Streaming Archives - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Nicole Kidman in Holland: "In sum, 'Two for a Minecraft Movie.'"

Holland (2025)

April 7, 20252025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Streaming, Thriller

*/****
starring Nicole Kidman, Matthew Macfadyen, Jude Hill, Gael García Bernal
written by Andrew Sodroski
directed by Mimi Cave

by Walter Chaw Mimi Cave’s Holland is a Fargo knock-off, a quirky fable of midwestern misbehavior featuring middle-aged frumps (and their satellite nebbishes) at the eye of tweedy flare-ups of droll and bloody devilry. In order to work, these grand chamber guignols of crime need to walk a delicate cornice above a yawning arctic crevasse, careful not to slip off into self-parody or, worse, a deadly unsureness of foot. Imagine listening to someone tell a story you know very well and they stumble through it…tentatively, fearfully, dare I say lugubriously? Fear is the mind-killer, and so it is with traversing minefields expertly trod by absolute killers like John Waters and David Lynch. Best not to contribute if you don’t have something to contribute. It’s like finding yourself at a dinner party where you’ve read a few books, but everyone else is a Nobel Laureate. They say you never make a shot you don’t take, but there’s a rather large difference between playing to win and swinging for the fences. I feel like the Jack Black character in High Fidelity when some guy comes in looking for a copy of “I Just Called to Say I Love You.” I mean, who could you possibly be buying this for? Oops, are they in a coma? Holland is timid where it needed to be bold. Honestly, it’s just a series of stumbles.

O’Dessa (2025)

March 23, 20252025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Music, Musical, Streaming, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Sadie Sink, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Murray Bartlett, Regina Hall
written and directed by Geremy Jasper

by Walter Chaw Every once in a while, a film comes along that is so not for me I don’t even dislike it. I don’t feel anything towards it. We barely exist in the same dimension. It’s like an animal from the deep ocean presented to me for my approval or condemnation, a cuniform poem written in a dead language; I don’t even have a baseline to test it against. Whaddaya mean, “Do I like it?” What the fuck is it? It’s dinner and a show at H.P. Lovecraft’s house. You could say that Geremy Jasper’s O’Dessa shares DNA with Six-String Samurai or Anna and the Apocalypse, or that it’s what The Wiz would be like if a sea cucumber and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s medulla oblongata collectively excreted it, though I look at it and all I see is a collection of stuff slammed together using an organizing principle I can neither recognize nor articulate. It is the product of an alien intelligence, and while it might appeal to children at a specific developmental age, I don’t know whether that’s good or bad or what that sweet spot is. I guess I could say the music in this musical (?) is just fucking godawful to my ear, but we live in an age where Lin-Manuel Miranda is treated like the second coming of Kander & Ebb. Again, there are things in the world that are not for you, and you’re better off leaving them alone, lest the existential horror of reckoning with your strangeness in this time and place swallow you whole like that kid in Stephen King’s “The Jaunt.”

The Electric State (2025)

March 15, 20252025, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Sci-Fi, Streaming, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Millie Bobby Brown, Chris Pratt, Ke Huy Quan, Stanley Tucci
screenplay by Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely, based on the book by Simon Stålenhag
directed by Anthony and Joe Russo

by Walter Chaw The Russos’ The Electric State is one of those movies where every other line is punctuated by an exhausted wisecrack from a passerby, a member of the faceless chorus, or the sassy, Black-coded sidekick. A mess, in other words; a loud one. What makes it an interesting skidmark along the road to our national humiliation, though, is how it feels like the first salvo in the kind of corporate warfare predicted by The Crimson Permanent Assurance and Demolition Man‘s triumphant, Michelin-starred Taco Bell. See, The Electric State is set in a post-robopocalyptic wasteland where the robot slave class are the invention of Walt Disney–adorable agents of meat-genocide led by a sentient, Hugs-a-lot-sounding Mr. Peanut™ (Woody Harrelson™), who, during the film’s extended prologue, solemnly signs a peace treaty with deepfake Bill Clinton after his Elon Musk, Ethan Skate (Stanley Tucci), invents humanoid robot drones. The “good guys,” then, defeat Disney! Does that make Netflix, the never-been-profitable streaming service bankrolling this Hindenburg and currently at open-platform warfare with the Mouse, the “good guys?” What of the newsreel aside that Kid Rock gave a celebratory concert upon the vanquishing of When You Wish Upon a Skynet? Is Kid Rock the anti-corporate, humanist good guy now? Or was that an unfunny insert mandated in Chris Pratt’s rider? What the actual fuck is going on?

