FILM FREAK CENTRAL

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

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

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

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

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

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.

She's a small wonder, brings love and laughter everywhere

Subservience (2024)

September 25, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Bulgaria, Sci-Fi, Thriller

*½/****
starring Megan Fox, Michele Morrone, Madeline Zima, Jude Allen Greenstein
written by Will Honley & April Maguire
directed by S.K. Dale

by Walter Chaw You could make a domestic robot servant look like anything. A spider or a dog, for instance. It could look like Michael Gough as Alfred the Butler or like Michael Caine as Alfred the Butler. It could look like ceramic Mrs. Potts and be voiced by the ghost of Angela Lansbury. It could look like a child or an old crone, a handsome young man or a beautiful young woman. What you decide you want your domestic robot servant to look like says a lot about a lot. I read that pedophiles are already buying robot children. I remember when Paulie got a robot in Rocky IV that was the spitting image of Rosie from “The Jetsons”; Paulie was, without question, fucking it. When M3GAN came out, I had a hard time believing there wasn’t at any point a serious conversation about who the target audience for a robot that looked like that, dressed like that, would be. Probably not little girls needing playmates, is what I’m saying.

TIFF ’24: Conclave + Emilia Pérez

September 20, 20242024, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Crime, Film Festivals, France, Musical, Thriller, TIFF, UK

CONCLAVE
**/****
starring Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Isabella Rossellini
screenplay by Peter Straughan, based on the novel by Robert Harris
directed by Edward Berger

EMILIA PÉREZ
*/****
starring Karla Sofía Gascón, Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz
written and directed by Jacques Audiard

by Angelo Muredda Knives Out at the Vatican: That’s the basic elevator pitch for Edward Berger’s Conclave, which follows the politically loaded secret process to elect a new Pope following the death of his predecessor under shadowy circumstances. Adapted by Peter Straughan from Robert Harris’s novel of the same name, Berger’s follow-up to the very serious and very loud All Quiet on the Western Front promises a frothier, pulpier good time, and for a while, it delivers one, having some fun with its cloistered setting of hushed hallway meetings, its colourful cast of red-draped snippy cardinals, and its tight 72-hour timeframe, where anything seems possible. Before long, though, Conclave begins to sag under the weight of its pretension to justify the effortful production design (including an ambitiously but pointlessly recreated Sistine Chapel), overwrought musical and editing flourishes, and fraught setting, and to say something–anything, really–about current affairs: gender diversity in the Church, the war between nativism and pluralism, you name it.

TIFF ’24: Young Werther + Friendship

September 18, 20242024, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Comedy, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF

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

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

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

TIFF ’24: Megalopolis + Oh, Canada

September 17, 20242024, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Directors: Francis Ford Coppola, Directors: Paul Schrader, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Israel, Sci-Fi, TIFF

MEGALOPOLIS
***/****
starring Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf
written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola

Oh Canada
***/****
starring Richard Gere, Uma Thurman, Jacob Elordi, Michael Imperioli
written by Paul Schrader, based on the novel Foregone by Russell Banks
directed by Paul Schrader

by Angelo Muredda Here at last is Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola’s long-delayed, triple-XL-sized work of utopian science-fiction, in development since the late 1970s and emerging nearly 50 years later not as the mid-career capstone once intended, but as a kind of valedictory address on the importance of family and the timelessness of unrestrained baroque aesthetics. Funded at last by 120 million dollars worth of the filmmaker’s stake in his winery (presumably diminishing the future inheritance of several Coppola cast members in the process), the film is impossible to divorce from its outsized origin story. The making of Megalopolis is allegorized in a pleasantly goofy way in its fable of an uncompromising and misunderstood architect named Cesar (Adam Driver), whose radical vision of the titular hypothetical city, rising from the decadent rubble of the downtrodden New Rome, clashes with the more conservative urban planning of his arch-nemesis mayor, Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito). The war between the two men for what will become of New Rome, mediated by yellow journalists like Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), decrepit financiers like Cesar’s uncle Cassius (Jon Voight), snivelling populist politicians like Cesar’s spiteful cousin Clodio (Shia LaBeouf), and Cicero’s dilettante socialist daughter–and Cesar’s eventual lover–Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), becomes a proxy battle for what’s to come of the human race: stasis and tedium or dynamic big swings. The future, Coppola suggests, is an unknown country that we may be so lucky to dwell in: It can either give in to conservative values about the status quo and fall into permanent decline, or welcome with open arms the next generation, in the form of Cesar and Julia’s child–not to mention films like Megalopolis, ostensibly a proof of concept that bold ways of seeing and doing are worth the investment.

