Source Code

 Man, I miss title credit sequences. Source Code, back from the halcyon days of 2011 (they were already rare back then) has a good one, with some lovely aerial shots of Chicago and environs, unorthodoxly-positioned credits, and an almost Lalo Schifrin-esque score.

 And then we're thrust into the life of Captain Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhal). Or are we? It's quickly revealed that Colter, who acts as if he'd just woken up in a stranger's shoes, well... has just woken up in a stranger's shoes. One minute he was flying missions in Afghanistan, and now he's on a Chicago commuter train where a woman he doesn't know but clearly thinks she knows him (Michelle Monaghan) talks to him as if he was someone else.

 A quick visit to the bathroom and a glance at a mirror convinces Colter that he is in fact inhabiting someone else's body. Then the train blows up, and he finds himself in some sort of mechanized limbo...

 From there the mystery starts being unraveled, one revelation at a time. It turns out Colter is being sent back in time to the train by a shady army outfit to discover who set the bomb; Over and over and over again, reliving those final eight minutes, doing different things until he manages to figure out who it was. And while he's at it, he also needs to figure out what's up with his situation.

 The science is silly (of course quantum mechanics are invoked, along with some mumbly techno-babble,) extremely inconsistent, and kind of falls down as soon as you think about it. But it can be forgiven, because this rickety scaffolding supports a tight, pacey, satisfying mystery with some Hitchcockian suspense and some intriguing themes about duty and the demands a country might place on those in its service. Nothing too deep on any of the fronts, but the fact that it manages to tell a coherent, compelling story while juggling all of this is pretty impressive.

 Ben Ripley's turned in a smart script (well, except for the science) that does particularly well at making its characters credible under ridiculous circumstances. It's a little bit too Hollywood, especially when reaching what seems like a perfect ending, only to forge ahead and ruin it with an additional dollop of schmaltz. This really bothered me when I first saw it way back when, but I must be getting soft in my dotage because it resonated a bit more this time around; a bit too saccharine, but it feels earned. Gyllenhaal, and the script, do a great job at grounding us in the Captain's reality, and he, Monaghan, and Vera Farmiga (playing a sympathetic CO) deploy ridiculous amounts of charisma to good effect.

 Source Code was director Duncan Jones's follow-up to his sci-fi breakthrough Moon, back when he seemed poised to move to the big leagues; unfortunately he did make the move, but it was to direct the Warcraft movie, which kind of finished off his career. I liked that one despite its problems; can't and won't extend the same courtesy to Mute.

 These days he may or may not be working on Rogue Trooper, which sounds very exciting, but it also sounds dead in the water with radio silence over the last three years. We'll see; whatever he comes out with next, it should at least be worth watching.

M3gan

 The name stands for 'Model 3 Generative Android'. Which is cute until you wonder what happened with the previous two models - did they call them Mwangan and Emtwogan? Also, generative? That's the sort of crap a marketing department would come up with, but the name comes from M3gan's creator, Gemma (Allison Williams) - a supposedly brilliant techie. Tsk tsk.

 M3gan is a very dumb but fun techno-thriller written by the same people behind the stellar Malignant (the gold standard for modern dumb fun scary movies) and directed by Gerard Johnstone, who did the also pretty good Housebound. It's got some satirical elements, some heightened character stuff and quite a few jokes, but somewhat surprisingly it's mostly played straight.

 Gemma works for Funki, a Seattle-based company that seems to mostly make robot toys. Bored of working on the company's biggest hit (a high tech Furby knock-off; they're a little more intelligent, and a lot more asshole), she's been working behind her boss's back on the titular M3gan, a four-foot tall humanoid robot with an embedded A.I.

 In an unrelated development, her young niece Cady (Violet McGraw) is orphaned in an ironic traffic accident, and Gemma is named her custodian. It's good that they explain that Gemma made a promise to Cady's mom to take care of her should anything happen because otherwise it'd make no sense at all; Gemma has no maternal instincts whatsoever, is uncomfortable around children, and would clearly rather not be a surrogate parent. Her lack of a clue on how to deal with Cady is mostly played for laughs (if nothing else, it's an excuse for the most passive-aggressive unboxing ever)

 So she gets the brilliant idea to give the prototype AI toy to Cady and let her bond with it. She clearly has never watched or read any sci-fi.

