Fantasia Extra: The Samurai and the Prisoner

I've got to admit, I thought I'd be well past the point in posting my reviews from Fantasia where I talked about how I saw something else because this was already listed as a coming attraction at the Coolidge so I knew I'd be able to see it and could thus prioritize something that might not come around Boston - the "no time during the festival/tough getting back into writing about it" funk has hit early this year! I'm trying, though!

Anyway, as it turns out, I didn't go to the Coolidge because, smug as I was about being out of town while the Red Line was shut down, the MBTA whacked me with a major Green Line shutdown once I got back, and that made a lot of shows there tricky - it's a long enough movie that they're running it at about 6:15pm, which would be right on the border of getting there from my apartment on the Green Line, much less the 66 bus (shuttle buses are Right Out). Surprisingly, though, it was playing Boston Common - "surprising" in that his last couple horror movies played the Brattle and director Kiyoshi Kurosawa's last mainstream film, Wife of a Spy, didn't play Boston at all (I was fortunate to see it while on vacation in Washington, DC) - and had a surprisingly full house for a mid-week screening of a 147-minute Japanese period mystery. I don't know what to read into that; maybe the Brattle's showing a fair amount of Kurosawa over the past year has raised his profile around here, maybe the trailers have played before anime; maybe everyone has seen Spider-Man and The Odyssey and the more mainstream releases that came out last weekend weren't of much interest. Heck, maybe someone at AMC realized that a lot of the local fandom is north of the river and weren't messing with the 66 this weekend.

Surprisingly, it doesn't look like it will be held over downtown - there is a lot coming out this weekend, and maybe they figure this is the sort of thing that has a steep dropoff after folks see it during week one - but it's going to continue at the Coolidge, and is well worth a trip.


Kokurôjô (The Samurai and the Prisoner)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½ (out of four)
Seen 11 August 2026 in AMC Boston Common #3 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available), or buy the novel or soundtrack at Amazon

I'm not sure exactly when I had the thought "this is pretty Kurosawa-esque" during my viewing of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's The Samurai and the Prisoner, but I had to laugh a bit and wonder if he had waited so long to do a samurai movie because he knew that his surname meant it would be compared to some of the greatest films of one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. That would be absurdly unfair, especially since it would be almost impossible for any Japanese director to not be influenced by Akira, so if you see any of the (unrelated) sensei in this movie, it just shows that Kiyoshi knows what he's doing, and that's no surprise.

The story begins in 1578, when Nobunaga Oda was seeking to unite Japan, and one of his generals, Lord Araki Murashige (Masahiro Motoki) suddenly broke from him, holing up in the impregnable castle city of Arioka. Oda sends an old friend, Kuroda Kanbei (Masaki Suda) as an emissary, but rather than sending Kanbei's head back as a refusal of Oda's proposal, Murashige locks him in the dungeon, which may leave Kanbei's hostage son forfeit if Oda believes he has switched allegiances. Murashige, it seems, is generally not keen on this sort of diplomatic murder, as he also imprisons one of his own hostages when his father joins Oda rather than executing the child. The boy soon winds up dead anyway, seemingly shot by a vanishing arrow, the first of four murders over the course of a year that seem like divine retribution for Murashige breaking with Oda and defying the code of the samurai, each sending him to the dungeon to see if the brilliant Kabnei can help him crack the cases.

The opening crawl notes that history does not record why Murashige broke with Oda; Kurosawa and Honobu Yonezawa (who wrote the original novel) have some ideas, but one doesn't need to know the ins and outs of Japanese military history to see that their Murashige, at the very least, finds the sorts of executions he is frequently called upon to perform wasteful and counterproductive: Oda's cruelty, he wagers, will make his reign short-lived as it will breed rebellion and deprive him of his best advisors. He's not exactly a pacifist, but his relatively modern ideas in this area certainly seem unpragmatic in the face of a remorseless enemy and allies who are part of a society that uses the threat of death as glue. Often, this is the story of a man whose nobility is revealed to be naive or even his downfall, but Kurosawa, to his credit, seems as interested in how it might work as in how it can't, examining how a smart man whose priority is avoiding casualties maneuvers in an arena where most are explicitly expendable.

I like the way Masahiro Motoki plays Murashige; there's the intelligence of a sharp tactician in unfamiliar territory to him, someone trying to change the world but accustomed to the deference that present circumstances give him, and occasionally the realization that what he's saying is going to sound like weakness as it comes out of his mouth. It's an exercise in whether or not you can have the air of a samurai without the threat of imminent violence. Masaki Suda is a fine contrast, whip smart, clearly deserving of respect though arrogant and enough of a true believer to be consistently angry over his survival rather than grateful and/or shamed. The respect but violent disagreement the pair share makes each time Murashige consults Kanbei fascinating, especially as Murashige is showing the wear of a slowly disintegrating situation above as Kanbei seemingly becomes both more feral and sharper, like he's spending months plotting potential next steps and losing his grip doing so.

The rest of the cast is fair, with Yuriko Yoshitaka the main standout as Murashige's wife Chiyoho. Once challenge a film like this has is that Murashige is going to have a bunch of subordinates, all very competent and pledged to a fairly rigid code, and on top of that, the film is broken into four chapters, with each murder mystery representing a season. Sometimes the writers can re-use characters, and sometimes a new mystery needs new ones, and sometimes they need to kill someone significant off to raise the stakes or thin out Murashige's base of support as time goes on. Munetaka Aoki and Joe Odagiri do a particularly nice job of making their particular retainers distinguish themselves, although a couple aren't quite up to the challenge of being briefly important in a long movie. That said, a lot of TV writers could probably take notes at how well Kurosawa (and presumably Yonezawa) structure a set of individual episodes that can be fairly procedural into an arc that builds to a finish.

Kurosawa often makes horror movies that play in the banal (or dark and hidden) corners of the present day, so it's a nifty change of pace to see him given the money for nice costumes and shooting on an impressively dressed location, although he often returns to the same locations, which feel tighter each time (the meeting room seems to shrink with Murashige's diminishing number of allies to the point where it seems difficult to get a camera in there). The interesting exception is the dungeon, which seems surprisingly vast with its undulating dirt floor, like Murashige is free when he comes to visit Kanbei, at least as far as expectations are concerned, even if his counterpart is pointedly kept anchored in one spot and well aware of it. Kurosawa, like his namesake, often seems to consciously stage meetings between samurai and flashbacks as theater, not quite making jokes out of the shuffling gates or the way characters will move about a room while sitting to respect hierarchy but making sure the audience recognizes the absurdity of it.

He also makes a valiant effort to fight how this sort of film can bog down in the later episodes, as well as how a man's efforts to avoid violence in a violent world can wind up feeling less that cathartic; you can feel history start to box him in a bit toward the end, when the specifics of various military/diplomatic tactics start to become a bit more important. The movie doesn't really fizzle, just reaches a point where it's hard to re-energize for a third or fourth time, and thankfully Kurosawa can see when it's about to break and wraps things up without it seeming rushed.