TIFF ’24: The Substance

September 15, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, TIFF, UK

***/****
starring Margaret Qualley, Demi Moore, Dennis Quaid, Hugo Diego Garcia
written and directed by Coralie Fargeat

by Walter Chaw Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance starts as David Cronenberg’s The Star before transitioning into Frank Henenlotter’s Black Swan. Toss in a pinch of Paul Verhoeven as well. Yet even at that, the picture suffers not for a lack of conviction but for a lack of breadth. The Substance carries a message warranting righteousness, no doubt, lamenting how women, especially in Hollywood, are valued for their sexuality and little else and how this trope eventually metastasizes within the victim as self-hatred and self-harm. But once eloquently expressed in the first (mesmerizing) 20 minutes, The Substance, in its dedicated mashing of its single outrage button, misses a few opportunities to broaden its scope, losing sight of its high concept. At least with Revenge, Fargeat’s straight-line rape-revenge flick (which ends with the pulverizing shotgunning of one antagonist’s scrotum), there’s no elaborate pretense it will engage in a broader dissection of male sexual violence. Its eventual bloodbath is less liberating and uncompromising than it is a shrine to the tradition forged by genre predecessors like I Spit on Your Grave and Ms. 45. Fargeat seems like a genuinely gifted filmmaker with a sense of humour skating on the outer edges of good taste. She wears her influences on her sleeve. She is, in other words, awesome, but her films so far are largely just slick celebrations of her Letterboxd favourites.

TIFF ’24: The Shrouds

September 15, 20242024, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Directors: David Cronenberg, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Sci-Fi, Thriller, TIFF

***½/****
starring Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, Guy Pearce, Sandrine Holt
written and directed by David Cronenberg

by Angelo Muredda David Cronenberg is no stranger to illness and death, from the synchronized degeneration of the Mantle twins in Dead Ringers to the sickly corporeal canvas of performance artist Saul in Crimes of the Future. But the aftermath of death has never felt more personal than in The Shrouds, where the filmmaker plants his most explicit authorial doppelgänger in Vincent Cassell’s Karsh, a cryptically described “producer of industrial videos” who shares Cronenberg’s career interest in the body, his trim white hair, his puckish sense of humour, and his grief, which is so palpable it’s rotting his teeth. Made in the aftermath of his wife’s long-term illness and 2017 death, The Shrouds isn’t Cronenberg’s elegy for the dead so much as an exquisitely sad and bitterly funny reflection on the desperate, illogical, unfulfilled ways the people they leave behind–in this case, a filmmaker with a fixation on his deceased wife’s body–mourn them.

TIFF ’24: Anora

September 14, 20242024, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Palme d'Or Winner, Romance, TIFF

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

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

TIFF ’24: Aberdeen + Seeds

September 11, 20242024, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Mystery, Thriller, TIFF

ABERDEEN
**/****
starring Gail Maurice, Billy Merasty, Liam Stewart-Kanigan, Jennifer Podemski
written and directed by Ryan Cooper and Eva Thomas

