Film Box

Casted_Runes said:I just saw Poor Things and it was fantastic. In a sense, it’s like the “adults only” version of Barbie (2023) and gives a lot more of what I hoped for from that film: a fundamentally feminist narrative woven subtly within a fantasy tale. Both films are about a woman living a relatively charmed life - but as a prisoner of her specific environment. Something inside them longs to explore the outside, and they do, becoming fully-rounded human women in the process. Poor Things is set in a fantasy version of Victorian society and tells the simple story of a woman’s growth and self-discovery, in a remarkably odd and imaginative fashion. It’s funny, filthy, beautiful, moving, and one of the best films I’ve seen in the last five years.

Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and written by Tony McNamara, based on a novel by Scottish author Alasdair Gray, the film stars Emma Stone as Bella Baxter, a “pretty r****d” in one man’s words. A Frankenstein-esque creation of Dr Godwin “God” Baxter (Willem Dafoe), she has been made from the corpse of a woman whom we see in the film’s first shot throwing herself from Tower Bridge. Baxter’s assistant, medical student Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), falls in love with Bella. But her longing for freedom is wetted by Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), a “pretty moron” who takes her on a Grand Tour of Europe during which her childlike state matures, and she finds herself becoming a person apart from what men have always wanted of her.

This is a film with a lot of very frank sex and language, including a refreshingly nonexploitative but still explicit lesbian scene, yet it feels so much more mature than most other Hollywood films which deal with similar material. Lanthimos has explored such themes before in The Favourite (2018), his film about Queen Anne’s fictionalised (and probably fictional) semi-lesbian relationships with her ladies-in-waiting. Both films are leavened by black comedy, although Poor Things reaches further into fantasy. Bella Baxter’s sexual escapades across Europe could have seemed sordid or fetishised in another director’s hands, but Lanthimos handles them with good humour, honesty, and maturity.

The visual look of the film is gorgeous, using saturation, desaturation, black-and-white, fish eye lenses, and other techniques to mirror the emotional as well as physical landscape. The settings are characters in the plot. London, Lisbon, and Paris are evoked with as much magic realism as, say, Mordor or Narnia.

Perhaps most importantly, the characters are developed or revealed with a keen understanding of and compassion for their natures. This is a feminist text, but not preachily so. Bella Baxter is at one level a comment on the heroine of Victorian literature, the abused and “ruined” woman who must kill herself to earn our sympathy. Without even realising what he’s doing, Dr Baxter - himself a victim of a sadistic patriarch - rewrites Bella Baxter’s story so that she’s not just a prettily tragic suicide, but a New Woman, divorced from men’s hangups about sex and sexuality and who finds the tools to self-actualise. She’s every woman, but also her own woman. Not just a poor thing, or a pretty child, but a human undefined by her sexual choices and how her successive male jailers interpret them.

Rating: 4/4

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I love this review.

The book was amazing. I haven't seen the movie yet, I'm always terrified to see the movie for a book I really loved. I'm glad it sounds like it stands up to the absolute hilarity of book, which I celebrated as a feminist retelling of Frankenstein, but with the protagonist as a sympathetic monster the entire time.

Thank you, Betty! I still haven’t read the book. It’s on my list.

Betty said:

I love this review.

The book was amazing. I haven't seen the movie yet, I'm always terrified to see the movie for a book I really loved. I'm glad it sounds like it stands up to the absolute hilarity of book, which I celebrated as a feminist retelling of Frankenstein, but with the protagonist as a sympathetic monster the entire time.



I just watched it recently, Betty! You'll love it!

“There’s nothing wrong with Ellen. It’s just that she loves too much.”

Oh, there’s something wrong with Ellen, all right. Possibly the first and probably the best of the “psycho girlfriend” genre in cinema, made famous by Glenn Close’s and Michael Douglas’ sleazy Fatal Attraction (1987) - and Clint Eastwood’s directorial debut Play Misty for Me (1971) - this 1945 film is the eerie portrait of one of the evilest, most pathological women in fiction. It’s also available on YouTube for free (which I wish I’d known before renting it via a streaming service!).

