Theatrical Archives - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Heretic (2024)

November 18, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Hugh Grant, Sophie Thatcher, Chloe East
written and directed by Scott Beck & Bryan Woods

by Walter Chaw Heretic‘s premise is childish wish-fulfillment, an exercise in mental cruelty in which a medium-schooled skeptic challenges a pair of comely young missionaries, hoisting them on their own insinuating, syllogistic petard. And who better to function as audience avatar than Hugh Grant? Rather, this elderly iteration of Grant, crusted over with a shell of sociopathic nastiness, like his brittle accent made manifest in flesh and wool cardigan? Get ’em, you ossified piece of British shit! Grant plays Mr. Reed, a cozy hermit secreted smugly in his richly-appointed hobbit hole who invites Sister Paxton (Chloe East) and Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) in from a God-is-wroth thunderstorm to indulge their desire to share with him the Good News courtesy of the Church of Latter-day Saints. He has a fire roaring, a blueberry pie in the oven, and, allegedly, a shy wife cowering in a back bedroom, so the girls aren’t in a strange man’s home alone with the strange man. The Mission wouldn’t allow that, you see, but Mr. Reed is reassuring. The amiable chatting soon turns to wicked jousting, and the jousting becomes inappropriate and uncomfortable. When Barnes and Paxton try to leave, they find that the front door is locked and their only option is the Stockton prize of lady or tiger. That is, they are offered the choice of two doors–one marked “BELIEVE,” the other “DISBELIEVE”–as their only possibility of escape from his unctuous, patronizing company. Behind one is the back entrance to the house. Behind the other? Tiger or, rather, Tyger, of the “here there be” variety.

Red One (2024)

November 14, 20242024, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Family, Mystery, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

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

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

Juror #2 (2024)

November 11, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Clint Eastwood, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Nicholas Hoult, Toni Collette, J.K. Simmons, Kiefer Sutherland
written by Jonathan Abrams
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. If it were the ’90s, this would star Richard Gere, but in 2024 it’s Nicolas Hoult as Justin Kemp, Juror #2 in a murder case involving the death of volatile Kendall Carter (Francesca Eastwood) at the hands of her scumbag boyfriend, James (Gabriel Basso). Justin is a recovering alcoholic and soon-to-be dad, married to faithful schoolmarm Ally (Zoey Deutch), AA-sponsored by defense attorney Larry (Kiefer Sutherland), and shocked to discover during the first day of the trial that he may have been the one who murdered Kendall one dark and stormy night, mistaking her for a deer he struck in the road and subsequently failed to find. If he goes to the judge (Amy Aquino), though, given his history in the cups, he’ll likely face life in prison; but if he doesn’t, an innocent man (innocent of this crime, at least) will be sentenced in his place. What’s a good but flawed man to do? Make a de facto widow of his beloved on the eve of their becoming parents because of an accident that could’ve happened to anyone stuck in an ethical Trolley Test cum The Book of Questions hypothetical? Or keep it to himself, knowing that the world is probably unmoved by the loss of low-aspiring/low-achieving James? It’s a fun parlour game, and Eastwood, 94, has fun playing it.

Here (2024)

November 6, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Robert Zemeckis, Drama, Esoterica, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, Paul Bettany, Kelly Reilly
screenplay by Eric Roth & Robert Zemeckis, based on the graphic novel by Richard McGuire
directed by Robert Zemeckis

by Walter Chaw If it were only vapid, insipid, faux-high-concept middlebrow treacle, then fine, you know, that’s between you and your withered stump of low-aspiring taste. If it were only a terrible concept done terribly, a body-temperature tongue-bath delivered without enthusiasm or interest, well, then, so be it; I have liked too many of Robert Zemeckis’s movies to muster up the energy to go after a genial tapestry of sopping Hallmark platitudes–especially those that make idiots happy. Happy is in short supply, after all. If it were merely mildly pathetic in its desperation to be liked; had it only avoided the deadly sin of also wishing to be relevant, wise, respected. But, alas, Here isn’t just awful by most measurable standards established over 130 years of this medium’s astonishing evolution–it’s didactic and self-satisfied about it. It’s the spiritual offspring of Paul Haggis’s Crash, another The Blind Side packed to the tippy-top with privileged foolishness in which the soft-pedalling of broad melodrama paints over history’s sins for the validation of one miserable, unmotivated white guy’s congenital lack of introspection and imagination. Who could’ve guessed that this film, widely touted as the reunion of Forrest Gump‘s writer, director, and stars, would be a redux of its messages, too? Has it ever occurred to you that you “never know what you’re gonna get” in a box of chocolates only if you refuse to read it?

