Gonna try and do these at least until Fantasia, trying to get the knack of getting these expansions of my Letterboxd entries done in a few hours, because I always get halfway through and sputter out.
So (hits timer at 7PM), let's go! The week starts off as a lot of weeks will this summer, at the Somerville Theatre for their Kurt & Jodie double feature, this week featuring Kurt Russell in
Used Cars and Jodie Foster in
Carny. The former was on 35mm, probably an original release print, and was a bit faded with some wear, but that's probably the optimum way to watch it, reminiscent of how it would have been after it bounced from first-run to second/third-run and drive-in theaters.
After that, I spent a couple days tormenting myself with the Red Sox on TV, but also started watching
Spider-Noir (black-and-white version) when it dropped on Prime. It was easy to be kind of skeptical at first, because Nicolas Cage is Doing A Voice, which I didn't really recall being the case in
Enter the Spider-Verse, but my eyebrow raised when I saw "and Brendan Gleeson" in the opening credits and that was a really pleasant surprise. Eventually it became clear he was doing Bogart - episode 2 opens with an homage to Philip Marlowe investigating the rare-bookstore front in
The Big Sleep, sadly without a cute bookstore girl across the street - and there's worse ways to keep things entertaining until it starts to add more Spider-Man stuff to the noir.
It's a fun cast - aside from Nic Cage doing Nic Cage all over the place, Lamorne Morris and Li Jun Li clearly understand the blend of comic book/hard-boiled pulp that they're working with, and Gleeson is a delight. The folks making it do okay with what kind of hems both comics and limited TV series in these days - you're just not going to get a new short story with noired-up versions of Spider-Man villains ever week, and it's necessarily going to be
about the main character in some way as opposed to a new adventure. Every new case is the most important case which most reflects the characters personally.
Thursday night it was back at the Somerville for a
Backrooms day-before show, not crazy-packed like some have been, but folks were there for it.
After that, it was one of those streaks where I actually use my Alamo membership when I'll typically go weeks without. Friday night was
Tuner, mostly because they had the first show of the evening and I had ideas of getting home and catching the end of the ballgame. Saturday afternoon was the AGFADrome mystery show, which previously had been on Monday evenings but either got confused with the regular mystery previews or just got pushed off to a quieter slot because only five or six of us tend to show up, as was the case on Saturday. I always wonder how these things do in other locations; the last couple ones I went to, I was pretty sure that they would have done better not making it a mystery or teaming with the Brattle/Somerville/Coolidge (or even Landmark), because I don't know that folks in the Boston area are excited to get on the airport bus for something that may kind of suck while there's not really a vibe to match in the Seaport, but that's pretty specific to where Alamo set up shop in this market. I enjoyed
The Shaolin Invincibles, but it's an odd one. The next day I was back for Godzilla vs. Hedorah, which was actually sold out and had a number of other showtimes put on, so I guess the branding worked. I naturally ended up right next to the guy who liked to gesticulate at the screen when something campy was going on.
Once that ended, it was a couple stops up the Red Line to catch
Pressure, which I liked a lot, and not just because I'm Dad-aged and it's pretty Dad-coded.
If you look at the stats page on
my Letterboxd account, seven movies is a bit of a light week for me, but it's just busy enough that there's not a whole lot of time for write-ups outside what I do on the subway. Part of my plan here is to try and get myself to not feel like I need to add too much to that first impression lest I fall too far behind when we're
really busy in Montreal!
Used Cars
* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 May 2026 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Kurt & Jodie, 35mm)
Where to stream it (
Prime link), or
buy the disc at Amazon
The introduction mentioned both that the best way to see this was on slightly faded 35mm, and that this was the movie that really established Kurt Russell's adult screen persona. I'm not entirely sure about the former, but Russell so clearly hit on something here that it's kind of surprising that he would wind up paired with John Carpenter rather than Robert Zemeckis, though I don't know that Zemeckis ever made a movie that would fit him again (
Romancing the Stone or
Death Becomes Her, maybe).
Russel plays Rudy Russo, a salesman at New Deal Used Cars, which is run down but whose owner Luke Fuchs (Jack Warden) is generally a pretty decent guy. Rudy is looking to run for state senate but needs to sell a fair amount of cars to pay off the political machine to get on the ballot, while Luke is anticipating a reunion with daughter Barbara (Deborah Harmon), who he hasn't seen since she left for a commune a decade ago. What they don't know is that Luke's twin brother Roy (also Warden), who owns the lot across the street, is scheming to take control of Luke's lot, since a new highway would go straight through his and make Luke's prime real estate. He manages to trigger a heart attack, so desperate Rudy and co-workers Jeff (Garret Graham) and Jim (Frank McRae) hide the body, scrambling to make excuses for both Roy and Barbara.