Ellen Berent (Gene Tierney) is a beautiful socialite who seduces a novelist, Richard Marland (Cornel Wilde), purely because he looks like her late father. Her lack of interest in him as a discrete entity is signalled early on when, not knowing his identity, she admits to not liking his book very much.

She’s apologetic on finding out he wrote it, and when it happens that they’ll be sharing a ranch in Mexico, where she and her family have gone to scatter her father’s ashes, a whirlwind romance leads to marriage. But Ellen wants only him, and for him to only want her, living alone together at the Back of the Moon (their rural retreat) without interference from either his writing, her family, or his crippled little brother (Darryl Hickman)…

Leave Her to Heaven, its title taken from a line in Hamlet where the old king’s ghost tells the prince to not seek vengeance against the widowed queen, draws heavily on Greek mythology. Ellen’s characterisation is inspired by the Electra complex, based on the story of a woman who fell in love with her own father. Of course, from a Freudian perspective, most little girls go through a period of being “in love” with their fathers. Ellen just never grew out of that period. The dialogue I quoted at the start is from her mother, in response to Richard’s questioning. She may be reassuring herself as much as Richard.

Filmed in lush Technicolour, this earlier film improves on both Misty and Attraction. It’s more disturbing than either, despite its U for Universal (G for General Audiences in America) rating. Neither of the later films was all that interested in their antagonists as characters, presenting them more as force-of-nature psychobitches without histories or motivations, less grounded in a detailed arc than many slasher villains. (Close pushed for a more psychologically astute ending to Attraction that happens to somewhat reflect Heaven’s, though test screenings led to the visceral but absurd finale that we got.)

Tierney is magnificent as Ellen Berent. Unlike Alex Forrest (the Close character), you can see why someone would like and maybe fall in love with her. She’s beautiful, yes, a sexual icon of her era, but that’s not all she is. She’s also convincingly kind and normal to people who don’t know her well, and even to people who do. When her sister Ruth (Jeanne Crain) finally blows up at her, it’s only after two violent incidents, a lot of provocation, and probably a lifetime of making excuses for her sister. We don’t really like to believe the worst of each other, especially those we’ve known for so long.

One of the joys of movies like this is thinking about their themes and hidden meanings, below the protective surface that censorship demands. My suspicion is that Ellen was a victim of incest by her father, which her mother maybe to some degree suspected but didn’t have the language to address, and this is what lies behind Ellen’s pathology. A film from 1945 cannot address this directly either, leaving you to wonder why it is that Ellen became so obsessed…

Sidenote: A supporting role is played by Vincent Price before he entered his horror phase. Unless you count this as a horror film, which in a way I do.

Rating: 4/4

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I just saw Kinds of Kindness and it was certainly an experience. A trilogy of short stories themed around sex, relationships, abuse, and power, it may be director/co-writer Yorgos Lanthimos’ coldest and most contemptuous film, with a title as playfully un-apt on a surface level as Todd Solondz’s Happiness (1998), another film about sad and neurotic people in a modern world where warmer feelings have been leached out. Kinds of Kindness is an absurdist comedy with humour as dark as a night in the mines, reminiscent here and there of the surrealist director David Lynch.

It probably isn’t for a lot of general moviegoers partly because it’s a film that doesn’t do much of the legwork with regards to meaning and intent for you, in fact not much at all, but perhaps largely because it’s so unrelievedly bleak, cruel, and cynical, with no major characters that are likeable or even charming really. The three stories star Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone, and Willem Defoe in varied combinations of relationships with each other and playing different characters each time. The effect is a bit like watching cells break apart and coalesce under a microscope, which I think is an apt description of Lanthimos’ narrative approach here. His two prior films, The Favourite (2018) and Poor Things (2023), were historical dramas which although highly stylised and tied to the director’s particular vision, presented more in the way of three-act stories with clear goals.

