Meghann Fahy looking at her phone slightly harried in Drop: "More like Ay Yi Yi Phone!"

Drop (2025)

April 25, 2025Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Ireland, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Meghann Fahy, Brandon Sklenar, Violett Beane, Reed Diamond
written by Jillian Jacobs & Chris Roach
directed by Christopher Landon

by Walter Chaw The distaff version of last year’s Carry-On, which was itself the umpteenth redux of Phone Booth, Christopher “Son of Michael” Landon’s Drop does the “I can see you/have you checked on the children?” mambo in a high-rise restaurant setting with young widow and single mother Violet (Meghann Fahy), who’s wading back into the dating pool with app match Henry (Brandon Sklenar). Her hipster sister Jen (Violett Beane) is holding down the fort at home, babysitting Violet’s adorable but deeply traumatized–in an adorable way–son, Toby (Jacob Robinson), who, we learn through a series of flashbacks, once had a gun pointed at him by his mentally unbalanced, now-dead dad. Is this a surprisingly dark development for a breezy, moth-eaten, high-concept entertainment that is otherwise as smooth and frictionless as a baby’s ass? Sure! 

Grave Expectations, by Walter Chaw. Title graphic features David Cronenberg's face on an old television and the television is sitting on a patch of grass.

Grave Expectations: FFC Interviews David Cronenberg

April 18, 2025Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Directors: David Cronenberg, Interviews

by Walter Chaw I first interviewed David Cronenberg after the premiere of Spider at the Telluride International Film Festival in 2002. A couple of months later, I hosted a screening of the same at Denver’s Landmark Mayan Theatre and was granted another hour with him to go through his filmography feature by feature. I was 29 in 2002–another lifetime–and I can feel the weight of my life’s experiences strapped to my back like lead weights: one for every tragedy, one of equal size and shape for every success. Cronenberg’s work has always spoken to me about the human body as frail and imperfect. He’s 82 now. He was still in his fifties when we met. And though he remains sharp and in good humour, I see how the long years have leaned into him. His latest film, The Shrouds, may very well be his last; on its press tour, he’s hinted that it will be. I have daily reminders I’m in the final third of my life, yet being confronted with the end of David Cronenberg’s career has shaken me more than I could have predicted. Who will teach me about love now? Who will teach me about grief?

"No, wait, 'Two for Holland.'"

A Minecraft Movie (2025)

April 9, 2025Posted in2025, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Fantasy, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Jason Momoa, Jack Black, Danielle Brooks, Emma Myers
screenplay by Chris Bowman & Hubbel Palmer and Neil Widener & Gavin James and Chris Galletta
directed by Jared Hess

by Walter Chaw It’s tempting to get knives out to hack at the hanks of the great beast. It’s tempting to sharpen your tongue to shriek at it, how close we are now to Idiocracy‘s prophecy of Ass: The Movie being the most watched and awarded film in the land. I keep coming back to the image of Kevin McCarthy at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, peering through the fourth wall to tell you it’s too late. They’re here already. The great beast will not feel you, and it does not have ears to hear you. It can’t feel shame. As it was never alive, you can’t kill it, and if you can’t kill it, neither can you bury it. You can fight, but you’ll lose. Not to the great beast, but to your friends and neighbours, who will urge you to forget it, take it easy. They will rationalize that some garbage piece of media was made for children, as if the things we make for children should be terrible. Feed them the rotten stuff, the maggot-infested stuff–they won’t know. Give them the chair with the splinters; the toy that takes eyes; the water full of lead. Why worry? It’s just for kids. It’s just for kids you don’t think will grow up or don’t care if they do. It’s cheaper not to let them live. When they consume, that’s less for you to consume. Maybe we should change our laws so they can work longer when they’re younger, because they don’t seem to last as long as they used to. Lie back and enjoy it. Pray you never get that direction outside of invitations to kid’s movies. Your friends and neighbours are pods now. I know they look like people, but they’re not. Your loved ones are dead. I’m sorry.

Nicole Kidman in Holland: "In sum, 'Two for a Minecraft Movie.'"

