Fantasia 2026.03: Anime no Bento '26, Break Free, and Unidentified Murder

Pardon if today seems a little more scattered than usual; I left the apartment without my little five-inch square notebook and so wasn't making notes through most of the day, and that's not great when the first couple films of the day are Japanese shorts and new releases; Japanese studios just do not update English-friendly movie databases and there's a lag on the crowd-sourcing as well. I eventually wound up hitting Pharmaprix to grab pen and paper for the last show, but wasn't quick-thinking enough to record or photograph the English credits of Break Free.

Anyway, late start because the early afternoon was filled with panels and such more than screenings, so we kick off at the Museum with the Anime no Bento package:

Five filmmakers for seven films from Japan is a pretty decent turnout, although the scheduling meant there wouldn't be time for a Q&A - these packages are soon after the "My First Fantasia" shows, and genre festival staff in a museum cinema might not exactly specialize in getting families with kids in and out - so there was little time to do more than introduce director Taka Yuki from "Don't Dodge Life", "20001 An Earth Odyssey" creator Taiki Sakurai, "Echo" filmmaker Asuka Dokai, "Foxing" director Takeru Shinokuza, and Eit Mitsufuchi, who did basically everything on "Dust of the Simulacrum".

It didn't quite run late enough to bump into Break Free, with producer Yusuke Suzuki (CHECK), star Akito Fujii, and writer/ director Yu Nakamoto on hand. It was a fun Q&A, even if it was one where you get the sense of how bizarre it must be to fly halfway around the world to show your movie to a huge room of people who speak two different languages from what you understand, standing in front of them while they chatter and a translator occasionally decides a question is for you. Fujii, in particular, often seems to be listening intently for something he could respond to and then giving a very amusing answer when he got the chance.

It was interesting, though, as I gather the film kind of grew from Fujii starting a TikTok where he did dances in character as a yakuza (his character's cover story in the movie), with the studio boys eventually calling Nakamoto in saying they wanted him to write and direct a movie about a dancing gangster, which sounds pretty old Hollywood for a movie built around social media! Fujii, though he's got the look of a gangster, has been dancing since he was young, and said it was a bit of a challenge to dance crappy in earlier scenes. Nakamoto, meanwhile, answered a question about directing action versus dance by noting that sometimes the work of choreography is similar, but with action you are often doing pieces at a time, often with doubles, and camera work very much plotted alongside motion, while dance is often longer shots, no doubles, and the camera reacting to something more spontaneous.

After that there was an hour and a half or so until Unidentified Murder back at the Museum, time to do a little shopping and grab a slice of pizza. I think it might be the only new Hong Kong film at the festival - Blades of the Guardians probably belongs more to the mainland and there are three archive prints/restorations - which seems kind of crazy.

Next up, another couple big gaps on Sunday with Niko, the International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, You Are the Film, and Attack on Paradise. Tuesday looks to be Big Break, Levitating, Hayop Ka!, Someone's Daughter, and either Los Vampires or Solo, depending what the release plans for the former look like.

(And here's a look at how the sausage gets made if you're without a notebook or a pen but know you're not going to remember who is who the next day!)

"Echo"

☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: Anime no Bento, DCP)

One from the "cute fantastical representation" school of animated shorts, "Echo" has a pair of twin children traversing a strange landscape, having crashed there in unusual escape pods of sorts, eager to meet their mother, with one more daring and apparently boasting greater stamina than the other. The twist is that they are as yet unborn, and in the outside world, their mother is not doing well, having lost her husband not long after discovering she was pregnant.

It's a lovely movie to look at, with cute designs that walk up to the border of perhaps overly whimsical without quite crossing it. I'm kind of torn on how directly I'd like weekdays happening with the twins to represent what's going on with the mother - they feel very disconnected here, but link them closer and suddenly there are implications best not examined!


"Future Kid Takara Episode 1: The Child From the Future"

☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: Anime no Bento, DCP)

This is very clearly built for children, which is no bad thing, but it can be kind of hard to parse as an adult as a result. It's bright and earnest and full of entertaining designs and transformations, but is it too simplistic? Tough to judge, as an adult, especially without seeing more of the series. Little kids do need introductions to the idea of climate change, though, and they might as well be plain-spoken.

This one looks pretty cute, like it will combine fun adventure with good information, and I kind of love that the girl Takara meets in the past/our present looks like she might be an over-enthusiastic chaos source. The opening has a really nice vibe that feels a bit like it's trying be a bit of a spoof of the sort of thing parents thought was fun as a kid while also trying to be that thing for a new generation.


"20001 An Earth Odyssey"

☆ ☆ ☆ ¼ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: Anime no Bento, DCP)

I am here for the joke about "it must have been used for religious rituals" in any form, which is good, because it basically does three of them as a family of alien archeologists examine a playground on an earth where humans have died out. It's a very fine example of how, if a joke is solid enough and you can tweak the execution just enough, there's a lot to work with.

The style of it is admittedly a bit after my time; in American terms it looks like NickToons from the 1990s or so. I suspect that it hits a sweet spot for kids and adults younger than me, even if the main 2001 reference is kind of corny.


"Don't Dodge Life"

☆ ☆ ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: Anime no Bento, DCP)

This one's a visually interesting bit of animation, although it probably makes a bit more effort reaching for profundity than it can really manage. Making the abstract concept of life a character can't help but oversimplify something that the other protagonist and potentially the viewer is really struggling with, and filmmaker Taka Yuki seems to struggle with what to do with the idea to make this a story.


"Ambivalent Garden"

Seen 18 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: Anime no Bento, DCP)

Two days later, I don't recall anything about this one at all, despite the description and images on the site's pages being striking! Did I nap?


"Foxing: Kitsuné-tsuki"

☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: Anime no Bento, DCP)

Write-what-you-know shorts can be dangerous, because they often reveal just how much young artists are pouring into their art to the exclusion of everything else. That's a bit of a weight on "Foxing" for a while, as filmmaker Takeru Shinozuka's avatar Shinano mopes about her work as an animator and how she feels unworthy in a way that's both familiar and also kind of tough to swallow for animation-lovers. We've seen young artists work themselves into and out of funks before, especially with some well-placed encouragement.

Still, the execution is really nice, especially once we meet her kitsune doodle come to life, Koyami. The expected metaphor reveal doesn't have quite so much pressure on it because Shinano has already commented on how much she's like a kitsune in some ways, but I really like the way Koyami is both pure ego and merciless criticism; She's obviously going to be an aspect of Shinano when the mask comes off, but I really like how Shinozuka doesn't separate these traits out into dueling avatars, because not only are both necessary for creating art, but they are more intertwined than usually presented.


