After a series of short films, writer/director Thomas Hardiman should have no problem getting noticed with this first feature. Medusa Deluxe is a finely constructed neo-noir mystery that is visually engaging from the opening minutes.
The setting inside a hair styling competition feels unique, full of well-drawn characters, a lively ensemble, and dialog that dances in and out of camp. But a good whodunit also needs a good reason to care who done it, with a feeling of well-earned satisfaction once the big reveal hits.
Hardiman takes us backstage as the stylists and models are prepping for the show, and reeling from the news that Mosca (John Alan Roberts), one of the favorites to win, has been found dead.
And not just dead, but scalped. Yikes.
Cleve (a completely dazzling Clare Perkins) is working on a model’s multi-layered ‘do while leading the discussion about just what the hell is up and worrying about what they’ll all tell the cops. And Mosca’s husband Angel (Luke Pasqualino) still hasn’t been told, so Rene (Darrel D’Silva) is preparing to break that news, along with another secret he’s been keeping.
There’s a lot going on!
Hardiman and cinematographer Robbie Ryan stay just as busy, with a free-flowing, faux single-take approach that’s pulled off with some pretty nifty precision. And while the attention to technical craftsmanship mirrors what’s happening with the hair, you eventually start itching for more substance in this mystery.
The long, tracking shots that follow characters as they walk begin to feel excessive, and resonant moments of character building get upstaged by histrionics. As accusations about bribes and black market Propecia are thrown around, the killer’s unmasking lands as a bit anticlimactic.
There’s little doubt Hardiman has camera skills. When his storytelling catches up, watch out. For now, Medusa Deluxe is an interesting blast of hair-raising madness that could use some more volume.
Milton (Ben Kingsley) walks to every town council meeting to recommend, when the time comes for citizen suggestions, that the town change its motto from “a good place to call home” to “a good place to refer to as home” in case it confuses people looking for somewhere to phone home.
He’d also like to see a crosswalk on Trent Avenue between Frost and Allegheny.
Oh, and an alien spaceship crash landed in his backyard and took out most of his azaleas, so if anyone knows what to do about that…
Director Marc Turtletaub, working from a script by Gavin Steckler, reimagines E.T. with his charming suburban sci-fi, Jules. Rather than a group of kids determined to hide their alien friend from grownups, its Milton, Sandy (Harriet Sansom Harris) and Joyce (Jane Curtin) – three elderly singles – doing the same.
Because the truth is, it would be hard for kids to pull something like this off nowadays. In the Eighties, sure – nobody was watching us then. But today? No, the innocents who go unnoticed these days are in their eighties.
The cleverness of the concept is bittersweet, as are the performances. Curtin’s a hoot and Kingsley’s characteristically spot-on, but it’s Harris’s open, joyful performance that holds the story together.
The veteran actors immediately gel as three lonesome individuals who come together over the shared fascination and protectiveness brought out by their new friend, Jules. Or Gary. Joyce thinks he looks more like a Gary.
A line running through the film parallels the wild circumstances with aging, and in particular, with dementia. Naturally, Milton’s behavior is not taken seriously and rather considered proof that he may need to be looked after. The fact that there is some truth to that worry haunts the film and adds texture to the otherwise lighthearted antics.
Turtletaub can’t quite pull those threads together, though. While Jules is a lovely film, its big-hearted take on mental health and science fiction made me just want to watch Colin West’s somewhat similar but vastly superior Linoleumagain.
Still, Jules is a dear, gentle film that gets in some decent laughs.
Writer/director Corey Stanton (Robbery) gets a great return on his investment with his one-actor/one-location movie, Trader.
Well, primarily one actor.
While she occasionally talks to some folks on the phone, the majority of the film falls on Kimberly-Sue Murray’s (Freeform’s Shadow Hunters) shoulders. She plays an unnamed sociopathic loner in a dingy, unfurnished apartment, who starts off the film by scamming an older man out of his credit card details.
She’s ambitious. And with the seven grand in her bank account, she educates herself about the stock market and becomes a day trader. After her bets start to pay off, she craves a seat at the “high-rollers table” and wants to get a face-to-face meeting with the bosses at a major brokerage firm.
