That is a good, sinister question when posed by the
mustachioed traveler responding to his captive’s promise to remain silent if he
lets her go. It’s good because it clarifies to her and us that this is not his
first prisoner rodeo, an unsettling fact that increases tensions and moves the
story forward.
It’s also a good question to ask director John Hyams as his
road trip horror Alone serves up a very familiar premise.
Jessica (Jules Wilcox), her beat Volvo station wagon and
hitched U-Haul trailer are making a cross-country trip. Nobody else, just them.
Sure, Mom keeps calling, but Jessica just can’t right now.
It’s beautiful, wooded country, but a little treacherous—more so once that black SUV starts following her around.
You know where this is going from the opening scene, so the only
hope is that the execution delivers some thrills. Drone shots of trees may be a
little tired by this time, but they are pretty and they give the sense of
isolation. Screenwriter Mattias Olsson makes subtle changes to the predictable
story, giving each character an unexpected layer or two to keep you guessing.
Wilcox’s no-thrills performance suits the project beautifully. Though frustrating in the early going (don’t pretend you wouldn’t do some stupid things in that situation, too), Jessica’s resolve and tenacity are proven with a focused, physical performance.
Marc Menchaca, known only as Man, is a delight in the role of the villain. That ‘stache! Nary a false note creeps into his menacing demeanor. His is the saucier of the two characters and the hateful chemistry between the actors drives the thrills and commands attention.
Anthony Heald also makes a welcome appearance at about the halfway point, and the action takes an effective turn with him. But mainly, Alone benefits from two truly savvy performances. It just doesn’t have much to say that we haven’t already heard.
How many films, horror or otherwise, open as a moving van
leaves a fresh faced family unpacking in their new dream home? Kurtis David
Harder and his new Shudder thriller Spiral welcome you to the
neighborhood.
What feels like your typical suburban paranoia film, this
time given a fresh coat of paint with the introduction of a same-sex couple at
its center, turns out to be something else entirely.
Even as Malik (Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman) and Aaron (Ari Cohen)
try to convince Aaron’s teenaged daughter Kayla (Jennifer Laporte) that she really
won’t miss the big city, Malik is seeing some things around the cul-de-sac that
worry him.
But Aaron isn’t ready to believe the neighbors are
homophobes (or racists, for that matter, even if Tiffany across the street
assumed Malik was the gardener).
Spiral quickly falls into a very familiar pattern.
Malik, who works at home as a writer, begins to let his research get the better
of him. Writer’s block has him paranoid—or maybe there’s a trauma in his past
that’s to blame? Is he really seeing something strange in his neighbors’
windows? Is Aaron right, did he go overboard with that new home security
system?
It sounds familiar—so much so that the film sometimes just figures your brain will fill in blanks left open. And while Spiral’s internal logic is never air tight, screenwriters Colin Minihan (It Stains the Sands Red, What Keeps You Alive) and John Poliquin are more interested in bigger patterns. Their social allegory doesn’t achieve the breathless thrills of Get Out, but Spiral swims similar waters.
The filmmakers see patterns in political hatred and the continuing reaffirmation of the status quo, and those patterns are horrifying. While horror has always been an opportunity for the collective unconscious to deal with social anxiety in a safely distant way, Spiral is less interested in creating that comforting fictional buffer. It’s as if the filmmakers want you to see the holes in their plot so you’re more able to see the nonfiction it’s based on.
“Lord knows where a person who ain’t saved might end up.”
Indeed. The constant fight to overcome the worst in ourselves lies at the heart of The Devil All the Time, director Antonio Campos’s darkly riveting realization of Donald Ray Pollock’s best-selling novel.
Bookended by the close of World War II and the escalation in Vietnam, the film connects the fates of various characters living in the small rural towns of Southern Ohio and West Virginia.
Arvin (Tom Holland), the son of a disturbed WWII vet (Bill Skarsgård), fights to protect his sister (Eliza Scanlen) while he ponders his future. Husband and wife serial killers (Jason Clarke and Riley Keough) look for hitchhikers to degrade, photograph and murder. A new small town preacher (Robert Pattinson) displays a special interest in the young girls of his congregation.
It’s a star studded affair—Mia Wasikowska, Haley Bennett and Sebastian Stan joining as well—but every actor blends into the woodsy atmosphere with a sense of unease that permeates the air. No stars here, all character actors in service of the film’s unsettling calling.
