Beast

  Beast is a ludicrous, but not ridiculous enough take on Man versus Nature, where the man is Idriss Elba and Nature is a lion that's presented as some sort of silent, efficient assassin just as long as it's not trying to kill Elba or his family. It's competently made, but the script (by Jaime Primak Sullivan and Ryan Engle) is... well, it's terrible.

 Elba plays Nate Samuels, a doctor who flies out to the bush in South Africa so he can reconnect with his daughters (Leah Jeffries and Iyana Halley). Things have been dicey since he separated from their late mother, you see, who died before they could reconcile. So he's got that typical hollywood sad dad thing going on where his daughters barely speak to him. But it's fine, honestly - trite, and convenient (they can bond while getting hunted by a lethal predator!) but the actors make it work.
 Also good: Congenial weirdo Sharlto Copley as Martin Battles, Nate's childhood friend; His relation with Nate and rapport with the girls is warm and genuinely charming.

 Martin is a preserve ranger, so as a treat he takes out Nate and his brood out to an area of a local preserve where tourists don't get to go. Things go south as the family is trapped in a crashed jeep by a stalking lion - one we know from the (fun, silly) prelude has sworn bloody revenge against humanity after poachers killed his pride. If the prelude had ended with the lion roaring at the sky while the camera pulls away, it wouldn't be a better movie, but... Wait, you know what? Fuck that, it'd totally be a better movie.

 OK, that's the basis for a fun, silly B-movie. Unfortunately Beast drags on for too long and commits the cardinal sin of making the lion be an almost laughable threat, incapable of eating these lousy civilians even though it has them all but served on a platter. Not because it's foiled in any particularly clever way, they just keep it away with kicks and screams. The fact that Cujo is still fresh in my mind, having rewatched it recently, does not help this movie's similar second act at all.

 There's some business with a band of Poachers that, besides giving the lion a revenge arc and a very short interaction with the protagonists, does fuck all for the story, an absolutely dire minor sideplot about a poacher killer (which seems like something that was mercifully cut shorter than it was originally intended to be), a late-film change of location, and, despite how lean the movie is (it clocks in at ninety minutes), a lot of what feels like wheel spinning. There's some scenes that might have some tension in a movie where there was any actual risk, but given how badly the lion fucked up the many, many chances it got with a clear shot at Nate and his family... yeah, not buying it.

 The effects are mixed, with some unnatural-looking action scenes along with some pretty well-made ones. Most FX shots would not look that bad on a more fantastic movie, but here the uncanniness sticks out like a sore thumb - we're too familiar with the real thing, thanks to David Attenborough and his ilk. The scenery is beautiful, and cinematographer Philippe Rousselot does it justice; Director Baltasar Kormákur keeps things moving nicely whenever there's not a lot of leonine action going on. It's the script that's the main problem here, with a rote plot and terrible confrontations between Elba and the lion - a pretty big problem when that's the main draw.

The Sacrament

 A thinly fictionalized found-footage account of the most horrifying cult massacre in modern times. Sure, sounds fun!

 The Sacrament is a grim, grim movie, as befits the material. It posits a world where the 1978 Jonestown massacre never happened, so it can re-stage it, simplified and in a much smaller scale.

 The movie presents itself as a Vice documentary following up on a letter received by one of its employees- Patrick (Kentucker Audley), a fashion photographer. In the letter his sister asks him to join her at Eden Parrish, some sort of religious utopic commune. When Patrick follows up and tries to get more information, he's informed that the Parrish has moved to a remote country, and they refuse to tell him where it is - they tell him that to see his sister he has to fly out to the unnamed country and go to an airstrip, where a helicopter will be waiting. Gulp.

 So Vice (which, honestly, should be paying advertising fees to this movie, but it's a fun conceit) fly Patrick out to find his sister, with investigative reporter Sam (A.J. Bowden) and cameraman Jake (indie director Joe Swanberg) embedded to report on whatever the hell is going on.

