Couple Quick Capsules

As I've said about thirty three thousand times this week I've been busy writing reviews of films I saw at the Tribeca Film Festival, which ended on Sunday, and that's why it's been a wee bit quiet in here. A couple of those will be dropping this afternoon (I think) but I do want to take a moment anyway to jot down some very fast off-the-cuff thoughts about a pair of new-ish horror movies that I watched on my own (i.e. not for the fest) in the past couple of days. Because they both ruled and I should say so!

Mārama (dir. Taratoa Stappard) -- It's not often you see an entire new sub-genre of horror film present itself these days, but if we could get about one hundred more "Gothic Maori" horror movies in the coming years I wouldn't side-eye askance at that. I'd be in heaven after this here unexpected meeting of flavors burst in my mouth in the most incredible of ways.  Ariana Osborne (who often seems a dead ringer for Lily-Rose Depp in Nosferatu) plays "Mary", a Maori girl who finds herself shipped off to not-so-jolly-ol Victorian England by a colonialist dickhead (Toby Stephens) whose got a fetish for her people (enslaving them, mostly) and wants to have Mary teach his own daughter about their ways. What Mary is faced with in quick succession is a bunch of upper-crust British assholes play-acting racist tropes -- thankfully she's got some will of her own and is no wilting Bronte gal, but damn this movie slaps. Visually and thematically a feast. Stappard is clearly one to watch.

Is God Is (dir.  Aleshea Harris) -- A tale of blistering revenge that will probably, and purposefully, make you think of Quentin Tarantino (tcasting Vivica A. Fox as the mother being avenged will do that), but writer-director Aleshea Harris along with her two incredible lead performers Mallori Johnson and Kara Young (as twin sisters Anaia and Racine) hand in something all their own here. A lot of Southern Gothic, dripping with moss and heat, with a real fire burning in its belly -- its heroines, who sink into the moral morass of their parentage no matter how hard they fight against it, are to my eye immediate movie icons, like nobody you've ever seen on-screen before and completely impossible to look away from. Oh and Sterling K. Brown should only play villains from now on. Anyway this is completely spellbinding stuff -- I absolutely cannot wait to see what Harris drops next. 

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Oh and as an aside I just realized that both of these incredible movies are debut features and holy shit does that make me optimistic for our movie future. Hey, websites and entertainment magazines, how about some cover-stories that talk about the British-Maori man and the black woman who just dropped two of this year's truly great horror films, instead of just slobbering obvious praise all over the two straight white YouTube dudes who made the most financially successful yet nevertheless mediocre ones? Just a thought! Puttin' it out there!

I Want My Mummy!

It's totally inexplicable how much not a Mummy movie this Mummy movie is. Lee Cronin's The Mummy (and I do think that's the official title in full, which... well that probably would've been a better choice had you been sure you'd made a great Mummy movie first, Mr. Cronin) is in fact, besides a couple of scenes set in Egypt and a sarcophogus, an Evil Dead movie. It's basically a remake of Lee Cronin's Evil Dead Rise (his last directorial effort) in fact, when it comes down to it. It's Evil Dead Rise with a bunch of CG sand flying around over everything every so often -- basically when Cronin remembers this is supposed to be a Mummy movie he makes some sand show up. Otherwise this is about a family who gets possessed one by one by a blasphemous demon, making little kids do the darndest things (or dare I even day, the damndest thing, gasp!), while ancient indecipherable artifacts get translated via obselete technology, and everything's extremely gross and obscene. 

The last bit is the best bit -- it's what I liked about Evil Dead Rise, too. Cronin is definitely not afraid to be extremely gross and extremely obscene. But as with EDR (which brought the Deadites to the city only to then keep them entirely contained to one building for the entire run-time, making it feel like a retread of everything we'd seen before in the franchise) the plot and the characterizations in this movie make so little sense from scene to scene; it's really just "gross and obscene" strung together by the thinnest of (admittedly sticky) threads. I didn't really hate my time watching this movie, but it's in no way "good" nor should anyone be applauded for how lazy it all is. Cronin made a terrific Irish Folk Horror movie in 2019 with The Hole in the Ground, but he's just been coasting on puke and pus and kids saying fuck ever since. Bad Mummy!