Kinds of Kindness, on the other hand, is Lanthimos unmoored from considerations of closure and clarity or, well, kindness. Even when truly dreadful things happen to the characters - like self-harm, dismemberment, and date rape - they don’t grow or change or become kinder people as a result. Almost all of them are utterly selfish, manipulative, sometimes pathetic, sometimes controlling. The first story sees Plemons as a man whose life is dictated to the finest detail - from what he eats and what he reads to whether or not he has children - by his employer (Defoe). The second casts Plemons as a man whose wife (Stone) returns from an ill-fated boat trip and seems like a different person. The third forefronts Stone as a cultist seeking a prophesied woman who can bring people back from the dead. The stories are linked by a non-speaking (as I recall) character called RMF, an older man tangentially connected to the main players’ lives and sometimes used as a pawn by them.

The third is my favourite story, which is the one with the most narrative propulsion, mystery, and suspense. It also ends on a note so incredibly cynical it’s like the ending of a conte cruel or tale of the unexpected. The second story is the next best in my ranking, with a weird and compelling monologue by Stone about an Isle of Dogs that leads to an amusing end-credits sequence. The first story is good, but more of an aperitif for what follows.

The film opens with a perfect opening song choice: “Sweet Dreams” by Eurythmics, which contains the lyrics: “Some of them want to abuse you, some of them want to be abused.” If you find yourself struggling to understand Kinds of Kindness, that’s its thesis right there.

Rating: 3/4

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I just saw In a Violent Nature and it was really good. I would have thought that there were no more places to take the slasher film, a subgenre that’s been played both straight and ironically in just about every permutation imaginable. But this Canadian entry manages it, pitching somewhere between (very) black humour and a genuine example of the formula. It’s clearly a riff on the Jason Voorhees, Friday the 13th movies, to a point where you could call it a spiritual sequel, but its deconstruction of the formula expands to all movies about mad supernatural killers who stalk twenty-something teenagers.

It’s basically a psychological drama about what it would be like to be such a villain, the first film to seriously ask, ‘How does it feel, moment to moment, to be a motiveless horror movie construct?’ For a slasher fan, it sheds new light on all those Jason, Michael, Freddy, etcetera flicks that came before. That it’s also incredibly gruesome in its practical effects is a lovely bonus.

The killer here, like all his predecessors, does in fact have a crude motivation open to discussion by fans. And like all the great (and not-so-great) slasher movies of the past, what happens in the current storyline is motivated by horrific events in the past. A rural part of America is haunted by Johnny (Ry Barrett), the zombie of a boy who was killed by loggers in the so-called White Pines massacre. A group of young people find a locket by the remains of an old fire tower and take it, an event which is followed by Johnny’s emergence from his slumber.

The narrative is told mostly from his mute and undead perspective as he walks the woods, killing whomever he finds in search of the locket, often in the grisliest manner possible. Very little music plays as he goes his gory way and the rest of the film is largely matter-of-fact in presenting its plot. Its stroke of genius is in how it assembles all of the tropes and elements of a slasher film so that you can tell the exact same story from the victims’ perspectives, then turns them on their heads so that you see it only through the eyes of the killer.

Back when slashers were enjoying their heyday critics would complain that they would present themselves too much from the killer’s POV, which they found sadistic and often sexist, but really this wasn’t the case beyond certain shots. The main perspective always rested with the Final Girl and her cannon fodder friends. That’s why some of the worst slasher films are just nonentities walking in the woods and talking nonsense between kills.

One of In a Violent Nature’s best scenes is when we hear the story of the White Pines massacre. All slashers are at heart campfire tales, the sort of overdone rickety tale-telling that you do with your friends, and as the tale is told here we see the camera move behind and around the circle of characters, having shown that Johnny is in the woods just beyond their gathering.

We only glimpse the interpersonal relationships that these characters share, for example, that one of them is going through a tough time and another doesn’t like him, a conversation glimpsed through a window of the inevitable cabin in the woods. The more traditional version of this film would show us inside the cabin and have us observe all this character stuff. In a Violent Nature reveals only what scattered bits and pieces Johnny would see or hear.

This definitely isn’t a film for everyone. There were walkouts in my screening, mostly of couples on dates. I’d hazard a guess that they were expecting a straightforward slasher piece with loud music, melodrama, and easily digestible themes. A lot of In a Violent Nature at a surface level is just walking around through beautiful cinematography (the woods have rarely looked so lovely in this genre) punctuated by extremely gory kills without much chase or mainstream-style suspense.

