In case you need a reminder about the versatility of Ralph Fiennes, here it is. In the same week we find him trying to outsmart a psychotic gang leader while working to cure a rage virus in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, he’s also looking to assemble a suitable group of singers in the midst of WW1 for The Choral.
The man has range, and he’s wonderful as Dr. Henry Guthrie, who has returned to Yorkshire in 1919 after a career in Germany. Those ties draw suspicious catcalls of “Fritz!’ from the locals, but with many of the best male voices leaving for the army, the choral committee feels he’s the best choice to move the group forward as chorus master.
The blunt and uncompromising Dr. Guthrie isn’t exactly thrilled at the prospect, which is evident right from the auditions. Fiennes gives him some delightfully pained expressions when notes are mangled, but glorious looks of enlightenment when true talent hits his ears.
Director Nicholas Hytner and writer Alan Bennett set a pleasing enough hook, but end up getting bogged down in a marsh of routine subplots and surface-level messaging.
Hytner (The Madness Of King George, The History Boys) gives the wartime period details a sheen that seems too glossy for an effective contrast between the boys who’ll soon go to the front and those coming home. It begins to resemble a more musical riff on Dead Poets Society, but the boys’ wartime bravado and impatience for sexual experience just distract from the more engaging conflict with Dr. Guthrie.
Due to the young age of his best male voice, Dr. Guthrie has to make some story changes to the Choral’s performance piece, “The Dream of Gerontius” by Edward Elgar – without telling Elgar himself.
And then guess who shows up.
If the themes of wartime loss and sacrifice cut deeper, the performance tension would play an understandable supporting role. But little outside of Fiennes’s orbit holds your attention, and The Choral settles into its place as a perfectly generic period drama.
Filmmaker Albert Birney made quite an impression with his previous film, Strawberry Mansion, injecting whimsy and surrealism into a story about a government audit. Stuffed full of creatures and characters brought to life with an appealing DIY aesthetic, the film was a love letter to creating art and felt like it had been made by a less cynical Michel Gondry. It also made me excited for whatever Birney might be doing next.
OBEX is a black and white hallucination of a film that would be a perfect find if you were flipping channels at midnight and came upon it. It’s so weird that you’d wonder the next day if you actually watched it or just dreamed it up after some iffy late-night leftovers. It’s smaller in scale than Strawberry Mansion, but that is intentional as it is focused on one man’s odyssey to leave his home.
Conor (Birney) is a loner self-imprisoned in his home with his companion, a sweet dog named Sandy. His only apparent connection to the outside world is Mary (Callie Hernandez), a nice neighbor who delivers his groceries and tries to have conversations with him from the other side of his front door. Conor spends his days playing games on his old Macintosh and watching tapes from his vast VHS collection. One day he responds to an ad in a magazine about a new game that promises the adventure of a lifetime – OBEX.
OBEX appears to be quite dull as a computer game, but that is before the real adventure begins. A demon crawls out of Conor’s computer and kidnaps Sandy the dog and retreats to his nightmare castle beyond the dark forest. Conor must now face his fears and past traumas as he will risk everything to leave the safety of his home to go on a fantasy adventure to save poor Sandy.
Birney mashes up tropes from retro video games and the 80s to create an imaginative journey that has the right amount of madness to keep things interesting and rolling along. Conor must face off against evil skeletons and insect men with a sword that looks like it came from Spirit Halloween. He also makes friends with Victor, a guy who has an old television for a head, and a fairy (Hernandez, pulling double duty) who runs a shop that sells anything an adventurer might need. The cast is game and helps fill out the fantasy world Birney is building.
OBEX is a fun little journey about a man conquering his fears and rejoining the world. Not as crazy or stressful as Beau Is Afraid, OBEX wears its heart on its sleeve as a nostalgic adventure that feels like comfort cinema.
Deeply, darkly weird and surprising—that’s a good phrase to describe, to one degree or another, the films of Fabrice du Welz. His high-water mark for me is 2004’s Calvaire, a Christmas horror story that feels like something David Lynch might have done with Texas Chainsaw Massacre if he spoke French.
I am always eager to watch whatever springs next from a mind that conjures anything so harrowing and bizarre. His latest, Maldoror, is a true crime tale set in Belgium in the 1990s.