Apartment 7A (2024) + The First Omen (2024)

October 5, 20242024, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Horror, Italy, Serbia, Streaming, Thriller, UK

APARTMENT 7A
***/****
starring Julia Garner, Dianne Wiest, Kevin McNally, Jim Sturgess
screenplay by Natalie Erika James & Christian White and Skylar James
directed by Natalie Erika James

THE FIRST OMEN
***½/****
starring Nell Tiger Free, Tawfeek Barhom, Sônia Braga, Bill Nighy
screenplay by Tim Smith & Arkasha Stevenson and Keith Thomas
directed by Arkasha Stevenson

by Walter Chaw The sense of dread in Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby and Richard Donner’s The Omen originates from the sacrifice of anonymous young women, dead before the stories proper begin. They are the black grasping soil, the damned ritual cycle from which feelings of claustrophobia and destiny extend backwards into an infinite past and forwards into an inevitable future. These dead girls give the stories a sense of eternity, in other words, and the feeling of inescapability. I love that the latest entries in these peculiar franchises are by women. About a third of the way through Arkasha Stevenson’s The First Omen, two concentric circles of novitiates sing and dance around troubled young Carlita (Nicole Sorace) like pagans around a maypole while above them a nun, Sister Anjelica (Ishtar Currie Wilson), sets herself on fire after promising her immolation is “all for you!” For whom, it’s not clear. Possibly Carlita, the red herring of the film’s first half and the obvious source of demonic visitation at the Italian convent in which the film is set, where inexperienced Sister Margaret (Nell Tiger Free) is assigned, fresh from America like Suspiria‘s Suzy Bannion. Or maybe Sister Anjelica’s messy end is meant for Sister Margaret as a strange welcome or a dire warning. “Ring Around the Rosie” was created to teach us about the symptoms of the Black Death. I don’t know what sort of death the circling children are teaching in The First Omen, though it doesn’t matter nearly so much as Stevenson’s absolute command of the unsettling, uncanny image and the ineffable gravity of archetype.

Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F (2024)

July 7, 20242024, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Eddie Murphy, Streaming, Thriller

*½/****
starring Eddie Murphy, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Taylour Paige, Kevin Bacon
screenplay by Will Beall and Tom Gormican & Kevin Etten
directed by Mark Molloy

by Walter Chaw Two things about Beverly Hills Cop IV, or Axel F if you’re nasty: 1) it’s so exhausted, there’s plenty of time to think through what these films are really about, and 2) there’s an existential horror attached to watching ageing idols trapped in endless iterations of themselves always, of course, but especially when they’re asked to continue to do the things they are no longer capable of doing. I’m thinking in particular of how sad it is to feel patronizing towards Harrison Ford after spending a lifetime in awe of him as an Übermensch in galaxies far, far away, booby-trapped tombs about to be robbed, or the Japanese-colonized Los Angeles of an eternal tomorrow just a few days away. Seeing him attempt to be young Indiana Jones in The Dial of Destiny is…pathetic? I’m not saying I could do better; I’m saying in my glorious prime, I could never have given performances as perfectly physical as Ford did, and today, still 30 years his junior, I can’t get off my sofa without noises erupting from every part of my body. I’m saying it would be like if Michael Jordan suited up again to attempt one more NBA season at the age of 61. It’s like breaking up a brawl at the old-folks’ home. They say the toothless get ruthless, though in my experience, they get brittle and out of breath. The Eddie Murphy of Martin Brest’s Beverly Hills Cop was lithe and dangerous, echoing the Eddie of 48Hrs., who could fight a hulking Nick Nolte to a draw. Of the dozens, maybe hundreds of times I watched Beverly Hills Cop, the image of Murphy in it that persists for me is of him swinging around in the webbing on the back of a trailer during the opening sequence. He’s quick, strong, dangerous. Now? Now Eddie’s 63 and in amazing shape–but amazing shape for a man who is 63.