Though Russell had previously been a Disney kid and would go on to play a wide variety of roles as an adult, Rudy Russo is what a lot of his parts from
Overboard to
Big Trouble in Little China to
Guardians of the Galaxy 2 would riff on, an evocation of almost-slick bluster with an inconvenient core of decency, and both Russell and Zemeckis make sure the audience sees all of that throughout the film, even in its meanest moments of black comedy. Russell is the unlikely linchpin of the movie, cheerfully eager to not just do all the fast-talking nonsense that you expect from someone with his job, but also willing to push it into the increasingly absurd places that the script by Zemeckis and Bob Gale go. There's earnest concern for Roy in their first scenes, though, enough that there's layers of awkwardness around Barbara later, because he is capable of caring about her and kind of knows that he's doomed when she finds out the truth.
In addition to re-introducing Russell,
Used Cars also shows what Zemeckis and Gale ('the Bobs") are capable of, arguably the start of Zemeckis's prime, and you can see the template that he would use: A big, kind of absurd, high concept, a bunch of gags that maybe don't work in any other context, the occasional surprising and in-character bit of sincerity, a pretty good ensemble around the leading man, and a terrific climax - 45 years later, I wonder if Quentin Tarantino was being clever casting Russell in
Death Proof as an homage to him leaping around on car roofs with no obvious harnesses or green screen work. It's the tail end of the 1970s when folk were wrecking a lot of cars in their chases, and Zemeckis has been gleefully smashing stuff up for the entire movie, but the finale is impressive beyond that.
It's kind of a bummer that Zemeckis would leave this sort of thing behind for some combination of the big idea well running dry, a desire for respectability, and increasing focus on how you get that big visual moment; even at his messiest, this movie is a lot of fun, and both he and his star have a knack for not making it feel quite so mean as what's in the script.
Carny
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 25 May 2026 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Kurt & Jodie, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (
Prime link), or
buy the disc at Amazon
Carny isn't the usual sort of movie I find myself respecting more than loving, but that's about where it lands anyway, doing interesting things fairly well but not quite cohering into something that totally works.
It starts with Frankie (Gary Busey) applying his makeup; he's the "bozo" in the dunk tank for a traveling carnival, with his friend and bunkmate Patch (Robbie Robertson) handling the front of the booth when he's not wandering the grounds and helping maintain some semblance of order. A bozo isn't a clown - clowns, Frankie will explain, are funny, while his job is to insult the customers enough to rattle them, that includes the boyfriend of Donna (Jodie Foster), an 18-year-old waitress who will wind up leaving home to join them. She's not the first girl who has run off with them, but sticks long enough to get under Patch's skin, even as she eventually tries to earn her keep.
Part of me suspects that
Carny is actually pretty true-to-life and that this is what makes it kind of drab compared to a lot of other movies set among traveling carnivals: It's not all that lurid or romantic, just sort of scuzzy without getting to the point of being grotesque, and not that interesting as a result.
Freaks makes you uncomfortable, while others create a sweet sort of found family out of the outcasts, but for most of the movie, these guys are basically fringey working stiffs. There's drama and interest there, but not quite a hook, especially when there's also not really a strong plot.
What sort of fascinates about
Carney is that in retrospect, and probably at the time, you can see that Jodie Foster is going to be
Jodie Foster - a hugely charismatic movie star that takes risks that seem even bigger because of her Disney kid background - but that her character Donna is not actually as interesting as Frankie & Patch. They feel like they've got this odd, specific backstory that has adapted them for this particular life, surprisingly mild-mannered despite having a nasty edge they can bring out, while she's just any pretty 18-year-old fleeing a quiet town. Donna's interesting entirely because Jodie Foster plays here, while Busey & Robertson bring out what's intriguing about Frankie and Patch.
Heck, would Foster's best scene without them, where she's running a game and feels a bit of a rush of power when she flirts with a girl, be nearly as noteworthy if she hadn't come out later? It makes me wonder if there's a version of the screenplay or deleted scenes that make it more explicit that this was what she was trying to find in running away from an unsatisfying life, which is ironic because Frankie & Patch don't realize what sort of closet they're in. Maybe that's a little obvious, but the movie gets more intriguing every time it leans in that direction, at least compared to what else it's doing.
Toward the end, when the filmmakers are starting to move toward a conclusion, you can see something closer to these movies' traditional forms, as these kind of honest (by their lights) scam artists contend with local officials trying to shake them down, flipping the script on who's respectable and who's dishonest but also displaying a mean streak. I don't know that I would have enjoyed the whole movie being like that, but it does at least feel like a specific story that might have inspired the film while much of the rest is a bit more vague.
