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.

Fantasia 2026.01: Her Private Hell, Tunnels: Sun in the Dark, and Kung Fu '26

 

Great to be back in Montreal, and not just because it is expected to be stupidly hot in Boston with unexpected apocalyptic air quality because of wildfires in Manitoba. We're looking at a nice 18 days of moves here!

Getting here was a bit of a thing, though - I had a 10:40am flight that was supposed to get me here by noon, and was out the door at around 7am or so, but two Red Line stations later, I realized I had forgotten my passport. By the time I got back to the apartment, I figured I should get a ride to be sure, but the first one was 12 minutes away for a half hour and seemed to be getting a block further away each time I checked. Canceled, got another one. When I arrived at the airport, I had trouble checking in at the kiosk, and the departure board said my flight was leaving early, at 10:30am, which I did not realize was possible. Apparently they both oversold it and the check-in cutoff was an hour before the flight. They got me on the next flight, which entailed a transfer in Toronto, but which didn't leave until I was stopped to arrive, which killed any plans I may have had about spending an afternoon and evening visiting favorite spots and restaurants.

Got to sit in business class on that second leg, though, which is nice, but kind of like when they started putting recliners in theaters, an almost unreasonable amount of space compared to what I'm used to. The Puritan New England's in me almost disapproves.

The lesson: Put your passport in your pants pocket the night before!

Oddly, the first press screening was before you could pick up badges; it's absolutely surreal that I can occasionally get away with writing "Jason Seaver, Jay's Movie Blog" on the sign-in sheet for one of these things. That's opening film Her Private Hell, which regular press passes don't get into anyway, and while I didn't see the director presented with an award as a result, that's fine (honestly, probably got the best). It means getting up stupidly early tomorrow will just be my habit of late rather than necessity.

Because that meant I could start the evening with Tunnels: Sun in the Dark, rather than catch the 10:45am show Friday, then head across the street for Kung Fu, crossing my fingers that Larry Fessenden would stay to host Friday's Trauma encore.

Which is where we have the plan for Friday: Trauma, or Monsters All, Dance Freak, Mum, I'm Alien Pregnant, and then Blaise, figuring Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma will be everywhere in a couple weeks. Tunnels is worth a look (if I post this in time).


Her Private Hell

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2026 in Cinema du Parc #2 (Fantasia press screening, DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

The opening shot of Her Private Hell is fantastic, the sort of thing the rest of the films in the festival will have a hard time topping, but also something that the rest of this film will have a hard time building on. Nicholas Winding Refn's movie is never less than visually striking, but as is often the case with the director, his storytelling is not up to his vibe creation.

Once he's set the scene, we meet Elle (Sophie Thatcher), a glamorous young movie star whose wealthy family lives in the penthouse apartment of the dizzying Tower Hotel. She spots Hunter (Kristine Froseth), one of her co-stars in the movie shooting the next day, sleeping in the lobby because her room was given away, and invites her up. There, she'll meet Elle's stepmother Dominique (Havana Rose Liu), another co-star who was once Elle's best friend, and Elle's father Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott), who says he is leaving town during the shoot so Elle and Dominique can fix things between them. Before that, Elle and Hunter witness a neighbor murdered by the monstrous Leather Man, who is being hunted by revenge-seeking Soldier K (Charles Melton).

The look and feel of all this is impeccable, a vaguely futuristic city either distinct from K's reality- which is seemingly postwar Japan - or located hundreds of stories above it. The crystalline planet where Elle's retro sci-fi movie takes place blends into both and the mythic space which seems to spawn the Leather Man and a pair of mysterious young women. Refn's team designs and shoots the heck out of it and the music has a driving bass line, with the effect that this world which has been fragmented and abstracted in different ways holds together extremely well.

The same can't be said of the stories and characters, though. The movie gets by for a while on Elle's aloof cynicism clearly being at war with her still loving the people who have hurt her, but Refn's story is all over the place; Hunter doesn't really have a place in that, K is all over the place, and the folks who are introduced and shuffled off for narrative convenience just feel like so much filler. The places where there's a lot going on are too busy to be interesting, and the time in between are slogs. Refn can't quite balance telling the audience that the glamorous are shallow, petty people while relying on holding the audience's interest by playing on how fascinating they're supposed to be.