And she’s willing to assume a lot of risk to do so.
Stanton and Murray manage to keep the momentum of the piece up despite the potential for audience fatigue at seeing the same person/location for an hour and a half. As her fortunes rise, the Trader revamps her apartment, which helps. She invests in programable lights that shift from green to red to reflect the changing market. The Trader also slips in and out of different personas with distinctive accents as she chats on the phone to set various scams in motion.
And then there’s her inner life, which is depicted in moody black and white and provides a contrast to the usual look of the film. And, of course, there’s the trip she takes on some sort of new mind-altering drug to get a stock tip via vision quest. Any scene that starts with someone blending raw eggs, tomatoes, wasabi, a loose-leaf sheet of paper filled with inspirational quotes, and three times the amount of an experimental hallucinogenic in a bullet-blender and downing it like it’s a shot is bound to be memorable.
Despite Stanton’s best efforts to educate me on how day-trading works and the terminology involved, I did feel somewhat adrift on what exactly was happening from a financial perspective as the film neared its climax. But it was easy enough to get the gist.
Overall, this movie was a winner and an inspirational example of how to get a big bang for your buck.
A compelling documentary providing context for the Očeti Šakówin’s[1] Land Back movement, Lakota Nation vs. the United States aims to help viewers understand the past so that remedies can be made to redress historical wrongs.
If I can beg your indulgence for a moment, I’m going to break the fourth wall of movie reviewership a bit.
I graduated high school in the late 1900s (as my kid would say). At that time, the school’s mascot was the Redskin. A six-foot-tall mannequin dressed in buckskins and feathers stood in the lobby opposite the administration offices to greet the almost entirely (at the time) White student body. There was a vocal minority of folks who viewed the mascot as pretty tasteless at the time, but it didn’t get retired and exchanged until 2021. You’d think that would be a sign that the district was moving in the right direction. And things did seem hopeful.
Until the school district passed a resolution banning so-called “critical race theory” in 2022.
Teachers there are no longer allowed to give assignments that ask students to question (among other things) their race, ethnicity, or culture in a way that might be “derogatory.” They can’t ask kids to question possible privilege or reflect on oppression. And this kind of thing is happening in other districts around the country.
How, then, can we talk about the history of the United States? How can we grow as individuals and as a nation without reflecting on our past? Identifying what worked and what didn’t and trying to make better choices as we make contemporary decisions?
Directors Jesse Short Bull and Laura Tomaselli lay out why it’s important to look critically at the past as it relates specifically to the Očeti Šakówin’s ownership of the area around the Black Hills in Lakota Nation vs. the United States.
See, in 1868 the US made a nation-to-nation treaty with the Očeti Šakówin to wrap up a war that the indigenous folks were doing really well at. In the treaty, the US specified a territory that was for the exclusive use of the indigenous folks and that US citizens had no right to step foot on.
But, shortly thereafter gold was discovered in them thar’ hills and the US started breaking its word so folks could weasel their way back in there and start pocketing shiny rocks. Land was stolen. To mark their supremacy over the land, four white guy’s faces were carved into the Očeti Šakówin’s sacred Black Hills. The US still wants that land, but this time it’s more for fossil fuels.
In Part 1, Extinction, the directors explain how initial contact with White settlers impacted native people and how the educational system and White-created pop culture helped reframe a story of invasion as a White self-defense narrative. In Part II, Assimilation, they describe how systematic economic destabilization, land allotment, and an abusive boarding school system tried to destroy Lakota culture so that it would be easier for Whites to take the land and resources. In Part III, Reparation, they describe the development of the modern Land Back movement and how the Očeti Šakówin’s refused a meager offer from the US to pay them for the stolen land. They want the land itself.
Short Bull and Tomaselli weave together vintage educational film strips, old Hollywood movies, news clips, poetry, interviews with members of the Očeti Šakówin, and stunning views of the Black Hills landscape to create a beautiful visual essay about the value of reflecting on the mistakes of American history.
