This Week in Tickets: 1 June 2026 - 7 June 2026 (Thin at the multiplex)

Not sure whether this attempt to get back to doing TWIT as warm-up for Fantasia is working or not - my big problem is getting started, which probably won't be as much of a problem in Montreal, but which also means a lazy morning could totally derail me.

The Somerville's new tickets (and presumably the Capitol's) are kind of weird - like, are they meant to be ripped in half, although that would mess with the QR code, which they don't (yet) scan…? They also seem to fade pretty quickly, although I'm not sure how many folks are buying them for a couple days (or even hours) in advance and I imagine there around something like four of us putting them in scrapbooks. Anyway, the guy at the box office accidentally hit the Backrooms button, but it's no big deal, because there was plenty of room in the main theater for The Accused and Silkwood.

For the rest of the week, there was a fair amount of futile watching of the Red Sox, and sort of performative sighing about not being interested in a lot of the new releases, but that they were taking up so many screens that the release of one of last year's biggest movies from Hong Kong, animated fantasy Another World, was one showtime a day at inconvenient times, which is why I was at Boston Common at 11:45am on Saturday. There's just really been nothing between the extremes of franchise entries that may not excite you and horror for the past month.

Then Sunday, it was off to the Seaport Alamo for Trainspotting, which I somehow missed during its initial run and just never got around to. Anyway, one of the reasons I'd like to see self-applied hashtags on Letterboxd's stats page is so I can easily see to just what extent most of the movies I see at the Seaport Alamo are on screen #3, which I believe is the smallest, so half the rep playing there is saying something about its audience.

Anyway, this week already has nearly this much posted on my Letterboxd account, and next week will be a challenge!


The Accused

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 1 June 2026 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Kurt & Jodie, 35mm)
Where to stream it (Prime link), or buy the disc at Amazon

I had just turned 15 when this came out, so I didn't see it in the theaters, but I was aware enough of it that it seemed like someone setting a bomb off in pop culture, like it was the first time sexual assault was so central to something this mainstream. Of course, I was 15, so a fair amount hadn't crossed the path my folks kept relatively clean, but even if it wasn't such a first for anyone at least a little bit older, the movie still feels like dragging something into the open, because the broad complicity and encouragement is just as central as the actual rape, along with the sometimes heavy-handed but earnest demand for Jodie Foster's Sarah to say what happened to her on her own terms.

In a lot of ways, The Accused has the feel of a TV movie-of-the-week minus the sanding off and euphemising necessary for it to be shown over the air, with HBO maybe just starting to do this sort of original programming. That's not really a strike against it, because it's doing the job of one of those presentations, presenting a social issue in a way that will feel relatable to a very broad audience, and there's value in doing it in a relatively familiar form. A lot of the cast beyond stars Kelly McGillis and Jodie Foster are fairly forgettable, the story is paced to allow things to sink in rather than surprise or send one's thinking off in a different direction, and it explains things rather matter-of-factly. It's the sort of straightforward filmmaking where things like a conversation happening at a hockey game where McGillis's prosecutor is clearly not enjoying herself as much as her male colleagues could be an attempt to make a point or a situation where a point gets made because the filmmakers did something that seemed ordinary.

The familiarity helps a bit for when it's not going to be painting in the lines as much. Though parts are heavy-handed, they are in a familiar way, and the film is surprisingly deft in how it seldom feels like the filmmakers are hiding What Really Happened until they hit the audience with it. At that point, it's very clearly from a specific point of view, but one we've been primed to trust despite Bernie Coulson's Ken being a fairly minor character despite also being the first guy we see. The flashback that the audience gets through his testimony is a barn-burner of a scene, as screenwriter Tom Topor and director Jonathan Kaplan let go of what restraint they were showing to draw a clear line with a right side and a wrong side. Though there's some of the usual courtroom movie stuff after it - summations, waiting for the jury to come back, that sort of thing - it's rightfully positioned as the climax despite having no real new revelations, with the rest just necessary business.

Foster's great even before that section, especially since a lesser actress might have lost the sympathy she'd generated as a shell-shocked survivor trying to stand tall given how reckless she seemed in retrospect; it's a terrific evocation of the imperfect victim to the extent that it doesn't actually require someone making a speech about how the law isn't just for the perfect victim. This is also one of Kelly McGillis's most solid roles (Hollywood never really figured out what to do with her after Witness, it seems), and the cast has a working-class feel to it that seldom seems too affected.

This movie came out four or five years after the one that followed it, which I called the last gasp of New Hollywood, and it's a much more commercial movie despite the confrontational subject matter; it seldom fails to underline its drama and fits a familiar template. But it works, and I imagine that it can still serve as a shock to the system today.


Silkwood

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 June 2026 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Kurt & Jodie, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (Prime link), or buy the disc at Amazon

1983's Silkwood feels a bit like the last gasp of 1970s New Hollywood, an exceptionally down-to-earth film that sometimes boosts its authenticity by meandering rather than staying laser-focused and is full of fine work by people who would thrive in the more consciously-commercial cinematic environment that would replace that movement. It's a good movie, but I must admit that when viewed as the back-end of a double feature with The Accused, I found myself much more aware of where it doesn't quite engage than when it does. It's the sort of film based on a true story that doesn't aim to dramatize in the sense of highlighting its dramatic elements so much as by having talented people meticulously recreate a situation in the hopes that the immersion becomes resonance and sympathy more than voyeurism.

The vibe of it is in many ways the most important part, showing how things like nuclear power/weapons that we tend to think of as high-tech and cutting-edge science, produced in pristine white clean rooms, are actually having the grunt work done in destitute small towns by blue-collar folks scared enough of losing their jobs and the area's main employer that companies can cut corners down to the bone. Karen Silkwood's specific story didn't do a lot for me - in some ways Meryl Streep makes her too airy to get a hold of even when she's at her most focused - and the finale makes it seem all the less consequential, having characters flash back to what we'd just seen a few minutes before rather than highlighting the rest of the story. It feels real - this is absolutely what her boyfriend would worry about - but this is a movie that occasionally manifests genuine terror about the effects of working with plutonium for an unscrupulous corporation - I will put every time Karen sets off the radiation monitor off at a moment one is expecting the scan to be perfunctory up against any jump scare in a horror movie since - but that's the final example of many of it perhaps being too eager to emphasize character over plot.

