Little boy in empty swimming pool: "Also bring back the pool water."

Bring Her Back (2025)

May 30, 2025Posted in****/****, 2025, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical

****/****
starring Billy Barratt, Sally Hawkins, Mischa Heywood, Jonah Wren Phillips
written by Danny Philippou and Bill Hinzman
directed by Danny Philippou & Michael Philippou

by Walter Chaw Danny and Michael Philippou are on the vanguard of a new wave. It doesn’t have a name–or if it does, I don’t know what it is. But I would include as its finest practitioners Jane Schoenbrun, Kyle Edward Ball, Charlotte Wells, and Demian Rugna. Generally working in horror, their work is often confounding to me at first glance: I don’t always understand the source of their anxieties. They occupy a shared universe, however, with the same colour of sky, the same certain thickness of air that makes it tough to breathe while I’m in there. I have begun to suspect I might be the cause of it all, somehow–my generation, I mean, as it passes from middle age into decrepitude, skipped over for leadership by a gerontocracy that has proved itself incapable of standing against the fall of the American Empire. Is that it? Or is it the Internet? Or is everything connected? Is it the proverbial assault rifle we gave to the chimp, who is us? A deadly gizmo we shaved apes couldn’t begin to understand but could, and do, gleefully wield with deadly consequences? Bad enough, but then we gave it to our children, hooked them on it, made the world impossible without it, and told them to be afraid of it, yet didn’t tell them why. Because we didn’t know. I watch these movies and wonder if this is what Crowther saw when he watched Bonnie and Clyde and refused to recognize the bounty of crop his generation sowed.

Jackie Chan looking off into the distance as Ralph Macchio and Ben Wang lock fists: "When you realize you forgot to pick up Jaden Smith from summer camp 15 years ago"

Karate Kid: Legends (2025)

May 27, 2025Posted in2025, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Family, Jackie Chan, Martial Arts, Sports, Theatrical

*/****
starring Jackie Chan, Ben Wang, Joshua Jackson, Ralph Macchio
written by Rob Lieber
directed by Jonathan Entwistle

by Walter Chaw I have a complicated relationship with John G. Avildsen’s The Karate Kid. I saw it in the theatre multiple times when I was 11 and dozens, maybe even hundreds, of times more on VHS. I did not know that Noriyuki “Pat” Morita spoke without an accent in reality, didn’t trouble myself with the damage this type of sensei character did to my minority in this country, didn’t sense that this was any kind of cultural appropriation, because as an Asian-American kid born and raised in a predominantly white backwater of Colorado, this was and remains ground zero of my culture. Appropriation? Of what? Not Okinawan culture, surely–what’s left of it after our now-eighty-year occupation of it. No, this is American culture, for good and for bad; don’t blame someone else for it. The Karate Kid was my Rocky. (Same director and composer, even.) Mr. Miyagi, together with Short Round from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Long Duk Dong from Sixteen Candles, both from the same year as The Karate Kid (1984), formed this foundational trilogy of Asian tokenism in the heart of the Reagan administration/Blockbuster Generation, during which I was reared. Perhaps not inconsequently, it’s this same period that sowed the seeds for our current neo-conservative Ragnarök. It was like they emerged at the same time on purpose, the Three Wise Men attending Evangelical Christ’s Young Life presumption to the reins of American Empire: the father (Miyagi), the son (Shorty), and the holy ghost (Long Duk Dong) constituting a thesis statement for the only way Asian-American men in their native film industry could be portrayed with the enthusiastic consent of anyone with an opinion. Can I get an “A(sian)men?”

Upside-down yellow biplane with Tom Cruise hanging on for dear life: "Elon's FAA is going great."