Sophie Thatcher almost can, though; Elle is full of melancholy and anger and just enough damning self-awareness to know that she's too privileged to garner much sympathy. Kristine Froseth is a fun contrast as Hunter, for a while; she wears nice clothes and makeup well but is not high-class in the way Elle and Dominique are and Refn eventually doesn't have anything to do with that conflict (there are a couple scenes that feel like terrible overacting before clicking as Hunter trying to be melodramatic in the same way Elle and Dominique are, when they do). Havana Rose Liu eventually has more to do but has little enough toward the start for it to be a problem. Charlie Melton plays his cipher well enough, but Diego Calva's Niko is clearly there so that the dynamics between the girls don't feel entirely like lesbian drama (and, to be fair, a lot of young actresses have done sex scenes to keep movies with three male leads from seeming too gay).

Refn is a good enough director and his cast and crew are talented enough that much of this is staged impeccably, with enough good bits that it is absolutely worth watching once. I'm genuinely curious what a second viewing will have me thinking, outside the minor caveat that the Japanese-language dialogue was subtitled in French rather than English (though my French was probably good enough to get the gist). It's entirely possible there will be layers I didn't spot the first time, but I'm afraid that it will appear more clearly as a pretty, hollow mess.


Dia Dao: Mat Troi Trong Bong Toi (Tunnels: Sun in the Dark)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2026 in Cinema J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

The first Vietnam War film that I've ever seen from Vietnam, Tunnels: Sun in the Dark is not exactly dry, but it can be rather procedural, a very clear take on how tunnel operations during the war worked that does not quite become the intense pressure cooker one might expect. Perhaps there is a sort of survivorship bias, in that you just wouldn't last in the tunnels and tell the tale unless you had a certain level of stoicism. Whatever the reason, Tunnels feels like an unusually muted sort of war movie, especially considering its domestic release was tied to the fiftieth anniversary of the war's end.

The action here takes place in 1967, starting with two noteworthy incidents in the ruins of the Binh An Dong hamlet of Cu Chi: First, Ba Huong (Thu Anh Ho) captures the lurking Tu Dap (Quang Tuan), a mechanic who claims their mothers were sworn sisters and a marriage had been arranged between them; second, local commander Bay Theo (Thai Hoa) welcomes Hai Thung (Hoang Minh Triet), whom he had previously been told would be guarding medical supplies but who in fact commands an intelligence operation that will be listening to American signals and relaying them, an operation that will bring increased attention and bombing to the tunnel system.

Western filmgoers have likely seen plenty of movies about the Vietnam War from the American perspective, and their structure and focus was often dictated by how Americans fought the war and many others: A focus on large operations getting mired down in an environment to which they are not well suited, a sort of incredulity that the most powerful fighting force the world had ever seen could get worn down and ultimately defeated by tactics that often seemed like madness. The flip side, it would seem, is the Vietnamese view of people hunkering down, literally inside their homeland, doing what they can to stop this invading juggernaut. This was never going to be a war of overwhelming victory in decisive battles, but persistence and digging in, laying claim to the land despite efforts to take it away.

What often takes center stage as a result is a story of community: The senior officers are uncles rather than generals, fretting about keeping secrets and managing the dynamics in their cells more than large-scale tactics. There are movie nights and singalongs that would play differently in the recent spate of Chinese movies about the Korean War, where the point would be reinforcing ideology rather than connections. Heck, there's a romance in there that feels genuine near the center.

It's not too cutesy, thankfully; especially compared to the other women in the tunnels, Thu Anh Ho's Ba Huong is not prone to nonsense or vanity. She gets most of the action-hero moments in the film, communicating the grim determination to do what's necessary without it having completely extinguished her humanity, and she seems enjoyably irritated that she's catching feelings for this guy who tried to use the possibility to manipulate his way into the unit. Quang Tuan's is a complement to her, a tinkerer who seems like he'd be a liability in the field but whose mind is unnervingly capable of designing weapons; there's a similar recklessness about Tu Dap's growing affection for his captor. Meanwhile, Thai Hoa is the steady bedrock of the film as Bay Theo, never off-mission but palpably concerned about the people in his charge, an uneasy contrast to Hoang Minh Triet's focused Hai Thung, who carries himself with the air of someone who knows how crucial their role is and won't let anyone suggest it's one notch less.