"Dust of the Simulacrum"

☆ ☆ ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: Anime no Bento, DCP)

Filmmaker Eit Mitsufuchi pitched "Dust of the Simulacrum" as, among other things, an argument for working in the 3D CGI medium when the animation industry in Japan is still very much focused on a traditional style, but kind of seems a little too meta about it at times? It's not ReBoot or anything, but it's a lost video game character trying to dodge "bugs" that are overrunning a blank landscape, and I don't know if it ever gets beyond being too on-the-nose.

Oddly enough, it's a case where the human characters look nice enough but the bugs look like they could use a little refinement (although, potentially, to look jankier rather than more realistic), and it's another one where what's going on doesn't quite carry the ambition the filmmakers are trying to project.


Odore! Yakuza (Break Free)

☆ ☆ ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2026 in Théátre Hall (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

Break Free opens with text about how Japan's crackdown on organized crime has more or less crippled the yakuza as a force in Japanese life, and if it goes further, one wonders what the effect will be on pop culture. There will be movies like this, chronicling the fall in ways both serious and comic, but will there eventually be nostalgia for it? As much as filmmaker Yu Nakamoto has a great deal of sympathy for his characters, that doesn't extend to bolstering the institution, which is probably a part of what makes it work.

In it, Kunio (Akito Fujii) is 38 and has been a yakuza for twenty years, but the business of organized crime is not great - he's working as a food delivery driver and longtime comrades are struggling as mascots and trying to catfish - beyond how everybody is filming everything these days and it's very easy to get caught doing violence in public. Insulted by a lack of respect by a civilian, he improvises a sort of dance thing where he doesn't quite hit the guy, and it racks up millions of views. The gang decides to monetize this - an odd scheme where Kunio will present himself online as an influencer who is just cosplaying as a gangster, though the intimidation going on in the background is real - but he'll need some better moves, which means taking classes with former background dancer Marie. She, of course, is very cute, and Kunio starts to wonder if he wants more than a life of crime, even as a less organized but more vicious gang makes a play for their territory.

There's a song and dance man inside every tough guy actor - they weren't doing film noir and kung fu in high school drama class - but I don't know that anyone since James Cagney has really had the chance to be both, no matter how much Hugh Jackman wants to. It's treated as a bit of a joke when they do, and both Break Free and the TikTok channel of star Akito Fujii which inspired the film are playing on the incongruity of a guy who looks like Fujii dancing, but the joke hits so well at its best. Fujii's muscles are not quite bulky but he's not exactly wiry, and even when Kunio cleans up, he kind of looks and sounds like a schlub, so it's genuinely entertaining to see him suddenly move with seeming abandon (though I'm not sure he ever becomes quite so competitive in the dance battles as the plot requires him to be), or have the film suddenly double back and remind you of the gangster life he's trying to hide.

Not that I'd dream of spoiling those moments, especially when the best are a couple layers of absurdity deep, but they bring forth an explosion of laughter, enough to get past how a lot of the movie around them isn't quite so brilliant, coasting a lot on how good the high concept is rather than how any of the details fit together. At their best, though, the filmmakers are great at sending up how goofy something is and then doing a quick pivot to this other very silly thing, catching someone who is just making fun of the one element off guard as the thing they like better isn't spared.

And, underneath it all, this all works because it feels true that the violence of the yakuza is a dead end, even without the steps that the government is taking so that gangsters can't participate in legitimate society. The organization is dying and success requires one to either be completely monstrous (true or not, the yakuza often tried to present themselves as a useful part of society) or otherwise make oneself miserable. Being the kind of gangster Kunio and his friends see themselves as is not manly in the way it once was. Dance isn't either, but there's joy in it if not money or glory, and that's got more value than posturing like a gangster.

The movie fizzles a bit at times, Nakamoto may show violence as ultimately ineffective and obsolete, but he can't quite create the triumphant dance moment that the film needs at or near its climax. It's great fun to watch Fujii play against apparent type, though, enough for the best moments to carry the rest.


Unidentified Murder

☆ ☆ ☆ ¼ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: Anime no Bento, DCP)

There's a fun bit at the end of Unidentified Murder where a newscaster is trying to recap what has come before and seems to feel that relating this idiocy is below her dignity, and she's kind of right, but the trick of the film is that, for all we the audience knows what was going on is screwy, it's not quite something that can be dismissed until the movie has finished walking right up to the line.

25 years ago, three kids went out to play and only two came back, saying their friend had been abducted by a UFO. 25 years ago Mark (Ling Man-Lung) and Kit (Ronald Lam) are going on some internet UFO programs to talk about how their friend Ho vanished, laughing dismissively at a host (Kenny Wong) bringing up how it was rumored they killed him. Mark's girlfriend Lau Man (Renci Yeung), who does YouTube pranks on Mark regularly, decides to hire an actor, Kim Chi-Fei, (Peter Chan) to pretend to be Ho and meet them at the site of the disappearance on the 25th anniversary, but, uh, why did Mark and Kit bring shovels - were they going to dig something up?

Suffice it to say, the film has a few more chances to bounce back in time to show what was really going on, adding more layers to its deceptions as it goes. The key, though, is that while Kim is in the middle of all this an explicitly hired to fake something, he is absolutely the most open and earnest character in the group, trying to come up with motivations for his character with three lines as he invested himself completely into something that Man has apparently put about seven seconds of thought into. He's a simple character but never really dumb; Peter Chan does an exceptional job of giving this oddball the right human frustrations.

The whole cast is like that, and it's impressive how, even as the film gleefully reveals how the audience doesn't have the whole story and things aren't as they seem, nobody in the cast has to completely switch things up and say that you were lied to. These folks are, by and large, pretty simple young folks and content creators who haven't grown into something more substantial, but even Renci Yeung's shallow YouTuber makes sense as a person and garners affection beyond not deserving to be murdered.

By the time it's finished, the screenplay has piled a lot of "here's something I didn't tell you before but which changes everything!" on, with some chips investigating the scene besides, but it remains clear and surprisingly linear, dishing out the new information at just the right time to not have to do a lot of sleight-of-hand to keep things out of the audience's sight. The chases and reveals go quick enough to keep things moving without there ever being much risk of missing anything, whether joke or information.

Filmmakers Kwok Ka-Hei and Jack Lee Chun-Kit have a good handle on how to thrive at this scale; the film sort of feels knowingly small, with roughly three or four locations, and doesn't try to trick the audience into it feeling bigger. The movie seems to speak the language of both classic farce and modern media-savvy internet video well, and gets good laughs from each of its about faces.

Fantasia 2026.02: Trauma or, Monsters All; "Yucky Guy"; Dance Freak; "Cardigan"; Mum, I'm Alien Pregnant; and Blaise

I started the day by misreading the time for Trauma or, Monsters All as 1:45pm rather than 1:15pm, which means when I got there at 1:30pm, the film was just starting because it had a nice long intro. I occasionally complain about that sort of thing causing films to bump into each other, but in this case it worked out for me, so I'll try not to whine later!