Paul Chartier (Anthony Bajon, Teddy) joins the Gendarmerie because he wants sincerely to make a difference. What he wants, as the film will slowly unveil, is to create for himself the life he was not born into—one with value, with family, with honor. For Paul, the unsolved missing persons case involving two small girls from the neighborhood provides the opportunity.
The crimes at the heart of the film are based on those of Marc Dutroux, a serial rapist, killer and pedophile who was able to continue to prey upon little girls in his community because of an inept and siloed legal system, as well as a corrupt justice department. Boy, there was a time when that would have sounded far-fetched, wasn’t there?
Du Welz surrounds Bajon with a large ensemble including the great Sergi López, always magnificent Béatrice Dalle, and du Welz regular Laurent Lucas. The filmmaker is at his loosest and most naturalistic with this film, a choice the cast embraces. Du Welz’s script, cowritten with Domenico La Porta, feels less well-suited to the approach.
The material is grim, covers more than a decade and casts a wide net. It’s sprawling and gritty, marked by a cynical unease about the possibility of finding truth or justice in a corrupt legal system. Yet somehow Maldoror becomes a tale of one man’s obsession, which neither fits the story being told nor the actor playing lead.
Bajon’s vulnerable, awkward cop and family man is played with an integrity that rings true. Even his early steps over the line in favor of eventual justice fit. But the character’s arc is a misfit for the film and the actor, and it reduces the story. Act 3 feels like it’s pulled from a different, lesser effort. The end result is that, though it boasts real tension and great performances, Maldoror feels like a misstep.
Crime drama, social commentary, action flick, vampire movie—Night Patrol bites off a lot. But since director Ryan Prows and writers Tim Cairo, Jack Gibson and Shaye Ogbonna’s last teaming combined an organ harvesting crime caper with the life of a luchador, it shouldn’t come as a surprise.
Night Patrol opens on a young man (RJ Cyler) bleeding from a weapon still poking out of his ribs. He’s in police custody, sitting across from a nonplussed LAPD officer (Nick Gillie), who’d like him to explain himself.
Prows then flashes back a couple of days, introducing the young man, the girl he loves, and the LA cops known as Night Patrol. What follows is an allegory about white supremacy dressed up as some kind of higher calling but behaving as bloodthirsty beasts.
Apt, particularly after what we all witnessed in Minneapolis last Wednesday night.
Justin Long co-stars as a cop looking to get to the bottom of whatever it is Night Patrol is up to, and he’ll go to some regrettable means to meet those ends. But he hopes to be remembered as “one of the good ones”.
It’s unfair to compare Prows’s film with the similarly themed Sinners because it’s unfair to compare any film at all with Ryan Coogler’s masterpiece. Prows’s ire is focused on the here and now, and probably bears a closer resemblance to Bomani J. Story’s 2023 film The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster as well as Remington Smith’s 2025 festival favorite LandLord.
The theme is clear-eyed and relevant: Systemic racism in the U.S. is monstrous, its willing participants are monsters.
Prows solicits game performances from Cyler, Long, and especially Nicki Micheaux who dominates every scene she’s in, as only her character could.
Where Night Patrol falters is in its wild mix of tones and genres. For all its bloodsucking, this is no horror film. The violence is action violence, but even that is sometimes lost in the loonier, funnier moments. The rival gang is preoccupied with supernatural entities, including Lizard Men, giving the film a bizarre sense of humor that doesn’t fully fit.
The hodgepodge approach to genre hampers its castmates—Cyler, in particular—from finding a suitable performing style. Long is custom designed for this character, and Micheaux elevates the material, but with no discernable genre, Night Patrol leaves you a little dizzy.
Chinese filmmaker Bi Gan set the bar high for himself with his second feature, the surreal sensation Long Day’s Journey into Night that capped off a dreamy neo-noir with an hour-long single take in 3D.
With his new film Resurrection, it’s clear that Bi’s ambition and technical skill have only grown. Resurrection trades the languorous pace of his first two films for short chapters that meticulously pay homage to distinct filmmaking genres. There’s the opening silent film with its eye-popping production design and nods to Expressionism and early greats like Méliès and Griffith, but if that’s not your taste just give it 20 minutes. Each section gives way to the next, including mid-century noir, a Buddhist parable and even a Y2K vampire love story.