(That "especially compared to the other women" doesn't mean the other women in the film are stereotypes so much as they are young women clearly thrust into roles that would not be traditional and their performances reflect that it's not easy to simply turn deactivate who they were before signing up to fight and intend to be after the war.)

The film reflects the general level-headedness of the main characters; though the Cu Chi tunnel system is under constant attack by American forces over the course of the film, raised voices and panic are rare. Though quarters are tight and lighting is often appropriately dim, it's not exactly a claustrophobic sensation that emerges so much as one of known and understood limits. There are problems to solve and tension as the soldiers try to handle them, but the feeling is often akin to talking to veterans, "we had a job to do that couldn't be avoided, so we did it". The moments of actual fighting are often brief and pointed - without being lectures, they sharply highlight how trying to fight an opponent with firepower that's an order of magnitude greater is folly, or how monstrous American forces have become to try and use their resources against the Viet Cong - the bombing seems desperate, and the attempts to flood them out of their tunnels far more vicious and unsporting than the VC's guerilla warfare.

It's an unusual war film in that way, not the grinder one may expect from decades of American films but interesting nonetheless. It's fascinating how the different perspective doesn't just change the meaning of the film's commentary, but its structure and design.


Kung Fu '26

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2026 in Théátre Hall (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

The introduction to Kung Fu at the festival implied that director Giddens Ko was adapting a comic book series he had written rather than a novel, which would track - there is a lot going on here, enough that Ko has to move at crazy speed to get it all in, and it often seems built around the visual rather than something that would work in print. It might work better as a television series than a movie, but I don't know that Taiwanese TV has the budget for the scale he wanted for the action. It's too much, really, but I don't know that it could have been otherwise.

It follows two high school friends, You Soo-Yuan (Kai Ko) and Chen Ming-Yi (Berant Zhu), who try to stay out of trouble but get bullied anyway, with Yuan nursing a crush on pretty but quick-tempered classmate Yi-Jing (Gingle Wang Ching) while Yi has a thing for her mother (Tseng Wan-Ting). A little kindness to what appears to be a mentally-ill vagrant at the bowling alley has the man, Huang Jun (Leon Dai) reveal himself as an ancient kung fu master, eager to take the boys on as disciples. They eventually accept, with Jing the first to realize something is very much off about them as they gain Chi power, but it's soon revealed that Huang Jun is not alone, with former friend Lan Jin (Liu Kuan-Ting) cutting a swath through the underworld, hoping to consolidate power and rule, and he seems a lot more capable and focused than Huang Jun. But things are not entirely as they seem!

Indeed, things are really not as they seem, with the sort of audacious twist at roughly the midway point more often seen in Indian films where the filmmakers can use the intermission to reset and restart with the surprisingly altered premise. It's a potentially great spin; the issue is that by that point things are moving so quickly that Ko has a hard time slowing things down enough to explore the implications or poke around the lore he's just introduced. There's really nothing to do but fight at this point, because things have already built to a fever pitch and there's not a lot of room for nuance or the kids finding new allies, even though what Ko has introduced deserves some time as a thriller before becoming a brawl.

The brawling is fun, though - Ko and action team Triple A are aiming for the sort of larger-than-life wire fu that gave Stephen Chow international hits in Kung Fu Hustle and Shaolin Soccer (fingers crossed for Kung Fu Soccer in a few weeks!), though with some bloody splatstick mixed in. It's high-flying action that doesn't exactly have much interest in looking realistic, as the impossibility of it is in some ways the point of the whole thing, the focus more on how these guys have so much raw power that their bodies are running hot and wailing on each other is going to cause a lot of collateral damage, rather than the sort of impressive, precise movement that indicates years of training and mastery. Ko moves fast to be able to move from one fight to another without a lot of room to rest, and while he doesn't always succeed in balancing the broad comedy and the gruesome combat, it's kind of exhausting rather than frustrating, a constant stream of high energy rather than whiplash that would have a viewer upset that he replaced the thing one was enjoying with something else.

