Hiddleston and partner dancing in the street: "Dance like Stephen King’s watching."

The Life of Chuck (2025)

June 6, 2025Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Sci-Fi, Stephen King, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Tom Hiddleston, Annalise Basso, Mark Hamill
written by Mike Flanagan, based on the short story by Stephen King
directed by Mike Flanagan

by Walter Chaw I admit it: I have an allergy to sentimental treacle. I get that this shit is like mother’s milk to some–that fading stars and, indeed, entire cable channels have tied their strings to the “shameless tearjerker” to great if niche fame and fortune; it’s a “me” problem, and I accept that. I reject being force-fed platitudes as meaningful life lessons. I break out in hives in the presence of humpy-bo-dumpty scores thick on strings and a sense of wonder, maybe a wistful tinkle of the keys when an angel earns its wings or dies of cancer. I dislike it enough that not even Macaulay Culkin getting stung to death by bees could save My Girl for me. I confess I haven’t read the Stephen King short story upon which Mike Flanagan’s The Life of Chuck is based, though I do remember a lovely piece King published decades ago in his collection Night Shift, “The Last Rung on the Ladder,” that, sans any supernatural elements, managed to bring a tear to my eye. So it’s not King’s variety of sentiment I’m immune to (I weep my eyes out still at the last “I love you, man” in Christine), only the bad faith kind that traffics in broad stereotypes dedicated to milking those fucking tear ducts like Amish grandfathers speed-bagging the herd’s teats before dawn.

Little boy in empty swimming pool: "Also bring back the pool water."

Bring Her Back (2025)

May 30, 2025Posted 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.

Jackie Chan looking off into the distance as Ralph Macchio and Ben Wang lock fists: "When you realize you forgot to pick up Jaden Smith from summer camp 15 years ago"

Karate Kid: Legends (2025)

May 27, 2025Posted in2025, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Family, Jackie Chan, Martial Arts, Sports, Theatrical

*/****
starring Jackie Chan, Ben Wang, Joshua Jackson, Ralph Macchio
written by Rob Lieber
directed by Jonathan Entwistle

by Walter Chaw I have a complicated relationship with John G. Avildsen’s The Karate Kid. I saw it in the theatre multiple times when I was 11 and dozens, maybe even hundreds, of times more on VHS. I did not know that Noriyuki “Pat” Morita spoke without an accent in reality, didn’t trouble myself with the damage this type of sensei character did to my minority in this country, didn’t sense that this was any kind of cultural appropriation, because as an Asian-American kid born and raised in a predominantly white backwater of Colorado, this was and remains ground zero of my culture. Appropriation? Of what? Not Okinawan culture, surely–what’s left of it after our now-eighty-year occupation of it. No, this is American culture, for good and for bad; don’t blame someone else for it. The Karate Kid was my Rocky. (Same director and composer, even.) Mr. Miyagi, together with Short Round from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Long Duk Dong from Sixteen Candles, both from the same year as The Karate Kid (1984), formed this foundational trilogy of Asian tokenism in the heart of the Reagan administration/Blockbuster Generation, during which I was reared. Perhaps not inconsequently, it’s this same period that sowed the seeds for our current neo-conservative Ragnarök. It was like they emerged at the same time on purpose, the Three Wise Men attending Evangelical Christ’s Young Life presumption to the reins of American Empire: the father (Miyagi), the son (Shorty), and the holy ghost (Long Duk Dong) constituting a thesis statement for the only way Asian-American men in their native film industry could be portrayed with the enthusiastic consent of anyone with an opinion. Can I get an “A(sian)men?”

Upside-down yellow biplane with Tom Cruise hanging on for dear life: "Elon's FAA is going great."