Pollock’s prose created a dizzyingly bleak landscape where Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy might meet to quietly ponder man’s inhumanity to man. Campos unlocks that world courtesy of Pollock himself, who narrates the film’s depravity with a backwoods folksiness that makes it all the more chilling.
As rays of light are constantly snuffed out by darkness, Campos (who also co-wrote the screenplay) uses Pollock’s voice and contrasting soundtrack song choices to create a perverse air of comfort.
Redemption is a slippery aim in and around Knockemstiff, Ohio, and grace is even harder to come by. With a heavier hand, this film would have been a savage beating or a backwoods horror of the most grotesque kind. Campos and his formidable ensemble deliver Pollock’s tale with enough understatement and integrity to cut deeply, unnerving your soul and leaving a well-earned scar.
Hey, it’s been a pretty easy going year. Feel like a movie?
Well, first time feature filmmaker Rodd Rathjen has one for
you and you’re not going to like it, but you should watch it anyway. Buoyancy
shadows a 14-year-old Cambodian boy sold into slave labor on a Thai fishing
trawler.
I know, but stay with me.
In his feature debut behind the camera, Rathjen wisely
relies on naturalistic performances from mainly non-professional actors to
recreate the circumstances rather than dramatize them.
Sarm Heng is Chakra, a put upon adolescent bristling at the
limitations of his life. There’s the universal element of adolescent rebellion,
here tied to far more than angst. Chakra does manual labor rather than going to
school, and as kids in uniform whiz by him on bicycles, and cars on the nearby
highway come and go, his stagnancy and the back breaking monotony awaiting him
in adulthood press down on him.
He follows an opportunity to sneak away from home and get a
ride out of the country, where he’ll make real money working in a factory. It’s
OK if he doesn’t have the $500 fare to leave the country, he can work that off
in his first month.
That’s not how it actually works, and we spend the rest of
the film watching as Chaka’s realization comes to him in bits and pieces that
he will probably never leave this rickety fishing boat.
Rathjen’s film ends with sobering facts concerning the
modern slave trade in Southeast Asia, with as many as 200,000 boys and men
currently missing and believed to be held in bondage on fishing boats. The
filmmaker’s verité style helps us understand how this happens. There’s no boisterous
villain detailing the scheme, no, “Ha! You belong to me now!” No one tells you
you’re never being paid, never going home. You simply adjust to your
circumstances or you die.
There’s little dialog once Chakra leaves the boys in the
village behind, but Heng doesn’t need it. The evolution of this character hangs
on his face. It’s a remarkable performance, especially from a kid who’s never
acted before.
Heng gets an assist from two actors with some experience. An
utterly heartbreaking Mony Ros is the middle aged man who falls prey to the
scheme in the hopes of providing for his family. The camaraderie between these
two characters is powerful, and it’s a theme Rathjen mirrors in Chakra’s
relationship with the ship’s captain, played with menacing relish by Thenawut
Ketsaro.
What they create together is harrowing, but it’s also a brilliant piece of filmmaking that needs to be seen.
The first tale of Mulan—a story that’s has been told
and retold for centuries—dates to an epic poem written more than 1500 years ago
in China. Back in 1998, Disney made its first attempt to capitalize on the girl
power message of the daughter who hides her identity to take her father’s place
in battle.
As part of the company’s live action re-imaginings of those
old animated films, Mulan comes back today.
Yifei Liu plays the young warrior in a version that takes
its material seriously. Don’t expect a wisecracking little dragon this
go-round. With the PG-13 rating and the multiple and violent battle sequences,
this one wasn’t made with the youngest fans in mind.
Director Niki Caro is not Asian, which makes her an unusual
and potentially inappropriate choice to helm a story so entrenched in Chinese
folklore. She hasn’t made as impressive a film as Mulan since her 2002
coming of age tale, Whale Rider, and it is no doubt on that film’s
account that the New Zealander got the call from Disney.
She certainly does justice to the message of empowerment, as
expected. What you might not expect given her previous films is her virtuosity
in filming beautiful, elegant and eye-popping action.
The fight choreography is wonderous, as are the gorgeous
vistas. Caro’s Mulan is a spectacle and it’s too bad it won’t be shared
across big screens.
There’s a simplicity to the storyline that allows Caro and
her cast to create wonder with the visuals, and Liu’s earnest portrayal suits
that aim. The screenplay remains true to the folktale’s message in spots where ’98
animated version betrayed its more conventional view of female power.
There are no songs and dances here, but there is magic nonetheless.