Also, 43 years later, it almost distractingly filled with That Guys, creating the odd sensation where movie stars like Kurt Russell and Cher playing unglamorous supporting roles doesn't quite knock one out of the movie so much as recognizing David Strathairn, Craig T. Nelson, Bruce McGill, James Rebhorn, Fred Ward, Ron Silver, or Will Patton every five minutes.


Shì Wài (Another World)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 6 June 2026 in Boston Common #21 (first-run, DCP)
Prime Video pre-order link)

GKids really needs another imprint that doesn't imply my brother should bring his 5-year-old son to something like Another World, because yikes. There weren't a lot of kids in my Saturday morning screening, but there could have been; aside from the studio name, the posters (and presumably the previews) scan as a more Ghibli-esque sort of eerie, and the folks at the theater loaded it up with previews for G & PG-rated family movies. It's a rather darker fantasy than that.

It opens with narrator Gudo (voice of Chung Suet-Ying) informing the audience that he used to be a spirit guide, helping the recently deceased through the netherworld to a waterfall where they can pass through to their next life, leaving behind their memories and a rope whose knots represents their resentments. The latest lost soul he encounters is Yuri (voice of Christy Choi Hiu-Tung), a green-haired girl looking for her brother Keiji, seemingly not aware she has died. He figures that it cannot hurt to help her find him, but soon we follow another path, as Princess Goran of Flower City (voice of Goofy Yeung Nga-Man) learns that her father the king has died in battle, with her uncle (voice of Raymond Fung Chi-Fai) accusing General Mok (voice of Antonio Cheung Chun-Shing) of murdering him. Considered cursed by the people because her beloved mother died in childbirth, Goran may find it difficult to maintain her kind heart in this situation.

It is not much of a stretch to guess that Goran is Yuri's reincarnation, even before Gudo somehow appears outside of Another World, guardian Dark Sky (voice of Louis Cheung Kai-Chung) by his side with a flame where his head should be, but that's just the start of how writer Polly Yeung (adapting Saijo Naka's novel Sennenki) and director Tommy Kai Chung-Ng are going to both do some impressive world-building and move up and down history. It's also unusually sophisticated narratively, promising that it will be doing interesting things with the timeline early without getting too cute about it: You can feel good about catching on, but it's got a lot more to reveal, and the result grows into something epic without losing track of what's grabbed the audience on a personal level.

It's an impressive movie in other ways, in part because you can see that it's maybe had to stretch a fair amount for its ambitions to fit into its budget - it looks a bit grainy and low resolution at times, and never seems to have the digital creatures and backgrounds that other animated films in this style do. It feels like a throwback to ambitious 1980s anime in terms of where it makes some extra effort and where it lets the background fade back and be static, even if it does feel more Chinese despite its origins (character designs and much of the mythology is fairly specifically Tibetan). Rather than jumping between styles by using CGI for its more complex monsters and machines the way a lot of other modern animated features do, it maintains consistent technique but changes coloring and detail. There's a sharp contrast between the human world and Another World though they do seem to be of a piece, and the design of the creatures and settings is terrific.

It gets pretty harsh at times, though, not necessarily working hard to emphasize how cynical it is even though the sweep of the story certainly indicates a pessimistic outlook on humanity over the course of history; the horrors eventually revealed are not for the squeamish. The filmmakers never really have Gudo doubt himself, or explain what sort of life form he is directly, but they also make it clear that, as this sort of otherworldly being, he doesn't necessarily understand humanity; he's detached and naive about human suffering in a way that a rich person may be about poverty only more so, though his intentions are never bad. There's an intriguing bit of philosophy to consider in its view of reincarnation where the cycle of life, death, and rebirth does not hone a soul to perfection through its suffering so much as the absorbed suffering of individuals seems to corrupt the underlying society, and the focus on untying individuals' knots or waiting for a pivotal moment to remove their Evil Seed just doesn't get the job done.

It's a visual stunner and an epic, though quite a bit heavier than one might expect from the previews. Pretty impressive on the big screen, though, and will probably manage to translate to the living room better than most films with this much spectacle do.


Trainspotting

* * * (out of four)
Seen 7 June 2026 in Alamo Seaport #3 (30th anniversary, laser DCP)
Where to stream it, or buy the disc at Amazon

How did I avoid seeing this when it came out? I was a college kid working in a movie theater and not afraid of Scots accents!

(Honestly, it seems quaint how worked up people got about that!)

Thirty years later, with Danny Boyle and Ewan McGregor's careers to look back on, it's amazing how much is right here from the start: Boyle is a director who really demands to be noticed, so clearly wanting you to see his style and clever decisions that it could become obnoxious if he weren't so assured; McGregor is probably too charming to really sell you on Renton being an actual lowlife. Maybe that's the point, that the heroin high is so good that it blots out his better self, but everybody involved is having too much fun to really underline the point except at important moments.

But, then, Boyle is skilled enough to handle the ebb and flow of the movie, and his last little trick where the camera loses focus until Renton is a kind of featureless horror sort of primes one to reconsider things in the way out of the theater, about how Begbie was the obvious psychopath all along, but the rest of them are nearly as bad in how they just don't seem to care. Renton, in particular, is a piece of shit for whom the audience is always given a reason to look the other way - he can't be that bad if his parents care that much for him, he freaks out when he realizes Diane is just a teenager, he's loyal to but annoyed by his friends who have graduated beyond petty crime when they reunite in London, he leaves a share for Spud - but considered in whole, he's arguably the film's greatest monster in part because he is able to slide: It's not clear he's got any probably with Diane being that young other than the chance he might get in trouble, he segues into being an estate agent a little too easily, and he uses that to hopefully dispose of Sick Boy & Begbie. Worst, though, is that he's responsible for Tommy's spiral, and never comes clean when there was a chance to stop it at pretty much no cost to him.