Doing her best to earn a spot in the Blumhouse intro.

 M3gan and Cady get on famously - enough that just seeing them together prompts Gemma's boss to do an about face Re:M3gan and promote it instantly to the company's biggest project after a demonstration to the shareholders goes down very well.

 But Gemma's starting to have second thoughts as M3gan starts showing some troublesome behaviours: subtly subverting Gemma's authority over Cady, downloading material even when it falls outside of her allotted actions, turning on when she should be off, killing the neighbour's dog, making her system files unavailable, killing the neighbour... You know, little things, but they add up.

 So in the eve of M3gan's public reveal, Gemma decides to pull the plug on the little psycho doll and go home to finally have a heart-to-heart and connect with her niece. Meanwhile, at the office, M3gan does what rogue AIs do best: escaping destruction, engaging in fun but unnecessary carnage, and tracking down the protagonists for a very crowd-pleasing final confrontation.

 Because it's a Blumhouse/Universal production, it's got a bit better production than you'd expect from a solo Blumhouse outing, with lots of extras, locations, and some pretty impressive effects for M3gan (there are a whole lot of puppeteers listed on the credits, kudos to them.) It's a PG13 movie, so don't expect much in the way of bloodshed, but it fits well with the movie's genre and unexpected restraint.

 It gets a lot of mileage from the toy's uncanny valley mannerisms and inscrutability, as expected, and some unexpected weird touches (including that dance scene spoiled in the trailers; It would have been much more effective without seeing that bit coming, but hey, guess it makes sense from a marketing point of view.) The script does try to raise some points - I liked how it compares Gemma's lack of parenting instincts to just dumping the AI on the doll and hoping it'll work things out on its own - but it's mostly a sub-Crichton screenplay that hits all the usual technophobic points and threads them into an entertaining yarn.

 Even at a lean hundred minutes it feels a little bit undernourished, padded out by a particularly dumb industrial espionage subplot that could be cut out and no one would miss it (its only justification is that it increases the body count, and dat dance scene.) Still, it does what it sets out to do while always keeps a sense of humor about itself. It may not have Malignant's batshit crazy mojo, but that's a rare, precious thing; let's not hold it against poor M3gan.

Expect a lot of M3gans next Halloween...

 Ending spoilers - The rock'em'sock'em robots sequence was superb, but I really expected Gemma to remember that first, disastrous presentation and remove the flux capacitor or whatever it was that made M2gan's head explode. A screwdriver to the CPU is fine (and it was foreshadowed when Gemma pointed it out to Cady on Bruce, which is a nice touch) but a tad unimaginative.

Bones and All

 Where do I even start with this one.

 Bones and all is a beautiful teen romance/coming of age story about a couple of very fine young cannibals. It's a road movie, a rambling character study that also manages to establish an interesting type of vampire-adjacent monster with its own idiosyncrasies and cool little details. It's heavily indebted to David Gordon Green's early, quiet, naturalistic movies set against run-down Americana (a conscious decision, as reflected in that the man himself was asked to play a character) with splashes of graphic gore and some really nasty, excellently creepy scenes.

 It's a defiantly batshit crazy movie, aggressively uncommercial but released by MGM/UA. I loved it.

 Highschooler Maren (Taylor Russell) leads a sheltered life with her dad (André Holland). Extremely sheltered: she's allowed to go to school, but her dad locks her in her room when he's not with her.

 Maren manages to escape and goes to a sleepover with some friends, but the she loses control and almost bites one of their fingers off. Oops! She runs away back to her house, and when her father sees her covered in blood, it's clear that this has happened before, because they have a drill to clear out of town with only what they can gather up in three minutes.

 Some time and a few towns later, Maren arrives home to find that her dad gone, leaving her some money, her birth certificate, and a cassette with a long message explaining why he did it. The message is played throughout the movie, but the gist of it is that he's had enough of covering for a cannibal; much as he loves her, he's out.

 The birth certificate gives Maren a town and her mother's name, so she sets off to find her to see if she can make some sense of her situation.

 On the road she meets Sully (Spielberg regular Mark Rylance), another 'eater', who sniffs her out and... well, invites her over for dinner. Here's where we get hints of a well-developed mythology for Maren's 'condition'. It's an ever-growing hunger, much like vampirism, but it comes with a developed sense of smell that lets them, among other things, find each other. Sully has even developed it to be able to find people who are about to die, which he claims has let him avoid having to kill anyone.