Holland (2025)

April 7, 2025Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Streaming, Thriller

*/****
starring Nicole Kidman, Matthew Macfadyen, Jude Hill, Gael García Bernal
written by Andrew Sodroski
directed by Mimi Cave

by Walter Chaw Mimi Cave’s Holland is a Fargo knock-off, a quirky fable of midwestern misbehavior featuring middle-aged frumps (and their satellite nebbishes) at the eye of tweedy flare-ups of droll and bloody devilry. In order to work, these grand chamber guignols of crime need to walk a delicate cornice above a yawning arctic crevasse, careful not to slip off into self-parody or, worse, a deadly unsureness of foot. Imagine listening to someone tell a story you know very well and they stumble through it…tentatively, fearfully, dare I say lugubriously? Fear is the mind-killer, and so it is with traversing minefields expertly trod by absolute killers like John Waters and David Lynch. Best not to contribute if you don’t have something to contribute. It’s like finding yourself at a dinner party where you’ve read a few books, but everyone else is a Nobel Laureate. They say you never make a shot you don’t take, but there’s a rather large difference between playing to win and swinging for the fences. I feel like the Jack Black character in High Fidelity when some guy comes in looking for a copy of “I Just Called to Say I Love You.” I mean, who could you possibly be buying this for? Oops, are they in a coma? Holland is timid where it needed to be bold. Honestly, it’s just a series of stumbles.

Jack Quaid with a knife through his hand: "No more Mr. Knife Guy."

Borderline (2025) + Novocaine (2025)

March 28, 2025Posted in2025, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Disability, Horror, South Africa, Theatrical

BORDERLINE
***½/****
starring Samara Weaving, Ray Nicholson, Jimmie Fails, Eric Dane
written and directed by Jimmy Warden

NOVOCAINE
*/****
starring Jack Quaid, Amber Midthunder, Ray Nicholson, Matthew Walsh
written by Lars Jacobson
directed by Dan Berk and Robert Olsen

by Walter Chaw Samara Weaving is the best Bruce Campbell since Bruce Campbell. They even worked together on the “Ash vs Evil Dead” show. Her timing is impeccable, her control over her physicality and facial expressions prodigious. She seems to have emerged specifically to anchor horror slapsticks like the second coming of Mabel Normand: a screwball Venus on a meshuga clamshell. Her short filmography is already heavy with cult classics like The Babysitter, Ready or Not, Guns Akimbo, and Joe Lynch’s fantastic Mayhem–each savvy enough to highlight Weaving’s charming, self-deprecating sense of humour. In another time, she would’ve given Lucille Ball or Carol Burnett a run for their money. She’s the dream improv partner, a champion bull rider. I don’t think there’s a scenario she wouldn’t seem unnatural in–no situation you could ask her characters to overcome that is too absurd. She’s a unicorn: the great beauty men think they might have a chance with and women don’t entirely resent. In her very small cameo in Babylon, she provides a tantalizing glimpse into what that film could have been with her in the lead instead of the ego doppelgänger to her id, Margot Robbie. Not good, mind you, but at least well-cast.

Snow White (2025)

Snow White (2025)

March 25, 2025Posted in2025, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, Family, Fantasy, Musical, Romance, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Rachel Zegler, Andrew Burnap, Gal Gadot
screenplay by Erin Cressida Wilson
directed by Marc Webb

by Walter Chaw In the case of live-action Disney reboots, it isn’t a matter of whether they’re a hate crime, but how egregious a hate crime they are. We expect dead-eyed CGI renderings of what were once astonishingly evocative hand-drawn miracles. We expect the shameless tokenism that sees race as a costume white people take on and off at their diversity balls and the feckless, tossed-off malaise that mercenary money-grabs can never entirely shake. Despite all that, despite the built-in stench of failure that attends these spectacles like miasmas of bluebottle flies on gas-bloated corpses, the Mouse keeps pumping them out, beholden to an accounting ledger they bind like a script. The goal isn’t art or expression, nothing so lofty. The goal is a percentage–a shareholder-appeasing PowerPoint presentation delivered by a board of directors, not a single one of whom would otherwise be trusted to form a graceful turn of phrase or produce something that could flower into a product that is culturally significant in a nurturing way. They are stripminers, colonizers of your childhood, overburdening resources for personal gain. Their legacy will be how they took our memories and replaced them with further evidence that there is nothing good the dullest, emptiest people in the world won’t exploit for profit.