The central question here, I guess, is whether Boyle and company make things too entertaining for the film's central message about how heroin is so good that people will have no compunctions being monstrous pursuing the high. Its best moments deliver a gut punch, but some of its more memorable ones reduce horrors to surreality or slapstick, and for as much as it's not subtle in many ways, there's something odd thirty years on about how casually the film treats the HIV/AIDS epidemic: It's mentioned regularly but casually, and a modern audience may need to be reminded that this was a huge deal in a way that someone seeing this in the mid-1990s might not, but everything else in the movie had an exclamation point.

Anyway, I should probably actually watch that copy of T2 Trainspotting soon, considering I'd intended to watch the first before seeing the sequel, but didn't find the time, so missed it. The original is messy but fascinating, and I'm curious to see where this group landed, 20 years later, on whether the heroin made these guys monsters or whether it kept their awful nature in check.

This Week in Tickets: 25 May 2026 - 31 May 2026 (Don't Get Used to This!)

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?

Independent Film Festival Boston 2026.01: I Love Boosters

Let's kind of not mess around here, because the festival wasn't.

Boots Riley, on hand and talking with Brian Tamm about opening night film I Love Boosters. Interestingly, it was just the two of them for the most part - no Jon Bernhardt on the theremin as we waited for showtime, nor last year's Keytar Bear, and while the post-film discussion for some of these higher-profile movies would often be led from someone from WBUR or other local media, it was mostly Brian & Boots fielding the questions directly.

Which isn't bad; what we got was probably more interesting than a semi-scripted chat, especially because there were a couple times you could see Brian about to select another question before the director remembered something else. It worked out in large part because he had interesting answers to some of the more groan-worthy questions. For instance, "I'm a film student, what lenses did you use?", which often gets a bit of a groan because most folks in the audience aren't that technical, and unless the director has been a cinematographer (which Riley has not), he maybe doesn't have that much insight into the choices. He pointed that out while also saying "Technicolor 2" and one other, but also mentioning that those particular lenses can be difficult to get hold of, but the folks at Technicolor are big fans of cinematographer Natasha Braier, and not only rented her those, but also some custom lenses that they were saving for the right project. In addition, Braier did a custom attachment that Riley apparently couldn't describe too completely because she's patenting it that created some interesting effects when shooting the scenes with LaKeith Stanfield besotting Keke Palmer's Corvette, which replaced some things they were planning to do in color timing. It locked them into a certain look early, which they seemed cool with.

Interestingly, it tied into another regular question, the infamous "what are your influences?" He didn't give the exact answer I'd always be tempted to ("every movie I've ever seen"), but that was the gist, with him pointing out that everything had two or three contradictory impulses in them, to the point where you couldn't really separate what the original ingredients to the stew in his head were. The most direct influences were less inspirational than technical; there were apparently a number of scenes where they only built the back wall for budget reasons, and they showed the studios other movies where they did this to show it was viable.

The last question someone asked was about how he's a self-described communist but both of his movies have been these big productions for corporations, and how he felt about it. The answer kind of tied back to how, earlier, he talked about how the activist community he grew in treated the arts as something distracting from the real work of revolution, and how early in his career he actually stepped away from music because it didn't feel like something an adult did, getting back to it when he realized that a lot more people were getting his message through the music than specifically activist work. Sorry to Bother You started as a more conventional sort of radical/independent cinema, but like his music, it got weird as he kept writing, and eventually it just wasn't going to be made as a small independent collective, and if you're going to make something that requires people to work on it for four months, there's got be someone paying them. He'd like to do something small someday, but that's just not how his creativity fires right now.

Anyway, a lot of fun, even before he started directing the staff and audience to get a very specific audience selfie. Movie opens wide on 22 May, and as he pointed out, the 2,000 screen opening means you've got to find your large audience right away, where there wasn't so much pressure on Sorry to Bother You's platform.


I Love Boosters

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 22 April 2026 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Independent Film Festival Boston 2026, 4K laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available), or Riley's original album at Amazon

The fun thing about Boots Riley's movies, at least for some of us, is that they start out as broad 2000AD-style satire of something fairly specific, and then launch into much weirder orbit as they go on. Sometimes, it can seem like he's got more ideas than he has time to make movies, but at other times, you wonder if it's the point: That this awful, ridiculous thing is intertwined with a number of things that are even more terrible and insane, and you can't tell the story you started from without exaggerating everything else the same way. The result is often so maximalist as to make a viewer's head spin, but also a good time.

It centers around Corvette (Keke Palmer), a would-be fashion designer who instead runs a booster ring with friends Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige), shoplifting designer clothing in bulk and selling it at affordable prices in open-air pop-us. She's a huge fan of designer Christi Smith (Demi Moore), but takes a job in one of her Metro Design stores to case it, on the rumor of $100,000 suits, and plans something bigger when she realizes Christi has stolen one of her weird designs she posted online. That's before a worker from Christi's Chinese factory, Jiansu (Poppy Liu), shows up with even bigger ambitions, and not taking into consideration the peculiar staff at the shop (Will Pouler, Eiza González, Najah Bradley), a dizzingly handsome catalog model (LaKeith Stanfield), or a motivational speaker (Don Cheadle) recruiting for a pyramid scheme.

Boosters seems kind of overstuffed, but perhaps by less than one might think. Its bright colors and crazy costumes which get switched up repeatedly during montages increase the intensity of what the audience is seeing but it's not actually more than they can take in, and almost every crazy new element and twist Riley adds has a clear place; with even the headier science-fiction elements (which he does in fact slow down a little bit to explain) pretty directly talking about blurring the line between homage and appropriation and synthesis & deconstruction in art. It's loud and bizarre and one can maybe lose track of what the goals are by the end of the film because Poppy's story is clearly bigger than Corvette's even though the latter is obviously the main character, but it never gets truly out of hand.

