Givertaker **½/**** (d. Paul Gandersman)
A nice, compact cautionary tale featuring a novice witch who takes vengeance on her buddies only to find there are Shadowmen living under other people's beds. I wish the lore were better developed, but it's paced beautifully and the young cast is game and lively. I wanted more, and I don't often feel that way.
Ah-ga-ssi
****/****
starring Kim Min-hee, Kim Tae-ri, Ha Jung-woo, Moon So-ri
screenplay by Chung Seo-Kyung, Park Chan-wook, based on the novel Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
directed by Park Chan-wook
by Walter Chaw I love Stoker, Korean master Park Chan-wook's updating of Shadow of a Doubt that centres on "young Charlie's" sexual awakening and all the perverse tensions attending that moment in a brittle upper-middle-class Nashville. Married to the swooning, hypnotic camerawork that has been the hallmark of Park's collaboration with DP Chung Chung since Oldboy, it has about it the perversity of a Victorian chamber drama squeezed through the filter of a very Korean take on class and sex–attitudes partly shaped by living in the shadow of one of the two or three most unstable regimes in the world. Stoker is a haunted-house movie without ghosts; a vampire movie without vampires. Its hero is a young woman who dons the raiment of the patriarchy at the end, lets blood on a field of flowers (one of a series of literal and metaphorical deflowerings), and stalks into the world fully-formed and dangerous. Park is best known for his "Vengeance Trilogy," of course, but it's the last film of that cycle, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, that finds itself faced with the kind of moral dilemma that has marked Park's work since. It's arguable that before it, Park was an exploitation filmmaker. A conversant, brilliant exploitation filmmaker, but an exploitation filmmaker just the same. Lady Vengeance, however, deals with the ethics of violence and the toll of retribution on the avengers. It's smart as hell, beautiful to look at, nigh unwatchable. I mean that as praise, for it should be.
***½/****
directed by Alex Infascelli
by Walter Chaw Emilio D'Alessandro was the only delivery driver courageous enough to brave a rare London blizzard to deliver a giant phallus to the set of A Clockwork Orange sometime in the last half of 1970. An aspiring Formula 1 racer and jack of all trades, Emilio caught the eye that day of one Stanley Kubrick, American expat and obsessive-compulsive who happens to be one of the handful of undisputed geniuses in the auteur conversation. Moved to London at this point and destined to die there in 1999 after the first industry screening of his last film, Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick hired Emilio essentially by writing him notes on index cards and Post-Its and steadily, some would say monstrously, dominating his life to the extent that it strained Emilio's marriage and caused him to miss the moment of his father's death. It would be easy to make a documentary like Alex Infascelli's S is for Stanley from that perspective: the madman in his laboratory, unwitting Igor fettered to his noisome wake. Harder is what Infascelli actually does, which is understand that the story here isn't about one odd duck, but two…and of a feather to boot. I love the moment where Emilio remembers his wife (they're still together) complaining that Stanley calls day and night: When he told Kubrick about it, Stanley proposed that the solution was to install a separate line in Emilio's house so that they could leave Emilio's wife out of it altogether. Emilio went for it.
Grave
****/****
starring Garance Marillier, Ella Rumpf, Rabah Naït Oufella, Marion Vernoux
written and directed by Julia Ducournau
by Walter Chaw A spiritual blood sister of Claire Denis's Trouble Every Day, Julia Ducournau's feature debut Raw is a crystallization of the last couple years' steady creep towards unabashedly gyno-centric fare. Kimberly Peirce's unfairly derided Carrie, which Raw references in one of its canniest, funniest moments, gathers monstrously in the rearview as a film doomed to have been just ahead of its time–literally hours away from being justly hailed as harbinger of a period of Furiosas and Reys, of It Follows and The Witch and The Green Room and more. As genre fare, Raw is as raw as it could be, the tale of a vegan first-year veterinary school student named Justine (Garance Marillier) who is submitted to a series of cruel hazing rituals that introduce her to body-image issues, existential crises, eating disorders, and the taste of sweet, sweet animal protein. You know, freshman year. Ducournau captures it all beautifully: the horror of being away, of surrendering to the higher university mind, of experimenting with drugs and drink and sex and becoming a full inhabitant of the desires and fears that will fuel the rest of your life. There's a scene early on where Justine visits a doctor (French writer and director Marion Vernoux) that reminds of the sequences in Jacob's Ladder where Jacob visits his angelic chiropractor. It's shot differently from the rest of the film. It's brighter. The film will never be this bright again.