 Rylance, like everyone else on this movie, gives an excellent performance, and it's unnerving to see the BFG be so unrelentingly creepy. When Maren takes off running at the earliest opportunity, it's perfectly understandable.

 While shoplifting across state lines, Maren has a sort of meet-cute with another eater her age, Lee (Timothée Chalamet). She awkwardly convinces him to take her under her wing, and teen biology does the rest. The love story is sweet and oddly underplayed- or rather, it's not so much about the standard romantic scenes, but about their connection. Like the rest of the movie, unsensational and honest.

 It's a loose, shaggy story that's held together by some plot threads (Maren's search for her mother, and oh shit Sully keeps popping up, somehow getting creepier every time!) but mostly it's a quiet, sensitive character study about these young lovers dealing with having such a shitty, shitty lot forced unto them. 

 It's a gorgeous film, with a production design that effortlessly and subtly invokes the eighties mostly without any obvious signifiers (well, except the music, which is excellent - a great selection of early eighties post-punk and an original score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross).

 Luca Guadagnino's direction is unintrusive, with some interesting editing at points, and an firm command of mood, well accompanied by beautiful photography of both urban and natural landscapes.. The script is by David Kajganich, who previously had adapted Dan Simmon's The Terror for an excellent miniseries, so the great character work here should come as no surprise.

 Another one that's hard to recommend, but I'll still recommend whole-heartedly.

Strange World

 All of humanity is confined to a single city -Avalonia- ringed by impassable mountains. The city's premier adventurer and explorer, Jaeger Clade (Dennis Quaid) tirelessly mounts expeditions with his son trying to find a way around them, as chronicled in one of the movie's highpoints - a very funny song that finds Jaeger endlessly impressive... his son, less so.

 The movie begins with one of these expeditions. Young Searcher Clade (Jake Gyllenhaal) finds a plant with weird properties - they discharge something similar to electricity - and insists on taking them back to the city; his father, irate, decides to continue into the mountains. so they separate.

 Cut to twenty-five years later. Searcher has revolutionized life for Avalonia when his plants turned out to be a powerful and renewable energy source, and he's now farming them, with a family of his own (his wife is played by Gabrielle Union, and his son by Jaboukie Young-White.) His father never made it back from the mountains.

 Life is good... until a some sort of malady starts affecting the electric plants (geddit?) Some scientists realize that all of their roots converge together and lead ever downwards; so an expedition is mounted by Avalonia's president (Lucy Liu) into a sinkhole that ends up leading into a candy-colored underworld.

 This underland is the main attraction in the movie - a beautifully rendered place, all pinks, reds, and oranges, full of weird plants, creatures, and striking vistas. Because we're operating in cartoon logic here, as soon as Searcher arrives he quickly reunites with his father, who's been stranded there all these years. So the three generations of Clade scions continue tracking the roots to see what lies at the heart of the corruption in this, wait for it, strange world.

 The conflict at the heart of the movie is, unfortunately, much more pedestrian: Jaeger wanted his son to be an explorer like him and is disappointed when he learns he became a farmer. Searcher, in turn, is desperate for his son not to become like Jaeger. Rote lessons will be learnt.

 Strange Word is another entry into Disney's recent string of nice but weirdly unmemorable movies. Not for lack of trying, though; Technically, it's amazing, and its art direction is top-notch, with cute, funny character designs and some impressive effects work (there's some fluffy cloud creatures that looked pretty cool.) There's also a cool twist lurking as to the nature of the strange world and how it plays into the plot. Unfortunately the characters are front and center, and |their arcs are didactic, plain and wholly predictable. Their conflict is so easily resolved it barely registers.

 And it does pointedly tick all the boxes people accuse Disney of ticking these days, for those keeping track at home; I'm sure it will propel a thousand 'think' pieces and trigger the usual crowd, but mostly it feels tired and... not insincere, but, well, almost. Algorithmic.

 Let it be known that in the ancestral cultural divide between Eurogames and (whatever the word for non Eurogames is), Disney have picked a side. The culture wars continue. The world at large shrugs.

