Mexico Archives - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Telluride ’23: Cassandro

September 3, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, Mexico, Sports, Telluride

*/****
starring Gael García Bernal, Roberta Colindrez, Perla de la Rosa, Raúl Castillo
written by David Teague & Roger Ross Williams
directed by Roger Ross Williams

by Walter Chaw Playing out as an exhausted vanity piece on the one side and an exhausted sports biopic on the other, Roger Ross Williams’s Cassandro essays the life and early career of flamboyant, El Paso-based luchador Saúl Armendaríz, who, under his nom de guerre “Cassandro,” became the first openly gay exóticos character in Mexican wrestling allowed to actually win matches. Armed with the “Mexico tint” coined by Steven Soderbergh in Traffic, a lot of Dutch angles, and an inexplicable 1.44:1 aspect ratio that makes everything seem like it was shot on an iPhone, Williams nudges the film along from one stale trope to the next like an old frog disinterestedly leaping across lilypads. There are flashbacks to Saúl’s childhood in which his “really into Jesus” dad, Eduardo (Robert Salas), feeds him doughnuts, not knowing his son will one day be an emblem of the love that dare not speak its name; interludes with Saúl’s figure-hugging-animal-print-dress-wearing mama Yocasta (Perla de la Rosa) that show her son to be a good boy; and then montages where Saúl trains with badass Sabrina (Roberta Colindrez) and starts climbing the Lucha Libre ranks. Cassandro, in other words, has nothing to say and doesn’t say it with any particular innovation, either. What a shame.

Telluride ’22: Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths

September 4, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Mexico, Streaming, Telluride

Bardo
Bardo (or False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths)
Bardo, falsa crónica de unas cuantas verdades
½*/****
starring Daniel Giménez Cacho, Hugo Albores, Andrés Almeida, Misha Arias De La Cantolla
written by Nicolás Giacobone & Alejandro G. Iñárritu
directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu

by Walter Chaw I can’t tell you how tempting it is to just re-post my review of Birdman for Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Bardo with a neon “BUT MORE SO” flashing over it, given that I’ve already invested a full three hours in the Mexican auteur’s latest altar to unseemly false modesty. (Oscars four and five, here we come.) This one is another technically dazzling cri de cœur featuring a tortured artist caught in the vicissitudes of a midlife crisis. The stand-in for Iñárritu is Mexican investigative journalist Silverio (a wonderful Daniel Giménez Cacho), who returns to Mexico for the first time in years on the eve of his winning a prestigious award from an American institution. This leads to the usual mid-life stuff: a visit with a dead father and a dying mother; a raucous party where his old friends give him shit for exploiting Mexicans and Mexican culture for gringo fame, power, and approval; a magic-realist consideration of a still-born child, resulting in a repulsive gag played like a circus trick in which a newborn is shoved back into the womb; and the exploration of impostor syndrome, which feels increasingly disingenuous with every enormous set-piece ripped off the Film School Mount Olympus. Bardo is Jay Sherman’s 8½, and knowing it doesn’t excuse it.

Bergman Island (2021)

October 14, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Drama, France, Germany, Mexico, Sweden, Theatrical

**/****
starring Vicky Krieps, Tim Roth, Mia Wasikowska, Anders Danielsen Lie
written and directed by Mia Hansen-Løve

by Walter Chaw Eric Rohmer made some snoozers, too. So it is with Mia Hansen-Løve, the inheritor of Rohmer’s cinema of intimate behavioural observation and obsession, and her Bergman Island, which lands midway between pointlessly clever and fatally self-obsessed. It follows married filmmakers Tony (Tim Roth) and Chris (Vicky Krieps) as they retreat to Ingmar Bergman’s compound on Fårö Island in the Baltic to finish their respective screenplays. Tony’s having a much easier time of it, and it’s revealed they’ve been invited to this unusual writer’s retreat at least in part so Tony can screen and conduct a Q&A for one of his films. From what we see of it, it’s possibly a horror film; whatever it is, it’s clear that Tony’s work is very different from Chris’s. Bergman shot a few of his film and TV productions on Fårö–in fact, Fårö was for him like Yoknapatawpha County was for Faulkner: an entire world unto itself that functioned as the canvas and backdrop for his working-through of major themes. There’s a tour of sites that Tony goes on and Chris does not, since she meets an earnest young graduate student, Hampus (Hampus Nordenson), studying Bergman, of course, and decides to spend the day with him instead. You think this will be a source of conflict in Bergman Island, particularly as Chris comments that the couple will be sleeping in the same bedroom where Scenes from a Marriage was shot, but it’s not.

