Zendaya and Robert Pattinson in The Drama: "Resistance is futile"

The Drama (2026)

Posted in2026, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

**/****
starring Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Alana Haim, Mamadou Athie
written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli

by Angelo Muredda SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The high-concept marital satire of Force Majeure meets the prosaic celebrity home tours of ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST in Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama, a dark comedy about a promising young couple undone on the eve of their wedding by a revelation from childhood. The film follows in the tradition of Borgli’s earlier works like Dream Scenario and Sick of Myself, which revel in the destructive force of abrupt, foundation-shaking status shifts between partners in a relationship. It’s good to have a thematic calling card, and The Drama expertly mines the talents of its cast where the prior Dream Scenario merely coasts on the audience’s pre-existing parasocial relationship with Nicolas Cage. But for all of the film’s conceptual wirework–not to mention the rich extratextual discourse surrounding the filmmaker’s recently recovered edgelord essay about dating a teenager when he was 26–The Drama is ultimately too timid to earn its bona fides as a provocative text.

Jesse Buckley/The Bride hooked up to wires on an examination table: "Buckley's mixture"

The Bride! (2026)

Posted in2026, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, France, Horror, Romance, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

*/****
starring Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Penélope Cruz, Annette Bening
written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal

by Walter Chaw I can’t tell you how excited I was for this. I love the Frankenstein myth for how malleable it is, how easily it slots into various syndromes and traumas. How contemporary it is, always, in its dissection of the masculine will to power. It can be told from the perspective of the pain of Icarus or the agony of Daedalus. Fathers and sons, husbands and wives; unwholesome desires, lost weekends. Frankenstein author Mary Shelley was, of course, the shit, a true progressive two centuries ahead of her time who likely helped a transgender man assume his new identity and kept a piece of her drowned husband’s heart in a folded copy of his poem Adonais. That poem is an elegy for John Keats. It’s arguably the best thing Percy Shelley ever wrote, not the least for the slight undertone of disingenuousness in its profusion. It’s like a Smiths song. This is my favourite line from it: “He is a portion of the loveliness which once he made more lovely.” I don’t think Percy liked how Keats was a genius while he, Percy, was not. I know that Keats, at least, was leery of Percy’s attention, especially as Percy began their relationship by dismissing his work. It doesn’t matter. I love how Mary Shelley chose Adonais as the shroud for her husband’s pickled heart. She was as good a literary critic as she was an author–and she was a phenomenal author. Mary would’ve torn Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! apart.

Steve Carell wearing a Hello, My Name is Andy nametag

The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005) [Unrated] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

Posted in2026, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Romance

The 40 Year Old Virgin
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
starring Steve Carell, Catherine Keener, Paul Rudd, Seth Rogen
written by Judd Apatow & Steve Carell
directed by Judd Apatow

by Bill Chambers Revisiting Judd Apatow’s The 40 Year Old Virgin for the first time in over 20 years is an experience in cognitive dissonance, as it features actors who haven’t really lost any of their currency in a world that has lost all of its currency. In 4K Ultra HiDef super-duper resolution, that world is maddeningly tactile, but it slips through your fingers, as it did in reality. The 40 Year Old Virgin was about one wide-eyed innocent; today, it’s about several. People who don’t know that plagues are coming in the form of smartphones, MAGA, COVID, and AI. Who’ve never used Tinder. Who can’t tell the difference between Aquaman and Iron Man. The ignorance must be bliss. This is not to gloss over the poorly aged edgelord humour–which is very likely inextricable from that ignorance–or frame Bush II’s second term as a utopia. (For starters, the theatrical release of The 40 Year Old Virgin coincided with Hurricane Katrina.) Still, the year before Twitter launched wouldn’t be a bad choice for a Restore Point. Watching The 40 Year Old Virgin in 2026, I envied everybody’s lightness of being. The fear and loathing that settles on us like dust now is absent here.