Kurosawas, it turns out, are pretty good at samurai movies, and I wouldn't mind seeing Kiyoshi try another one now that the seal's been cracked.

Fantasia 2026.05: "Pimple", Our Effed Up World, CineMapsosa '26, Beasts Clutching at Straws '26, "Best Friends with the Devil", and Penny Lane Is Dead

Back to the "de Sève in the afternoon, Hall in the evening" grind (for one of the more pleasant definitions of "grind")!

We start off with composer Freya Berkhout, actress Jess McLeod, and writer/director/producer Alice Maio Mackey for Our Effed Up World (with host Justine Smith), which feels like an interesting turn for Mackey in that the trans and nonbinary characters are supporting roles and there was a lot of wanting to see folks like herself up front in her previous films. Maybe not that big a deal, but interesting in terms of whether she's going to have a more commercial career at some point; she mentioned "an IP thing" as part of what's next at the end of the Q&A.

She mentioned that they lucked out finding a video store that could be used as a set, including the genuinely sketchy basement which apparently smelled terrible, but you don't have time or money to clean it on an indie budget. The range of influences for this one was an odd mix, more Kevin Smith and Australian soap operas than the genre elements. I must admit that it's kind of odd to hear "gen-X" as more of an aesthetic description than "the people you grew up with", and folks from Australia talking about something as CW-inspired is kind of like seeing "Black Friday" sales abroad; it feels like it should be a specifically American term since they would be connecting it to something else within their culture, right?

(Also, did Mackey have a tremor last year? She had this thing where she was swinging the microphone back and forth in front of her mouth and it wasn't quite like we could only catch the syllables where it passed in front of lips, but it was oddly distracting!)

After that, I took a meal break because I have not see Pontypool since its original release and wasn't really up for a Bruce McDonald/Steven McHattie talk (though some friends back home would have loved it). After that, it was back to de Sève for the Korean shorts block, with filmmakers Lee Chang-bee ("I Love Your Alter Ego"), Lee Min-hyun ("Wish You Were Dead"), and Park Jung-yoon ("TROPIC") between the Fantasia hosts/translators. Very fun group of shorts!

Then, across the street for Beasts Clutching at Straws and Penny Lane Is Dead, with writer/director Mia'Kate Russell and actresses Alexandra Jensen & Sophia Wright, the latter of whom create very different impressions without the costumes and hairstyles from the movie, with Wright joking that half of being able to be Kat was wearing that outfit, and also joking about how the days when it was an all-woman set were different than when men were around, even if it was just as violent and gory.

Then to bed. Tuesday wound up being Big Break, Levitating, Hayop Ka!, a good burger because I was very late to the pass line for Someone's Daughter, and Los Vampires. And, man, I can't believe this has taken me so long to finish that today's the festival's last day, where you'll likely find me at The Peril at Pincer Point, City War, The Fox, Freaks Part II, and Jim Queen. Kind of half tempted to rearrange things to see Gozu, but also trusting that it playing here means some midnight shows back home and a spiffy new disc are on the way.


"Borbulha" ("Pimple")

☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2026 in Cinema de Sève (Fantasia Underground, DCP)

A pretty simple but entertaining gross-out short from Portugal with Tiago Rodrigues as a kid with a really noticeable pimple getting picked on by bullies until they decide to pop it and, man, they are not going to like what comes out.

I'm pretty sure that this isn't the first pus monster I've seen, but it's impressively gross and filmmaker Fernando Alle uses an impressive combination of gore effects, stop-motion, and puppetry to have it manifest and take out the little brats. The movie is just four minutes long, but Alle crams every beat needed from Rodrigues being sullen to the three victims having individual reactions and a funny denouement. Simple idea exceptionally well-executed!

Our Effed Up World

☆ ☆ ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2026 in Cinema de Sève (Fantasia Underground, DCP)

Alice Maio Mackay has been making micro-budget genre movies that festivals pick up even when they were very rough since she was a teenage girl, and even without the way she spoke in the Q&A after the screening, this is the first time that I find myself wondering what kind of filmmaker she's going to wind up being. She's clearly still learning and straddling the line between making a movie for a broader audience and making it for herself, but Our Effed Up World is fairly watchable.

It follows Sheri (Sara Thompson), who works in a supermarket with bestie Poppy (Annapurna Sriram), hanging out afterward with Finn (Jess McLeod) and Ash (Karis Oka) at the video store Finn's uncle left them. She's just resolved to dump boyfriend Harry (Jordan Dulieu), who doesn't take it particularly well, wandering about until he comes upon a strange and dangerous meteor - the sort of thing Sheri's astronomer father Hank (Scott Major) knows about because it's his job to watch out for such things.

A major part of the growing pains here are that, both by the amount of time spent and from what she said in the introduction, Mackay is mostly trying to make a hangout film with alien zombies to spice things up, and the latter almost feels like a crutch: The sci-fi/horror is not particularly memorable, and rather than resonating with the characters, mainly seems like an excuse to have them do something other hanging around and saying catty things. That's enjoyable enough in large part because Mackay has a more seasoned cast than usual - Sara Thompson has plenty of higher-profile credits, Scott Major is a bona fide veteran actor, and Annapurna Sriram is a natural goofy best friend - who are mostly able to slip comfortably into character rather than just recite lines on cue.

Those lines are sometimes more than a bit in need of a polish - the scene where Sheri dumps Harry especially makes her feel mean rather than frustrated or fed up - and It's kind of important to remember how young Mackay is because, although she's become a staple of festivals and other programs that want to showcase trans filmmakers, she's actually just now at the age where young filmmakers start working professionally, and only starting to actually be good. This movie still clanks, but not as often or as badly as the last one, which wasn't as rough as the one before that.

Which means I'm not sure whether I'd rather see her continuing to hone her skills or see how she does directing someone else's script, because you can really feel how this film lacks a lot of the connective tissue that ties one moment or aspect of a character to another, or does it awkwardly. Working with a more professional cast helps, but this is still very much someone learning the ropes and feels like it.


"SPEEDY!"

☆ ☆ ☆ ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2026 in Cinema de Sève (Fantasia: CineMapsosa 2026, DCP)

"Child learns the awful truth that adults lie" isn't necessarily a plot that scale to a feature-length film, but it's something that can certainly sing at the length of a short, and this one is charming as all get-out, getting a lot of great mileage from how ridiculous this speed-reading scam can seem when it's not held up by folks you should be able to trust, but, hey, Jung-min might have a bit of a crush on the teacher's prodigy son. The actress NAME turns in a really delightful performance as a bright girl who is shouldering a lot and but still feels like a kid.

The movie also hits its period marks nicely on top of being very earnest about what it can be like on a family that's striving for better but knows it might take some luck, or suddenly finding yourself complicit in something that's maybe not a crime but isn't right.