FRAUD
***½/****
directed by Dean Fleischer-Camp
BELIEF: THE POSSESSION OF JANET MOSES
**½/****
directed by David Stubbs
by Walter Chaw The line between documentary and fiction filmmaking is blurry. Better–more accurate–to say there’s no difference at all: that documentary is just a genre in and of itself. Documentaries are products of points of view, of editing, of premise. You could film someone reading a phone book, but even that’s a choice. Where to put the camera; why do it in the first place? Consider the Heisenberg Principle as well, this notion that the nature of anything changes once it’s observed. Documentary as “truth” is an interesting philosophical question. It’s sold as such, used politically, manipulated to serve purposes contrary to the idea of objective reality, but documentaries are never objective. Indeed, they challenge the very idea that the product of any endeavour could be truly objective. It’s an interesting phenomenon in our technological wasteland that video “evidence” of malfeasance has proven inconclusive in courts of law. Replays in professional sports have only muddied the playing field. Everything is subject to interpretation and the product of someone’s decision made somewhere along the way.
SWEET, SWEET LONELY GIRL
*½/****
starring Quinn Shephard, Susan Kellermann, Erin Wilhelmi, Frances Eve
written and directed by A.D. Calvo
A DARK SONG
**/**
starring Catherine Walker, Steve Oram, Mark Huberman, Susan Loughnane
written and directed by Liam Gavin
by Walter Chaw Self-consciously a throwback to supernatural softcore lesbian exploitation as indicated by the films of Jean Rollin and, specifically, James Kenelm Clarke's The House on Straw Hill (with bits of Pawel Pawlikowski's My Summer of Love in there), A.D Calvo's Sweet, Sweet Lonely Girl has a pretty good feel for time and place, but not much more than that. It's the definition of slight. Adele (Erin Wilhelmi) is a bit of an outcast. Gangly and awkward, she's sent away to be the helper for her mysterious shut-in of an aunt, Dora (Susan Kellermann), at Dora's decaying Victorian manse. One day Adele sees a beautiful girl at the market, Beth (Quinn Shephard), strikes up a friendship with her that evolves into a love affair of sorts, and discovers herself at the same pace that everything begins to fall apart with Dora. It's a recognizable tale of feminine agency told better, directly and indirectly, as recently as Osgood Perkins's February (now The Blackcoat's Daughter) and Robert Eggers's The Witch. Sweet, Sweet Lonely Girl begs comparisons because it begs them explicitly. Its soundtrack is AM Gold featuring choice cuts from Rod Stewart and Crystal Gayle as well as a few nice slices from Starbuck, and the film itself is a mix-tape in every way.
*/****
starring Eva Green, Asa Butterfield, Chris O'Dowd, Samuel L. Jackson
screenplay by Jane Goldman, based upon the novel by Ransom Riggs
directed by Tim Burton
by Walter Chaw The right material and collaborator can bring out the best in Tim Burton, but it's mostly a one-way street. Before it soured, his work with Johnny Depp compelled because of the pathos Depp imported into projects like Edward Scissorhands and Ed Wood. When Burton lands the right material, as he did with Sondheim's Sweeney Todd, he's capable of masterpieces. I would argue that his most personal picture by far, the only one that plumbs the exquisite gulfs of loneliness and disconnection suggested by his other pieces, is Batman Returns. There's a scene in it where Bruce Wayne drinks soup, recoils that it's cold, then digs in again without hesitation when told by his long-term keeper that it's supposed to be. Bruce is a broken clockwork and wholly dependent; it's a fascinating read of the Batman character. Burton's Catwoman is the purest representation of the gender injustice that results in her mania and rise to power. The film is a spiritual predecessor to Burton's poetry collection The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories, the contents of which speak of misbegotten births, misunderstood childhoods, and unimaginable betrayals that lead to lonesome deaths. These themes are always on the periphery of Burton's films. I wonder if as he's gotten more monolithic whether they don't become commensurately more difficult to tease out.