It did mean there wasn't a whole lot of time for the post-film Q&A with DP Sharif El Neklawy, producers Tilson Allen-Merry & Gaby Leyner, actress Aitana Doyle, and writer/director/editor/producer/co-star Larry Fessenden. One thing that sort of made my eyebrows go up but wasn't followed up on was that he called it "a late film and maybe a last film", which is a bit surprising - though a lot of folks are thinking about retiring at his age, artists generally have another decade or two in them - but as a producer, I suspect he knows the reality of his viability as a director. Horror's often a young person's game, and one of the things he did was thank Doyle and the other younger cast members for pointing out when he was behind the times, which she laughed at in a "yeah, we had to do that" way (as opposed to "Larry's just being silly and self-deprecating").

It was also apparently an unusually tricky shoot, even though he lives in the town where he shot it - not only did he have to find two houses right next to each other that had the right properties, but co-star Alex Breaux was doing Stranger Things on Broadway, which means he was only available to shoot on Mondays. It also meant getting the cast of Depraved and Blackout together, and while I suspect it's not as hard as it might be if you're based in New York and have a lot of friends like Fessenden, but with that schedule it's probably some work. That's also where he mentioned that James Le Gros doesn't really like horror, but they go back.

Next up: Justine Smith with Dance Freak director/DP Alan Resnick and director/writer/actor Robby Rackleff, and I must admit, though I like Justine a lot, when she's hosting a screening, it's probably the Underground section she programs, and that's kind of an empty-slot choice for me most of the time. I've enjoyed some, but that's getting lucky.

Anyway, I didn't really like their movie, and I sort of enjoyed their Q&A mostly as a comedy act where Resnick was the pro trying to make his friend look good. Sometimes you just aren't quite sure whether folks making a movie like this and taking it to festivals did it as a lark and are enjoying the ride even if they're kind of out of their depth, sort of contemptuous in an "I can't believe you paid money for this thing we crapped out" way, or doing a bit. It's usually the first, but, man, can this sort of thing not be my sort of thing.

Next up, crossing the street and having writer/actor Hans Obma of "CARDIGAN!" ask how many of us have ever heard Welsh, and, you know, I don't know if I've ever seen a short or a feature in Welsh before. His was fun!

It played before Mum, I'm Alien Pregnant, with "THUNDERLIPS" - Jordan Windsor (holding the alien baby) & Sean Wallace, because I guess music video guys have to also be named like a band - talking about how, yeah, it is kind of odd that a couple of dudes were making a movie about pregnancy and childbirth. Windsor pointed out that, once you have a kid (even as a father), you find out that every woman has some sort of horrific pregnancy story, and they made sure that they got a lot of outside input while making their film, and they requested to get more questions from folks who weren't dudes when the first few were guys. Aside from that, they mentioned that it took a circuitous path to production - they wrote a feature script, got told that it would sell easier with a short, so they pulled ten pages out, made a short, brought that to a Melbourne film market, and then got to make the feature. Hannah Lynch stars in both, and they said they cast her in large part because her personality is fairly close to Mary.

After that, I had some time to kill before heading up to the Museum for Blaise, amused to overhear in line that Nicolas Winding Refn had been at the Ultraman documentary because he's a major fan.

Next up, an oddly late start on Saturday with some gaps as it's mostly events before the "Anime no Bento" package, then Break Free and Unidentified Murder; Sunday looks like Niko, the International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, You Are the Film, and Attack on Paradise, with Blades of the Guardians, Pontypool, and Redline all recommended. Just a coupleof those weird days where you've got to stay in one screen to maximize movies but I'm apparently building in meal breaks.


Trauma or, Monsters All

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2026 in Cinema J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
One gets the feeling that Larry Fessenden had the idea for doing a crossover when he realized that Blackout would mean he'd directed vampire, Frankenstein, and werewolf pictures, but didn't necessarily have a great story when he started doing the work of a producer to bring people back, and one didn't come together when the schedules lined up. That probably makes the whole thing a little more meta than intended, with everyone sort of aware that they're in a monster mashup even if they're not quite winking at the camera.

He returns us to Talbot Falls, where historian Cassandra (Laëtitia Hollard) has moved looking for some quiet as she begins a book on George Washington Carver, taking a job in the library and making friends with Agnes (Aitana Doyle). Having read about the werewolf incident that took place a couple years ago, she begins to suspect that her next-door neighbor who locks himself in the basement during the full moon is actually Charley (Alex Hurt), whom everyone presumes is dead. Reading up a little more suggests that his housemate Adam (Alex Breaux) is the Frankenstein's monster that was said to beset a neighboring town a couple years earlier (in Depraved). Wanting to write about something in the present rather than from a hundred years ago, she pitches an editorial to the local paper about how the trauma of those events is like monsters in their midst, though Charley's girlfriend Sharon (Addison Timlin) is looking to get into contact with him. Not only does that raise the hackles of a lot of people who don't like an outsider coming in and trying to analyze them, but things like that get online these days, which attracts the attention of a biotech investor (Joshua Leonard) who has been looking for Adam, but also Sam (Larry Fessenden), who became a vampire 30 years earlier and is intrigued at the idea of other monsters relatively nearby.

If Sam's presence sounds kind of odd, it is; when Fessenden mentioned that this might be his next project after Blackout played the festival three years ago, it sounded like he intended to have Meredith Snaider from Habit return as Anna, but he apparently could not track her down or interest her in participating. I'm not sure she would have been a better fit, although the tone might have been different, since the exposition and "let me expound upon some themes" moments carry a different weight coming from the very recognizable writer/director of the film playing an earthier character than Snaider's Anna. Even taking that into account, there are an awful lot of people status-dumping more than conversing or acting, after doing things that the film needs even if they don't arise naturally, jawing about where things stand in the aftermath of Blackout, with Cassandra also spending a lot of time worrying about the book she's writing in a way that doesn't always feel like it connects to the rest of the story (and boy howdy, do people comment on how she's telling uncomfortable truths while being named "Cassandra" a few times). It's a scenario in search of a plot. Fessenden is kind of onto something in terms of poking around the idea of trauma and recovery, likening the end of a horror movie to a mass shooting/casualty event that scars a place and attracts outsiders trying to use it for their often good-natured but insensitive ends, but mostly winds up restating it rather than developing it.

He's put together a nice cast, though, especially in terms of the newcomers - young leads Laëtitia Hollard and Aitana Doyle are really charming, and although it can sometimes feel a little frustrating, there's something very real and earnest about the way Hollard's Cassandra naively stumbles and repeatedly uses "I'm just connecting what's already out there" as a shield. A hangout movie with Hollard and Doyle as these characters would be quite enjoyable, and that really helps when wheels are mostly turning in the background. The returning folks do a fair job of sketching out who they are in a little time, possibly enough that the exposition and flashbacks could have been cut back a bit. Alex Breaux is a standout as Adam, playing kind of simple and brain-damaged without doing Karloff or struggling to get words out to hammer that home.