Smile (2022) + Smile 2 (2024)

October 22, 20242022, 2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

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

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

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

Terrifier 3 (2024)

October 14, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Horror, Theatrical

***/****
starring David Howard Thornton, Lauren Lavera, Elliott Fullam, Samantha Scaffidi
written and directed by Damien Leone

by Walter Chaw Damien Leone’s Terrifier films are empathy tests for a culture, for a creature, that has amused itself to death. No longer able to discern the line between reality and the media we consume, we are presented with these Voight-Kampff tests designed to replicate the social conditions of our steady dehumanization. You see, I’m sick. I’m afraid it’s mortal but I don’t know–I mean, every second is a second I will never see again, so isn’t everything mortal? I have, for over a year now, watched Israel gleefully, defiantly wage genocide on the Palestinian people and consumed images of the human body in various states of dismemberment, violation, and humiliation that before this I had only glimpsed with horror in grainy photographs smuggled out of Nanking during WWII–that I had only imagined while reading war stories written by men destroyed largely by just the act of bearing witness. This is the shape of my astonishing privilege. If I didn’t want to see it, I didn’t have to. Something changed.

The Apprentice (2024)

October 11, 20242024, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Blog, Canada, Denmark, Drama, Ireland, Theatrical

***/****
starring Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong, Maria Bakalova, Martin Donovan
written by Gabriel Sherman
directed by Ali Abbasi

by Bill Chambers “The moment I found out Trump could tweet himself,” the Trump Organization’s former director of social media Justin McConney told ESQUIRE in 2018, “was comparable to the moment in Jurassic Park when Dr. Grant realized that velociraptors could open doors[.] I was like, ‘Oh no.'” Though it takes place before the dawn of social media as we know it, Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice, whose title shrewdly weaponizes Trump’s pop-culture legacy against him, is essentially about a velociraptor learning to open doors. Indeed, the weight Sebastian Stan gained to play Trump– something of an anachronism for the time period being covered (like his blonde cockscomb), perhaps to narrow the gap between Stan’s handsomeness and our calcified image of Trump as an orange tub of Vaseline in Barry Egan’s hand-me-downs–contorts his lips into a reptilian grimace that’s not inappropriate, even as it departs from the glory-hole mouth that stiffens into a rictus around other terrible people. Stan’s performance is more expressionism than impression, but I think that’s the right approach: Dead-on impersonations of Trump are a dime a dozen, and they long ago stopped revealing anything about him. They’re fun–and “fun” is how you declaw a raptor for the masses.

A Different Man (2024)

October 7, 20242024, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Disability, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

***½/****
starring Sebastian Stan, Renate Reinsve, Adam Pearson, John Keating
written and directed by Aaron Schimberg

by Angelo Muredda Speaking at a recent Lincoln Center screening of his new meta dramedy A Different Man for New Directors/New Films, Aaron Schimberg suggested the project was inspired in part by the loaded reaction to his depiction of disability in Chained for Life, his previous film. Chained for Life cast Adam Pearson, an actor with neurofibromatosis, as an actor with the same condition playing a sanitarium patient in a dodgy European arthouse film-within-the-film about a mad surgeon restoring his disabled charges to normalcy through radical experimentation. Some critics, Schimberg claims, wondered whether it might not be inherently exploitative to cast Pearson and other visibly disabled actors–many of whom, like Schimberg (who has a cleft palate), had facial differences–in a send-up of disability tropes about deformity and beauty. Others would surely have balked at the opposite approach, were he to have burlesqued disability by hiring non-disabled actors to star in a postmodern examination of the aesthetic and ethical traps of disability on film. Why not split the difference and make everyone unhappy with his follow-up, Schimberg thought, by pitting Sebastian Stan, a non-disabled actor playing a disabled protagonist in search of a cure, against Pearson as his obnoxious frenemy–a disabled man as gregarious and comfortable in his own skin as Stan’s character is desperate to crawl out of his?