SEEDS
***/****
starring Kaniehtiio Horn, Patrick Garrow, Dylan Cook, Graham Greene
written and directed by Kaniehtiio Horn

by Bill Chambers It opens on a manipulative but striking juxtaposition. A First Nations girl, Aberdeen (Ashlyn Cote-Squire), and her little brother Boyd (Lucas Schacht) go fishing with their grandparents at a lake–a sun-dappled tableau that fades out on young Aberdeen’s bright smile and fades back in to find middle-aged Aberdeen (Gail Maurice) passed out on a bench, being kicked awake by the turtleneck Gestapo on park patrol. Across town, Boyd (Ryan R. Black) is at the doctor, receiving the devastating news that he’s terminally ill. As he’s taking this in, his phone rings: could he come get his big sis out of jail? There’s an implied “this time” when the police inform Boyd that Aberdeen’s lucky they’re not pressing criminal charges, but Boyd, espying a Bible on the officer’s desk, appeals to the man’s religious convictions (and gambles on his latent racism) in blaming her actions on a “beer demon,” saying he’s been trying to get her to church. The Indigenous people we meet in Aberdeen have to be nimble code-switchers to navigate the world, and that’s something our proud, mercurial heroine steadfastly isn’t. She’s all out of fucks to give–that is, until Boyd informs her of his cancer, which has forced him to place her grandchildren, who became Aberdeen’s responsibility after her drug-addicted daughter ran away (and then Boyd’s when flooding left Aberdeen unhoused), in foster care. With a white family, no less, something “Abby” resents more than Boyd, who was raised in a white home, apart from his sister. For Aberdeen, it feels like nothing is ours and everything is theirs. What follows is a Dardennes-ian narrative in which an anxious Abby attempts to clean up her act faster than the ticker of red tape will allow.

TIFF ’24: The Room Next Door

September 10, 20242024, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Film Festivals, Spain, TIFF

***/****
starring Julianne Moore, Tilda Swinton, John Turturro, Alessandro Nivola
written by Pedro Almodóvar, based on the novel What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez
directed Pedro Almodóvar

By Angelo Muredda Nobody dresses a set quite like Pedro Almodóvar. The tasteful, colour-coordinated accoutrements of a bourgeois life well-lived–elegant throw pillows and couches, the right Pantone mug and the perfect bookshelf, beautifully draped and brightly saturated garments–have lent his later films an air of aloof, upper-middle-class refinement at odds with the sexual frankness and messy spectrum of human emotions that were once his stock-in-trade. But in his latest, The Room Next Door, the tastefulness that sometimes feels like a late-style diversion from his singular traits as an artist is the point, an expression of his protagonists’ moral imperative to surround themselves with beautiful things to face the end of life with dignity.

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.

TIFF ’24: The Brutalist

September 9, 2024Authors: Angelo Muredda, Disability, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, TIFF, UK

**½/****
starring Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Alessandro Nivola
written by Brady Corbet & Mona Fastvold
directed by Brady Corbet

by Angelo Muredda “I’m not what I expected, either,” Hungarian-Jewish architect Laszlo Toth tells the first of many resentful hosts he’ll encounter in his new land early in Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, a super-sized historical epic that, despite its flashy, roguish presentation, tells a fairly old-fashioned story of capitalism funding, then strangling, art, interwoven with a fable about the ethnic roots of American innovation dying in a soil poisoned by white supremacy. It’s a good line, ably delivered by Adrien Brody in a nimble performance that flits from the depths of prostration to the confident delivery of treatises on the utility of brutalist architecture. Like a number of the film’s pronouncements concerning the titular artist (whose name, as fictionalized art-world stars go, is at least as good as Lydia Tár’s, evoking the Australian geologist who took a hammer to Michelangelo’s Pietà in 1972), it’s also a thematic tease. Protracted in length but paced like it’s in a hurry to get someplace, The Brutalist is prone to such dashed-off expositional asides about the self-alienation that ostensibly drives its protagonist, who would otherwise remain something of a cipher apart from his strong feelings on the literal and figurative endurance of concrete.