Does it address uncomfortable truths? Yes. Does it require thinking about privilege and oppression? Yes. But it’s also an opportunity to look back, understand a different point of view, and try to do better moving forward.
It’s an invitation to think about the land differently. It’s an opportunity to learn how to treat people better. It’s moving portrait of a resilient, hopeful, people. It’s a movie that should be shown in schools.
It’s just too bad that the history teachers at my high school and schools in similar districts around the country are now banned from showing anything like it.
[1] The name for the Lakota, Nakota, and Dakota indigenous peoples.
Who had the genius idea of counting down the best siege movies in horror? Why, it was our friend Dustin Meadows – filmmaker, actor, composer, comic and all around awesome dude. So awesome that he brought filmmaker Alison Locke (The Apology) to the club and we ranked the best bloody sieges in horror.
5. 30 Days of Night (2007)
A horde of very nasty vampires descend upon an arctic town cut off from civilization and facing 30 solid days of night. A pod of survivors hides in an attic, careful not to make any noise or draw any attention to themselves. One old man has dementia, which generates a lot of tension in the group, since he’s hard to contain and keep quiet.
There’s no knowing whether the town has any other survivors, and some of these guys are getting itchy. Then they hear a small voice outside.
Walking and sobbing down the main drag is a little girl, crying for help. It’s as pathetic a scene as any in such a film, and it may be the first moment in the picture where you identify with the trapped, who must do the unthinkable. Because, what would you do?
As the would-be heroes in the attic begin to understand this ploy, the camera on the street pulls back to show Danny Huston and crew perched atop the nearby buildings. The sobbing tot amounts to the worm on their reel.
Creepy business!
4. From Dusk till Dawn (1996)
This one represents a kind of backwards siege. Our heroes (though most of them are hardly heroic) are trapped inside the villain’s lair already and have to fight them off from there. But they only have to keep these vampires at bay until dawn.
You have everything you need for a good siege movie. A horde of baddies, a trapped group of characters whose true character will be revealed, scrappy weapons making, traitors in the midst, and the desperate hope to make it til morning.
Robert Rodiguez impresses with Tarantino’s south of the border tale with an outrageous and thoroughly entertaining mixture of sex, blood and bad intentions.
3. Dog Soldiers (2002)
Wry humor, impenetrable accents, a true sense of isolation and blood by the gallon help separate Neil Marshall’s (The Descent) Dog Soldiers from legions of other wolfmen tales.
Marshall creates a familiarly tense feeling, brilliantly straddling monster movie and war movie. A platoon is dropped into an enormous forest for a military exercise. There’s a surprise attack. The remaining soldiers hunker down in an isolated cabin to mend, figure out WTF, and strategize for survival.
This is like any good genre pic where a battalion is trapped behind enemy lines – just as vivid, bloody and intense. Who’s gone soft? Who will risk what to save a buddy? How to outsmart the enemy?
But the enemies this time are giant, hairy, hungry monsters. Woo hoo!
2. Green Room (2015)
Young punk band the Ain’t Rights is in desperate need of a paying gig, even if it is at a rough private club for the “boots and braces” crowd (i.e. white power skinheads). Bass guitarist Pat (Anton Yelchin) eschews social media promotion for the “time and aggression” of live shows, and when he accidentally witnesses a murder in the club’s makeshift green room, Pat and his band find plenty of both.
As he did with Blue Ruin, Saulnier plunges unprepared characters into a world of casual savagery, finding out just what they have to offer in a nasty backwoods standoff. It’s a path worn by Straw Dogs, Deliverance, and plenty more, but Saulnier again shows a knack for establishing his own thoughtful thumbprint.
1. Aliens (1986)
“Game over, man! Game over!”
That was the moment. The Marines believed they were in for a bug hunt. Ripley knew better. And now they were trapped. Surrounded.
The scene where the Marines and company see that they are outnumbered and out maneuvered by their xenomorph opponents is a jumping off moment for James Cameron. More action film than horror, Aliens still terrifies with sound design, production design, and the realization that these beasties are organized.