The Real Snuff

For some reason when my cousin and I were scouring the horror aisle at the video-store in my teen years we never bothered to rent the original Faces of Death -- probably because it clearly didn't have any sexy naked people, which is why we kept watching the same Slashers over and over again after all. But I was legitimately afraid of its VHS box too, and even though I now know it was all a bunch of hooey, that legacy of the forbidden remains attached to its title. And director Daniel Goldhaber and writer Isa Mazzei (of the fantastic Cam) have done a solid job embracing and expanding that with their... it's not a remake. Reboot, I suppose. Set in a world like ours where the Faces of Death video haunted a generation, Faces of Death (2026 Edition) introduces a serial killer (Stranger Things' Dacre Montgomery) who's viciously reenacting the original's seedy tableaus to gain viral social-media fame. And it's up to a content moderator named Margot (Barbie Ferreira) to track him down and press permanant pause on his reign of cyber-terror! 

Anyway the very real gig where a person watches "content" all day long to flag the worst offenders has been sitting around for several years now outright begging for this treatment -- this movie would make a perfect double-feature with Prano Bailey-Bond's killer 2021 film Censor, which did the 1980s "Video Nasties" version of the same thing (and I honestly wouldn't be surprised if the original Faces of Death got name-checked in that). And the team of Goldhaber & Mazzei do make some murderous magic of it, tapping into the very real social-media sickness that's saturated our culture, anesthetizing us to real horror. The film's at its best when its staring into the dead eyes of the normies who don't give a shit about violence for whatever reason, be they benefitting from its monetization or simply part of the parade of empathy husks now found on every corner. 

The actual stuff with Montgomery though, who goes way over the top, is a little less successful -- okay we get it Dacre, you watched Manhunter, you watched Dahmer; maybe dial it down a notch or two. This movie has stellar vibes that all his shrieking keeps swallowing up. As for Ferreira she makes for a likeable presence that we're rooting for. Even if the movie vacillates wildly between her character having superpowered MacGyver-like skills when it needs her to (the way she manages to break out of the killer's cage after being there for all of five seconds while the people who've been locked up for weeks look on -- if I'd been one of them I would've told her to fuck right off) while then having her acting dumb as a box of rocks when the movie needs that. In that same vein this whole new Faces of Death endeavor is both sloppier than necessary while also being smarter than it had any right for. You should be pleasantly surprised, even if your groans sometimes get the better of you. (Although a few points knocked off for Yet Another Dead Gay in a year of too many of those. I would just prefer not, y'all.)

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

 ... you can learn from:

Synonyms (2019)

Yoav: I moved to France to flee Israel. Flee a state that is nasty, obscene, ignorant, idiotic, sordid, fetid, crude, abominable, odious, lamentable, repugnant,
detestable, mean-spirited, mean-hearted... 

Emile: No country is all that at once.

Today is the 51st birthday of the rightfully outraged Israeli ex-pat filmmaker Nadav Lapid, who's weaponized his filmmaking to dissect the horrors of his homeland making one furious masterpiece after another. This includes the brilliant film above as well as 2014's The Kindergarten Teacher, 2021's Ahed's Knee, and the just-recently-released here in the U.S. film Yes. And speaking of Yes I am rather furious at myself for not reviewing that movie because I found it a total stunner, so let's throw down some words about it since the ocassion's presented itself. (I already shared the trailer right here.)

Yes tells the story of Y (Ariel Bronz) and his wife Yasmin (Efrat Dor) as they party the pain away in Tel Aviv, turning their radios up so they can drown out the sounds of the bombs dropping onto Gaza. He's a musician, she's a dance-instructor, and the two of them routinely hand off their baby son (pointedly named Noah) so they can humiliate themselves every night for the grotesque powers-that-be in order to sustain a living. Lapid gives the Israeli elite the full Beckmann & Dix treament, rendering them hideous to the point where they're literally bending over and waving their assholes in our face. It ain't sublte, nor should it be. 