TIFF ’21: Wrap-up

October 6, 20212021, Authors: Bill Chambers, Brazil, China, Comedy, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Hong Kong, Horror, Iran, Mexico, Music, Sweden, Thriller, TIFF, UK

by Bill Chambers I’ve been covering TIFF for, gulp, 25 years now. If I didn’t expect to mark this silver anniversary in the confines of my living room, I have no complaints. Some of the show ponies were geoblocked for Canadian press or offline altogether, but although I’m fully vaccinated, I wasn’t about to risk transmission or stew for hours in a mask to see the May-December romance Dear Evan Hansen, or another remake of Dune, or a Secret Steven Soderbergh Screening that turned out to be, lol, Kafka, which is almost as good a prank as moving Best Actor to the end of the Academy Awards ceremony. I did at least get to stream my white whale, Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, so no regrets. No regrets, no complaints.

Siberia (2020) – Blu-ray + Digital

July 27, 2021****/****, 2020, 2021, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Germany, Greece, Horror, Italy, Mexico, UK

****/**** Image A Sound A
starring Willem Dafoe, Dounia Sichov, Simon McBurney, Christina Chiriac
screenplay by Abel Ferrara and Christ Zois
directed by Abel Ferrara

by Walter Chaw I had a dream when I was very young. A fever dream, while tangled in my parents’ bed sheets, delirious and afraid, soaked and burning. I bore horrified witness to a line of bald monks stretching into an impossible black, all awaiting their execution by beheading and various other cranial offenses. I couldn’t make out the executioner. I wondered why my parents couldn’t see what I was seeing, and in my confusion, I didn’t know if they were angry with me or lying to me. Abel Ferrara’s Siberia has somehow manifested this fever dream of mine in a sequence where its ex-pat protagonist, the Jack London-ian Clint (Willem Dafoe), rides a dog team through the arctic on his way to a cave carved into the side of a jagged rockface. He passes a village in the midst of some sort of violent cleansing where gunmen force a group of men, naked and bald, into the cold to be executed, one after the other. When I had my hallucination as a child, I couldn’t have been more than five or six. I had never, at that point in my life, actually seen a monk. When I finally did, some years later, I felt as though I’d already borne witness to their martyrdom. When you first read Carl Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections, you’re confronted with two beginnings–two approaches to what is one of the most profound works of self-examination in the history of Western thought. The first is in the prologue, the next in the first chapter (called “First Years”). In the prologue, Jung writes:

Total Recall (1990) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

December 9, 20201990s, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Mexico, Schwarzenegger, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

***/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rachel Ticotin, Sharon Stone, Ronny Cox
screenplay by Ronald Shusett & Dan O’Bannon and Gary Goldman, based on the short story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” by Philip K. Dick
directed by Paul Verhoeven

by Bryant Frazer Before watching Studiocanal’s new restoration of the 30-year-old science-fiction adventure Total Recall, I had only vague memories of seeing it on opening night. I mean, I remembered that I hated it, but I wasn’t sure why. I was already a Paul Verhoeven fan based on RoboCop, though I didn’t know anything else about his work. I know I was put off by the scene where Arnold Schwarzenegger puts a bullet in a woman’s head and then yuks it up with one of his trademark murder jokes. Sure, the screenplay has taken pains to establish the character’s unforgivable duplicity, but that’s the problem: She’s disposable, and she’s a punchline. (No wonder Sharon Stone jumped at the chance to play a serial murderer of men in Verhoeven’s next film.) And I recall that I was annoyed beyond reason by the film’s climax, which involves a very sudden change to the environment on Mars. The science behind it struck me as insultingly preposterous. Still, I think what I really objected to, what actually offended me, was the light tone. After RoboCop, which struck me as an appropriately sick joke about fascist tendencies in American law enforcement (still in the news!), I guess I expected Verhoeven to treat Philip K. Dick’s epochal ruminations on human consciousness, thought, and identity with some gravity (cf. the similarly Dick-inspired Blade Runner) instead of turning them into a wildly overblown comic-book complete with an absurdly-ripped muscleman as the self-doubting superhero at the centre of the action. That’s on me; Looking back on Total Recall after three decades, I can see it more clearly. For Verhoeven, the cartoonishness is the point.