There's a fair amount to keep track of happening kind of randomly, even if there's not a whole lot of actual horror movie action and gore for most of the film, with what there is feeling a bit obligatory even if it's well-executed. Even the climax seems like something a movie has to do rather than entirely where threads were heading, although Fessenden earns the emotions his finale is aiming to stir when they finally hit.

Would a little more time ruminating on the script have made Trauma a more fitting climax to 30 years of Fessenden putting his spin on classic monsters, or was the idea always more enticing than what could be pulled together from the previous three movies?


"Yucky Guy"
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2026 in Cinema J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Underground, laser DCP)

What can I say, this is a sort of absurdity that doesn't really connect with me at all; I keep waiting for it go somewhere but it's really "'people sleeping through chaos in their grand but featureless mansion', 'dogs wearing diapers', and "tresspasser pees to mark territory' are funny" and not a whole lot else. I mean, sure, they are funny, but once the concept has presented itself, I just want a bit more than this movie does.

It's also 13 minutes long, and it kind of makes me think about how a lot of people don't necessarily need something to be funny to laugh, but it's sort of their default way of breaking tension, and a lot of this sort of comedy seems to confuse effect with cause.


Dance Freak

* * (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2026 in Cinema J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Underground, laser DCP)

A thing about a lot of "Underground" movies is that they're not just acquired tastes that may not match one's sense of humor or kink, but they are often actively unpleasant to watch under a lot of circumstances, such as sitting close to the front of the auditorium for Dance Freak. It's a grainy black-and-white film with frequent strobing made by viral-video specialists and probably meant to be viewed on a tablet or maybe a television, a contained rectangle rather than the entirety of what one can see. It's harsh to look at and the filmmakers don't really give an audience a lot of reasons to do that.

It introduces us to Obie (Robby Rackleff), a sort of sad sack whose girlfriend Dorty (Megan Koester) is running for office and starting to explicitly leave him behind rather than just by implication, and who is apparently mainly employed because everyone else at the office has forgotten how to access systems. He's trying to take up birdhouse building as a hobby, but it's not going that well. That's about the time when the Dance Freak starts showing up, somehow hypnotizing folks and deflating them while they are in their trance. A scientist at the lab where it was created, Dr. Dilly Gorgul (Sheila Mears) tells Obie it "looks just like you but is a separate entity" and then runs for the wasteland, mostly leaving Obie and Dorty to handle the situation.

Filmmakers Robby Rackleff & Alan Resnick give Obie the sort of surreal micro-budget film world where things are sort of empty and eccentric where we can see it though there are hints that it gets truly bizarre just out of sight, and that's good for a few good gags at worst and a fairly constant stream of chuckles if your mileage varies in that direction. The trick is often finding something that sounds not quite right in a particular way, such as names like "Obie" and "Dorty" and "Gorgul", and saying them with a straight face. It's easy to milk jokes like that too far; a street gang called "the Salad Boys" earns a chuckle when the name is tossed out but fizzles quickly when they try to play the gag much longer. A lot of the movie is deadpan where the silence after a joke without a punchline is held too long or they keep going, sure there's a bit that will convince someone that this is funny.

If the jokes in this sort of movie don't land, it can still work if there's something interesting to grab onto, but that's seldom the case here. Obie and Dorty are not particularly personable either individually or as a pair, and the idea of the Dance Freak doesn't quite coalesce, either as an awkward expression of Obie trying to feel joy or him draining/feeling drained by the world. It's like a whole movie based on the snidest reading of Peter Parker dancing like a dork in Spider-Man 3, and by the end, the storytelling is muddled - it's Obie's story, but he's out of action, and the chemistry between Obie and Dorty isn't enough to let her work as the lead later on.

There are a couple of bright spots - Sheila Mears actually gets to make Gorgul a character, giving a bit of a "knows what danger looks like" edge to her ivory-tower dorkiness - but I seldom found it funny enough to be worth looking at.


"Cardigan"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2026 in Théátre Hall (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

I don't want to belabor how much I enjoyed "Cardigan"; it's a five-minute short that doesn't quite have one joke but leans on its main gag enough that parsing it in a review can deflate it. But, as such things go, it's executed very well: Writer Hans Obma and Lois Meleri Jones hit the right notes as a couple that the audience can identify with when faced with something unfair but also just privileged enough that we feel like they may have something coming; Iwan John and Bethany Williams-Potter are an enjoyable odd couple as the police officers the run afoul of. The main joke of just how much this town identifies with its namesake clothing is goofily absurd and pivots to something that delivers a wry grin at the end.

It's a five-minute comedy sketch, but it's a good one.


Mum, I'm Alien Pregnant

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2026 in Théátre Hall (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

Where the short that preceded Mum, I'm Alien Pregnant is adroit with its gag, the feature uses a sledgehammer, but it's got a target that can use a good sledging and seemingly never forgets something that a lot of absurd comedies forget, including one I saw earlier in the day: Make everything as weird as you want, because people and situations are weird, but do it by pushing something very familiar to an extreme that one can still recognize.

So we meet Mary (Hannah Lynch), nearly 30 and still living with her mother Cynthia (Yvette Parsons), who simultaneously harangues her for being a layabout but also doesn't give her any space whatsoever. Mary's got an odd kink in that she really enjoys tentacle hentai, which brings us to the neighbors, whom we meet as Ann (Jackie van Beek) tries to get her son Boo (Arlo Green) to do something other than masturbate in his room, seeing as that causes the power to flicker. When Mary and Boo bump into each other in the laundry room, she discovers that Boo was conceived when his mother was abducted by aliens, and he has the glorious tentacled genitalia of her dreams. They only agree to masterbate, but, well, his jizz is powerful, spraying across the room and dissolving her pants - and, apparently, alien fetuses grow faster than Mary can convince people she wants no part of being a mother.

Writer Jordan Mark Windsor and his co-director Sean Wallace don't mess around, letting the audience see what Boo's got between his legs in the first ten or fifteen minutes rather than playing coy, and it's kind of a brave decision, because it's going to be a while before they can really escalate from that sort of prosthetic weirdness. They don't retreat from it - among all the other fluids, Mary's morning sickness is a colorful, gooey mess - but it's not quite the movie where they're going to try to top the last crazy thing you saw every ten minutes, although when the climax comes, it's great, just as weirdly practical and weirdly organic as one might hope after setting the bar high at the beginning.

