Close-up of a harried Samara Weaving: "Coming back to where you started is not the same as never Weaving"

Ready or Not (2019) + Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (2026)

Posted in2019, 2026, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

READY OR NOT
***½/****
starring Samara Weaving, Adam Brody, Mark O’Brien, Andie MacDowell
written by Guy Busick & Christopher Murphy
directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett

READY OR NOT 2: HERE I COME
**/****
starring Samara Weaving, Kathryn Newton, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Elijah Wood
written by Guy Busick & Christopher Murphy
directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett

by Walter Chaw There’s an old chestnut that you can always tell who we’re going to war with next by the villains in our mass entertainments. I hope that’s true, because over the past few years, the bad guys in movies have been explicitly and almost exclusively the rich. No warfare except class warfare, amiright? That’s one of the reasons I loved Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin’s 2019 thriller Ready or Not, a key example of the dam breaking in the proletariat’s tolerance for the excesses of the bourgeoisie. It’s also a crackerjack horror contraption that establishes fresh lore without making lore the purpose of its existence, and it minted a genre superstar in Samara Weaving following years of strong showings in cult triumphs (like The Babysitter, Mayhem, and Guns Akimbo). Should the Evil Dead series get another reboot, Weaving is the natural heir to Bruce Campbell’s throne, possessed of the same A-list good looks, the same elastic expressiveness, the same gift for slapstick and self-effacing sense of humour.* Ready or Not really feels like a modern screwball classic–a genre metastasis of the marriage comedies of the 1940s, starring the new Carole Lombard and a few gallons of blood.

Ghostface wielding a knife: "Like I said, some people will die."

Scream 7 (2026)

Posted in2026, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical

*/****
starring Neve Campbell, Isabel May, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Courteney Cox
screenplay by Kevin Williamson and Guy Busick
directed by Kevin Williamson

by Walter Chaw Follow me for a second: If you were of limited morality, you would make the decisions that went into Scream 7. And as a person of limited morality, it’s very possible, nay, probable, that you lack some of your factory-allotted share of human empathy. Depending on the kind of asshole you are, you may even lack empathy altogether, thus qualifying you for corporate management and elected positions. Likely, you’ve become quite wealthy on the backs of others. But without empathy, you’re incapable of creating or understanding art, and so you make the decisions that went into Scream 7. Your cultural analogue is the bad guy from The Incredibles, Syndrome. You, who pray for machines to do what others do naturally, so that others will look at you the way they look at them. You, who are arrested at the point in childhood when you watched gifted but otherwise less-privileged kids outpace you in every measurable category. Still, it’s not the same, is it? You know you weren’t born exceptional, and your jealousy makes you shrunken and vile. Now everyone else suffers for your mediocrity.

All the President’s Men (1976) – 4K Ultra HD + Digital Code

All the President’s Men (1976) – 4K Ultra HD + Digital Code

Posted in****/****, 1970s, 2026, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, FFC Must-Own, Mystery, Thriller

Please note, the film and Blu-ray portions of this review were originally published on October 7, 2012.-Ed.

****/****
BD – Image A Sound B Extras A
4K UHD – Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman, Jack Warden, Jason Robards
screenplay by William Goldman, based on the book by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward
directed by Alan J. Pakula 

by Walter Chaw The final film in director Alan J. Pakula’s loose “paranoia trilogy,” All the President’s Men does the impossible by making heroes of newspaper reporters and a thriller out of telephone calls and follow-up interviews. Based on Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s exposé of the Watergate Scandal and President Richard Nixon’s involvement in felonious dirty tricks, it’s more than just a cunningly-crafted docudrama–it’s a key film in the best era of the medium’s history. It’s a picture that highlights the period’s mistrust in our leadership while establishing highly unconventional heroes for whom the stakes couldn’t possibly be higher. And though we know how it all works out, it seems more poignant for our knowing how everything works out.

The Ugly/The Furious

TIFF ’25: The Ugly + The Furious

Posted in2025, 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.

Paula Beers in a red convertible, looking skeptical

TIFF ’25: Miroirs No. 3

Posted in2025, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Film Festivals, Music, Mystery, Thriller, TIFF

Mirrors No. 3
***/****
starring Paula Beer, Barbara Auer, Matthias Brandt, Enno Trebs
written and directed by Christian Petzold

by Angelo Muredda Not content to have already put his stamp on Vertigo with 2014’s postwar noir Phoenix, where an Auschwitz camp survivor and cabaret performer who’s undergone facial reconstruction surgery finds herself remade into the image of her former self by the scoundrel husband who sold her out to the Nazis, Mirrors No. 3 sees Christian Petzold delivering a lower-key riff on Alfred Hitchcock’s masterwork. An uncanny, tragicomic European idyll that improbably takes equal inspiration from Vertigo, Final Destination, Mulholland Drive, and Hansel and Gretel despite largely being set on sun-kissed porches and in open garages, Mirrors No. 3 is a beguiling, singularly strange picture that could only have been made by the simultaneously heady and easygoing German auteur.