TIFF ’20: New Order + Fauna

September 18, 20202020, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Mexico, Thriller, TIFF

Nuevo orden
*½/****
starring Naian Gonzaléz Norvind, Dario Yazbek Bernal, Mónica Del Carmen, Sebastian Silveti
written and directed by Michel Franco

FAUNA
***½/****
starring Francisco Barreiro, Luisa Pardo, Lázaro Gabino Rodríguez, Teresa Sánchez
directed by Nicolás Pereda

by Bill Chambers I’d heard that Michel Franco’s New Order was the new Parasite but from the rich people’s P.O.V., and I’m here to tell you that Parasite from the rich people’s P.O.V. wouldn’t be Parasite. Still, I did find the basic premise of New Order quite promising as social commentary: In Mexico City, mounting class resentments spark an uprising against aristocracy on the same day a local heiress is due to be married. I imagined a modern-day storming of the Bastille, but this is a film, for better or worse, of 21^st-century ideas, and it introduces a wrinkle into our eat-the-rich fantasies–military intervention–that becomes a tsunami. An elderly man (Eligio Meléndez) who used to work for the family of the bride, Marianne (Naian Gonzaléz Norvind), shows up at the wedding claiming his sick wife needs money for an operation. (If you watch HBO’s “Succession”, you know the kind of territory he’s wading into.) The mother (Lisa Owen) wants to help but is cowed by the guests’ stinginess, while Marianne’s brother (Diego Boneta) tips him like a bellhop and expects him to shoo. They’re unwittingly justifying the fury of the vandals and looters advancing on their home; only Marianne is truly sympathetic to the old man’s plight, going so far as to leave her own wedding (with one of the help in tow) to pick up his wife and drive her to the hospital. But during her absence, the military hatches a diabolical plan to manipulate the situation so as to solidify the caste system rather than see it evolve: they will abduct any wealthy citizens who’ve strayed from home–mostly the younger set, which leads to a lot of youthful flesh being exploitatively displayed as hostages are stripped naked and hosed down–and ransom them back to family members, pinning the responsibility for these kidnappings on the protestors.

Sundance ’20: Summer White

January 31, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coming of Age, Drama, Film Festivals, Mexico, Sundance

Blanco de Verano
**½/****
starring Adrián Rossi, Sophie Alexander-Katz, Fabián Corres
written by Rodrigo Ruiz Patterson & Raúl Sebastián Quintanilla
directed by Rodrigo Ruiz Patterson

by Walter Chaw Aspiring for something like The 400 Blows with a young protagonist who looks and acts like 15-year-old Jean-Pierre Léaud, Rodrigo Ruiz Patterson’s directorial debut Summer White seeks to explain the pain and occasional outbursts of a young man coming of age without the means to express himself. The film’s style lies somewhere at the intersection of early Harmony Korine and Ken Loach: it’s aggressively not-showy–so devoted to its austerity and so accomplished in achieving it, in fact, that its aesthetic humility becomes a kind of distraction. It looks beautiful. Maybe too beautiful. It looks like an Y Tu Mamá También while acting like a Ratcatcher or a Kes, and reconciling that dissonance begins to feel difficult. In the end, what disappoints most about Summer White is that I started to question whether the film wanted to be something for its own sake or if it was just something done by someone who’d seen a few Linda Manz movies and thought she was really great. I mean, she is, of course. Linda Manz is awesome.

Bad Boys for Life (2020)