Colman Domingo in Dead Man's Wire/Miles Teller and Elizabeth Olsen in Eternity

TIFF ’25: Dead Man’s Wire + Eternity

Posted in2025, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Gus Van Sant, Drama, Fantasy, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF

DEAD MAN’S WIRE
**/****
starring Bill Skarsgård, Dacre Montgomery, Cary Elwes, Al Pacino
written by Austin Kolodney
directed by Gus Van Sant

ETERNITY
*½/****
starring Miles Teller, Elizabeth Olsen, Callum Turner, Da’Vine Joy Randolph
written by Patrick Cunnae & David Freyne
directed by David Freyne

by Bill Chambers Bill Skarsgård finally butts up against the limits of his versatility as he lamely channels Michael Shannon in Dead Man’s Wire, Gus Van Sant’s first feature since 2018’s Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot. (Most recently, he worked on Ryan Murphy’s “Feud: Capote vs. The Swans”, directing six of its eight episodes.) Both are based on true stories, an enduring kink of Van Sant’s going back to 1995’s To Die For, which riffed on the Pamela Smart case with a satirical bent that hasn’t really resurfaced in his docudramas since. But when, late in the game, Dead Man’s Wire develops something like a comic edge, it feels like Van Sant might be heckling the material out of boredom, if not something more problematic. The film dramatizes the 1977 kidnapping of mortgage broker Dick Hall (Dacre Montgomery) by Skarsgård’s Tony Kiritsis, who tied a 12-gauge shotgun to Dick’s neck and held him hostage for three days at his rathole apartment in Indianapolis. He believed that Dick and his wealthy father, M.L. Hall (Al Pacino), were waiting for him to fall behind on his mortgage payments so they could poach a valuable piece of property he owned, and he demanded the Halls give him $5 million in damages as well as–and this was the sticking point, according to the film–a full-throated apology in exchange for Dick’s life.

Aziz Ansari and a winged Keanu Reeves outside a Denny's: "No one can be told what Denny's is, you have to see it for yourself."

Good Fortune (2025)

Posted in2025, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical

*/****
starring Seth Rogen, Aziz Ansari, Keke Palmer, Keanu Reeves
written and directed by Aziz Ansari

by Walter Chaw Comedians can be great educators. They speak truth to power. They needle inconsistencies and hypocrisies to light like splinters coaxed from the body politic. Charlie Chaplin. George Carlin, of course. Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce, Lucille Ball, Mary Tyler Moore–just the beginning of a roll call of storied court jesters attached to naked emperors. There are good modern examples, too, even ones who didn’t perform in Riyadh at the discretion of a homicidal regime fond of public beheadings, dismembering American journalists, and, you know, brutally punishing women who dare to challenge the status quo. And then there’s Riyadh headliner Aziz Ansari, who has made a career of playing the most irritating side character in other people’s stuff, parlaying whatever fame that earns a person into the smart, at times surprisingly raw three-season dramedy “Master of None”. There’s some depth to Ansari, it appears, despite his being the weakest part–whinging, facile, fast-talking, insincere–of his own strong project. Orson Welles famously said about Woody Allen:

Tall Margaret Qualley holding flowers and short Ethan Hawke holding court in Blue Moon

TIFF ’25: Blue Moon

Posted in2025, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Comedy, Directors: Richard Linklater, Drama, Film Festivals, Ireland, Music, Romance, TIFF

***½/****
starring Ethan Hawke, Margaret Qualley, Bobby Cannavale, Andrew Scott
written by Robert Kaplow, inspired by the writings of Lorenz Hart and Elizabeth Weiland
directed by Richard Linklater

by Angelo Muredda Contrasting epitaphs set the tone for Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon, a melancholy tribute to the self-destructive genius of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart, a not especially handsome guy played by Linklater’s decidedly handsome long-time muse, Ethan Hawke. Moments before we see the man’s lonesome onscreen death from pneumonia on a rainy street, a title card offers Hart’s posthumous characterization from a pair of observers: his contemporary Oscar Hammerstein II, who hails him as “alert and dynamic and fun to be around,” and cabaret performer Mabel Mercer, who pronounces him “the saddest man I ever knew.” Hawke’s Hart is both–a charming but embittered barfly in a personal and professional crisis who loves conversation as much as he resents having to make it with perceived dullards like Hammerstein, who, in the film’s timeline, has just replaced him as Richard Rodgers’s creative partner on the verge of their major commercial breakthrough, Oklahoma!.