Backrooms
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 28 May 2026 in Somerville Theatre #4 (first-run, DCP)
Where to stream it (when available) , or
pre-order the disc at Amazon
There's something kind of off about
Backrooms in a way that may not necessarily be intended despite its whole vibe being "that's weird and unnerving", although I'm not quite sure. It seems to be a natural outgrowth of its origins as YouTube videos which could potentially stand alone (because who knows how the algorithm will serve them up) but which each expand their lore, driving those who discovered one to seek out the rest, and even build their own, a sort of collaborative and viral project that's perfect for that medium. It doesn't quite feel like it coalesces into a movie, and while I think the filmmakers are canny enough to realize that and let it be unsettling, that sort of intrigue doesn't quite fit the new medium as well as the old.
After the traditional "things go badly for characters we'll never see again" opening, the first person to encounter the strange liminal spaces in 1990 is Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), operating a furniture store which is losing money and sleeping there as well, his wife having thrown him out of the house. Investigating some electrical issues in the basement leads him to an oddly permeable spot on the wall, which leads him to empty rooms that get stranger as he goes deeper, never seeming to end. He recruits employees Bobby (Finn Bennett) & Kat (Lukita Maxwell) to help him explore, but eventually doesn't come out, and his therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve), who has her own issues with loneliness and loss of a home, comes searching.
There's also an odd sort of tension between journeyman writer Will Soodik and 19-year-old director Kane Parsons. The script uses these blank, labyrinthine areas to symbolize alienation and disconnection, and the casting director has given Parsons a great core in Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve (and Mark Duplass on the periphery), but as much as teenagers can certainly feel alone, it sometimes doesn't feel like Parsons can entirely connect to the specific angst these characters are feeling; there's something very ham-handed if well-conceived about how it's expressed. Sometimes it's almost meta, a young film nerd's take on viewing drama as a movie, as one character demands more sincerity from another as if directing them, and another maybe talks about exploring the backrooms like trying to understand a pop culture's lore. Parsons is deft enough and has that cast to sell late scenes when they're kind of speculating but also telling the audience what's probably going on, but it doesn't feel like discovery.
That said, Parsons's raw talent is impressive and a lot of the creepy bits work; the setting itself is often a really effective combination of spaces that are not immediately threatening until they accumulate dread in their endlessness and increasingly surreal layout, and if the occasional shots of the repetitive, featureless Los Angeles exurbs are obvious metaphors, they kind of work. The staging is not fancy, but often deliberately muted, but that works, grinding the audience down without it being a slog. I especially love one scene which is not just dizzying on its own, but which gets a lot more tension out of someone seeming much more genuinely afraid of falling (and not entirely overcoming it to do a big jump) than an actor can usually conjure up around green screens and a stunt team dedicated to making it safe.
It's a pretty strong theatrical debut, and it'll be interesting to see what Parsons becomes with a little more filmmaking and life experience under his belt.
Tuner
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 29 May 2026 in Alamo Seaport #10 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available), or
pre-order the disc at Amazon
Tuner has stretches where one might be inclined to say it's a nice little movie and leave it at that, but it's got a few where it really sings, director and coo-writer Daniel Roher unabashedly deciding to set aside the quiet competence on the one hand and casual expertise on the other to put on a show, performing as flamboyantly as a character does because we don't make music or movies just to nod at technically impressive precision.
As it opens, Niki White (Leo Woodall) is tuning a piano with mentor Harry Horowitz (Dustin Hoffman), who is mostly supervising; he wears hearing aids and his brain is starting to get fuzzy, but Niki makes up for it because on top of perfect pitch, he's got the kind of impossibly good hearing where loud noises cause physical pain. The job alternates between institutions whose instruments take a lot of wear and wealthy households annoyed that pianos fall out of tune even when they haven't been played in a year. He meets Ruthie (Havana Rose Liu), a focused composition student, at a conservatory, while staying late in a mansion brings him in contact with Uri (Lior Raz), an Eastern European security consultant who is surely not drilling into a client's safe for legitimate reasons. Niki just wants the noise over with, so he helps crack it by listening to the tumblers. Uri has more jobs like this if he'd like, and soon enough Harry has an avalanche of medical bills, so…
It's not exactly surprising that the film seems to revel in the details of music and crime; director Daniel Roher has a best documentary feature Oscar and you see some of the that make that possible here: There's a sense that he's immersed himself in a subject enough to give things the ring of truth whether the viewer knows about it or not, but also a kind of joy in deploying music and editing in a way that might be dismissed as manipulative in a documentary but which play like flourishes in fiction. He and co-writer Robert Ramsey are observant enough to talk about various issues in the real world when they'd naturally be touched on, whether it be how medical debt accumulates or how wealth and beauty can wind up in the hands of those who don't have any use for it. The film looks and sounds great, whether the camera is positioned to take in everything or getting right into a tight, specific situation.