It's hilarious from front to back, though, with Keke Palmer trying to get out of Christi's bizarrely canted apartment some of the best slapstick since Ryan Gosling stumbling around a bathroom stall in The Nice Guys as an example. The jokes and general strangeness come at a rapid pace, with recurring bits not quite in the background and an ability to do deadpan without necessarily slowing down and pausing. Riley has come up with a lot of gags that fit the setting and fits them into the script without necessarily twisting the story but letting them be weird enough that the audience can appreciate them individually. Similarly, there's a lot in the movie that is more tactile than it might be in others - the credits reference both miniature and stop-motion units - but without necessarily making a point of how practical effects are inherently better than digital ones; Riley has a good handle on how to have the medium enhance the material without itself taking the focus.

He's also assembled a cast that can work at his breakneck comedic pace but also give us some emotion under the frantic nature of it: Keke Palmer makes Corvette cool despite a lot of insecurity, and Demi Moore understands the assignment by making Christi the reverse, kind of a nervous dork under her brash entitlement (between this and The Substance, it's kind of odd seeing Moore committing to weird parts because she always seemed such a carefully mainstream movie star in her 1980s/1990s heyday). Eiza González and Poppy Liu are both firehoses of exposition and activity, while LaKeith Stanfield is almost soothing as he calmly delivers some of the movie's most bizarre material. Nobody here is being subtle, but they all feel human and kind of well-rounded in Riley's weird world.

We Were Dangerous

I'm mildly surprised this isn't hanging on into next week, especially since the Somerville isn't getting any of the two big openers this weekend - they've got a live event, Ran, and Friendship, because the theater was quite full when I got there last night. Granted, it's not terribly difficult to make screen #2 in the Somerville Theatre look relatively full, but I figured this might indicate good word-of-mouth that gets it a little more life. It's apparently hanging around at West Newton for another week, but they've got six screens to play with rather than three.

Anyway, still at the Somerville Wednesday and Thursday. I liked it more than expected, and kind of hope my nieces are reading because the girls in it are about their age, this seems like their kind of thing, and though I doubt that it's playing anywhere near them in Southern Maine, maybe they'll look it up on JustWatch in a couple months.


We Were Dangerous

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 May 2025 in Somerville Theatre #2 (first-run, DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

It's been some time since I was the age of the kids in this movie and I was never a young girl, so I don't know if We Were Dangerous necessarily rings true, but it feels like it does. Or, maybe, it reflects one's memories from a few years later, that even when adolescence is far from carefree, kids can find a lot more fun and joy than you might expect from experiences that mingle with horror.

It opens inside a New Zealand "School for Incorrigible & Delinquent Girls" with a trio trying to plot a break-out (only one gets out and it may not quite be an "escape"). This gets the facility moved to an island that has previously been used as a fort, a leper colony, and a staging area for a trip to Antarctica. The two Maori girls who tried to help their friend escape are Nellie (Erana James), stubborn and defiant, and Daisy (Manaia Hall), impulsive and eager; they describe themselves as "cousins, but not in the white sense" to new arrival Louisa (Nathalie Morris), who unlike most of the girls is white and from a very nice home, but called a "sexual delinquent" for being caught making out with her female tutor. They become fast friends despite or because of the Matron (Rima Te Wiata) having it in for them, but being placed in the worst, leakiest cabin also gives them an eye on how this place can become worse.

For American viewers, executive producer Taika Waititi will probably be the most familiar name in the credits, and while the film doesn't have his particular fingerprints on it, you can put this movie beside his work and see the same sort of Maori sense of humor, a wry sense of absurdity that takes a cock-eyed view of the world. The front half of the movie, especially is loaded with great deadpan verbal and visual gags, with newcomer Maniana Hall a real find as someone who can make the fact that Daisy is uneducated and naive about three quarters of the joke while the rest is that Daisy is actually a funny kid the rest. It's a very funny movie, much more than I perhaps expected.

That makes the shift to things being serious work even better; director Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu (who has an "additional writing" credit after writer Maddie Dai) never has the movie screech to a halt to say that fun time is over, and now we're getting serious even as she does linger on something intended to make one feel sick to one's stomach. She's more likely to present it in a way that reminds the audience that it was always there, and girls like Nellie and Daisy already knew it was there, even if others were able to ignore it. Stewart-Te Whiu may raise the stakes for the audience and start driving things to a climax, but there's a steadiness to how she does it that, in the end, reminds you that Nellie and Daisy, at least, are the same girls who tried to help a friend at the very start.

And they're great girls. Erana James's Nellie may, as the Matron's narrator claims, think she already knows everything, but James plays her as not just observant and clever, but smart enough to not to bring out the sharpest edge of her sarcasm until it's really necessary, and not prematurely cynical even though life has treated her badly. Hall, as mentioned, is a newcomer (IMDB says she auditioned for the role as a joke), but it's easy to see why the filmmakers cast her; she's not just funny but capable of expressing Daisy's worry and shame, and expressing big emotions by speaking plainly. Nathalie Morris, of course, comes at things from a different angle, making Lou someone who could be snobbish but is just self-aware enough not to be, although her reactions when both Nellie and the Matron call her on her privilege are impressive as well.

On the other side, Rima Te Wiata gives a terrific performance as The Matron. We don't necessarily need for the film to have her narrate flashbacks to her younger years with a couple young actors, perhaps, because we can see who she is fairly clearly, although those scenes really cement that she's not a well-meaning outsider but a Maori who is complicit, having absorbed the disdain of her oppressors. Indeed, there's something heartbreaking about her sincerity when she says she's looking out for the girls; the matron is not entirely a good person who has been used as a tool by evil, but there's enough of that in her to make her a pitiable villain.

It's a great-looking film, especially once it gets to the island. Stewart-Te Whiu does a fine job of contrasting the mostly-unspoiled beauty of the location with its malign intent, often creating the feeling of visiting a preserved historical site and having it sink in that there's danger behind its quaintness. She regularly flips the costuming between school uniforms and jumpsuits that scan as not quite prison garb but close enough, and the matron's narration is carefully contrasted against action that undermines it. All this double duty keeps things tight; there's really not a wasted minute despite the film often seeming more ambling and observational than focused, right down to the final minutes which don't dawdle at all.

