The Time Masters

Not much to say about the moviegoing experience up here because I mostly want to have a review up during the week it's at the Brattle in a pretty great-looking restoration.


Les Maîtres du temps ([The] Time Masters)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 August 2024 in the Brattle Theatre (special engagement, 4K laser DCP)
Available to rent/purcase on Prime and perhaps elsewhere

My eyes bugged a bit at the trailer for The Time Masters when it played before another film at the Brattle a week or two ago - cool animated French sci-fi, looks a bit more accessible than Fantastic Planet, and, man those designs look like they could come straight from a Jodorowsky & Moebius… oh, wait, it actually is Moebius! How in the heck is this restoration 40 years later somehow the first real US release? Well, it turns out that it's a lot of ideas and not a lot of story; not really a drag, but not all one might hope.

It opens in zippy enough fashion, with a spindly wheeled vehicle racing across an alien planet, driver Claude (voice of Sady Rebbot) making an interstellar plea to a friend; his wife has been killed by the planet Perdide's murderous hornets and they need to be evacuated. Crashing in an area presumed to be safe, the dying man gives his transceiver to his five-year-old son Piel (voice of Frédéric Legros), saying to hide in the woods and do whatever the voice that comes out says; Piel doesn't quite understand that it will be someone far away talking to him, and not the device itself. On the other end, Claude's adventurer friend Jaffar (voice of Jean Valmont) doesn't get the message right away; he's been hired to smuggle Prince Matton (voice of Yves-Marie Maurin) and Princess Belle (voice of Monique Thierry) and half the royal treasury to a new world after Matton was deposed, but immediately makes plans: He will have to consult with old friend Silbad (voice of Michel Elias), an expert on Perdide, and use the gravity of the Blue Comet to make his way there. Along the way, they pick up a couple of telepathic gnomes (voices of Patrick Baujin & Pierre Tourneur) as stowaways - they don't like the smell of Matton's thoughts - and try to keep a scared child safe as they don't know exactly what he is up to.

That opening is terrific, a fast-paced dash across a thoroughly alien landscape with enough great Moebius designs to make one's eyes pop anew every few seconds augmented by a cool, synthy score, and director René Laloux (co-writing with Moebius, who also does the art design) isn't exactly shy about trying to build the entire movie on this feeling: When things start to drag, get on a new spaceship, go to a new planet, or have Piel discover some new piece of Perdide life that can grab a viewer's attention, and hang around that until it's time to do this again. It's the same principle that Moebius often brought to his science-fictional bandes dessinées, and his style works exceptionally well here: He's a perfect blend of cartooning and grit under most circumstances, but given a space mercenary trying to rescue a frightened child, it's even better, especially as the innocent antics of the gnomes on Jaffar's ship and the ominous creatures surrounding Piel tie the whole universe together.

You maybe need a little more than that, though: After that exciting opening, there really isn't a lot for anybody to do; there are a few bursts of activity, but a lot of time spent observing and explaining as opposed to doing, and that has its limits, even with as much nifty stuff to observe as this movie offers. It's not necessarily a surprise that the actual Time Masters don't show up - or even get mentioned! - until almost the very end of the film, although there are a couple comments toward the end that make me wonder if I'd missed a reference looking at scenery rather than subtitles. Still, it's not uncommon for French sci-fi to drop the audience into a weird milieu and half-explain it later. Stranger, though, is that there are at least two or three major sequences that happen off-screen or at the other end of the communicator, which you shouldn't have to do in animation.

And maybe Laloux had intended to, but couldn't because of what a fraught production this could be: The French producers outsourced much of the actual animation to a Hungarian firm, and by all accounts the two groups did not get on well at all and collectively were not up to the challenges this movie faced; they maybe just couldn't animate a large, complex action scene given the resources available; even simple facial work and motion is often stiff. Backgrounds, design, and a few big moments are fantastic, at least; what could be done was executed with incredible love and skill.

Which is why, in a few months, I'll buy this on the fanciest disc its distributor makes available and pull it out when I'm in the mood for something mildly trippy and easy to follow; it's fantastic when it's on target and isn't going to frustrate at 78 minutes.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 30 August 2024 - 5 September 2024

And so August ends as used to be traditional, before streamers and pandemic shortages and the like changed how movies are released, culminating in not treating Labor Day weekend like holiday time, but dumping long-shelved movies and squeezing things where they should really know better in.

• Consider 1992, for instance. Kind of a nice cast with Tyrese Gibson & Christopher Ammanuel and Ray Liotta & Scott Eastwood as fathers and sons at cross-purposes during the post-Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, but Liotta died over two years ago; so what took distribution so long? Find out at Fresh Pond, Boston Common, Causeway Street, South Bay, and Assembly Row.
  
  Also kicking around looking for distribution since a few years ago is Reagan, with Dennis Quaid playing the 40th President of the United States in a production that doesn't exactly look like a particularly strenuous interrogation of his work and legacy, to say the least. It's at Fresh Pond, Boston Common, Causeway Street, South Bay, and Assembly Row.
  
  Another one that first started showing up at festivals in 2022 is Across the River and Into the Woods, an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's novel about a dying officer in post-World War II Italy, played by Liev Schriber. Limited showtimes at Boston Common. Mexican drama City of Dreams, about a soccer-loving boy from Mexico trafficked to a Los Angeles sweatshop, has only been kicking around a year, and plays Boston Common.
  
  Afraid, meanwhile, just looks kind of conventionally bad, with writer/director Chris Weitz going for a Blumhouse-produced career resurrection like M. Night Shyamalan got with his tale of a sinister version of Alexa starring John Cho & Katherine Waterston, playing Fresh Pond, Boston Common, the Seaport, South Bay, Assembly Row, and Arsenal Yards. Slingshot, meanwhile, seems to be sneaking into theaters despite a cast including Casey Affleck and Laurence Fishburne as part of the crew of a mission to Saturn whose ship may have been compromised while they were in cryo sleep; it's at Causeway Street, Boston Common, Kendall Square, and the Seaport.
  
  You Gotta Believe looks like a pretty standard inspirational sports movie, with Luke Wilson and Greg Kinnear as Little League coaches whose team makes it to Williamsport, although the trailer sure hits the "somehow, their faith in each other fuels the team and keeps the coach's tumor from killing him" stuff hard. It plays Boston Common.
  
  Shaun of the Dead gets an anniversary re-release on the Dolby Cinema screens at Boston Common, Assembly Row. National Geographic Documentary Fly has a two-day "Imax Experience" run at Assembly Row on Monday & Tuesday. Twisters gets some bonus showtimes on fancy screens (Imax at Jordan's Furniture, South Bay, and Assembly Row; CWX at Arsenal Yards).
  
  First Shift plays one show a day at Fresh Pond, following a veteran cop and his new rookie partner , and it's directed by Uwe Boll, a filmmaker generally bad enough and allegedly mostly just pocketing tax incentives to be counted as "infamous". Could have sworn he buggered back off to Germany a decade ago, but apparently not!
  
  They're playing the Harry Potter movies again at Boston Common, with Half-Blood Prince and Prisoner of Azkaban Friday to Monday; Beetlejuice Beetlejuice has extra-early screenings at Jordan's (Imax), Boston Common (Dolby Cinema), South Bay (Imax Xenon & Dolby Cinema), Assembly Row (Imax Laser & Dolby Cinema), and Arsenal Yards (CWX) on Wednesday
• The Coolidge Corner Theatre looks like they're trying to program some good stuff: Mountains, the debut film from Monica Sorelle, takes place in Miami's Little Haiti and has parents struggling to relate to their son who has spent just enough time in college to not wish to speak Creole or otherwise engage with their culture; meanwhile, the father is literally dismantling the neighborhood as a demolition worker.
  
  War Game plays mostly in the Screening Room/screen #3, except for the Friday 7:15pm show, where filmmaker Tony Gerber will be on hand for a Q&A. What he has shot is a role-play/"war game" session where intelligence and defense professionals try to play out how to handle an insurrection that goes farther than that of 6 January 2021.
  
  With the month ending, so do the quasi-medieval midnight shows, wrapping with 35mm prints of A Knight's Tale on Friday and The Dark Knight on Saturday (get yourself some Heath Ledger, I guess). Monday offers the traditional Labor Day Big Screen Classic, a 35mm print of Jaws, while Thursday's is a print of the original 1988 Hairspray.
• The Brattle Theatre has the New restoration of 1982 French animated sci-fi adventure The Time Masters, which is also its first US release, at various times throughout the week, and it kind of looks amazing. It's directed by René Laloux of Fantastic Planet and has visuals designed by Jean "Mœbius" Giraud, so it's surprising to see this just showing up!
  
  It plays around "Hello, I'm Shelley Duvall", a selection of the late actress's body of work including The Shining (35mm Friday & Monday), Brewster McCloud (35mm Saturday & Wednesday), Nashville (Saturday & Sunday), Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (Saturday), "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" (free 16mm screening Sunday), Time Bandits (35mm Sunday/Monday), Popeye (Monday/Tuesday), Roxanne (Tuesday), and The Portrait of a Lady (35mm Wednesday). Then, on Thursday, they have the latest short film compilation from Grrl Haus Cinema.
• Apple Fresh Pond opened Saripodhaa Sanivaarm, about a man who only acts on his rage on Saturdays, opened Telugu action-comedy last week (it also opened at Boston Common). On Sunday, they have a one-day re-release of another Telugu-language police action=comedy, Gabbar Singh, while The Greatest of All Time, an action flick about top hostage negotiators, arrives with Telugu screenings starting on Wednesday and Tamil shows starting Thursday (Boston Common has Tamil shows on Wednesday but nothing further out yet).
  
  Held over are Hindi horror-comedy Stree 2 (also at Boston Common) and Tamil mystery Vaazhai.
• The Somerville Theatre and IFFBoston finish Summer Nights with Cruel Intentions & Wild Things on Friday and Eyes Wide Shut on 35mm film on Saturday, with an intro py critic Jake Mulligan and an after party upstairs at the Crystal Ballroom. That finishing frees the main screen up for a couple of 4K reissues, with the new 40th anniversary restoration of The Terminator playing midnight Saturday and normal hours Sunday & Monday and The Conversation Sunday to Tuesday (the pair can be seen as a twin bill on Sunday & Monday). On Wednesday, they have a back-to-school show of Hundreds of Beavers with discounts for students.
  
  The Capitol picks up Between the Temples; they also host a special screening of indie Advanced Chemistry on Tuesday, with the filmmakers on hand. The 4th Wall Show is on Saturday this week, with Warpark, Fat Randy, Trash Sun, Rain House, and visuals by Digital Awareness.
• The Seaport Alamo has Jackie Chan's Police Story Friday and Saturday, for folks who hate unbroken glass. The "Final Cut" of Apocalypse Now plays Friday/Sunday/Tuesday (with Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse on Tuesday); The Terminator on Friday/Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday; Repo Man Saturday/Sunday/Monday/Wednesday; The Conversation Sunday & Tuesday; Electric Lady Studios: A Jimi Hendrix Vision on Tuesday; Point Break '91 on Wednesday, and a free-for-members preview of The Front Room on Wednesday.
• Landmark Kendall Square has a Retro Replay screening of Being John Malkovich on Tuesday.
• The Lexington Venueis open Friday to Sunday with Between the Temples and Sing Sing.
  