The story (from Bi, with a screenplay by the director and Zhai Xiaohui) loosely unites the wide-ranging chapters—but emphasis on loosely. Jackson Yee plays a Deliriant, a dissident dreamer in a speculative future where “the secret to eternal life is to no longer dream.” These Deliriants must be hunted down by “Other One” (Shu Qi, who also narrates throughout the film).
This is explained at breakneck speed in the opening silent film cards, but don’t worry. The cinematic metaphors tend not to be subtle in each of the chapters, with story taking a backseat to Bi’s dazzling visuals. After the Other One tracks down the Deliriant in the opening chapter, the rest of Resurrection is a projection of his dying dreams across time.
The final chapter is the one with “that shot” – one of Bi’s now-trademark long takes that follows a whirlwind romance between the Deliriant (now a street tough named Apollo) and a vampire singer (Li Gengxi) through Chongqing’s foggy nighttime streets. It’s Before Sunset with vampires plus Bi’s stunning use of light, darkness and color coming together perfectly, and the cinematography is such an achievement on its own that the long take is almost superfluous.
It’s a neat encapsulation of what can be equal parts beguiling and frustrating about Resurrection. There’s a deft bit of poetry on ending with the vampire vignette, as the two lovers seek to find something real, something even more sublime than immortality. (And cinema is also something we find meaning in with each another, but only in fleeting darkness before the lights come up.)
And it also draws attention to its own artifice in ways that might be intentional but, over the course of a 150-minute movie, threaten to overshadow the emotion of an already threadbare story. Bi has the immaculate craft to look back at diverse eras of filmmaking, but the burning question in today’s climate is forward-looking: Can film as an art survive? Can we be at peace with the idea that art is not a cure for suffering but rather a place to find our shared humanity? It’s a little corny or maybe it’s a little deep, or both depending on your tolerance. But the questions are worth asking. Especially from a master technician who is practically demanding that you see this on a big screen, with a hushed crowd of strangers, all in agreement that there is still something essential about the power of stories through moving images on a screen.
Even without the cameo from Al Pacino, Dead Man’s Wire has the gritty, absurdist vibe of legendary 70s thriller Dog Day Afternoon. Also based on true crime events, the latest from director Gus Van Sant leans on a timely, anti-hero tone and some stellar performances for a look into the desperate edges of the American dream.
Bill Skarsgård is utterly manic and completely magnetic as Tony Kiritsis, who held an Indianapolis mortgage company executive hostage in February of 1977. Kiritsis, who hoped to build a shopping center on his 17 acres of land, became convinced that Meridian Mortgage president M.L. Hall (Pacino) was sabotaging the project. Finding M.L. out of town, Kiritis settled on son Richard Hall (Dacre Montgomery from Stranger Things) for his plan of revenge.
Armed with a sawed-off shotgun and a “dead man’s wire” running from the trigger to Richard’s neck, Tony demanded media access, immunity, compensation and a personal apology from M.L. himself.
Tony’s mood swings with wild abandon, but he’s downright starstruck when telling his story to WCYD deejay Fred Temple, the “voice of Indianapolis.” The great Colman Domingo plays Temple with a grounded mix of caution and curiosity, as the confused local celeb is reluctantly pulled into a life-or- death drama where a potential murderer is a gushing fanboy.
Writer Austin Kolodney comes from a comedy background, and Van Sant weaves some darkly comedic layers through terrific period details that only enhance the through line from 1977 to today’s breaking news.
Just two years ago, we saw how a communal feeling of hopelessness can turn a fugitive into a heroic man of the people. Dead Man’s Wire reminds us this feeling of simmering resentment is as old as the art of stacking decks. And while his narrative approach ultimately carries more polish than bite, Van Sant and a terrific ensemble never fail to make this history lesson an engaging high wire act of sadness, surprise and bittersweet delight.
Maybe you enjoyed last year’s coming-of-age survival story masquerading as horror, 28 Years Later. Respect. But if you believe the film lacked the genuine terror required for this franchise, director Nia DaCosta has you covered.
She delivers the first great horror film of the year with 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, also written by Alex Garland. It picks up the most intriguing threads left untied last time: those of the band of Clockwork Orange-esque marauders who saved young Spike (Alfie Williams) from the infected, and the beautiful soul covered in iodine and living amongst the bones, Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes).