It’s probably too weird for casual genre fans and is aimed more squarely at those with a nigh-on obsession with the genre, as well as more critical viewers who’ll enjoy the careful and intelligent deconstruction of narrative formula. In its way, it does for the slasher film what Scream (1996) did, though inevitably with far less cultural impact.

I liked the gore, and I liked the moving nature of the monster, who despite his atrocities accords to a nature that wasn’t of his making, really. A monologue near the end of the film captures this perfectly. The title “In a Violent Nature” has two meanings, one nature itself, the other the nature of the beast. And how those two natures unite in a sad little boy called Johnny.

Rating: 3.5/4

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I just saw Longlegs and it was really good. It has one of the best minimalist prologues that I’ve seen in a while, ruthlessly exploiting the child’s POV to create a haunting moment without any violence at all. It also begins with a quote from the classic rock band T-Rex that informs both the prologue and what follows in creepy, unsettling ways.

This is the new horror film from Osgood Perkins, son of Anthony “Norman Bates” Perkins. He’s carved out a niche in tricksy, psychological-cum-supernatural movies. He clearly knows a bit about and appreciates the genre more than someone like, say, Ari Aster, whose work in horror - Hereditary (2018), Midsommar (2019) - was clearly just a prelude to the arthouse project (2023’s Beau is Afraid) that he wanted to make, caring about analogy rather than occultic tropes and themes, really.

The plot sees a psychic FBI agent (Maika Monroe) investigate a serial killer known as Longlegs, who’s been operating for decades and whose crimes seem at first to be cases of murder-suicides where the father kills his family before taking his own life. Letters left in code, however, indicate the presence of a third party. Who showed up out of a clear blue sky and somehow managed to make completely normal men do the unthinkable…

Nicolas Cage is a producer on Longlegs and also stars in a role that rides the razor’s edge between authentic character work and unleashed gonzo weirdness. It’s a very “Nicolas Cage” performance that may elicit a smile or laugh but is also genuinely creepy and compelling. He seems like the sort of scuzzy weirdo whom parents have nightmares about finding in their child’s company.

The filmmaking is so rich in atmosphere that you could wade through it. Though it utilises a few more “scares” than I’d like, its true scariness comes from the world it evokes, a standard suburban America of the ‘90s (you can tell the period by the portrait of Bill Clinton in the FBI offices) with the Devil lurking somewhere in the details.

Monroe’s performance is pitch perfect, each of her jittery movements and expressions evincing an expert control of characterisation. Perkins injects a sense of humour into proceedings that encompasses her as well, including a shot where she bonds with a colleague’s daughter, which got a big laugh from the audience I saw the film with.

The story starts to taper off a little for me as its mysteries are revealed. Without spoiling anything, I’m not a big fan of when crime/horror films of this type lead their central plot back to the protagonist, making them more than just the detective investigating. The Silence of the Lambs (1991) would have been a lesser film if it turned out that Buffalo Bill and Hannibal Lecter knew both each other and Clarice Starling since the latter was small.

The problem is that plotting like that is too clever for its own good, and exposes the story for what it is: a screenplay construct. Elsewhere, there are one or two character decisions from Monroe that feel a bit ropey and eyebrow-raising.

Otherwise, though, this is high-quality horror fiction that’s well worth your time for both style and substance.

Rating: 3/4

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I just saw Deadpool & Wolverine and it was good. The Deadpool movies are my favourites of the Marvel cinematic stable because I’m not too invested in the larger overarching stories of these films and Deadpool provides a less baggage-laden movie-going experience, mixing self-aware humour, cartoonish ultraviolence, and large-scale set pieces.

That isn’t to say that they’re completely uninfected by the large helpings of treacle that presumably come across as high drama to invested franchise fans. I’d always be happy personally to turn off these movies once the Big Bad has been defeated and the heroes go on their victory lap/exposition wrap-up.