 When they arrive they find that the Parrish, which is set in the middle of the jungle (or as close to a jungle as Georgia, where the film was shot, can provide) have cleared out a few hectares and set up a compound with several cabins and a central meeting area for a hundred and something people; It's a pretty impressive setup. On a creepier note, a group of AK-toting gunmen are sent out to meet them.

 But once inside everyone they talk to seems to be happy and thinks the world of the Parrish and Father (Gene Jones), the cult their spiritual leader, and Patrick's sister Caroline (Amy Seimetz) looks radiant and more together than she's been for a while. So the Vice crew, while sceptical, allow themselves to be somewhat won over by the commune.
 Until the second act, where they discover things are not as paradisiacal as they seem (the Vice crew sub in for the real-life Ryan delegation, and the way they find out about the cult's nastier side is the same). So begins a tense search for more information and a series of face-offs with Father and his cronies, resulting in... well, a fact-inspired massacre that includes dozens of children, depicted in an unsensationalistic manner. You have been warned.

 The events have been changed - by necessity, as so much went on in Jonestown before shit went down that it'd take at least a miniseries (with a much bigger budget) to do a faithful dramatic depiction. For starters, the original massacre claimed more than nine hundred lives, not a hundred and sixty-odd. And there's all sorts of wrinkles- from attempted collusion with the soviet bloc to Father pulling off full-scale suicide dry runs before the main event that the movie never covers (the real Jones was much more openly unhinged than his cinematic counterpart, at least until his final scenes.) But for a fictionalized take, it's pretty close, taking all sorts of small details and weaving it into a thriller framework.

 Writer/Director/Editor Ti West does a stellar job delivering an unflinching, genuinely upsetting slow-burn of a horror thriller. It's a good-looking movie, too, with a bright, polaroid-like color scheme (cinematographer: Eric Robbins) and a lot of the footage actually shot by Swanberg as he was acting the character.

 West hasn't missed yet, and this is another strong entry in an extremely impressive run of very diverse films.

Official Competition (Competencia Oficial)

  Hollywood famously loves movies about itself, to the point where satires about movie business are a minor subgenre by themselves. It's easy to see why - take your pick: narcissism, writing what you know, navel-gazing. But I can't, off the top of my head, think of any world-cinema analogues. I'm  not counting stuff like... I dunno, Deerskin or One Shot of the Dead as they don't really aim at the same target.
 That might be because there's no close analogue to Hollywood outside of Bollywood (do they do these satires?), but as Official Competition (an Argentine/Spanish co-production) shows, some of these tropes are universal - at least past a certain budget level.

 Don Humberto (José Luis Gómez) is having an end-of-life crisis on the eve of his eightieth birthday. Trying to secure a legacy, he decides to bankroll the best movie, with the best story, the best actors, and the best director. What it's about... well, he doesn't care.
 So his assistants scuttle to get the rights to an important literary novel, hire prestigious director Lola Cuevas (Penelope Cruz), and two of the best-rated actors available: Argentine Iván (Oscar Martinez), a pretentious method actor, and Félix (Antonio Banderas), a vapid blockbuster star.

 Most of the movie takes place within the nine table readings Lola arranges to nail the characters down, almost all of them with just her two main actors. And trouble starts almost immediately.
 Some of it stems from Lola's unorthodox acting exercises (such as making her two actors perform under a boulder suspended from a crane to make them nervous), but the lion's share comes from the immediate dislike and rivalry between the two leading men- with Lola, nuts as she is, as a sort of straight woman to their antics.

 The dick-measuring contest calls to mind Alex De La Iglesia's Muertos de Risa*, but this is a far gentler film, its humor much less bleak as both Iván and Félix struggle to keep appearances up while still scoring passive-aggressive hits against each other.
 It runs a bit overlong at almost two hours, but it's such an agreeable, funny and well-acted film that it's easy to forgive some bloat. Argentine directing duo Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat make do with mostly static shots, but they compensate by making the film very pretty to look at, with a few striking compositions (Cinematography: Arnau Valls Colomer; Art Direction: Sara Natividad). The script, by the directors plus Andrés Duprat, is a bit one-joke, but the joke is good and gets many different angles of attack.