Snow White (2025)

Snow White (2025)

Posted in2025, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, Family, Fantasy, Musical, Romance, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Rachel Zegler, Andrew Burnap, Gal Gadot
screenplay by Erin Cressida Wilson
directed by Marc Webb

by Walter Chaw In the case of live-action Disney reboots, it isn’t a matter of whether they’re a hate crime, but how egregious a hate crime they are. We expect dead-eyed CGI renderings of what were once astonishingly evocative hand-drawn miracles. We expect the shameless tokenism that sees race as a costume white people take on and off at their diversity balls and the feckless, tossed-off malaise that mercenary money-grabs can never entirely shake. Despite all that, despite the built-in stench of failure that attends these spectacles like miasmas of bluebottle flies on gas-bloated corpses, the Mouse keeps pumping them out, beholden to an accounting ledger they bind like a script. The goal isn’t art or expression, nothing so lofty. The goal is a percentage–a shareholder-appeasing PowerPoint presentation delivered by a board of directors, not a single one of whom would otherwise be trusted to form a graceful turn of phrase or produce something that could flower into a product that is culturally significant in a nurturing way. They are stripminers, colonizers of your childhood, overburdening resources for personal gain. Their legacy will be how they took our memories and replaced them with further evidence that there is nothing good the dullest, emptiest people in the world won’t exploit for profit.

Ben and Suzanne/Stranger

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

Posted in2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Netherlands, Norway, Romance, San Diego Asian Film Festival

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

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

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

Wicked (2024)

Wicked (2024)

Posted in2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Fantasy, Iceland, Musical, Romance, Theatrical

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

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

Love Lies/Dead Talents Society

SDAFF ’24: Love Lies + Dead Talents Society

Posted in2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Hong Kong, Horror, Romance, San Diego Asian Film Festival, Taiwan

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

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

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

Young Werther/Friendship

TIFF ’24: Young Werther + Friendship

Posted in2024, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Comedy, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF

YOUNG WERTHER
*/****
starring Douglas Booth, Alison Pill, Iris Apatow, Patrick J. Adams
screenplay by José Lourenço, based on the novel The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang Goethe
directed by José Lourenço

FRIENDSHIP
**½/****
starring Tim Robinson, Paul Rudd, Kate Mara, Jack Dylan Grazer
written and directed by Andrew DeYoung

by Bill Chambers Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s 1774 semi-autobiographical novel The Sorrows of Young Werther made Goethe a global literary sensation practically overnight. José Lourenço’s Young Werther dares to poke a hole in the fourth wall by splashing this factoid across the screen in introductory text, comparing the book’s impact to that of Beatlemania. It’s certainly a choice, explaining the success of The Sorrows of Young Werther as if today’s audiences have no sense of history while simultaneously drawing an analogy to a fad from the ’60s. A more current reference would, I suppose, throw off the film’s Luddite chic. This is a modern-dress adaptation, yes, but there’s a strong whiff of Wes Anderson in how it translates the novel’s epistolary form into a fondness for the quaint and the bespoke (those opening titles are presented with filigreed borders, silent-movie style)–not to mention the picture’s formalist approach to shot design, which at least gives Young Werther more visual élan than one expects of a Crave Original. Citing the book’s fame at all, though: what’s the point? It feels like insecurity at best, overpromising at worst. Can you tell I didn’t care for Young Werther? It’s just so in love with itself that I felt like a third wheel.

Anora

TIFF ’24: Anora

Posted in2024, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Palme d'Or Winner, Romance, TIFF

***½/****
starring Mikey Madison, Yura Borisov, Ivy Wolk, Karren Karagulian
written and directed by Sean Baker

By Angelo Muredda Early in the second act of Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or-winning Anora, Toros (Baker staple Karren Karagulian), a rumpled Armenian fixer arriving on the scene of what ought to be a straightforward extraction job, notices the broken glass and smashed furnishings before him, and asks what happened. Baker’s camera follows Toros’s perspective as he takes in the fruits of the expertly crafted, lengthy screwball set-piece preceding his arrival, with the grim visual punchline of a young woman bound with a phone wire, gagged with a scarf, and propped up on one of his colleagues’ laps. The joke, at the expense of his ignorance and our knowledge of eponymous heroine Ani (Mikey Madison), the bound woman, is that the bulk of the damage hasn’t been done by his meathead colleagues but by her, in a feral act of self-defense that falls somewhere between the survival tactics of Road Runner and Kevin McAllister.

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.