  The West Newton Cinema continues screening Between the Temples, Sing Sing, It Ends with Us, Deadpool & Wolverine, Thelma, and Inside Out 2.
  
  The Luna Theater has Longlegs on Friday/Saturday/Sunday and CatVideoFest 2024 Saturday/Sunday; presumably a Weirdo Wednesday Show will be added to the schedule.
  
  Cinema Salem has It Ends with Us, Alien: Romulus, Didi, Deadpool & Wolverine, and Strange Darling from Friday through Monday. Drop Dead Gorgeous plays Saturday and Seven Samurai plays Thursday.
• Outdoor films on the Joe's Free Films calendar this week are Spirited Away on Friday at MIT Open Space, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts in the Seaport on Monday, Napoleon Dynamite at the Speedway in Allston on Wednesday, and The Mighty Ducks at Boston Common on Thursday.

Probably going to use the long weekend (and beyond) on Slingshot, The Time Masters, Popeye, The Terminator, and maybe Eyes Wide Shut or giant-screen Twisters if they fit (what is the point otherwise?), plus the things I missed last week and somehow haven't had spoiled.

Successor

I'm not sure, but I think this Chinese comedy, for which I never saw a preview, winds up with a four-week run at the Causeway Street multiplex, more or less full schedules all the way through. I never saw a trailer for it, compared to, say Fly Me to the Moon, which I don't think lasted that long despite having a preview in front of nearly every movie I saw for two.

It's apparently been an enormous hit in China, up to around $460M, easily the biggest movie of the summer, and it could possibly catch Lunar New Year movies Pegasus 2 and YOLO if it hangs around until National Day. Sure, China's population is four times that of the USA, but since movie tickets cost about half of what they do here… Well, that's a comedy making about $230M in the States, and I imagine a lot of studios would take that.

Interestingly, all three of those big hits feel like things that could do okay with an American remake; they're solid concepts, but the vibe of all of them is off, so maybe a little localization could help.

Oh, and fair warning: Today's the last day at Causeway Street, so I'm not terribly worried about some spoilers in the review, even though part of what I enjoyed was the surprise of discovering that the description on IMDB was fairly deceptive.


Zhua wa wa (Successor)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 26 August 2024 in AMC Causeway Street #7 (first-run, laser DCP)

It feels strange to have any particular opinion on Successor as part of a body of work, because while a fair number of the movies that the core croup (filmmakers Peng Da-Mo & Yan Fei and stars Shen Teng & Ma Li) and various subsets have made it across the Pacific, I have missed a few and lack context. And yet, I can't think that they've lost something from their early days: They almost seem to be striving for maturity here, compared to when they made Goodbye Mr. Loser and let nothing get in the way of a joke or the general absurdity.

It opens by introducing the audience to Ma Jiye (Xiao Bochen), a bright kid being raised by poor layabout parents Ma Chenggang (Shen Teng) and Chunlan (Ma Li) and also caring for his grandmother (Sa Rina) in a run-down apartment complex that his teacher (Ding Liuyuan) finds quaintly anachronistic compared to the rest of Slinky Town. She has found a sponsor who will allow him to live and work in a better environment, but the parents refuse. After the two leave and Jiye heads to school, we see why, as Chenggang and Chunlan sneak out a secret passage and into an expensive car: Chenggang is a self-made billionaire, but has opted to raise Jiye in the environment that forged him so that he can be a true heir.

Though its targets and intentions are often very different - indeed, almost inverted in terms of where the comedy and drama are to be found - Successor has the same sort of vibe as The Truman Show, a single innocent unaware that the world around him has been carefully constructed, at least until cracks start to develop faster than they can be plastered over. There are kernels of truth that the filmmakers can work with in how obsessive parents can get about both their children's success and for them to repeat their own childhood, all the more so because they are often at cross-purposes. Done right, there's the chance to smuggle in some clever satire underneath the slapstick absurdity.

Instead, though, the two things often blunt each other; the various secret rooms, manufactured coincidences, and double lives often bring chuckles rather than the guffaws that this sort of broad absurdity often managed in previous Teng/Ma comedies, maybe because those two doing ridiculous and selfish things to screw each other over is a lot more fun than them doing it to fool a little kid. That could still work - Xiao Bochen gives Jiye the right sort of wide-eyed combination between naivete and curiosity that works when his parents seem to have good but misguided intentions - but there comes a point where it feels more cruel than funny, but by the time Jiye (now played by Shi Pengyuan) is starting to act on this, it's a hard turn and Peng & Yan don't quite have the heart to make Chenggang a proper villain, or even properly tragic.

Teng knows the job, though, and plays Chenggang as entertainingly off-center enough to keep the movie fun even if the guy is, in all likelihood, kind of awful. Xiao Bochen and Shi Pengyuan make a very solid tag-team as Ma Jiye - Shi really does look like the older version of Xiao on top of maintaining a skewed world view even as tears turn to determination - and they both play very well against Sa Rina as the teacher impersonating Jiye's grandmother and naturally being pulled into the role (she's probably the film's MVP). It feels like they could do a bit more with Ma Li as the mother who did not sign up for this when she married a wealthy man or Zhang Zidong as the older son whom Chenggang deemed unworthy.

Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of good jokes in here and more of them work than don't, although I did sometimes feel that I was laughing at different bits than other folks in the mostly Chinese & Chinese-American audience did. I just have the nagging feeling that I would have laughed much harder if this was played more as a classic Ma/Teng farce that teed the best jokes up one after another rather than something which maybe has a point to make.

Some Odd Casting: Decoded & My Penguin Friend

I don't want to sound entitled or anything, but the Detective Chinatown movies have been operating on a three-year schedule and that's with a pandemic to deal with, so I'm a little disappointed this isn't DC4. I want to know what's going on in London, darn it!

Anyway, this wound up an odd sort of themed weekend because of some casting I didn't necessarily expect. Decoded is one I didn't realize existed until listings started showing up on Monday and I saw John Cusack's name and pulled up short, not necessarily assuming that it was that John Cusack, although also musing that he wasn't as big a get for a Chinese movie as one might have thought; though he never stopped working, the last time I saw him in a new big-screen feature was 2015's Chi-Raq, and he already wasn't really a leading man at that point any more; his last big starring role was probably 2010's Hot Tub Time Machine. There's stuff in between that played theaters which I liked, but that's kind of when he stopped being a star who could open movies, although there weren't really any flops after that. I wonder what changed; did writers stop coming up with scripts that played to his strengths, is he kind of a pain in the neck on set; was there something that made him a bad risk? I dunno. I do know that a friend was surprised that it had been nearly a decade since something he was in played the Boston area.

(Well, maybe Cell did and I missed it. Also, a trailer for Pursuit played in front of the first thing I saw at the Somerville when it reopened in 2022, but it never played there.)

The same friend, when I mentioned Jean Reno starring in My Penguin Friend, asked if Reno was going to eat the penguin. And the thing is, I don't know if Reno has really done a part like that in 15 years - like Ronin co-star Robert De Niro, he's probably done more comic subversions of those parts or just generally more genial roles as he's aged - but, no, he's not exactly the first guy you'd expect for the lead in a family-oriented film. That he's also a French actor playing a Brazilian fisherman in an English-language film makes it a bit more odd.

They're fun to see on the big screen again, though, even if (or perhaps because) it's in unexpected places. And it's kind of a shame that I didn't have time to get to Blink Twice this weekend, which in Geena Davis, Christian Slater, Simon Rex, Kyle MacLachlan, and Haley Joel Osment just has a murderer's row of "I didn't realize it had been so long" casting in the supporting roles.


Jie Mi (Decoded)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 August 2024 in AMC Causeway Street #4 (first-run, laser DCP)

I came into Decoded expecting a thriller only to quickly realize I was getting a life story instead, which isn't necessarily bad - I try not to be as dismissive of biopics as some, especially for figures who are new to me anyway - but wasn't what I was looking for. It turns out that this is an adaptation of a spy novel rather than a biography, which makes the way filmmaker Chen Sicheng presents it weirdly frustrating: Maybe he can't quite make the Christopher Nolan movie he's seemingly shooting for, but it's odd that he often falls back to one of the blandest ways to tell a movie, considering how the film is at its best when it's the most weird.

It introduces audiences to mathematical prodigy Rong Jinzhen as a child whose mother, arriving at her husband's family home for the first time alone and pregnant, died during childbirth, leaving Jinzhen to be raised by the household staff and a German friend of that wandering father who taught dream interpretation. He is taken in at age twelve by distant cousin Rong "Lili" Xiaolai (Daneil Wu), principal at a college in Nanjing that accepts Jinzhen early, where he becomes the protege of mathematician Jan Liseiwicz (John Cusack), who became a man without a country when the Nazis invaded Poland. Liseiwicz will lose his adopted nation when he refuses to decode Nationalist telegrams for spymaster Zheng (Chen Daoming), fleeing to America, though Jinzhen (Liu Haoran) does so - and does so well enough that Zheng brings him to "701", an enclave dedicated to codebreaking. Though he meets future wife Mei (Ran Luyao) there, Zheng keeps his mathematicians isolated from the isolated world, particularly by intercepting letters to Jinzhen from Liseiwicz, who develops the two NSA ciphers used to communicate with Taiwan that will occupy Jinzhen's next ten years.

There's the material for a terrific spy epic here, especially when you step back and lay the pieces out: Both Jinzhen and Liseiwicz are taken from their home and imprisoned in some manner, forced into a duel by their respective governments, and while Liseiwicz's dreams of building computers sophisticated enough to house a human mind seem at odds with Jinzhen's more intuitive methods, perhaps the Pole's greatest insight is that his student can be rattled. Original novelist Mai Jia, adapted by Chen and American screenwriter Christopher MacBride, has come up with a story that makes this sort of codebreaking work, at its heart multilayered mechanisms and mathematics, a personal story despite the rivals being at a far remove without diminishing how complex the work is. It should be great!

There's a gulf between what can be and what is, though, and Cheng shows how it's happening in real time, where a nifty dream sequence will be followed by Jinzhen walking up and scribbling in a notebook; the visuals are cool, the trying to get them to serve the narrative is immediately boring. There's a connection to interpreting dreams and cracking codes to be found, but it just doesn't work on-screen, and a big sequence toward the end winds up feeling more silly than anything, in part because it's taken a step too far when the inevitable result of Jinzhen spiraling is played as a specific American plot. It also doesn't help that Chen adds a meta level with him interviewing older versions of the characters as research; it takes what makes a genre movie clever (there's a story about how this sort of work hollows a person out inside the thrilling spy yarn) and makes it the surface text.

Liu Haoran winds up giving his all to what feels like a stock part, the vaguely autistic math prodigy who defies authority out of annoyance but is dedicated in his own way. It often doesn't quite connect with the rest of the cast - it's notable that Liseiwicz and Lili talk a fair amount about what a country and as a result patriotism mean to them but Jinzhen can only parrot it rather than make his own formulation. The supporting cast around him is quite good - Daniel Wu, Yu Feiong, and Chen Yusi are interesting as the foster family, and Chen Daoming's spymaster seems both fond of Jinzhen and aware that he gains little by being a martinet even as he is ruthless in his actions - but Liu gets little chance to show a sharp mind rather than being buffeted.

