Theatrical Archives - Page 2 of 65

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.

The Devil’s Bath (2024)

July 2, 20242024, Austria, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Germany, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller

Des Teufels Bad
****/****
starring Anja Plaschg, David Scheid, Maria Hofstätter
written and directed by Veronika Franz, Severin Fiala

by Walter Chaw Did it start with Robert Eggers’s The Witch, or was it earlier? I’m not speaking of origins–indeed, the origins of folk horror are as old and as long as the origins of Man. No, I’m wondering about when it became an annual thing to release these little folk-horror movie masterpieces. Films that, for the most part, are relegated to a few niche festivals and then banished to the Neverwhere of streaming, entombed for eventual discovery by a devoted audience that will pass them around like secrets scrawled on a parchment browned and creased from the handling. I’m talking about movies like 2017’s A Dark Song and Hagazussa, 2018’s The Wind, and 2019’s Saint Maud (although most would pick Midsommar for that year’s folk-horror contribution). In 2020, we had the brutal The Dark and the Wicked, but there was also Oz Perkins’s Gretel & Hansel and David Prior’s cult-ready The Empty Man. 2021 gave us Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth and the Adams Family’s Hellbender, 2022 brought You Won’t Be Alone and Nightsiren, and last year there was Demian Rugna’s When Evil Lurks. Has it always been going on like this–as an anniversary or biannual event, something so many of these films are structured around–without my noticing? And doesn’t it make sense that we use our cave painting and darkest night, our medium of mythologizing and memorial, to put milestones on our terror? Doesn’t it?

In a Violent Nature (2024)

June 28, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Ry Barrett, Andrea Pavlovic, Cameron Love, Lauren Taylor
written and directed by Chris Nash

by Walter Chaw Chris Nash’s In a Violent Nature is wonderful on a technical level, but I’m suspicious of its motives. The best you could say about it is that if it likes slasher movies, it likes them for what seems like many of the wrong reasons; and the worst you could say is that maybe it doesn’t like slasher movies at all. At best, it doesn’t understand them and, because of that, doesn’t respect them. And because of that, I had a feeling it was mocking them–like being caught in an awkward conversation with someone explaining something you love back to you as something they think is, at its heart, a silly distraction. (Or, in this case, a vacuous dispenser of cheap thrills.) I suspect In a Violent Nature‘s primary influences were not, despite a few superficial call-outs, Twitch of the Death Nerve or Halloween or even the more atavistic Friday the 13^th saga, a series commonly misread as shallow and puerile. No, what it most resembles is Gun Media’s asymmetrical third-person, open-world Friday the 13^th survival game from 2017, which allows you to play as hockey-masked Jason Voorhees while a camera follows you over your right shoulder, Dardenne Brothers-style. The difference is that the video game has Jason’s mother’s voice urging him on, coddling him with warmth when he’s dispatched another victim, thus giving him a constant prod to engage in various, fruitless attempts to be a dutiful son, the desired offspring of a lost parent. The video game, in other words, sees the slasher as a vehicle at some level for exorcizing mental disturbances caused by abandonment and unrequited love for a parent. In a Violent Nature is essentially the feature-length version of that brilliant Geico commercial where a group of twentysomething idiots eschew a running automobile and hide behind a wall of chainsaws in a well-lit kill shed instead.

The Bikeriders (2024)

June 27, 2024****/****, 2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Theatrical

****/****
starring Jodie Comer, Austin Butler, Tom Hardy, Michael Shannon
based on the book by Danny Lyon
written and directed by Jeff Nichols

by Walter Chaw It’s hard to feel sorry for men, because the tragedy of so many of them is that they are only able to express themselves through violence. Our culture fetishizes violence, genders it male, and admires men who enact it while pathologizing those incapable of expressing themselves productively. Jeff Nichols’s The Bikeriders is another of his films about men trapped inside repressive systems: punished for their intuition, for tenderness and kindness, for love, for heaven’s sake. His films aren’t complicated, but in their romantic simplicity, they can be dazzlingly, emotionally complex. What causes brothers to fight at their father’s funeral? A man to mortgage everything he has to build a storm shelter? Another to ferry an unusual boy he fears he can’t protect across the country to the care of people who can? Nichols’s films are the stories of us all as victims of our hardwiring, whether it’s you who stands before me or me who can’t get out of my own way. They are elegies because there are few happy endings for men who choose violence or the people who would like to forgive them even when they’ve done nothing but keep the gentle parts of themselves encased in sinew and rage. I wanted to disappear inside The Bikeriders.

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.

Inside Out 2 (2024)

June 15, 20242024, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Drama, Family, Japan, Pixar, Theatrical

*/****
screenplay by Meg LeFauve and Dave Holstein
directed by Kelsey Mann

by Walter Chaw Inside Out 2 hasn’t resolved any of the issues I had with the first film, which boil down to if I’m meant to treat this conceit seriously, then you should probably treat it seriously, too. I grew up with Judy Blume and can’t recall a single instance in her books where a young girl’s emotional development was a playground for cheap gags and high concepts. The sequel’s plot is inane, of course: Riley (voice of Kensington Tallman) goes into puberty around the time of summer hockey camp and experiences the complexities of self-doubt, self-loathing, and anxiety attendant to adolescence. All her thoughts and actions are retrofitted around the decisions made by a cadre of anthropomorphized emotions as they battle for supremacy over a TARDIS-like control centre located somewhere, it seems, in Riley’s frontal cortex. The stakes are elevated because Riley is a vulnerable young woman, not because she’s an especially well-developed character. Because she’s blonde, blue-eyed, and adorable, every little thing that doesn’t go well for her is cause for people raised in this culture to tsk and worry. I would go so far as to say the stakes are outsized for what this is, i.e., a nonce of a nothing-burger, precisely because we are hardwired to cherish this species of porcelain vessel independent of any personal knowledge of her. She is a pinnacle of a cultural ideal, and if she is troubled, we are troubled.