"Soulmate" '26

☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2026 in Cinema de Sève (Fantasia: CineMapsosa 2026, DCP)

There may be one too many alter-egos in this movie, between Ji-eun (Jeong Ji-eun), "hot girl Ji-eun" - the persona she adopts as a young actress - and Eun-ho (Kim Mi-ran), the result of dissociative personality disorder brought on by her stepfather's abuse. I spent an embarrassing chunk of this 20 minute movie thinking it was going to be a teenage actress trying to find a way to form a friendship/relationship with the boy next door who mostly knows her screen image.

That's not what this is, though there's a bit of it; instead, it's about Ji-eun being exiled to a mental landscape based upon the spot in the middle of nowhere where her abuse took place It's got all the pieces that go with that, from the taunting internal dialog to the enabling mother, to ultimately deciding to assert oneself, and for the most part done pretty well. Writer/director Lee Chan-bee does a very nice job finding the details that drive certain points home, particularly how there's this sexualization of teenage girls that's not entirely imposed by older men even as it often caters to them, and how Ji-eun's mental prison is abstracted but not cool in any way: It's empty and undeveloped and the sort of thing a city girl like a young actress would find boring.


"Ijen jugeosseumyeon jokenne" ("Wish You Were Dead")

☆ ☆ ☆ ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2026 in Cinema de Sève (Fantasia: CineMapsosa 2026, DCP)

Lee Min-hyuk and co-writer Park Kyu-eun know how to make a good short film: They kick off with a neat premise that has some resonance, kick off in media res, and build a lot of beats around jumping straight to the result of a bad move rather than playing out the bits that are going to require a lot of tricky effects work. You could probably build a feature around a funeral for the controlling patriarch that has him coming back as a zombie and continuing to destroy the family after his death, but this really reduces it to its essentials.

It's got a lot of neat little bits in it, as well: The fact that the male heirs who can deliver offspring are privileged feels annoying and arbitrary as a zombie-movie rule (down to Seo-hyun's father being vulnerable in the way her brother isn't because Dad's had a vasectomy), but it's also annoying and arbitrary in everyday life; Seo-hyun taking a Go board and using it to try and plot an exit - visually, it's a sort of Go/Clue hybrid - is fun improvisation. And Park Seo-yoon is sneakily great as Seo-hyun in part because, while she's clearly the smartest member of the clan and the one with the best chance of figuring out an exit and probably running the family business afterward, there's something a bit unsympathetic about her, like she's not that upset that the family members who treated her as less important than her dimwit brother and cowardly father are being murdered as they try to execute her plans. This isn't a woman who needs to prove herself to her family so much as one whose potential doesn't have to be linked to their approval.

There's a pretty good path to a longer feature if director Lee wants it, and I suspect a feature would look a bit different from the short, which is why this film is worth twenty minutes whether it leads to something bigger or not.


"TROPIC"

☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2026 in Cinema de Sève (Fantasia: CineMapsosa 2026, DCP)

Anything can be a metaphor if you work at it enough, such as an aloha shirt, which reminds Choi Sun (Bae Min-su) of both how her sister Seou (Kim Da-a) committed suicide and how she really wanted to get to a happier, more carefree place, even if neither she nor Sun could make it happen. It kind of suggests the Swamp Thing-looking monster and headspace that Sun finds herself in as writer/director Park Jung-yoon bounces her between the present and the past, her two young actresses playing two people with no-one closer even though being together isn't easy.

I really love how Park ends the movie, with Sun wearing a shirt that is clearly faded, either from far too much detergent or repeated washings. That's probably how you have to remember a loved one who has ended her life like that, and it's a nice visual for how Sun will keep as much of Seou with her as she can, even if she can only handle part of her.


Wara Nimo Sugaru Kemonotachi (Beasts Clutching at Straws)

☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2026 in Théátre Hall (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
Where to stream the Korean version (Prime link for Korean version), or buy the disc for the Korean version at Amazon

I must admit to being curious about both previous iterations of this story: I recall the Korean film from 2020 being entertaining but also being kind of a miserable viewing experience (the festival streaming platform used in 2020 was terrible), and there are just enough differences between the two movies to make me wonder if this Japanese adaptation of a Japanese novel is closer. Sadly, there doesn't seem to be an official English translation - more mysteries and thrillers from that country are crossing the Pacific than ever before but there are so many! - but both adaptations being pretty good suggests good things about the source material.

It starts with Kanji (Ouji Suzuka), who doesn't seem like much of a "beast"; he's trying to make it as a Vtuber without really having a hook as he works in an internet cafe with private booths and looks after his grandmother with severe dementia in the apartment above her late husband's shuttered barbershop. Things potentially change when a guy who rushed out without paying his bill leaves behind a bag of money. Elsewhere in Tokyo, Ryosuke Ebato (Hiroki Narmiya), a corrupt cop deep in debt to the Goda syndicate, has a line on a college regent who has defrauded his employer. Is that the man who dropped the bag at the internet cafe, or the one who recently started visiting sex worker Mina, who has made a new friend in femme fatale Maria. Speaking of Maria, she seems to know the drill a bit too well when Mina needs to dispose of her abusive husband's body.

There's a twist or two to this, of course, which isn't completely surprising when you get to it, although to be fair I may have had the Korean version in mind when it happened. One thing director/co-wirter Hideo Jojo does fairly well is keep Kanji just busy enough, considering that most of the other threads are more obviously connected. They're not going to collide for a while, but his various frustrations at home are worth watching and entertaining for being darkly comic in a different way than the folks less innocently connected to various crimes. It means the tone doesn't really cause whiplash but the audience doesn't get completely mired in the pure cynicism of backstabbing and threats elsewhere, and there's just enough of that lurking around the edges that it doesn't feel completely separate.

It doesn't hurt that there's a nice supporting cast of characters around the main folks; Kanji's got a cute co-worker who might be a potential partner but doesn't have to be, and his grandmother is out of it in a way that plays as chaos comedy from a remove but which is also a pure nightmare from up close. Ebato's often paired with a driver who seems to haplessly wind up deeper than he intends because he (perhaps unwisely) considers Ebato a friend and a new partner investigating the very fraud he's trying to cover up, with the Goda chief having a hulking and horrifically eccentric good on hand. Mina's got an avid younger client, and Maria's lone-wolf status is fitting but things also lock in when her other connections are revealed. It's not a huge, messy ensemble, but it's one where the "hubs" are very solid indeed and none of the folks in their orbit are entirely one-note jokes.

There's also something very pleasant about how Jojo and company often seem to have come out on the other side of trying to chase the kind of cool that many were after with their intersecting crime narratives in the wake of Pulp Fiction - Kanji's streaming is small-time enough to be kind of pathetic, and everyone bit Maria is more dork than badass, with Maria explicitly pretty awful. The repetition of a zipper splitting a black screen as a scene transition renders it cute rather than too-clever, and there's fun knowing chaos to how the opening gag is used later.