But they’re films where I’m solidly entertained for a not gargantuan amount of time (this one is 2 hours and 7 minutes, while Deadpool 2 was 119 minutes and the original Deadpool a comparatively trim 108). They’re like watching superhero films from the ‘90s or early ‘00s when it wasn’t assumed that everyone in the audience was a fanboy/girl and there needed to be some compelling reason to watch beyond brand loyalty.

Funnily enough, although it’s the longest and in its way might be the most bloated, bombastic, and least solidly plotted, this is probably my favourite of the three Deadpool films. I didn’t really care about the story in a dramatic sense and found it at times hard to understand to the degree that it just felt like tropes (British villain, wounded hero with a past, etc.) hammered together, then larded with jargon (what’s a “Time Ripper”? What does “TVA” stand for again? I kept thinking that it was a TV channel).

I found myself asking silly questions like “Where does Channing Tatum’s character keep getting brand label booze in the Void?”, a Mad Max-esque apocalyptic tundra where troublesome super-people are abandoned. Is someone from the multiverse shopping for him at liquor stores and then transporting the purchases?

At any rate, Ryan Reynolds returns as the merc with the mouth who in this instalment must dig up (literally, in the prologue’s case) Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, and travels to various universes to do so, bringing back the “worst” one, a shambling drunk who did something shameful enough to provide a secret that will be revealed.

Wolverine was the “anchor being” of Deadpool’s universe, meaning that upon his death that strand of reality or “timeline” started to deteriorate and now corrupt officials from the “sacred” timeline are looking to yakety-yak yak, we’d be here all day if I tried to summarise this stuff. Details are there in comic book films like this, but they’re not really important unless you’re the type of person who commits to understanding them, like the soap opera fan who can recall who’s been married to/had affairs with/cheated on whom.

What I liked were the characters and their dialogue, which are funny and whimsical as they move through comic book landscapes that are often eye-popping in their effects and choreography. The film is also kind of a musical in how it scores its various bloody fight scenes with ‘80s and ‘90s pop ballads, including *NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye” and Madonna’s “Like a Prayer”. The film essentially distils what worked about its predecessors - self-aware humour, dirty jokes, violence, gore - and cranks the dial until it snaps off.

Rating: 3/4

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I just saw Trap and it were crap. (More like Claptrap, amirite?! My humblest apologies.) Of course it was, though, it’s by M Night Shyamalan. He’s only made crap for the last… what? 20 years? Apparently Split (2016) is worth a watch, but I’ve no desire to see another movie about M Night not understanding and somehow getting away with grossly mischaracterising mental illness and those who suffer from it as ticking time bombs.

Of course, you could fill a stadium with things that M Night doesn’t understand, which brings us neatly to Trap, which is about a father (Josh Hartnett) who takes his teenage daughter to see a concert by Lady Raven. She’s played by Saleka, a real R&B singer and M Night’s daughter. I wonder how she got the role?! It certainly wasn’t via a rigorous audition process, since her “acting” is so disconnected and flat that she seems like a space alien at times.

Hartnett’s character’s secret is that he’s really a serial killer nicknamed “the Butcher”, a name that I would have given my story’s antagonist when I was twelve. Shockingly original imagination, that M Night. I can see where he got the idea that his films are too good for America, when he responded to a question about their poor box office with the absurd coping strategy that they just have “European pacing”. Okay. And I have an arse like Nicki Minaj’s.

“The Big Bad Man No Really You Guys” realises that, dun dun dun, the concert is a trap! And a profiler played by Hayley Mills is coming for… wait. Hayley Mills. As in, from The Parent Trap (1961)? Why on earth is beloved 78-year-old British character actress Hayley Mills playing a hard-nosed FBI profiler who brings down serial killers and leads SWAT teams?

It can’t be… noooo… it’s surely not the case that M Night Hitchcock, “I like to play the audience like a broken kazoo” Shyamalan woefully miscast a crucial role in his film because he thought that casting the star of The Parent Trap in a film called Trap was funny? WHY AREN’T WE CATAPULTING OSCARS THROUGH THIS MAN’S WINDOWS ON THE DAILY?! THAT’S SO FUNNY, M NIGHT, THAT’S SO CLEVER! I’M SO GLAD THAT YOU GET TO MAKE HIGH PROFILE ENTERTAINMENT WHILE TALENTED OUTSIDERS CAN’T GET A FOOT IN THE DOOR!