Sting (2024) + Infested (2023)

June 23, 20242024, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, France, Horror, Sci-Fi, Streaming, Theatrical, Thriller

STING
***½/****
starring Ryan Corr, Alyla Browne, Penelope Mitchell, Jermaine Fowler
written and directed by Kiah Roache-Turner

Vermines
***½/****
starring Théo Christine, Sofia Lesaffre, Jérôme Niel, Finnegan Oldfield
written by Sébastien Vanicek and Florent Bernard
directed by Sébastien Vanicek

by Walter Chaw If Jeff Wadlow’s Imaginary and John Krasinski’s If are opposite sides of the same coin, so, too, are Kiah Roache-Turner’s Sting and Sébastien Vanicek’s Infested: the first pair identifying a desire for imaginary friends, the second a desire for anthropomorphized things with which to share our otherwise empty and desperate lives. Each offers different nightmare scenarios for what happens when we try to escape into our fantasies of saviours and second–or first–comings. Each serves as a warning that we are the only thing that can save us; everything else is just a distraction. (I know If is meant to be a kid’s movie, but holy shit.) When patterns appear in our culture, I find it useful to at least begin a conversation about why that might be. I mean, when fish start floating belly-up to the surface of your pond, it seems dense not to wonder what’s in the fucking water. With only a few months left until our last election, it seems a good time to leave a monument here to the bleak timeline saying that pretty much everyone saw everything coming with clarity and rage and eventually resignation and despair once it was proven the people who could make a difference had already come and gone. We are cursed to live in interesting times, and we’re loath to suffer them alone.

SlipStreams Vol. 19 (Patreon exclusive)

May 19, 20242024, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Documentary, Drama, Mystery, Patreon, SlipStreams, Streaming, Thriller

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

March 15, 20242024, 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)

December 18, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Germany, Romance, Streaming

***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.

May December (2023)

November 17, 20232023, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Streaming, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore, Charles Melton
screenplay by Samy Burch
directed by Todd Haynes

by Angelo Muredda “You just don’t know with these Hollywood types,” Julianne Moore’s wilted Southern belle Gracie says early in Todd Haynes’s intricate hothouse melodrama, May December. She’s referring, by way of a throwaway reference to a prior encounter with Judge Judy, to the impending visit at her idyllic Savannah, Georgia home by Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), a TV actress who’s about to play her in a movie about the defining event of her life more than twenty years prior. Gracie is a tabloid celebrity, famous for her exploitative sexual relationship with a 12-year-old boy, for which she served time in prison. Improbably, she’s also a proud matriarch, having married and built a home with her victim, Joe (Charles Melton), who now finds himself an empty nester at the ripe age of 36, as the couple’s twin children, born while she was in prison, prepare to go off to college. Loosely inspired by the story of sex offender Mary Kay Letourneau, who went on to marry and start a family with the victim of her abuse until their separation in 2019, May December isn’t a work of true crime so much as a playful, sly, tonally restless exploration of Gracie’s observation about the unknowability of Hollywood folks, which turns out to be broadly applicable to the unfathomable nature of everyone, including herself and her partner.

Ghosted (2023) + The Mother (2023)

May 20, 20232023, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Espionage, Romance, Streaming, Thriller, ZERO STARS

GHOSTED
ZERO STARS/****
starring Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, Mike Moh, Adrien Brody
screenplay by Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick and Chris McKenna & Erik Sommers
directed by Dexter Fletcher

THE MOTHER
**/****
starring Jennifer Lopez, Lucy Paez, Omari Hardwick, Joseph Fiennes
screenplay by Misha Green and Andrea Berloff and Peter Craig
directed by Niki Caro