Part of the point may be to get a big early laugh that hooks the audience - this movie is weird and gross enough that its theatrical run might be limited, so you've got to give the folks streaming it something to whet their appetites at the start - but I suspect that part of it is how frankness is the engine driving the movie, and spending the next hour and a half letting the audience see all the ways pregnancy can wreak havoc on a woman's turned up to 11 isn't really compatible with getting cute about just what put Mary in this position. Windsor & Wallace are careful never to be scolding; Mary wears her kink on her sweatshirt even if she doesn't want her mother, Boo, or anything else all up in her business, and folks being matter-of-fact about things is seldom played as foolish. There's not really a villain here - all these people are trying to do their best by Mary and Boo even as they're confused and trying to act normal in the face of it, despite the situation being pretty darn abnormal.

The cast sells that great, especially Hannah Lynch, whose Mary is annoyed and sarcastic and winds up snapping at a lot of people but seldom comes off as mean; she's probably funny if weird under better circumstances. She bounces off Yvette Parsons's Cynthia well, the latter always seeming to take up extra space with a working class accent that you can see as a constant embarrassment to Mary. Cynthia herself is a contrast to Ann, all reserve and fear that puts a quiver in her voice when she tries to protect authority. Arlo Green gives a really nifty performance, exaggeratedly reserved and tentative at the start, but in a way audiences will quickly buy into, but doing a nice job of coming out of his shell as having an actual friend and a sense of responsibility displace shame.

The secret sauce might be the small army of folks playing doctors, nurses, pharmacists and the like who all deliver the right blend of disbelief, surprise, curiosity, and ultimately professionalism in the face of this bizarre pregnancy. As much fun as the gnarly practical effects are, a lot of what makes the movie work minute to minute is the mix of how health care can be an impossible bureaucracy to navigate despite being filled with individuals who mostly want to make things better on the one hand and how this crisis clarifies who these four people are, especially to themselves.

And it's impressively gross.


Blaise

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia Animation Plus, DCP)
Buy the original book en français at Amazon

Blaise is kind of a weird-looking movie, not quite the CGI equivalent of animating mouth movement onto photographs, but residing in a very particular spot in the uncanny valley where a still looks like it might be live action but looks more and more unreal and off-putting as you stare or watch it in motion, and that's the movie in a nutshell: Seemingly-relatable cringe comedy that gets very weird, very quickly, but still has the chops to get some big laughs.

Blaise Sauvage (voice of Timéo) is 16 and friendless at high school because he's more than a bit weird, but comes by it honestly - father Jacques (voice of Jacques Gamblin) is a ball of neurosis and mother Carole (voice of Léa Drucker) has a real knack for saying the wrong thing and being absolutely unable to explain her error and recover. They try to get him to reconnect with the daughter of Carole's friend Marisa, which leads to him getting dragged along to a party and protest where he meets Joséphine (voice of Nina Blanc-Francard), who crushes on him immediately but both make things needlessly complicated by pretending to be something they're not.

The film is co-written and co-directed by Dimitri Planchon, who created the original bandes dessinée, and it feels very much like a certain style of comics: It's made of a lot of little vignettes, as likely to end with a sort of unnerving ambiguity as a punchline, which helps the movie bounce around a bit, rather than get mired in the boringly serious moments that connect one funny bit to the next, very helpful for this sort of dry, French comedy where what's functional could dilute what's deadpan or transgressive without the viewer quite realizing why it's not as funny throughout as it could be.

That deadpan style puts a fair amount of responsibility on the voice cast, since the animation isn't going to help out with wild takes very often, so there's got to be a fair amount of nuance. Jacques Gamblin is maybe the standout, giving Jacques a sort of soft-spoken nervousness that adds to the slightly shaggy image on the screen, while Léa Drucker makes sure Carole seems (over) confident at home and then brings a hint of panic to her voice that doesn't quite contradict the professional mien at work. Timéo's performance as Blaise is kind of flatter, an introverted teenage drone, while Nina Blanc-Francard does a good poor little rich girl, sympathetic even as she's often kind of awful.

That all makes the film sound kind of small, offering a chuckle or two at most, but Planchon, co-writer Clémence Lebatteux, and co-director Jean-Paul Guigue both make sure that the film has outstanding timing and a satirical punch, often positioning the Sauvage's petty concerns against angry protesters in a way that makes the family look petty and thus more absurd even as a lot of the radicals are plenty ridiculous in their own way. There's not a misconception that they can't escalate into a disaster, with the path out of it both clear to see and impossible to take, and when all else fails, there's Chekhov's hand grenade threatening to take what is an irritation and make it literally explode.

It's a very, very funny movie, bouncing expertly between the squirms of recognition and belly-laughs of disbelief, and only enhanced by how it so often looks almost normal.

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.

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.

Film Rolls Season 2, Round 09: Shipwrecked and Dream Lovers

A couple days later, a couple more movies.

Dale rolls an 8, moving down to the next row and silent movie territory with Shipwrecked, another crowdfunded disc featuring a woman on the run from the murder of an abusive man. Honestly, kind of impressed how okay the silent era was with this.

Centipede, meanwhile, rolls a 13 and jumps from the silent era to 1980s Hong Kong and the pairing of Chow Yun-fat and Brigitte Lin in Dream Lovers. Looking at my camera roll, it looks like I came home to do that right after treating myself to some swordfish schnitzel before starting the pre-colonoscopy fast!



So, uh, that was fun. How about the movies?

Shipwrecked '26

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 December 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, crowdfunded Blu-ray)

Shipwrecked is an amiable little silent with a very pleasant cast that sort of stumbles a bit when the plot has to matter more than just watching them bounce off each other. That's hardly fatal at its 74-minute length, though even at that scale, one kind of feels like the movie could have done a little bit more.

It starts with ship's cook Larry O'Neil (Joseph Schildkraut) seeming none too excited to set sail again with Captain Klodel (Matthew Betz) and his ragtag crew, but, hey, it's a living. Meanwhile, Lois Austin (Seena Owen) fought back against a prominent man who tried to rape her and attempts to throw herself into the sea, but Larry pulls her out. Larry eventually finds her hiding among his stores after the ship sails, but can't keep her hidden; the captain installs her in the first mate's cabin (and Larry in the brig), expecting sexual favors as he plans to turn her in. A storm leads the crew to abandon ship and Lois to rescue Larry, eventually making landfall on a small island more or less run by a British trader (Lionel Belmore). They carve out a decent life there, but Klodel is returning, blackmail on his mind.

The name of the movie is "Shipwrecked", but the good stuff happens on the ship and before. Well, for certain values of "good", considering that we're talking about Klodel being a gross letch who puts Lois and Larry in very uncomfortable positions after we've had the fun of Larry sneaking around to make sure Lois gets fed without alerting the crew to how their supplies are dwindling a little faster than they should be. They've got nice chemistry, with Larry pushing the boundary of being just a little too eager to be a white knight and Lois being a bit more of a survivor than she initially thought. The storm's a nicely done action scene, too, recalling Buster Keaton's The Navigator even if it's not quite so elaborate.