"Everything plus the Sadie Sink."

O’Dessa (2025)

March 23, 2025Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Music, Musical, Streaming, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Sadie Sink, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Murray Bartlett, Regina Hall
written and directed by Geremy Jasper

by Walter Chaw Every once in a while, a film comes along that is so not for me I don’t even dislike it. I don’t feel anything towards it. We barely exist in the same dimension. It’s like an animal from the deep ocean presented to me for my approval or condemnation, a cuniform poem written in a dead language; I don’t even have a baseline to test it against. Whaddaya mean, “Do I like it?” What the fuck is it? It’s dinner and a show at H.P. Lovecraft’s house. You could say that Geremy Jasper’s O’Dessa shares DNA with Six-String Samurai or Anna and the Apocalypse, or that it’s what The Wiz would be like if a sea cucumber and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s medulla oblongata collectively excreted it, though I look at it and all I see is a collection of stuff slammed together using an organizing principle I can neither recognize nor articulate. It is the product of an alien intelligence, and while it might appeal to children at a specific developmental age, I don’t know whether that’s good or bad or what that sweet spot is. I guess I could say the music in this musical (?) is just fucking godawful to my ear, but we live in an age where Lin-Manuel Miranda is treated like the second coming of Kander & Ebb. Again, there are things in the world that are not for you, and you’re better off leaving them alone, lest the existential horror of reckoning with your strangeness in this time and place swallow you whole like that kid in Stephen King’s “The Jaunt.”

The Electric State (2025)

The Electric State (2025)

March 15, 2025Posted in2025, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Sci-Fi, Streaming, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Millie Bobby Brown, Chris Pratt, Ke Huy Quan, Stanley Tucci
screenplay by Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely, based on the book by Simon Stålenhag
directed by Anthony and Joe Russo

by Walter Chaw The Russos’ The Electric State is one of those movies where every other line is punctuated by an exhausted wisecrack from a passerby, a member of the faceless chorus, or the sassy, Black-coded sidekick. A mess, in other words; a loud one. What makes it an interesting skidmark along the road to our national humiliation, though, is how it feels like the first salvo in the kind of corporate warfare predicted by The Crimson Permanent Assurance and Demolition Man‘s triumphant, Michelin-starred Taco Bell. See, The Electric State is set in a post-robopocalyptic wasteland where the robot slave class are the invention of Walt Disney–adorable agents of meat-genocide led by a sentient, Hugs-a-lot-sounding Mr. Peanut™ (Woody Harrelson™), who, during the film’s extended prologue, solemnly signs a peace treaty with deepfake Bill Clinton after his Elon Musk, Ethan Skate (Stanley Tucci), invents humanoid robot drones. The “good guys,” then, defeat Disney! Does that make Netflix, the never-been-profitable streaming service bankrolling this Hindenburg and currently at open-platform warfare with the Mouse, the “good guys?” What of the newsreel aside that Kid Rock gave a celebratory concert upon the vanquishing of When You Wish Upon a Skynet? Is Kid Rock the anti-corporate, humanist good guy now? Or was that an unfunny insert mandated in Chris Pratt’s rider? What the actual fuck is going on?

The Rule of Jenny Pen (2025)

The Rule of Jenny Pen (2025)

March 14, 2025Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Mystery, New Zealand, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring John Lithgow, Geoffrey Rush, George Henare, Nathaniel Lees
written by Eli Kent, James Ashcroft, based on the short story by Owen Marshall
directed by James Ashcroft

by Waler Chaw James Ashcroft’s The Rule of Jenny Pen scares the shit out of me. Not just as a horror movie, but also as a reminder of how our elder-care system is so broken that most of us will end up dying at the hands of overworked caregivers in underfunded facilities. My plan is to kill myself before the dementia takes over completely, but that boat may have already sailed. In The Rule of Jenny Pen, Eunice (Hilary Norris), a dear old thing, believes that every day is Christmas, and tells everyone her family is due to visit. Every day ends with her disappointed, but then she wakes up the next morning thinking it’s Christmas again, thus hope springs eternal. We later learn that she’s been in this loop for years. Is she in Hell or is she in Heaven? Is anticipation sweet, or is it torture? Was Sisyphus happy because he knew what was expected of him? At a terminal point, is there much difference between sweet delight and endless night? Is there much of a difference between this limbo in God’s waiting room and the limbo of lives meted out in coffee spoons and the long shadows of regret?