Kate

  Kate's another John Wickalike movie from Netflix - they promote it as "'John Wick' meets 'Crank'"; "'John Wick' meets 'The Professional'" would be much more accurate, but they already used that for Polar. This one is actually produced by EightySeven North, the House that John Wick's money built, so you know that at least the action is going to be good.

 The titular Kate (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is yet another ridiculously proficient assassin in yet another shady underworld outfit that needs full time assassins in their roster. She was taken at a young age and moulded into a killer by her handler, Varrick (Woody Harrelson), whom according to the rules of this sort of thing is either going to betray her or die heroically trying to save her from whatever conspiracy targets her.
 After something goes wrong on a job against the Yakuza in Osaka (the target's daughter is at the assassination site) Kate is left visibly shaken, and decides to retire. She promises Varrick that she will complete what they came to do in Japan, but after that, she's out.

 Does any last job ever go smoothly? As she's about to kill her final victim, Kate feels violently ill and botches it. This leads to a good running gun battle that transitions to a cool (and pretty artificial-looking) car chase, which ends badly.
 When she wakes up in the hospital a doctor soberly informs her that she's been poisoned with a radioactive agent - Polonium-204, and she only has twenty-four hours to live (that's six less poloniums than what the Russians used to kill Alexander Litvenko; in this case, though, it sounds like bad news).
 Kate stocks up on five stim-filled autoinjectors, and decides to go after the Yakuza kingpin she was after originally, who seems the most likely culprit.
 I liked the use of the autoinjectors throughout the movie; they end up being a sort of countdown clock.

 On a completely unrelated note, they could have called this movie Atomic Noirette, and it would be pretty accurate.

 As she tears through Tokyo's criminal underworld, it soon becomes clear that the only person who can lead her to her target is the crime lord's niece Ani (Miku Martineau)... the girl whose father Kate killed in front of her. With time and options running out, Kate kidnaps the girl, and things get a little complicated in mostly predictable ways.
 For one, there's internecine trouble within the yakuza, which means that Ani immediately becomes a target for Kate to protect. And then there's the fact that Katie killed Ani's father, and that's gonna come out at some point. I can't say anything there are any major surprises as the film barrels on to its conclusion, but for the most part it's solid. It doesn't embarrass itself.

 Helmed by visual effects guy turned director Cedric Nicolas-Troyan  (he's only directed this and the second The Huntsman movie), the action is, well, pretty good. It's not up to the studio's best efforts but it's bloody, dynamic, varied, and full of cool moves and little moments; Because of the Japanese setting, there's some nods to samurai movies and pop culture. There's a really cool variation of one of those bits where the killer seems to disappear but is wedged above the people searching for her; A great gun and knife battle with lots of horizontal panning and blood splattering paper walls, good stuff.
 It looks pretty stylish, in what can probably be called the EightySevenNorth house style by now - you know, a lot of nighttime, neon-drenched streets and stylized graphic violence. This one's a bit more naturalistic, despite taking advantage of the setting's animated billboards and cheesy J-pop soundtrack.

 Winstead's already proved she can do action, and does great here. Kate makes for a really compelling protagonist, enough to make it credible that Ani very quickly goes from being terrified of her kidnapper to thinking she's the coolest thing in the world. She gets as good as she gives, as well, especially as her health deteriorates; normally action movies use kid gloves with female fighters or cop out with acrobatics, but no such concessions here; she's brutally manhandled by stronger and bigger opponents, and it makes the fights that much more realistic and interesting (this was also one of the few good points in this... sorry, last year's otherwise disappointing The Princess.)

 The script... is ok. It strings together the action sequences nicely and has plenty of good moments, but has a little trouble dealing with the central relationship between Kate and Ani; by the end how Ani is feeling towards Kate seems really arbitrary. It's like some vital character moments were cut out throughout.

 More than anything else, this is Mary Elizabeth Winstead's movie to carry, and, like Mads Mikkelsen in Polar, that other Netflix John-Wickalike, carry it she does. Kate doesn't take a lot of risks, and isn't free of issues, but it's a slick, great action vehicle for a relatable and utterly badass protagonist. There's way worse ways to spend a couple of hours.

 P.S: I'm not watching that Netflix Bullet Milkshake movie or whatever is called. I have my limits.