Robot Dreams (2023) + The Wild Robot (2024)

September 30, 2024****/****, 2023, 2024, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Family, France, Music, Sci-Fi, Spain, Theatrical

ROBOT DREAMS
****/****
based on the graphic novel by Sara Varon
written and directed by Pablo Berger

THE WILD ROBOT
**/****
screenplay by Chris Sanders, based on the book by Peter Brown
directed by Chris Sanders

by Walter Chaw Pablo Berger’s Robot Dreams, an adaptation of Sara Varon’s graphic novel, has about it the sadness and loneliness of Harvey Pekar’s work. Set in a zootopia of anthropomorphic animals that’s actually New York City circa 1984, it’s about a woebegone, chonky grey dog named Dog who resorts to buying a robot for companionship in this cold metropolis. They go on walks, horse around; in an affecting moment, Robot sees lovers holding hands and takes Dog’s paw in his. He grips too hard, Dog pulls away in pain, and then, just before the scene cuts away, Dog reaches out and takes Robot’s hand again. It’s perfectly timed, sentimental but subtle, a gag paid off with a lovely grace note that doesn’t draw attention to itself–that, indeed, could be missed if one weren’t paying attention. They go to the beach together, the introverted Dog and the exuberant, animated Robot, where Dog picks out a quiet spot to put down blankets while Robot does a full back-flop into the water between a group of kids. Dog is horrified by Robot’s audacity, but Robot has won fast friends. Robot is Dog’s social confidence, his fresh outlook on the possibilities life has in store for the bright-eyed and courageously optimistic. Robot is the part of us that has died in most of us, the victim of cruel experience, and the wonder of Robot Dreams is how it doesn’t patronize the viewer with a world that conforms to the sunny expectations of a newborn. After their bucolic day at the beach, Robot rusts solid, and Dog is forced to abandon him on the now-shuttered boardwalk for an entire season.

My Old Ass (2024) + Omni Loop (2024)

September 26, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Time Travel

MY OLD ASS
**½/****
starring Maisy Stella, Aubrey Plaza, Percy Hynes White, Maddie Ziegler
written and directed by Megan Park

OMNI LOOP
**½/****
starring Mary-Louise Parker, Ayo Edibiri, Carlos Jacott, Harris Yulin
screenplay by Bernardo Britto
directed by Bernardo Britto

by Walter Chaw Writing in the time of John Donne and Andrew Marvell, who both had takes on his “once was horny, now reformed” shtick, Robert Herrick was an Anglican cleric who came upon his piety late in life, as many of us do. Herrick’s most famous work is a “to his coy mistress” bit about “gather[ing] ye rosebuds while ya may,” which, while not as vivid as Marvell’s version threatening a woman that worms will take the frigid object of his pursuit’s virginity if she doesn’t lose it before she dies, is nevertheless a come-on passing as wisdom. As advice to a younger self goes, though, getting laid as much as possible seems the standard, along with more flossing. (It says something that Billy Joel offers the same carrot to his Catholic inamorata in “Only the Good Die Young.”) As we collectively advance into the winter of our sour regret over the calamities we didn’t avoid that have led us to a dark and dimming future, find two films about going back in time to warn, provide guidance for, and essentially function as a mentor to our younger selves before it’s too late. I think it’s touching that we’re having this idea at the same time–strangers, I mean, scenting great change carried on the same foul wind and offering up signal fires from their respective, isolated bunkers. It’s like the last exhalation of a drowning man: it won’t make a shred of difference, but it does trouble the water for a second. Besides, at this point, “touching” is all we got left.

Dafoe and Bob in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)

September 9, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Tim Burton, Fantasy, Horror, Theatrical

