A damaged man imposes order on his life, eventually growing confident enough in this structure to try to save someone else because he cannot save himself.
That’s right. This is a Paul Schrader movie. Like most of Schrader’s best features (First Reformed,The Card Counter, all the way back to his script for Taxi Driver) Master Gardener delivers a variation on that same riff. Lucky his characters are so compelling they keep us watching.
In this case, that character – the titular gardener – is Narvel (Joel Edgerton). Narvel tells us, via his journal: Gardening is a belief in the future, that change will come in its due time.
Is Schrader growing more optimistic? Or will we grow to hope for Narvel only to witness the worst possible outcome (a la Card Counter)? Longtime fans may get a little nervous before the general moviegoer, but either way, Schrader sets a hook early.
The other element that jumps out early is the look of this film. Schrader’s gift for visual composition has never seen so exceptional a vehicle. Fitting, given the beauty of a garden. The lovely orderliness of Narvel’s garden is set against the riotous disarray that arrives in the shape of Mya (Quintessa Swindell): sloppy clothes, hair everywhere, no plans, no future. Maya doesn’t crave orderliness. Mya just is.
What Mya is not is like her Great Aunt Norma (Sigourney Weaver, letter perfect as the wealthy matriarch of the estate). Norma has arranged for Mya to apprentice on the property. She’d like Narvel, or “Sweet Pea” as she calls him, to look after the girl.
The arrival of this outsider sets wheels in motion. Narvel’s once orderly world now falls victim to his own past, drug dealers, the Feds. Edgerton’s a solid choice for the role, stoic but roiling with regret and quietly desperate for redemption. Swindell’s free spirit, tempered with the justifiable righteousness of youth, offers an excellent counterweight and Weaver outshines them all, stealing every inch of scene she’s in.
But they don’t have enough to do. Redemption feels unearned. Drug addiction is treated as too easily overcome. Most troubling is the way racism is skirted throughout the film.
“Gardening is the manipulation of the natural world, the creation of order out of disorder,” Narvel tells us. Filmmaking can provide much the same exercise. But forgiveness comes too easy for this damaged antihero, and Master Gardener feels too much like Schrader light.
For this latest reimagining of the classic story, director Benjamin Millepied credits inspiration from Prosper Mérimée’s originalnovella from 1845, and Alexander Pushkin’s poem “The Gypsies” from 1824.
Flashing more modern vibrancy through culturally rich music and dance, this new Carmen arrives as a wonder of visionary composition that struggles to find an equally compelling connection to its characters.
The writing team of Loic Barrere, Alexander Dinelaris and Lisa Loomer crafts a surface-level tale of lovers on the run. Aidan (Paul Mescal) is a troubled Marine veteran volunteering on a night patrol along the Mexican border, while Carmen (Melissa Barrera) is trying to cross after the death of her mother. A violent altercation leads to casualties, and the two are soon trying to stay one step ahead of authorities.
Millepied (choreographer and co-star of Black Swan) knows his way around a dance number, getting an assist from flamenco specialist Marina Tamayo for sequences that sport some thrilling fluidity. The acclaimed talents of cinematographer Jörg Widmer (The Tree of Life, V for Vendetta) and composer Nicholas Britell (Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk) are also on full display, rounding out a veteran stable of technical skill that consistently lifts the film’s imagery and scope.
Mescal (Aftersun) continues to show a gift for quiet nuance, Barrera (In the Heights, Scream, Scream VI) finally breaks out of her reliance on posing, and the veteran Rossy de Palma (various Almodóvar projects) steals scenes as a savvy nightclub owner, but the script seems content to keep depth at a distance.
Pushkin’s centuries-old themes of noble savages and the tragedy of life are too often given a heavy hand, needing a rescue by the visual poetry on display.
This Carmen tells us “dancing will you heal you.” Indeed, it’s one of the cures for what ails a less than passionate romance.
The Seventh Seal, Blindness, Carriers, Rabid, Mayhem, Masque of the Red Death, Infection, Flesh + Blood, The Crazies – all amazing movies exploring our communal fear of contagion. They pick that scab, so to speak, but are there others that do it better?
Our two rules: no zombies, no living beasties (The Thing, Shivers, etc.) Just some kind of virus. Here goes!
