Ryan Coogler can direct the hell out of a movie, can’t he?
For Sinners, he reteams with longtime creative partner Michael B. Jordan to sing a song of a 1932 Mississippi juke joint. The Smokestack twins (Jordan) are back from Chicago, a truckload of ill-gotten liquor and a satchel full of cash along with them. They intend to open a club “for us, by us” and can hardly believe their eyes when three hillbillies come calling.
Jack O’Connell (an amazing actor in everything he’s done since Eden Lake) has a brogue and a banjo. He and his two friends would love to come on in, sing, dance, and spend some money, if only Smoke would invite them.
He does not.
The night becomes a standoff between those inside the club and those outside, but by the time Act 2 sets its fangs, Coogler and his terrific ensemble already have you invested in everyone inside.
The great Delroy Lindo effortlessly charms as bluesman Delta Slim. Wunmi Mosaku (His House, Lovecraft Country) works with Coogler’s direction to turn the horror trope “supernatural expert” (the one person who can explain to the others what’s going on and how to stop it) into the film’s broken heart.
Newcomer Miles Caton shines as the young blues guitarist whose voice is so sweet it can conjure the devil.
The setting and period suit the film beautifully, giving Coogler room to play with ideas of religion and redemption, music and temptation, and everything else that offers hope to the powerless. Every character carries a rich history that you can feel.
Jordan impresses in dual roles, carving out unique but dependent characters. O’Connell delivers lines and lyrics with a lived-in magic, twisting together Coogler’s insightful ideas about how prayer and song are often tools of the oppressor.
It’s scary. It’s sexy. The action slaps. It’s funny when it needs to be, sad just as often. It looks and sounds incredible. And there’s a cameo from Buddy F. Guy, in case you needed a little authenticity.
When Ryan Coogler writes and directs a vampire movie, he gives you reason to believe there is yet new life for the old monster.
Welcome to Peoria, IL sometime in the mid-1980s. A little mystery has taken hold of the post office. Letter sorters found a necklace in an envelope with the wrong address on it. It looks valuable, so that means Jasper (Tomas Boykin) will put his skills to the test to try to sleuth out who the jewelry belongs to and return it to its rightful owner.
There’s also this torn, bloody piece of paper about a kidnapping.
Filmmakers Joe DeBoer and Kyle McConaghy’s thriller Dead Mail builds on a wildly unrealistic concept: smalltown post offices with super-secure back rooms where pains are taken and spies may be accessed to solve mysteries behind lost mail. And yet, their analog approach to this period piece gives it a true crime feel you never fully shake.
The authenticity is not just in the lo-fi look—although the set design, costumes and hair are spot on. The wholly convincing performances, especially from two of the cast mates, pull you in.
Boykin’s low key, unflappable turn as the dead letter investigator quietly anchors the film—so quietly that the machinations around him are more likely to draw a “huh, I had no idea the Peoria post office went to such pains to track down lost mail” than they really should.
But the bulk of the film is carried on John Fleck’s shoulders. As Trent, the seemingly harmless organ enthusiast who has a man trapped in his basement, Fleck’s delivers magnificent work. There’s a beautiful loneliness in his performance that makes Trent irredeemably sympathetic.
DeBoer and McConaghy (Sheep’s Clothing), who co-write and co-direct, invest in character development enough to complicate your emotions. You’re genuinely sorry to see what happens to some of these characters, and yet, you just can’t hate Trent.
A couple of characters are there more for comic relief than anything, but even they are somewhat delicately drawn. And though the premise on its face is outlandish, every detail in the film convinces you you’re watching nonfiction.
Filmmaker and cast investment pays off. Dead Mail is clever, intriguing and wholly satisfying little thriller.
Back in 1993, Ang Lee scored his first Academy attention when The Wedding Banquet was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film. The marriage of convenience farce reimagined rom-com tropes and landed emotional hits thanks to nuanced direction and generous characterizations.
A generation later, director Andrew Ahn reimagines once again. His sweet film reexamines the same culture clash and romantic comedy tropes, this time with more of an insider’s viewpoint in an allegedly more progressive world.
Min (Han Gi-Chan) is a wealthy Korean man in the US, making art and living with his commitment phobic boyfriend, Chris (Bowen Yang). The couple stays in the guest house behind the home of their friends Lee (Lily Gladstone) and Angela (Kelly Marie Tran), long-committed partners living through the heartbreak, hope, and financial burden of IVF.
Min’s student visa is about to expire, and his grandmother (Oscar winner Youn Yuh-jung) has decided Min needs to return to Korea and take his place in the family business.
So, Min decides to marry a sex worker…no, wait. That’s a different movie. No, when Chris refuses Min’s sincere marriage proposal, he proposes something different. He will pay for Lee and Angela’s IVF if Angela will marry him to keep him in the country.