Gazer

Independent Film Festival Boston takes the Somerville Theatre over starting on Wednesday, so not much is opening there since it would just get moved around anyway, but it does mean that they had a little room on screen #2 for this to get a brief five-day run, while the other screen downstairs is playing Secret Mall Apartment. They had filmmakers and subjects for the opening last week, so you'll find these throughout the theater:

If you've seen the movie, you get it.

(There was also a plastic easter egg in my seat's cupholder, because it was Easter, and now I'm wondering if there was a free ticket or something inside)

Anyway, it's serendipitous that Secret Mall Apartment was last year's IFFBoston spotlight film at the Somerville, and its regular run is at that theater just as the next year's festival opens.

So, obviously, late post, but last call for Gazer is tonight at 7pm, but Secret Mall Apartment will be back next Wednesday, at least for a couple of days.


Gazer

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 April 2025 in Somerville Theatre #2 (first-run, DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

I'm not saying Gazer would have been better if this was the case, but I went into the film thinking it was going to be a scrappy little 74-minute indie only for it to be half-again that long. It doesn't quite fall into the "you're probably only going to get one movie about X, so put every X thing you can imagine into it" trap (with X being dyschronometria in this case), but it does wind up spreading both its hook and its plot kind of thin.

Frankie Rhodes (Ariella Mastroianni) is the person with dyschronometria here; for her, it tends to present as zoning out, not realizing that a time has passed, but also interacts with a number of other cerebral issues, which together are likely terminal. Her doctor has advised her to look into an assisted living facility, but she bristles, wanting to be reunited with daughter Cynthia, who has been in the custody of her mother-in-law Diane (Marianne Goodell) since Frankie's husband Roger's suicide (Diane thinks Frankie's claims she was zoned out and unable to remember is awful convenient). At a support group, she meets Paige Foster (Renee Gagner), whose brother Henry (Jack Alberts) has become abusive since their mother's suicide. Paige offers to pay $3000 if Frankie will sneak into the apartment, get her car keys, and drive it to someplace she can pick it up, but when Paige doesn't show up at the meeting the next day, Frankie doesn't know whether something has happened to her or if, rather than another woman in a tough situation, Paige had seen her as a perfect patsy.

Despite being set in roughly the present day, the vibe of Gazer comes from a generation or two earlier; director Ryan J. Sloan and cinematographer Matheus Bastos shoot on 16mm film and find the sorts of locations in Newark, New Jersey that haven't changed much in the last three or four decades. Everyone has cars that have been on the road for a while, and, crucially, Frankie relies on payphones and a cassette player in her daily life; LED screens and the like tend to trigger her illnesses in a bad way. The score by Steve Matthew Carter isn't exactly a throwback but wouldn't seem out of place in a paranoid 1970s thriller. Little bits of modernity appear around the edges - the PC showing brain scans in the doctor's office, the way Frankie uses earbuds rather than clunky headphones - but the effect is just enough to keep the audience from asking questions and maybe put them in a similar state of detachment.

It's a good sort of mental space for this kind of mystery. The story is not particularly complicated, perhaps, but it's interesting enough to have something to tug on while observing everything else in Frankie's life. Star Ariella Mastroianni (who co-wrote the film with husband Sloan) is careful never to present Frankie as a sleuth, even as she is following a trail or evading pursuit, but someone locked into the current moment who has to work hard to manage anything outside it. There's something off about the way she plays against everyone else in the movie, like Frankie isn't really sure how well she knows anybody aside from her daughter. As much as Frankie is mostly-functional and the more relatable pieces get across, one kind of has to learn to read her, though Masroianni seems to have figured out a nonstandard but consistent set of expressions and tones.

One could argue that the way the pacing and priorities get weird in the last stretch is part of the point; is giving the audience a sense of the disorientation and distraction Frankie feels as he stretches the time out after all the pieces have been put together and has Frankie sort of stumbling forward while often having surreal flashbacks to the night her husband dies. There's not much connection, which frustrates the audience who expects movies to edit in a way that creates links but also perhaps underlines how Frankie is constantly both in the now and the then. A lot of the second half of the movie is like that, though, with Cronenbergian imagery that doesn't exactly resonate with the idea that Frankie's main issue is keeping track of time, and a finale that may be frustratingly discordant in how it emphasizes that Frankie's priority is not necessarily the mystery that has been occupying the audience's more conventional brains.

It's a reasonably intriguing paradox of a movie, in that everything that helps the audience get into Frankie's head and mindset also makes the movie more frustrating as a mystery and story, but it's possible that the filmmakers are well aware of that: What are the cassette tapes that Frankie uses to keep her focused and aware of, say, how long she should be riding on the bus to get home but a way to impose a narrative on her frustratingly nonlinear mind, and how is someone more likely to spiral rather than regroup when those crutches fail? It's a movie that many will leave frustrated, but, well, imagine how Frankie must feel!

This Week in Tickets: 14 October 2024 - 20 October 2024 (China, Hitch, oddities)

So, I gather nobody's been seeing these, even though I've definitely been posting them!

(You're not buying it, are you?)

I've got several things I want to catch up with on this blog, from T.W.I.T. to FIlm Rolls to Fantasia to the festivals in between, and they feel nested in a way that I wasn't ever getting out of, so now I'm going to try to rotate and keep current and say "you know what, if this isn't done by bedtime it gets a really quick finish tomorrow morning before work because it is cutting into 'watching more movies' time".

Anyway, it was a fairly fun and busy week, starting off with a Chinese double feature - Tiger Wolf Rabbit being a fairly serviceable thriller from the mainland and Stuntman is a more ambivalent ode to Hong Kong movies than is typical. I must admit, I can't help but wonder what moving the Chinese and Korean films from Boston Common to Causeway Street is doing to their audience; even if it is leading to theater splits that make double features easier.