Lisa Frankenstein (2024) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

Lisa Frankenstein (2024) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2024, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Horror, Romance, Teen, Zombie

*½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Kathryn Newton, Cole Sprouse, Liza Soberano, Carla Gugino
written by Diablo Cody
directed by Zelda Williams

by Bill Chambers During what I suppose constitutes the climax of Zelda Williams’s Lisa Frankenstein, the “UK Surf” remix of The Pixies‘ “Wave of Mutilation” cues up on the soundtrack. It’s broadly fitting–three people have been mutilated over the course of the picture, and our antiheroine is preparing to claim a fourth victim with an axe–and period-appropriate. (“Wave of Mutilation” came out in 1989, the year in which the movie takes place.) It’s also, like a lot of the creative decisions driving Lisa Frankenstein, amateurish in its literal-mindedness, derivativeness (anyone who knows anything will tell you that “Wave of Mutilation” (UK Surf remix) belongs to Pump Up the Volume), and clunkiness, with the song fighting a losing battle to be heard through the prophylactic of Isabella Summers’s score. Lisa Frankenstein is the brainchild of writer-producer Diablo Cody, her first horror comedy since Jennifer’s Body, a film I didn’t care for in 2008 but suspect I was wrong about, having watched it back then as some sort of Megan Fox litmus test instead of as its own thing. I’m prepared to accept that I’m similarly wrong about Lisa Frankenstein–that I’m too old and male for it, that it will endear itself to me over time, the way today’s trash turns into tomorrow’s treasure. I dunno, though. I don’t think demographics are the issue–Cody conceived it as a distaff Weird Science (hence “Lisa”), and that’s kind of my wheelhouse–and I don’t think Lisa Frankenstein is epochal enough to age like anything other than milk.

Oh, no! Two vampires!: Zendaya getting a double hickey in Challengers

Challengers (2024)

Posted in2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Italy, Romance, Sports, Theatrical

**/****
starring Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, Mike Faist
written by Justin Kuritzkes
directed by Luca Guadagnino

by Walter Chaw Challengers feels…what’s the word, is it “coy?” It’s a tease, a jape, a roundelay and a smug one. It promises the world and delivers a quintessence of dust: a movie about tennis where the balls are blue. The best part is near the end, when two once and future lovers consider each other from across a swirling maelstrom–a scene of heightened emotions right there on the verge of magic realism that reminded me of better movies like Adrian Lyne’s Unfaithful and Jacques Tati’s M. Hulot’s Holiday and even Bronwen Hughes’s wildly underestimated Forces of Nature. What a pity the resolution to said scene is a heatless tumble in the backseat of a beater. It’s possible that consummation in the sexual sense is meant to take a backseat to ecstatic metaphor–that fucking is secondary to dazzling cinematography and a sweaty clinch in front of an adoring crowd. That would explain why the non-tennis sequences are equally sparkless: the two-thirds of the book you skim to get back to the good bits. Off the court, it’s an irritating, underwritten melodrama played by two fantastic actors and one who purses their lips and concentrates a lot, husky-whispering like late-career J-Lo when trying to convey seriousness. The one who seems altogether unworthy of the attentions of the other two points on this love triangle, so that any hint of romantic suspense has fled. Of course the boys should be together: the boys are the sexy ones in perpetual heat. What are we even doing here?

Watch this space

Spaceman (2024) + Sometimes I Think About Dying (2024)

Posted in2024, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Czech Republic, Drama, Romance, Sci-Fi, Streaming

SPACEMAN
**/****
starring Adam Sandler, Carey Mulligan, Paul Dano, Isabella Rossellini
screenplay by Colby Day, based on the novel Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfař
directed by Johan Renck

SOMETIMES I THINK ABOUT DYING
**/****
starring Daisy Ridley, Dave Merheje, Parvesh Cheena, Marcia DeBonis
written by Kevin Armento, Stefanie Abel Horowitz, Katy Wright-Mead
directed by Rachel Lambert

by Walter Chaw Its basic set-up is like Duncan Jones’s Moon: a lone astronaut, far from home and tethered only by occasional contact with the partner he’s left behind on Earth, finds some solace in conversations with an alien/artificial intelligence. But this genre of listless Rocket Men and their internal melodramas traces back to Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running, right? Or that 1964 episode of the original “Twilight Zone”, “The Long Morrow”? Apocalypse-tinged futureworlds centred around Byronic heroes. Where its antecedents rarely showed the strain of their creation, however, Johan Renck’s Spaceman (an adaptation of Jaroslav Kalfař’s Spaceman of Bohemia) often does. It has good taste, and maybe even the right idea in putting a man in isolation in order to Altered States him into a cleaner understanding of his essential self, but it’s better at pounding out the notes than it is at hearing the music. While I didn’t hate it, I am, I suspect, squarely in its target audience of pretentious, sad, The Fountain-loving Proust-readers, so it never drowned me like I hoped it would. Me, whose pockets are always filled with the smooth rocks I picked along the shore.