What follows is a dear if too broad comedic fable about found family, acceptance, and forgiveness. There’s no way Ahn—working from a script co-written with Lee’s original writing collaborator, James Schamus—could have foreseen the sinister cloud that hangs over immigrants, IVF patients, gay marriage, indigenous women, the entire LGBTQ+ population, and essentially every human represented by a character in this film.
The Wedding Banquet already feels nostalgic for a time when disapproving grandparents and medical bills were the only things a gay couple had to worry about.
That aside, Gladstone, You-jung, and Ang Lee regular Joan Chen (as Angela’s mother) are true talents. They do what they can to bring depth to their roles.
Yang struggles with the dramatic needs of his character while Tran has trouble with the comedic, but there’s charm in the mess. Ahn conjures a bubbly, romantic confection and maybe that’s needed right now.
In a sterile conference room, a man speaks to a disembodied voice coming from a speaker. The voice is trying to determine if the man is the right kind of person to go on a government retreat that will decide if he would make a suitable father. If he’s not chosen, he will instead receive a vasectomy. So begins the dystopian comedy, Daddy.
Writers/directors Neal Kelley and Jono Sherman have crafted a new kind of hellscape with their look at toxic masculinity, the fear of vulnerability, and the competition that springs from the kind of scarcity that would lead a government to screen potential parents.
As four men arrive at the scenic mountain home, we’re given bits and pieces of the world that has given rise to such a scenario. Mo (Pomme Koch) tells the others his girlfriend is at the female version of the retreat. The two decided to be screened at the same time. But while the men are housed in the lap of luxury, the women are apparently put through a more intense screening process. The subtle details that we pick up during the film’s run time make what we see on screen more interesting.
The men begin to descend into paranoia, leading to a certain amount of comedy as they try to decide what will make them seem like they’d be good fathers. The discovery of a realistic baby doll amps up the comedy.
Each actor brings a certain rigidity to their character that plays well with the idea that men have a hard time embracing their emotions. Scenes when the characters do display some vulnerability feel awkward – perfectly encapsulating how difficult some men find it to open up to other men.
When the film remembers that there is humor to be mined from such a situation, it shines. When it forgets, it becomes tedious.
However, it’s not hard to imagine this world, and Kelley and Sherman have fun wondering how men might react to the absurdity of it all.
Some of the greatest films in horror do not dwell on women in terror, but women in the throes of righteous fury. Ginger Snaps, Revenge, Alucarda, Possession, Teeth, Jennifer’s Body, The Love Witch, She Will, A Wounded Fawn, Immaculate, Ms. 45, The Craft, The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster, The Substance, American Mary—it’s a long list, each film on it more than worthy of attention.
Alas, we had to boil it down to 5. Here, recorded live with a fantastic audience at Gateway Film Center in Columbus, OH, are our picks for the 5 films that best channel female rage.
5. Watcher (2022)
If you’re a fan at all of genre films, chances are good Watcher will look plenty familiar. But in her feature debut, writer/director Chloe Okuno wields that familiarity with a cunning that leaves you feeling unnerved in urgent and important ways.
None of the beats are new, and as events escalate, others are pretty clearly telegraphed. But it’s the way Okuno (who helmed the impressive “Storm Drain” segment from V/H/S /94) slowly twists the gaslighting knife that makes the film’s hair-raising chills resonate.
Even as Julia pleads to be believed, the mounting indignities create a subtle yet unmistakable nod to a culture that expects women to ignore their better judgment for the sake of being polite.
4. Carrie (1976)
The seminal film about teen angst and high school carnage has to be Brian De Palma’s 1976 landmark adaptation of Stephen King’s first full length novel, the tale of an unpopular teenager who marks the arrival of her period by suddenly embracing her psychic powers.
Sissy Spacek is the perfect balance of freckle-faced vulnerability and awed vengeance. Her simpleton characterization would have been overdone were it not for Piper Laurie’s glorious evil zeal as her religious wacko mother. It’s easy to believe this particular mother could have successfully smothered a daughter into Carrie’s stupor.
One ugly trick at the prom involving a bucket of cow’s blood, and Carrie’s psycho switch is flipped. Spacek’s blood drenched Gloria Swanson on the stage conducting the carnage is perfectly over-the-top. And after all the mean kids get their comeuppance, Carrie returns home to the real horror show.
3. The Other Lamb (2019)
The first step toward freedom is telling your own story.
Writer C.S. McMullen and director Malgorzata Szumowska tell this one really well. Between McMullen’s outrage and the macabre lyricism of Szumowska’s camera, The Other Lamb offers a dark, angry and satisfying coming-of-age tale.