It's always an odd experience to catch a remake of something after just long enough that the original isn't fresh in one's mind and not know whether good surprises are legit or differences and need bits are not quite pulled off versus vaguely remembered. I'm leaving towards this basically being well done, a chaotic but generally fun caper.


"Best Friends with the Devil"

☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2026 in Théátre Hall (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

Hugo de Sousa comes up with a neat idea for a short here that's really well-positioned between innocent mayhem and something sinister, as Lola (Ellyn Jameson), worried about the disappearance of her friend Amy (Kailee McGee), files a missing person report and follows her trail to David (de Sousa), the last person to see her on a hike. Maybe not wise on the face of it, but when you're starting from the premise of "unfortunate accident" rather than "foul play", not indefensible!

I like how de Sousa plays this both as writer/director and actor, not really tilting the tone into obvious danger but also recognizing that the world can be especially dangerous for women on their own and letting the audience see various red flags without actually waving them in one's face. He gives out new information in ways that recognize that this is a short and maybe shouldn't be too vague for too long, forcing the viewer to really evaluate the situation without it being a slow-down/nod-sagely beat. The end's a mess, but it's a mess from how things started out.

I also always dig when a concussion is an actual big deal.


Penny Lane Is Dead

☆ ☆ ☆ ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2026 in Théátre Hall (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

You've got to hand it to writer-director Mia Kate Russell for the title "Penny Lane Is Dead", because when you stand back a bit and look at the movie, it's not necessarily terribly different from others like it, but centering the title character like that sure makes the movie feel like people don't fit into the roles they're supposed to. The movie delivers impressive blood, guts, and women in peril, but feels a lot more off-center than it might.

It starts by introducing us to Penny herself (Bailey Spalding), a pretty blonde with a nice family who just graduated after being accepted into a good school and who genuinely seems to acknowledge and enjoy her good fortune without trying to exploit it. She's heading out to her grandparent's cabin for a girls' weekend with her best friends: Toni (Tahlee Fereday), a tall and sporty girl whom the Lanes took in when her own parents couldn't handle her coming out as gay, and Amy (Alexandra Jensen), mousy and maybe autistic, which is probably not something you'd use to describe an Australian girl in 1986. Not invited is Kat (Sophia Wright-Mendelsohn), Penny's cousin and a constant source of drama, but she shows up anyway, with drugged cupcakes and her boyfriend Angus (Ben O'Toole) not far behind. Angus is a bad'un, the son of a crime boss, and has two goons in tow, with Merrick (Fletcher Humphrys) and old pro who would rather deliver the drugs they have with no fuss but Rodowsky (Steve Le Marquand), like Angus, more inclined to have a little fun with Kat's cousin and her friends, whether they want it or not.

Penny's the title character and Toni's the conventional protagonist, but the movie's center of gravity is Kat, who kind of fascinates in that she's clearly a monster from the word go, but Russell and actress Sophia Wright-Mendelsohn seem to have a pretty good handle on how girls like her get like that. There's not a moment when the movie stops and she explains her sad origin story, but every time Russell finds a way to remind the attackers (and the audience) that these sexy young girls are 17 or 18, you can't help but remember that this applies to Kat as well as Penny, and she's an outcast for what she did as a teenager. Wright dives into the role with abandon, fully committed to Kat's awfulness, but there's always a streak of desperate need to her bad behavior and skimpy outfits, and there are moments when Angus treats Kat terribly and it's very clear she knows this and one wonders if this might be the time she wobbles.

It's a great performance, but doesn't push the rest off the screen; the girls especially are a strong ensemble. Tahlee Fereday and Bailey Spalding are impressive as Toni & Penny; there are early scenes where they discuss the possibility of being more than friends and while they're maybe a bit nervous about letting Amy or Penny's parents in on this, they're both likably confident in who they are and trusting in each other, even if Toni's future isn't quite so certain as Penny's seems to be. Alexandra Jensen's Amy isn't the same - she's seventeen and carries an emotional support stuffie around - but I really like how Jensen doesn't play Amy as a collection of tics and nervousness; she seems to take a second to think before speaking even if she misjudges her words. On the boys' side, Ben O'Toole is entitlement unleashed as Angus, ninety percent repugnant but with the sort of self-assurance that one can see why he might be kind of appealing to someone like Kat or go unquestioned by someone like Fletcher Humphys's Rodowsky who doesn't allow any sympathy into how he helps himself to Angus's scraps. Steve Le Marquand does really well with one of my favorite archetypes, the unrepentant criminal who nevertheless wants to be friggin' professional both for what he tells himself and because leaving a bunch of corpses around is bad for business.

And there will be corpses; it's a pretty gnarly movie where folks are likely to get maimed before being outright killed, and Russell is adept at using that to both make Angus & Kat seem more vicious and Toni's wins more satisfying. The gore team is on point throughout but Russell doesn't entirely lean on them to make the movie work: She doesn't exactly do a slow build but she tends to add momentum more than stopping for a breather, and she's crucially aware that Penny unconscious or dazed is going to create a lot more tension that the audience can grasp than various nasty injuries that much of the audience is going to read as "fun" special effects, and she's good at making sure there's really nothing sexy about it without making things more outwardly grotesque.

Indeed, I think what's kind of exciting about Penny Lane Is Dead and makes it feel noteworthy more than the setting or the quality of the gore is how the screenplay seems to reflect all the toxic forces at work in good balance: It is absolutely older guys preying on younger girls and even the surfer dudes at the local shop who are basically unproblematic don't serve as a "not all men" counterweight to that, but the engine that drives much of the violence is the jealousy and resentment among young women that is its own real thing even if Penny and her friends are great and casually supportive. Russell doesn't exactly bend things toward a definitive statement here, but she mixes these various impulses together in ways that give the movie a ring of truth even though it is, also, a revenge thriller with a ton of bloody action. It's good stuff, apt to satisfy the gorehounds but play like a real movie to those who want more.

Fantasia 2026.04: Niko, International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase '26, You Are the Film, "175", and Attack on Paradise

Another day, another short film package at the Museum seemingly scheduled with the intent of overlapping everything else in the schedule. But first, Niko.

Director Julien Birban Levy is French, apparently spent a fair amount of his youth in New York, lives and works in Tokyo, and decided that this particular film needed to be set in Seoul. I can't necessarily say that it captures that place specifically, although I kind of understand him saying Tokyo and Paris were too "cute" for it. I suspect that even the sections of those cities that were the appropriate sort of working-class-but-not-blue-collar might be too familiar or have some sort of quirky shorthand that makes them as today rather than a vague future. Interestingly, the neighborhood they found in Seoul was kind of emptied out, which really helped the vibe of the movie, though it's kind of odd: You make a movie that's partly about how capitalism is squeezing folks to death, and the best place to shoot it is a spot where capitalist redevelopment and gentrification is getting folks out of the way.