5. Pontypool (2008)
Canadian director Bruce McDonald’s shock jock horror film is best appreciated as a metaphor on journalistic responsibility and the damage that words can do. Radio air personality and general pot-stirrer Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie) finds himself kicked out of yet another large market and licking his wounds in the small time – Pontypool, Ontario, to be exact. But he’s about to find himself at the epicenter of a national emergency.
McDonald uses sound design and the cramped, claustrophobic space of the radio studio to wondrous effect as Mazzy and his producers broadcast through some kind of mad epidemic, with Mazzy goosing on the mayhem in the name of good radio. As he listens to callers describe the action, and then be eaten up within it, the veteran McHattie compels attention while McDonald tweaks tensions.
Shut up or die is the tagline for the film. Fitting, as it turns out that what’s poisoning the throng, turning them into a mindless, violent mob, are the very words spewing at them. It’s a clever premise effectively executed, and while McDonald owes debts all around to previous efforts, his vision is unique enough to stand out and relevant enough to leave an impression.
4. Antiviral (2012)
If you could catch Kim Kardashian’s cold, would you?
This is the intriguing concept behind writer/director Brandon Cronenberg’s seething commentary on celebrity obsession, Antiviral.
Young Syd March (Caleb Landry Jones) works for a clinic dealing in a very specific kind of treatment. They harvest viruses from willing celebrities, encrypt them (so they can’t spread – no money if you can’t control the spread), and sell the illnesses to obsessed fans who derive some kind of bodily communion with their adored by way of a shared herpes virus. Gross.
But the ambitious Syd pirates these viruses by injecting himself first, before the encryption. Eventually, his own nastiness-riddled blood is more valuable than he is, and he has to find a way out of quite a pickle. Maybe vitamin C?
3. It Comes at Night (2017)
Deep in the woods, Paul (Joel Edgerton, solid as always), Sarah (Carmen Ejogo) and their teenage son Travis (Kelvin Harrison, Jr.) have established a cautious existence in the face of a worldwide plague. They have boarded their windows, secured their doors, and enacted a very strict set of rules for survival.
At the top of that list: do not go out at night.
Writer/director Trey Edward Shults explores the confines of the house with a fluid camera and lush cinematography, slyly creating an effective sense of separation between the occupants and the dangers outside. But what are those dangers, and how much of the soul might one offer up to placate fear itself? In asking those unsettling questions, It Comes at Night becomes a truly chilling exploration of human frailty.
2. It Follows (2014)
It Follows is another coming-of-age tale, one that mines a primal terror. Moments after a sexual encounter with a new boyfriend, Jay (Maika Monroe) discovers that she is cursed. He has passed on some kind of entity – a demonic menace that will follow her until it either kills her or she passes it on to someone else the same way she got it.
Yes, it’s the STD or horror movies, but don’t let that dissuade you. Mitchell understands the anxiety of adolescence and he has not simply crafted yet another cautionary tale about premarital sex.
Mitchell has captured that fleeting yet dragging moment between childhood and adulthood and given the lurking dread of that time of life a powerful image. There is something that lies just beyond the innocence of youth. You feel it in every frame and begin to look out for it, walking toward you at a consistent pace, long before the characters have begun to check the periphery themselves.
Mitchell’s provocatively murky subtext is rich with symbolism but never overwhelmed by it. His capacity to draw an audience into this environment, this horror, is impeccable, and the result is a lingering sense of unease that will have you checking the perimeter for a while to come.
1. 28 Days Later (2002)
Activists break into a research lab and free the wrong effing monkeys.
28 days later, bike messenger Jim wakes up naked on an operating table.
What follows is the eerie image of an abandoned, desolate London as Jim wanders hither and yon hollering for anybody. In the church, we get our first glimpse of what Jim is now up against, and dude, run!
Prior to 28 Days Later, the zombie genre seemed finally dead and gone. But director Danny Boyle single-handedly resurrected the genre with two new(ish) ideas: 1) they aren’t dead, 2) therefore, they can move really quickly.
Both Brendan Gleeson and Cillian Murphy are impeccable actors, and Naomie Harris is a truly convincing badass. Their performances, and the cinematic moments of real joy, make their ordeal that much more powerful. But you know you’re in trouble from the genius opening sequence: vulnerability, tension, bewilderment, rage, and blood – it launches a frantic and terrifying not-zombie film.