To be serious for a moment, Trap is a stupid and tension-free film which is of a type where every character or plot decision is moronic, so it’s hard to even summarise why it doesn’t work. To pick one as an emblem for the whole, then, the reason why the Butcher knows that a seventy-something Disney star is on his tail is that a stadium employee tells him literally everything about the trap that police have created, including the code word he’s been told to on no account share with anyone.

He then takes him to a staff only area so that the Butcher can steal his security pass. Why does he trust this random stranger? Because the employee was selling t-shirts and the man gave up one that his daughter wanted so that a pushy girl could have it, which the employee takes as a sign that the guy is a good man of great morals. I’m giving myself a migraine explaining this.

The writing is honestly on the level of a Tommy Wiseau/Neil Breen/Ed Wood film at times. It’s well known now that M Night cannot grasp how people talk, or possibly just doesn’t care and feels as though his awkward laboured dialogue is “better” than how real people talk.

The slop seeps into the structure as well. It may be that M Night realised too late in the process how bad an idea it was to cast 78-year-old Hayley Mills in the Jodie Foster role, so shuffled her to the background while cycling through other women to play against Hartnett, from the character’s daughter to Lady Raven to his wife.

The only semi-interesting thing about the film is how little M Night seems to care about characterising either the Butcher or anyone, really. The Butcher has no convincing pathology. Serial killers generally target one particular gender, since their psychopathy tends to be sexual to some degree. The Butcher has a young Asian man chained in a basement, whom he spies on through his smartphone. So is he queer? Don’t be daft. That would be interesting. Is the guy a hostage whom he trapped because he found out what Hartnett had done to his girlfriend, the Butcher being more a Ted Bundy type? I JUST TOLD YOU TO NOT BE DAFT. THAT WOULD BE INTERESTING.

Because he’s ignorant and seems to hate the mentally unwell for some reason, the only motivation that M Night alludes to is based on some vague pulpy tropes about a domineering mother and OCD. Thanks, M Night. You’re so brave, using actual medical conditions to villainise characters in the trash that you make.

I think what he was going for with this is a movie like Seven (1995) and Saw (2004), where the plot is absolutely dominant while things like motivation and character are in service of it. The characters in those films are essentially puppets in a mechanical artifice, and the joy is in watching the highly intricate machine jerk them about. The problem with that is that M Night can’t be bothered to properly construct that machine, so all that we’re left with is his terrible dialogue and plotting.

Rating: 1/4

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Thanks for these stellar reviews, Mr Karswell! I have absolutely no desire to see crappy "Clabtrap" or any Shyamalan film, for that matter.

I just saw I Saw the TV Glow and it was honestly fantastic. What starts as a typical if somewhat atmospheric YA drama about disaffected high schoolers in the ‘90s bonding over a television show becomes stranger and spookier until it’s an almost David Lynch-ian mystery, with resonant themes of fear and self-loathing. When I was leaving the cinema I overheard a group of girls who’d been in the screening room discussing it and one of them said, ‘It was a movie… but it wasn’t a movie.’

That I think sums up the general attitude to non-standard narrative in mainstream films, and while I Saw the TV Glow might be a little too disconnected to resonate with even cult audiences beyond a certain level, I was delighted to see something this unapologetically eerie and weird.

It opens in 1996 as Owen Foreman (later played by Justice Smith when he grows into a young man), a seventh-grade student, runs into Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), a ninth-grade goth who gets him into watching a ‘90s YA show a la Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Are You Afraid of the Dark? etcetera. Their show is called The Pink Opaque, about two girls with a psychic connection who take on monsters-of-the-week, sent by a mysterious Big Bad called Mr Melancholy.

Both Owen and Maddy are neglected and troubled by what makes them different. Owen is asexual and possibly neurodivergent, while Maddy is a lesbian. Their bond as outsiders endures until one day Maddy disappears, leaving behind just a burning TV in her parents’ garden.

