importance of Alma to Hitchcock’s career, it may be useful to examine those films where we know she was absent.) I also think of Saboteur, when I do, as an attempt at an “all-American” film of the kind Hitchcock, fearing he’d left Britain trailing with him too much of the old country, was desperate to make. The desire to embrace his adopted culture is so conspicuous it becomes uncomfortably obvious in multiple instances (stops at the Statue of Liberty, Rockefeller Center, and even the Hoover Dam) that setting has fatally superseded narrative. His follow-up, the Thornton Wilder-penned Shadow of a Doubt, is the all-American Hitchcock that works, locating the country’s heart in the introduction of a human stain into a small town and a wholesome family.

Dexter: New Blood (2021-2022) – Blu-ray Disc

May 12, 20222021, 2022, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Disability, Drama, Mystery, Television, Thriller

Image A- Sound A Extras C+
“Cold Snap,” “Storm of Fuck,” “Smoke Signals,” “H is for Hero,” “Runaway,” “Too Many Tuna Sandwiches,” “Skin of Her Teeth,” “Unfair Game,” “The Family Business,” “Sins of the Father”

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. It begins with a white buck. Dexter is tracking it through the woods, a regular Natty Bumppo. Though he has a clear shot, something stops him from pulling the trigger, and he falls to his knees in a parody of biblical defeat. A second attempt the following day is foiled when a sharp noise from elsewhere causes the wildlife to scatter, while a third and final try sees him lowering his rifle and surrendering to the beauty of the beast. Dexter and the white buck are kindred spirits–outliers of their species, yet built to blend into their surroundings. Trophies, ultimately, for their rarity. The premiere episode of “Dexter: New Blood”, “Cold Snap,” might be my favourite of the character’s entire television run, because it allows him this brief state of grace. There was a season of “Dexter” where he went searching for signs of a higher power, but it’s here that he finds one, and what makes this so different from our serial-killer Pinocchio’s previous real-boy epiphanies is that, for once, there’s no noise in his head. In fact, this most compulsive of narrators only starts talking to us again after the tranquillity of the moment is shattered, which is a surprisingly understated gambit for “Dexter”. It’s a crowd-pleasing thing, I suppose, when he finally pipes up (it’s Clark Kent ducking into a phone booth, or Popeye squeezing a can of spinach), but it plays to me as bitter commentary on how short-lived inner peace is these days for anyone with a moral compass–even one as faulty as Dexter’s.

CODA (2021)

August 16, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Disability, Drama, Music, Streaming

½*/****
starring Emilia Jones, Eugenio Derbez, Troy Kotsur, Marlee Matlin
screenplay by Sian Heder, based on the original motion picture La Famille Belier by Éric Lartigau
directed by Sian Heder

by Walter Chaw It says something, something terrible, that the Deaf community has expressed gratefulness for CODA because it’s some kind of representation, while also expressing trepidation because CODA trafficks in harmful stereotypes and centres the hearing perspective. The great Marlee Matlin made news by insisting that deaf actors be cast as the film’s deaf family, and that’s amazing, huge, a tremendous step in the right direction–and still, the material is so rancid that all of their great work highlights how desperately this community deserves to have material worthy of them. CODA is a grotesque bit of “big performance”/workingman’s blues uplift trash in the vein of Mr. Holland’s Opus or Dangerous Minds. It has a high-school audition montage, for Christ’s sake. (A practicing-for-the-big-recital montage, too.) CODA posits that Deaf people don’t like music even though it shows the parents, Jackie (Matlin) and Frank (Troy Kotsur), pulling up to a heavy rap beat, suggesting that the film itself doesn’t consider rap to be music, just a noise even Deaf people can appreciate.