Following three increasingly competent features (Easier with Practice, C.O.G., The Stanford Prison Experiment), filmmaker Kyle Patrick Alvarez moved into episodic television. His return to feature length feels a bit more like TV than film, but Crater marks new territory for Alvarez in family entertainment.
The Disney+ feature, written by John Griffin (also mainly TV), follows a quintet of adolescents on a joyride across the moon.
The effortlessly charming Mckenna Grace (Ghostbusters: Afterlife) is the new kid on the helium mining colony. Caleb (Isaiah Russell-Bailey) and his buddies need her to help them break into the basement garage so they can hotwire a rover and take it to the “crater” Isaiah’s dad was always talking about. They never expected her to want to go with them.
The film’s anticapitalism message (ironic coming from Disney) is welcome, as we commiserate with the five children of miners – each with no future outside of mining, except for Isaiah. When Isaiah’s father died in the mine, the insurance money bought his now-orphaned son a ticket off this rock.
But first, the kids go on an epic adventure that will change their lives.
It feels about as pre-packaged as it sounds, very Goonies or Stand By Me, but slicker, tidier and without the soul. Grace has proven to be nothing but an authentic talent since toddlerhood, really announcing her skill in 2017’s Gifted. But she’s given no real opportunity to create a character here.
Her co-stars struggle even more. Russell-Bailey can’t dig deep enough to manage the life-altering grief or rage a kid in his position would face, but at least his backstory is unveiled slowly. Isaiah’s best friend (Billy Barratt) just announces his trauma, then stares doe-eyed at both Grace and Russell-Bailey for the balance of the film. This isn’t a knock on the performance as much as it is the script and direction.
Crater cobbles together a lot of cliched ideas but can’t find any depth to explore. Instead Alvarez delivers a superficial and forgettable road trip movie in space.
I understand and respect that there is an audience for Book Club: The Next Chapter. I see the draw in watching characters in their Seventies – vital, beautiful, rich women, who have men that adore them exactly as they are, and healthy, supportive friends who are always ready for an adventure. May we all have such a third act.
It’s a lovely fantasy. But it’s a bad movie.
Back in 2018, director Bill Holderman introduced us to a quartet of lifelong friends whose monthly book club turned a little ribald when Viv (Jane Fonda) recommended 50 Shades of Grey. Everybody got horny, one marriage was saved, and four remarkable talents got to spend 90 harmless if uninspired minutes onscreen together.
Fast forward five years and one Covid lockdown and the besties are finally able to host their monthly meetup in person again. Just in time, too, because Viv is engaged! So Carol (Mary Steenburgen), Diane (Diane Keaton) and Sharon (Candice Bergen) decide a bachelorette trip to Italy is in order. Madcap!
The stakes are low and the wine is flowing, the police stations and jail cells are remarkably clean and free from riffraff, the comedy is broad and the life lessons are frequent but not too painful. Consequences are entirely nonexistent, but that’s because this is a fantasy. It’s a geriatric Sex and the City episode.
Holderman, writing again with Erin Simms, mercifully avoids jokes made at the expense of the characters. We laugh with them more often than we laugh at them. Holderman and his film respect these mature characters, which is a nice change of pace.
And, of course, Keaton, Bergen, Steenburgen and Fonda can act. They’re not asked to for this particular film, but we’re aware that they have the capacity. Fonda has two Oscars, Steenburgen and Keaton have one apiece, and bringing up the rear, Bergen has a nomination. And the best Book Club: The Next Chapter can think to do with them is have them model wedding dresses.
At least they’re not in a wing eating competition, I guess. And that’s actually where Holderman deserves praise, because he’s not making a great movie. He’s not even making a very good movie. But he’s making a movie for a target audience, and it’s a group of people who’ve lived through enough drama and trauma, cynicism and tragedy. That’s not what they want. They want a fantasy where there are no money issues, no health issues, all their friends are alive and well and still with them, and romance abounds.
Zoe (Lily James) is having trouble pitching her next documentary. The execs want something upbeat, so she spitballs about her childhood friend, Kazim (Shazad Latif), who’s decided to let his Pakistani parents arrange a marriage for him. Why doesn’t Zoe follow him through all the steps of marrying a stranger?
What will they call this documentary? Meet the Parents…First? My Big Fat Arranged Wedding?
They go with: Love, Contractually.