Since the pair are gorgeous and entertaining and simply good at what they do (i.e. debasing themselves with extreme vigor) Y & Yasmin move pretty easily up the social ladder, until Y finds himself charged with writing a new national anthem for Israel in the wake of the October 7th attacks. For there he's shot through the cannon of a dark night of the soul as he tries to come to terms with his role as propogandist for genocide, but Lapid spares no one his visciousness; everyone is to blame for keeping the broken system afloat. Yes is brutal, brilliant, a ballistic missle shot straight at our insidious self-preservation in the face of so much unspeakable. Its farce is tragedy, all too familiar. All the punchlines are a horror; our laughter curdled, indistinguishable from screams. How au current, if you will. 

Super Mario Galaxy Movie in 200 Words or Less

My boyfriend and I have a running joke about how lesbian sex in the movies has long been reduced to two women holding their palms out flat toward the other's, hovering but not quite touching, which is to say that The Super Mario Galaxy Movie hinges on incestual lesbian sex saving the universe. So that's something! Indeed that's the best thing I can say about this clashing cacophony of noise which has me pitying all the poor parents out there -- get ready to paint eyes onto your eyelids so the kids don't catch onto your snooze, Moms and Pops. The movie does unlock its honest end-game though, in that it really made me want to dig out my dusty Wii to play Super Mario Galaxy again -- this is nothing but an assemblage of dopamine signifiers for Mario-heads, lapsed or still running, with nary a thought thunk outside that sphere. There is a scene where I really thought the movie might reenact Raiders' infamous opening of the ark scene, just with Bones Ghosts melting Princess Peach's face off, but that sadly didn't come to pass -- like everything here, opportunities super smashed. 

How To Make a Killing in 500 Words or Less

Remember Scream Queens? The Ryan Murphy series that ran for two seasons a decade ago didn't rewrite the television medium but it's one of Murhpy's most entertaining efforts, goofy in a way that embraced Murphy's tendencies toward chaos -- the slapdash quality that sinks so much of his work was there a feature, not a bug. Anyway that was where I was introduced to Glen Powell as the dipshit hunk Chad Radwell, a perfect distillation of the actor's strengths right up front. That character's smugness wasn't meant to be charming... until it was, thanks to Powell's balls-deep performance. Point being I've been rooting for Powell all these years because he charmed me so fully right out of the gate. 

But the iteration of Glen Powell Movie Star that we have in 2026 has become a different beast altogether, and the limits of this current rictis-grin persona of Powell's meet and are beat by their match in John Patton Ford's How To Make a Killing (his follow-up to Emily the Criminal with Aubrey Plaza), out this weekend. What this movie -- which is based on the book Kind Hearts and Coronets, previously turned into a very fun movie with Alec Guinness in 1949 -- needs is a real asshole. Somebody who isn't desperately trying to be liked while also murdering his rich-prick relatives in order to get their wealth.

The actor who played Chad Radwell ten years ago maybe could've pulled this off. But Glen Powell V.2026 cannot. The movie works so hard trying to make his character Becket into a good guy -- despite all, you know, the killing shit -- that it deflates any and all of its satire, instead wandering around some unpleasant uncanny valley for two hours. Powell's face is frozen into an action-figure smirk for the entirety of this thing's runtime, and it's impossible not to wonder what an actor who was actually enjoying their slide into depravity might've brought -- an actor with an edge, somebody who brings a real sense of danger. A Jack O'Connell or LaKeith Stanfield could've rocked this.

The character really needs to have some crazy in his eyes; a sense that he's finally finding himself by discovering and embracing his monstrous lineage of rich shits. But both the movie itself and Powell keep backing off of that at every opportunity. There's no sense of developing tragedy or mounting lunacy -- it's just a bunch of stuff that happens, the end. And it's a genuine disappointment because the good version of this movie is so close, so possible, but it's just a series of self-owning stumbles instead. A cowardly trip, man.