A couple hours later, I'm at the Museum for the sci-fi shorts, with "Echoes of Time" writer Charlie Clausen & director Gemma Lee; "Soulmate" writer/director/editor Jens-Julius Dall; "Noise of Waves" writer/director Tomasz Wróbel; "Idyll" producer/co-star Mina Sundwall & writer/director Austin Cauldwell; and "Horse Fly" writer/director Alex Park & D.P Adam LaPine . I've got to admit, the block made me feel kind of cranky after the claims that it was their best package ever, because, honestly can it really be that if not even one of the seven shorts was set in outer space? I kid, a bit, but it's kind of dreary to watch one short about someone getting addicted to a virtual reality app where every incremental upgrade comes with a pop-up saying it requires an additional fee or membership, and then have the second short be about someone addicted to a virtual reality app where every incremental upgrade comes with a pop-up saying it requires an extra fee or membership.

That wasn't the subject of all seven, but few of them felt like they were opening my eyes to something rather than rehashes of what I scroll past on social media daily. These are subjects worth exploring and on filmmakers' minds, but taken as a group, it just felt like such limited imagination, a lack of dreaming big, on top of all of them being European or English-language. Even the two that weren't about that sort of subject had filmmakers saying that they wanted to do a story about human relationships first and then worked in the fantastical elements to fit, but the upshot wound up being that it's less important to solve problems than to learn to accept them. Fair when the problem is "loved ones dying", sure, but combined with the rest…

All of these things are valid uses for the genre, and I've loved many stories along those lines. Some of the shorts were really good! But as a group, it's not just that this program was a bummer, but the implication that this is what folks working in the genre should aspire to seems wrong to me, like well-intentioned analysis about how great science fiction tells us about the here and now has diminished everything else about it.

Fortunately, I had time to sit around and grab some food before settling into Hall for the rest of the night. First up was You Are the Film, which matches the broad strokes of the subnormal but was oddly different in the details. Writer/director Makoto Ueda has done the screenplays for a number of fun recent time travel/loop films from Japan, so there was a big crowd.

Last up for the day, Mitch welcomed Bob Colaers, director of Attack on Paradise, and it's a shame star Said Boumazoughe wasn't here, because a lot was short of talking about what the film meant to him second-hand. Belgium has enough Moroccan and other MENA folks that he'd been frustrated not seeing anyone like him on-screen as a hero, so he came up with a sort, collaborated on the screenplay, trained like crazy, and then shot this movie in a building either very much like the place he grew up or the actual building, only doubled a handful of times during the action. It's kind of a crazy thing to will into existence, really.

Then to bed. Monday wound up being Our Effed Up World, Beasts Clutching at Straws, and Penny Lane Is Dead. You might bump into me Saturday as I more or less camp out in Hall for Bliss, Drag, AnyMart, and The Last Temptation of Becky.


Niko

☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2026 in Cinema de Sève (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

It feels a little odd to note that Niko could maybe stand to lose ten minutes or so and also suggest that it's one of the more interesting depictions of a slowly-decaying dystopia I can recall seeing, but there's pacing and what you're using that pacing to show, right? Both the title character and the odd nuances of the world she lives in are often fascinating to dig into, but there comes a point where director Julien Levy isn't really finding new things to examine, and his story doesn't quite sing as much without the thrill of discovery.

He posits that in the fairly near future, Seoul will impose a digital curfew on top of a physical one, with the internet shut off after 9pm and only 30-second analog calls permitted. Clever young Niko (Tiffany Young) has figured out a way to monetize that with "Locked Out Company Service Niko", where she'll hang out and chat while someone waits for a locksmith, or perhaps anything else where someone might otherwise be fiddling about on their phones. That's how she meets Jiyoon (Kim Soy), and while she usually doesn't develop real friendships on the job, Jiyoon's an exception. Meanwhile, her boyfriend Jeremy (Sandor Funtek) is working at a highly-specialized travel agency - only serving a Seoul to Nairobi route - as a side gig to his "one week, one photo" project. He's surprised to actually meet a potential customer, whose husband is mad to see lions, though she's initially looking to go to Addis Ababa. Neither are really making enough money to pay rent, and there doesn't seem to be much point in planning for the future.

It's hard out there for a manic pixie dream girl at the end of the world, especially when the government is out there trying to make it difficult for people to connect, lest they organize. Perhaps accidentally, Niko makes the argument that it's not the screens that are crushing our mental health, but the constant squeeze of existential dread and nobody having enough money to do anything while everything stops working around them. How often does the average person have to call a locksmith, for instance, and how far do things have to fall that doors not working is a major problem? The characters are trying to carve out niches, in ways that are often foolish because they are young and only know the problems. It's not a fun world to live in, but it's one where Levy is able to find interesting new corners and ideas without having to spend much money on effects or making its characters difficult to relate to.

It can admittedly be kind of insufferable, like when Jeremy is giving his "one week, one photo" spiel, or any other time folks are coming off as twee and arch; it's not hard to sympathize with the unnamed young woman delivering an apocalyptic newspaper and raging at the triviality of the other characters' concerns. There's rather more of people bemoaning their lot in nothing but words than needed, an occasional excess of introspection and self-importance.

A one-two punch that refreshes a few elements of eccentricity as containing at least a germ of mental illness may have one reconsider one's feelings in that respect, and I like the way Levy gets a viewer thinking along those lines before introducing a pill bottle that solidifies the direction without specifying too much unneeded detail. He treats this respectfully, not going with wry observations about how this is a reasonable response to a dying world, and the overall tenor at the end is tragic, even if not literally or immediately so - Niko may have a plan, but it's probably not a solution, and there's little that these individuals can do to make life easier for those struggling.

It makes Tiffany Young's performance as Niko grow as the film goes on. She initially seems very mannered, a K-pop idol who may be out of her depth despite that background requiring the exact sort of charisma that Niko needs to have, but when she starts to crack midway through, a lot of the same tics start to seem more in-character. It gives Sandor Funtek a little more to respond to, and also highlights how Kim Soy really becomes the glue of the film as it goes on, managing because she's maybe got a slightly more solid foundation than the others, personally messy rather than existentially so.

Seoul is an interesting place for a French filmmaker based in Japan to make a mostly English-language movie; Levy finds areas that can feel kind of overstuffed but can also be starkly empty, like the life has been sucked out but what's left has been crammed too tight. It's a recipe for despair that, nevertheless, can still make you believe that maybe there's still something for you there.


"Idyll"

☆ ☆ ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, DCP)

I went off a bit up top about how movies like "Idyll" feel kind of redundant as science fiction if you're following tech in any way, and I kind of don't know who is watching short sci-fi films that isn't, but it still hits its spots pretty well: The premise makes sense, the gags about how tech companies will create an addictive experience and then squeeze people for every upgraded hit possible are both funny in their timing and anger-inducing in how they ring true, and the whole thing clings together pretty well: It's not really a movie about how these curated channels create unrealistic expectations or how something sold as social actually separates one from their other friends in favor of bots and simulacra, but it fits in. That "Our Girl" (Mina Sundwall) is cute and name-checked as such works rather than seeming like something that would work against the movie, saying no-one is immune rather than trying to convince us she's a sad sack.