Pattinson in Mickey 17: "Oh Mickey you’re so fine/you’re so fine you blew my mind 17 times/hey Mickey!"

Mickey 17 (2025)

March 10, 2025Posted in2025, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Satire, Sci-Fi, South Korea

***/****
starring Robert Pattinson, Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Mark Ruffalo
written and directed by Bong Joon Ho

by Walter Chaw Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 is a philosophical sequel to Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers, expanding on that movie’s satire of an overly-militarized American Imperialist fascist state to talk about how we are at the mercy of trillionaire megalomaniacs who, because they’ve been social outcasts their entire lives, have interstellar plans for colonization tied to their specific visions of a master race. It’s another film that uses a civilization of alien bugs as a stand-in for a culture selected to be murdered, displaced, and exploited made by a foreign filmmaker who sees Americans as they are: so beguiled by money they’d trade their lives for a corporation’s. The people pushing us in Mickey 17′s direction will interpret it as a mandate, not a condemnation.

The 4:30 Movie

The 4:30 Movie (2024) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital

February 27, 2025Posted in2024, 2025, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD

*½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Austin Zajur, Nicholas Cirillo, Reed Northrup, Ken Jeong
written and directed by Kevin Smith

by Bill Chambers What is Kevin Smith’s most personal film to date? Inveterate online cinephiles trapped in a parasocial relationship with him such as myself might say it’s still his first, Clerks, a comic ode to the plight of the American convenience-store worker shot at the very same Quik Stop that employed him at the time. Or is it Chasing Amy, a movie that allegorizes Smith’s burgeoning romance with actress Joey Lauren Adams, for whom he wrote the female lead? Could it be Jersey Girl, his fantasy of widowhood and single-fatherhood and Ben Affleck-hood? Howzabout Clerks III, in which Smith used his “widowmaker” heart attack as a jumping-off point to tell the story of the making of Clerks? All good guesses, but according to Smith, his “most personal film to date” is his most recent, The 4:30 Movie, about three Jersey teens hanging out at the movies in the summer of ’86. The erstwhile Silent Bob has had alter egos before (Dante from Clerks, for instance, although in Clerks III Dante and Randal are possibly Kevin Smith split in two), but not like Brian David (Austin Zajur), a stocky film geek with the gift of gab.

The Monkey (2025)

The Monkey (2025)

February 25, 2025Posted in****/****, 2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Horror, Stephen King, Theatrical, UK

****/****
starring Theo James, Tatiana Maslany, Christian Convery, Elijah Wood
written by Osgood Perkins, based on the short story by Stephen King
directed by Osgood Perkins

by Walter Chaw Oz Perkins’s The Monkey plays like WWI frontlines poetry. Like something by Siegfried Sassoon or Wilfred Owen documenting the birth of irony as a literary device–the only appropriate response to mechanized, impersonal, mass and random death. The house poet for the DAILY MAIL, publishing under the pseudonym “Touchstone” in 1916, wrote about doomed British Captain Nevill’s decision upon his last, suicidal charge to have each of the four battalions under his command kick a soccer ball towards the German lines:

Paddington Bear writing in a journal: Dear Diary, Timothy Treadwell was delicious.