The middle of the week (around watching some baseball) was given to watching some Hitchcock at the Somerville. Marnie on Tuesday was a nice 35mm print, and Frenzy on Thursday in a new-ish 4K remaster. They're both what I call "post-peak Hitchcock" in the reviews, made after the late-1950s masterpieces and perhaps in some ways more interesting compared to what other folks were doing in the 1960s and early 1970s than the rest of Hitch's career, because other genre filmmakers had started internalizing his lessons.

Friday evening was a trip to Kendall Square for Rumours, the new Guy Maddin that I wish I liked a bit more, then Saturday morning I headed out to the Seaport for the re-release of Tarsem Singh's restored The Fall, two filmmakers who can be niche but also have incredible style.

Then I wrapped the weekend with a couple of movies that AMC basically scheduled against each other and made difficult to see during the week, more or less carving out the weekend's late afternoons: Kensuke's Kingdom on Saturday was a nice little animated film from the UK, and Panda Plan on Sunday was the latest Jackie Chan film. The most amusing thing about it, perhaps, was that I skipped a film of his at Fantasia figuring Well Go or someone would release it in the USA, but apparently not before his next one.

Anyway - my Letterboxd account is genuinely more reliable than this, although full of spelling errors and hastily composed thoughts that get sorted out here.


Yu Huo zhi Lu (Tiger Wolf Rabbit)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 14 October 2024 in AMC Causeway Street #4 (first-run, laser DCP)
Not yet streaming in the USA, but listings for when it is

There are a couple moments in Tiger Wolf Rabbit when the filmmakers try to pull back from what has become a movie perhaps too dour and grim to get audiences to the finish, and the result is just mild disbelief. It's better than outright whiplash of going from talking about child abduction to romantic comedy material and back again, but the filmmakers don't quite have the knack for taking a little step away from the abyss or occasionally touching solid ground that keeps the audience from drifting away.

It's a movie that really doesn't come together until the second half, like the filmmakers know the three characters they need for later but can't really get them to work together before the main story kicks in. It opens with some striking scenes, but kind of drags between introducing the oddly mismatched trio - Cui Dalu (Yang Xiao), a just-released convict whose child was abducted; Li Hongyng (Zhao Zanilla), the woman he hooked up while searching for his son and wound up running scams with; and Zhao Zishan (Liu Ye), a mysterious figure who wants to hire Dalu to find a worse criminal - and giving them a big mission. That mission, it turns out, is pretty good. It's fragmented, sure, but you can see them building a movie to get there.

I don't know that the full story of the film really holds up; it often feels like the screenwriters came up with its two halves separately and stitched them together the best they could; the screenplay gets the story through but every previously-unrevealed thing about the characters feels more useful for explaining their next steps than making any sense of their previous ones. The cast is good, and vibe well when they're allowed to, but there's a segment in the middle where the characters are literally lost and pulled out via a weird deux ex machina, like the writers had no idea to how to get things to come together naturally.

There's style to the film, too; it feels like the folks involved sought out parts of China that seldom show up on screen and made the most of striking landscapes and village architecture. The big visual swings and plot twists are probably more memorable than things in many more sensibly constructed movies, to the point where it impresses more than it disappoints, even if the result isn't quite the sum of the parts.


Stuntman

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 14 October 2024 in AMC Causeway Street #4 (first-run, laser DCP)
Not yet streaming in the USA, but listings for when it is

Stuntman starts out with what feels like a really good Police Story pastiche and gets interesting when that not only goes awry but the film fast-forwards to the present day and tempers its nostalgia for old-school Hong Kong action.

After the energetic stunt show, and the horrible accident at the end, it has once-famed action director Sam Lee (Stephen Tung Wai) running a little first aid clinic, catering mostly to former stuntmen who are now taking shifts as security guards and the like. At a martial-arts society reunion, he meets old friend Cho (To Yin-Gor), a director who wants him to handle the action on a movie he's putting together with action superstar Wai (Philip Ng Wan-Lung), who had been a suntman in Sam's crew but now has his own. Sam hires Lee Sam-Lung (Terrence Lau Chun-Him), who is just about ready to give up stunts to work at his brother's logistics business as the stunt co-ordinator, all while trying to prepare for the wedding of daughter Cherry (Cecliia Choi Si-Wan), though most of the father-of-the-birde work is going to her stepfather.

DIrectors Herbert Leung Kun-Seun and Albert Leung Koon-Yiu - I think they're brothers - have stuntwork bona fides and I wouldn't be terribly shocked if every piece of this movie was based on a real anecdote or experience. What's notable is that they present both the bits about making a movie and what comes after with remarkable clarity; where some may have blind spots about their life's work, the Leungs show what an action director does compared to a stunt co-ordinator, for instance, and what working-class jobs these actually are. Most importantly, while many fans of Hong Kong film and bigger names like Sammo Hung will often look back at the industry's heyday and talk about how a month would be spent on a single fight despite the guerilla filmmaking, they recognize that it was tremendously dangerous, and folks like "Heartless Sam" were a big part of the reason why. Perhaps the key thing they capture is that someone like Sam can be very good at his job and also extremely dangerous; the film's centerpiece is one that many films would play as a thrilling caper but which instead feels like Sam is going to get someone killed.

Hong Kong action is a complicated legacy and the film isn't completely successful at grappling with it; it's too fascinated by Sam to really give sufficient space to the younger characters who maybe want to be smarter about things even when he proves to be a terrible role model. It doesn't exactly help that Stephen Tung Wai has a wonderfully weathered face but never feels as natural as nearly everyone else in the cast as an actor, especially during the scenes with Cecilia Choi, where his smiling too wide and trying too hard only start to feel like something the character does rather than the actor in retrospect. The film is also big on "Hong Kong Spirit", not so much in a way that feels like it's meant to contrast with anywhere else, but also not in a way that examines it. Is it just doing more than such a tiny place should, stretching yourself past the breaking point no matter what, or...?