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025)

May 26, 2025Posted in****/****, 2025, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Theatrical, Thriller, Tom Cruise, UK

****/****
starring Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Angela Bassett
written by Christopher McQuarrie & Erik Jendresen
directed by Christopher McQuarrie

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. There is a brief period in most of our lives where we feel as though we are part of a large, maybe operatic melodrama that is barely comprehensible to us, but of which we are a vital component. If the world is lucky, we grow out of it. As part of the brain’s formation, it seems, as part of Freud’s or Lacan’s self-recognition, there is this wet gulf during which we believe that everything matters. It has to be an evolutionary response–the last gasp of profound weltschmerz on the way to nihilistic self-interest. On the one side is the self-righteousness of adolescence; on the other, a dangerous megalomania. And then there’s Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible film franchise, which is fundamentally a clinical dissection of the martyr complex that drives the myth of American exceptionalism. At the core of it all is a serious unpacking of movie stardom–of movies themselves as an essential conduit to the primal core of our monkey makeup. They tickle every pleasure centre. When Mission: Impossible movies are exciting, few movies were ever as exciting. When they’re sexy–the yellow dress, my god–they are as sharpened and drowsy as an autumn pheromone. They’re funny, they’re puzzles, and they’re an approach to understanding George Eliot’s quote about how the good of the world depends on the valour of hidden lives lived with virtue and courage. You don’t have to be Ethan Hunt (Cruise) to fix the world, you see. You don’t need to be a superhero, but you do need to be a good person when it’s easier not to be.

Zhao Tao in Caught by the Tides; petting a robot: "Hello, member of Daft Punk"

Caught by the Tides (2024)

May 19, 2025Posted in2024, 2025, Authors: Angelo Muredda, China, Drama, Esoterica, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Zhao Tao, Li Zhubing
written and directed by Jia Zhangke

by Angelo Muredda While some spent their COVID lockdowns making sourdough starters and boning up on the medicinal properties of horse dewormer, Jia Zhangke retraced two decades’ worth of cinematic memories, from 2002’s Unknown Pleasures to 2018’s Ash is Purest White, weaving them into a singular new project about urban alienation and the passage of time. Caught by the Tides is the formally playful product of that act of pandemic creative stir-craziness. Conceived and partially shot in the final days of China’s COVID-Zero policies in 2022, the film takes the real-life constraints of social distancing and contact tracing as an aesthetic inspiration to burrow into the past before standing firmly on the present. The strange times, and their restrictions on film shoots, prompt Jia to revisit and reposition the actors, characters, and settings of his oeuvre into a contemporary mosaic. Inspired, as he said at the film’s NYFF festival premiere, by ukiyo-e art from the Edo Period, a tradition of Japanese woodblock prints of transient urban life and folk scenes, he’s fashioned a singular floating world portrait of 21st-century China.

Brec Bassinger in a burning restaurant: "Another fondue party turns deadly."

Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025)

May 15, 2025Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Horror, Theatrical

***/****
starring Brec Bassinger, Richard Harmon, April Telek, Tony Todd
screenplay by Guy Busick & Lori Evans Taylor
directed by Zach Lipovsky & Adam B. Stein

by Walter Chaw I love the Final Destination franchise that James Wong started with writing partner Glen Morgan–all six films, but particularly the two Wong directed. Wong and Morgan were, of course, instrumental in the creation of “The X Files” and its stickier, gloomier spiritual brother, “Millennium”. I love the absolute nihilism of Final Destination‘s premise and its suggestion that Death is a mysterious force more interested in contriving incredible machines to complete its dread duty than in, you know, just giving someone a heart attack. But is it Death in a playful, Ingmar Bergman sense, playing chess on the beach in the middle of a mass-casualty event with a survivor of a genocidal campaign who’s come home to find he’s brought the plague with him? What kind of person must one be for Death to want to hang out with them? The type of person who’s very good for business. No, Final Destination is more Death as an artificial intelligence, I think–an algorithm fed vaguely conflicting instructions that labours to maintain this corner of the Matrix of which it’s in charge: fix glitches but, and here’s the rub, don’t let the subjects know there’s been a glitch and that it’s being fixed. So it’s not a sentience, exactly, but a subroutine in a larger system. A celestial calculator. The biggest twist left for the series would be the identification of the being that made our lives an accounting problem it sent a somewhat limited clockwork to manage in the first place.

Guy being sucked through hole in an airplane: "No ticket!"