January 18, 20202020, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Mexico, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Will Smith, Martin Lawrence, Vanessa Hudgens, Joe Pantoliano
screenplay by Chris Bremner and Peter Craig and Joe Carnahan
directed by Adil El Arbi & Bilall Fallah

by Walter Chaw Rumors of Will Smith’s death were greatly exaggerated as, in reprising one of his most vile characters, he finds in this third Bad Boys flick the pathos-leavened vitality that had been missing since his last third instalment, 2012’s Men In Black 3. Between: a string of bathetic misfires of varying levels of foul, wherein the once and future superstar struggled to regain his stride. Truly, only a Will Smith could survive a concentrated period such as his last eight years of genuine calamities like Winter’s Tale, Suicide Squad, Collateral Beauty, and Max Landis. Here, again, the irrepressible charisma that made him a bona fide A-list action hero long about Independence Day (if not the first Bad Boys the year before) busts off the screen like a physical thing. It’s a ballsy choice, then, that the directing team of Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah (Black) choose to sideline him for a while immediately after a bombastic opening car-chase sequence. Even that’s a fake-out, as our rogue cops Marcus (Martin Lawrence) and Mike (Smith) are just rushing to Marcus’s daughter’s side as she gives birth to Marcus’s grandson. Everyone’s growing older. Bad Boys for Life gets that.

BHFF ’18: Knife + Heart

October 21, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Horror, Mexico, Romance, Switzerland

Un couteau dans le coeur
***½/****
starring Vanessa Paradis, Nicolas Maury, Kate Moran, Jonathan Genet
screenplay by Yann Gonzalez, Cristiano Mangione
directed by Yann Gonzalez

by Walter Chaw Yann Gonzalez’s Knife + Heart is a smart film by a smart filmmaker. It’s a movie-lover’s fugue, a tribute to the heyday of gay porn and the grindhouse theatres that showed it, a salute to editors, a shrine to multi-cultural myths about birds. It’s a deep well with obvious pleasures, a film with a recognizable structure complete with solution that still manages to avoid the standard exposition and perfunctory resolution. The spiritual brother to Brian De Palma’s Body Double (exploitative and sleazy and also commentary on exploitation and sleaze), it’s a movie about looking that has as its central image a blind grackle–an extinct variety of the common pest that used to bring folks back from the dead by burning off the ever-after as it flew too close to the sun. Its central couple is gay-porn director Anne (Vanessa Paradis) and her editor and former lover Lois (Kate Moran), who churn out the sort of softcore masterpieces of art-film erotica favoured once upon a time by your Kenneth Angers, your Paul Morrisseys and Radley Metzgers. All of her work is autobiographical in some way. There’s no line separating Anne’s reality, nor her dreamlife, from the mindscreen of her movies.

Telluride ’18: Roma (2018)

September 9, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Mexico, Streaming, Telluride

***½/****
starring Yalitza Aparicio, Marina de Tavira, Diego Cortina Autrey, Carlos Peralta
written and directed by Alfonso Cuarón

by Walter Chaw Alfonso Cuarón retreats from the noisy silliness of Gravity to produce something more in line with his A Little Princess–a touch of Children of Men thrown in for topical relevance and actual gravity. It’s all in black-and-white, no less, with a non-professional lead and Cuarón himself operating the camera, shooting in 65mm. What results is the slow but dulcet, small but sometimes impossibly large Roma, capturing the microcosm of the immigration question in one wealthy family’s interactions with their native servants, Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) and Adela (Nancy Garcia), and what happens when the small tragedies of the day-to-day intersect with the larger tragedies of a world that doesn’t care about them. The mistress of the house, Sofia (Marina de Tavira), her inconstant husband, Antonio (Fernando Grediaga), and the couple’s four small children live in a posh house in Mexico City sometime in the late-1960s. (An event in the film that is probably the Tlateloco Massacre sets the events somewhere around October of 1968.) Cuarón has called Roma his most personal film, and so it is as he continually directs attention away from the larger events at play, back to the intimate upsets of this upper-class family and their subsistence-class help. The largest scene of the film, a riot that led to a deadly confrontation between students and the military, immediately reverts to Cleo and Sofia’s aged mother-in-law, Teresa (Veronica Garcia), interrupted in the middle of a shopping trip.