John Cusack, meanwhile, is mostly called upon to be John Cusack, especially in the first half, sad and hangdog about the state of the world but capable of motormouth enthusiasm when it comes to math and computing, and the ruthlessness in the second half is familiar, too; being able to surface that harsh edge is what made the likes of Grosse Pointe Blank and War Inc. work. I'm not sure I entirely buy the heel turn, and wonder if the novel spent more time on his side of the story, but the film wasn't going to be able to put together an English-speaking cast to make that viable: Scenes with other English speakers are telling, in that Cusack maybe playing a familiar persona, but the other guy is bad in the way Western actors in Asian movies are always bad, minor talents who either can't quite communicate the right mood or can't convince their director that this sounds off.

It's subversive in a certain way - Chinese filmmakers seem to have figured out that there's no end to how much they can have people suffer and die for the good of the nation and the censor board will pass it so long as there's a victory over Nationalists or the West in there, not realizing the message is "what a cruel waste!' - but that's kind of a feature of Chinese bios now too. The movie is pretty good when Chen gets to play with dreams - there are two or three sequences in here where the dream-staging is terrific (the Beatles can be downright terrifying for someone not equipped to approach their psychedelic imagery), and it might have been a stronger movie if Chen were able to represent the math in a similarly flashy way to invite connections. That's a thing Christopher Nolan does well that doesn't get a lot of comment, and Chen is clearly trying to work in the same mold.

The film fell somewhat flat for me on this first viewing, but I must admit that I'm curious how it will play on a second watch, now that what Chen is going for is a bit more clear. I also suspect that, like a lot of big-budget Chinese films, it's making an effort to target an international audience with its American co-writer and co-star (plural, though Daniel Wu is likely a bigger star in China than his native U.S.), but has a hard time threading the needle between what can play at home and what will work abroad.


My Penguin Friend

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 August 2024 in AMC Boston Common #12 (first-run, laser DCP)

Here's the thing about Jean Reno: Even if you've only seen him as the cool guy in hard-edged thrillers, it's absolutely no surprise to discover he's got a family movie about a kind but sad man rescuing a lost penguin in him. There are some guys a viewer is happy to see when they show up in a movie even if their characters aren't likable, because they've formed a connection with the audience. You know he's got the range even if you haven't seen it.

Reno is not in the film's opening, which has a young Brazilian boy named Miguel (Juan José Garnica) excited about his upcoming birthday and hoping his fisherman father João (Pedro Urizzi) will take him out on the sea rather than make him go to school, which João does, though rightfully nervous about the gathering storm clouds. Twenty-five or thirty years later, João (now played by Reno) is withdrawn; he and wife Maria (Adriana Barraza) don't fight, but they aren't like they were. Meanwhile, five thousand miles away in the Patagonia region of Argentina, a curious penguin begins his annual migration, only to be thrown off course by a storm and covered with oil from a leaking tanker. He's in bad shape when he washes up on the beach, and João takes him in, planning to put him back out to sea when his feathers have regrown. But the day that happens, a local girl gives him the name "Dindin" and the little guy decides to stay.

Though seemingly cast against type, Reno is great, exactly what you want out of this character in this movie, a rumpled good heart and embarrassed dignity in situations other films might play for slapstick. It's nothing surprising, really, but he can certainly set a mood with just his body language, from the old-man waddle that suggests he and the little guy will be great friends to his first hesitant time going to town with Dindin. He and Adriana Barraza are old pros in how they navigate the path back to the pair being a couple rather than little more than housemates, such that they can put across the way that Dindin is filling a whole in their lives without writers Kristen Lazarian & Paulina Lagudi Ulrich or director David Schurmann having to either position the penguin as a replacement for their son or backing off the idea. And while Reno and Pedro Urizzi don't particularly resemble each other, they capture the essence of this man at different points in their lives that repeated lines and actions connect.

Around Reno, it's a charmingly old-fashioned family film, with relatively few scenes using digital penguins compared to documentary and stock footage or just having a bird on set, and I suspect that even a small separation between what a penguin does and what filmmakers imagine penguins doing can be a big deal. It's not afraid of having a protagonist in his 60s despite kids being a great deal of the audience, and isn't shy about folks learning a few things. The script is wobbly at points, but generally in a way that falls forward rather than back, and does well to switch from João's perspective to that of Dindin or a trio of Argentine scientists to balance the mood.

It's a bit surprising that the scientists played by Alexia Moyano, Nicolás Francella, and Rocío Hernández never seem to make any direct contact with João, especially toward the end when it would seem to make sense even if it would reduce the suspense. They're a good enough trio to always be welcome even if they're pulling away from the main story and shouldering the educational duties; it's not hard to imagine the movie made primarily from their point of view. There's some care put into making their dynamic interesting rather than just obligatory.

If the film has an issue, it's that the opening is a bit long and heavy-handed; older folks in the audience can see exactly what's being set up (and might find the young Brazilian actors being obviously dubbed into English distracting), but might play well with the younger folks. That's the sort of thing that puts this movie right on the line between a movie that a person might say is surprisingly good and one which that person actively recommends, although it's easy to push it into the latter category with the cute penguin and a famous tough guy playing effortlessly against type.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 23 August 2024 - 29 August 2024

 

It is going to keep Augusting at the movie theaters until at least past Labor Day, I'm afraid.

• Blink Twice, a thriller starring Naomi Ackie as a waitress billionaire Slater Kane (Channing Tatum) impulsively takes to his private island, only to find other guests - and apparently memories of them - disappearing. Kind of a terrific supporting cast on this one with new favorites and folks one hasn't seen enough of lately. It's at the Capitol, Fresh Pond, Boston Common, Causeway Street, Kendall Square, the Seaport, South Bay (including Dolby Cinema), Assembly Row (including Dolby Cinema), and Arsenal Yards.
  
  Slasher-looking thing Strange Darling stars Willa Fitzgerald as a woman on a one-night stand which spirals out of control, with nothing as it seems. That plays CinemaSalem, Boston Common, Causeway Street, Kendall Square, South Bay (including Dolby Cinema), and Assembly Row.
  
  Someone finally got a remake of The Crow made - the (in)famous original was 30 years ago and this seems to have been in the works ever since - with Bill Skarsgård as the revenant avenger. It's at Fresh Pond, Boston Common, Causeway Street, Kendall Square, the Seaport, South Bay (including Imax Xenon & Dolby Cinema), Assembly Row (including Imax Laser), and Arsenal Yards.
  
  200% Wolf is a follow-up to Aussie animated show 100% Wolf about a were-poodle who wants to be a real werewolf; getting his wish here causes all sorts of chaos. It's at Fresh Pond and Boston Common.
  
  The latest faith-based drama from Alex Kendrick, The Forge, plays Fresh Pond, Boston Common, Causeway Street, South Bay, and Assembly Row.
  
  Horror movie Stream, with Danielle Harris as part of a family whose hotel is locked down so psychos can compete for who can manage the most creative kill (with a bunch of horror notables as killers/victims), has an very short run at Boston Common through Sunday; it's from the producers and FX crew of Terrifier 2.
  
  Rear Window plays Arsenal Yards on Sunday and South Bay on Sunday & Wednesday. There's a "Screen Unseen" preview at Boston Common, Causeway Street, Assembly Row on Monday. There's an A24 x IMAX show of Everything Everywhere All at Once on Wednesday at Jordan's Furniture, South Bay, Assembly Row with Talk to Me the A24 selection at Boston Common; Wednesday also has screenings of The Batman with a preview of HBOs The Penguin spinoff at Boston Common (Dolby Cinema), Assembly Row (Dolby Cinema).
• The Coolidge Corner Theatre gets Between the Temples, with Jason Schwartzmann as a grieving widower whose entire family seems to want him to move on, but the thing that winds up helping him out is a meeting with a former music teacher played by Carol Kane. It's also at Kendall Square, West Newton, and Boston Common.
  
  Two tracks for midnights at the Coolidge this weekend: On one screen, the medieval-adjacent films continue with a 35mm print of Highlander on Friday night and a DCP of Legend on Saturday; on the other, they team with Justin LaLIberty of Cinematographé for two directed by Abel Ferrera starring Harvey Keitel: Bad Lieutenant on Friday and a 35mm print of Dangerous Game on Saturday. On Monday, there's a Big Screen Classic show of Inside Man; "Out of Time '99" features Bringing Out the Dead Tuesday and Magnolia on Wednesday; and "Rewind!" features Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl on Thursday with an after-party upstairs. All four of those are on 35mm film.
• The Somerville Theatre has the new 4K Restoration of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in the main auditorium, with Tobe Hooper's sequel The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 Saturday's midnight special if you want to make a night of it. Sunday's "Attack of the B-Movies" twin bill doubles up on Bela Lugosi with The Phantom Creeps & The Devil Bat. The week's IFFBoston Host Summer Nights are Bound (35mm Monday), Crash (35mm) & Boxing Helena (Tuesday), and Lost Highway (4K Wednesday).
  
  The Capitol has a 4th Wall show on Saturday with bands Misuser, Jim Rat, and Exit 18, with Misuser handling visuals themselves, and another on Monday with bands Edhochuli & Don't Grow Old, with Digital Awareness doing the visuals. There's also the monthly free "Disasterpiece Theatre" show/VHS swap on Monday.
• Apple Fresh Pond picks up several Indian films this weekend: Nunakuzhi is a Malayalam-language thriller about a seemingly honest company head whose business is suddenly targeted by the government for tax evasion and other violations; Maruthi Nagar Subramanyam is a Telugu-language comedy of mistaken identities starring Rao Ramesh in the title role; Vaazhai is a Tamil-language film about a 12-year-old boy and a village highlighted by a plantain tree; those open on Friday. The latter should not be confused with Vaazha: Biopic of a Billion Boys, a Malayalam-language film about four young boys considered losers which plays Saturday & Sunday. Toofan, a Bengali-language action movie co-produced with Bangladesh, also plays Saturday & Sunday; Telugu-language action movie Saripodhaa Sanivaarm, about a man who only acts on his rage on Saturdays, opens Wednesday (also at Boston Common).
  
  Held over are Stree 2 (also at Boston Common) Demonte Colony 2 (through Tuesday), and #Aay (matinees on Friday, Monday, and Tuesday).
  
  Decoded, the latest from Detective Chinatown mastermind Chen Sicheng, stars Haoran Liu as a mathematical prodigy that the government puts to work cracking codes in a top-secret compound with John Cusack (really!) as his Polish mentor and later nemesis; it's at Causeway Street. Chinese comedy Successor is also held over at Causeway Street.
  
  This week's Ghibli Fest movies are connected, with Whisper of the Heart playing Boston Common, South Bay, Assembly Row Sunday (dubbed) & Tuesday (subtitled) while sequel The Cat Returns plays the same locations Monday (dubbed) & Wednesday (subtitled). If your anime tastes run to the more delightfully, bloodily insane, Kizumonogatari: Koyomi Vamp plays Boston Common on Wednesday night.
  
  K-pop concert film Seventeen Tour "Follow" Again to Cinemas has encores at Boston Common on Saturday.
• The Brattle Theatre has the new 4K restoration of Vittorio De Sica's Shoeshine from Friday to Tuesday, although it's just matinees starting Sunday. They also have (mostly) late shows of the restoration of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre through Sunday.
  