 I was turned to this by Nada, a TV series directed by the same team. This is a very different beast - more of a straight comedy, if nothing else, but just as likeable.
 Some of the specifics here might get lost in translation (a Spaniard vs Argentine insult match might be the biggest casualty), but it still traffics in pretty universal humor, and could slot into the Hollywood satire subgenre as one of the better entries without difficulties.

*: Highly recommended, too.

Blue Beetle

  I'm not a fan of superhero stuff, but I'm able to enjoy it when it's good. Blue Beetle is right at the edge of that line: On the one hand it's relatively well-made, pacey, and has a slightly stronger paintjob than usual of latin (mainly Mexican) culture which goes beyond just pop culture stuff. I can't think of any mainstream picture that even mentions the Escuela de las Americas, much less use it as a plot point. I can't be mad at a superhero film that does that, even when it does so without supplying any context or proper information on it.
 On the other hand... this movie is so very clearly not for me. It's a kid's movie, an old-school family film both in form and content, cheesy, cliché ridden and enthusiastically... wacky. Everything is either over-the-top, simplified, or both, and all the plot beats feel repurposed from a hundred other movies. Meanwhile, like most other superhero movies, it doesn't pay enough attention to the spectacle side of things, featuring the same boring, weightless set-pieces we've seen in a dozen Marvel movies.

Someone's clearly been watching too much anime.

 Jaime Reyes (Xolo Maridueña) returns to his family in Palmera City (which seems to be the DC version of Miami, but with a majority population of Mexicans rather than Cubans and other central Americans.) after being away a few years getting a degree at Gotham.
 Things aren't great, though; the family's about to lose the house, thanks to villain Victoria Kord (Susan Sarandon). And I want to highlight this because it isn't just shitty storytelling, it dilutes the portrayal of systematic racism that the movie does try to show. It's shitty storytelling because... well, come the fuck on. You have the villain doing all sorts of world-breaking villainous stuff and, on an unrelated note, kicking out immigrant families for some sort of land development deal. That'd be like... I don't know, a third-act revelation that not only is Rhas Al'ghul behind the plot to destroy the city, he personally also had Batman's parents killed. How do you call it - oh, a Goyerism.
 But more importantly, it pins institutional racism on a very rotten apple. Wouldn't it have been much more simple and believable to say it was gentrification instead? I mean, that's evil enough.

 Anyhow. Through a series of pretty forced contrivances, Jaime ends up in the possession of an alien artifact that gives him exoskeleton-related superpowers, complete with Iron Man-style internal helmet cam. They should have trademarked that shit. There's a montage of misadventures as he gets used to his newfound powers, then he starts sparring against Victoria Kord and her cronies, his family gets dragged in, tragedy, comedy, extremely CGI-tired-marvel-looking action... all the sort of stuff you'd expect. It's not bad, necessarily, but none of it essential. And the film's constant pandering to the younger set is often cringeworthy.

 When the scarab first melds with him, it does so by... crawling up his butt, something that the movie avoids coming out and saying outright, but highlights a couple of times. Not funny, exactly, but bizarre. I guess it makes sense in a world where the hero's bug-shaped vehicle has a fart gas attack, complete with fart sounds. It's pretty rough.

 There's a few cool details: a couple of fight moves, some of the synth-driven music (by Bobby Krlic), and I like how the suit burns Jaime's clothes when it gets deployed: a pretty tactile effect that is unfortunately mostly there to get him naked so his zany family can make fun of his chorizo; They are so loco.
 It's hard not to be down on the acting when everyone is pitching to the rafters like this, but I did enjoy some of the quieter interplay between Maridueña (who's pretty good in this overall) and his sister (Belissa Escobedo). The less said about the zany grandmother character (Adriana Barraza) the better; She's a good actress (a regular with Iñárritu) - this is strictly a Blue Beetle tone issue.

 Director Angel Manuel Soto and writer Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer have their heart in the right place, but the clear aspirations this has to be a crowd pleaser, while having very little of interest to say or show kind of killed it for me.