FrightFest ’18: Tigers Are Not Afraid

August 26, 20182017, 2018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coming of Age, Fantasy, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Horror, Mexico

Vuelven
***½/****
starring Paola Lara, Hanssel Casillas, Rodrigo Cortes, Ianis Guerrero
written and directed by Issa López

by Walter Chaw Estrella (Paola Laura) is just a little girl. Her mother's been disappeared by a local drug cartel and she's living by herself in their tiny apartment. She has three pieces of chalk that a teacher's given her to represent the three wishes little girls without mothers sometimes get in fairy tales about abandonment in times of great evil. She uses the first one to wish for her mother to return, and so her mother does. But her mother's dead, of course, and now Estrella is living on the roof with a small band of other young orphans led by Shine (Juan Ramon Lopez) in hopes that the gangster from whom Shine has lifted a gun and cell phone don't find them. It's W.W. Jacobs's "The Monkey's Paw" set against the backdrop of the troubles plaguing modern Mexico, and while it's not entirely clear to the children if Estrella's wishes are actually coming true, it's never really a question for writer-director Issa López, who manifests the subjects of the kids' hopes and fears as animated street graffiti and the sudden animation of a stuffed animal. There are echoes of a lot of things: of Stephen King's short story "Here There Be Tygers", of Isabel Allende's City of the Beasts, and most of all of Guillermo Del Toro's The Devil's Backbone, to which it owes its structure and allegorical strategy. But Tigers Are Not Afraid is most of all its own lyrical thing.

Silence (2016)

January 17, 2017****/****, 2016, 2017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, Mexico, Taiwan, Theatrical

****/****
starring Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver, Tadanobu Asano, Liam Neeson
screenplay by Jay Cocks & Martin Scorsese, based on the novel by Shusaku Endo
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Walter Chaw Martin Scorsese’s Silence is Martin Scorsese’s Silence. Not Shusaku Endo’s Silence. Not Masahiro Shinoda’s Chinmoku. Rather than a Japanese perspective, it’s told from the perspective of our most notoriously Catholic filmmaker (next to Mel Gibson, but he went to a different church), who, at the end of his life, has found this cap to a trilogy about faith and doubt begun in The Last Temptation of Christ (an adaptation of a novel by Greek author) and Kundun (about the life of the Dalai Lama)–films, each, that explore mystery and land somewhere personal and inherently unknowable, as faith is and should be. It’s an essentially Romanticist text, not Humanist like Endo’s or doom-laden and progressive like Shinoda’s. It’s the closest Scorsese’s come to truly contemplative since Kundun, and it shares with that film a sense of wonder at the Natural: this Romanticist conceit that the first testament of God is, as it always has been, Nature. Silence is almost a Terrence Malick film in that sense. In every other, it’s Scorsese coming to terms with the idea that grace is made manifest only through the actions of its proponents. The title refers not just to the Christian God’s notable state when confronted with the unimaginable suffering of His children, but also to Scorsese’s own idea of what God wants from His followers. It’s not thoughts and prayers in the face of tragedy. Maybe it’s humility. Maybe it’s service. Or maybe it’s just silence..

Fantastic Fest ’16: Short Films

October 15, 20162016, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Disability, Drama, Esoterica, Fantastic Fest, Fantastic Fest '16, Film Festivals, Horror, Mexico, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK

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.

Fantastic Fest ’14: The Incident

September 28, 20142014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantastic Fest, Film Festivals, Mexico, Sci-Fi

El Incidente
½*/****
written and directed by Isaac Ezban

by Walter Chaw There are a couple of ideas hidden in Isaac Ezban's The Incident, packed in there amongst an impenetrable payload of dreck. It shows some promise only when it suggests William Sleator's House of Stairs, the book it most resembles when it works. Unfortunately, the book it wants to resemble is Philip K. Dick's Time Out of Joint, which, you know, it just doesn't. It's the tale of two time loops following a mysterious celestial explosion: the first strands a pair of petty robbers and their cop pursuer in an Escher painting, while the second strands a squabbling, awful family on an endless highway TO NOWHERE. Portents and signs everywhere hang low like significantly meaningful storm clouds, leading to a thirty-minute exposition–in what feels like the fourth or fifth hour of a hundred-minute film–that's delivered with the careful precision of a slow adult explaining something s/he doesn't entirely understand to a slow child. Painful? It's at least painful. Ironic, too, that this movie about temporal looping makes you a victim of it.