Originally it was East and West Dakota (Dakota Fanning in The Watchers)

The Watchers (2024)

June 12, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Horror, Ireland, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Dakota Fanning, Georgina Campbell, Olwen Fouéré, Oliver Finnegan
screenplay by Ishana Night Shyamalan, based on the novel by A.M. Shine
directed by Ishana Night Shyamalan

by Walter Chaw Let’s get something straight: I love terrible movies like Ishana Night Shyamalan’s The Watchers, a handsomely mounted, well-cast, high-concept bit of folderol that swings wildly at a soft, underhand pitch…and misses. But you can’t fault the effort, the desire in that swing–the arrogance of it. It’s the hubristic brio of a Ken Griffey Jr. tearing a rotator cuff striking out at t-ball. M.’s daughter isn’t exactly the Mighty Casey, but the lead-up to The Watchers carries with it the same mythopoetics, the same anticlimactic denouement, the same whiff of mustiness that comes with a reference to Ernest Lawrence Thayer in 2024. Granted, that’s my fault for noticing it. I also thought a lot about “People Are Alike All Over,” that “Twilight Zone” episode where astronauts figure out they’re the new exhibits in an interstellar zoo, and another “Twilight Zone” called “Five Characters in Search of an Exit,” in which five disparate individuals find themselves in a mysterious container, isolated from the outside world. I thought of Walter Kubilius’s incredible 1954 novella The Other Side, which influenced Peter Weir’s exceptional The Truman Show, and of Raymond Feist’s 1988 Faerie Tale, one of my all-time favourite horror novels. So hail to the skilled excavators, or at least the dedicated raiders of popular culture. Hail to the hyphenate debut that feels like something I picked up on 99¢ VHS rental Friday at King Soopers in 1991. Hail to nepotism working as it should by reintroducing the concept of the mid-level genre piece to curry favour with a former A-list director who keeps letting the air out of his own tires. And hail to the new “Night Shyamalan” who has learned her lessons exquisitely, the good and the bad. Just like that, she’s neatly doubled the number of directors of terrible movies I will like a little bit.

If (2024)

May 27, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Family, Fantasy, Theatrical

*/****
starring Ryan Reynolds, John Krasinski, Cailey Fleming, Steve Carell
written and directed by John Krasinski

by Walter Chaw The message of John Krasinski’s excruciating If is that you are never too old to have an imaginary friend–or, rather, you will never be so old that you won’t need an imaginary friend. Let’s all just sit with that for a minute. Work it around in your head. You will never…be so old…that you won’t need…an imaginary friend. Is that a warning? A promise of mental decline? Is the innocence and happiness of childhood synonymous with having an imaginary friend? The presumption is that imaginary friends are good things and that everyone has had one, you see, and one of the tragedies of growing up is that you forget your imaginary friend. Except there’s this adorable little Asian kid (Alan Kim, already needing a new agent) who doesn’t seem to have one for some reason, so I’m already starting to lose the thread that’s connecting this world. Do all kids have imaginary friends except Asian kids? Why is that? Is it a cultural ban? A deficiency? The fuck is going on? Another premise in If is that once kids forget about their imaginary friends, they disappear–except they don’t disappear, they’re still there but invisible to their former childhood pals. Bea (Cailey Fleming, who is great; this is not her fault) can see them, though. Bea is afraid she’s about to be orphaned. Bea is possibly a monster. Maybe there aren’t rules in If. Maybe it’s madness or hallucination, a psychedelic freakout or, better yet, a true sequel to the “It’s a Good Life” episode of “The Twilight Zone”, which I know did have a sequel, but here’s another one. Work with me here.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)

May 22, 2024****/****, 2024, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disability, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

****/****
starring Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Burke, Alyla Browne
written by George Miller, Nico Lathouris
directed by George Miller

by Walter Chaw In matters of vengeance, the Greeks had it all figured out. Their God of such things was a tripartite Goddess: Alecto (“unceasing”), Megaera (“grudging”), and Tisiphone (“avenging murder”), collectively called the “Erinyes.” Hesiod gave their parentage as the Titan Ouranos and Gaia: When Ouranos was castrated by his son, Cronos, three drops of Ouranos’s blood fell to the fertile soil of Mother Earth, impregnating her with his resentment and rage. Other sources describe the Erinyes’ parentage as Night and Hell. The Romans renamed the goddesses the Furiae, and now George Miller houses them in the slight frame of his Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy). Furiosa, who births herself from the dirt and, over the course of a too-short 150 minutes, pursues her vengeance like the “darkest of angels” her nemesis, Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), dubs her. He asks her, “Do you have it in you to make it epic?” He already knows she does. Furiosa is the very definition of epic. It’s a treatise on how archetype remains the blueprint for our behaviour, and in its absolute simplicity, it has a sublime power. Furiosa is born of our rage to avenge the death of the world. She reminds me of a Miyazaki heroine, and the film itself is as obsessively detailed, thought-out, and functional as a stygian Miyazaki fantasia. If it’s opera, it’s Wagner. As a film, it may be George Miller’s best.