An amiable cast helps; Kai Ko plays Yuan as a sad-sack dork with a fair amount of resentment and anger underneath, and it's kind of an impressive balancing act: There's clearly something ready to be unleashed upon his frustrations and worse, but he never quite comes across as the sort of nasty incel that would be a bad boyfriend if Jing decided to look at him that way. Gingle Wang is a good match for him in that way; her Jing is brimming with hostility and there's a certain delight in seeing how learning Ultimate Kung Fu gives her a way to vent but also a way to have friends. Berant Zhu doesn't quite play a sidekick so much as the film's glue, a likable presence that keeps a lot of scenes going and jokes flowing.

It's Leon Dai who is billed first, though, and he's the one who gets a lot to do, a lot more than just "ancient magic warrior not coping entirely well with the present". Huang Jun is kind of nuts, and it manifests in several different ways, and yet all the various facets revealed by the plot twists and in flashbacks feel coherent even as they're scattered and contradictory. The movie is built in such a way that he's the sort of character you might expect to be sidelined toward the end so that the kids can step up, but this isn't that movie, and Dai handles the challenge adroitly even as the film requires him to be manic.

I must admit, Kung Fu is kind of an exhausting movie to see at the end of a long day, and the mix of broad comedy and cruel violence had me wishing it would pick a lane at times. I still might be interested in catching it again in other circumstances ,to see how it plays when I've got a little more room to breathe even if the film doesn't.

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?

While You Can: Scarlet and Dust Bunny

I'm a bad "the guy you know who sees everything and recommends the good stuff online" these days, but it's especially acute with these two movies that I quite liked and which I knew were going to be short-timers. They're fun and deserve the biggest screens you can see them on, and they've got maybe a day or so of that left, as both seem to have got these releases to fill screens before the blockbusters arrive on the 19th.

Scarlet might be back on Imax screens come 6 February, depending where you live; none of the other things being released that day seem likely to bump Send Help and, at least in the Boston area, big anime releases tend to get the big screen, and this release may give Sony Pictures Classics more reason to open it wide: The 12-18 November run is an Oscar qualifying release, but while LA and NYC have traditionally been enough for that, this getting Imax screens in ten cities. There doesn't seem to be an animated feature shortlist, but of the 35 qualified features there are six big-studio ones (The Bad Guys 2, Dog Man, Elio, KPop Demon Hunters, Zootopia 2), two big animes (Chainsaw Man, Demon Slayer), and a few wild cards (this, Arco, Fixed, The Legend of Hei 2, Night of the Zoopocalypse). I don't know how many Academy members/voters there are in the Boston area, or the other places it's released, but it could be the difference between being 6th in the voting and 5th, and thus being able to be advertised as an Academy Award Nominee when it gets its regular release.

I must admit, the idea that Sony has rented out the biggest screen at Assembly Row for a week on the off chance that Frederick Wiseman decides to watch some anime tickles me. It should be there tomorrow (Wednesday), then bumped to a regular laser screen on Thursday, then so long for a month and a half.

Dust Bunny, on the other hand, is more a "grab some screens during a window between big weekends and hope you get lucky" play. It's got a 2024 copyright date on the end, so it's possible Lionsgate/Roadside Attractions weren't really sure what to do with it for a year or so, and I kind of get that. It's a weird one that probably mostly appeals to folks who know who writer/director Bryan Fuller is, and maybe folks figure that television/streaming is its natural home because that's where he's done almost all of his work. It'll look really cramped there, though - it's got a super-wide 3.00:1 aspect ratio and a lot of detail - and I'd kind of love to see if it would hit with a bigger crowd, or a different one. It was kind of hardcore nerds.

It's playing Boston Common & the Seaport on Wednesday, just matinees at the Common on Thursday, and after that, you have to head to the Liberty Tree Mall in Danvers, where it's holding spots until the Christmas releases.