**/****
starring Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara, Willem Dafoe
screenplay by Alfred Gough & Miles Millar
directed by Tim Burton

by Walter Chaw Somehow lugubrious at under 100 minutes, overburdened by five or six storylines and an unnecessary new lead character who dominates its first half, Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice leans hard on Burton’s established weaknesses while largely ignoring his established strengths. It treats women like shrill caricatures, for instance, saving its deepest contempt for Monica Bellucci’s Mrs. Beetlejuice, Delores, a bride so ‘Zilla she reconstitutes herself from her violently dismembered parts for the sole purpose of reuniting with her lost love and murderer, Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton). Lydia (Winona Ryder), the little girl lost from the first film who, by the end, discovered adoptive parents in the now-absent Maitlands, has grown into a ghost-hunting television charlatan engaged to unctuous workshop SNAG Rory (Justin Theroux). As Rory, Theroux appears to be doing Phil Hartman doing Glenn “Otho” Shadix and is asked to carry the comedic load of this thing for far too long. (It’s like showing up for Patti Lupone and getting fucking Florence Foster Jenkins for an hour.) Then there’s young Astrid (Jenna Ortega), Lydia’s kid, who resents her mother for being a nutjob and her dad (Santiago Cabrera) for becoming piranha food early in her life.

Strange Darling (2024)

September 2, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Willa Fitzgerald, Kyle Gallner, Madisen Beaty, Barbara Hershey
written and directed by JT Mollner

by Walter Chaw Defenders will say that JT Mollner’s Strange Darling exists, in an ancillary way, in the Martyrs universe, but it isn’t playing the same game. It lacks that movie’s meanness, for one; for another, it lacks the discipline required of ecclesiastical curiosity, the doom and fear and loathing that comes with any honest spiritual examination of the biological roots of fear. I want to call it “Martyrs for Dummies,” but that’s not exactly right, either. The only things Strange Darling ultimately shares with it–and with Christopher Nolan’s Memento–are a destabilizing narrative and an unreliable protagonist. It lacks the rigour of Martyrs and Memento, too, a clear grasp of what it’s after and how. When all’s said and done, Martyrs, which has nothing to do with Clive Barker, remains the truest adaptation of Barker’s marriage of atrocity and communion that I’ve ever seen. Strange Darling is mostly a life-support machine for a twist given away by its title. It’s like handing someone a ukulele in wrapping paper. Surprise! A gimmick tied to a high concept. A Shyamalan flick shot like a series of 1970s grindhouse trailers, featuring a lot of good work in the service of a disappointing puzzle box. Worse is that one of its red herrings involves consent and BDSM, which, you know, are serious and personal issues dangerously marginalized in horror movies that want to treat kink like a moral issue in need of correcting. Imagine the version of Strange Darling that follows through on the idea that a perfectly normal person might like to get stepped on between the sheets. Even better, imagine the version of the film interested in asking: If there is a line, how hard would one need to push to turn a “nice” man into a violent rapist?

Danny Huston and Bill Skarsgård in The Crow

The Crow (2024) + Blink Twice (2024)

August 26, 20242024, 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.

Alien: Romulus (2024)

August 15, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

**½/****
starring Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson, Archie Renaux, Isabela Merced
written by Fede Alvarez & Rodo Sayagues
directed by Fede Alvarez

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. It’s at least an hour before the fan service begins in earnest, and until it does, Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus is a sterling example of how to tell another story in a familiar universe without regurgitating what came before. Although I’m a sucker for Rogue One, I can’t really defend its exhumation of Peter Cushing and a young Carrie Fisher to live as zombies in digital eternity. It feels infernal, a punishment invented by Dante. In space, no one will let you die. But, oh, that first hour of Romulus, in which we’re introduced to Jackson’s Star, a miserable, exploitative, blue-collar mining colony teeming with poverty and indentured servitude. (In a nice touch, these exhausted 22^nd-century schlubs still carry canaries in cages and black lungs in their chest.) Orphaned miner Rain (Cailee Spaeny) and her adopted, Black, android brother Andy (David Jonsson) dream of starting a new life in an off-world colony (time to begin again!) but find their entreaties to the company store falling on corporate’s deaf ears. The films in the Alien universe are at their best when they’re invested in the working class: first miners, then soldiers, then prisoners. Though centring Romulus on miners again demonstrates a lack of imagination and should have been a red flag, after the strained mythopoetics of the last couple of Ridley Scott pictures, it actually ratcheted my hopes up high. I mean, even Rain’s ship is named, again, for an element of a Joseph Conrad novel, the “Corbelan”–just like the “Nostromo” of the first film, the “Sulaco” of the second, and the “Patna” of the third. Hearts of darkness, indeed. Capitalism will destroy us all.