  On Sunday, the folks from Cinematographé travel up the 66 bus from the Coolidge for a 35mm double feature of Robert Altman's Thieves Like Us & Last Embrace from Jonathan Demme, a couple of rarely-screened (and impressively cast) flicks from two masters.
  
  With August ending, so does the vertical calendar. The Columbia Musicals are Across the Universe. on Monday and a 35mm print of Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story on Tuesday. Tuesday also features a 35mm screening of Pee-Wee's Big Adventure for the late Paul Reubens's birthday. Wednesday's final Summer of Sophia show is a 35mm print of The Virgin Suicides, and Cruel Summer wraps on Thursday with a 35mm Ripley double feature: Purple Moon (planned well before the death of Alain Delon) and The Talented Mr. Ripley.
• The Seaport Alamo has matinee/afternoon shows of The Conversation through at least Wednesday (you can see it at the Somerville next weekend). Other specials include Blade Runner: The Final Cut (Friday), The Toxic Avenger (Friday), the restored Caligula (Saturday & Tuesday), CatVideoFest 2024 (Saturday), Ju-On The Grudge (Shimizu's Japanese theatrical version, Saturday), Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Sunday & Monday), Grease (sing-along movie party Sunday), Jurassic Park (Sunday & Tuesday), Carpenter's The Thing (Monday), and The Last Starfighter (Wednesday).
• The Regent Theatre continues host to Lonely Seal International Film, Screenplay, and Music Festival through Sunday the 25th. On Wednesday, they have a screening of local filmmaker Jimmy Martin's short film "The Painter", with a number of other local shorts included.
• It's Films at the Gate Weekend, with three kung fu classics playing outside by the Chinatown Gate with pre-show martial arts demonstrations; it's fun to grab some snacks in Chinatown and enjoy! This year's movies are Kids from Shaolin on Friday, Jackie Chan's The Young Master on Saturday, and Stephen Chow's Shaolin Soccer on Sunday.
• Landmark Kendall Squarehas a Retro Replay screening of Eyes Wide Shut with a pre-recorded Q&A on Tuesday.
• The Lexington Venue continues to show My Penguin Friend, The Instigators, and It Ends with Us and showing the Cat Film Fest on Thursday evening as well. Open Friday to Sunday.
  
  The West Newton Cinema opens Between the Temples, Didi, and Sing Sing, keeping It Ends with Us, Deadpool & Wolverine, Thelma, and Inside Out 2.
  
  The Luna Theater has CatVideoFest 2024 Friday and Saturday, Longlegs on Saturday, Jaws on Sunday, and a Weirdo Wednesday Show.
  
  Cinema Salem has Alien: Romulus, Didi, Deadpool & Wolverine, and Strange Darling from Friday through Monday. Friday's Night LIght show is Freeway, The Talented Mr. Ripley plays Saturday, and Drop Dead Gorgeous plays Thursday.
• Outdoor films on the Joe's Free Films calendar this week are Wish on Saturday at Kendall Urban Gardens and Tuesday at Ronan Park, The Little Mermaid Saturday at the Prudential Center, Trolls Band Together Monday at Winthrop Park, PAW Patrol: The Movie in the Seaport on Monday, The Sandlot at TimeOut Market on Monday and The LOT on Thursday, Encanto at Noyes Playground on Wednesday, All Quiet on the Western Front at Goethe-Institut on Wednesday (RSVP required), Back to the Future at the Navy Yard on Wednesday, and Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire at Boston Common on Thursday.

Got a couple of fun things blowing holes in my movie-seeing time, but I'll probably find time for Blink Twice, Strange Darling, hopefully catching up with Successor and My Penguin Friend, as well as Purple Moon.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 16 August 2024 - 22 August 2024

Even the release that will likely sell a bunch of tickets looks kind of "sure, it's August, whatever".

• Alien: Romulus, the latest film in the series, is directed by Fede Alvarez and sure looks like "more Alien(s)", which I guess may be enough, although this used to be a series where up-and-coming filmmakers switched things up with each new entry. It's at the Capitol, Fresh Pond, Jordan's Furniture (Imax), Embassy Waltham, CinemaSalem, Boston Common (including Imax Xenon & Dolby Cinema & Mandarin-subtitled shows), Causeway Street (including Mandarin-subtitled shows), Kendall Square, the Seaport (including Dolby Atmos), South Bay (including Imax Xenon & Dolby Cinema), Assembly Row (including Imax Laser & Dolby Cinema), Arsenal Yards (including CWX), and Chestnut Hill.
  
  Chiiwetel Ejiofor writes, directs, and co-stars in Rob Peace, with Jay Will as the title character, a young man risking a bright future to defend his father in court. It's at Fresh Pond, Boston Common, and South Bay.
  
  Jean Reno stars in My Penguin Friend as a Brazilian fisherman who rescues and befriends a penguin who has wound up very far from the Arctic, although scientists are tracking and intending to return the little guy to his natural habitat. It's at Fresh Pond, the Embassy, the Lexington Venue, West Newton, and Boston Common.
  
  Ryan's World the Movie: Titan Universe Adventure is based on a YouTube series about a kid who, in this movie, follows his twin sisters into a magic comic book, that goes back to 2015, which has me wondering just how young he was at the start. It's at Boston Common, Causeway Street, and South Bay.
  
  Laika's first stop-motion animated feature, Coraline gets a 15th-anniversary rerelease, and, yeah, it's kind of a bummer Neil Gaiman couldn't wait a couple of months to be revealed as a creep, because that takes some of the fun out of it. It's at Boston Common (including RealD 3D), Causeway Street (including RealD 3D), South Bay (including RealD 3D), Assembly Row (including RealD 3D), and Arsenal Yards (no 3D).
  
  Good Bad Things has an encore screening at Boston Common Sunday afternoon. A24's Wednesday show at Boston Common this week is The Bling Ring.
• The Coolidge Corner Theatre starts their regular run of IFFBoston selection Good One, which follows a 17-year-old girl on a camping trip with her father and his best friend, which starts out kind of fun, but then… Well, there's enough drama for a movie.
  
  The Coolidge also opens documentary How to Come Alive with Norman Mailer, with Monday's 7pm show on screen #2 rather than #6 with the subject's daughter Maggie on-hand for a Q&A afterward.
  
  They've got what seems to be their first "Box Office Babies" screening in a while on Friday, with Didi showing in the morning with the lights up and other accommodations for parents of young children, and are also advertising screenings of Longlegs and Cuckoo on screen #1 (mostly on the weekends) as being 35mm prints. The weekend's medieval-ish midnights are Knightriders on Friday (35mm) and Monty Python and the Holy Grail on Saturday. Saturday also has Mass Mini Con presenting a Mutant Mystery Movie, which is not necessarily about mutants, but has a custom poster giveaway by an unknown artist in the collective for an unknown movie. The week's "Out of Time 1999" movie is Beau Travail on Sunday afternoon, there's a Sound of Silents collaboration with the Tanglewood Music Center presenting new scores for four silent short films on Tuesday; and Sorcerer is Thursday's Big Screen Classic with UConn professor Justin Liberman leading a seminar before the film.
• Landmark Kendall Square, Boston Common, Causeway Street, the Seaport, South Bay open Skincare, a dark comedy/thriller with Elizabeth Banks as an esthetician whose life begins going into a tailspin as she prepares to launch her own line of beauty products.
  
  Kendall Square also has a mystery first look preview on Monday and a Retro Replay screening of Three Kings on Tuesday.
• The Capitol picks up Didi and has Trolls: Band Together as their kids' matinee. They've also one of 14 cinemas where PlutoTV is paying for all tickets on Saturday & Sunday; no advance sales for those days. They also wrap their "Throwback Thursday" series with Mamma Mia!, and if Abba is not your jam, they've got a premiere screening of music doc/concert film This Is New Tone.
  
  Their friends at The Somerville Theatre have the new 4K restoration/reconstruction of Caligula: The Ultimate Cut, and also opens Sing Sing. They also have nearly a full week of "Hot Summer Nights" with Pretty Woman (35mm Friday), a double feature of Basic Instinct & Sliver (Saturday with Instinct on 35mm), Thelma & Louise (35mm Sunday), Poison Ivy & The Crush (Monday), The Last Seduction & Jade (Tuesday with Jade on 35mm), and Showgirls & You Don't Nomi (Wednesday with Showgirls on 35mm). There's also an early "Silents Please!" screening of Wings Sunday afternoon, with Jeff Rapsis on the organ at 12:30m rather than the usual 2pm.
• In addition to the Indian films that opened at Apple Fresh Pond for Parsi New Year - Hindi comedyKhel Khel Mein, action flick Vedaa (also at Boston Common), and horror-comedy sequel Stree 2 (also at Boston Common); Telgugu crime drama Mr. Bachchan and sci-fi flick Double Ismart; Tamil historical drama Thangalaan - they also open Tamil-language thriller Demonte Colony 2 and Telugu-lnaguage film #AAY
  
  Chinese comedy Successor is held over at Causeway Street.
  
  J-pop concert film Live Is Smile Always: Lander plays Boston Common, South Bay, Assembly Row on Saturday, Sunday, and Wednesday. K-pop concert film Seventeen Tour "Follow" Again to Cinemas also plays Boston Common on Wednesday.
• The Brattle Theatre has another IFFBoston alum, Last Summer, from Friday to Saturday; the latest from Cahterine Breillat, with Léa Drucker as a woman whose intention of growing closer to her husband's teenage son crosses a line. It shares the screen with Music, a new film by Angela Schanelec about two lovers who meet as prison guard and prisoner who bond and form a family based on their love of music.
  
  Columbia Musicals continue with a double feature of Annie & The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T. on Monday, and a matinee of Annie on Tuesday while School Daze takes the night shift. Wednesday's Summer of Sophia show is a 35mm print of Lost in Translation, while Thursday's Cruel Summer show is the start of a weekend run for the new 4K restoration of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
• The Seaport Alamo has CatVideoFest 2024 on Friday & Saturday afternoon, with Takashi Miike's Audition playing those evenings. The NeverEnding Story has matinee shows Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. They're apparently going to be doing Harry Potter movies Sunday afternoons, with Sorcerer's Stone this week (and also playing Tuesday). Footloose plays Monday. Wednesday also has a Hot Fuzz movie party and an advance screening of Blink Twice.
• The Regent Theatre plays host to Lonely Seal International Film, Screenplay, and Music Festival, with multiple programs Tuesday through Sunday the 25th. This includes a 45th Anniversary show of The Kids Are Alright, also part of the theater's regular "Midweek Music, Movies, and More" series.
• Boston Jewish Film screens Shalom Bollywood at The Vilna Shul on Thursday, with the $25 ticket including an Indian dinner before the show.
• Last call for Twisters Friday & Saturday evenings at The Museum of Science.
• The Lexington Venue opens My Penguin Friend and The Instigators, keeping It Ends with Us and showing the Cat Film Fest on Thursday evening as well. No shows Monday.
  
  The West Newton Cinema opens My Penguin Friend and The Fabulous Four, keeping It Ends with Us, Deadpool & Wolverine, Despicable Me 4, Thelma, and Inside Out 2.
  
  The Luna Theater has Longlegs on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Thursday; and a Weirdo Wednesday Show.
  
  Cinema Salem has Alien: Romulus, Cuckoo, Deadpool & Wolverine, Twisters, and Despicable Me 4 from Friday through Monday. Rocky Horror shows with the Teseracte Players on Saturday night (Full Body is, as always, at Boston Common). There's a Whodunnit watch party Wednesday, and The Talented Mr. Ripley plays Thursday evening.
  