Whistle in 250 Words

I can be (when an unpredictable mood of  generosity finds me anyway) disgustingly easy to please when it comes to horror movies -- I have sat through far too many hours of bottom-of-the-barrel bullshit to not to be entertained by a movie that is at least competantly made. And so, with that level of "high praise" in mind, went Whistle. It's a bald tire of ideas whose rubber's been ripped off by every Final Destination movie before it -- with a good dose of Talk To Me to boot too -- but as angry and irritated as the movie often made me for its extraordinary plagiarisms of far better, funner previous materials, I still rode the dumb thing to its dumb end and I didn't feel totally dirty about it.

There are a couple of fun scenes -- the horror maze is well-staged with the movie's only genuinely likeable character in peril -- and there is one explosive set-piece of gore that I watched three times in a row, jaw agape. (You will know it when it hits you in the face with its viscera.) Corin Hardy isn't a bad director -- go see The Hallow if you haven't! -- but this is unfortunately closer to his limp Conjuring spin-off The Nun than it is to that original-concept creep-fest that gave him his career. But this will probably be the favorite for some 14-year-old new to the genre and as such my old, expired ass can't get too angry at it since that's who it's made for.

Whistle is in theaters tomorrow.

Found Footage & Vacuum Resurrections

It's a full ass, good ass weekend at the multiplex with the release of the franchise-best 28 Days Later: The Bone Temple horror sequel (my review) plus the awards season spreads of several films including Park Chan-wook's No Other Choice (my review) and The Testament of Ann Lee (which I have not had a chance to review but which rules, so go see it). But that's not all -- there are two more movies I want to quickly mention that are worth your time, even if your effort at this juncture in time might be for naught because you just might not be in the place to see them. The first is the Thai film A Useful Ghost which is opening, as far as I can tell, only here in NYC at the IFC Center. And the second is even more narrow a drop than that -- it's called Infirmary and it's screening tonight only at the Dances With Films Festival happening here in NYC. What's next -- I review a movie that you can only watch under the covers in my bedroom at 4am next Tuesday? (You wish!) Anyway I wanted to toss out a few words about both of these terrific and worthwhile movies so you can keep an eyes out for them in the future, and so now I shall do just that. 

A Useful Ghost -- I know that someone will yell at me for calling this an Apichatpong Weerasethakul movie with a sense of humor -- I mean how dare I besmirch the name of one of the world's great (and gay!) auteurs by insinuating that it's not a laugh riot to watch Tilda Swinton move in slow motion beside a stream for fifteen straight minutes? And Weerasethakul is certainly capable of being funny, but A Useful Ghost has that same very specific Thai vibe of the afterlife mingling with present reality as oh let's say Uncle Boonmee did, but it does so at a far, far goofier register. It's probably more in line to compare it to Wes Anderson than Weerasethakul, save for that Thai-specificity of ghosts among us being not a big whoop. This movie is after all about a man's wife coming back from the dead in the guise of a vacuum cleaner. And yes, there is sex with a vacuum cleaner. Of course there is sex with a vacuum cleaner! What world do you live in where there wouldn't be sex with a vacuum cleaner? That said that's just the first of many silly tricks that first-time filmmaker Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke's got up his poofy sleeves, and A Useful Ghost had me falling off the sofa with a litany of guffaws. And, with that Wes Anderson comparison I made above, a fair share of awe as well -- visually this movie is a feast, existing in its own vacuum-sealed weirdo world of wonder. Basically you will exit this film desperate to see what Boonbunchachoke pulls outta those poofy sleeves next. (It's also got what will surely be one of the year's best posters, as seen up top.)

Infirmary -- If you're anywhere near as big a fan of Found Footage horror movies as I am then you know you've suffered through a lot of fool's gold just to find those infinitesimal bits of real gold out there left to scavenge; sometimes it feels like all the good tricks have been used up. In that sense Infirmary does't re-write the handbook -- it's not doing anything you haven't seen done before. But what it is doing is playing the handbook well, very well -- you know the routine, you've seen the greatest hits, but this one will feed you some of that sweet stuff you love. As usual so much of these movies hinge on location, and Infirmary's got a great one with its half-closed, run-down psychiatric hospital, where two security guards are on the night shift. And just as importantly these are characters you'll actually like -- there's the skittish new kid on the block Eddy (Paul Syre) and there's the "I'm too old for this shit" archetype of Lester (Mark Anthony Williams), who's been doing the job for ages and who spends most of the night just messing with Eddy, scaring him... until the scares start getting real. See? Basic as hell set-up. But first-time feature director Nicholas Perada hits his marks -- the scares are real! -- and in return I jumped and made all of the requisite "Hell no" noises that you hope to make while watching these movies, as the characters stumble deeper into the awful, awful dark. Solid spooky business!