There is more visceral horror in the first three scenes of DaCosta’s film than in the entire hour and fifty-five minutes of the previous installment.
Spike finds himself unwittingly and unwillingly one of the Jimmys, the seven blond-wigged disciples of Sir Jimmy Crystal (O’Connell). Meanwhile, die-hard Duran Duran fan (hell yeah!) Dr. Kelson might be making friends with Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry), the pantsless alfa-infected who left such an impression in the last film.
As the two stories lead toward inevitable collision, Garland, who wrote the 2000 genre masterpiece 28 Days Laterbefore writing and directing some of the best genre films of the 2000s (Ex Machina, Annihilation, Men, Civil War), delivers smart storytelling, impeccable world building, and scares aplenty.
And again, Garland is able to display an intense social conscience, with timely and relevant nods to humanity fighting cruelty for survival, and the desperate allure of demagogues.
O’Connell’s never given a bad performance, and thanks to Sinners, the world knows what he can do with a villain role. But the man’s been doing the charismatic sadist better than any actor since his 2008 breakout, Eden Lake. His performance here is diabolical and unsettlingly funny.
Fiennes is again in wonderous form, soulful, earnest and dear. DaCosta surrounds them both with a strong ensemble that more than sells this story.
The filmmaker (Little Woods, Candyman, The Marvels, Hedda) returns to horror with aplomb, expertly weaving from the grimmest horrors the Jimmys can muster to the tender bromance blossoming over at the bone temple. And the climactic musical number she stages there is a thing for the ages.
Back in the summer of 2002, Danny Boyle released the single scariest movie to hit screens in a decade or more. The next two sequels are solid films. But credit DaCosta and her game and gamey cast for upping the ante to deliver everything a horror fan hoped to get last time out.
The last decade has seen an explosion in Spanish language horror—so many incredible options that we went fuzzy math for this list and still had to leave off some incredible movies, including Amigo, Veronica, The Platform, Terrified, Luz: The Flower of Evil, La Llorona, Huesera: The Bone Woman, and The Untamed. So, make sure you check every one of those out, but first, you should peruse the films that did make our list.
Thanks as always to a great crowd at Gateway Film Center!
6. El Conde (2023, Chile)
On Netflix Pablo Larraín has a particular gift for poetic historical retellings grounded in a singular woman’s perspective: Spencer, Jackie. But his passion for the political history of his native Chile rings through most of his films, including Naruda and No. But did we see a vampire movie coming?
El Conde reimagines Augusto Pinochet as a vampire weary of his many years on earth and ready to leave his bickering family in squalor and finally die – until the church sends a vampire slayer after him. What follows is a near-slapstick political satire, sort of The Death of Stalin meets What We Do in the Shadows.
Every moment’s a delight, and a late-film reveal is a cynical and biting reward for a gloriously spent couple of hours.
5. Tigers Are Not Afraid (2019, Mexico)
On Shudder, Prime and AMC+
Lopez’s fable of children and war brandishes the same themes as Guillermo del Toro’s masterpiece Pan’s Labyrinth, but grounds the magic with a rugged street style.
Tigers follows Estrella, a child studying fairy tales—or, she was until her school is temporarily closed due to the stray bullets that make it unsafe for students. As Estrella and her classmates hide beneath desks to avoid gunfire, her teacher hands her three broken pieces of chalk and tells her these are her three wishes.
But wishes never turn out the way you want them to.
4. Piggy (2022, Spain)
On Hulu, HBO Max, Prime, AMC+
Mean girls are a fixture in cinema, from Mean Girls to Carrie, Heathers to Jawbreaker to Napoleon Dynamite and countless others. Why is that? It’s because we like to see mean girls taken down.
Writer/director Carlota Pereda wants to challenge that base instinct. But first, she is going to make you hate Maca (Claudia Salas), Roci (Camille Aguilar) and Claudia (Irene Ferreiro). In one tiny Spanish town, the three girls make Sara’s (Laura Galán, remarkable) life utterly miserable. Like worse than Carrie White’s.