Herzog: The Collection [Blu-ray Disc] – Aguirre, The Wrath of God (1972)

August 5, 2014****/****, 1970s, 2014, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Werner Herzog, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Mexico, Peru, Scream/Shout! Factory, West Germany

click any image to enlarge

Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes
****/****
DVD – Image A Sound B+ Commentary A
BD – Image A- Sound B+ Commentaries A
starring Klaus Kinski, Helena Rojo, Del Negro, Ruy Guerra
written and directed by Werner Herzog

by Walter Chaw A work of holy madness about acts of holy madness, Aguirre, The Wrath of God is a transcendent, haunting film that defies description and captures, somehow, what it means to be human in all the venal, small, sometimes grand things that being human implies. Once seen, it's never forgotten, and upon repeat viewings, it's one of those pictures that makes you want to cry for no particular reason but that it is, in almost every non-quantifiable way, perfect, a film alight with invention, love, and passion–a memoir of the worm in the gut that demands blood and glory. Aguirre (Klaus Kinski) is an under-lieutenant in the bona fide Peruvian expedition of Gonzalo Pizarro (Alejandro Repullés) to find the lost city of gold, El Dorado, a fiction of the Peruvian Indians meant as a suicide pill for their conquistadors. Once the expedition bogs down in the mud of the rainy season, Pizarro sends nobleman Don Pedro de Ursua (Ruy Guerra) off with Aguirre on a satellite mission to scout a path ahead for the main body. Though neither party was ever heard from again, Aguirre, The Wrath of God proposes to tell the final days of Ursua's doomed men.

Greatest Hits (2012)

November 22, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Drama, Esoterica, Mexico, Theatrical

Los mejores temas
***½/****
starring Gabino Rodríguez, Teresa Sánchez, José Rodriguez López, Luis Rodriguez
written and directed by Nicolás Pereda

by Angelo Muredda Odd as it might seem for a 30-year-old director to get a retrospective, you can see the logic
behind TIFF Bell Lightbox's series on Nicolás Pereda, whose six features
demonstrate a remarkably consistent vision stemming from Pereda's interest in gently
setting an audience's narrative expectations on their side. Pereda, who's been
relatively unheralded in his adoptive home of Toronto (despite his sturdy
international reputation and his 2011 feting at New York's Anthology Film
Archives, to name just one laurel), brings the sophistication and focus of an
old hand to each of his formally rigorous but unassuming projects. Although
it's his most recent work, there's perhaps no better starting point for the
uninitiated than the aptly titled Greatest Hits, which sees Pereda
gathering his cast of players for a twist on the family reunion.

Conquest (1983); Contraband (1980); Zombie (1979) – DVDs|Zombie (1979) [2-Disc Ultimate Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

March 15, 20121970s, 1980s, 2012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Blue Underground, Crime, Drama, Fantasy, Horror, Italy, Mexico, Morocco, Spain, Zombie

CONQUEST
½*/**** Image D+ Sound C
starring Fabio Testi, Marcel Bozzuffi, Ivana Monti, Guido Alberti
screenplay by Ettore Sanzo and Gianni de Chiara
directed by Lucio Fulci

Luca il contrabbandiere
**/**** Image B Sound B
starring Fabio Testi, Marcel Bozzuffi, Ivana Monti, Guido Alberti
screenplay by Ettore Sanzo and Gianni de Chiara
directed by Lucio Fulci

by Walter Chaw There's something decidedly uncinematic about the films of Lucio Fulci (excepting Don't Torture a Duckling and Four of the Apocalypse, which actually sort of rock). If not for his fascination with gore effects and his propensity for casting irritating children in irritating children parts, it'd be hard to find anything to separate his work from the grindhouse ghetto of, say, Jess Franco. As it is, the stilted claims at auteurism (he's known as the master of eye violence, mainly for a few juicy bits from The Beyond and Zombie) do more, perhaps, to relegate his work to a sort of camp gulag: the Siberia of legitimate cinema, where adolescent tools congregate for midnight showings armed with irony and a crippling baggage of disdain and contempt. I liked "Mystery Science Theater 3000" and believed that I liked it because I was sophisticated; in time, you realize that you like it because you're an officious prick who sort of gets off on mocking movies. I think a lot of people would argue that this is the role of the film critic, but I'd offer that a critic–a good one–loves film so much that he or she is offended when a movie is terrible. There's no real joy in defiling altars, particularly when they're your own.

Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (2011)

August 26, 20112011, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Mexico, Theatrical, Thriller

**½/****
starring Katie Holmes, Guy Pearce, Bailee Madison, Jack Thompson
screenplay by Guillermo Del Toro & Matthew Robbins, based on the teleplay by Nigel McKeand
directed by Troy Nixey

by Walter Chaw There are so many opportunities squandered, so many set-ups dishonoured, so many promising moments clearly assembled into incoherence in the editing bay, that it's kind of amazing how Troy Nixey's Don't Be Afraid of the Dark still manages to coast along on its monsters and its lovely, gothic atmosphere. It's not a good movie, but it's a good time, for the most part–the part where you're not thinking about how irritating it is that in movies like this parents are constantly leaving their children in peril. Produced by Guillermo Del Toro, the picture feels an awful lot like another Del Toro production, 2008's The Orphanage, which also provides solid atmosphere, a couple of gross-outs, and an overall feeling of pleasant well-being. The major difference is that Don't Be Afraid of the Dark is so disjointed and spotty that the predominant aftertaste is frustration. What a shame.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) [Two-Disc Special Edition] – DVD|Blu-ray Disc

November 15, 2010****/****, 1940s, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Mexico, Thriller, Western

****/****
DVD – Image A Sound B+ Extras A+
BD – Image A- Sound A- Extras A
starring Humphrey Bogart, Walter Huston, Tim Holt, Bruce Bennett
screenplay by John Huston, based on the novel by B. Traven
directed by John Huston

by Walter Chaw John Ford isn't America's Akira Kurosawa, John Huston is, and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, an intimate epic that unfolds against the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution, is Huston's Throne of Blood. Huston also draws comparisons to Ernest Hemingway, not just for being a man's man in life, but for his precision and economy in art. There isn't any flab on The Treasure of the Sierra Madre–it's as sleek as a dancer in its waltz between complex character drama on the one side and broad social commentary on the other. There haven't been many better American films (it's Huston's best film next to Fat City and maybe The Misfits, and it boasts of Humphrey Bogart's best performance without question), and when it's spoken of, it's spoken of in terms of one of those films that decided careers in the cinema for generations of filmmakers.

Predator (1987) [Ultimate Hunter Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

July 5, 2010****/****, 1980s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Mexico, Schwarzenegger, Sci-Fi

****/**** Image C Sound A Extras B+
starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Carl Weathers, Jesse "The Body" Ventura, Bill Duke
screenplay by Jim Thomas & John Thomas
directed by John McTiernan

by Walter Chaw Appearing the same year as Stanley Kubrick's great, enigmatic, dangerous Full Metal Jacket, the brilliant neo-noir of Alan Parker's Angel Heart, John Hughes's devastating Planes, Trains & Automobiles, and what many feel is the quintessential film of the 1980s, Wall Street, John McTiernan's Predator is, in plain truth, one of the two real quintessential films of the decade, a distinction it shares with Back to the Future–pictures, both, that initially appear to toe the Reagan era's line of worship at the altar of Eisenhower's mythological Americana only to reveal that lost wars cannot, in fact, be re-fought and that the Good Old Days were always a little violent and randy. It's a film, this Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle all of oiled musculature and technological fetishism, of unusual kinetic power and intelligence, one that sets out to sate the popular audience's hunger for such entertainments in the age of the modern blockbuster before leaving its hero battered, broken, frightened, alone. Its kinship is to movies from the period like Aliens and, yes, Rambo: First Blood Part II–films that understand that when Shane rode away at the end, he was probably just looking for a place to die.

Splice (2010)

June 3, 20102000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Canada, Drama, France, Horror, Mexico, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

***/****
starring Adrien Brody, Sarah Polley, Delphine Chanéac, David Hewlett
screenplay by Vincenzo Natali & Antoinette Terry Bryant and Doug Taylor
directed by Vincenzo Natali

by Ian Pugh Vincenzo Natali's Splice unavoidably lives in the shadow of countless sci-fi/horror properties that came before it–stories that have already taught us, as Splice teaches us, that tragedies occur when Man dabbles in God's domain. But dismiss the film as cliché at your own peril. While it provides numerous shocks to the system, the traumas themselves take a backseat to the horror of their implications and, moreover, what those tragedies say about the risks and ambitions of daily life. Indeed, while the movie consciously seeks to fashion a cautionary tale out of the stock phrase "What's the worst that could happen?," its ultimate goal is to tell that tale as a domestic drama.