Paddington in Peru (2024)

February 22, 2025Posted in2024, 2025, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, France, Japan, Mystery, UK

*/****
starring Hugh Bonneville, Emily Mortimer, Julie Walters, Ben Whishaw
screenplay by Mark Burton, Jon Foster & James Lamont
directed by Dougal Wilson

by Walter Chaw Remember that episode of “The Brady Bunch” where the gang goes to Hawaii and finds a cursed Tiki idol? That was hilarious. What I mean is it was memorably not hilarious, a brazen and desperate last gasp at relevance and invention that is held up alongside the “Happy Days” where Fonzie waterskis over a shark as shorthand for what happens when a beloved institution runs out of ideas: the death wave of a drowning man. Anyway, the third instalment of the Paddington franchise uproots the Browns of Windsor Gardens and drops them in the middle of a rainforest in search of a horrifying convent filthy with energetic British nuns given to random outbursts of song that are less delightful than pointedly aggressive. Imagine Olivia Colman, dialled to 11, decked out in full habit, keening a single, held high note for a full 20 seconds, and you have a small taste of the unpleasantness of this probably unintentional nunsploitation horror. Call it “Bleak Narcissus.” Gone is the charm of the previous Paddingtons, and with it the focus on absolute patience and kindness that made this series such a balm to the brutal and inconsiderate hell of our day-to-day. In its place? A jungle quest punctuated by elaborate pratfalls as cuddly Paddington (voiced by Ben Whishaw) tries to recover his dementia-addled Great Aunt Lucy (Imelda Staunton) from an unplanned walkabout in the wilderness of Peru. The step down from gentle grace to broad slapstick is an ankle-breaker.

A City Full of Hawks: On the Waterfront Seventy Years Later―Still the Great American Contender – Books

A City Full of Hawks: On the Waterfront Seventy Years Later―Still the Great American Contender – Books

February 12, 2025Posted in1950s, 2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Books About Movies, Directors: Elia Kazan

A City Full of Hawks: On the Waterfront Seventy Years Later―Still the Great American Contender
by Stephen Rebello
FFC rating: 7/10

by Walter Chaw I’m not alone in quoting passages from Stephen Rebello’s Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho in lectures and conversation over the years. Written in a user-friendly, almost conspiratorial style, it has a breathlessness that makes old history and twice-told tales alive and urgent again. Would Hitch burn all the capital he’d earned from the success of North by Northwest on a grimy little project about a serial killer and something-something a decapitation in the shower by the same? The book’s final moments, with Hitchcock conducting the audience like a symphony from the projection booth, deliver a payload of dopamine like the clash of cymbals at the end of a particularly stirring concerto. Rebello’s latest, A City Full of Hawks: On the Waterfront Seventy Years Later―Still the Great American Contender, is more of the same: a deeply researched yet slender volume that recounts well-known (and more obscure) stories from the making of another masterpiece–in this case, Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront.

Thatcher in Companion

Companion (2025)

February 8, 2025Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

***½/****
starring Sophie Thatcher, Jack Quaid, Lukas Gage, Megan Suri
written and directed by Drew Hancock

by Walter Chaw Drew Hancock’s feature debut Companion plays a lot like a cross between Peter Berg’s comedy of (bad) manners Very Bad Things and Alex Garland’s solemn Ex Machina. It is, in other words, extremely my jam. Depicting an escalating series of catastrophes like a Pierre Étaix movie with a body count, Companion is a house of cards composed of appalling behaviour and hidden agendas that mashes together tropes from the “Bad Dinner Party” subgenre of awkward horror movies and the sentience melodramas of android fiction. The script is fleet and smart, the cast is game, and damned if Companion isn’t prepared to follow through on the essential human awfulness of its premise. I worry that the inevitable rush of “peeved A.I.” thrillers will fail to offer a credible reckoning with the morality of making a thing 90% of its consumer base will attempt to fuck, if not outright purchase for that purpose. (Some, like flavour-of-the-moment M3GAN, don’t even acknowledge it as a likely possibility.) Consider Companion the corrective: here, the talking toasters are made to be fleshlights capable of having rudimentary conversations. A fun ride that wrestles with the controversies at the root of its concept? Don’t threaten me with a good time.