  If you can make it to the Liberty Tree Mall in Danvers, they have Close to You, starring Elliot Page as a trans man returning to his hometown for the first time since transitioning.
• Outdoor films on the Joe's Free Films calendar this week are Pirates of the Caribbean on Friday at Wright's Pond in Medford, something unannounced at MIT's Open Space the same night,, Migration Saturday at the Prudential Center, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom Monday at Malcom X Park, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days in the Seaport on Monday, The Parent Trap at TimeOut Market on Monday, Bob Marley: One Love at The Museum of Fine Arts on Tuesday, Ferris Bueller's Day Off at Peters Park on Wednesday, Apollo 13 on 35mm at the Greenway Wednesday, Run Lola Run at Goethe-Institut on Wednesday (RSVP required), Barbie at the Navy Yard on Wednesday, Footloose at Boston Landing on Thursday, Kung Fu Panda 4 at Iacono Playground on Thursday, and Timechasers at Seven Hills Park on Thursday.

I'll probably try and get to Alien, Successor, My Penguin Friend, and maybe Caligula and Skincare, although, geez, the lineups at the Somerville and Brattle are a whole bunch of "you should have already seen some of this stuff, Seaver" material.

Next Week in Tickets: Films playing Boston 9 August 2024 - 15 August 2024

Back from Montreal and… kind of tempted to watch a couple of movies I saw in Montreal again, actually

• Why? Because Cuckoo (which I saw at Fantasia) is a blast, the first non-student film from Tilman Singer starring Hunter Schafer as a 17-year-old girl who moves to Germany with her father, only to find that the man who hired him is into some deeply weird stuff. The Coolidge has it on a 35mm print (for all the shows in theater #1) and it plays digitally at CinemaSalem, Boston Common, Kendall Square, the Seaport, and South Bay.
  
  Also opening is Borderlands, an adaptation of the video game series which looks like someone saw an empty ecological niche after James Gunn finished with Guardians of the Galaxy and got Eli Roth to make a sci-fi action-comedy with Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, and Jamie Lee Curtis in the same vein. It's at the Capitol, Fresh Pond, Boston Common (including Imax Xenon), Causeway Street, Kendall Square, the Seaport, South Bay (including Imax Xenon & Dolby Cinema), Assembly Row (including Imax Laser & Dolby Cinema), and Arsenal Yards.
  
  Perhaps the biggest opening, though, will be It Ends with Us, starring Blake Lively as a woman who fears that she may be repeating the mistakes of her parents' abusive relationship. It's at the Capitol, Fresh Pond, the Lexington Venue, West Newton, Boston Common, Causeway Street, Kendall Square, the Seaport, South Bay, Assembly Row, Arsenal Yards, and Chestnut Hill.
  
  Belgian-produced but English-language World War I film The Last Front plays at The Embassy and Boston Common.
  
  The Olympics continue to screen at South Bay and Assembly Row through Sunday. Lawrence of Arabia plays Boston Common Sunday & Monday. French animated feature Sirocco and the Kingdom of the Winds plays Boston Common Sunday (dubbed) and Monday (possibly subtitled). There's a "Screen Unseen" preview at Boston Common, Causeway Street, Assembly Row on Monday, an "Early Access" preview with streamed Q&A for Strange Darling at Assembly Row on Wednesday, and "Fan Event" early shows for Alien: Romulus on Thursday at Assembly Row (Dolby Cinema). Despicable Me 3 plays matinee kids' shows at Boston Common, Causeway Street Monday and Wednesday. A24 reaches kind of deep into their catalog for Mid90s at Boston Common on Wednesday. Drama Good Bad Things plays Boston Common on Thursday.
• In addition to Cuckoo, The Coolidge Corner Theatre opens a new 4K restoration of Burden of Dreams, a terrific documentary about the making of Fitzcarraldo and how Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski were one of the most fascinatingly combustible combinations of director and actor. It plays Friday to Sunday and Thursday; Fitzcarraldo itself plays once on each of those days as well.
  
  The midnight shows this weekend are Dragonslayer on Friday and a digital restoration of The Church on Saturday. "Out of Time 1999" shows this week are all 35mm prints, with All About My Mother on Sunday and one of The Insider on Tuesday, and Go on Wednesday, with the annual The Big Lebowshi party in the big room on Monday and a 35mm print of Bird as the Cinema Jukebox show on Thursday, There's also a special preview screening of Good One with director India Donaldson on Tuesday.
• The Capitol opens Dance First, a biography of Samuel Beckett that stars Gabriel Byrne as the noted literary figure. They also have afternoon matinees of Puss in Boots: The Last Wish all week and a Throwback Thursday screening of Moonrise Kingdom. Two 4th Wall/Digital Awareness shows this week, with Clifford, Robber Robber, and Prewn on Friday and Battlemode, Lions and Lavender, Plague Dad, and Vices Inc. on Saturday.
  
  The Somerville Theatre opens National Anthem on Sunday, with the film about a construction worker who learns about himself among an eccentric group of rodeo performers, plays at least through Thursday. Knowing for the Saturday Midnight special, a rare chance to see the local town get destroyed on film. Dirty Dancing plays Monday, an "Off the Reel… Onto the Dance Floor!" show with a dance party upstairs in the Crystal Ballroom afterward. IFFBoston Hot Summer Nights continues with No Way Out on Tuesday and Sex, Lies, and Videotape on Wednesday; all three are on 35mm film.
• Telugu film Committee Kurrollu opens at Apple Fresh Pond this weekend, but the big action happens on Wednesday & Thursday, when six new films open for Parsi New Year. In Hindi, there is Khel Khel Mein, a comedy about six friends who meet for dinner and reveal secrets about each other, and, yes, it's the latest remake of Perfect Strangers, the 25th since the original came out in 2016; action flick Vedaa (also at Boston Common); and horror-comedy sequel Stree 2. In Telgugu, there's Mr. Bachchan, a crime flick based upon a raid on an industrialist; and Double Ismart, a sci-fi flick about an assassin who has the memories of a dead police officer implanted in his brain. And, finally, in Tamil, there's Thangalaan, based on events in the lives of miners in the Kolar Gold Fields in the 19th Century.
  
  Chinese comedy Successor and thriller A Place Called Silence are held over at Causeway Street. Maybe them sticking around is why Hong Kong hit Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, an action/star-packed crime movie set in the Kowloon Walled City of the 1980s, is getting the one-screening-a-day treatment at the Seaport. UPDATE: It's now also playing at Boston Common!
• The Brattle Theatre has a weekend of Hitchcock in 4K with double features of Rebecca & Saboteur on Friday, North by Northwest & Vertigo on Saturday, and To Catch a Thief & North by Northwest on Sunday.
  
  In the vertical part of the schedule, "Musical Columbia" has a double feature of The Buddy Holly Story & La Bamba on Monday and another featuring American Pop (35mm) & Heavy Metal on Tuesday. Marie Antoinette 9n 35mm) is the Summer of Sophia show on Wednesday, and "Cruel Summer" on Thursday is Do the Right Thing & Falling Down, the latter on 35mm.
• In addition to holding over The Instigators and picking up Walled In, The Seaport Alamo continues the Seaport Selects with Shogun Assassin (a dubbed mashup of two Lone Wolf and Cub movies) on Friday & Saturday, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom for brunch on Sunday, Firestarter on Monday, Streets of Fire on Wednesday, and previews of Skincare on Tuesday and Jackpot on Wednesday (the latter for members).
• The Tuesday Retro Replay at Landmark Kendall Square is Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels, which will feature a pre-recorded Q&A with cinematographer Tim Maurice-Jones.
• The Midweek Music Movie at The Regent Theatre is on Thursday this week, with director John McDermott on-hand to introduce his film Electric Lady Studios: A Jimi Hendrix Vision and answer questions afterward.
• Twisters is still running at The Museum of Science on Friday and Saturday evening.
• The Lexington Venue opens It Ends with Us, with Kneecap and Seven Samurai. Open Friday to Sunday
  
  The West Newton Cinema opens It Ends with Us and keeps Harold and the Purple Crayon, Deadpool & Wolverine, Widow Clicquot, Despicable Me 4, Thelma, and Inside Out 2. There's also 100th Anniversary screenings of two Buster Keaton movies - Sherlock Jr. & Our Hospitality - on Sunday with Jeff Rapsis on the organ. No listings for Thursday.
  
  The Luna Theater has MaXXXine on Friday, Saturday, and Thursday; the original Friday the 13th on Sunday; and a Weirdo Wednesday Show.
  
  Cinema Salem has Cuckoo, Trap, Deadpool & Wolverine, Twisters, and Despicable Me 4 from Friday through Monday. The Friday Night Light show is Hard Boiled and Three Kings plays Saturday & Sunday afternoon.
• Outdoor films on the Joe's Free Films calendar this week are The Goonies on Saturday at Boston Common, National Treasure Saturday at the Prudential Center, A Million Miles Away Monday at Jamaica Pond, School of Rock in the Seaport on Monday, Finding Nemo at TimeOut Market on Monday, Elemental at Healy Playground on Tuesday, Wonka at Hynes Playground on Wednesday, Kung Fu Panda at Donnelly Field in Cambridge on Wednesday, I'm Your Man at Goethe-Institut on Wednesday (RSVP required), Knives Out at the Navy Yard on Wednesday, The Outsiders at Seven Hills Park on Thursday, and Toy Sory at The LOT on Thursday.

It's awful quick to see Cuckoo again, even with a 35mm print, and I want to support HK Cinema with Walled In, but, again… I'll probably check out Borderlands, Successor, and The Instigators, some of the Brattle's Hitchcocks, maybe give Knowing another chance, because, man, I did not like it 15 years ago.

Fantasia 2024 in Theaters This Weekend: Cuckoo, Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, and Oddity

"Cuckoo Walled-in Oddity" feels like it's kind of a horror premise of its own, right?

Anyway, as I'm sort of running behind on what started out as "Fantasia Daily" posts back in '05 (and have been since Day 4), I'm going to try to not let regular releases get too far ahead of me. I often don't really have to worry about it - I'll mostly try and avoid things that I'll have a chance to get to in regular theaters - but Cuckoo played against a streaming series that would have a second screening and felt appropriate to see at the festival because I was part of the crowd that got gobsmacked by Tilman Singer's student film six years ago; Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In was up against a set of shorts that I figured i could do without (and Hong Kong films, even those filled with stars, can be more hit-and-miss about getting a release in Boston); and Oddity... Well, Oddity came and went in Boston during the festival's first week, so this was actually the chance I had to see it on the big screen.

They are all pretty dang good; you can have a good time in Boston theaters (or theaters elsewhere, obviously) this weekend, and for all I know Oddity will be hitting SVOD around the same time.


Cuckoo

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

Tilman Singer just absolutely goes for it in his first post-student film, which feels like someone taking a case that Quatermas might have been involved in back in the day, going spook-a-blast on it, and dropping a thoroughly overwhelmed teenager in the middle. Just a big, loud, science-fictional take on something that seems like it belongs in the domain of slow-burn folk horror.

I kind of love it.