A modern celebration of classic Japanese V-cinema (their version of DTV genre fare), director Kensuke Sonomura’s Bad City unleashes a furious, fist-flying tale of crime, corruption, and righteous retribution. The story is a tale as old as time: a diabolical businessman (Lily Franky) is in league with the Korean mafia and local politicians. His goal? To bring “prosperity” to Kaiko City by bringing in casinos that no one but the rich wants. His methods? Bribery, blackmail, and murder. All that stand in his way are a handful of good cops and some honorable Yakuza with aligned interests.
At the center of it is 60-year-old genre stalwart Hitoshi Ozawa (Dead or Alive, Gozu), who also wrote the screenplay. His knowledge of and experience in Yakuza cinema comes in mighty handy here, as does his charisma and still-formidable physical prowess. He’s an absolute powerhouse as the unflappable Captain Torada and he’s surrounded by equally great supporting castmates including Tak Sakaguchi, Masanori Mimoto, Katsuya, Mitsu Dan, Akane Sakanoue, Masaya Kato, and the aforementioned Franky.
There’s nothing wholly original on display in terms of narrative, but that matters not, as Sonomura and Ozawa are aiming for grandiosity over complexity, even amidst their low budget. The plot is still filled with twists, turns, and double-crosses, but the pace moves with breakneck speed. It plows through subplots and arcs like it’s tearing through an entire season of television, ultimately offering up a narrative that is as dense as it is straightforward.
Any danger of monotony in terms of pulp crime storytelling and exposition is wiped away by the action itself. While there is the occasional moment of gun violence, the bulk of the fighting is brutal hand-to-hand combat. Fists, knives, baseball bats, pipes, and even a loudspeaker are utilized as criminals and cops wail on each other to the point of exhaustion. The fights constantly swing back and forth between martial arts, vicious groundwork, and barroom-style brawls. Said action is further punctuated by some absolutely stellar foley work, making each punch, kick, and stab sound even more painful than it looks. Throw in the fact that many of the characters are wearing sneakers – one has to be comfortable on the brawling move after all – and the bouts often sound like a massacre playing out on a basketball court.
Simply put, this is a killer slice of low budget action cinema.
Stop if you’ve heard this one before… good-hearted, small-time criminals get caught up in a web of violence and forces far beyond their control, with a dash of social commentary and vague nods toward the senselessness of the universe and fate.
Mob Land, the feature film debut from Nicholas Maggio, could at a distance be mistaken for any number of neo-noirs it borrows heavily from. Strong, silent Shelby Conners (Shiloh Fernandez) relies on what work he can get—legal and otherwise—to support his family in rural Alabama. When his brother-in-law Trey (Kevin Dillon) comes up with a plan to rob a local pill mill, Shelby tags along as wheelman.
Both men of course end up over their heads and soon have to tangle with the ruthless New Orleans mob outfit that runs the clinic, as well as local law enforcement, headed up by a sheriff who exudes “too old for this” with each gruff word.
When it comes to showing its influences on screen, Mob Land is as unlucky as Shelby and Trey. The movie has the guts to take from more incisive forebears, and it’s hard not to make running comparisons. It’s also hampered by a script from Maggio that always feels right on the cusp of making a point about its characters and the hands they are dealt. But here again, it lacks the follow-through to turn its stars into more than the slightly off-discount versions of the brand name version.
The dialogue and character choices are likely too great for any ensemble to overcome, but Mob Land has brief flashes of a world where a less restrained pastiche might have worked. John Travolta’s performance as the tired sheriff is reserved to the point of redundancy. It serves mainly as a reminder that he deserves to find the right vehicle for this stage of his career.
But it falls to Stephen Dorff’s mob hitman Clayton as the prime example of how Mob Land stretches out the seams of the influences it wants to inhabit. Clayton is the AI output of an Anton Chigurh text generator. An unstoppable force with questionable morals who speaks almost entirely in empty aphorisms for the whole movie, Dorff tries valiantly to add dimensionality to the part. That it almost works is a testament to the actor, whose eclectic filmography belies how good he is in the right part.
Story aside, credit to Maggio as a director. Along with cinematographer Nick Matthews, Maggio elevates the film’s limited settings to deliver a believably lived-in southern noir. As by-the-numbers as much else seems, Mob Land takes an effective approach to the creeping dread and violence that tear apart Shelby’s world.