In the Shadow of Loss: Walter Chaw interviews Leigh Whannell

In the Shadow of Loss: FFC Interviews Leigh Whannell

February 4, 2025Posted in2025, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Interviews

by Walter Chaw I met Leigh Whannell through the miracle of social-media DMs a few months into the pandemic, when reaching out was all anyone had to do. His The Invisible Man reboot had landed just a couple of weeks before the first lockdown, and I was so floored by its prescience I had to let him know. We’ve kept in touch. The Invisible Man hit that enviable sweet spot for popular cinema: smart without being an asshole about it; thrilling without sacrificing its depth. I came to it from Upgrade, Whannell’s cautionary tale about artificial intelligence, and then worked my way backwards to Insidious: Chapter 3, his directorial debut, which, separated from franchise expectations, proved shockingly soulful and introspective.

Lucy Liu in Presence: Not just a subpar Led Zeppelin album anymore

Presence (2025)

January 24, 2025Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Drama, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Lucy Liu, Chris Sullivan, Callina Liang, Eddy Maday
written by David Koepp
directed by Steven Soderbergh

by Walter Chaw The subjective camera is nothing new, of course. 1947’s Lady in the Lake is a largely failed Raymond Chandler adaptation in which Philip Marlowe is the camera, while director RaMell Ross cannily attaches the technique to a critic-proof project in the current Nickel Boys. First-person shooter (FPS) video game enthusiasts are more than familiar with the concept, and purveyors of porn know that VR-ready stereoscopic smut has its own niche market. Everything “new” is ancient, in other words, and the experience of Steven Soderbergh’s Presence at times reminded me of playing the first-person, text-based INFOCOM games of my childhood: floating in and out of scenes; picking up bits and pieces of information and trying to cohere them into an unrevealed storyline. Horror aficionados will certainly have moments of déjà vu here, what with the camera being yoked to a predatory point-of-view. (Halloween, I’m looking at you.) Which is to say that Presence definitely pulls the odd pleasure-lever in my lizard brain, not that it’s good. Funny, because even Soderbergh himself has said he never thought a “POV” film could work because you don’t get to see the reaction of the protagonist–but then he goes ahead and makes Presence anyway…and cheats.

Blind man sitting with his daughter in a movie theatre as the lights go down in Demons

Demons (1985) + Demons 2 (1986) – 4K Ultra HD Discs

January 22, 2025Posted in1980s, 2025, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Dario Argento, Horror, Italy

Dèmoni
**½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A
starring Urbano Barberini, Natasha Hovey, Karl Zinny, Fiore Argento
screenplay by Dario Argento, Lamberto Bava, Dardano Sacchetti, Franco Ferrini
directed by Lamberto Bava

Dèmoni 2… l’incubo ritorna
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring David Knight, Nancy Brilli, Coralina Cataldi Tassoni, Virginia Bryant
written by Dario Argento, Lamberto Bava, Franco Ferrini, Dardano Sacchetti
directed by Lamberto Bava

by Walter Chaw It’s one of the best horror premises ever: A mysterious figure (legendary director Michele Soavi, doing double duty on screen and off as creep and AD, respectively) hands out invitations for a movie premiere to beautiful teens, pimps and their hookers, and other manifold riffraff in the Berlin Underground. The venue is a mysterious theatre, “Metropol,” that no one’s heard of before, and when the curtain goes up, it’s for the pleasure of a dozen or so cinephiles down for a show and maybe some sordid adventure. Then the demons come. Setting a horror movie in a cinema is nothing new, of course (the meta implications of it are too delicious to resist), but I like how the moviegoers in Lamberto Bava’s Demons–these marks, these fools–have been sucked into the freak tent without even having been mesmerized there by an able barker. Turns out, some of us don’t need a showman to pique our curiosity. Turns out, even though we should know better than to show up at a party we’re invited to by some guy in a metal mask on the subway, caution goes right out the window now and again. Maybe I can relate because, for as risk-averse as I am, this is the sort of provocation I could be vulnerable to under the right–which is to say wrong–circumstances. (“Sure thing, friend-o, I’ll watch your movie.” God knows I’ve agreed to worse.) Maybe this is the perfect metaphor for being a film critic in a festival setting: stuck in an auditorium with the creators and no easy way to escape if things go pear-shaped.