What were we looking for? Reboots/remakes that are superior to the original. There are more than you think. In the podcast, we run through eight horror reboots that are superior to the original, kick around another handful that are Even Stevens, and argue about several that could maybe go either way (depending on which one of us you’re talking to). So, you know, have a listen.
5. Dawn of the Dead
Zack Snyder would go on to success with vastly overrated movies, but his one truly fine piece of filmmaking updated Romero’s Dead sequel with the high octane horror. The result may be less cerebral and political than Romero’s original, but it is a thrill ride through hell and it is not to be missed.
The flick begins strong with one of the best “things seem fine but then they don’t” openings in film. And finally! A strong female lead (Sarah Polley). Polley’s beleaguered nurse Ana leads us through the aftermath of the dawn of the dead, fleeing her rabid husband and neighbors and winding up with a rag tag team of survivors hunkered down inside a mall.
In Romero’s version, themes of capitalism, greed, and mindless consumerism run through the narrative. Snyder, though affectionate to the source material, focuses more on survival, humanity, and thrills. (He also has a wickedly clever soundtrack.) It’s more visceral and more fun. His feature is gripping, breathlessly paced, well developed and genuinely terrifying.
4. Suspiria
Luca Guadagnino continues to be a master film craftsman. Much as he draped Call Me by Your Name in waves of dreamy romance, here he establishes a consistent mood of nightmarish goth. Macabre visions dart in and out like a video that will kill you in 7 days while sudden, extreme zooms, precise sound design and a vivid score from Thom Yorke help cement the homage to another era.
But even when this new Suspiria—a “cover version” of Dario Argento’s 1977 giallo classic—is tipping its hat, Guadagnino leaves no doubt he is making his own confident statement. The color scheme is intentionally muted, and you’ll find no men in this dance troupe, serving immediate notice that superficialities are not the endgame here.
3. The Ring/Ringu
Gore Verbinski’s film The Ring – thanks in large part to the creepy clever premise created by Koji Suzuki, who wrote the novel Ringu – is superior to its source material principally due to the imagination and edge of the fledgling director. Verbinski’s film is visually arresting, quietly atmospheric, and creepy as hell.
From cherubic image of plump cheeked innocence to a mess of ghastly flesh and disjointed bones climbing out of the well and into your life, the character of Samara is brilliantly created.
Hideo Nakata’s original was saddled with an unlikeable ex-husband and a screechy supernatural/psychic storyline that didn’t travel well. Screenwriter Ehren Kruger did a nice job of re-focusing the mystery.
Sure, it amounts to an immediately dated musing on technology. (VHS? They went out with the powdered wig!) But still, there’s that last moment when wee Aidan (a weirdly perfect David Dorfman) asks his mom, “What about the people we show it to? What happens to them?”
At this point we realize he means us, the audience.
We watched the tape! We’re screwed!
2. The Thing/The Thing From Another World
The 1951 original The Thing From Another World is a scifi classic, and every inch of it screams 1950s. The good guys are good, the monsters are monsters. Everything has its place. It’s reassuring.
John Carpenter’s remake upends all that with a thoroughly spectacular tale of icy isolation, contamination, and mutation.
A beard-tastic cast portrays a team of scientists on expedition in the Arctic who take in a dog. The dog is not a dog, though. Not really. And soon, in an isolated wasteland with barely enough interior room to hold all the facial hair, folks are getting jumpy because there’s no knowing who’s not really himself anymore.
This is an amped up body snatcher movie benefitting from some of Carpenter’s most cinema-fluent and crafty direction: wide shots when we need to see the vastness of the unruly wilds; tight shots to remind us of the close quarters with parasitic death inside.
The story remains taut beginning to end, and there’s rarely any telling just who is and who is not infected by the last reel. You’re as baffled and confined as the scientists.
1. The Fly
As endearing and fascinating as we find Kurt Neumann’s 1958 Vincent Price vehicle, it just doesn’t quite have the same impact once you’ve seen Jeff Goldblum peel off his fingernails.
Not because it’s gross—and it is gross AF—but because he’s fascinated by the process itself. It’s the scientist in him.
David Cronenberg knows how to properly make a mad scientist film, especially if that madness wreaks corporeal havoc. But it’s not just Cronenberg’s disturbed genius for images and ideas that makes The Fly fly; it’s the performance he draws from Goldblum.
Goldblum is an absolute gift to this film, so endearing in his pre-Brundlefly nerdiness. He’s the picture’s heartbeat, and it’s more than the fact that we like his character so much. The actor also performs heroically under all those prosthetics.