Borderlands (2024)

August 11, 20242024, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

½*/****
starring Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, Jamie Lee Curtis
screenplay by Eli Roth and Joe Crombie
directed by Eli Roth

by Walter Chaw Borderlands is what happens if you stop evolving as a human being when you’re a privileged, 16-year-old, cis-gendered, heterosexual male. When you are a mess of hormones and your prefrontal lobe has not finished growing–has barely even started growing, truth be known. Remember the uncontrollable and inexplicable boners? The constant fear and self-loathing that results in your actively seeking out groups you perceive to be vulnerable in order to predate upon them and make yourself bigger? You are violent and emotional and wrapped up in your melodrama. You might pretend that you wrote that song by Counting Crows because you are well aware you’ve done nothing of note and, based on the emptiness inside, probably never will. Yet you believe the world is for you, since you’ve never learned any differently from Dad, the doctor/professor, and Mom, the artist. I read somewhere that dolphins stopped evolving because there was no need: the food was plentiful, and they reached the top of the food chain. I believe certain people stop evolving in the same way because interpersonal and professional success was handed to them, so they didn’t need to develop curiosity, empathy, or humility. I’ve heard that dolphins, incidentally, are assholes, too.

Trap (2024)

August 3, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: M. Night Shyamalan, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, Yemen

½*/****
starring Josh Hartnett, Ariel Donoghue, Saleka Shyamalan, Hayley Mills
written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan

by Walter Chaw I try sometimes to put myself inside the mind of the creator, to imagine the route they took to the art they made. Maybe M. Night Shyamalan was at a concert, looked around, and imagined what it would be like if everyone there was searching for him. How he would have trouble blending in, but someone who looked like, say, Josh Hartnett, might have an easier time of it. He kind of took a run at this with the football game in Unbreakable, right? But why would Night imagine people were looking for him in the first place? Did he want that? Did he want the discomfort of being recognized in public, the struggle and obligation to be magnanimous towards strangers while remaining present for his family? Was the sacrifice of it appealing, a chance to display unusual charm and grace and build on the self-mythology he started in SPORTS ILLUSTRATED reporter Michael Bamberger’s hilarious, bathetic The Man Who Heard Voices, which begins: “Night’s shirt was half open, Tom Jones in his prime.” Not Henry Fielding’s fortunate foundling, for sure, but the Welsh sexy beast notorious for the amount of ladies’ lingerie tossed in his general direction on stage. Maybe Night was feeling the burden of being semi-famous in a specific location that night at this theoretical concert. Maybe he was feeling the burden of not being more famous.

The Exorcism (2024) + Maxxxine (2024)

July 22, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Horror, New Zealand, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

THE EXORCISM
*½/****
starring Russell Crowe, Ryan Simpkins, Sam Worthington, David Hyde Pierce
written by M.A. Fortin & Joshua John Miller
directed by Joshua John Miller

MAXXXINE
**½/****
starring Mia Goth, Elizabeth Debicki, Moses Sumney, Kevin Bacon
written and directed by Ti West

by Walter Chaw Joshua John Miller is Hollywood royalty: the son of actor/playwright Jason Miller (best known as The Exorcist‘s Father Damien Karras) and grandson of bang-zoom Jackie Gleason. He’s vampire royalty, too, having played foul, bitter Homer in Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark around the same time his brother Jason Patric headlined Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys as almost-turned heartthrob Michael, making Joshua John ideal for helming a film about the goings-on behind the scenes of a genre flick. The film-within-a-film in his The Exorcism is codenamed “The Georgetown Project,” a requel/redux/remake of The Exorcist in which Russell Crowe’s Tony Miller, a broken-down, widowed, recently in his cups actor seeking a comeback, essays a role very much like Father Karras while hoping to reconcile with his offscreen daughter Lee (Ryan Simpkins), who has come to live with him after being kicked out of school. The director is unctuous piece of shit Peter (Adam Goldberg), whose main motivating tactic for Tony is to remind him of Tony’s multiple failures as a human being while dangling his career in front of the lumpen actor like a spider over a Jonathan Edwardsian abyss. Credit Crowe for making Tony’s humiliation feel so familiar and lived-in that even his flinches from Peter’s gut punches are understated and resigned.