Afire (2023)

Posted in2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Germany, Romance, Streaming

Afire

***½/****
starring Thomas Schubert, Paula Beer, Langston Uibel, Enno Trebs
written and directed by Christian Petzold

by Walter Chaw In their fetishization of hopelessly pretty women on bicycles. there is a hint of Claude Chabrol in Christian Petzold’s films; and in their obsessive deconstructions of interpersonal interactions, a touch of Arnaud Desplechin. Both echoes are filtered through a specifically Teutonic social brusqueness that reminds me now of Paul Verhoeven’s early Dutch thrillers. Petzold’s latest, Afire, is, in other words, a wonderland for film nerds looking to engage in another of this filmmaker’s beautifully wrought bits of cinematic nostalgia, though I confess Afire flayed me close to the bone more for its depiction of a lumpen, lachrymose writer named Leon (Thomas Schubert) than for its rich, multi-textural references. (It’s Ozon that Petzold most resembles, isn’t it? Or is it countryman Fassbinder, the master of the social-realist melodrama?) The picture opens with Leon and his friend Felix (Langston Uibel) driving to Felix’s father’s house in the woods by the ocean when their car breaks down. Wandering along a trail, Leon asks if they’re lost, and Felix, in response, sprints deeper into the forest with promises to scout out the road ahead. “It can’t be far!” he says. Afire sets itself up immediately to be a folk-horror movie where Felix never comes back and Leon is left to fend for himself against cultists or witches or wildlife. But Felix does come back, and all those immediate feelings of dread linger like a chill over the remainder that no amount of the film’s wildfires can completely chase away.

SDAFF ’23: New Strains

Posted in2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Film Festivals, Romance, San Diego Asian Film Festival, Sci-Fi

Sdaff23newstrains

***½/****
starring Artemis Shaw, Prashanth Kamalakanthan
written and directed by Artemis Shaw & Prashanth Kamalakanthan

by Walter Chaw Prasanth Kamalakanthan and Artemis Shaw’s New Strains is perhaps the definitive film about the COVID shutdown, addressing it both straight-on and metaphorically in adopting the central conceit of Michael Tolkin’s dystopian novel NK3, in which a world-ending virus has as its primary symptom the infantilization of the infected. “New Strains” refers to both viral evolution and the manifold tensions introduced into the new romantic relationship of vacationing couple Kallia (Shaw) and Ram (Kamalakanthan), who land in the Big Apple right when the world shuts down. Trapped in a well-appointed, centrally-located flat, they bicker, watch television, have spiritless sex, and disagree over how seriously to take the risks of infection. Kallia, giving off some Lena Dunham vibes, is loose about masking and decontaminating when entering the living space. Ram, notably more uptight, freaks out a time or two in response to her laxness. It doesn’t help that she deals with strife through giggling and taunting. Indeed, for all of Ram’s irritating quirks–his fastidiousness and jealousy–I instantly despised Kallia for her schoolyard cruelty.

SDAFF ’23: Grounded

Posted in2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Film Festivals, Romance, San Diego Asian Film Festival, Time Travel

Sdaff23grounded

***/****
starring Whit K. Lee, Katherine Leidlein, Angela Chew, Alfredo de Guzman
written and directed by Justin Chan

by Walter Chaw Justin Chan’s Grounded is triggering for me. It opens with a sunny prologue in which William (Whit K. Lee) proposes to longtime girlfriend Mackenzie (Katherine Leidlein). She accepts–with the caveat that he must finally introduce her to his parents (Angela Chew and Alfredo De Guzman) after three years of dating. If that seems like a long time, well, he’s Asian-American, and she’s happy to say how often she’s mistaken for Nicole Kidman. My wife and I share the same racial dynamic with William and Mackenzie, though I had no problem introducing her to my parents, because a large part of me hoped they would disapprove of her and I could complete my divorce from them. I mean, I did care, but I was angry and looking for the fight. I wanted them to present me an ultimatum so I could choose not-them. Grounded made my blood-pressure rise immediately–the ol’ fight-or-flight closer to my surfaces than I thought possible after all this time. The danger of films like this lies in how I will struggle to find any distance between it and my exposed nerves; Grounded cleaves so close to the bone I thought about tapping out a few times. I’m glad I stuck with it.