Being a short rather than a feature makes the end seem more than a bit rushed, though; writer/director Austin Cauldwell seems to be skipping to the most noteworthy events in chaotic fashion rather than using related ideas to reinforce each other like in the beginning. The end's a decent sting, but maybe not quite the one that follows from the rest of the movie.


"Soulmate" '26

☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, DCP)

This one also gets dinged a bit for playing right after "Idyll"; it's a lot of the same jokes and themes in less clearly polished form, and which you prefer might entirely be a matter of whether you like a movie that finishes with a rug-pull or a display of growth. I do kind of dig it for how relatively low-fi it is, not out of some knee-jerk preference for analog or DIY-style filmmaking, but for how most the the VR scenes being machinima using software that's not quite state of the art emphasizes that there's no way Jalte is fooling himself into believing the VR environment is real but that these bots and online-only experiences are giving him something he wants.

That extends to how Hampus Egelund spends almost the entire movie with VR goggles over his face that aren't exactly sleek and modern-looking, and you get a lot from his body language. He does really well walking around like this is something he's got plenty of practice doing even if it's not quite a person's natural state in this particular future. I kind of like that filmmaker Jens-Julius Dall kind of avoids showing other people's faces as well, at least for a bit, to disguise whether Jalte is a truly sad case or if we're looking at the future more generally.


"Algorithm"

☆ ☆ ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, DCP)

…and the internet is still awful and making it difficult to connect! Who knew?

There's kind of an interesting idea here, as filmmaker Emily Charlotte Poulter plays with how many of these social media sites/publishing platforms will tempt users with potential monetization, and there's a lot of potential in Evie (Leonie Federie) and Cora (Virginia Hartmann) finding that being split up has been bad for them financially even if they recognize that they really aren't good together. It feels like a really rich vein to mine between how this sort of thing is addictive and leads to one creating a sort of curated version of oneself, but the film doesn't get into much of that.

It might just be a matter of resources being thin and this being a pilot for a feature; there are one or two sets and the apartment set is especially barebones - it looks like Evie lives in a Big Green Room without any personality, bland and generically futuristic without many of the details that would make what seems like a pretty good premise sing.


"Szum fal" ("Noise of Waves")

☆ ☆ ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, DCP)

Oh, so we're off the internet being evil and on to contacting people you love from the past?

In this case, the fun is in the details - everything about the Ghost Phone is hand-crafted analog/retro, from the machine itself to the online video which looks like it was shot on VHS decades ago and maybe not uploaded recently, to how its effects are generated in-camera using a CRT and affecting the magnetic fields as you touch it. The back and forth between 13-year-old Antek (Marceli Sikora) and his father Pawel (Andrzej Konopka) is quite charming and has the right amount of melancholy while letting them feel alive. Sebastian Pawlak is fun as the inventor who mostly wants to get rid of this cursed thing while still having a glimmer in his eye.

Once it gets into the bit about how both Antek and Pawel potentially get lost trying to contact Antek's late mother, the movie dries out a bit; despite the novel mechanism, filmmaker Tomasz Wróbel feels more bound by what has to happen than going anywhere unexpected.


"Horse Fly"

☆ ☆ ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, DCP)

"Horse Fly" doesn't feel like a pilot for a feature so much as a short that excised a major chunk of what might make it interesting, to wit: Who are the targets of the drone missions that Cameron (Angela Wong Carbone) and Matteo (Brian Sutherland) are monitoring? Thematically, it would certainly hit harder if it were China, but I don't believe this is ever specifically stated, and the way the last scene talks about their base moving around suggests a United States at war with itself, and the checkpoints are also weird. During the Q&A, the filmmakers talked about preserving ambiguity, but I feel like ambiguity really works against this movie: Cameron seems torn up because she has been ignoring her Chinese heritage before meeting a family who immigrated from the same reason, and their shared ties work because they are specific, but the film's lack of detail makes it a sort of free-floating guilt.

Weird, because Carbone is good, as is Janet Hsieh as the shopkeeper surprised and delighted that the mixed-ethnicity customer who has been coming in for months speaks Mandarin, and the hand-made drone bunker is a really nifty little set. The folks involved all know their stuff, and having everything front and center feels like it would solidify the whole thing.


"HappyDeal"

☆ ☆ ☆ ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, DCP)

And we end back where we began, with modern internet-enabled capitalism making everybody miserable with the really nasty bit being that most of the darkly satirical elements here are barely exaggerated. Here, Emma (Marie Kauffmann) is working at not-Amazon-wink fulfilment center that has been thoroughly gamified with the reward being an apartment and being taken on as a salaried employee. She's looking good until she twists her ankle, but that leads to another opportunity.

If you've read anything about what working an Amazon warehouse or delivery route is like, there's a lot in this movie that will have you nod, thinking "yeah, that's probably the next step", and the film more or less runs on each of them seeming like they should be beyond the pale even as you can see unaccountable billionaires and corporations doing them as soon as possible. It works a lot more often than not; Kauffmann's Emma is easy to root for, and she does very well at communicating that she knows this is insane and soul-destroying but rationalizing it because she and her daughter need to eat and sleep, without a lot of laying it out plainly. Filmmakers Alexis & Jeremie Lopez do very well handling the frustrating details, as well, such as how online polls are less about gathering reactions than getting a chance to signify loyalty, or how something meant to be awful will be presented as helping veterans.

The story is kind of built to fizzle, because ending it on a riot or Emma winning the competition or losing it because someone else was more committed or anything, really, is going to be either unsatisfying or undermine the point. It probably couldn't end any other way but how it does, but it's abrupt but not quite ironic enough to be an absolute gut-punch.


You Are the Film

☆ ☆ ☆ ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2026 in Théátre Hall (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

You Are the Film is slight and anything-goes to the point of eventually becoming nonsense, but then, those are arguably also this movie's virtues. It's 67 minutes long and has a pair of absolutely insane final-act twists that will get some folks laughing out of sheer incredulity, but it's been meta from the start, so there's no arguing that this isn't what you signed up for.

It opens by introducing the audience to two young people in similar situations: Madoka (Marika Ito) manages and writes for a small theater troupe that mostly performs in a small pub but is on the verge of playing a large venue; Kazuma (Kai Inowaki) is the glue holding a rock band that plays in a nearby bar together. The proprietors of the establishments give them flyers for movies playing in the theater next door, but when they arrive, rather than meeting each other in person, they see their opposite numbers on the screen, and get kind of annoyed that the film appears to be interactive, before reading the synopses to each other reveals that two of Madoka's cast are about to quit and some hamsters are threatening the other members of Kazuma's band over money their guitarist stole.

From there, things mostly proceed in real time with Madoka and Kazuma rushing in and out of the theater to deal with their respective issues, occasionally returning to the theater to consult or talking over their shoulder. These challenges, by and large, aren't exactly intractable on their own, which means the crossing over is more fun chaos than the movie becoming an interconnected moebius strip of a plot. It's fairly shaggy, maybe unavoidably so given the meta nature of the story, where cinematic logic is going to be invoked rather than drawing charts.