These touches aren’t enough to salvage the film, but they do keep it from being outright bad. Worse, Mob Land is mostly forgettable, perhaps the greater sin for a noir. There are echoes of the poverty porn of Hell or High Water, and more than a few heaping doses of the Coen brothers.
It’s all thrown together too haphazardly, and with little room left for Mob Land to have something to say of its own that we haven’t already heard before.
The police work on display in The Night of the 12th (La nuit du 12) is methodical, committed, and sometimes intense. You can say the same about the filmmaking.
Director and co-writer Dominick Moll introduces his latest as a retelling of a “based on true events” unsolved case that still haunts a veteran French police captain. But as he unveils the facts of the investigation in an intimate and calculating manner, Moll deftly brings more universal concerns to the forefront.
Yohan Vives (Bastien Bouillon) rises to Le capitaine after a retirement on the force, and it’s at the going-away party for the retiree that we first glimpse the signs of a generational divide.
Not long after Yohan’s promotion, 21-year old Clara Royer (Lula Cotton-Frapier) is attacked and killed while walking home from a party. And as Yohan digs into the details of the life Clara had been living, he starts to realize that something’s also “amiss” between men and women.
Moll (With a Friend Like Harry…, Lemming, Only the Animals) pulls off a tricky balancing act here. He brings a detached, documentary-like approach to the investigation itself, but adds layers of humanity through Yohan’s growing obsession with the case, and the B story involving an older investigator named Marceau (Bouli Lanners).
Marceau’s marriage is suddenly in serious trouble, and the effect this has on his approach to Clara’s case brings the narrative threads together with a weary resignation. Bouillon and Lanners are terrific leads amid a first-rate ensemble that includes Pauline Serieys as Clara’s grieving best friend and Anouk Grinberg as a sympathetic judge who urges Yohan not to give up on the case.
Cinematographer Patrick Ghiringhelli immerses us in the imposing beauty of the French Alps, while Moll’s Memories of Murder setup gradually adopts a more Cormac McCarthy worldview, but it’s one more focused on how that world views women, young or old.
This is a completely absorbing crime drama, and one that is not afraid to reach beyond its local jurisdiction. By the end of The Night of the 12th, Moll has drawn us into a tragic mystery and left us searching for answers to questions beyond the identity of Clara’s killer.
Two sisters invent and control a time machine in director Andrew Legge’s historical sci-fi drama, Lola.
In 1941, Thom (Emma Appleon) and Martha (Stefanie Martini) can access broadcasts from the future with their device, Lola. They discover David Bowie, Bob Dylan, and other great musicians from the future. However, they also realize they can send precise warnings to fellow Britains about impending German air raids. What they do saves lives.
Though their efforts begin with mere warnings, the sisters start to reshape the future with the help of a British soldier who verifies the authenticity of each German broadcast. When Thom decides to take matters into her own hands, offering more than warnings, she loses Britain the U.S.’s support in the war effort. And that’s just the first mistake.
As with any movie about time travel, changes in the present affect not just the immediate future, but the far distant future, as well.
A 78-minute story leaves little time to make the point that some things are best left alone, but still Lola does a lot of meandering. The tension from decisions made is never allowed to build.
There is also the strange idea behind the film’s surface message that it’s best not to act, as any action you take can have unknown repercussions on the future. I’m not sure this is what the filmmaker intended to convey, but this is what comes across.
A large portion of the film comprises stock footage and montages depicting how the sisters change the war effort. It becomes tedious, making the film’s run time feel much longer than it is.
There is also the dubious notion of a found footage film that takes place in 1941. Martha’s camera is explained (it also conveniently captures sound), but several other cameras appear in places where it doesn’t make sense. You’re left wondering who exactly is behind the camera.
While Lola has a one or two stand out moments (invented superstar Reginald Watson, for example), the overall output is a mess. The theme of leaving the present unaltered based on what one knows of the future has been explored before. Lola offers nothing new save a questionable perspective on taking any action at all.