I wonder how both will play with younger viewers, too - Scarlet is PG-13 and Dust Bunny is R, both for violence, and I kind of wonder if that would be reversed if Scarlet used guns and Dust Bunny used knives. They both feel like things that could drop tween/teen jaws.


Hateshinaki Sukâretto (Scarlet)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 12 December 2025 in AMC Assembly Row #1 (limited release, Imax Laser)
Where to stream it (when available)

Scarlet may be writer/director Mamoru Hosoda's best since The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, and it's not like the other films he's made since haven't been some of the best anime coming out of Japan. It's certainly his most ambitious. Those ambitions aren't subtle, but they're earnest, and he's willing to let them wind up a frayed mess by the finale where some might engineer a more pat resolution. Heck, it feels like he can see the audience watching for the moment when he cheats and dances around it.

Scarlet (voice of Mana Ashida) is a princess in 16th Century Denmark, beloved of the people and her father King Amleth (voice of Masachika Ichimura), a pacifist who favors negotiation with his neighbors rather than competition. But, well, something is rotten in the State of Denmark, and Amleth's brother Claudius (voice of Koji Yakusho) usurps the throne and marries Queen Gertrude (voice of Yuki Saito), and while Scarlet aims to take revenge, he strikes first, poisoning her. She wakes up in The Otherworld, a purgatorial afterlife out of time, and when she finds out Claudius is there as well, sets out to finally end his existence. What she doesn't count on is falling in with Hiriji (voice of Masaki Okada), a paramedic from 21st Century Tokyo, who is kind-hearted and even treats the foes Scarlet fights along the way to confront Claudius in his castle near the gate to the next world.

Along the way, Scarlet is a frequently-dazzling piece of animation that mixes its traditional and digital pieces in smart ways: The cel-shaded CGI Otherworld looks kind of uncanny while the hand-drawn Denmark feels real, but not jarringly so; the two styles are just similar enough that one might not necessarily clock a difference in style versus tone, especially during a later visit to what may be the living world. There are more action beats than Hosoda usually goes with, with swordfighting that's exciting enough for one to notice there's quality choreography, and a fantastic dragon that explains its purpose with action rather than any exposition. It's more intentionally multi-ethnic than anime often is - it feels noteworthy that many of the nomads Scarlet and Hiriji encounter are Middle Eastern, both fitting the desert environment and perhaps a reference to how many laborers in Japan are Kurdish and other MENA refugees - and merges its influences well.

The action is intense, but there's also a fair amount of fun amid the intensity, with the Hamlet references playful ("get thee to a monastery!") and a bit more fun for those of us who have seen Hamnet a week earlier. That's kind of important because Hosoda is putting Scarlet and Hiriji through the ringer for a purpose: Hiriji's quiet decency does not quite seem naive compared to Scarlet's grim desire for revenge - he's aware that he comes from a more peaceful era - but it's a constant, non-judgmental reminder that Scarlet has fallen from the girl who truly believed in her father's ideals, and regaining them is hard; she's seen too much and committed to doing too much. We've seen her shed the lovely princess gown and put on armor like she'd decided that was her true self, and her glimpse of Hiriji's world is both inspiring and the cause of some despair - how can there be a place like that when so many suffer?

It's that confusion that makes her final confrontation with Claudius raw and stressful - she's been both laid low by Claudius and Gertrude's betrayal and hurt as she has crossed a barren wasteland, but has also seen the good examples of Amleth and Hiriji, and how they have had an effect on those she would see as enemies. She wants to do the right thing, but knows that any kindness on her part will be met with violence and cruelty by Claudius. One can feel Hosoda trying to find a resolution to this that is both hopeful but honest, and doesn't use the circling dragon as a heavenly deus ex machina that says everything will be put right, and he mostly manages it. It's tricky and messy, but then, one shouldn't be completely reassured that things will work out.

Here's hoping that Sony's gambit to get this in front of some Academy voters so they can market this as an Oscar Nominee in February works; it's a worthy film that deserves the boost.