The stonework is legit, at least - Tung and the directors have extensive stunt backgrounds and know their stuff - and while I suspect the filmmaking is simplified, it's nicely grounded and doesn't seem interested in romanticizing the process too much.


Marnie

* * * (out of four)
Seen 15 October 2024 in Somerville Theatre #1 (A Bit of Hitch, 35mm)
Available to rent/purchase digitally on Prime or elsewhere; 4K and DVD available on Amazon

Perhaps the most entertaining thing about Marnie is that you can see Hitchcock trying to coax a James Stewart or Cary Grant performance out of his lead, who absolutely cannot be anything but Sean Connery. He knew the power of movie stars, but Connery was just starting to be James Bond and broaden his own screen persona beyond that as the film was shooting, so maybe Hitch wasn't fully familiar with his new tool yet.

Connery plays the wealthy head of a publishing company who recognizes the title character (Tippi Hedren) as the woman who robbed her previous job when she applies for work as a secretary but is nonetheless fascinated by her, covering up her crimes and blackmailing her into marriage. There's the makings of an intense thriller there, but Hitchcock, perhaps, is not the man to make it; his world view seems locked into seeing Marnie as the broken women driven to crime by previous psychological trauma and Connery's Mark Rutland mostly holding her tight so that he can see how to fix her. There's a moment - perhaps the film's best - when Hitchcock or screenwriter Jay Presson Allen seem quite happy to undermine the idea, as Marnie mocks Rutland's psychological approach, saying she's seen all the same movies, but hanging a lantern on those issues isn't exactly rising above it. The whole thing might be better off acknowledging Rutland as kind of a bastard and letting Marnie own her choices move, even if they don't wind up together.

Heck, you can see how that works in the second best thing about the movie, watching Diane Baker's Lil mature from bratty to bitchy before the audience's eyes; she's never a conventional good girl but it's tough to really dislike her as she's doing interesting things around the edges, even if it she is working at cross-purposes to the film's central romance. There are also a couple other impressive scenes - the bit where Marnie steals from the safe is a clinic in presenting such a basic bit of crime as genuinely tense, and the way Hitchcock and Hedren present Marnie's panic during the hunt (where she should feel safe and assured) is great as well - but they're often exceptions, the parts the filmmakers can make singe even if what's around them aren't as great.

The movie is very much post-peak Hitchcock: Elaborate psychological constructs, a script stuck between explicit and euphemistic, and an underlying meanness where a younger Hitch would have found chemistry and affection.


Frenzy

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 17 October 2024 in Somerville Theatre #1 (A Bit of Hitch, 4K laser DCP)
Available to rent/purchase digitally on Prime or elsewhere; 4K and DVD available on Amazon

Fifty years later, Frenzy feels like it's in a weird, in-between spot, where a casual viewer might not be able to tell where Alfred Hitchcock is ahead of the times, where he's catching up, and where his experiments are having mixed results. It's good, but there are moments when I'd wonder what he's getting at; it can feel like a Monty Python sketch, and Hitchcock's dark sense of humor means it could be a joke or the sort of thing the Pythons were spoofing.

(And that's setting aside stuff like the joke about how exotic and terrible a "Margarita" is, which has aged about as well as James Bond scoffing at the Beatles)

Some of those bits are obvious bad ideas, like a long recap of what has already happened that exists to beat the joke about the detective's wife's cooking into the ground. Sometimes I wondered whether stuff like using a freeze-frame instead of holding a shot was meant to be unnerving or not. Other times, Hitchcock seems to be trying to get every morbid gag he's ever thought of in during what he probably figures will be one of his last few films.

But, on the other hand, some pieces are legitimately great. The armchair psychoanalysis might be terrible, but the way the killer slides from affable to vicious is genuinely terrific, and a scene where the camera seems to nervously back away from a murder and then wait for the body to be found feels about three layers deep. The film tortures by waiting just a little too long, but not so much that giggling breaks out. It's mean, and the results of murder are undignified in a way that makes the whole idea even more awful.

At times, it feels like Hitchcock wants to scratch the same itch as Psycho but knows folks will compare the two films and maybe tries too hard to differentiate between them (and his other "wrong man" stories). But it works more often than not, and looks gorgeous to boot.

Previous review (2013)


Rumours

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 October 2024 in Landmark Kendall Square #9 (first-run, DCP)
Available to pre-order digitally on Prime; not yet streaming in the USA, but listings for when it is

Everything about Rumours feels like it should not just be a lot of fun, but work well together: Guy Maddin (And his frequent collaborators)! Bog body zombies! At the G7 summit! With a giant brain! And a fun cast, including an increasingly game-for-anything Cate Blanchett! And yet, it resolutely fails to come together. One of cinema's greatest weirdos seems too timid to be absurd or satiric.

You can tell early on, too, when the leaders are chummy but won't say what sort of crisis they are meeting to discuss, and then seem like they're being taxed to write out platitudes. In 2024, it seems like the weakest jokes you can make about politicians, even if the G7 feels like a lot of empty hype (has anything concrete actually emerged from one?); if you're making them, put some tension in it. Make them seem paralyzed into politeness rather than empty. Or maybe go all in on absurdity, which is often this group's specialty, but they seldom push a joke past odd into weird or unnerving territory. Rumours is all the little bits a movie puts in between the big gags that you might miss, elevated to the foreground.

When the jokes land and linger, the film can be pretty fun - a late gag with the Canadian Prime Minister going for the land acknowledgment in an emergency feels downright clever for instance. The cast is admittedly terrific: Everybody seems to at least be digging into the various bits of pompous dignity of their characters, with Roy Dupuis (as Canada's virile, scandal-plagued PM) and Denis Ménochet (as France's intellectual President) in particular making off with any scene that's not tied down. It's also very fun to see Maddin's silent-influenced style emerge from a movie that initially looks downright normal, especially once one learns that they have taken an actual forest and used lighting and smoke to make it look like a set. The melodramatic score is fun.

The filmmakers just don't seem to know how to connect all those ideas that probably seemed like they would write themselves once that failed to happen.