The central folks in the cast of relative unknowns impress - Leo Woodall has the look of a generically handsome actor of a certain sort but carries his damage well, and I really like the way Havana Rose Liu gets to play Ruthie as kind of spiky and driven and that's evident even before she appears on screen - and they seem to fit together in ways beyond the obvious. They look right together, and even when they fight, it's in the manner of people who maybe know where the other is coming from a bit too well. The movie stars are deployed well too, at opposite ends: Dustin Hoffman embodies an abrasive but decent sort of uncle-figure immediately, the sort who is full of great stories but is also kind of a pain in the ass, and while there's maybe not a lot of acting in how an 89-year-old actor highlights the physical and mental decay of an 89-year-old character, but the moments are chosen well so that you can see how everyone talks and works around it. Toward the end, Jean Reno is who you need for a character that shows up with maybe fifteen minutes to go to be this important; he's amusingly fussy but also someone that everyone else bends over backwards to please, and he clearly has practice in using that.
As mentioned, a nifty little movie for most of the time, with Woodall playing well off both Hoffman and Liu while danger intrudes in the form of Uri, pleasant melodies (to use the obvious musical metaphor) until Roher decides it is time for a crescendo, and the entire orchestra delivers.
Yong zheng ming zhang Shao Lin men (The Shaolin Invincibles)
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 May 2026 in Alamo Seaport #3 (AGFADrome Mystery Voyage, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (
Prime link)
The last couple AGFA mystery movies have been oddly frustrating events, not because the movies were bad, but because Johnnie To's
Exiled and Stephen Chow in
The God of Cookery deserved to be sold on their merits to hopefully glean more than the meager crowds they did. That's not exactly the problem with
The Shaolin Invincibles, something less than a classic from Taiwan which nevertheless delivers the grindhouse goods promised.
As a long opening title explains before it is played out on screen, a cruel and capricious Emperor (Chen Hung-Lieh) sought to have families of those who opposed him annihilated 12 years ago, only for Shaolin monks to escape with their youngest daughters, raising them and training them to fight in the temple. Now, Lu Szu Liang (Chia Ling) and Lu Yu Liang (Doris Lung Chun-Erh) have come of age and are leaving the temple, special swords in hand, to avenge their parents' murders, splitting up with the intent of rejoining to attack the palace. Other swordsmen (Carter Huang Chia-Ta & Dorian Tan Tao-Liang) will shadow and assist them, but the Governor (Yi Yuan) who gained his position by supervising the purges intends to erase any evidence of his failure, and they will need to enter the castle as maids to scout out the lay of the land and some of the unusual guardians.
I found myself idly wondering at times if a whole bunch of this movie's footage was unusable, or if the filmmakers were just trying to cut this movie as close to 90 minutes as possible to get that extra showtime in. For all that it is often goofy Saturday-serial fun, it is messy even beyond what you expect from low budget kung fu flicks. Like, the filmmakers occasionally seem to forget that Lung Chun-Erh is in the movie as Yu Liang, right down to the final fight which completely loses track of her for a long stretch as Szu Liang battles the emperor. It almost seems like they missed a major flaw in the script until they started shooting, at which point they realized things were getting bogged down doing everything twice (once with Szu Liang and then again with Yu Liang), but there was too much footage already shot with both of them to rejigger the film as a solo showcase.
Which is a bummer, because when they let Lung's Yu Liang talk some shit while Chia is closer to stoic, it's kind of a fun dynamic. Not that there's necessarily that much need to spice up dull moments, because not much time passes without folks fighting or the various levels of scheming servants to the evil king plotting to keep him from finding out that they missed a couple little girls when slaughtering their families 12 years ago. This mission of vengeance is not complicated by romance or doubts, and keeps up a nice pace as the ladies follow through.
The fighting is mostly good - Chia Ling and Carter Huang especially move nicely as they deal with waves of opponents - though the filmmakers kind of shrug and say "good enough" at the effects quite a bit, and the editing is often not great (aside from how awkwardly unbalanced to two protagonists are, action scenes will occasionally have one stop and think that a combatant doesn't seem to be where they were in the previous shot): There are plenty of silly gorilla suits, mediocre prosthetic makeup jobs, and swords that don't really look like they're going all the way through a body which the filmmakers probably hope you overlook because the ideas of Kung fu gorillas and Count of Monte Cristo homages are fun. And you can, more or less, since the choreography is decent and folks leap around well.