Dust Bunny

* * * (out of four)
Seen 13 December 2025 in Alamo Seaport #1 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available) (Prime pre-order link)

Somewhere around the middle,Dust Bunny becomes rather a lot, piling more and more on but not necessarily paying things off to make room, writer/director Bryan Fuller maybe being a little too coy about the nature of his genre crossover and not quite having the time to service everything he's got in play without tipping his hand too much. But even when you can see the movie straining, Fuller is filling a Barry Sonnenfeld-shaped void at the movies that I hadn't quite realized was there, in a way that's very much his own. It's instantly recognizable for those who have seen his TV work, and makes you wonder why he hasn't done film before.

The story at least seems simple enough - eight-year-old Aurora (Sophie Sloan) is convinced there is a monster under her bed, and the disappearance of the parents who pooh-poohed the possibility doesn't exactly give the audience reason to suppose that the lint underneath coalescing into something is anything but what it looks like. A neighbor (Mads Mikkelsen) catches her attention, especially when she seems to see him slaying a dragon late at night in Chinatown. She offers him money to kill her monster, but the fact that she has seen his "monster-slaying" activities puts him in a bind, and the pair of them in danger.

That sequence with the neighbor and the dragon and everything around it is a delight, a merger of elaborate production design, whimsical choreography, and well-used visual effects that sets the stage for the film's heightened world and balances the different perspectives of Aurora and the unnamed neighbor without tipping its hand too much. It's full of movement that is fluid but also kind of unnatural. A thing one can't help but notice in this and other scenes at this end of the film is that Fuller doesn't have Mikkelsen or Sloan speak when their characters wouldn't, trusting their particular body language to say what needs to be said and allowing them to demonstrate and withhold in a way that feels natural. The action piece that balances the film on the other end is a different beast, chaotic and with a fair amount of talk to make things clear, but that's kind of right, in its way; the film is setting up and resolving mysteries through action, and each fits that purpose.

The rest of Dust Bunny, filled with contention between the central pair and those in their orbit, is an odd duck. It's the rare movie that gets an R rating for "some violence", and I wouldn't be surprised if the studio spent the last year trying to squeeze it into a PG-13 - I suspect it's the use of guns rather than fantasy weapons that keeps that from happening - and because it feels like the sort of thing that made tweens go for Tim Burton 40 years ago, an ornate darkness with corners to explore where every character worth the audience's affection has innocent and cynical sides in conflict (I'd have little trouble recommending it to my 14/15-year-old nieces). It can't quite square that circle, and you can kind of feel Fuller circling around something about violence being difficult to escape once it's unleashed or monsters inside everyone but not quite landing, seemingly struggling to turn his script into a story that does more than look cool and make you grin at its eccentricity.

That eccentricity is a ball, though, with the visual team going full-on maximal in the extremely wide screen frame - it is very much from the imagination of the creator of Pushing Daisies and Wonderfalls - and the combination of puppetry and digital animation for the titular monster is nifty: It must, at various times be unnerving both believable and unbelievable in turn, and mostly manages that. One can feel Mads Mikkelsen getting into a groove as the movie goes on, his weathered cool a perfect sort of contrast with Sophie Sloan's cherubic agitation. David Dastmalchian shows up to steal a bunch of scenes in the end, and Sheila Atim does fairly nice work as someone who is often a catalyst but seems real enough that she's not just there to make things happen. Sigourney Weaver gets a tough draw, her shadowy but stylish operator is threatening but not quite charismatic.

It's a mess, but the visuals and performances and fun soundtrack tend to be elaborate and charming without ever losing track of how it's a kid's scary story set in a John Wick-like world. I had a blast with it, even when it was treading water; it's all the colorful fantasy invention of a Fuller TV show compacted down to about 100 minutes, and I hope Fuller gets to do more like it on the big screen.

Asian Imports: My Daughter Is a Zombie and The Lychee Road

Back from Montreal, back on this nonsense:

Both are apparently leaving Boston after Thursday (and those are early/late shows), though The Lychee Road had a pretty good three-week run; I was kind of worried I might have to find a window while in Montreal, where it was playing at the Forum. They're being displaced by another big Chinese movie (Dead to Rights) and some others from elsewhere in Asia - the Shin Godzilla rerelease and War 2 & Coolie from India.