The Other Lamb does not simply suggest you question authority. It demands that you do far more than that, and do it for your own good.
2. The Nightingale
A mother’s grief is something many filmmakers see as the pinnacle in pain, the one emotion almost unimaginable in scope and depth and anguish. That’s why brilliant filmmaker Jennifer Kent begins here, using this one moment of ultimate agony to punctuate an almost unwatchable scene of brutality, to tell a tale not of this mother and her grief, but of a nation—a world—crippled by the brutality and grief of a ruling white male culture.
What happens to Clare (Aisling Franciosi) at the hands of Leftenant Hawkins (Sam Claflin), the British officer to whom she is in service, is as brutal and horrifying as anything you’re likely to see onscreen. It’s the catalyst for a revenge picture, but The Nightingale is far more than just that.
Kent’s fury fuels her film, but does not overtake it. She never stoops to sentimentality or sloppy caricature. She doesn’t need to. Her clear-eyed take on this especially ugly slice of history finds more power in authenticity than in drama.
1. Audition
The prolific director Takashi Miike made more than 70 movies in his first 20 or so years in film. Among the best is Audition, a phenomenally creepy May/December romance gone very, very wrong.
Audition tells the story of a widower convinced by his TV producer friend to hold mock television auditions as a way of finding a suitable new mate. He is repaid for his deception.
Nearly unwatchable and yet too compelling to turn away from, Audition is a remarkable piece of genre filmmaking. The slow moving picture builds anticipation, then dread, then full-on horror.
By the time Audition hits its ghastly conclusion, Miike and his exquisitely terrifying antagonist (Eihi Shina) have wrung the audience dry. She will not be the ideal stepmother.
A lot had changed in black ops, terrorism and surveillance since 1981, when Robert Littell wrote the novel and film The Amateur. The Cold War gave way to a surveillance state where it’s even easier to believe that a guy from CIA’s encryption team could undermine their entire operation.
Rami Malek plays that guy, Charlie Heller. Malek can be an acquired taste, but he brings a believable fragility and oddball quality to Heller that suits the film. When his wife—a photographer in London for a conference—is killed by terrorists, Heller uses compromising intel he has on his department head to get the training he needs to find the four responsible.
Of course, it’s all a double cross, but maybe Heller’s smart enough to have predicted that?
Director James Hawes (One Life, TV’s Slow Horses) keeps the story one step ahead of the audience, building in just enough layers to satisfy without overwhelming.
Malek’s the key ingredient. He projects a vulnerability that makes the ridiculousness believable. His is an unselfconsciously gawky, awkward performance that never leans toward caricature or mockery.
A solid supporting cast including Julianne Nicholson, Holt McCallany, Jon Bernthal, Rachel Brosnahan and Laurence Fishburn help to elevate scenes of exposition or, worse still, naked sentimentality. The script from Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli boasts a somewhat nuanced view of tech-aided murder. It also contains ham-fisted red herrings and silly moments of audience pandering.
Are there leaps in logic? More than a Bourne, fewer than a Bond. It’s the kind of laid-back spy thriller we used to get in the ‘80s and ‘90s—no gorgeous humans jet setting, no big explosions, no breathless vehicular gimmickry. Just normal looking people trying to outsmart one another and an audience that’s fitting the puzzle together as quickly as we can.
The Amateur is no masterpiece. (You should really see Black Bag.) But it is a nice change of pace.
The thing about Drop, Christopher Landon’s new first date thriller, is that we’ve seen it before. Maybe not this exact scenario, but the idea. Go all the way back to 2002’s Phone Booth, when Joel Schumacher and a self-righteous sniper trapped Colin Farrell on a pay phone. Or back to 2014 and Drop co-writer Chris Roach’s extortion-by-text-in-the-sky thriller, Non-Stop.
The point has always been that, via our technology, we’re helplessly surveilled and those watching can pull strings we don’t want pulled. It can be effective because it mines our collective reality. And Landon and a game cast keep the cat-and-mouse antics about as believable as they can be.
Meghann Fahy (The Unbreakable Boy, White Lotus) is Violet, a single mom out on her first date since the death of her abusive husband. She leaves her precocious 5-year-old Toby (bespectacled Irish internet sensation Jacob Robinson) at home with her sister (Violett Beane) and heads to a downtown Chicago high rise for a pricy dinner with too-good-to-be-true Henry (Brandon Sklenar).
But before she can even taste that calamari appetizer, Violet’s phone starts pinging with messages, including a command to check her home security footage. If Violet doesn’t kill Henry, the masked man in her living room will kill Toby.
Landon (Freaky, Happy Death Day, Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse) has a strong track record with horror comedies, but Drop is not really either. It’s a tidy thriller, and though Landon’s instinct for humor gives the first date banter a charming quality, he can’t quite direct his way out of the script’s physical limitations and storytelling contrivance.