by Walter Chaw Two new entries in the woman-warrior subgenre of action pictures find a pretty abysmal knock-off of Knight and Day in the Ana de Armas vehicle Ghosted (with villain Adrien Brody doing a weird accent) and a pretty fair knock-off of Hanna in the Jennifer Lopez vehicle The Mother (with villain Joseph Fiennes doing a different weird accent). The one is ultimately a half-assed romcom, the other a grim survivalist ex-military Stella Dallas melodrama. They share a queasy desperation, as well as a sense that they’ve lapped their respective sell-by dates by at least a full creative cycle. It’s that feeling where you recognize someone at the party who hasn’t been invited, and they know you know but no one wants to say anything. The best modern iterations of this kind of movie are Renny Harlin’s The Long Kiss Goodnight and James Cameron’s Aliens. I wonder if my overall fatigue with the genre isn’t a product of my searching for those highs again in the intervening, largely disappointing decades. Part of me feels like I should celebrate non-IP attempts at mature actioners–but the rest of me feels like I’d rather be watching something that doesn’t suck. It’s the eternal struggle.

Air (2023)

May 16, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sports, Streaming

*/****
starring Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Jason Bateman, Viola Davis
written by Alex Convery
directed by Ben Affleck

by Walter Chaw The irony of a film celebrating the taking of chances being so absolutely afraid to take any chances is so conspicuous it feels a little like bullying to point it out, but here goes: Ben Affleck’s Air is the flabby, out-of-shape version of Moneyball, aspiring only to appease the narcissists it essays and the billion-dollar corporations with which they have developed disturbing symbiotic relationships. It’s not boring, exactly, though it is like that story your grandfather has told you a dozen times already: you listen patiently for the climax you know is coming in order to time your surprise and delight appropriately. Some movies in this vein, like Miracle, are pretty good. Others, like Hoosiers, are pretty awful. All of them are watchable pabulum, pre-chewed and partially digested. It goes down without much swallowing and goes out without much noise–and every six months, there’s another one. Interviews with Affleck and his muse Matt Damon have found them breathlessly recounting how scripter Alex Convery was watching an ESPN “30 on 30” documentary when he had the “eureka” that the story of Nike guy Sonny Vaccaro (Damon) would “make a great movie!” An uncredited rewrite by Affleck/Damon incorporated notes from roundball legend Michael Jordan hissownself, elevating the roles his mother, Deloris (Viola Davis, whom Jordan cast), and Olympics coach George Raveling (Marlon Wayans) played in Jordan’s decision to sign a sponsorship deal with Nike. Et voilà! Not a “great movie,” let’s say, but definitely a movie.

Somebody I Used to Know (2023)

February 9, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Streaming, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Alison Brie, Jay Ellis, Kiersey Clemons, Julie Hagerty
written by Dave Franco & Alison Brie
directed by Dave Franco

by Walter Chaw My Best Friend’s Wedding is vile, happy-go-fucky bullshit that polishes the sociopathic behaviour of a solipsistic narcissist to a patently plastic Julia Roberts sheen. It stinks of flop sweat and forced artificiality, and it made somewhere in the neighbourhood of a kabillion dollars because it traffics in exactly the sort of soft-racist, misogynistic horsepucky favoured by a demographic that likes blended drinks and doing mall walks. About 30 minutes into Dave Franco’s Somebody I Used to Know, someone confronts someone else by saying, “You’re not doing some My Best Friend’s Wedding thing, are you?” And, well, she is. Credit for knowing just how unbearable your film is, I guess, this comedy of cringe where “naturalism” means ending every statement as a question and the main character is a pastiche of insufferable tropes who decorated her childhood room with a Sleater-Kinney poster, a pen-drawing of Joni Mitchell, and the “Have a Nice Daze” Dazed and Confused and American Movie teaser posters. Get it? That real clear picture of who this person is and who the people sketching her are? The song over the closing credits is Third-Eye Blind‘s “Semi-Charmed Life.” Got it now? There’s a Chance the Rapper sighting, too. Run. Fucking save yourself.