It always amuses me that, when I get back from Fantasia, there are a couple of films that would have been right at home there which I kind of have to scramble to see, but it's mostly because those movies have a higher churn rate than a lot of multiplex material all year round.


My Daughter Is a Zombie

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 8 August 2025 in AMC Causeway Street #8 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

As far as I can tell, My Daughter Is a Zombie has no connection to My Neighbor Zombie, one of my favorite movies in the genre that also happens to come from South Korea, but I like it for one of the same reasons I liked the other: The filmmakers steadfastly refuse to approve of solving a health-care crisis with guns, which even the most well-intentioned folks in other zombie movies find hard to resist.

The film opens with Lee Jeong-hwan (Jo Jung-suk), a former zookeeper and large animal trainer, returning to his family home in the quaint village of Eunbag-Ri to greet his daughter Su-ah (Choi Yu-ri) - who, we are soon shown and informed, is likely South Korea's last zombie. Like most 15-year-old girls, she found her father kind of cringey and annoying, even if she did share his love of dance, but got bitten while they fled Seoul during the zombie outbreak. She had turned by the time they got to Eunbag-Ri, but neither her father, grandmother Kim Bam-soon (Lee Jung-eun), nor Jeong-hwan's old friend Cho Dong-bae (Yoon Kyung-ho) had it in them to put her down. What they soon discovered was that apparently infectees like Su-ah respond to reminders of their old lives, so they do all they can to help Su-ah resist her new feral instincts. Not eager to help, on the other hand, is Shin Yeon-hwa (Cho Yeo-jeong), Jeong-hwan's first love, the local schoolteacher, and, after having to put down her own finacé, the region's top zombie-hunter.

I don't know how many Webtoon-derived movies I've seen, but this feels like the most Webtoon-derived a movie can be. There's an episodic structure that seems built to never really end but also never leave you completely hanging if it were to stop, a cat that is just expressive enough to need to be CGI. That isn't a dig, necessarily, but it kind of feels 90% premise, 10% plot, committed to the idea of this but kind of content to meander and not worrying about filling in some gaps. It's all right by that, though; the filmmakers capture how comics designed for infinite scroll have a sort of soothing rhythm even when the events are tense, and translate transitions and style to live action well. I'm reasonably sure the caricaturist at an amusement park is the original artist, which would be cute.

It's got a pleasant enough cast playing characters you're seldom sorry to see on screen, too: The adults are affable and funny while still tending to carry a little bit of the tension that naturally comes with hiding Su-ah, with Cho Jung-seok tending to look more committed as the movie goes on and more backstory is revealed, while Lee Jung-eun gives depth to the alcoholic granny that would typically be a comic character and Cho Yeo-jeong sees how a potential threat can be funny. I like Choi Yu-ri's Su-ah enough to wish we saw most of her as just a regular kid, although I kind of suspect that the pantomime she does as a zombie is kind of difficult to pull off well. The script says the word "zombie" throughout but doesn't treat Romero rules as necessarily definitive (indeed, the entire idea is arguably that they're made to force people to act cruelly rather than question cruelty). The filmmakers are pretty good at balancing cute absurdity and danger.

Maybe not enough; there's a lot that seems really ill-advised beyond what we might be willing to forgive, and less soul searching afterward than seems warranted. The story maps just well enough onto caring for, say, a child with cognitive issues that the places where it doesn't feel a bit uncomfortable (I wonder how it would hit if the girl's father was "teaching" instead of "training" her). And, boy, it wants to have all the endings, both introducing a new threat and including a gigantic "oh, by the way" bit.R />
Is it a bit odd for a zombie movie to ultimately be described as "pleasant"? Maybe, and there are certainly times when it doesn't seem to be the best of ideas, but it's not a bad idea to take this approach every once in a while.


Chang'an De Li Zhi (The Lychee Road)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 9 August 2025 in AMC Causeway Street #9 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

The trick of a movie like The Lychee Road, I think, is figuring out how to maintain the odd spirit of the start, where you've got room to be kind of goofy setting things up and making jokes that are either anachronistic or about how certain things haven't changed to make the Tang Dynasty relatable to a moder audience, into the finale, when the stakes are immediate, the story is maybe catching up to recorded history, and there's a lesson you want to teach. Da Peng is better at the modern and chaotic than period adventure and dreams, so this movie slides out of his wheelhouse as that goes on.