After establishing its weird bona fides, it introduces us to Gretchen (Hunter Schafer), pointedly riding with the movers in a van rather than her father Luis (Marton Csókás), stepmother Beth (Jessica Henwick), and half-sister Alma (Mila Lieu), who is mute though not deaf, as they take up residence in a unit provided by Herr König (Dan Stevens) on his Bavarian resort property as Luis oversees an expansion. Gretchen would really prefer to be home with her mother, friends, and band, but that's not possible, and while König offers her a job working at the hotel, he's also insistent she not try to bike home at night. She draws the attention of a couple of guests - Ed (Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey), who floats the idea of the two ladies running off to Paris together, and Henry (Jan Bluthardt), a cop who says there definitely is something screwy going on with König and Dr. Bonomo (Proschat Madani), who operates a nearby clinic, and looks for Gretchen's help.

Like Singer's remarkable student film Luz, Cuckoo takes place in an isolating but still contemporary location, where even the people under the sway of something apparently paranormal are still modern and thinking in such terms. For Singer and his young heroines, the dangers in the world outside one's normal field of view may have deep roots but the ways they are monstrous are familiar: König is a developer who thinks himself a philanthropist, and there's not necessarily anything else behind that particular sort of ego, which is perfectly capable of doing catastrophic damage on its own. When Gretchen and her new allies are attacked, it's more a sort of sensory overload/déjà vu that knocks them off balance enough that they sustain conventional injuries rather than mysterious scars, and if Henry fills the void of the mysterious monster hunter, he's also basically a cop with guns. There are secrets to be uncovered, of course, and they're not just normal creepy-men things, but weird in the way the natural world can be weird and dangerous.

What's maybe most impressive is that Singer often has this simmering while the difficult relationship the Gretchen has with her father and his new family is in the foreground, circling back around a week later, a lot of the most memorable scenes involve her forlorn calls to her mother's answering machine and how Alma clearly adores her big sister despite Gretchen's resentment. It's so much the movie that the extremely impressive job Singer does in the last act of making the weird thing going on clear is kind of amazing: He's got to get a lot of explanations out in the middle of a great deal of action. It's screwy as heck, but audiences who came in expecting a normal horror movie are going to come out knowing what its deal is rather than shrugging and saying "that was, uh, something".

It's also fun to watch Hunter Schafer and Dan Stevens run with it. Singer never calls for them to be subtle, so Schafer is wearing her character's heart on her sleeve the whole time while also being a moody teenager who slacks off at work and spending much of the movie having to pull off various injuries. Stevens, meanwhile, is smirkingly manic that the energy level jumps every time he enters a scene, giving off this charisma that doesn't lessen how he's all kinds of dangerous.. Others get in on the act later, and by the time the finale is going, everyone is sort of in overdrive but approaching the chaos from a clear direction.

By the time it's over, Singer has thrown a lot at the audience, from crazy camera angles and oddball music choices, people who are very much not combat-trained trying to extricate themselves from shootouts, and revelations that say they take the title "Cuckoo" seriously in every way they can. It's a blast of modern action-horror that's fun in large part because it's so contemporary.


Jiu Long cheng zhai · Wei cheng (Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 1 August 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

After a trilogy of Monkey King films amiable for their ambition but a mixed bag (to say the least) in their execution, "Soi" Cheung Pou-Soi made a hard shift, directing two contemporary crime films whose vision veered more to the dystopian than the mythic in Limbo and Mad Fate. He doesn't exactly split the difference here, so much as he finds a way to infuse a dark urban vision with big, wuxia-style action. The end result is something that feels like an entertainingly elevated classic triad movie.

It's adapted from a long-running comic book series, so it starts by getting the audience up to speed of how Cyclone (Louis Koo Tin-Lok) became the main godfather in the Kowloon Walled City early in the 1970s. By the time refugee Chan Lok-Kwan (Raymond Lam Fung) arrives some years later, his control is unquestioned, although Mr. Big (Sammo Hung Kam-Bo) runs other parts of Hong Kong. He's impressed by Lok's abilities in underground fights, but when he tries to fob a lousy fake HK ID off on Lok, the latter grabs a bag and runs, thinking it was money rather than drugs, leading to Mr. Big's #2 King (Philip Ng Wan-Lung) chasing him through Hong Kong all the way to the Walled City. King stops there, but Cyclone's lieutenant Shin (Lau Chun-Him) picks up where he left off, thinking Lok was trying to sell without giving Cyclone a slice. Eventually, things get sorted out, Cyclone takes Lok under his wing, and Lok becomes friends with Shin, underground doctor "AV" (German Cheung), and Twelfth Master (Tony Wu Tsz-Tung). Things are good for a while, but this isn't the sort of environment where that can last.

As might be expected from the last two movies, Cheung's vision of the Kowloon Walled City is something else, a mess of buildings that blur into a black monolith when seen from the outside, so tightly-packed and shabby that the distinctions between streets and alleys and hallways collapse. Cyclone's barber shop may be open air, or maybe not, because the Walled City is both a bunch of tiny rooms and one place. It almost leaves no room for wall-climbing action despite the three-dimensionality of the place, although these guys will find a way. There's nostalgia to it, an almost magical sort of stasis but violence is never far off; it's soon clear that old grudges are never truly buried here, leading to a set of explosive confrontations.

Then it's time for revenge and retribution, and for all that the action in the first couple of acts has been elevated, the climax is at another level. Make no mistake, those action sequences that kick the movie off often feature Raymond Lam fending off a half-dozen guys while on the run, with everybody taking a lot of hits in a way that sells that they are all exceptional fighters. Action choreographer KenjiTarigaki (often Donnie Yen's go-to guy) gets people up in the air and otherwise on wires so that each blow feels twice as powerful and being of this city becomes a distinct advantage. By the final stretch, what basically amounts to a four-on-one battle, it's like a set of mortals battling an enemy who has sold his soul for the power of the gods, wire fu that seems utterly detached from limits even as it still hits hard and looks like it hurts. It's eye-popping action that keeps escalating until it can seemingly go no further.

The melodrama of it all is maybe a bit wobblier; the movie is at its strongest when it's about the here and now, with Raymon Lam maybe not having a complicated character in Lok but getting across that, capability for violence aside, he's a simple man who wants to live by some sort of rules, the sort of orphan who slides into a found family easily. You see Louis Koo maybe seeing some of himself in the younger man (there's like a five year difference between the actors but it's exaggerated by Koo going gloriously silver in a more period-appropriate haircut and a lot of charm to the group of friends. Sammo Hung seems to be having a good low-impact time as Mr. Big, chewing scenery more than punching holes in it, although that's nothing compared to what Philip Ng eventually gets up to as King.

Admittedly, one has to laugh a bit at the misty-eyed montage of what was lost when the Walled City was demolished and redeveloped in the 1990s; the aftermath of a gang war that involved smashing people through concrete walls face-first is maybe not the best time to go "but at least neighbors looked out for each other. It's unusually sentimental for the run that Cheung has been on, but maybe not for the guy who spent the previous few years making films about legendary heroes.


Oddity

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 4 August 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)
Available for digital pre-order on Prime; where to stream when available.

Not every filmmaker who tries it can manage what writer/director Damian Mc Carthy does with Oddity, which is essentially to say that they are going to start out in fairly weird territory and establish that as a sort of baseline which a viewer is going to have to accept to understand the logic of the rest of the movie. It's a tough stretch - the movie requires one to simultaneously accept and be surprised by the bizarre - that Mc Carthy manages, no matter how difficult that sounds.

It opens with Dani Timmins (Carolyn Bracken) working on renovating the peculiar old house she has purchased with husband Ted (Gwilum Lee), a doctor who works the night shift at a Cork mental hospital. It's an odd one, a square around a courtyard, currently without power or heat - but perhaps with ghosts; Dani has set up a tent to sleep in and a digital camera taking regular pictures so she can hopefully see what kind of spirit she's dealing with. That's when one of Ted's patients, Olin Boole (Tading Murphy) approaches the door, saying he saw someone else enter, but, well, Declan is in the hospital for killing his mother in a rage. A year later, on the anniversary of Dani's death, Ted complies with an unusual request by Dani's twin sister Darcy Odello (Bracken again), bringing Declan's glass eye to their mother's old shop, where every item is alleged to be cursed. She takes Ted's offer to maybe have dinner sometime and shows up at the house a week later, freaking out Ted's new girlfriend Yana (Carline Menton) even without the chest containing a bizarre mannequin that somehow seems to set itself up at the kitchen table when Yana isn't looking. Darcy is going to use her psychic powers to find out the whole truth of what happened to her sister, and Yana, who can't find her car keys, is stuck there with her.

If folks say the star of the movie is the mannequin, I won't argue - whether it be Mc Carthy, production designer Lauren Kelly, art director Conor King, someone working in their departments, or a true team effort, somebody came up with a spectacular design which looks big and hulkling, threatening even though it is obviously inanimate in part because of its gigantic open maw. You can get a good jump stare just out of it changing position while one isn't looking. It looks lifelike if completely immobile from a distance, but when Yana gets up close, one can see seams that suggest it can be posed, even if it seems unlikely to actually move about, and other details that make a certain, unnerving sort of sense.

That, of course, understates what Carolyn Bracken is doing, from initially presenting Dani as someone whose sincere belief in ghosts makes everything else not-ridiculous to how, at the end, Darcy can say she did something and the audience can fill in the absurd mechanism of it with placid acceptance. In between, she and Mc Carthy are taking a character who under normal circumstances is the eccentric occultist supporting character that adds spice to a movie that is really about Yana and Ted, even if it's later revealed that Darcy was some sort of canny manipulator, and making her the protagonist. Darcy's silver hair, spinster's outfits, barbed words, and passive-aggressive attitude, indicate someone who should be stealing scenes from the more relatable Yana and Ted (and, make no mistake, Caroline Menton's increasingly exasperated Yana is the reaction shot that makes a lot of scenes work); instead, the audience is with this oddball and her increasingly peculiar plan, and she's able to get the absolute most out of moments that focus on her sadness and regret. She does nothing conventionally, but the sadness of this woman who lost her sister is palpable.

Meanwhile, Mc Carthy is well aware that the audience is not there for some sort of quiet pondering on the subject of grief, and has a grand old time deploying jump scares and drawing out scenes where you're meant to just marinate in the sheer peculiarity of it. I'm not sure to what extent the film was built around the location as opposed to the opposite, but it's a terrific place for this sort of movie; you'll not only absolutely believe the house was haunted even before Dani died, but every corner of it invites the audience to study how the two floors interact, the halls with the ninety-degree turns, and even the bright yellow camping tent so that it's in their minds as a scene starts to play out there.

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I also kind of love the epilogue, even though it works a bit contrary to how I approach horror movies. The whole thing has, in a way, been a duel between Darcy, whose way of understanding the world is through the occult (the "unseen") and the impressions that strong emotions make on it, to the point of accepting that she will pay for Olin's murder, and Ted, who has made a study of the mind and cool consideration of everything marks him as a manipulative sociopath. It's not just that he has seemed to have won at the end - Darcy is dead and he has successfully placed the blame on Ivan because he is a more emotional psychopath with less self-control - but his way of thinking has won out: He is arguably able to burn the wooden man because he does not believe in it; his rationality has triumphed over Darcy's spirituality.