½*/****
starring Veronica Ferres, Michael Shannon, Gael Garcia Bernal, Volker Zack Michalowski
written by Werner Herzog, based on the story “Aral” by Tom Bissell
directed by Werner Herzog
by Walter Chaw There’s an early moment in Werner Herzog’s misbegotten Salt and Fire where three scientists wander through an abandoned terminal in a Bolivian airport, scored by a cacophonous, disturbing Ernst Reijseger composition, that finds Herzog on comfortable, familiar ground. His films are at their best when they combine this kind of displacing, disquieting music against scenes of the mundane. Later, as his DP Peter Zeitlinger pans across the flaking spines of an ancient book collection, and again when Zeitlinger takes in the staggering scope of Bolivia’s Uyuni Salt Flat, Herzog finds his rhythm as chronicler of unknowable mysteries and philosopher of intimations of immortality. The film would have been better without dialogue. A scene right around the mid-point where scientist Laura (Veronica Ferres) and mad industrialist Matt Riley (Michael Shannon) have a conversation about children in front of a crackling fire would have been transcendent silent. The planes of Shannon’s and Ferres’s faces, lit by flickers of orange, are suggestive of extraordinary depths and tensions. When they’re forced to say things like “the tragedy is when men are afraid of the light,” it tends to make it all gravid and unintentionally hilarious. When Michael Shannon is incapable of landing a weird line, imagine how the others fare.
****/****
written by Yoshiyuki Fukuda, Eiichi Yamamoto, based on the novel La sorcière by Jules Michelet
directed by Eiichi Yamamoto
by Walter Chaw The completion of Osamu Tezuka's "Animerama," a trilogy of early-'70s erotica initially imagined as a tie-in to that era's "pink films" that eventually applied their boundary-testing to its own form and function, Belladonna of Sadness is the only one of the three pictures to, ironically, feature no direct involvement from Tezuka. Instead, longtime collaborator Eiichi Yamamoto takes the reins and, in this loose adaptation of a non-fiction tract on witchcraft and Satanism, produces the headwaters for everything from hentai to Andrzej Zulawski's Possession. It's a template that parallels Ralph Bakshi's dabbling in ani-porn, a thing that runs on evocations of Roman Polanski in not just its function and form, but also the drawing of its heroine, Jeanne, as the very image of Sharon Tate. The fate of pretty blondes is a primary concern of Polanski's in this period–no less so enacted through this saga of a woman, raped and humiliated before, in the end, like Yeats's Leda, she takes on the power of her patriarchal tormentors to exact precise, poetic vengeance.