He plays Li Shande, who came to the capital at 24 with the desire to be a dedicated public servant, and twenty-odd years later "Old Li" is well-liked by his co-workers in the Department of Imperial Granaries but still a broke ninth-level administrator (he's much better at math than politics), taking out an expensive loan to buy a home on the very outskirts for his sharp-tempered wife A-tong (Zhuang Dafei) and young daughter (Yang Huanyu). But it gets worse: The Emperor has decreed that fresh lychees from Lingnan will be served at his wife's birthday celebration on June 1st, 117 days away, but lychees spoil in three or four days, far faster than any route between the cities. Scheming Eunuch Du Shaoling (Zhang Ruoyun) advises the head of the Granaries, Liu Shuling (Wang Xun), to find a sap to appoint as Lychee envoy and take the fall, along with the expected death sentence for failing the Emperor. That'd be Old Li. It takes him 30 days to reach Lingnan and would likely take just as long to return. Ambitious merchant Su Liang (Bai "White-K" Ke), a second son looking to escape his brother's shadow, offers to buy the pass that will let Li bypass tolls and customs to live out the next three months in comfort, but after meeting Su and Zheng Yuting (Yang Mi), the young owner of the local orchards, he begins to think there may be a way to pull it off.

Longtime fans of co-writer/director/star Dong "Da Peng" Chengpeng, whose movies have fairly reliably opened in North America on top of being big hits in China, should feel at home in the first section; Li is more nerd than hustler, but he's both pretty funny and a guy audiences can relate to amid the slapstick chaos and broad comedy, a lot of it along the lines of "folks in Tang Dynasty Chang'an had to pay mortgages and deal with monstrous bosses too!", and even in this sort of period piece, it's the sort of comedy Da Peng is good at, both as a filmmaker and an actor. There's delights in the middle, too, as Li sets out to handle a mission where he's been set up to fail by using the scientific method and experimenting with logistics, along with making friends with the people he'll need to help rather than ring to trick them. It's a neat balance of problem-solving and not getting too far into the weeds, and sort of feels like a bridge between the light satire of the first act and a finale which needs to be believable in Tang Dynasty terms. There's lots of chuckling about pigeons being Imperial email and wondering if stickers were really a thing in that time.

Even before the finale throws a bunch of epilogues one's way, though, the shift to something more melodramatic feels a bit off, especially if one thinks Li Shinde would be more conscious of where his new plan was heading. The scheming suddenly seems too immediate compared to the rest of the movie, and too abstract. Sure, the truth of the matter is that Li's fate is largely in the hands of nobles and bureaucrats who barely regard him as human while he's in the room with them, and not even that once he leaves, but even with the occasional cuts back to Chang'an, it's hard to get invested in the scheming over who will lose face if Li succeeds (and is willing to kill over it) versus those who think they can derive advantage when the sort of logistics problems Li has to solve on the fly are what has been driving interest so far. There's also a speech which seems a little too intent on reflecting good socialist values, maybe to counter how Su Liang and Zheng Yuting aren't portrayed in a bad light for being businesspeople seeking advantages, but we've all got folks who need to hear it, whether we're in China or the United States.

It is, at least, an extremely watchable cast that Da Peng surrounds himself with: Zhuang Dafei gets introduced as something of a harpy who mostly slaps people, but by the end one can see a marriage that works. White-K and Yang Mi lubricate the center of the movie in different ways and always feel like they've got a life outside this particular story. When you need to raise the stakes in the end, you can do a lot worse than bringing in Andy Lau Tak-wah as an imperial advisor who seems malevolent even when being helpful.

I'm not sure it necessarily adds up to a crowd pleaser, though it's done fairly well in its native land and stuck around here longer than usual. There are bits throughout the movie to enjoy, at least, even if it as a whole never gets the heights of the filmmaker's best, zaniest work.