Ideally, this would either be most of the movie or an exciting first act that sets up the bulk of the film on the island, but that's never quite set up to be truly exciting. There's Laska Winter as island girl Zanda (she seemed to play a lot of "exotic" beauties in her brief career), who is smitten with the handsome newcomer, men with an interest in Lois, and the question of whether Klodel will be able to force the genteel trader to surrender Lois before news reaches them that she's not as wanted for murder as they think, but not much comes of it. Lois and Larry are seemingly not a couple at this point for vague, unsatisfying reasons, but there never seems to be any real threat of them ending up otherwise.

The way they get there, on the other hand, isn't ideal; the last half of the movie hasn't necessarily been leading to much, but Larry jumping from assertive to aggressive doesn't quite seem like the right call, at least from a hundred years later. All the ingredients for a more active finale or there, but the second half just doesn't lead to them.

Mung chung yan (Dream Lovers)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 December 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)
Where to stream it

I wonder just how much trend-chasing was going on when Dream Lovers was made; the filmmakers don't really hide the attempt to draft on how popular the Terra Cotta Soldier exhibit in Hong Kong was at the time even as they don't seem to have much ability to actually include it. In some ways, the way Hong Kong filmmakers turned so many movies around quickly from all sorts of inspiration is what made it so exciting, in that someone with a shotgun is bound to hit something, but it turns out to be more fun in a goofy action movie than this sort of romantic fantasy, despite the star power brought to bear.

Though conductor Song Yu (Chow Yun-fat) has roots in Hong Kong, he has spent much of his career working internationally, but makes sure to visit the exhibition when his latest stop brings him to the Crown Colony. His girlfriend and manager Wah Lei (Cher Yeung Suet-Yee) notes that he bears a striking resemblance to one of the soldiers, which triggers strange, erotic dreams involving a distant age and a beautiful concubine. Jeweler Cheung Yuet-Heung (Brigitte Lin Ching-Hsia) has many of the same dreams, from the other perspective, and when their paths cross, they feel a powerful attraction, the sort where even Lei's blind spiritualist grandmother (Wong Man-Lei) warns her that she should probably not just prepare for their relationship to end, but encourage it; this sort of love across incarnations is undeniable.

Dream Lovers often feels like an attempt to build an entire romantic film out of chemistry, and when it reaches its finale, they've almost pulled it off: The final embrace between Chow Yun-fat and Brigitte Lin in the rain is beautiful and sad, the culmination of a ton of scenes where director Tony Au Ting-Ping dials in on the pair's powerful charisma, and the screenplay by Manfred Wong Man-Chun and Chiu Kang-Chien builds up the attendant mythology without making it a puzzle that must be solved to accomplish some sort of task. Cher Yeung leans into the utter thanklessness of her role; Lei is a good person who has put real effort into this relationship and knows she deserves better than being cast aside just because this Yuet-Heung chick has done little more than exist, and Yeung makes this jealousy both righteous and corrosive.

The trouble is, there's not much of a story grappling with what it means. The idea that having a fated lover suddenly appear and turn you on might actually be less romantic than horrifyingly disruptive is buzzed about, but treated as a problem for Lei rather than the reincarnated lovers, who don't really do anything or fret about how these versions of themselves from thousands of years ago are overriding their present selves. There's flashbacks, both to the Qin Dynasty and to the night they were born, and Chow & Lin have the necessary spark, but the eeriness of the start dissipates quickly and there's not a lot to replace it aside from sheer attraction and lust. What makes Yu and Yuet great together besides having this prehistory? I'm open to the idea that, for a culture with a stronger belief in reincarnation than mine, you don't necessarily need more, that a lot of this is assumed and one can see the pairs' reactions in their personalities from the start and the fantasy itself is much more basic and relatable, but, I don't know, it feels like it still needs more.

As an aside: One of the things I do when my mind wanders during a movie is prime factor numbers that get mentioned, and the oft-repeated '2197 years" is 13*13*13. Does that mean something? Is this some powerful Chinese numerology? Not to dismiss numerology - after all, it's kind of fascinating serendipity that my rolling dice paired these two movies, made on opposite sides of the planet and separated by sixty years, but both featuring an intriguing setup and fine casting allowed to fizzle by a back half that knocks around, kind of coasting to an expected ending.


All told, I liked Shipwrecked a little more than Dream Lovers, and when they're expressed in star ratings, it results in the pair pulling even!

Dale Evans: 39¾ stars
Centipede: 39¾ stars

Tight as can be, with more serendipity to come!

Film Rolls Season 2, Round 06: Harry Palmer and Shin Dong-hun

It's gonna be a long one today, because I spent the next month after round 5 getting through a couple of box sets!

Dale rolls a three, making the relatively short hop to Imprint's very slick-looking Harry Palmer box set! I don't necessarily need or even want fancy box sets much these days - horizontal inches of shelf are at a premium! - but this is a pretty nice package, which generally seems to be the case with Imprint, although I haven't gotten very many more of the fancy releases. Tariffs & shipping make it rough, currently.

To start December, Centipede rolled a 17, which jumps then a good way into the first Korean box, which is all material from the Korean Film Archive. I purchased a bunch of those when Kimchi DVD had a sale and I figured, what the heck, these things may never be cheaper (or even available again), and shipping costs less per disc when you order a bunch, and I've got the tendency of thinking of Korean cinema a starting roughly when Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance arrived stateside, so why not give myself the chance to learn more. The first one landed on was a pair of animated films from 1967 by Shin Dong-hun.

So, that's five movies (and a bunch of special features) that kept me busy for the better part of a month. How'd it go?

The Ipcress File

* * * (out of four)
Seen 10 November 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Imprint Blu-ray)
Where to stream it, or buy the American disc at Amazon

The Imprint disc includes the trailer, and it's kind of telling that, even more than highlighting how this is based on a very popular novel and some of the people who worked on the James Bond movies, it promotes Michael Caine as an exciting young face to watch. Obviously, they got that call right: I don't know that the pointedly non-Bond-like spy story is actually that great, but everything that would make Caine a star in the 1960s and 1970s is here from the start, just the right ingredient to make a movie that flirts with dryness kind of exciting.

Caine plays Harry Palmer (nameless in the original Len Deighton novels), a former soldier that got a little bit too entrepreneurial with the supplies and was given the choice of working for MI-5 or prison. He's bored out of his mind doing surveillance for Colonel H.L. Ross (Guy Doleman), who seconds the insubordinate agent to Major Dalby (Nigel Green), a stuffy middle-manager investigating the abduction of British scientists who, when ransomed, are seemingly unable to continue their work.