That’s actually a great nod, since Emma Thompson is in this movie. (And aside from the ’93 Tina Turner biopic, there is also a 2013 documentary called What’s Love Got to Do with It by Rohena Gera that follows eight people in India who’ve decided on arranged marriage. From what I can tell, this movie has no direct relation to that except that everyone is having trouble coming up with an original title.)
Thompson, by the way, is a hoot as Zoe’s mum because she’s a remarkable performer who elevates everything she’s in.
What’s Love… treads similar themes as Michael Showalter’s 2017 The Big Sick. It does not live up to that comparison, but what could? That film was brilliant, touching, authentic and hilarious. This one is safe.
Both films expose the conflict between falling in love and living up to a family’s expectations. WLGTDWI goes one step further by also watching Zoe’s struggle over whether to settle or live up to her own expectations of love.
Kazim’s choice stems from the fact that he’s not sure he even believes in love, or in “in love”, and he’s weary from trying. Meanwhile, Zoe sees herself as a fairy tale princess who can’t find the kind of love she feels she’s been promised. So, she repeatedly makes terrible, often drunken decisions that she immediately regrets in her search for her handsome prince.
There’s also a very big question about what to do with well-meaning but overbearing parents who continue to pressure you well into your thirties. And that’s a lot for one movie to cover. Director Shekhar Kapur (Elizabeth, Elizabeth: The Golden Age) keeps it warm – there really are no villains here – while Jemima Khan’s script offers messy, human characters you can identify with.
The point is, marry your best friend. Which is good advice, and Latif and James have a wonderful, lived-in friendship, but no real chemistry. The film does what it can to resolve the issues it raises, but that last gasp “will they or won’t they” felt more like “do I really want them to?”
Even if James Gunn had forgotten that his Guardians of the Galaxy formula was plenty familiar, the way Dungeons and Dragons just repackaged it would serve as a winning reminder.
So for the finale of the Guardians trilogy, writer/director Gunn smartly adds some unexpected layers to the good-natured humor and superhero action.
How unexpected? Well, if you had existential tumult and Return of the Jedi homages on your bingo card, congratulations to you. But if you figured Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) as the catalyst, think again.
Gunn wants us to know that this whole story has been Rocket’s all along.
Peter is indeed still hurting from losing Gamora (Zoe Saldana) to memory loss, but it’s a threat to the life of Rocket (voice of Bradley Cooper) that gets him back with Drax (Dave Bautista), Nebula (Karen Gillan), Groot (voice of Vin Diesel) and Mantis (Pom Klementieff) – with yes, help from Gamora – for one last ride.
The mission? Stop the “High Evolutionary” (Chukwudi Iwuji) on his quest to program evolution until perfection is achieved. The themes are heady, with both echoes of the past and callouts to the current “burn it all down” crowd, but Gunn still finds plenty of room for goofy laughs, warm camaraderie, and real heart.
Plus, mean Gamora is so much more fun than righteous Gamora. Drax and Mantis continue to be a joyous mismatch of besties and Gillen’s deadpan delivery is maybe more funny in this episode than any other.
Gunn’s MCU sendoff retains his trademark mischievous humor and fondness for raucous violence. The action sequences here match anything Gunn has done previously, while Rocket’s origin story packs Volume 3 with an unexpected emotional wallop.
When Gunn joined the MCU for 2014’s first GoG episode, he made his silly mastery of the blockbuster known. With ruffian charm, Rocket and the gang deliver deeper, more believably touching chemistry now than they did then. Volume 3 is a fitting, emotional, madcap swan song.
Ghosts! Maybe the first ever scary idea in all of history, the first thing to haunt our dreams. To give us the word haunt. Ghosts have been a staple of horror for as long as there was such a thing, so it was with great difficulty that we narrowed down our five favorite ghosts in horror movies.
We welcome director George Popov back to the podcast to run down the whole list. Keep up to date on his Sideworld documentary series and grab the cool merch we talk about by visiting sideworld.co.uk and following them on Twitter @Sideworld._UK, Facebook @SideworldUK and Instagram @sideworld_uk.
5. Santi in Devil’s Backbone (2001)
The Devil’s Backbone unravels a spectral mystery during Spain’s civil war. The son of a fallen comrade finds himself in an isolated orphanage that has its own troubles to deal with, now that the war is coming to a close and the facility’s staff sympathized with the wrong side. That leaves few resources to help him with a bully, a sadistic handyman, or the ghost of a little boy he keeps seeing.