But, of course, Darcy was dying already, so that's no great victory, and, ultimately, she shows that she understands him far better than he understands her. She knows that he will not be able to help but ring the bell and summon the Bellhop, if only to prove it does nothing. As soon as he does, she's won so completely that the film can stop at just showing the Bellhop next to him savoring the empty victory that has cost him two women who loved him and saddled him with the house that the first wanted but he considered a millstone.

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That finale is a beautiful capper on a movie that has somehow taken a bucket of nothing but the strangest, most irregularly-shaped building blocks and built something that's not just scary, suspenseful, and surprisingly funny but also an impressively solid story.

Fantasia 2024.07: "Ring Neck", Kryptic, FAQ, "Elves on the Edge", Carnage for Christmas, "What the Hell", Frankie Freako, "Réel", and The Soul Eater

Another day in De Sève for the afternoon, then across the street pretty quickly.

We start with the makers of Kryptic: Director Kourtney Roy, producers Amber Ripley & Josh Huculiak, and actor Jason Deline (kind of them to stand in the same order they're listed on the website, so I can just copy and paste). Nice folks all, even if I didn't love their movie.

I'm kind of amused at Roy answering a question about how she kept the time period vague by avoiding phones and mocking up computer screens that looked like their from the 1990s with "I hate seeing cell phones in movies". Like, maybe you're older than you look, but you don't appear to have spent that much time with phones on the wall rather than in the pocket. Sure, it's harder, but I kind of wonder how many folks a hundred years ago were setting movies in the 1890s because they hated seeing automobiles in movies.

Two movies and a trip across the street later, we meet Valerie Barnhart, who is wearing a dress featuring the main character of her animated short. Not much time to discuss things when you're introducing the short before someone else's movie, but that's pretty cool.

Frankie Freako was the main event of the night, and writer/director Steve Kostanski brought up cinematographer Pierce Derks (with Frankie) and Mike & Dave (with a robot) from the art department. This once again demonstrates my favorite thing about Q&As, which is demonstrating how often the people making off-the-wall stuff are often not guys you would peg as that if you saw them on the street at all; Kostanski made a downright bizarre movie but he's not really doing "hello fellow weirdos" here, but mostly talking about they practical matters of combining floppy and solid pieces, co-ordinating with multiple puppeteers, and the like.

I noticed Kostanski thanked in the credits of another, not-particularly-fantastical Canadian indie a few days later, and get the impression that he's mostly just a really solid guy. I suspect that you don't become a mainstay even in wacky cult film circles if you are not, on some level, a person who just gets work done without a lot of fuss or being abrasive enough to alienate collaborators while the egotistical "geniuses" burn bridges and burn out.

One last photo with Mitch Davis and "Réel" director Rodrigue Huart, whose short ran before The Soul Eater. Seemed glad to be here!


I was hoping to get this posted before the end of the festival, but I wound up drained enough that I am, instead, posting from the airport a few days later. I'lll at least be trying to get rest of these out fairly quickly; there's enough banked on Letterboxd that I hope I can knock out shorts and expand features by the end of August or sometime in September.


"Ring Neck"

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024: Septentrion Shadows, laser DCP)

An underrated thing that happens in horror stories is when someone who should know looks at the protagonist early on and is like "why would you even do that?" Indeed, one of the more oddly satisfying things about this short is that it is more or less bookended by this: The tattoo artist (Andrea Pavlovic) at the start saying "you know, I don't think we should use this much ash" and on the other saying "no, get to a hospital, this is weird and I don't want to have any part of it!" David (Antoine Olivier Pilon) doesn't listen, of course, and she caves, but it's a neat pivot to say the premise is kind of dumb but make you believe the characters would go through with it anyway.

That's kind of more interesting than what's going on with the rest of the movie, which at times feels like it's built out of the pieces writer/director/producer/set decorator Vasili Manikas had on hand once he and his team locked down the prosthetics work, because it's all kind of scattershot. David's got a girlfriend (Sarah Swire) because the movie needs someone upset about his retreating, and Swire does more than go through the motions, but it never feels like a relationship with a history or anything in common. His work in a recording studio feels off. The recently deceased pet that has him depressed is a pigeon, and not only is that one of the most expressionless creatures alive, but there's something weird about mourning the unconditional love you get from a pet you keep in a cage.

The transformation work is nicely done, and Manikas and his crew stage the movie in a way that creates a strong mood. You can enjoy that work for what it is, but the bigger thing it's part of doesn't quite hold.


Kryptic

* * (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024: Septentrion Shadows, laser DCP)

Usually, when I remind myself to review the film I saw, rather than the one I wanted to see, it's about putting aside impressions I'd formed even before entering the theater; but I suppose it applies to Kryptic too. In this case, I can't necessarily say I was baited and switched, but I did find that the vibe changed enough that what had me excited near the start was gone by the end, and that's a lousy feeling to get from a movie.

It opens with Kay Hall (Chloe Pirrie) joining a nature hike, nervous about meeting new people; at one point a guide mentions that this is the area where cryptozoologist Barbara Valentine went missing while trying to catch a glimpse of the local cryptid, the Sooka. Kay goes off the trail and encounters the creature, which leaves her shaken, goop coming out of her ears, and amnesiac. When she arrives home, nothing looks familiar, and trying to research the Sooka reveals something shocking: She is, at the very least, a dead ringer for Valentine, whose husband Morgan (Jeff Gladstone) has apparently been using her disappearance to raise his own profile. She's already shaken to the core when someone attempts to break into her home through the front widow. Not sure what else to do, she flees back to the trail and across Western Canada, trying to find others who have encountered the Sooka, often using Valentine's name.

I found Kryptic engrossing for its first leg, as Kay is searching for answers and expressing revulsion at her life, but eventually attempts to actually solve the mystery fall by the wayside to be replaced with random drifting and gross-out bits that don't excite or repel or intrigue. It just abandons its hook, wandering from place to place until it finally alights somewhere that might be kind of interesting, and is likely actually the natural place for the movie to land, except that the route to get there is so convoluted and full of likely-unintentional red herrings that it might not mean anything when one arrives.

A large part of it might be a specific sort of misinterpretation built on my own perspective, a "you'd get it if you were a woman" thing, but I also tend to think that writer Paul Bromley and director Kourtney Roy are often too cavalier with their usage of genre: The cryptid, the goop, and all the mysterious disappearances of the people Kay meets in her travels, are signaling something paranormal, a possession or doppelganger story, enough that I at least never considered the idea that Kay had been Barbara all along and had escaped an abusive home life. It perhaps makes the most sense thematically and with what she does, but not only is there so much else going on, little is done to indicate that Kay may be a recent creation - her house looks lived-in, nobody mentioned she moved there recently, she's got a career that requires professional accreditation, and she stayed in a place and went on a hike where people might be looking for Barbara Valentine. It's a lot of clues pointing in what is probably the wrong direction and it doesn't seem like Roy and Bromley ever considered where all the conflicting information might lead someone else.

(They're also apparently really into these gross, mucus-intensive sexual interludes and, okay, if that's your kink, go for it, but don't be surprised when folks find it unpleasant or want to know what the deal is because it is seemingly affecting the story.)

I did kind of like Chloe Pirrie's central performance; I'm not sure it holds together, but the actress certainly gives 100% of what's asked, from the nervous opening voice-over to a great line-reading when Kay finds out what she does for work to the ever-more-gonzo final act, where she plays off Jeff Gladstone just barely putting a good outward face on Morgan's sliminess. There's certainly a genuine but eccentric feel to everyone she meets across a number of environments.

The generous interpretation is that Kryptic is very much not for me, made with a different audience in mind and running from what I enjoy most. Even beyond that, though, it feels very much like the work of creators more skilled at vibes than narratives, too confident that they've done enough of one to compensate for the other's shortcomings.


FAQ

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

There are two or three moments in FAQ that can hit a person in the gut and the odd thing is that I don't know if they're exactly a big part of the main story; or at least they don't feel like they are in the moment, and maybe not until one has had the chance to think on the film a bit. They probably are, though, with filmmaker Kim Da-min mostly making her point so gently and with such whimsy that the logical conclusion is surprising.

It introduces the audience to Kim Dong-chun when she's five and already enrolled in English kindergarten by mother Hae-jin (Park Hyo-ju), although she freezes up in an English-speaking demonstration. By the time she's nine (and played by Park Na-eun), she's still introverted, but how can she not be - her after-school time is filled with activities her parents think will get her into a good college, the only common element the daughter of one of Hae-jin's friends who is too competitive to treat Hae-jin like a friend. She often slips into reveries with two supportive imaginary friends, although she soon happens on something stranger: A bottle of rice wine falls out of a cabinet and rolls to her feet, and she picks it up. Having built a morse code key in science class, she hears patterns in the bubbles, but they don't match Korean or English. The next class she's enrolled in gives her the necessary information to interpret it, though, and she soon finds that it is giving her instructions.

This is the sort of whimsical premise that might often get the Wes Anderson treatment, or be presented as a bright, colorful sort of live-action anime where all the bits of oddity in Dong-chun's life are presented in heightened fashion, but it's telling that Kim Da-min presents anything like that as an obvious, explicit fantasy that Dong-chun pointedly outgrows. Her world is small and relentlessly ordinary in some ways; Hae-jin's brother who has escaped from the rat race (Kim Hee-won) is disheveled and the boring sort of hippie, and the world doesn't shift to something brighter and more full of childlike wonder when Dong-chul goes on adventures to help her bubbly new friend. It's the same as it was, somewhere between indifferent and hostile to a young girl.

There is, ultimately, a pretty explicit message about striving going on - between the families pressing their 9-year-old girls to build a good resume for college, the uncle who lies about being a corporate big shot, the mother who worries about having fallen behind at work because she had a child, and Dong-chun having no control over her life, it's clear that everyone is working to get ahead, with even the ones who enjoy it only doing so when they succeed, which by definition can't make everyone happening. So what we've got is a girl is pointedly not lazy but someone who enjoys figuring things out, but isn't what the folks want her to be, and who grasps at something that lets her find another way to use what she's capable of.

Park Na-eun is kind of a delight in the part. It is, admittedly, the kind of role that one sometimes thinks might get over-praised, a lot of neutral-faced dismay or concentration that may be a case of putting the best shots where she's doing relatively little together in the editing stage, but she is given a chance to light up when it will have the most impact, and she's got a way of delivering perceptive lines or reacting to higher stakes that always impresses. She's also ably supported by the rest of the cast, particularly Park Hyo-ju as the mother, whose realization that she's one of those mothers is sadder for how low-key it is; she always finds the sort of tone where one can realize that Ha-jin is simultaneously part of the problem and a victim of the system.

Altogether, the film is a nice combination of deadpan, absurd, and mundane, and there's something not quite fearless about how sharp a poke the finale is, a reminder that while people often tend to couch these issue in feel-good terms that give a lot of credit to parents' good intentions, solving the problems might involve something as drastic as the fallout.


"Elves on the Edge"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024: Fantasia Underground, laser DCP)

"Elves on the Edge" is the sort of short where you point out that maybe it's got one joke but tells it well enough, often enough, to get through ten minutes, but I don't know that it actually gets that much mileage out of "two rocker chicks trying to make it big after leaving home to make it big in the Big Apple, except the home they left is Santa's workshop", except that it feels like there's a lot more they could do with this: For the most part, Candy and Cookie are pretty much clichés with pointy years, and it might be a lot funnier and sharper if they felt more like Santa's elves and "Elf culture", as Will Ferrell once put it, was a part of who they are despite their wanting to reject it.