TIFF ’24: Paying for It

September 6, 20242024, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Comedy, Film Festivals, TIFF

**/****
starring Dan Beirne, Emily Lê, Andrea Werhun, Noah Lamanna
written by Sook-Yin Lee, Joanne Sarazen, based on the graphic novel by Chester Brown
directed by Sook-Yin Lee

by Bill Chambers Paying for It director Sook-Yin Lee is the ex-girlfriend of Toronto cartoonist Chester Brown. They broke up in the late ’90s when Lee fell in love with another man but continued living together. Overhearing the petty squabbles between Lee and his replacement, Chester gained a new appreciation for bachelorhood and swore off romantic relationships for good. To satisfy his sexual needs, he began to frequent prostitutes and, over the next few years, amassed enough material for a graphic novel. Part confessional memoir, part manifesto arguing for the decriminalization of prostitution, Paying for It was published in 2011 with an introduction by the king of porny cartoons himself, R. Crumb, who describes Brown as “a real connoisseur in the world of professional sex workers.” Now Lee has adapted the, er, fruits of Brown’s labour for the screen–which is quite the lede in itself (Woman Makes Movie of Ex’s Autobiography), but she also accounts for her whereabouts during Chester’s misadventures, fleshing out her ghostly appearances on the page into a full-blown character arc. Women have been consigned to the fringes of so many biopics that an artist’s former lover hacking into his autobiography feels nothing short of radically feminist. It’s also something of a tonic, as the book’s blunt assessments of the ladies Brown solicits can read as casual misogyny.

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.

Twister (1996) – Blu-ray Disc|4K Ultra HD + Digital Code

August 13, 20241990s, 2024, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Spielberg

The film portion of this review was written when Twister made its Blu-ray debut in 2008. I stand by it and don’t have much to add. It seems funny to cling to “they don’t make ’em like they used to” about a movie whose reboot-quel just came out, but there are more years between Twister and Twisters than there were between Psycho and Psycho II, and the industry has been through a sea change. High-concept blockbusters–of which Twister was one–have virtually gone the way of the dodo, replaced by “IP” blockbusters (of which Twisters is one), where all the focus is on branding. This, along with the kind of “technological progress” that’s a euphemism for the dismantling of time-honoured industry practices, has left today’s tentpoles feeling ersatz, if not curiously bespoke. The passing of Bill Paxton and Philip Seymour Hoffman in 2017 and 2014, respectively, only makes the sense of loss that much more palpable, though it hasn’t, in my experience, translated to a higher opinion of Twister, which is far from either actor’s best work. (The movie might, however, be Jami Gertz’s finest hour. Hopefully, Film Twitter’s recent reassessment of her character and performance will result in the Gertz-aissance that should’ve happened in 1996.)

**/****
BD – Image B+ Sound A Extras C+
4K UHD – Image A- Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton, Jami Gertz, Cary Elwes
screenplay by Michael Crichton & Anne-Marie Martin
directed by Jan De Bont

by Bill Chambers Jan De Bont’s Twister has a host of problems that mocking its physics–a common pastime among smartasses the summer of its release–doesn’t begin to address, though if the film were even one degree more earnest than it is, moments like the bit where a tornado powerful enough to hoist a tractor leaves two people clinging tenaciously to a wooden support beam under a rickety bridge unscathed would make for prime “MST3K” fodder. (That’s the thing about notorious pedant Michael Crichton, who co-wrote Twister with then-wife Anne-Marie Martin: he figures getting the technobabble right buys him more poetic license than it really does.) For starters, Helen Hunt doesn’t belong in this milieu–and by that I mean the film’s, not that of the blockbuster. (I actually thought she acquitted herself fine in What Women Want and Cast Away.) Blame the contemporary compulsion to spell everything out: The picture saddles her character, Dr. Jo Harding, with a Tragic Past™ so that she’ll have a psychological motivation for chasing twisters, something that is not only completely gratuitous but also forces us to consider her provenance in a way that would never be an issue had the film stuck to the present tense. It’s impossible to imagine the immutably bicoastal Hunt as the Midwest offspring of the rednecks who leave an indelible impression in the opening flashback, and as a result, she wanders through Twister a virtual impostor.

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.

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