Five Nights at Freddy's 2 in 250 Words or Less

Just when you thought movies couldn't get worse than the first Five Nights at Freddy's was, along some the sequel to say "Wait hold up just a goddamned second you say you want one hundred of your minutes ripped violently out of your life with no recourse? We gotcha covered!" Well guess what, Five Nights at Freddy's 2 -- I became a movie critic just so I could have recourse, bitch! Small satisfaction, sure, but hey it's something. The thing that's so annoying about this franchise is the idea is fun and the animatronic monsters are superbly designed (thank you Jim Henson's Creature Shop) and I keep thinking they'll do something with this. Director Emma Tammi even made a wonderful horror movie called The Wind back in 2018. But these movies are so absurdly tedious, so deathly dull, so flat and ugly and boring and offensively dumb, I refuse to believe there's even anybody standing behind the camera. I could be convinced the camera was set up inside an abandoned Chuck E. Cheese, turned on by a breeze, and then just left there to capture whatever. Gently drifting spiderwebs would be more fascinating. These movies are cruel and vulgar tricks -- some real Lucy-yanking-the-football shit. And they didn't even give the Killer Cupcake anything to do in this one! Fuck outta here.

Shell in 150 Words or Less

Like so many people places and thing-like things this 2024 body horror movie about the beauty industry got fully stampeded and ground to dust by Monstro Elisasue and the ladies of the other, better 2024 body horror movie about the beauty industry, The Substance. And Shell ain't no The Substance. But it's perfectly fun and 100% worth circling back to now that the shadow of Margaret Qualley yanking a chicken leg out of her bellybutton doesn't loom quite so large. Consider it the Ugly Betty to Demi's Veronica. Director Max Minghella and screenwriter Jack Stanley don't have anything up their sleeve as daring as Coralie Fargeat did, but when a movie basically reenacts the last scene of John Waters' Multiple Maniancs with what must have been millions more dollars I still have to hand it some slow clap. Moss & Hudson both having a hoot.

Quick Me on Train Dreams & Wicked 2

Train Dreams -- It's not often that I have a completely different opinion when I see a movie a second time than I did the first, and so it feels important to note when it does happen. And it very much happened with Train Dreams, Jockey director Clint Bentley's Malick-ified adaptation of Denis Johnson's book and starring Joel Edgerton as an old-timety railroad worker, on Netflix today. I saw it an Sundance in January and got swept up in the current of its lush visuals and lyrical score (from The National's Bryce Dressner), plus its fine clear-eyed close-mouthed turn from Joel Edgerton. It wasn't enough of a love affair that I felt the need to write a review at the time, but I thought my heart might grow fonder down the line. 

This was not the case -- a re-watch a couple of weeks ago was like a gust of tornado winds splitting through its smoke, and all that was left rang hollow; an ash-heap where a forest once stood. It was as if the film rotated ninety degrees and revealed cardboard backing. It's got the appearance of meaning that reveals itself to be thimble-deep, like a video of somebody diving into a gorgeous lake only to break their neck on the rocks mere inches beneath its serence surface. (The score, on its own merits, still rules though.) 

Wicked For Good -- Nobody should be coming to me for opinions of the Wicked movies, since this shit was always gonna be straight-up me-kryptonite from the start. And yet -- wow! This movie is really, really bad! Far worse than the already awful first one, which at least had a sense of humor, best embodied by Ariana Grande's fluffy little performance therein. This one doesn't even have the decency to have a plot, or "things that happen" -- humorless, tuneless, meandering flying-monkey malarkey, it feels like one terrible song about how a character feels piled on top of another one piled on top of another one until every iota of your patience has been crushed to yellow dust for that endless CG stretch of brick road. Bury beneath it and be done with me! In a better world people would be embarrassed. But, in the spirit of giving, I'll end on the one highlight:

There is this one shot of Jonathan Bailey in Wicked For Good, and you'll know the one when you see it, that is utter pornography, just absolute unhinged filth, and it made all of it worthwhile

— Jason Adams (@jamnpp.bsky.social) November 16, 2025 at 4:37 PM

Black Phone 2 in 200 Words or Less

I suppose if forced to choose I'd rather be bored than offended, so I guess Black Phone 2 is better than Black Phone in that it's not quite so rigorously homophobic this time out. Otherwise -- shrug emoji? I swear the first hour of this sequel is the same scene played out several times in a row. Little sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) -- who's very much the protagonist this time out -- slips into a dream, a phone rings, ghost kids, wakes up, little more dream, longer ringing phone, more ghost kids, on and on and on until your eyes have rolled down your throat. I don't recall the sound of a ringing phone being quite so annoying in the first film -- it's absolutely relentless here. Call it "Won't somebody answer the goddamned phone???": The Movie. And I've said this before when it comes to Scott Derrickson's movies (re: Sinister) but I will never find Ghost Kids scary. Ghost Kids will never be scary! There's some fun Elm-Street-esque shenanigans in the last half but having re-watched Dream Warriors earlier this week if you can't have a character say "In my dreams I'm beautiful and bad!" then bzzzt, you lose the contest.

Mussolini: Son of a Century in 200 Words or Less

Joe Wright's eight-part miniseries Mussolini: Son of the Century dropped on MUBI last week and it really deserves far better than I'm about to give it, but it can't be helped as I'm running woefully behind and fully ensconsed in NYFF stuff right now. But watching our leaders applaud the racist pile of shit Charlie Kirk this morning made me realize how vital and timely the series is, so I really want to highlight it in case you're unaware -- Italian actor Luca Marinelli, who'd already stunned me right outta the gate with Martin Eden a couple of years back, gives what can only be described by ye ol' chesnut "tour de force" as ol' Benito, and it's in service to a deeply traumatic and extremely worthwhile excavation of how Fascism takes hold. Methodical in its brutal detailing of how Democracy crumbles by the eensiest of steps, one norm crossed without a word after another until it's too late and nobody's noticed, this series made me sick to my fucking stomach but in a very necessary way. Can't recommend highly enough. It's all on MUBI. Go watch it this weekend. I shared the trailer back here.

The Life of Chuck in 200 Words or Less

Flat visuals, costumes, and some of the most truly inane messaging this side of a dollar store greeting card -- this movie is like somebody wrote a full length screenplay for one of those prescription drug commercials where everybody's wearing solid knits and drinking margaritas on sunny terraces as their depression turns to ash in their mouths. Truth be told The Life of Chuck may induce a cold sweat, nausea, vomiting, seizures, more vomiting, testicular regression, fire and brimstone, dry eyes, an online gambling addiction, Akathisia, simultaneous constipation and diarrhea, chest pain, heart attack, your full torso spontaneously turning into those big snapping jaws of teeth like that dude in John Carpenter's The Thing, drowsiness, coma, tinnitus, voluntary Tourettes, necrophilia, proptosis, an outburst of immediate and unrelenting misanthopy, rashes, hives, leprosy, all ten Biblical Plagues plus a few more plagues that god couldn't have even thought of at the time, sugar spikes, dry mouth, vanishing fingerprints, vanishing fingers, your image disappearing from all known photographs because this movie went back in time and stopped your parents from ever having sex, night sweats, night terrors, day sweats, day terrors, headaches, and so, so, so much suicidal ideation. Also death.

Together in 300 Words or Less

The best horror movie of 2025 to date is out this Wednesday! (And just screened at Fantasia, which is where I saw it.) Newcomer writer-director Michael Shanks proves with Together that he's not just somebody to not just watch but someone to attach yourselves to as if glued by some sort of demonic force. Tackling the story of an inseparable couple named Millie and her sexy but useless cuck-boy Tim (played by real-world couple Alison Brie and Dave Franco) who literally become inseparable thanks to some weird-shit-in-the-woods hoodoo that they do, Together is exctly what it promises to be on the package -- but what a package! (Don't make the Dave Franco's penis joke, don't make the Dave Franco's penis joke....)