The Fall

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 October 2024 in Alamo Boston #4 (re-release, laser DCP)
Available to rent/purchase digitally on Prime or elsewhere; original DVD available on Amazon (new one likely on the way)

The Fall is arguably one of the great cinematic follies of our time, and that's no insult: It's just acknowledging that there's clearly a lot of time, money, and effort poured into a film that was probably never going to connect with a mainstream audience unless it got very lucky. It's a folly, but one that's worth being in the world. The world is richer for having such things in it.

And it's worth checking out during this re-release, even if it hadn't been cleaned up and presented as the finest digital file possible. The film is more eye-poppingly gorgeous than one likely remembers, for a start, even if you remember it looking pretty good; 15 years of movies being increasingly built inside machines rather than from figuring out how to populate a grand landscape or striving for consistency rather than this movie's glorious contradictions makes something like this harder to conceive even in memory, as we often remember things in relation to other things, and that can cause something as singular as this to fade precisely because there's nothing like it. Watching it for the first time in years allows it to stun anew because there is very little like, say, a scene where an elaborately-costumed army makes their way down an almost Escher-like series of stairs in sync.

The script often seems shaggier than the precisely-planned visuals, and the fact that it's a bit of meta-commentary - Roy's story shifts and expands and contracts to capture his young visitor's attention to a purpose - the viewer can perhaps see that a bit too plainly. It stays to grind at a certain point, but then, the movie is about to change, and perhaps wearing out its welcome keeps the audience from rejecting the shift, and Tarsem's choice to plunge what had spent a lot of time as a children's story with dark undertones into not just darkness but despair can feels audacious: There's no winking or quipping, but the sincerity is powerful, and Tarsem isn't trying to impress us so much as be honest about how hard crawling out can be.

The filmmaker never got to make this sort of big swing again, but what a thing to spend your credit on.


Kensuke's Kingdom

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 October 2024 in AMC Boston Common #6 (first-run, laser DCP)
Not yet streaming in the USA, but listings for when it is

Kensuke's Kingdom certainly starts out in that easily-maligned category of "British animated films that look kind of cheap but somehow have an amazing voice cast", but happily grows into something better. The language barrier that never really gets bridged forces it to be more visual, and the filmmakers are wise to keep the scale manageable.

And it could be easy for it to seem too big, opening with Michael (voice of Aaron MacGregor) sailing around the world at some point in the 1990s, presumably, with his parents (voices of Cillian Murphy & Sally Hawkins) and older sister (voice of Raffey Cassidy), none too pleased about supposedly leaving his dog stella behind, though he's somehow managed to smuggle the pup on board and keep him hidden for days despite being not that great a sailor otherwise. It all leads to him being swept off the deck during a storm, landing on a seemingly deserted island, although eventually he'll meet Kensuke (voice of Ken Watanabe), who appears to have been there since World War II.

It's kind of wobbly at times, but the filmmakers are wise to lavish attention on what will get the most benefit: They quietly show how ow great it is to have a dog in this situation, lovingly render tropical animals, and make sure Kensuke's those doesn't look like a CGI effect on the middle of a hand-drawn film, as can happen. Heck, it happens here, as a choppy sea and the boat upon it are clearly created using different methods. The style switch to show his origins is very nice, and the animators give him a lot of dignity without making him stiff.

The filmmakers do sometimes seem to have a bit of trouble with how to tell the best part of the story; one suspects that the heart of the original book is Michael and Kensuke somehow getting to know each other without being able to speak, but that's probably more internal and time-consuming than the film can likely manage, while Michael remains a rather passive part of the story. The introduction of an external danger sometimes feels like something needs to be going on, but feels like an interruption more than a climax.

Still, as these small family movies which are fortunate to get one show a day for a week go, it's pretty decent.


Xiong Mao Ji Hua (Panda Plan)

* * (out of four)
Seen 20 October 2024 in AMC Causeway Street #3 (first-run, laser DCP)
Not yet streaming in the USA, but listings for when it is

You don't have to do this, Jackie Chan. You're a seventy-year-old legend who has recently expressed a fair amount of interest in being seen as a serious filmmaker rather than a clown. You don't have to sign up for the movie with the CGI panda cub, ego-puffing self-referentiality, and action scenes where everyone can see you've lost a step. You can just do one movie a year, play mentor on and off the screen, and just enjoy the fruits of an incredibly successful career.

Maybe someone gave Jackie that advice before Panda Plan, which takes what must have at one point seemed like a clever idea for a movie - action movie star gets caught up in the middle of a plan to steal baby pandas while at a symbolic "adoption ceremony" - and just sucks the life out of it. Part of it is probably Chan's ego - when going meta, he's willing to have people joke about his nose and make himself look like a goofball, but he's not going to let folks take out the knives like Andy Lau did in The Movie Emperor - which means that a lot of this movie is heroes and villains alike fawning over Jackie-the-character and he never quite plays himself as an older man who needs choreography in a way that would add tension. The filmmakers don't spend much of their Dairy Queen product placement money on actors who can play English-speaking mercenaries like people who actually speak English. The effects work isn't great and the last stretch is a cringe-worthy attempt to give the heartstrings an unwarrented tug.

(It's interesting that Jackie has a line about receiving an Oscar, though; it's clearly what he says, rather than subtitles, and while he did receive an honorary award in 2015, I wonder if this takes place in an alternate universe where The Diary got made out he didn't pass on Everything Everywhere All at Once. Plus you kind of expect him to go with the Mainland China equivalent these days)

Of course, Jackie Chan can star in a movie like this and get a National Week release because he knows the ropes as well as anybody ever has, and it's not just habit to smile as he slips through gaps in leaders or dodges punches. He may not be as spry as he was, but the choreography is still pretty good, inventive and funny, and there's a moment when things slow down enough to let Jackie talk about why he loves making movies where we're reminded of his genuine charisma and how good he can be given a chance to play it straight.

Sometimes you can say that the rest of the movie is worth it for those good bits, but this isn't one of them; it's a bit that could fit in many other movies and have the whole thing be much better.