Fight or Flight (2025)

May 8, 2025Posted in2025, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Theatrical, UK

**/****
starring Josh Hartnett, Charithra Chandran, Marko Zaror, Katee Sackhoff
written by Brooks McLaren & D.J. Cotrona
directed by James Madigan

by Walter Chaw I remember the thrill I felt when I heard the premise: a plane full of murderers is freed to go hog on one another with impunity. Maniacs and assassins, right? Hannibal Lecters and spree killers and cons and bounty hunters. Fuck, I thought, it’s gonna be like one of those Universal Monsters “rally” movies where Frankenstein fights the Wolf Man or some shit; imagine the possibilities! The mayhem! I remember it like it was yesterday because it was 1997, and when you get old, things that happened almost 30 years ago seem like they happened the day before. Man, oh man, it’s good to talk. Anyway, James Madigan’s Fight or Flight is about a plane full of murderers who go hog on one another with impunity. It’s got the same frenetic energy as David Leitch’s Bullet Train, which is about a train full of murderers who go hog on one another with impunity. To be fair, Leitch’s film is centred around a handsome white guy with a secret everyone is after, whereas Fight or Flight hinges on a handsome white guy everyone is after but there’s also a young woman (Charithra Chandran) who is more than she seems. No, wait, that’s Bullet Train, too.

Life After still featuring Elizabeth Bouvia surrounded by men in suits

Life After (2025)

May 5, 2025Posted in2025, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Disability, Documentary, Hot Docs

***½/****
directed by Reid Davenport

by Angelo Muredda “I’ve done what I can, and the quality of my life is over,” 26-year-old disabled woman and assisted dying cause célèbre Elizabeth Bouvia says in archival footage of her 1983 legal fight to refuse medical care in the opening moments of Reid Davenport’s Life After. Bouvia, Davenport shows us through a montage of the media frenzy around her case–which largely evaporated once her petition proved unsuccessful–became a rallying point for the assisted dying cause, represented by an activist attorney from the Hemlock Society (whose more palatably named successor group, End of Life Choices, is later seen clashing with disabled activists in Congress) and given fawning news coverage for her frequently cited physical attractiveness and disarming affect. That the frank, direct, and relatable Bouvia made for good TV, as evidenced by a condescending “60 Minutes” update from 1998 in which Mike Wallace casually muses about the tension between her lingering prettiness and the ongoing cost to the taxpayer of her daily care, is not in dispute. But to what extent, Davenport wonders, can a disabled euthanasia activist who didn’t die, whose WIKIPEDIA page cryptically lacks either new details about her life or a conclusive date for her death, as Bouvia’s does when Davenport sets out to find her, truly be said to have no quality of life if she continued to live it?

Hailee Steinfeld in Sinners: "Children of the night. What music they make."

Sinners (2025)

April 30, 2025Posted in2025, Action, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Horror, Thriller, Vampire

***/****
starring Michael B. Jordan, Hailee Steinfeld, Miles Caton, Jack O’Connell
written and directed by Ryan Coogler

by Walter Chaw Movies used to make me feel all kinds of ways. Usually, it was Adrian Lyne’s fault. Fatal Attraction was unapologetic. Flashdance was unashamed. 9½ Weeks? Brothers and sisters, 9½ Weeks was a sin. Movies were everything to me once: friend, secret sharer, father confessor, mother, and, yes, lover, participating in the formation of my object choice and foundational in the encouragement of my onanism. I still feel a butterfly in the pit of my stomach thinking of the curtained room at the back of the video store–the stolen, lidded glances as I pretended to peruse the “Foreign” section. I think about how VHS brought the forbidden pleasures of grindhouses and peepshows into the middle-class living room of otherwise “traditional” nuclear families, tucked behind rows of hardbound books on respectable bookshelves or in the leather-clad storage ottoman set in the middle of the party, holding drinks and hiding corpses, perversely, in plain sight. “Help yourself to another cocktail wiener off the tray there, Father O’Shaughnessy.” Did you see No Way Out in a theatre when you were 14? How about Angel Heart? No? How about The Big Easy or Sea of Love? Ellen Barkin? No? I’m sorry to hear that.

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.