A not-at-all funny thing happened to the movie calendar this year. And now, instead of kicking off the summer blockbuster season with a bang, the stakes for Tenet are a wee bit higher: rescue movie theaters.
As you may have heard, writer/director Christopher Nolan has been adamant that this film be experienced in theaters. He’s not wrong.
Tenet is a sensory battering experience, one not to be paused or downsized. The ideas are big, the visuals are full of wide-eyed wonders, and the persistent mind-bending immediately invites second helpings (maybe more).
An agent known only as The Protagonist (John David Washington) is introduced to technology that has the power to invert time. Time travel? Sorry, that’s Bill & Ted kid stuff. We’re talking the ability to move forward in a space where everything else is moving backward.
Nolan is returning to a familiar playground that manipulates time and reality. From Leonard looping through a constant present tense in Memento to Cobb forever bumping into his own past in his attempts to shift the future in Inception, back to The Prestige, forward to Interstellar and again to the braided timelines of Dunkirk, Nolan is a filmmaker who orchestrates universes by playing with time and consequence.
In Tenet, the future is talking to the past, and the fate of the world hangs in the balance. To put things right, our Protagonist and a mysterious partner named Neil (Robert Pattinson) must gain the trust of a high-end art dealer (Elizabeth Debicki) on the way to taking down her Russian arms dealer husband (Kenneth Branagh) who’s thinking bigger than Thanos.
A dialog heavy first half benefits primarily from the oily charm and sly humor of Pattinson’s character, whose arc is made more fun and more interesting by the way the film loops its realities. As elegant as always, Debicki exists to give the film a truly human character, which is to say, one whose behavior is too often (and too conveniently) impetuous.
The film’s biggest drawbacks are some cliched dialogue and its tendency to present itself as a SciFi James Bond movie with well-dressed characters popping up in gorgeous locales to impressively (and too conveniently) offer well-timed information. (Washington does impress as a potential Bond, though.)
The two and a half hour running time is not a concern, because once we hit the midpoint, Nolan (with a big assist from cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema and stunt coordinator George Cottle) decide we ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Past and present collide in some of the most interesting, tense and downright fun action sequences Nolan’s ever put together—and fan or not, that’s a feat to acknowledge.
That’s merely a summary that doesn’t require a physics degree, but as Nolan’s own screenplay admits, “Don’t try to understand it.” We’re back to big screens, baby, let’s make it count!
Let’s be honest. Logan’s
dead, JLaw’s past her contract obligations, Dark
Phoenix bombed and the X-Men are in need of some new blood and maybe a
new direction.
The franchise does make a big of a zig with its latest
offshoot. The New Mutants is essentially a YA horror film. Co-writer/director
Josh Boone’s premise may be comic book, but his execution is angst and PG-13 scares.
Dani Moonstar (Blu Hunt) wakes up to find herself in a locked-down, mainly vacant, definitely old and unmistakably spooky asylum of some sort. Here Dani will learn to control her power—whatever that might be—with the help of the sole custodian of Dani and four other special youngsters, Dr. Reyes (Alice Braga).
Focusing exclusively on adolescence allows the film to
deliver, undiluted, the main concepts of the franchise: embrace your differences,
forgive yourself, accept others for what they are, master your own potential
and stick it to the man. Fine ideas, every one of them, and certainly common
themes in YA.
As our plucky hero, Hunt struggles to find anything close to
authenticity in her dreamy dialog, but the balance of the cast is strong.
The always remarkable Anya Taylor-Joy relishes the wicked
girl role while Game of Thrones’s Maisie Williams (battling Taylor-Joy
for largest eyes in a human face) is a deeply empathetic, awkward girl with a
crush.
That the crush is not on one of the two boys in
lockdown—played by Charlie Heaton and Henry Zaga—is a refreshing change of pace
charmingly underscored by the teens’ apparent fixation with the TV show Buffy
the Vampire Slayer.
Boone, whose 2014 effort The
Fault In Our Stars defines angst porn, knows YA. His combination of these
two genres is a bit of a misfire, though, particularly when the final, big,
giant scare is revealed. Yikes—and I don’t mean that in a good way.
New Mutants is a film trying too hard to cash in on proven youth market formulas, but the concoction fizzles. It doesn’t really work as an angsty romance, misses the mark as a horror movie and never for a minute feels like a superhero flick.