by Walter Chaw
The Babysitter Murders ****/**** (d. Ryan Spindell) For certain artists working in the short-film format, I don't have any idea how or why it is they haven't been called up to the big leagues yet. This speaks as much to my prejudice, obviously: there's nothing wrong with the short form. In literature, many of my favourite writers are best in the short form. In film, though, there's so little real opportunity for distribution that it seems a particular shame when guys like Ryan Spindell have only produced shorts. I'm not complaining (his work is excellent), merely hoping he has the means to continue. Spindell's latest, The Babysitter Murders, is so expertly composited that it would be kind of a shame to dissect it at all. Sufficed to say that it unearths a new place to take Wes Craven's Scream meta funhouse, and does it without a hint of smugness or show-off-y insecurity. It's beautifully paced, conceived, and executed. Look at a cooking scene early on, set to "Fast & Sweet" by Mondo Boys feat. Kestrin Pantera–the way it's shot and edited, the way Elie Smolkin's camera stalks and Eric Ekman cuts it all together. The movie's premise–a babysitter alone on a stormy night when a psycho escapes from an asylum–is as rote as they come, but Spindell, as he did with The Root of the Problem and dentists, finds something new to say. The performances are to a one pitch-perfect and the gore is appropriately horrifying; it's a film balanced in that space between hilarity for its excess and hilarity for its brilliance. I'm out of superlatives. Spindell is one of the finest voices working in genre right now, carving out a niche that's neither self-serious nor self-abnegating. He's full of joy, this one, and his movies are treasures.
****/****
starring Emma Roberts, Kiernan Shipka, Lucy Boynton, James Remar
written and directed by Oz Perkins
by Walter Chaw Osgood Perkins's hyphenate debut February is haunted. It plays like a boarding-school version of Rob Zombie's extraordinary Lords of Salem, coloured by the same sadness and sense of inevitability and doom. Like it, February features a female protagonist cast adrift in a mostly-empty building, waiting for something to take her away–to Heaven or to Hell, it's not clear. Not clear, either, if there's much of a difference at the end of the journey. Here it's Kat ("Mad Men"'s Kiernan Shipka), who has a terrible dream one night that her parents aren't going to arrive to take her home from school over the mid-winter break and then wakes to find it come true. She's marooned there with two guardians and a Heather, the beautiful Rose (Lucy Boynton), who's engineered her own abandonment, the better to spend an extra week with a boy who may have knocked her up. February is obviously about young female sexuality, locating its girl heroes right there, teetering on the cusp of still calling out to their mothers when they're hurt. And it's about grief. Grief for the passing of innocence to experience, literalized in the loss of parents and the desire for their surrogates. It wonders what would happen if Rosemary's baby were a girl, and met her real father for the first time as a young woman going through puberty. It's a lovely metaphor for the sensual horror of that transformation, for the little deaths that separate children from their parents, literally or figuratively.
ZERO STARS/****
starring Dominic Purcell, Stephen Lang, Trish Stratus, Danny Glover
screenplay by Rob Robol & Allan Ungar
directed by Allan Ungar
by Walter Chaw Danny Glover's been too old for this shit for over thirty years now, making it all the more tragic to find him in Allan Ungar's dipshit remake of The Hard Way that nobody wanted, Gridlocked, which magnifies its crimes by also being the second remake of Assault on Precinct 13 that nobody wanted. A desk jockey checking IDs at the police station, Glover's Sully advises about 45 minutes in that he is, yes, too old for this shit. The only thing missing is a wry saxophone riff when he says it. At least Gridlocked, as it's pissing on the corpse of the literally dozens of better movies it's ripping off, had the decency to let Michael Kamen rest in peace, if nobody else. It's uniquely awful.
Die Frau hinter der Wand
**½/****
directed by Grzegorz Muskala
THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY
***/****
written and directed by Peter Strickland
by Walter Chaw Grzegorz Muskala's moody, sexy Whispers Behind the Wall updates Matthew Chapman's little-seen but well-remembered Heart of Midnight. Both films are about a young, vulnerable, single person in a new space, discovering Monsters of the Id hiding behind the walls. Where Chapman's film tossed literal apples at a quailing Jennifer Jason Leigh, Muskala introduces vaginal holes in his hero Martin's (Vincent Redetzki) new flat, the better to hide illicit diaries and, ultimately, ease egress into the climax. More, Muskala fills Martin's never-draining bathtub with red sludge, and hides in its drain, in one of several nods to Hitchcock, the key to the whole bloody affair. It seems that Martin, a student who looks just like Ewan McGregor in Shallow Grave, has secured his new, coveted lodgings on the strength of his willingness to allow a creepy caretaker to take a shirtless picture for hot landlady Simone (Katharina Heyer). It also seems former occupant Roger has disappeared, leaving Martin to eavesdrop on Simone banging her insane boyfriend Sebastian (Florian Panzer) before finding himself in Simone's eye, in her clutches, and in her bed.