The Crew (Braqueurs)

  Now this is a movie that knows how to get the fuck out of its own way. It starts with someone setting explosives on a manhole in the middle of the woods, cuts to a football game with some of the same people (as the credits roll), then to a scene where a guy asks for more money, and the other guy agrees but "only because you're my brother". You can bet that'll be significant later on. Then you get an amazing armoured truck heist, pulled off with military precision and no loss of life.

 Braqueurs doesn't exactly skimp on crime movie clichés, but it uses them to tell its story efficiently, and give it room to go to some pretty unexpected places. Yanis (Sami Bouajila), a sort of master armoured truck thief, leads the titular crew; His brother Amine (Rédouane Behache) is their gofer, Nasser (Youssef Hajdi) and Frank (David Saracino) act as drivers/muscle, and young Eric (Guillaume Gouix) has just been recruited as the demolitions expert - the very first scene of the movie is his induction test.

 They have a pretty good thing going until the fallout of that first heist hits; Turns out they didn't dispose properly of one of the guns, the one gun that was used (to fire warning shots). That results in some drug traffickers gaining some leverage over the crew, and they use it to coerce the crew to steal a drug shipment from a rival gang.
 Yanis knows that the traffickers will never let them go once they start working for them, so he sets in motion a plan to try and get out of the deal. And going any further would spoil the pleasures of this twisty, unusual crime film, but events end up endangering the families that the film has been carefully introducing in the background.

 The crewmembers are cool and likeable but not necessarily relatable, and definitely not infallible; The acting is solid throughout. There are multiple extended shootouts and the action is of the action/thriller variety, hewing close to its characters with shaky handheld shots; For the most part it does a good enough job establishing where everyone is so that things don't get too confusing.
 Colours tend towards cold blues and greys, not because the palette is desaturated (much), but because of the urban environments most scenes are set against - cinematographer Philip Lozano knows to add some colourful interludes in between as palate cleansers. Palette palate cleansers.

 Director Julien Leclercq (who also wrote, along with Simon Moutaïrou) has done a few of these French action thrillers - I tend to like them, and this one is above average. He's also done some pretty good action movies with both Van Damme and Olga Kurylenko. He's making a remake of The Wages of Fear, which I'd find terrifying if I were him - it's only one of the best suspense movies ever made. We'll see how that goes.

The Forgiven

 The Forgiven is another quiet, sardonic study on personal responsibility from writer/director John Michael McDonagh. It's not as good as Calvary - nowhere near as rich thematically, nor as funny - but it's a decent follow-up.

 David (Ralph Fiennes) and Jo (Jessica Chastain) Henninger are heading to a party hosted by some friends (Matt Smith and Caleb Landry Jones). On the long drive there David, who's DUI, accidentally runs over a kid and kills him.

 And they would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for that pesky other kid who was watching from behind some rocks (and was going to rob them when they stopped). The police, however, are uninterested  -the kid was from a nomad tribe- and quickly decide it was an accident. So all seems well... until the father of the kid (Ismael Kanater) pops up and says that honor demands that David accompany him back to his village to bury his son. David, understandably concerned for his personal security, ends up reluctantly going while Jo stays behind and indulges in some decadence.

 It's a pretty prickly movie. David is basically what you'd call a nasty piece of shit, but his character arc is interesting, especially when compared to the party back at the compound. All sorts of acts of casual (and not so casual) racism, flaunting of privilege, and delusion are presented with a wry sense of humor (I don't think I've seen as bleak a joke as the fireworks scene here in a long time). A little preachy, maybe - it's certainly not very subtle - but done with enough sophistication and depth that it doesn't grate too much.

 McDonagh's dialog is sharp and witty as ever, and there's a lot of humanity to David's growing rapport with the dead kid's father and their guide Anouar (Saïd Taghmaoui). The addition of thriller-ish elements to their jaunt are also welcome, adding some sorely needed risk to the proceeds; It's a slow movie where not a lot happens. The direction, besides pacing, is also excellent, with lovely, sweeping shots of the beautiful Moroccan countryside courtesy of cinematographer Larry Smith.

 It's not an easy watch - despite the dramatic premise, it doesn't build up to any grand thesis or revelation, just a lot of messy moments and maybe a little growth - but sometimes that's the best you can hope for.