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025)

May 26, 2025Posted in****/****, 2025, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Theatrical, Thriller, Tom Cruise, UK

****/****
starring Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Angela Bassett
written by Christopher McQuarrie & Erik Jendresen
directed by Christopher McQuarrie

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. There is a brief period in most of our lives where we feel as though we are part of a large, maybe operatic melodrama that is barely comprehensible to us, but of which we are a vital component. If the world is lucky, we grow out of it. As part of the brain’s formation, it seems, as part of Freud’s or Lacan’s self-recognition, there is this wet gulf during which we believe that everything matters. It has to be an evolutionary response–the last gasp of profound weltschmerz on the way to nihilistic self-interest. On the one side is the self-righteousness of adolescence; on the other, a dangerous megalomania. And then there’s Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible film franchise, which is fundamentally a clinical dissection of the martyr complex that drives the myth of American exceptionalism. At the core of it all is a serious unpacking of movie stardom–of movies themselves as an essential conduit to the primal core of our monkey makeup. They tickle every pleasure centre. When Mission: Impossible movies are exciting, few movies were ever as exciting. When they’re sexy–the yellow dress, my god–they are as sharpened and drowsy as an autumn pheromone. They’re funny, they’re puzzles, and they’re an approach to understanding George Eliot’s quote about how the good of the world depends on the valour of hidden lives lived with virtue and courage. You don’t have to be Ethan Hunt (Cruise) to fix the world, you see. You don’t need to be a superhero, but you do need to be a good person when it’s easier not to be.

Zhao Tao in Caught by the Tides; petting a robot: "Hello, member of Daft Punk"

Caught by the Tides (2024)

May 19, 2025Posted in2024, 2025, Authors: Angelo Muredda, China, Drama, Esoterica, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Zhao Tao, Li Zhubing
written and directed by Jia Zhangke

by Angelo Muredda While some spent their COVID lockdowns making sourdough starters and boning up on the medicinal properties of horse dewormer, Jia Zhangke retraced two decades’ worth of cinematic memories, from 2002’s Unknown Pleasures to 2018’s Ash is Purest White, weaving them into a singular new project about urban alienation and the passage of time. Caught by the Tides is the formally playful product of that act of pandemic creative stir-craziness. Conceived and partially shot in the final days of China’s COVID-Zero policies in 2022, the film takes the real-life constraints of social distancing and contact tracing as an aesthetic inspiration to burrow into the past before standing firmly on the present. The strange times, and their restrictions on film shoots, prompt Jia to revisit and reposition the actors, characters, and settings of his oeuvre into a contemporary mosaic. Inspired, as he said at the film’s NYFF festival premiere, by ukiyo-e art from the Edo Period, a tradition of Japanese woodblock prints of transient urban life and folk scenes, he’s fashioned a singular floating world portrait of 21st-century China.

Brec Bassinger in a burning restaurant: "Another fondue party turns deadly."

Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025)

May 15, 2025Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Horror, Theatrical

***/****
starring Brec Bassinger, Richard Harmon, April Telek, Tony Todd
screenplay by Guy Busick & Lori Evans Taylor
directed by Zach Lipovsky & Adam B. Stein

by Walter Chaw I love the Final Destination franchise that James Wong started with writing partner Glen Morgan–all six films, but particularly the two Wong directed. Wong and Morgan were, of course, instrumental in the creation of “The X Files” and its stickier, gloomier spiritual brother, “Millennium”. I love the absolute nihilism of Final Destination‘s premise and its suggestion that Death is a mysterious force more interested in contriving incredible machines to complete its dread duty than in, you know, just giving someone a heart attack. But is it Death in a playful, Ingmar Bergman sense, playing chess on the beach in the middle of a mass-casualty event with a survivor of a genocidal campaign who’s come home to find he’s brought the plague with him? What kind of person must one be for Death to want to hang out with them? The type of person who’s very good for business. No, Final Destination is more Death as an artificial intelligence, I think–an algorithm fed vaguely conflicting instructions that labours to maintain this corner of the Matrix of which it’s in charge: fix glitches but, and here’s the rub, don’t let the subjects know there’s been a glitch and that it’s being fixed. So it’s not a sentience, exactly, but a subroutine in a larger system. A celestial calculator. The biggest twist left for the series would be the identification of the being that made our lives an accounting problem it sent a somewhat limited clockwork to manage in the first place.

Guy being sucked through hole in an airplane: "No ticket!"