Twisters (2024)

July 18, 20242024, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Spielberg, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell, Anthony Ramos, Kiernan Shipka
screenplay by Mark L. Smith
directed by Lee Isaac Chung

by Walter Chaw Lee Isaac Chung’s Twisters is the whistle next to the graveyard, a fascinating companion piece to Adam Wingard’s Godzilla x Kong: the one a spectacle designed to desensitize against our ongoing climate collapse, the other to deaden us against widely-broadcast images of an ongoing genocide. Its only two points of interest are Glen Powell’s sudden ascendance as matinee idol and the astounding majesty of natural phenomena fuelled by man-made climate change–meaning, in its simplicity, the goal is to leave audiences with the dazed satiation one associates with the aftermath of an ostentatious fireworks display: half-deafened, eyes bedazzled, the smell of gunpowder sulphurous in the air. A gut full of barbecued meats and sugared drinks in the American fashion, celebrating our liberation from a monarchy on the back of our God-sanctioned manifest genocide of an Indigenous population. We had fun, but that hangover is a sonofabitch. For me, the best part of Twisters is the extended prologue, where I thought it was going to be a Kiernan Shipka movie.

Longlegs (2024)

July 16, 20242024, Canada, Crime, Horror, Nicolas Cage, Theatrical, Thriller

***½/****
starring Maika Monroe, Nicolas Cage, Blair Underwood, Alicia Witt
written and directed by Oz Perkins

by Walter Chaw Thematically, at least, Oz Perkins reminds me most of Sofia Coppola, in that all of his films are autobiographical examinations of the relationship between isolated, creative, depressed children and their absent parents. Not abusive parents, mind (not exactly, in any case)–more parents lost in labyrinths in the company of goblin kings. Perkins uses negative space to suggest presence in the way that absence can become a palpable thing. Not a state in which one could lurk, but the lurker itself. After a parent is gone, they’re not really gone, because the space they used to occupy can take over all the light in your world. It’s a shadow of a naught. It happens when you’re not paying attention, and it happens because the absence of what is essential becomes physical in time. The golem of being forgotten is still preferable to being alone. I have the image in my head of Frankenstein and the little girl he drowns out of love. Their filmographies, Perkins’s and Coppola’s, are exquisite autopsies of the various forms the friendship takes between golden orphans and their parents. They tell it in the way their parents might understand them. It is their gilded grief that guided them to their seat behind the camera. Film is their native language, and so what they write in it is fulsome and tactile, full of subtext raw and personal. It is the cinema of solipsism, and it tends to be beautiful, self-indulgent by nature. And sometimes, but not always, it can even resonate with lost children vibrating at the same strange frequencies.

Vampire sitting at a picnic table with a severed head on it: "I think we can win Clacton."

The Vourdalak (2023)

July 5, 20242023, 2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, France, Horror, Theatrical

Le Vourdalak
***½/****
starring Kacey Mottet Klein, Ariane Labed, Grégoire Colin, Vassili Schneider
written by Adrien Beau and Hadrien Bouvier, based on the story “La famille du Vourdalak” by Aleksei Tolstoy
directed by Adrien Beau

by Walter Chaw Adrien Beau’s The Vourdalak has the look and feel of all those period horrors from the heyday of AIP and Hammer and the early years of Amicus. There’s even a touch of Jean Rollin, who brought production value and class of a sort to eroticized genre fare. It also features my favourite horror scenario: a lost traveller landing on the doorstep of a mysterious manse in the middle of a haunted wood. In films that start like this, sometimes it’s during a storm, sometimes the moon is new and the night’s so black the traveller can’t see his hand in front of his eyes. Sometimes, he is the monster, though more often, the traveller finds himself in the company of monsters. In Valeri Rubinchik’s The Savage Hunt of King Stakh, maybe the pinnacle of movies that open this way, our wayward traveller is bewitched by the sight of a beautiful woman, the lady of the manor, who haunts the decrepit, cavernous expanse like the rumour of a draft. In The Vourdalak, the traveller is prim Marquis Jacques Antoine Saturnin d’Urfé (Kacey Mottet Klein), a member of the King’s court who has been separated from his companions by bandits. The family of Gorcha, a great man currently away on a mission of vengeance against the marauding Turks who ransacked this part of the world, takes him in. Gorcha has warned his sons and daughters (and daughter-in-law) not to let him, Gorcha, back in the house should his absence stretch longer than six days. Because if he comes back after that, he says, it will be as the Vourdalak.