It can go pretty far on how amiable its two leads are, though, and their performances parallel each other nicely enough for the premise to work while also feeling distinct enough that they're not repeating themselves. Marika Ito and Kai Inowaki manage the neat trick of having chemistry while spending most of the movie only seeing each other on a film screen, impressing with their commitment to their art even as they acknowledge what a mixed blessing it is to do so with their friends. Ito probably has the stronger general ensemble around her, but Inowaki plays off, the guitarist, nicely.

(This all takes place in what looks like a delightfully cozy theater surrounded by a fish & chips café, vintage shop, and rock bar; I'm envious!)

It eventually becomes chaos, and I'm kind of torn between wishing Ueda has a big budget to work with for the last act and appreciating the shoestring absurdity he goes with. There's fun in both approaches, but the one Ueda chooses shows how his reach exceeds his grasp, and for as high-energy as the last act is, you can kind of feel him flailing and maybe wish that this was a more cohesive film, more the ouroboros his previous works managed to be while still feeling like anything could happen.

This isn't quite the magic trick that Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes and River were, but it's cute, goofy, and finishes quickly rather than wearing out its welcome.


"175"

☆ ☆ ☆ ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2026 in Théátre Hall (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

This is an impressively nasty little short without a whole lot of overt violence, in large part because its edge is baked into its politics, with its characters' humanist goals in direct opposition to the violent, inhumane actions they will use to achieve them. The screw-turning is nice - cops in the café where those trying to prevent a vote on exclusionary immigration policy are holding a representative's son, the captors being a bunch of amateurs who aren't all sold on the plan - but what's really effective is how the filmmakers know this clearly cannot work: Good people will choke doing bad things, from taunting the cops because they've become too assured to being lax with the weapons they don't want to use. Evil will more directly beget evil.

In some ways, the ending seems a bit too abrupt and not what the rest of the film was leading to, but in others, it couldn't be otherwise: All the strong performances and nail-biting cutaways to television coverage of the vote is always going to lead to a mess, and likely one that plays as unfair and random.


Paradise (Attack on Paradise)

☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2026 in Théátre Hall (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

There's got to be a great book in looking at the "fight your way in/out/up/down" genre, which seemingly hit its apogee in The Raid, likely the first movie people can remember to being all-in on the idea, though it likely has antecedents back to the silent era in film and a whole host of video game brawlers. The Raid hit at just the right point to be hard to top in terms of sheer action, so something like Attack on Paradise has to lean a bit more on personality, which it has in bunches even if it's often sort of messy.

It opens with Suleyman "Solo" Akhari (Saïd Boumazoughe) being pulled over on a garbage traffic violation only to have the racist cops who try to beat him discover he's got martial arts skill they don't, with one left dead or incapacitated enough that Suleyman spends seven years in prison. When he gets out and attempts to return home to Paradise Apartments, he finds a great deal has changed for the worse: Not only has his diabetic mother (Fatima Khanfour) lost her husband and other son while Suleyman was locked up, but she has been moved to a smaller unit on a lower floor because the upper two are now occupied by "Prince Hanza Haddad" (Achmed Akkabi), a gang kingpin who has decided to make the building his fortress. It's also his lousy luck that the cops have decided this is the day they're going to take the Prince, and not only are they none too concerned about the residents of the building, mostly poor immigrants, but they've severely underestimated the firepower Prince has. It's not too long before Suleyman winds up thrown together with Yasmine (Clara Cleymans), a single mother on her first mission as a member of SWAT, where the only way out appears to be fighting their way up to take the Prince down.

Attack on Paradise is a labor of love for star Saïd Boumazoughe, and while "extremely violent brawler" might be an odd dream project for someone not particularly known for action work, it clicks into place a bit when you learn that he grew up in an Antwerp high-rise much like the Paradise (if not that actual building) and seldom saw other Moroccan immigrants in this sort of role. He's certainly done the prep, getting into great shape and training to at least sell the moves he makes on-screen even when he's paired up with a much larger MMA-fighter type. Of course, part of that is that he's willing to take a beating on-screen in the way that some action specialists aren't; he's got no problem selling that he's running on fumes at points, looking sort of knowingly ambivalent when thugs praise him as a cop-killer (he's obviously not proud but not going to contradict these guys), or engaging in different sorts of amusing banter with his mom or the old friend who runs the convenience store at ground level.

He's given a fine counterpart in Clara Cleymans, who plays Yasmine as equal parts "only woman on the team who has to act extra-tough to deal with the meatheads around her" and just being like that; Yasmine and Suleyman are both Not Screwing Around in different ways but there's something very fun about how she's got the tough-guy energy and he's the put-upon partner, even if that's not their roles. It would be nice if they had adversaries who were on their level beyond selling fights; Achmed Akkabi makes the Prince ruthless but not quite intimidating, while Jamal Ben Saddik and Soroush Helali don't have much personality as his toughest enforcers. Imanuelle Grives is entertaining as the lieutenant (and Suleyman's former lover) who is there in part to serve as Yasmine's final boss, and there are some colorful opponents, but no-one who plays as much more than an obstacle to the heroes.

Which is fine; the point is to make Suleyman and Yasmine run a gauntlet, with director Bob Colaers and the action team going as hard as they can for as long as they can. Boumazoughe does a lot of his own stuntwork and I suspect that a lot of his opponents were cast for their ability to move as much as look threatening, so fights look pretty darn good for a relatively modest Belgian flick, with a few sequences feeling at least a bit inventive and unusual. Colliers and company don't stint on the blood and guts even when it might raise some eyebrows - does Belgian SWAT go straight for headshots before announcing their presence generally, or is that something reserved for immigrants, or artistic license because the filmmakers know what their audience came to see? - just blasting the hell out of everything as they throw their heroes against increasingly larger-than-life bad guys.

It's a fun stretch of no-messing-around action, and I certainty wouldn't mind seeing Boumazoughe and/or Cleymans back for round two, especially if they get some more charismatic villains.

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.

Unidentified

I feel like I say some variation on this every time I see something released by Sony Pictures Classics these days, but it's odd that I'm heading out to Arlington to see this one, rather than it playing in Kendall Square or at the Coolidge. SPC used to be the Kendall's bread and butter, putting out a bunch of foreign and indie material that maybe wasn't as high-profile as what Focus, Searchlight, and the Weinstein Company picked up, but there was something new every couple weeks. It's a different world, now - streamers hoover worldwide rights up up so things don't get theatrical releases abroad, Neon and A24 want to be late Miramax more than early Miramax, Kendall Square has chosen to focus more on mainstream fare than boutique fare since the pandemic, as has the Coolidge to a lesser extent (they've added two screens but play more mainstream material), while AMC Boston Common is casting a larger net with fancier places nearby, but not so much when there are big releases - and that sometimes means that the unusual releases wind up in Arlington but nowhere else.