More than that I won’t say, although this isn’t a movie that gives you answers, and after a point stops being usefully literal at all. The world of the TV show mixes with Owen’s reality until the two become at times indistinguishable. What happened to Maddy is answered in a way, but also not even slightly. It’s a movie, but also not…

When it comes to determining what’s “real” in the story, the anchors are Owen, his mother, and Maddy, as well as the relationships that he has with these women. But Owen’s mother leaves the narrative fairly early on and Maddy’s usefulness in judging reality goes away completely the moment she disappears. After that, whatever influence she has on the story might just be Owen’s imagination. Lundy-Paine gets a monologue at one point that’s both chilling and heartbreaking.

The film could be interpreted as being about the loneliness of neurodivergence, how a young man latches onto a show that gives him an escape route from his mundane destiny of living in a world that he doesn’t understand, and that doesn’t care to understand him. A thick layer of sadness pervades the narrative, reinforced by its ambient lighting from glowing TV sets, arcade machines, etcetera. The show and Maddy offer him an answer to why he feels so disconnected, but he dismisses it as just fantasy, kids’ stuff.

Whether or not you believe the fantasy or decide that all of what happens after Maddy’s disappearance is just the fevered imaginings of a sad man might say something about you. Or not. This is a movie that depends on interpretation. It might be this generation’s Donnie Darko (2001), another film about a disconnected suburban teen who might be connected to some vast supernatural mosaic of inner meaning, or just lonely and mentally ill.

The movie’s supernatural imagery is haunting regardless of whether it’s supposed to be real, an extended sequence of a moon-shaped fiend tormenting a young woman especially chilling. It also captures the feeling of being young and how television shows can seem the whole world to you. As strange as the story gets, there’s a buried emotional thread about sadness and isolation and failure, what it’s like to be young and then suddenly old, that runs deep throughout.

Rating: 3/4

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I just saw Alien: Romulus and it was so good it made up for every bad sequel in the franchise and has earned its place as the third best after Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986). A group of young people living as indentured servants on a mining outpost owned by those dastardly villains of the series, the Weyland-Utani corp, decide to try to make a better life for themselves by stealing a ship that can take them the nine light years to the nearest human settlement. The trip requires them to siphon fuel from the Romulus, a ship floating free near the asteroid belt. But when they arrive they find out why it’s been abandoned. Hint: some very toothy parasites might be involved. And I don’t mean the Tories.

Set between Alien and Aliens (following Saw X, midquels seem popular in horror), our Final Girl is Rain (Cailee Spaeny) and her supporting lead “Andy” (David Jonsson), an android built by her late father and raised as her brother. The film is easily the best since Aliens primarily because it dispenses with all of the pseudo-philosophical warbling and laborious myth-making of Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant (2017), and focuses instead on developing a plot with a clearly typed cast of characters. In other words, it functions as a sci-fi horror movie with suspense and shock. In this way, it actually does better at the existential theming than its two predecessors, due to it presenting its themes as elements of a story rather than thinking itself too good to have a story.

The stroke of genius here was hiring stylish Uruguayan horror director Fede Álvarez, who also handled Evil Dead (2013) as well as the two Don’t Breathe films (2016 and 2018). Evil Dead was about as good as anyone could have made it given how limited the director would have been. Here Álvarez has a freer reign to develop his own plot, and he borrows from what used to be called the Dead Teenager Movie for structure, focusing on a group of youths vaguely conforming to slasher types. (Final Girl, jerk, nice guy, nerd, and so on.) He fleshes out these types with his co-writer and makes them engaging, which is refreshing in a post-Aliens sequel. Apparently all this franchise needed was a dedicated genre director to recapture some of what made the original work.

The cinematography is beautiful, evoking the asteroid belt, space, and inner chambers of the Romulus with a crisp and laser eye. I feel as though Álvarez had in mind Scott’s famous description of Alien as a haunted house movie in space, since that is what he’s making here, with oogly-booglies jumping at our cast down long, dark corridors. The gore is squishy and nasty, the character choices believable. The themes around artificial intelligence and just how conscious “Andy” may or not be hold your interest throughout even if the alien stuff doesn’t, which it should anyway because it’s expertly done.