How to Lose Friends & Alienate People (2008) – DVD + Beverly Hills Chihuahua (2008) – Blu-ray Disc

March 23, 20092000s, Adventure, Authors: Ian Pugh, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disney, Drama, DVD, Family, Mexico, Romance, UK

HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS & ALIENATE PEOPLE
**/**** Image B- Sound A Extras B+
starring Simon Pegg, Kirsten Dunst, Danny Huston, Jeff Bridges
screenplay by Peter Straughan, based on the book by Toby Young
directed by Robert Weide

BEVERLY HILLS CHIHUAHUA
½*/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Piper Perabo, Manolo Cardona, Jamie Lee Curtis, José María Yazpik
screenplay by Analisa LaBianco and Jeffrey Bushell
directed by Raja Gosnell

by Ian Pugh Tipping its hat to Godard through a poster on the wall of disillusioned magazine editor Clayton Harding (Jeff Bridges), How to Lose Friends & Alienate People (hereafter How to Lose Friends) owes an enormous debt to the success of The Devil Wears Prada, but it may be more accurate to describe it as Contempt as told by Elizabethtown-era Cameron Crowe. Which is to say, it argues that the only way to beat the entertainment industry at its game of media-manipulation is to play by the rules. The idealistic writer has to sell out, temporarily at least; and when he loses the girl to some asshole "in the know," the audience can rest assured that they'll be reunited soon enough. Simon Pegg ostensibly plays boorish journo Sidney Young, a British transplant in New York City come to shake the foundations of a thinly-veiled VANITY FAIR clone only to endure several rude awakenings. Pegg really plays the part of the wacky Kirsten Dunst pixie from Elizabethtown, though, come from merry old England with a fistful of snark to teach strait-laced Kirsten Dunst (here essaying the Orlando Bloom role) about the fruitlessness of obsessing over ridiculous establishments beyond your control. Well, that and the joys of Con Air.

Che (2008) + Milk (2008)

January 9, 20092000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Directors: Gus Van Sant, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Drama, France, Mexico, Spain, Theatrical, War

CHE
***½/****
starring Benicio Del Toro, Demián Bichir, Santiago Cabrera, Vladimir Cruz
screenplay by Peter Buchman, based on the memoir Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War by Ernesto "Che" Guevara
directed by Steven Soderbergh

MILK
*½/****
starring Sean Penn, Emile Hirsch, Josh Brolin, Diego Luna
screenplay by Dustin Lance Black
directed by Gus Van Sant

by Walter Chaw Steven Soderbergh's Che is the curative to the Hollywood biopic formula that insists on reducing interesting/important historical figures to their workshop elements. It sees Ernesto "Che" Guevara as a charismatic figure but no T-shirt deity, as a guerrilla fighter with blood on his hands but also a revolutionary almost holy in his single-minded conviction that things weren't fair in the world and that one man–or one small group of heavily-armed men–could affect change that mattered. It's not a political film in the sense that it takes sides, rendering it a political film by the fact of it having no agenda except to make it difficult to condemn or celebrate first the events leading up to the success of the Cuban Revolution, then the failure of the Bolivian Revolution (which ended in Che's death). Soderbergh goes from close and medium shots in the first half–known as Che Part One in its marathon "roadshow" incarnation and as The Argentine in parts of the country where it and Che Part Two (a.k.a. The Guerrilla) are being treated as unique films–to an increasing distance for the second, a subtle, evocative move away from Che's idealism.

Man on Fire (2004) – Blu-ray Disc

January 11, 20082000s, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: Tony Scott, Drama, Mexico, Switzerland, Thriller, UK

*½/**** Image A+ Sound A+
starring Denzel Washington, Dakota Fanning, Marc Anthony, Radha Mitchell
screenplay by Brian Helgeland, based on the novel by A.J. Quinnell
directed by Tony Scott

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. What used to be the province of the Times Square grindhouse and drive-in movie theatres is now star-vehicle blockbuster fodder, making the revenge sub-genre's subversive qualities and carefully-cultivated atmosphere of frustrated rage suddenly a reflection of the demons plaguing mainstream culture. Though certainly more substantive than the hit-and-run remake of Walking Tall, Tony Scott's Man on Fire falls far below the redemptive qualities of Kill Bill, Vol. 2, offering the world the logical end result of a nation operating under the twin godheads of fear and Old Testament vengeance: a slickefied, iconographic, racist, sexist, huckster version of the grimy, low rent, pleasantly exploitative The Punisher.