Fight or Flight (2025)

May 8, 2025Posted in2025, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Theatrical, UK

**/****
starring Josh Hartnett, Charithra Chandran, Marko Zaror, Katee Sackhoff
written by Brooks McLaren & D.J. Cotrona
directed by James Madigan

by Walter Chaw I remember the thrill I felt when I heard the premise: a plane full of murderers is freed to go hog on one another with impunity. Maniacs and assassins, right? Hannibal Lecters and spree killers and cons and bounty hunters. Fuck, I thought, it’s gonna be like one of those Universal Monsters “rally” movies where Frankenstein fights the Wolf Man or some shit; imagine the possibilities! The mayhem! I remember it like it was yesterday because it was 1997, and when you get old, things that happened almost 30 years ago seem like they happened the day before. Man, oh man, it’s good to talk. Anyway, James Madigan’s Fight or Flight is about a plane full of murderers who go hog on one another with impunity. It’s got the same frenetic energy as David Leitch’s Bullet Train, which is about a train full of murderers who go hog on one another with impunity. To be fair, Leitch’s film is centred around a handsome white guy with a secret everyone is after, whereas Fight or Flight hinges on a handsome white guy everyone is after but there’s also a young woman (Charithra Chandran) who is more than she seems. No, wait, that’s Bullet Train, too.

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

Drop (2025)

April 25, 2025Posted 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! 

"No, wait, 'Two for Holland.'"

A Minecraft Movie (2025)

April 9, 2025Posted in2025, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Fantasy, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Jason Momoa, Jack Black, Danielle Brooks, Emma Myers
screenplay by Chris Bowman & Hubbel Palmer and Neil Widener & Gavin James and Chris Galletta
directed by Jared Hess

by Walter Chaw It’s tempting to get knives out to hack at the hanks of the great beast. It’s tempting to sharpen your tongue to shriek at it, how close we are now to Idiocracy‘s prophecy of Ass: The Movie being the most watched and awarded film in the land. I keep coming back to the image of Kevin McCarthy at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, peering through the fourth wall to tell you it’s too late. They’re here already. The great beast will not feel you, and it does not have ears to hear you. It can’t feel shame. As it was never alive, you can’t kill it, and if you can’t kill it, neither can you bury it. You can fight, but you’ll lose. Not to the great beast, but to your friends and neighbours, who will urge you to forget it, take it easy. They will rationalize that some garbage piece of media was made for children, as if the things we make for children should be terrible. Feed them the rotten stuff, the maggot-infested stuff–they won’t know. Give them the chair with the splinters; the toy that takes eyes; the water full of lead. Why worry? It’s just for kids. It’s just for kids you don’t think will grow up or don’t care if they do. It’s cheaper not to let them live. When they consume, that’s less for you to consume. Maybe we should change our laws so they can work longer when they’re younger, because they don’t seem to last as long as they used to. Lie back and enjoy it. Pray you never get that direction outside of invitations to kid’s movies. Your friends and neighbours are pods now. I know they look like people, but they’re not. Your loved ones are dead. I’m sorry.

Jack Quaid with a knife through his hand: "No more Mr. Knife Guy."

Borderline (2025) + Novocaine (2025)

March 28, 2025Posted in2025, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Disability, Horror, South Africa, Theatrical

BORDERLINE
***½/****
starring Samara Weaving, Ray Nicholson, Jimmie Fails, Eric Dane
written and directed by Jimmy Warden

NOVOCAINE
*/****
starring Jack Quaid, Amber Midthunder, Ray Nicholson, Matthew Walsh
written by Lars Jacobson
directed by Dan Berk and Robert Olsen

by Walter Chaw Samara Weaving is the best Bruce Campbell since Bruce Campbell. They even worked together on the “Ash vs Evil Dead” show. Her timing is impeccable, her control over her physicality and facial expressions prodigious. She seems to have emerged specifically to anchor horror slapsticks like the second coming of Mabel Normand: a screwball Venus on a meshuga clamshell. Her short filmography is already heavy with cult classics like The Babysitter, Ready or Not, Guns Akimbo, and Joe Lynch’s fantastic Mayhem–each savvy enough to highlight Weaving’s charming, self-deprecating sense of humour. In another time, she would’ve given Lucille Ball or Carol Burnett a run for their money. She’s the dream improv partner, a champion bull rider. I don’t think there’s a scenario she wouldn’t seem unnatural in–no situation you could ask her characters to overcome that is too absurd. She’s a unicorn: the great beauty men think they might have a chance with and women don’t entirely resent. In her very small cameo in Babylon, she provides a tantalizing glimpse into what that film could have been with her in the lead instead of the ego doppelgänger to her id, Margot Robbie. Not good, mind you, but at least well-cast.