Instead, Candy has a thoroughly bonkers (but, admittedly, Christmas-elf-appropriate) hookup.

And let me just say - this is such an absolutely gonzo moment, drawn out just the right amount, to get a whole bunch of laughs, and writer/director/star Abby Lloyd runs with it for the rest of the rest of the short for a few more laughs. It's a success - it gets those laughs - but it feels like it was set up to do a bit more, especially in the lead-up to the one big gag.


Carnage for Christmas

* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2024 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

There probably haven't been quite enough "Encyclopedia Brown returns home as an adult" movies to call it a genre, but it's a fun idea to play with: Kid detective stories are fun gateways to the mystery and thriller genres even though their appeals often tend to be quite the opposite. This one goes queer slasher with it, a pretty fun choice.

Lola (Jeremy Moineau), who gained some notoriety in her South Australia hometown back when she was an assigned-male teenager for actually finding the bodies in the local haunted house, is a college student majoring in forensic sciences who co-hosts a true crime podcast, is returning home for the Christmas break for the first time in years, happy to reconnect with her sister Danielle (Dominique Booth) but naturally wary: Like a lot of small towns, Purdan has gained some nice coffee shops and even a gay bar, but it's still not a great place to be trans like Lola or even gay like Danielle, which is made abundantly clear when one of the bar's regulars is murdered in the same way as the victims decades ago and the cops immediately start looking at Lola as the weird outsider. Well, most of them; Constable Kent (Tumelo Nthupi), assigned to keep watch, is actually a fan of the podcast and does his best to look the other way while she starts poking around, because most of the cops sure aren't going to spend a lot of effort on someone whose targets seem confined to Purdan's queer community.

Co-writer/producer/director Alice Maio Mackay crowdfunded and made this, her fifth feature, at the age of 19, and it's probably not hard to draw a line between her and Lola, young trans women diving into the things that they love and getting some recognition for it (a previous film, T Blockers, got a fair amount of attention on the festival circuit) even though they're still getting their formal education, if Mackay is even bothering with film school. It's probably not a stretch to call Lola a Mary Sue; Jeremy Moineau plays the part with self-assurance and a fair amount of wit, but the way she's almost always right and admired except by the complet bigots comes off as smugness in a way that seems unintentional, like the filmmakers are overshooting "cool".

Of course, part and parcel of all that is that this is the work of enthusiastic amateurs, and it feels like it, from a lot taking place at night but not being lit particularly well to maybe not having the time with the actual professionals or other resources that let you get a take where everything is good. There are a lot of stretches where they're stitching together the best they can do, which is at least better than taking refuge in "it's camp!".

There's at least a fun sort of vibe to the movie that meshes nicely with its homemade origins more often than not as Lola has this sort of effortless cool investigating her mystery rather than going for intensity. It's like a relaxed smart-ass attitude, not pandering or against anyone who doesn't deserve it but with some wit in her back pocket. There's also something really Gen-Z, I suspect, in bumping up against a decent slasher movie concept but already being kind of over it. Whatever, murderers with kind of cool masks are no big deal any more, and even Scream-style slasher mysteries are played out, but you can hang stuff on it.

I am kind of interested to see where Mackay winds up going, though - she's got some chops and isn't exactly repeating herself.


"What the Hell"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024: Septentrion Shadows & Animation Plus, laser DCP)

Filmmaker Valerie Barnhart takes a kind of worn premise - the demons in Hell have everyday lives and concerns not so different from our own - and rolls with in, offering up a dissatisfied harpy saying that this netherworld isn't what it once was, with all the real torment happening on Earth, and her minotaur boyfriend being satisfied with the current state of things is part of why she can't take it there any more. No joke is particularly earth-shaking, but they are all well-executed, and she's built the familiar character types in a way that makes them fun to watch bounce off each other, and the way Hell is breaking down keeps things from feeling bogged down. Some of the character designs are nifty, especially Charlotte, who looks like a refugee from a fifty-year-old cartoon; the oddness of her proportions playing into Hell being populated by abominations while still making her a good protagonist.

Also, from the final scenes, I kind of like the idea that this is the flip side to some horror movie where a dark sorcerer has opened a portal to Hell, but instead of demons immediately spewing out, it's kind of a gradual migration.


Frankie Freako

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024: Septentrion Shadows, laser DCP)

I've tended to like the work of Steve Kostanski and his gang best when they were not exactly playing it straight - I don't know that they've ever really done that - but leaning a little more toward highlighting what made a certain type of weird 1980s movie awesome rather than silly. There's overlap, of course, but this one leans very silly indeed, and the joke's kind of strained for a while before the movie gets around to awesome.

Set in the 1980s, it introduces the audience to Conor (Conor Sweeney), a dorky office cog with an improbably hot wife (Kristy Wordsworth) and a boss (Adam Brooks) warning him that his square, comically milquetoast proposals are putting his job at risk - although, if he comes in during the weekend and shreds a few documents while the boss stays out of view of the surveillance cameras before the SEC investigators arrive, he might be in good shape. He amiably agrees, since Kristina will be out of town anyway, but decides to loosen up a bit by calling a 900 number hosted by imp Frankie Freako, but gets much more than he bargained for: Frankie and two other little goblins ride the phone line into his house, and their partying leads to a mess that has Conor in a panic, and Mr. Buechler drops by to see why his patsy hasn't shown.

It does eventually get around to awesome, of course - there's little more reliable in improving a movie than this crew opening a portal - and the back half of this is delightful lunacy. Even those who don't default to finding something more magical to practical effects rather than digital will likely enjoy how Freak World logically should feel like miniature work, and even when it's nuts, it's nuts in a less painfully arbitrary way. Puppets work better as broad one-note characters than the humans, and the way Conor Sweeney gamely deflects or redirects a lot of period-appropriate queer-phobic jokes is one of the film's more clever bits, and gives Sweeney the chance to do the sort of dry oddball humor that Adam Brooks and Kristy Wordsworth were doing at the start.

There is, I guess, a certain sort of cleverness to the first half; it plays like a live-action cartoon not just in terms of slapstick and bright color but that this is some sort of vague approximation of what kids watching those cartoons would be thinking when they hear "Michaelangelo is a party dude!", only it's kind of dumb when you're not eight. The main character being "square" in the same kind of way is the rest of the gag, and while there are some good bits, it's not quite enough to hang 45 minutes or so of movie on. Everyone is game for it, and it's not really a bad joke, but I felt like I knew and appreciated what they were doing more than I laughed. Adam Brooks's deadpan villainy and Kristy Worsworth's mass of weird contradictions are great fun, but maybe because they're deployed precisely rather than constantly the way Conor and the Freakos are, and thus don't have a chance to wear out their welcome.

Make no mistake, there's a lot to like here; the animatronic stuff is very strong, the sort of 1980s throwback that Kostanski and his crew do so well, and there are lots of people who do much worse with this sort of joke. The dumb-to-awesome ratio is tricky to get just right for everyone, is all, and this would have worked better if about ten percent of its dumb material were awesome instead.


"Réel"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

This thing is four minutes long and much of it is its two characters just beating the hell out of each other, but you can't be anything less than impressed with how well filmmaker Rodrigue Huart does his thing: Without any real dialogue, you immediately get that (1) somehow a smartphone has fallen a couple hundred years into the past through a wormhole, (2) the farm girls who find it both want it for themselves, and (3) are not going to be demure about getting it out of each other's hands. It's moving incredibly fast except for the brief moments it slows down for audience reaction to an impressively hasty hit, more or less getting the entire story out based on its audience knowing context. Actresses Emma Gautier and Dorothée Quiquempois just let 'er rip, and Huart (as cinematographer and editor as well as writer/director/producer) makes sure that things are paradoxically clear enough that you can recognize the chaotic action and are able to discern the story.

Nifty work, and while I'm curious to see what Huart would do with a feature, I'm impressed at just how well he's taken advantage of what sort of burst of energy a short can be here.


Le mangeur d'âmes (The Soul Eater)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

The borders between genres have been thin and getting more so for a while now, and The Soul Eater doesn't just straddle one of those lines, but the point where a few of them intersect. It can be a lot, pushing a viewer right up to the edge of grumbling that they didn't but a ticket to that sort of movie, but the filmmakers do fairly nice work of walking right up to the point where someone might roll their eyes and delivering a nasty little surprise instead.

It opens with two cops converging on a crime scene: Franck de Rolan (Paul Hamy), from the Department of Alarming Disappearances, is tracking a string of missing children; Commander Elizabeth Guardiano (Virginie Ledoyen) has been sent in because this small town's police force has no detectives, much less ones with experience investigating this sort of brutal murder. A classic "I work alone" type, Guardiano would rather de Rolan verify that the murdered couple's particular white van is not the one he's looking for, but it's de Rolan who finds the victims' son Evan Vasseur (Cameron Bain) in a hidden room. The case just gets weirder from that point, with bodies piling up, a mysterious figure on a motorcycle, and little figurines of "the soul eater", a local bogeyman said to live in the woods. Many of the local cops are more hindrance than help, the mayor would rather they just leave, and Dr. Carole Marbas (Sandrine Bonnaire), the child psychologist assigned to Evan who also wears a number of other hats around town, is perhaps being unusually resistant to de Rolan interviewing the boy.

Does it really matter that a movie where the killer(s) that a couple of cops are chasing may be a monster doesn't have a particularly memorable monster design? There's something to be said for the explanation of how every family in the area kind of has their own conception of it, but the soul eater winds up in this sort of no-man's land where the audience can't quite imagine anything lurking in the shadows but doesn't have that much to shake them, specifically. A lot is left vague even beyond the monster and "who's that on the motorcycle?", hinted at until ti's time to use them in the finale, and this movie could maybe use more of an anchor.

There's a lot going on, after all, maybe too much; the last act is impressive in terms of stitching things together but it's a lot, maybe more of an exercise in how you pull these threads together and have it make sense than making a statement or solving a mystery. The filmmakers do that well - there's nothing entirely new but there is a sense of one more thing being piled on top or spinning out of control until things are finally all out in the open, so it's a fun, messy ride that feels pretty satisfying afterward. Indeed, for a team mostly known for horror making a film that traffics in a lot of grim cases of child sexual abuse, Alexandre Bustillo & Julien Maury are good about giving the audience a finale that is exciting beyond seeing how nasty it can get and earlier moments tha get a viewer's motor running. It's impressively more than just grim.

There's also the enjoyable sensation of watching French actors that one normally sees in classy boutique-house dramas letting it rip in kind of fancy trash. It's neat to watch all of them as cops with different jurisdictions snap or smirk at each other and then play both cool and harried when stuff goes sideways. Virginie Ledoyen, it turns out is really fun to watch smirk and dismiss folks in what Guardiano considers lesser law enforcement agencies or look annoyed that people are worried after she empties her gun at someone; Sandrinne Bonnaire gets to have great fun chewing scenery as Marbas later on after being huffy that de Roan went behind her back. Paul Hamy, for his part, does well balancing the protagonist who is less abrasive while still being as intense as one expects a man hunting child predators to be, and Francis Renaud is always welcome when he shows up as the cop who does not have a chip on his shoulder.

The movie can swing between wearing an audience out and making them wish the movie would get on with it, but the willingness to be down for anything works in its favor more often than not.