In all seriousness I refused to watch the trailer for this but I had susseed out what the general story would be anyway thanks to 1) its title and 2) the images on the posters -- and as any of you who've ever read anything of mine know, it's not because I'm thrillingly clever. It's one of those stories that is so obvious now that it's been made you can't believe it hadn't been made already. (Final scene of Society notwithstanding.) But Shanks -- with copius thanks to the wonderful chemistry between his stars -- delivers a film that exploits our expectations while also delivering on them to a gratuitous (complimentary) and gore-iffic tee. The shocks come in how far the three of them are willing to go with it all, and Together goes all the way, baby. Two days before a movie comes out is probably early to call something a classic but Together has all of the makings. I will watch this fifty times if the world can refrain from ending first.

Hell of a Summer in 150 Words or Less

May the devil bless Fred Hechinger because he's the only one making anything land in Hell of a Summer, the "Scream at a summer camp" riff that was written and directed by (and co-stars) Strangers Things actor Finn Wolfhard and his Ghostbusters buddy Billy Bryk. The best choice those boys made was giving Hechinger their lead role as a past-his-expiration-date camp counselor who loves the gig too much to let go -- even as the movie flails around him, neither funny enough to be comic nor scary enough to be horror, Hechinger is at least never not charming and goofy and worth following as he makes bad dialogue feel okay enough to pass. Otherwise this is a lazy lazy lazy movie that offers up nothing new or interesting in its under ninety minutes -- one gets the feeling nobody wanted to tell Wolfhard no, so I will say it. No.

The Monkey in 400 Words

Although it'd be neat if he wants to hang out sometime since he seems like a rad dude (just saying) I don't personally know Osgood Perkins, sometimes actor, son of Psycho star Anthony, and the quickly-becoming-his-own-brand horror director of The Blackcoat's Daughter, Longlegs, and my til-now-favorite Gretel & Hansel. And yet it's impossible to not think while watching his latest movie, the Stephen King adpatation The Monkey, that this feels like an extraordinarily personal movie for the man. 

Like I said -- I don't know him. And yet knowing what I do -- having watched him speak eloquently in Bryan Fuller's horror doc Queer For Fear about his closeted father's tumultuous relationship with the character of Norman Bates and his death from AIDS, and also knowing that Osgood's mother, the actress Berry Berenson, was killed in one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center on 9/11 -- the thematic threads of cursed familial chaos passed down patriarchally that thrum though The Monkey feel, you know, fairly pointed! Notable. Of note. Resonant. And then when planes on fire start falling out of the sky? Can you blame me? These thoughts are right there for the taking.

The Monkey also feels the closest Oz has gotten to date to his father's wild late career work -- the absurdly nasty black humor on display here is very close to the Tony-directed Psycho III, or to his father's oh let's say lurid performance in Ken Russell's Crimes of Passion. This movie is bleak and pitch-black hearted and finds the absurd pointlessness of human existence to be a ribald punchline. It's of a piece with the Final Destination movies, but if they were less Rube Goldberg and more Albert Camus on acid. 

It also might be, all due apologies to Gretel, my new favorite movie of Oz's. It'll definitely take a second viewing to decide that because The Monkey is so tonally erratic and balls deep wackadoo that it's hard to decide from moment to moment if this shit's anarchic genius or gallumphing mess. Hell maybe it's both! But in a world of so much personality-free I.P.-driven "content", The Monkey feels so bloody particular, so preposterously gonzo, that I must slow-clap it for audacity alone. (If you liked last year's Cuckoo, which I've come to appreciate more and more with distance for how by-its-own-rules it flew, this should also be your cuppa.)

W&G: Vengeance Most Fowl in 150 Words

Unqualified utter perfection. I could leave this review right there, honestly. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl is another jewel in the Aardman Animation crown. As good as any of the four previous W&G shorts or the one previous W&G movie The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (aka "The Complete Cracking Collection" as they call it) -- I'd say I wished I was a kid so these movies could be formative but they make me feel like a kid and reform me in their image anyway. If you spend the entire holiday break watching this new movie over and over again on Netflix I would not, could not, blame you. It's absolute and total buck-tooth-to-stub-toe delight start to finish. The only complaint is obviously we all wish Nick Park could churn these perfections out faster, but I'll take the slow turnover rate when these illustrious homeruns are knocked out every time. Cinema!