Kraftidioten
***/****
starring Stellan Skarsgård, Pål Sverre Hagen, Bruno Ganz, Birgitte Hjort Sørensen
screenplay by Kim Fupz Aakeson
directed by Hans Petter Moland
by Walter Chaw I've been a fan of Hans Petter Moland since his ferocious Zero Kelvin, starring a relatively unknown Stellan Skarsgård as a psychotic trapper alone with two other men in the wintry Norwegian wilderness. A wildly-successful commercial director, Moland's work is more contemplative than you might expect, considering. He was hand-picked by Terrence Malick, to give you an idea of his style, to take over The Beautiful Country for him when the director was called to another project (The New World). Moland returns to the frigid Norwegian winter with In Order of Disappearance, which opens with a man shaving, cutting a square swath through the foam on his face. Cut to the man on a giant snowplow, describing the same shape through a blanket of white. It's a beautiful moment. Moland's films are full of them.
Autómata
*/****
starring Antonio Banderas, Dylan McDermott, Melanie Griffith, Birgitte Sorensen
screenplay by Gabe Ibáñez, Igora, Javier Sánchez Donate
directed by Gabe Ibáñez
by Walter Chaw Though I've seen worse movies than Gabe Ibáñez's Automata, I've also seen Automata what feels like a few dozen times. Rather than turn this into an exercise in listing source materials, however attractive shooting fish in barrels might be, best to focus on how the picture makes Isaac Asimov's three rules of robotics into two (making it different!), and how its closest film analogue is probably somewhere in the junction between Kurt Wimmer's Equilibrium and Richard Stanley's Hardware. That'll have some of you feeling pretty excited and most of you either puzzled or properly dissuaded. Yes, Automata is a muddy piece of pseudo-profundity showcasing its creators' lack of vision, discretion, and judgment. It needed at least a few more passes through the typewriter, frankly, and a mid-film appearance by a distractingly-altered Melanie Griffith–altered by real-life plastic surgery, not in-film techno-debauchery–highlights exactly how brutal the Hollywood machinery is in destroying people like her and Kim Novak and Lara Flynn Boyle and on and on. Griffith's kind of like the girl-version of Mickey Rourke at this point. There's more sadness and auto-reflection embedded in how she looks now than in anything in the film.
***½/****
starring Koji Yakusho, Nana Komatsu, Satoshi Tsumabuki, Jo Odagiri
screenplay by Tetsuya Nakashima, Miako Tadano, Nobuhiro Monma, based on the novel by Akio Fukamachi
directed by Tetsuya Nakashima
by Walter Chaw Takashi Miike's Natural Born Killers, essentially, with a bit of the old Park Chan-wook ultra-violence (or is it Shohei Imamura's A Clockwork Orange? Tarantino's Hardcore?); I'm finding it next to impossible to talk about Tetsuya Nakashima's The World of Kanako free of larger contexts, and its short-circuiting of my hard drive is perhaps intentional. The film is extremely stylish, distractingly so–or it would be if not for a central, anchoring performance from Koji Yakusho as disgraced detective Akikazu Fujishima, demolished by a long drunk and roused back to furious, ugly action by the disappearance of his daughter, Kanako (Nana Komatsu). Yakusho is so good, so grounded in his self- destruction and loathing, so extraordinary, really, from calamity to atrocity to spurious bloodletting, that watching him in this Grand Guignol is something like a true privilege. He's manifested possibly the most disgusting hero in the history of such things (Mickey Rourke's Harry Angel? Eagle scout), a creature of this dank, abattoir noir who gets progressively filthier, baser, as the picture unravels. His performance, not to gild the lily, is fucking genius.