The filmmaker complicates every trope, all the one-dimensional victim/hero/villain ideas this genre and others feast on. Redemption doesn’t come easily to anyone. Pereda also seamlessly blends themes and ideas from across the genre, upending expectations but never skimping on brutal, visceral horror.
3. The Coffee Table (2022, Spain)
On Shudder, Prime, Tubi, AMC+
A remarkably well written script fleshed out by a stunning ensemble becomes utter torture as you want so badly for some other outcome. Co-writer/director Caye Casas ties threads, builds anxiety, plunges the depths of “what’s the worst that could happen?” and leaves you shaken.
David Pareja and Estefania de los Santos craft indelible, believable, beautifully flawed characters so convincing that their experience becomes painful for you. Casas salts the wounds with dark comedy, but the tenderness and tragedy collaborate toward something far more crushingly human.
2. The Wolf House (2018, Chile)
On Prime, Tubi, Plex, Fawesome
Another Chilean horror, so you’re safe in assuming it has something to do with Pinochet. This breathtaking, incredibly creepy stop motion animated wonder tells of a true cult, Colonia Dignidad. One of its inhabitants escapes into the woods, has a near-miss catastrophe with a wolf, and hides in an abandoned house.
Directors/animators Cristobal León and Joaquín Cociña pull you into Maria’s dreamlike world, as her thoughts and reality blend before your eyes. Sets are painted, built, melted, and destroyed on the screen as Maria’s thoughts and the dangers she faces come and go. It’s an eerily beautiful and unforgettable fairy tale rooted in reality.
1. When Evil Lurks (2023, Argentina)
On Shudder, Hulu, Max, AMC+, Prime
Just when you thought no one could do anything fresh with a possession movie, Terrified filmmaker Demián Rugna surprises you. When Evil Lurks does sometimes feel familiar, its road trip to hell detouring through The Crazies, among others. But Rugna’s take on all the familiar elements feels new, in that you cannot and would not want to predict where he’s headed.
This is a magnificently written piece of horror, and Rugna’s expansive direction gives it an otherworldly yet dirty, earthy presence.
The inexplicable ugliness – this particularly foul presence of evil – is handled with enough distance, enough elegance to make the film almost beautiful, regardless of the truly awful nature of the footage. And Rugna never lets up. Each passing minute is more difficult than the last, to the very last, which is an absolute knife to the heart.
Hope & George review this week’s new releases: Is This Thing On?, Primate, Greenland 2: Migration, Father Mother Sister Brother, The Chronology of Water, All That’s Left Behind, and Sleepwalker.
Opening with two teenagers swept up in a demonstration in the West Bank, writer/director Cherien Dabis drops us into a world of strife and sorrow with her film, All That’s Left of You.
After the tense opening, the film moves backward in time to 1948, Jaffa, Palestine. From here, we follow Sharif (Adam Bakri) as he struggles to hold onto his land and home amid ever worsening strikes in the region. His wife is less concerned with his ideals than she is with keeping her family safe.
As we follow Sharif and his family, and the decisions they have to make as Zionist troops close-in, we get a sense of the hopelessness of the situation. Whether or not you know the history, there is a sense of impending doom as the men in the region discuss their options—stay and resist or leave in hopes of a safer future.
The 1948 segment of the film is the shortest, but it gives a sense of what was lost for the people of Jaffa.
Jumping ahead 30 years to the occupied West Bank, Sharif is now an old man who lives with his son Salim (Saleh Bakri) and his family. Each moment we spend with this family shows how deeply the film cares about its subject matter.
One scene during the 1978 segment is so intense it’s nearly impossible to watch. As soldiers torture and humiliate Salim in front of his son, Noor (Sanad Alkabareti), their laughter only underscores the cruelty present when we dehumanize each other. Noor’s reaction to the event is heartbreaking, yet honest.
The film jumps ahead another ten years as we follow an angry, teenage Noor (Muhammad Abed Elrahman) in an increasingly charged West Bank. The scene that opens the film comes full circle as the third section begins.
This family’s trauma across generations is our gateway into this world. Events unfold around them that are almost incomprehensible. Protestors are gunned down in the street. Treatment for a medical emergency is delayed over bureaucratic red tape and a misplaced ID. All That’s Left of You is an impassioned portrayal of one family’s experiences of displacement and heartbreak in Palestine.