This is the sort of thing that works well as a mystery movie - not nearly good enough to seek out specifically, but just screwy enough to be fun when it's sprung on you.
Gojira tai Hedora (Godzilla vs. Hedorah)
* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 31 May 2026 in Alamo Seaport #3 (Tohoscope, laser DCP)
Where to stream it, or
buy the Criterion box set at Amazon
This movie does not respect Godzilla, and it doesn't matter whether you mean a film, franchise, character, or implacable force of nature when you say "Godzilla".
I am tempted to leave it at that, but it also must be said that it looks cheap, even compared to the other kaiju movies of its era, and is boring, finding constant ways to feel inert. Director Yoshimitsu Banno must frame many scenes around scientist Toru Yano (Akira Yamauchi) confined to in his sickbed without playing up a sense of how powerless he must feel, and truly gives a sense of its giant monsters' scale. It also feels like the producers also wanted to cash in on the era's psychedelia and youth culture, but were also conservative old men who hated such things, and as a result drained any way that the off-center choices could be cool and also any tension from scenes that would normally have it. The pandering to children and sneering at older youth both threaten the one thing it sort of does do well, going surprisingly hard at how horrific and apocalyptic pollution threatens to make the earth.
One thing I wonder is where this movie rests in the psyches of the filmmakers who made
Taroman; Godzilla's odd swaying motions (how much weed does it take for a 50-foot monster to get high??) and the ethereal final monster designs for Hedorah are reflected there, so maybe some good has come of this movie, implant weird images in the heads of kids who would later know what to do with them.
Pressure
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 31 May 2026 in AMC Boston Common #7 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available), or
pre-order the disc at Amazon
It's not just that I'm a middle-aged man and this is a 99-minute movie about World War II with a cast I really like, but that it's ultimately about what means of analyzing different sorts of data will ultimately lead to better results? That is just built for me! Still, I do feel like it's a film that can have broad appeal, in large part because it is nicely focused and not stretched to match the topic's import.
It follows Scottish meteorologist James Stagg (Andrew Scott), who has been assigned to the staff of General Dwight Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser) to provide a forecast for the upcoming Normandy invasion. Eisenhower expects Stagg to reach the same conclusions as American Irving Krick (Chris Messina), who has been an advisor throughout the war, but they have very different methodologies leading to different predictions: Krick, looking to previous years as reference, foresees clear skies; Stagg demands all the current atmospheric data he can get and sees three smaller storms forming a monster.
That may all sound dry, but the filmmakers do a good job in making it not so. The difference between the two prediction systems is made clear in ways that even those not schooled in either meteorology or data analysis can understand, and it intertwines with what might be the more expected story about non-technical people tending to believe what they want to be true. Director Anthony Maras (who wrote the screenplay with original playwright David Haig) gets their methodologies across without a lot of explanation, and without making Krick's less-current techniques look ridiculous.
To parallel that, Andrew Scott and Chris Messina give nifty contrasting performances that don't quite represent archetypes, though you can see an attempt to understand how things work despite recognition of uncertainty in Scott's pushy but tense performance compared to the somewhat hollow charm and confidence Messina projects. Brendan Fraser and Kerry Condon do nice work surrounding them, displaying somewhat masculine and feminine forms of responsibility as Fraser gives the impression of a strong back but a tendency to shout while Condon's Kay is all meaningful pauses leading to common-sense wisdom. Damien Lewis hams it up a bit as a darkly comic take on the sort of motivated reasoning you often found in the aristocratic office corps.
The filmmakers take a screenplay that originated on the stage and which covers what may be familiar territory and make it work as a movie; it looks and sounds dynamic and gets across how busy all this was early so it can be somewhat pared down later, really only bogging down a bit when it hits the sort of subplot that can feel rote in this genre despite likely tracking historical fact. It maybe goes on a bit too long at the end, kind of stuck between how the story its telling is kind of over when the storms come and/or pass but needing to show some of what it was enabling even if it's a bit out of scale.
I'm admittedly partial to stories that get into how stuff works, and I especially like how
Pressure gets into how forecasting the weather had to be done before the satellite imagery and computer models we now take for granted without moaning about how primitive it was. Maras and company do that well, and elevates the personal to a good level of melodrama without diminishing the giant stakes.
(clicks timer) Okay, just about 4 hours, HTML map not included. I can do that 18 times in July/August, right?