It's a bit of a pain; if you use transit, it means transferring to the 77 or 350 bus, or walking a bit from Alewife, which filters some of the audience out, and the layouts could really use an upgrade. Like, if they are showing movies on screen #1 on one day and screen #anything else on another, you go on that first day. But, hey, at least they're open to sometimes grabbing something like this on occasion, even if it is mostly just keeping a screen warm for a week. The area needs that.

Anyway, on another note, I've already gotten one like on the hastily-jotted paragraph I put on Letterboxd while riding the bus, and following it to the person's own review, there's a lot of time on calling this Saudi propaganda. And, sure, I've been thinking that Saudi Arabia has seemed to be making a push to fund and be portrayed more favorably on film recently, although the amount seems to be coincidence; Desert Warrior and In the Grey were delayed a different amount of years each to wind up coming out so close to Hokum. But I don't know to what extent this is a propaganda push to make the country look good so much as it's an Arabian filmmaker reflecting a country that is changing but maybe not as fast as some, probably including people like director Haifaa Al-Mansour, may like.

We all fall prey to this, whether it's trying to wedge every movie from Hong Kong into a box about it being about Hong Kong's relationship with mainland China or watching a Vietnamese movie that takes place in what looks a lot more like a comfortable American suburb than the image of the poor farming villages we're carrying from 50 years ago and being surprised. There's truth to both points of view: What it's like to be a Saudi woman is going to permeate Al-Mansour's movies the way China is going to loom over films about Hong Kong whether that's the point or not, and I think a lot of movies like this are going to be made with the folks who live in the middle-class neighborhoods where the malls and multiplexes are and can afford to go to the movies in mind, reflecting their lives (and be aspirational for others).

Ultimately, Unidentified feels more like the sort of movie that someone like Al-Mansour who has lived and worked internationally and seen changes in her homeland would find to be an interesting yarn about its present, more so than something aiming to make a point, and certainly not to outsiders. If KSA was looking to use it to present itself as a more modern, liberal country than it is, they've certainly got the funds to four-wall it better! I suspect that it's more the thriller that folks like Al-Mansour and her characters would like to see than how they want outsiders to see them.

I do also suspect that KSA is liberalizing somewhat because its leaders can see the writing on the wall on how good renewable energy and batteries are getting and they're going to have to deal with the rest of the world on the world's own terms and sell their desert grandeur as much as what's underneath, even though the ruling class is not going to let go of power any faster than they can, but that's probably the background more than the point here.


Al-majhoula (Unidentified)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 June 2026 in Arlington Capitol #3 (first-run, DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

I suspect that many Westerners who see Unidentified will be drawn by the novelty of it being a female-directed/led mystery from Saudi Arabia. That is a thing that, depending on our assumptions, things like it should not exist, but here it is, and it's actually pretty impressive, a solid crime story that plays on the audience's assumptions and satisfies when it reveals the depth of its sleight of hand.

It opens with the body of a young girl being dumped in the desert outside of Riyadh before introducing Nawal (Mila Alzahrani), who has moved to the city since her husband divorced her about a year ago, a box labeled "baby clothes" implying a tragic story. He brother Arif (Mishal Aleanzi) thinks she should move back home, but she seems to be enjoying her job at the North Riyadh police station, scanning documents for digitalization, chatting with Lt. Majid (Shafi Alharthi) over their shared fandom of an Arabic-language true crime podcast (she likes the combination of lurid violence and makeup tips, while he notes the forensic work is surprisingly solid). With the station's sole woman in uniform at training in Jeddah, Majid brings Nawal to the crime scene to handle duties that would be unacceptable for a man. He probably should have predicted that Nawal would start trying to solve the crime herself, figuring the men at the station would not prioritize it.

There's an odd feel to how Nawal goes about trying to solve the mystery, in that she's more or less attacking it like a cop, making lists of possibilities and doing a great deal of footwork to cross things off, even though she is pointedly not one. The crime itself stays tantalizingly out of focus for some time, with the attention not quite shifting to Nawal's life even as her reasons for this being so important to her snap into clearer focus. Director Haifaa Al-Mansour and her co-writer Brad Niemann never minimize the actual crime even as the focus often shifts to what Nawal has to do to make progress in solving it, but they dole out new information slowly enough that the more personal elements have to fill the space.

That's fine, because in a lot of ways the film is what it's like to be a young woman in today's Saudi Arabia, which is in some ways not quite so restrictive as the images that took up residence in this viewer's head around Operation Desert Storm and haven't necessarily been updated despite the occasional news story about women being allowed to drive and movie theaters opening, but that often winds up highlighting just how arbitrary and dangerous the limits that do remain are. Intentionally or not, Al-Mansour plays with westerners' assumptions on that count, and also lets it heighten the tension. There's an extra dollop of danger to every bit of Nawal's amateur sleuthing as the audience is acutely aware, just by the nature of the crime, that she is in danger not just for getting close to the truth, but for being a woman with the nerve to be nosy or exceeding her nonexistent authority. Fascinatingly, the resistance often comes from other women, who often display a combination of having internalized their place in the order of things, fear that they might not be able to get away with what Nawal does, or (especially among the teenagers) nihilistic resignation at their limited futures.

It gives star Mila Alzahrani a lot to work with, and she's magnetic throughout. As the movie goes on, she does great work merging the young woman enjoying freedom and being able to indulge her unladylike interests with someone whose marriage collapsed with tragedy, trauma, and rejection. She's a ton of fun to watch, a little bit cocky and sarcastic and plenty smart. Shafi Alharthi is an enjoyable foil for her, maybe not quite a father figure but likable in how he often seems to respect her even if he's old enough to need some effort to keep traditionalism and condescension at bay. Mishal Aleanzi only has a couple scenes as her older brother but they form a great bookend in terms of being a patrician busybody and how clear it is that he's going to have his sister's back. It also highlights Abdullah Alqahtani's performance as the religious calligrapher/graffiti artist who was close enough to the victim to be the prime suspect - how Arif and Nawal interact helps flesh out Mishal and Amal.

Al-Mansour is good at making scenes like that perform double duty, because this is a mystery even if the themes of grief and needing closure assume greater prominence as the film goes on. She never exactly lies to the audience but she does misdirect, enough to make the end of the movie a pretty nifty set of dominoes as new bits of information click into place. What's great about it as the last act of a mystery is that the flashbacks highlight what was in plain sight as much as what was hidden, with there being a great deal of satisfaction in how people were never truly misrepresented. The characters can be seen struggling with their assumptions, much the same way the audience is (presumably at home and abroad).

The effect is that of a good mystery paperback: A pretty breezy tale that nevertheless has something to say about the environment in which it takes place if one is inclined to look, while also keenly aware that the audience is there to play a shell game with the writers and commentary does not necessarily come before crime. It's a smart genre story that the filmmakers pull back down to earth when it threatens to get too close to prestige drama.

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?