Snow White (2025)

Snow White (2025)

March 25, 2025Posted 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.

The Rule of Jenny Pen (2025)

The Rule of Jenny Pen (2025)

March 14, 2025Posted 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?

The Monkey (2025)

The Monkey (2025)

February 25, 2025Posted in****/****, 2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Horror, Stephen King, Theatrical, UK

****/****
starring Theo James, Tatiana Maslany, Christian Convery, Elijah Wood
written by Osgood Perkins, based on the short story by Stephen King
directed by Osgood Perkins

by Walter Chaw Oz Perkins’s The Monkey plays like WWI frontlines poetry. Like something by Siegfried Sassoon or Wilfred Owen documenting the birth of irony as a literary device–the only appropriate response to mechanized, impersonal, mass and random death. The house poet for the DAILY MAIL, publishing under the pseudonym “Touchstone” in 1916, wrote about doomed British Captain Nevill’s decision upon his last, suicidal charge to have each of the four battalions under his command kick a soccer ball towards the German lines:

Thatcher in Companion

Companion (2025)

February 8, 2025Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

***½/****
starring Sophie Thatcher, Jack Quaid, Lukas Gage, Megan Suri
written and directed by Drew Hancock

by Walter Chaw Drew Hancock’s feature debut Companion plays a lot like a cross between Peter Berg’s comedy of (bad) manners Very Bad Things and Alex Garland’s solemn Ex Machina. It is, in other words, extremely my jam. Depicting an escalating series of catastrophes like a Pierre Étaix movie with a body count, Companion is a house of cards composed of appalling behaviour and hidden agendas that mashes together tropes from the “Bad Dinner Party” subgenre of awkward horror movies and the sentience melodramas of android fiction. The script is fleet and smart, the cast is game, and damned if Companion isn’t prepared to follow through on the essential human awfulness of its premise. I worry that the inevitable rush of “peeved A.I.” thrillers will fail to offer a credible reckoning with the morality of making a thing 90% of its consumer base will attempt to fuck, if not outright purchase for that purpose. (Some, like flavour-of-the-moment M3GAN, don’t even acknowledge it as a likely possibility.) Consider Companion the corrective: here, the talking toasters are made to be fleshlights capable of having rudimentary conversations. A fun ride that wrestles with the controversies at the root of its concept? Don’t threaten me with a good time.

Lucy Liu in Presence: Not just a subpar Led Zeppelin album anymore

Presence (2025)

January 24, 2025Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Drama, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Lucy Liu, Chris Sullivan, Callina Liang, Eddy Maday
written by David Koepp
directed by Steven Soderbergh

by Walter Chaw The subjective camera is nothing new, of course. 1947’s Lady in the Lake is a largely failed Raymond Chandler adaptation in which Philip Marlowe is the camera, while director RaMell Ross cannily attaches the technique to a critic-proof project in the current Nickel Boys. First-person shooter (FPS) video game enthusiasts are more than familiar with the concept, and purveyors of porn know that VR-ready stereoscopic smut has its own niche market. Everything “new” is ancient, in other words, and the experience of Steven Soderbergh’s Presence at times reminded me of playing the first-person, text-based INFOCOM games of my childhood: floating in and out of scenes; picking up bits and pieces of information and trying to cohere them into an unrevealed storyline. Horror aficionados will certainly have moments of déjà vu here, what with the camera being yoked to a predatory point-of-view. (Halloween, I’m looking at you.) Which is to say that Presence definitely pulls the odd pleasure-lever in my lizard brain, not that it’s good. Funny, because even Soderbergh himself has said he never thought a “POV” film could work because you don’t get to see the reaction of the protagonist–but then he goes ahead and makes Presence anyway…and cheats.