Shotgun Wedding (2023) + You People (2023)

January 31, 20232023, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Streaming

SHOTGUN WEDDING
½*/****
starring Jennifer Lopez, Josh Duhamel, Jennifer Coolidge, Lenny Kravitz
written by Mark Hammer
directed by Jason Moore

YOU PEOPLE
***/****
starring Jonah Hill, Lauren London, David Duchovny, Eddie Murphy
written by Jonah Hill & Kenya Barris
directed by Kenya Barris

by Walter Chaw Jennifer Coolidge, 61, plays the mother of 50-year-old Josh Duhamel in Jason “Pitch Perfect” Moore’s abominable-in-pretty-much-every-conceivable-way Shotgun Wedding, and her being 11 when she had him isn’t even the worst of it. Honestly, this is the kind of movie where it would’ve been funny if they’d made a joke out of that somehow (like maybe how Steve Coulter, who plays his dad, would’ve been 12), and Coolidge has exactly the befuddled, oversexed MILF persona to pull it off. I don’t know, I didn’t write this shit. Coolidge is Carol and Coulter is Larry. Their son Tom is a total loser recently released from a minor-league baseball team, which only makes sense because he’s on the AARP mailing list. Has he been trying to make it to “the show” for 30 years? One of these Crash Davis things, I guess. Just kidding: Crash was 33; can Tom even tie his own shoes anymore without getting winded? Because I’m turning 50 this year, and let me tell you, I cannot. Tom is marrying Darcy (Jennifer Lopez), who spends every other sentence mobbing Tom for each of his groomzilla decisions–decisions he has to make, because Darcy is disengaged from the entire process and resents having to have a wedding at all, since one of the first things she said to him when they started dating was that she didn’t want a fancy wedding. Tom will eventually apologize for not listening to her, but if the intent is to make this about Tom learning to be a better partner, I must confess I would stop listening to someone as passive-aggressive and monstrously belittling as Darcy. Maybe Tom has a humiliation kink. That would explain why he played minor-league baseball for 30 years and probably votes Republican. It’s not my place to judge that, I’m just observing it.

White Noise (2022)

December 29, 20222022, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Horror, Mystery, Streaming, UK

*½/****
starring Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle, Raffey Cassidy
written by Noah Baumbach, based on the book by Don DeLillo
directed by Noah Baumbach

by Angelo Muredda “Everything was fine, everything would continue to be fine, would eventually get better, so long as the supermarket did not slip,” says professor Jack Gladney midway through White Noise, Don DeLillo’s satire of contemporary middle-class American family life tested by catastrophe. DeLillo’s protagonist is marvelling at the grocery store’s capacity to endure unaffected in the face of a transient disaster that’s hit his charming town, impressed by how the so-called “airborne toxic event” that’s blown through (and now over) his community has, if anything, only enhanced the store’s unnaturally perfect wares, which always seem in-season no matter the time of year. He could just as well be marvelling at the elasticity of DeLillo’s novel, which holds up in the face of the ongoing global catastrophe it prefigures in many ways, a pandemic that briefly forced westerners to interrogate their insulation from the kind of suffering they normally watch on television.

Halloween Ends (2022)

October 14, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Streaming, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

***½/****
starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Andi Matichak, Rohan Campbell, Will Patton
written by Paul Brad Logan & Chris Bernier & Danny McBride & David Gordon Green
directed by David Gordon Green

by Walter Chaw I think the point, if not the pleasure principle, of franchise entertainments is the illusion of ownership over them, the obsessive knob-polishing of arcane knowledge not so very different, in many cases, from the pursuit of doctorate degrees in the liberal arts. You dedicate your life to learning so much about an exceptionally narrow field of study that you eventually come to a place where you know a lot about a little and not much about the rest. This monocultural–and, in most cases, monotextual–training tutors one in identifying deviations from the mean, so that what was joy in discovery becomes jealous taxonomy in defense of the tiny corner you’ve painted yourself into. The point of it all, ultimately, is to complain. When a totem such as John Carpenter’s Halloween arrives, it carries with it the inspiration for epistemological/maniacal cults: entire fields of worship in which the limited revelations provided by a singular text serve as the foundation for religion. Hungry for more tablets, new installments are met with jeweller’s glasses and tests of fidelity to the one true Word. The complaining, in other words, starts immediately. Is this new version of the Golden Calf walking the right way? Is it behaving as it should? Slow, not fast, or fast, never slow? Is it savage enough? Is the hero worthy? Is the lamb worthy of the blade? Each new film in any long-running series that earns enough each time out to warrant a continuation receives the scrutiny attending the unearthing of a new book of the Bible. Sources are vetted, false prophets are suspected, bloody debates are had in the town square, and finally, it’s either the grudging acceptance into a growing canon or a casting off into the wilderness. The complaining is the point. It solidifies a community like the negging built into Evangelical outreach missions, and it’s instant. The only thing verboten is if the franchise threatens the fragile identities of the high priests of its insular cult of personality.