Álvarez even re-does bad ideas from previous Alien films and makes them work, like the hybrid life-form from Alien: Resurrection (1997) and the cryo-chamber birthing in Prometheus, elements that he combines in a gloriously nasty sequence that drew gasps from my Friday-night audience. In short, Alien: Romulus might not be perfect, but it’s a Space Horror Movie with a capital Movie. It’s possibly the most purely entertaining pulp horror that I’ve seen this year.

Rating: 3.5/4

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Oh snap! I was just considering watching that but felt it might be a waste of time, as no sequels have compared to the original. Thanks!

I just saw Blink Twice, the directorial debut of Zoe Kravitz, and it was really good. Besides the certification card, it came with its own “trigger warning”, and I guess I can see why. This is very much a post-MeToo movie, and possibly (?) the first fiction film to tackle the Jeffrey Epstein scandal in so direct a fashion.

Naomi Ackie plays Frida, a waitress at a black tie gala who literally stumbles into a fairy tale encounter with Slater King (Channing Tatum), a tech bro mired in a misogyny scandal who as part of his PR rehab owns an island at which he and his guests dispense with their phones and rediscover their “intentionality”. Dippy rich brat nonsense, basically.

Frida, however, is whisked off her feet when he invites her along. But why are the locals mute and hostile, what’s with the snakes everywhere, why does the facilitator (Geena Davis) keep handing out red bags to male guests, and… wait a minute, did Frida just get on a plane to a remote island and surrender her smartphone for a man she barely knows?

On one level I enjoyed Blink Twice simply as a thriller. It plays a bit like a much darker version of the mystery film Glass Onion (2022), also about an ordinary black woman infiltrating an island of rich friends with sinister secrets. I wouldn’t be surprised if Kravitz had been imbibing some Roald Dahl and Tales of the Unexpected. I think I saw a reference to “Man from the South”, about a gambler in the tropics who collects human fingers, and possibly “Poison”.

The mystery’s resolution is profoundly horrible, as you can imagine from names like Epstein and MeToo being evoked, and Kravitz really doesn’t flinch here. The sexual violence isn’t exploitational, but in one scene where the nature of what’s going on is made explicit, it IS provocative. This bit alone is likely what inspired the extra trigger warning, some executive at MGM or Amazon deciding that it needed to be added for extra protection if the film became too controversial.

One of the things that’s most impressive about Blink Twice is how it adumbrates the various personality types that cluster around organised sexual crime, from the heartless Jeffrey Epstein type to the moral coward who suspects but does nothing, and even the former victim whose survival approach was to repress and become a functionary of the system, luring in others. Although Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell are the obvious allegory (Epstein is even added to a photograph in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it-moment), I wonder if Kravitz had Armie Hammer in mind when characterising Slater King.

Hammer is the former Hollywood star born of privilege who witnessed all manner of debauchery in his rarefied circle as a boy, and went on to be revealed as having engaged in or fantasised about various depravities. Some surprisingly subtle work exists in how Kravitz and her co-writer don’t present their villains as one-dimensional slobs and brutes.

Some are damaged, some are so inured to privilege they don’t have a moral intelligence, and others are more Prince Andrew types: idiots, who just don’t question what’s behind all the “gifts” they’re being given, and take them as a matter of course. Did the girl serving lunch look oddly young and scared? Did she seem like she didn’t really want to be there when she came to your room? Oh well, it’s not yours to question.

As heavy as these themes are, Kravitz adds a rich vein of dark humour especially in the second half as the violence ramps up. She juggles it beautifully as well, with some well-observed character moments for the female players. It’s refreshing in a thriller like this to have such vivid characterisation for the women’s roles. Tatum is brutally effective as King and has a moment both sad and horrifying in his final rage against life. He’s a monster, but like a lot of monsters - like Hammer, like Epstein, like Maxwell - he’s also deeply, incurably pathetic.

Rating: 3/4

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Oh shit! I gotta see this! *blink blink*

Thanks so much for sharing your reviews here! They really do help me decide if I want to see something ( or not ).