TIFF ’25: The Secret Agent

TIFF ’25: The Secret Agent

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

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

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

Telluride ’25: Ballad of a Small Player

Telluride ’25: Ballad of a Small Player

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

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

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

Honey Don’t! (2025)

Honey Don’t! (2025)

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

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

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

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

Weapons (2025)

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

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

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

Bring Her Back (2025)

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

****/****
starring Billy Barratt, Sally Hawkins, Mischa Heywood, Jonah Wren Phillips
written by Danny Philippou and Bill Hinzman
directed by Danny Philippou & Michael Philippou

by Walter Chaw Danny and Michael Philippou are on the vanguard of a new wave. It doesn’t have a name–or if it does, I don’t know what it is. But I would include as its finest practitioners Jane Schoenbrun, Kyle Edward Ball, Charlotte Wells, and Demian Rugna. Generally working in horror, their work is often confounding to me at first glance: I don’t always understand the source of their anxieties. They occupy a shared universe, however, with the same colour of sky, the same certain thickness of air that makes it tough to breathe while I’m in there. I have begun to suspect I might be the cause of it all, somehow–my generation, I mean, as it passes from middle age into decrepitude, skipped over for leadership by a gerontocracy that has proved itself incapable of standing against the fall of the American Empire. Is that it? Or is it the Internet? Or is everything connected? Is it the proverbial assault rifle we gave to the chimp, who is us? A deadly gizmo we shaved apes couldn’t begin to understand but could, and do, gleefully wield with deadly consequences? Bad enough, but then we gave it to our children, hooked them on it, made the world impossible without it, and told them to be afraid of it, yet didn’t tell them why. Because we didn’t know. I watch these movies and wonder if this is what Crowther saw when he watched Bonnie and Clyde and refused to recognize the bounty of crop his generation sowed.

Meghann Fahy looking at her phone slightly harried in Drop: "More like Ay Yi Yi Phone!"

Drop (2025)

Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Ireland, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Meghann Fahy, Brandon Sklenar, Violett Beane, Reed Diamond
written by Jillian Jacobs & Chris Roach
directed by Christopher Landon

by Walter Chaw The distaff version of last year’s Carry-On, which was itself the umpteenth redux of Phone Booth, Christopher “Son of Michael” Landon’s Drop does the “I can see you/have you checked on the children?” mambo in a high-rise restaurant setting with young widow and single mother Violet (Meghann Fahy), who’s wading back into the dating pool with app match Henry (Brandon Sklenar). Her hipster sister Jen (Violett Beane) is holding down the fort at home, babysitting Violet’s adorable but deeply traumatized–in an adorable way–son, Toby (Jacob Robinson), who, we learn through a series of flashbacks, once had a gun pointed at him by his mentally unbalanced, now-dead dad. Is this a surprisingly dark development for a breezy, moth-eaten, high-concept entertainment that is otherwise as smooth and frictionless as a baby’s ass? Sure! 

The Rule of Jenny Pen (2025)

The Rule of Jenny Pen (2025)

Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Mystery, New Zealand, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring John Lithgow, Geoffrey Rush, George Henare, Nathaniel Lees
written by Eli Kent, James Ashcroft, based on the short story by Owen Marshall
directed by James Ashcroft

by Waler Chaw James Ashcroft’s The Rule of Jenny Pen scares the shit out of me. Not just as a horror movie, but also as a reminder of how our elder-care system is so broken that most of us will end up dying at the hands of overworked caregivers in underfunded facilities. My plan is to kill myself before the dementia takes over completely, but that boat may have already sailed. In The Rule of Jenny Pen, Eunice (Hilary Norris), a dear old thing, believes that every day is Christmas, and tells everyone her family is due to visit. Every day ends with her disappointed, but then she wakes up the next morning thinking it’s Christmas again, thus hope springs eternal. We later learn that she’s been in this loop for years. Is she in Hell or is she in Heaven? Is anticipation sweet, or is it torture? Was Sisyphus happy because he knew what was expected of him? At a terminal point, is there much difference between sweet delight and endless night? Is there much of a difference between this limbo in God’s waiting room and the limbo of lives meted out in coffee spoons and the long shadows of regret?

Paddington Bear writing in a journal: Dear Diary, Timothy Treadwell was delicious.

Paddington in Peru (2024)

Posted in2024, 2025, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, France, Japan, Mystery, UK