The Munsters (2022) – Blu-ray Disc

September 29, 20222022, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Family, Horror, Streaming

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Sheri Moon Zombie, Jeff Daniel Phillips, Daniel Roebuck, Richard Brake
written and directed by Rob Zombie

by Walter Chaw Rob Zombie only makes movies about families, and he does it with a wife he loves. It’s the kind of relationship John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands shared: the iconoclastic, combative director and his muse, living examples of a creative partnership built on mutual respect, come hell or high water. I call Rowlands Cassavetes’s “muse,” though I think closer to the truth is that their movies feel like watching great jazz musicians play off each other. Without exactly equating one of the greatest independent filmmakers of all time with Rob Zombie, I think Zombie and Sheri Moon Zombie go to some interesting places together they couldn’t get to on their own. I can’t claim Zombie’s for everyone–hell, Cassavetes ain’t for everyone, either–but he works on a specific wavelength where if you’re hip to it, if you fall into his groove, for his part he never loses the beat. I didn’t get it when I first saw House of 1000 Corpses, but from a second viewing of The Devil’s Rejects on, I’ve been ride or die with Zombie. Unlike most, when it was announced he was tabbed to do a reboot of “The Munsters” (which has turned out to be a prequel to the TV series), I was not only not surprised, given his penchant for family stories–I was excited. I wish it were better.

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.

Orphan: First Kill (2022)

August 19, 20222022, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Crime, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Streaming, Thriller

*½/****
starring Isabelle Fuhrman, Rossif Sutherland, Hiro Kanagawa, Julia Stiles
screenplay by David Coggeshall
directed by William Brent Bell

by Angelo Muredda “Esther’s terrifying saga continues,” promises the confusing promotional copy for William Brent Bell’s Orphan: First Kill, a listless prequel to Jaume Collet-Serra’s impressively nasty thriller Orphan. It says something about the project’s existential inertia that even the pitch is muddled about whether the film’s diminutive protagonist, played again with an appropriate mix of madame prudishness and girlish optimism by Isabelle Fuhrman, is coming or going. Arriving a whole 13-year-old’s lifespan after the original, which famously culminated in the reveal that Esther was not a helpless urchin from St. Mariana’s Home for Girls but a short, thirty-something serial killer from Estonia, Orphan: First Kill dilutes rather than develops the deliberately thin mythos of its predecessor, stretching its punchy 30-second exposition dump about her past into 100 minutes of deadweight.

Prey (2022)

August 4, 2022****/****, 2022, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Sci-Fi, Streaming, Thriller

****/****
starring Amber Midthunder, Dakota Beavers, Dane DiLiegro, Stormee Kipp
screenplay by Patrick Aison
directed by Dan Trachtenberg

by Walter Chaw There is a complete lack of pretense to Dan Trachtenberg’s Prey–lack of pretense being one of the emerging traits of a filmmaker whose two films so far (both stealth sequels, both tremendously ethical towards their source materials) are lean genre exercises that feel like minor miracles in a landscape studded with sodden, high-profile disasters. Neither a puzzlebox nor a legacy sequel requiring a spreadsheet and an encyclopedic knowledge of a quarter-century of lore, Prey tells a particular, standalone story in an economical way. It’s a coming-of-age period piece with shades of Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto; what I’m saying is it means business. Set in the Northern Great Plains in 1719, it follows a spirited young Comanche woman, Naru (Amber Midthunder), as she tries to prove herself as a hunter under the shadow of her brother, Taabe (Dakota Beavers), a gifted bowman and all-around badass who has a stranglehold on the admiration of their tribe. When she follows an all-male hunting party in search of the mountain lion that has attacked one of their people, one of the young men asks her why she’s bothered, given that they don’t need a cook out there in the wilderness. But she sees things they miss in their arrogance and desire to impress one another. Like the skinned rattlesnake left by a path, or the footprint bigger than anything that should be in this place. The boys discount the latter as nothing to worry about, lest they be seen as cautious and thoughtful–as feminine, like Naru.