Kraven the Hunter in 450 Words or Less

You know that scene in the fourth Indiana Jones movie where Indiana finds himself inside the fake small town in the middle of the desert and realizes all of the families therein are mannequins and the fruit is plastic and it's really just a staged world that the military has set up in order to drop a nuke on? Sometimes I wonder if we sneaked past the security guards and got into the offices of Sony Pictures if it might not be just like that. Nothing but cardboard walls and doors that open onto bricks. Because it boggles the mind that there could actually be human beings behind the decisions they keep making for their superhero movies. They feel like the "monkeys with typewriters" scenario brought to life, or perhaps a league of Coneheads pretending to be Earth people but getting each step just a hair off, one after another, until a smorgasboard of gibberish spills out its ass-end. This is textbook Bad Movie behavior.

But that doesn't mean there's not a good helping of true WTF fun to be had out of Kraven the Hunter anyway. Yes, Sony's latest and opposite-of-greatest stab at the genre somehow manages to make the glory days of Madame Web feel fonder. But none of these actors are to blame. This troupe of thesps know what they're up against and dammit they keep fighting the fight, one camp whisper to another, winding through the marauding CG mayhem. Leading man slash abdominal billboard Aaron Taylor-Johnson is ultimately done in by the movie's frankensteined incoherence, but our boy tries his damndest to yank it together with every one of those big beautiful muscles of his. He does not succeed! But he's having fun most of the time, and he manages to get some of that across whenever the movie lumbers out of his way for a split second. 

But best of all -- Alessandro Nivola as the ridiculous baddie is legit great, lifting the movie unto absurdist heaven whenever he appears. (And not for nothing he looks as hot as he's ever looked on-screen, his tight white dress shirt and strappy little backpack doing the lord's work.) Nivola is a real riot, chewing every dumb line of dialogue right up, and when he does this silent scream thing about halfway into the movie it instantaneously paid for my ticket in full. (Well okay I didn't pay for a ticket thankfully, but this moment would have had I.) None of this is enough to save the movie from itself, but I wasn't angry when I left the theater. Just deeply suspicious about those Sony offices filled with outer space mannequins, is all...

A Complete Unknown in 350 Words or Less

As with Wicked I don't think anybody needs my thoughts on a Bob Dylan bio-pic given the fact that I have never in my life given a shit about Bob Dylan -- add on top of that the fact that I have never loved a movie by director James Mangold and we're really cooking with gas (as in flatulance). But unlike Wicked and unlike every single one of Mangold's previous movies I actually walked out of A Complete Unknown with a smile on my face and a few tears wiped from my eyes -- this is a solid, totally respectable and enjoyable movie. 

Obviously I'm one of the founders of Team Timmy so you might think me biased due to that, but honest to blog he crafts a real character here -- this movie doesn't feel exhaustingly yolked to the bio-pic conventions of "here I was born and here I died and oh I did some Forrest Gump like shit in between;" it gives us an arc, and characters, to care about. Granted the real life arc it bridges -- "Folk Music can't be Electric or the world will end, oh my gahhhhhhhh" -- is hella silly from the vantage point of now; the film, as sweet as Edward Norton's performance as Pete Seeger is, really never manages to make that line of thinking seem like anything but nonsense. So that conflict never rises above a shrug. 

But the fiery relationship triangle between Chalamet, Elle Fanning (as a semi-fictional take on a real girl that Dylan dated), and Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez (both actresses superb) is beautifully acted and surprising and truly honestly earned my heart. And the film is very good at involving us in the songwriting process -- even if I'm not a Dylan fan the movie made me appreciate his skills as a wordsmith and a world-shifting entertainer. A Complete Unknown doesn't break open the bio-pic mold but it's about as good an example of what's-to-be-expected can be. Gonna be a fine pic over the holidays for those forced to endure family time.