*/****
starring Hugh Bonneville, Emily Mortimer, Julie Walters, Ben Whishaw
screenplay by Mark Burton, Jon Foster & James Lamont
directed by Dougal Wilson

by Walter Chaw Remember that episode of “The Brady Bunch” where the gang goes to Hawaii and finds a cursed Tiki idol? That was hilarious. What I mean is it was memorably not hilarious, a brazen and desperate last gasp at relevance and invention that is held up alongside the “Happy Days” where Fonzie waterskis over a shark as shorthand for what happens when a beloved institution runs out of ideas: the death wave of a drowning man. Anyway, the third instalment of the Paddington franchise uproots the Browns of Windsor Gardens and drops them in the middle of a rainforest in search of a horrifying convent filthy with energetic British nuns given to random outbursts of song that are less delightful than pointedly aggressive. Imagine Olivia Colman, dialled to 11, decked out in full habit, keening a single, held high note for a full 20 seconds, and you have a small taste of the unpleasantness of this probably unintentional nunsploitation horror. Call it “Bleak Narcissus.” Gone is the charm of the previous Paddingtons, and with it the focus on absolute patience and kindness that made this series such a balm to the brutal and inconsiderate hell of our day-to-day. In its place? A jungle quest punctuated by elaborate pratfalls as cuddly Paddington (voiced by Ben Whishaw) tries to recover his dementia-addled Great Aunt Lucy (Imelda Staunton) from an unplanned walkabout in the wilderness of Peru. The step down from gentle grace to broad slapstick is an ankle-breaker.

Depp in Nosferatu

Nosferatu (2024)

Posted in****/****, 2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Vampire

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

by Walter Chaw

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

Nightbitch (2024) + Babygirl (2024)

Nightbitch (2024) + Babygirl (2024)

Posted in2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Mystery, Netherlands, Theatrical, Thriller

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

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

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

Red One

Red One (2024)

Posted in2024, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Family, Mystery, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

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

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

Smile 2

Smile (2022) + Smile 2 (2024)

Posted in2022, 2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

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

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

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

TIFF ’24: Aberdeen + Seeds

TIFF ’24: Aberdeen + Seeds

Posted in2024, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Mystery, Thriller, TIFF

ABERDEEN
**/****
starring Gail Maurice, Billy Merasty, Liam Stewart-Kanigan, Jennifer Podemski
written and directed by Ryan Cooper and Eva Thomas

SEEDS
***/****
starring Kaniehtiio Horn, Patrick Garrow, Dylan Cook, Graham Greene
written and directed by Kaniehtiio Horn

by Bill Chambers It opens on a manipulative but striking juxtaposition. A First Nations girl, Aberdeen (Ashlyn Cote-Squire), and her little brother Boyd (Lucas Schacht) go fishing with their grandparents at a lake–a sun-dappled tableau that fades out on young Aberdeen’s bright smile and fades back in to find middle-aged Aberdeen (Gail Maurice) passed out on a bench, being kicked awake by the turtleneck Gestapo on park patrol. Across town, Boyd (Ryan R. Black) is at the doctor, receiving the devastating news that he’s terminally ill. As he’s taking this in, his phone rings: could he come get his big sis out of jail? There’s an implied “this time” when the police inform Boyd that Aberdeen’s lucky they’re not pressing criminal charges, but Boyd, espying a Bible on the officer’s desk, appeals to the man’s religious convictions (and gambles on his latent racism) in blaming her actions on a “beer demon,” saying he’s been trying to get her to church. The Indigenous people we meet in Aberdeen have to be nimble code-switchers to navigate the world, and that’s something our proud, mercurial heroine steadfastly isn’t. She’s all out of fucks to give–that is, until Boyd informs her of his cancer, which has forced him to place her grandchildren, who became Aberdeen’s responsibility after her drug-addicted daughter ran away (and then Boyd’s when flooding left Aberdeen unhoused), in foster care. With a white family, no less, something “Abby” resents more than Boyd, who was raised in a white home, apart from his sister. For Aberdeen, it feels like nothing is ours and everything is theirs. What follows is a Dardennes-ian narrative in which an anxious Abby attempts to clean up her act faster than the ticker of red tape will allow.

Danny Huston and Bill Skarsgård in The Crow

The Crow (2024) + Blink Twice (2024)

Posted in2024, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Fantasy, France, Horror, Mexico, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

THE CROW
***/****
starring Bill Skarsgård, FKA twigs, Sami Bouajila, Danny Huston
screenplay by Zach Baylin and William Josef Schneider, based on the comic book series by James O’Barr
directed by Rupert Sanders

BLINK TWICE
***/****
starring Naomi Ackie, Channing Tatum, Christian Slater, Alia Shawkat
written by Zoë Kravitz & E.T. Feigenbaum
directed by Zoë Kravitz

by Walter Chaw “Eric, I had this dark dream,” she says. She doesn’t know these are their last moments together, here and for eternity–that she’s been dead and that her lover has bartered his life for hers, and that whatever there is of mercy in this blighted place has briefly reunited them as they pass each other in purgatory. It certainly doesn’t feel like mercy. It feels cruel. Cruelty is all there is. When I was a depressed, moony kid, I believed in my heart there was a grand melodrama in which I had a part to play. A delusion of grandeur, a symptom of narcissism (should one fail to outgrow it): you dressed the part with eyeliner and black trenchcoats, Doc Martens and clove cigarettes–the borrowed identity, the illusion of disaffection in language affected by quotes pulled from Shakespeare, Wilde, and our patron saint Morrissey. Most of my childhood and adolescence was a dark dream. I lived in a fugue. I lived in the spaces where my brain needed to mature, and I didn’t know what I was doing from one moment to the next, not really. I believed I was responsible for not only the feelings but also the fate of others. I was always performing. I was never performative.