Palmer was given a name for the movies, presumably because dialog that avoids mentioning it would have called attention to the filmmakers trying to avoid naming him more than it would have allowed him to be an anonymous functionary in the way that a novel told in the first person would (the special features tell what feel like oft-repeated stories about Caine and the producers trying to come up with the most unobtrusive name possible). Which is not to say Palmer is a cipher - he is a man of intelligence and taste, but with a scrappy, working-class edge to him, a guy you can easily imagine doing the crimes alluded to but also honest enough in his way, observant and willing to take the straightest line between points A and B even when it's not the done thing. He is in this way the template for every character Caine would play over at least the next twenty years, at least until he became a familiar and reassuring presence, and he's got it down to a science from the start. He's well-paired with everybody else in the film - Guy Doleman as the boss who knows you've got to embrace all of Palmer to get his best work, Nigel Green as the aristocratic officer who is increasingly irrelevant in post-war Britain, Sue Lloyd as the office girl who knows exactly what Palmer is up to, Gordon Jackson as a veteran who has just the class and experience to be amusedly aloof, etc. - and it never becomes a story about Palmer, or the sort of 1960s Brit he embodies, but who he is feels essential to the story and Michael Caine feels essential to that.

It's wrapped around a story about brainwashing, which is central to a few high-profile Cold War thrillers (The Manchurian Candidate being the most obvious), and looking at it from 60 years later, it's kind of odd that it was not a big part of more. It was, after all, presented as an existential ideological conflict, and the fear that one could have one's brain broken to embrace communism despite it being obviously inferior (and, indeed, necessitating some sort of traumatic attack) was embedded deep enough to still persist today, despite somewhat different targets. There's maybe a metaphor to that sort of collectivism smothering individual genius or making one a mindless pawn, even with the idea that Palmer's rebellious streak is what might serve as a bulwark against it.

Or not; the film is rather too matter-of-fact to lean into that sort of thing. It makes for an entertaining watch, though, as Palmer does something more like actual police work than one sees in crime or espionage films, finding the short cuts through his networks that would give him information the likes of Dalby wouldn't even consider important. It climaxes on a grueling attack on his mind as he tries to resist brainwashing, an impressively surreal moment that nevertheless emphasizes the crudity of the process, like Palmer isn't important enough for bespoke mind-control.

All in a day's work, of course, although Palmer and the film have no illusions about the nobility of such work.


Funeral In Berlin

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 25 November 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Imprint Blu-ray)
Where to stream it (Prime link), or buy the American disc at Amazon

Following The Ipcress File about a year and a half later, Funeral in Berlin is probably the best of the Harry Palmer films, especially for those who come to them looking for a sort of anti-James Bond. It's the purest game of spy-versus-spy (versus spy?) of the bunch, with a story that demands attention and a reminder of just how present some elements we take for granted were at the time.

It has Palmer (Michael Caine) dispatched to Berlin, where he had been stationed at the time of his arrest, to facilitate the defection of Col Stok (Oscar Homolka), a KGB official about to be transferred from Berlin to somewhere far less prestigious and feeling disrespected, a huge get if for real, and one who demands his extraction be handled by Kreutzman (Günter Meisner), who has proven the most capable and audacious at smuggling people across the border. Palmer will be working with Johnny Vulkan (Paul Hubschmid), a co-conspirator in the larceny that got Harry blackmailed into the secret service (although Harry kept his mouth shut). He immediately finds he has the attention of model Samantha Steel (Eva Renzi), and while Harry isn't necessarily one to feel she's too beautiful for the likes of him, he's not a big believer in coincidence, either.

More so that the other films, Funeral is concerned with the mechanics of spycraft, how one goes about arranging something which must be audacious and almost undetectable, linking the skills of both street criminals and officials at anonymous desks doing boring file-pulling. The filmmakers put together a lean, streamlined tale with very few unnecessary parts, even though some may look like needless procedural detail. The main set-pieces of extractions are thrilling and full of a sort of whimsy amid the serious business, and as before, the ensemble around Caine is well-chosen: Everybody easily embodies what they appear to be, enough to keep everything moving forward in parallel with the audience not necessarily questioning more than they are meant to, and easily maintain that sense even their hidden agendas are revealed. The key to being a good spy, apparently, is presenting as much truth as one can so as not to slip up, and a good thriller reveals the parts of the lie that matter without making one feel a fool for missing it.

Which, inevitably, leads to something devastating for the seemingly aloof Palmer: On the one hand, he finds himself still quite capable of rage even beyond the manipulation by friends and foe that he has come to accept as par for the course. For as cynical as he is, he's not actually close to amoral, and while it's been fun to see him puzzle his way through things and adapt when he can't, there are points at the film where he's got to deal with anally not being who he had hoped and the fact that an enemy rather likes him despite it all. It's not a big breakdown scene, but one does get enough of a sense of Harry that it's not exactly surprising that he's done all he could to leave this life behind by the start of the next movie.


Billion Dollar Brain

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 November 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Imprint Blu-ray)
Where to stream it, or buy the all-region Australian box set at Amazon

It's easy to get kind of excited but also somewhat wary when getting ready to watch Billion Dollar Brain: This is the most overtly spy-fi premise of the three Harry Palmer stories, often treated as more grounded than the rest of the genre, but it's also got Ken Russell in the director's chair, and maybe a screwy story will allow for a preview of Russell's later, stranger work. Or maybe it will just be a mess.

As it starts, Palmer (Michael Caine) is working as a low-rent private eye, finishing another tawdry divorce case only to find prior employer Colonel Ross (Guy Doleman) waiting for him, looking to bring him back into the fold. Palmer refuses, but also takes a call from a recorded voice that wants to hire him to deliver a sealed package to Helsinki, where he's to meet American comrade Leo Newbigen (Karl Malden), though it's his paramour Anya (Françoise Dorléac) who is at the airport when he arrives. These two threads are, of course, the same case, with Palmer realizing he's smuggling eggs filled with a dangerous virus, and that Newbigen is working for - and plans to recruit Harry into - an anti-communist organization led by a former General Midwinter (Ed Begley Sr.) whose activities are plotted by a fancy computer. Harry is dispatched to Latvia to facilitate a revolution before arriving at Midwinter's Texas compound.

If it were a better movie, Billion Dollar Brain would be ripe for rediscovery. It's not just that it's ahead of time on seeing the dangers of artificial intelligence and "patriotic" American organizations whose symbols are too Nazi-adjacent for it to be a coincidence, but either Len Deighton's novel or John McGrath's screenplay has also zeroed in on the very specific point that these things are actually not that bright, easily manipulated and played by grifters who, sure, maybe agree with some of the goals but mostly want to drain the big rich moron terrified of paying taxes as much as possible. The film is at its most memorable when Begley is full of bluster in his weird compound or addressing his large but deeply silly militia. It's an insight that many are still just coming around to 60 years later, and for all that Russell and company have great fun with the insanity of it, they're still to be taken seriously as threats, if only for the chaos they create if not for their ability to achieve their goals.