***/****
starring Niamh Algar, Stephen Cromwell, Gerry O'Brien, Ged Murray
written and directed by Conor McMahon
by Walter Chaw Conor McMahan's From the Dark is a hell of a film. Sarah (Niamh Algar) and Mark (Stephen Cromwell) are taking a little detour into the moors when they're predictably bogged down as night approaches. What they don't know is that a peat farmer has just been summarily attacked in a stagnant pool after unearthing what appears to be some sort of bog mummy earlier in the day. It's a nifty set-up for a spam-in-a-cabin scenario, and indeed, Mark discovers a ramshackle farmhouse where he and Sarah decide to spend the night–especially once they're attacked by some unseen thing apparently repulsed by light of any kind. It's an amalgam, in other words, of The Descent and Nosferatu: a horror film resting on those genre pillars of transgression, transformation, and contagion that cannily milks every possible light source in its rural environment (cell phones, an old tube television…more would be telling) for surprise and plot points.
**½/****
starring Ebizo Ichikawa, Ko Shibasaki, Hideaki Ito, Miho Nakanishi
screenplay by Kikumi Yamagishi
directed by Takashi Miike
by Walter Chaw Takashi Miike's dip into formalism and tradition continues with Over Your Dead Body, a play-within-a-play conceit whereby star stage performer Miyuki (Ko Shibasaki) reprises the legendary role of Oiwa in the classic "Yotsuya Kaidan" and finds his off-stage relationship with co-star Kousuke (Ebizo Ichikawa) beginning to resemble the supernatural relational drama in which they've been cast. It's essentially the good version of Birdman, however low a bar that might be, with Miike embracing the new, languid pace of his middle-to-later career before suggesting that maybe he's ready to let a little of the ol' Gozu out again. Another Audition tale of a woman wronged, Over Your Dead Body can be read by the Miike scholar as further examination of the filmmaker's sources and inspirations while providing for the neophyte enough craft and late-in-the-game Guignol to sate most any variety of bloodlust. Yeah, it gets pretty nasty.
by Walter Chaw There’s a song by The Nails called “88 Lines About 44 Women.” Here are 52 lines about 26 films. Let’s go:
Amateur (***/***, d. Evan Katz)
A hitman’s plans for carrying out his contract are slick and sexy, while the reality is clumsy and ridiculous. Katz follows up Cheap Thrills with a short that shows the same comfort with gore, physical comedy, and Naked Gun causality.
***/****
directed by Matthew Salton
by Walter Chaw Here's the thing, and I say this after years of being tortured by Chinese people: Chinese people are pretty awful. At least culturally, it should be said, there's an extreme disconnect in terms of social mores. There's a certain directness that's difficult to assimilate as an American, along with a certain disapproval that maybe I'm just more sensitive to because of my privileged status as neither fish nor fowl. I used to say the Chinese perfected racism because they had to learn how to be racist towards people who didn't look substantially different from themselves. I became a case study in a graduate anthropology course once concerning the evolution of human sexuality. Asked about my object-choice apparatus (was I triggered more by distinct facial features than by hair colour, for instance, or body type?), I wasn't offended. It's a good question.
***½/****
starring Lou Taylor Pucci, Nadia Hilker, Vanessa Bednar, Shane Brady
screenplay by Justin Benson
directed by Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead
by Walter Chaw Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead's Spring is sensitive, smart, romantic, and disturbing in the best ways. Flip to call it Cronenberg's Before Midnight, but how else to describe a warm, resonant relationship drama-cum-travelogue that happens to feature tentacles and extreme body mutations? It's a compliment. Evan (a tremendous Lou Taylor Pucci) loses his mother to a wasting illness in the same week he loses his job, so he packs it up and goes to Italy, where he encounters a beautiful, mysterious woman named Louise (Nadia Hilker) who happens to have an accent he can't place. No one could.