Backbone is a slow burn as interested in atmosphere and character development as it is in the tragedy of a generation of war orphans. This is ripe ground for a haunted tale, and writer/director Guillermo del Toro’s achievement is both contextually beautiful – war, ghost stories, religion and communism being equally incomprehensible to a pack of lonely boys – and elegantly filmed.
Plus the ghost looks awesome. Del Toro would go on to create some of cinema’s more memorable creatures, and much of that genius was predicted in the singular image of a drowned boy, bloody water droplets floating about him, his insides as vivid as his out.
Touching, political, brutal, savvy, and deeply spooky, Backbone separates del Toro from the pack of horror filmmakers and predicts his own potential as a director of substance.
4. Jennett Humfrye in The Woman in Black (2012)
Director James Watkins was fresh off his underseen, wickedly frightening Eden Lake. Screenwriter Jane Goldman (working from Susan Hill’s novel) had recently written the films Kick-Ass and X-Men: First Class, both of which are awesome. And star Daniel Radcliffe had done something or other that people remembered…
I’d have been worried that Radcliffe chose another supernatural adventure as his first big, post-Hogwarts adventure were it not for the filmmaking team putting the flick together. Goldman’s witty intelligence and Watkins’s sense of what scares us coalesce beautifully in this eerie little nightmare.
A remake of a beloved if rarely shown BBC film, the big screen version is a spooky blast of a ghost story. It makes savvy use of old haunted house tropes, updating them quite successfully, and its patient pace and slow reveal leads to more of a wallop than you usually find in such a gothic tale. Glimpses, movements, shadows—all are filmed to keep your eyes darting around the screen, your neck craned for a better look. It’s classic haunted house direction and misdirection laced with more modern scares.
3. Toshio in Ju-On: The Grudge (2002)
Yuya Ozeki was 5 years old when his melancholy, cherubic little face first appeared in Takashi Shimizu’s Ju-On: The Grudge. He’d reprise his role as Toshio in Shimizu’s Japanese sequel as well as his English language remake of the original.
Ozeki’s presence onscreen is the perfect combination of adorable and terrifying. He sticks around this one hours, makes a mess, runs his little feet all over the place, sometimes meows.
The real gut punch of The Grudge series is that the ghosts are inescapable. You are doomed from the moment you set foot in Toshio and Kakayo’s home. It’s a way that the film perverts expectations of the gothic tale, and that corruption of something elegant is no more perfectly encapsulated than in the guide of little Toshio.
2. The Staff in The Others (2001)
Writer/director Alejandro Amenábar casts a spell that recalls The Innocents in his 2001 ghost story The Others. It’s 1945 on a small isle off Britain, and the brittle mistress of the house (Nicole Kidman) wakes screaming. She has reason to be weary. Her husband has still not returned from the war, her servants have up and vanished, and her two children, Anna and Nicholas, have a deathly photosensitivity: sunlight or bright light could kill them.
The new staff – Mrs. Mills (Fionnula Flanagan), Mr. Tuttle (Eric Sykes) and Lydia (Elaine Cassidy) – is here to help. Amenábar uses these three beautiful performances as a way to talk to Kidman’s harried mum as well as the audience. Flanagan, in particular, is brilliant.
What unspools is a beautifully constructed film using slow reveal techniques to upend traditional ghost story tropes, unveiling the mystery in a unique and moving way.
1. Delbert Grady in The Shining (1980)
Have we talked about this movie before? As is true with The Others, The Shining offers a smorgasbord of ghosts to choose from: Lloyd the bartender, the little Grady sisters, the old lady in the bathtub, the guy in the bear suit. But we settled on Grady because he may come across like the help, but don’t let that fool you. Grady’s the one in charge.
In one of the greatest single scenes in a horror film – and one that contains no murder at all – Delbert quietly clarifies the power structure at work for Mr. Torrence.
Stanley Kubrick’s camera is, per usual, meticulous in creating an atmosphere that mirrors this shift in power. Jack Nicholson’s transformation from smug to obedient is glorious. But it’s longtime character actor Philip Stone who nails the terrifying nuance that amounts to the most pivotal moment in Kubrick’s masterpiece.