Unfortunately, there wind up being a few too many threads going on here for the whole thing to form a good pattern. The deadly bioweapon, the astroturfed Latvian rebels, and Newbigen's scheming all wind up at cross-purposes to each other, there's not really a great spot for Anya inside all of this, and as much fun as it is to see Oscar Homolka's Colonel Stok again, he feels more like fanservice than a clever insert. There's something that seems like it has real potential at the core - is Harry more disgusted with the way everyone in the spy business uses each other to join up with Newbigen to leach off Midwinter or horrified at how these cavalier monsters could get a lot of well-intentioned Latvians killed? - and the idea that trying to fight something as incoherent but well-funded as this organization is actually really difficult could fold in there, but it never all comes together, rather than just being a bunch of things happening.

Indeed, it's mostly good at the extremes, whether that be Michael Caine continuing to charm and seduce as the smart, pragmatic Palmer or the broadest American nonsense. There's some fun in between, but the film doesn't fully figure out how to have capable agents tussle with screwy villains.

Hong Kil-dong (The Story of Hong Gil-dong)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 December 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Korean Film Archive Blu-ray)
Where to stream it (Prime link), or buy the American disc at Amazon

I was a tad surprised to see Shin Dong-heon's 1967 animated features seemingly owing more to Disney and other American animation houses than those of Japan, but why not? Despite the two countries being physically close, Japanese occupation was well within living memory and there were plenty of American army bases in the country on top of Hollywood's global reach. It does, nevertheless, make is somewhat ironic that the preservation and restoration of this film hinged on a Japanese print.

The film itself starts with Minister Hong (voice of Lee Chun-sa) being told by a fortune-teller that he must kill his concubine's son Gil-dong (voice of Kim Suil) in order to avoid a doom of his own. He doesn't have the heart to do it (which is good, because it's a ruse by his envious wife) and instead exiles Gil-dong. Gil-dong accepts this stoically, and soon meets Chadol Bawi (voice of Kim Sun-won), a diminutive but spunky wanderer, and the pair make enemies of despotic governor Um Ga-jin (voice of Yeom Seok-ju). In order to fight him, Gil-dong studies swordsmanship with Master Baekun (Lee Wu-yeing), during which time Um's power grows and begins to threaten the elder Hong.

The film is based upon a Joseon-era epic that was itself likely inspired by a Korean Robin Hood figure (although the research connecting them would not be published until a couple years after this film), or at least a portion of one version of it, and it being such a large work that a 67-minute film can only cover so much is a bit of a problem: Writer Shin Dong-woo seems to pick the important highlights that form into a story the best, but it's kind of inert. Not boring, really, but maybe too steady - Gil-dong doesn't really evolve much over the film, mostly becoming more skilled with a sword, and his ties to Chadol Bawi, farm girl God-dan and her father, or even the various villains, don't exactly intensify. One expects that all happens over the course of a long novel, but director Shin Dong-heon and screenwriter Shin Dong-woo have beats they need to hit and every extra cel is time and money, so it's streamlined.

It looks great, though, the animation is smooth and the designs are appealing, showing plenty of Disney and Fleischer influence. I'm not sure how far off it is from other Korean animated films of the period - a quick glimpse at the booklet suggests it was a major hit and spawned imitators quickly, along with an immediate follow-up/spin-off for Cadol Bawi. It's a nifty little movie, and while I've kind of harped on its faults because it was a disjointed thing to watch at night - I kept thinking I'd nodded off and missed something only to see that it just leapt forward a bit - it looks pretty great for its origin and period.


Hopi and Chadol Bawi

* * * (out of four)
Seen 9 December 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Korean Film Archive Blu-ray)
Where to stream it (when available)

Work must have started on Hopi and Chaol Bawi just about as soon as The Story of Hong Gil-dong hit South Korean screens, because it came out the same year, and it certainly seems to benefit both from the previous film's success and from perhaps being less tied to famous source material: It's a bigger, more fantastic adventure that lets the crew from the first stretch in new directions rather than be penned in by respecting the original novel.

With Hong Gil-dong busy with official duties, sidekick Chadol Bawi (voice of Kim Sun-won) goes out looking for master swordsman Hopi, hoping to learn his lightning sword technique. Hopi saves him from attacking wolves, but disappears into the night, while thief Gomsoe is happy to take credit. Hopi, it turns out, is not the defender of the oppressed that Chadol Bawi imagined, Nevertheless, the three wind up having their paths cross with corrupt officials who intend to cede the northern part of the kingdom to the Jurchen tribe, led by a shapeshifting wizard.

Hong Gil-dong wasn't a bad movie at all, but its central character being unfailingly righteous and heroic could make it feel very predictable; here, the filmmakers let Chadol Bawi's earnest youthfulness take center stage and let Hopi's bitterness and Gomsoe's willingness to go along serve as counterpoints. It puts friction into the picture, and suspense, and the revelation of the tragedy in Hopi's past makes everything more operatic rather than just being spelled out like in the previous movie. It's not really a complicated story, but it lets kids watching identify with Chadol Bawi and feel a little nervous about where Hopi might wind up, which is a genuine emotional hook.

On top of that, the trio gets to occasionally face monsters instead of just bandits and soldiers, which allows director Shin and his compatriots to really let loose, using the tools of animation to have impossible things happen, design exaggerated creatures, and make alpha villain Somasul especially a worthy adversary. Even the less supernatural action scenes such as the attacking wolves toward the beginning are striking. It's a dizzying land of adventure and legend at times, and the animation is pretty darn good, occasionally showing some of the looping that you'd see in the Fleischer cartoons that clearly serve as an inspiration but also some Disney grandiosity.

It can kind of be a lot at times, especially at the end, when you're enjoying the big action sequences but also maybe mentally thinking back and wondering if all these folks being bad guys makes sense; were they ever working against each other before being revealed as allies? It's also got a last-minute revelation that's kind of inevitable even if it's not really set up or hinted at, as much because you kind of need to give Hopi something after all this. That's not a bad thing - it feels right - but it kind of feels like it came out of nowhere.

Perhaps surprisingly, after doing these two features, Shin Dong-heon would not direct another, instead working in television (including a stint at Nelvana in Canada) and writing about music. Perhaps Korean productions got crowded out between American and Japanese animation, or perhaps the overwhelming nature of theatrical animation was overwhelming. Either way, he leaves behind a couple of striking films that deserve to be more than a footnote in the history of global animation.


Well, that's a lot - how's it affect the score?

Dale Evans: 31½ stars
Centipede: 28¾ stars

Dale benefits from the slightly bigger box set, but that can get flipped later!