Almost, though. Landon gives the penthouse eatery a dizzying fishbowl quality. Between savvy editing and the cast’s commitment, tensions rise with gamesmanship that usually feels fairly authentic.
But then, a dramatic convenience reminds you that this is a movie, and that no human would react as the character is reacting if, indeed, a gun was pointed at their 5-year-old.
Still, Drop exceeds low expectations mainly on the charisma of the cast and two universal fears: technology and first dates.
Nic Cage makes, what, 18 movies a year? And every tenth or so is really worth watching, maybe because it’s fun, often solely because he’s a lunatic, and once in a long while you get a Pig, a Dream Scenario, a Mandy. But more often than not you get a Gunslingers.
Written and directed by Brian Skiba, the film opens with the worst AI New York skyline, circa 1904, you’ve ever seen. The scene that sets up the film amounts to a handful of quick cuts, gunshot sounds, and the worst CGI fire you’ve ever seen.
Cut to four years later and Thomas Keller (Stephen Dorff, a consistently solid actor who deserves better roles) is looking for the mythical town of Redemption, Kentucky. There he can lay down his guns and his name and take on a new, peaceful life, like every other citizen. It’s a town full of wanted men who’ve found…subtlety is not Skiba’s strong suit.
Hold your horses! That guy who was badly CGI burned? He’s on Thomas’s trail! And so is Val (Heather Graham), an “old friend” with a 4-year-old in tow. Who could be the father? What could Val want in Redemption? And how much exposition can Heather Graham be tasked with blurting out at opportune moments?
Well, old Thomas hasn’t been a citizen of Redemption long, but he’s already got friends in Redemption: town leader Jericho (Costas Mandylor); his daughter, the bartender (Scarlet Rose Stallone); his righthand law man (Tzi Ma in the worst wig you’ve ever seen onscreen); and the town religious zealot (Cage, dressed so anachronistically like a late ‘60s hippie it’s ludicrous).
Gunslingers feels like a grade school play written by a precocious 4th grader who watched a lot of Spaghetti Westerns. Skiba presents all the main beats of the genre with none of the connective tissue that gives them context or purpose. Every scene is contrivance plus shoot out plus convenient plot turn plus Val shouting exposition followed by Cage brandishing some kind of inexplicable tracheotomy sound to his vocal delivery.
It’s probably not the worst movie Cage has made, but lord, it is not good.
The film Eric LaRue pairs two of modern cinema’s most talented and least appreciated actors: Judy Greer and Michael Shannon. Intriguingly, Shannon doesn’t appear onscreen. Instead, he makes his feature directorial debut with this emotionally raw drama about a mother’s spiral after her son murders three of his classmates.
As we meet Janice (Greer), she’s struggling just to make it through a grocery store when she runs into Pastor Steve (Paul Sparks, pitch perfect). The dynamic these two actors and their director develop in this crucial scene sets the tone for a movie unafraid to get messy and stay there.
Pastor Steve wants to help. He sincerely does. He doesn’t want to think about what happened, doesn’t want to blame anybody for anything, doesn’t want to rehash the ugliness of the incident. He wants to help this woman clean her wounds and end the infection, but definitely does not want her ripping off any scabs to get there.
Likewise, across town at the more evangelical Redeemer church, Janice’s husband Ron (Alexander Skarsgård) is being wooed into an even cleaner and more complete erasure of his pain by giving his burden to Jesus.
Janice is just not sure any of this helps. And even if it does, it’s not the help she wants.
Shannon directs a script by Brett Neveu, the screen adaptation of his own stage play. It’s a tough story, and one that’s been covered by some outstanding indie films: Fran Kranz’s 2021 chamber piece Mass, and Lynne Ramsay’s 2011 masterpiece We Need to Talk About Kevin ranking among the best.
Eric LaRue leans closer to Mass in that it examines the influence of religion on the grief, shame, and anger left after such a crime. But Shannon mines his material for a different outcome. A single moment of surreal absurdism (in a booth at Cracklin’ Jane’s restaurant) underscores the film’s cynicism concerning the good-faith efforts of religion to end suffering.
Skarsgård breaks your heart as an awkward, broken man trying desperately to move past his pain. A supporting cast including Tracy Letts, Lawrence Grimm, Kate Arrington, Nation Sage Henrikson, and especially Annie Parisse, delivers precise and authentic turns. But it’s Greer whose powerful performance—full of anger, shame, regret, longing, disappointment and most of all weariness—plays across her face in ways that seem achingly real.
Not everything works, but every performance is remarkable and there is bravery and power behind the message that life and death are messy things.