Pamela Anderson in The Last Showgirl: Don't use the stairs if Nomi's around, girl

The Last Showgirl (2024)

January 13, 2025Posted in2024, 2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Pamela Anderson, Brenda Song, Kiernan Shipka, Jamie Lee Curtis
written by Kate Gersten
directed by Gia Coppola

by Walter Chaw The distaff The Wrestler, Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl is a showcase for Pamela Anderson, reborn in middle age as a serious actor after a career spent being the butt of jokes, the object of desire, and the sufferer of violations to her privacy and dignity. Not to rob her of agency by painting her as strictly a victim–the fact is, Pamela Anderson and the choices she made in how she presented herself in the entertainment industry had everything to do with the dictates of our still-unresolved/perhaps unresolvable systemic, representational biases. Sure, her stolen sex tape was the first of its kind in the early days of so-called celebrity “leaks,” but she made the decision to star in the legendary beefcake-and-jiggle showcase “Baywatch”, didn’t she? To be the PLAYBOY cover girl not once, but 13 times? It’s complicated, and I confess that while I never thought poorly of her, I never thought much about her, period. That’s me, to my shame, being patronizing and lacking empathy and curiosity. Of late, Anderson has stopped wearing makeup in public appearances and redirected the focus to her love of gardening. (She has a show on HGTV.) She’s our Kim Novak: unfairly underestimated, even derided, for her appearance in her prime, finding a measure of redemption by not asking for it, making no apologies, and refusing anymore to fit herself into the molds created for her by the appetites and prejudices of others.

Jude Law aiming a gun in The Order: This time...Dickie came prepared.

The Order (2024)

January 12, 2025Posted in2024, 2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Crime, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

***/****
starring Jude Law, Nicholas Hoult, Tye Sheridan, Marc Maron
screenplay by Zach Baylin, based on the book by Kevin Flynn & Gary Gerhardt
directed by Justin Kurzel

by Walter Chaw Justin Kurzel makes films about bad, broken men and the cultures that cultivate them, and he excels at this. His True History of the Kelly Gang is one of the great neo-westerns, while The Snowtown Murders is already a cult classic for true-crime reenactments of small-town atrocities. The only other person working so dedicatedly in this arena is S. Craig Zahler. The difference is that Zahler’s films leave me feeling filthy, disgusted with myself and everyone else. Unlike Kurzel, Zahler doesn’t deal in “based on real events” currency. Rather, his nihilism is founded on more uncomfortable insights into masculinity. Zahler’s films are about you and me; there’s no chance to separate ourselves from his loathsome and violent men. It’s that space in Kurzel’s films, the ability to say, “Sure, that happened once, but it’s over now,” that allows us to look at his subjects as apart from us. Kurzel’s films are gripping for sure, even powerful, professional and superlative technically, but not soul-sickening–not indictments of who we are and what we will allow. While he may pinion the Other with merciless clarity, he’s on the side of the angels. Society is restored in Kurzel’s films, one way or another. Zahler’s, on the other hand, offer us no good guys or a future worth living.

A Complete Unknown

A Complete Unknown (2024)

December 26, 2024Posted in2024, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Drama, Music, Theatrical

**/****
starring Timothée Chalamet, Edward Norton, Elle Fanning, Monica Barbaro
screenplay by James Mangold and Jay Cocks, based on the book Dylan Goes Electric! by Elijah Wald
directed by James Mangold

by Angelo Muredda “I like everything, Pete,” a young Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) confesses to his soon-to-be-mentor Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) early in James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, which traces for what feels like the hundredth time the chameleonic artist’s quick rise through the New York City folk scene in the early 1960s en route to his reinvention as a rock star circa 1965. (The film leaves him just as he goes electric.) Driving in Seeger’s car after Dylan’s famous pilgrimage to meet–and, in his words, “catch a spark” off–his hero, Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), by whose hospital bed Seeger has been keeping vigil, the oath-keeper to folk’s aesthetic and progressive causes and the scene’s as-yet unknown generational star and future turncoat talk past each other. Hearing the rambunctious rock of Little Richard on the radio and sensing his passenger’s divided artistic loyalties, the older man tries to put out the fire, espousing the values of traditionalism and the political utility of protest music while his protege, sounding like the puckish, curatorially adventurous future host of Theme Time Radio Hour he would turn out to be, sheepishly admits that sometimes electric instruments sound good.

Depp in Nosferatu

Nosferatu (2024)

December 20, 2024Posted 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)

December 14, 2024Posted 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.