Black Friday

  I was hoping this'd be a Thanksgiving review, but that'll have to wait as my local cinema chose to push it back to the shitty screens. So we're doing Black Friday instead.

 It's one of those B-movies that banks on the recognizability of it stars, and to be fair it's assembled a pretty great ensemble: Michael Jai White! Bruce Campbell! Ivana Baquero! Devon Sawa! And Seth Green, I guess. Unfortunately it hands them a pretty shitty script.
 Everything takes place around the midnight opening of a toy superstore, one that's unfortunately been hit by an alien meteorite that turns everyone it comes in contact with into fast-zombie-like mutants. A short time after opening the staff has to close shop again when infected customers start attacking people. So it turns into a zombie siege movie with the staff having to fend off a (very modest) alien invasion.

 All good, and some of the fundamentals are in place: the practical effects range from cheesy to pretty respectable (the late-stage mutation aliens have a pretty nifty EC comics look). The extremely low budget means that they're very inconsistent, though, and save for... well, one, most of the kills are pretty mundane and non-gory.
 The bigger problem with the scarce funding is that all sorts of filler needs to be added - and instead of providing events for the cast to react to, they go for character development; The script (by Andy Greskoviak) is not nearly up to that.
 There's a couple of disposable characters that are so cartoony they're painful to watch (an old lady who keeps saying inappropriate stuff! A couple of corporate suckups!), but the main characters don't really fare that much better. There's a couple of interesting ideas in there - the deconstruction of Sawa's attempts to be the big fish in a little pond with his too-cool-for-school attitude, for example - but mostly it's just tiresome, clichéd, unfunny shit. It comes off as an attempt to look like it's saying something about people stuck in retail jobs rather than any sort of actual commentary.

 The cast is game, with Jai White coming out on top simply because he gets the least amount of characterization, no corny attempts at fleshing him out; Just a variation of his usual hyper-competent persona. Campbell is obviously having fun with his scumbag, avuncular store manager, and Baquero and Sawa come across as likeable at least some of the time.
 But you can only do so much when the script requires you to reveal (very shallow) hidden depths and have sub-Breakfast-Club heart-to-hearts not two minutes after someone's been brutally butchered in the same room.

 So we've got character drama with laughable characters, comedy with next to no laughs, and inconsistent, spotty action/horror business. Director Casey Tebo does what he can with the little money left over after FX and casting - things look professional enough, and there are a couple of good scenes - but as a whole it's too stop-start to work properly; At best it's disposable entertainment with too much dead time in its hands and some insufferable characters.

Men and Chicken (Mænd & høns)

 Trust the Danish to put out the closest thing I've seen to Nothing But Trouble...

 Gabriel (David Dencik) and Elias (Mads Mikkelsen) learn that they were adopted at their father's deathbed; This sends them to a distant island in a quest to find their biological father.
 There they find a dilapidated estate overrun with mutant animals and run by three previously unknown brothers (Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Søren Malling and Nicolas Bro)- belligerent man-children who at first beat Gabriel up with an embalmed waterfowl when he tries to introduce himself.

Gentlemen, choose your weapons.

 Things cool down when Elias shows up, as he speaks their language (he tries to beat them up with a rolling pin). Soon they're invited to come in and live with them.
 As it turns out, they all had different mothers, and all of them died during childbirth; The Father, Evelio Thanatos (how's that for an ominous name?) is a renowned geneticist who lives as a recluse upstairs, but the boys won't let Gabriel and Elias see him. As the days go by, Gabriel tries to introduce a semblance of order into the house, while his brother takes to life at chateau de Thanatos with glee. Tensions rise between them as Gabriel keeps trying to go up to Evelio's room to find out what the hell is going on.

 That's the basic plot; There's not a lot of it, and it's soon clear it's not that important. Men and Chicken is a thoroughly grotesque black comedy that revels in its weirdness and off-putting humor. It's... well, it's pretty funny. Gabriel, who got slightly luckier in the gene pool lottery (not to mention more loving parents) is of course the straight man, trying to tame four pseudo-feral idiots, and losing; As the story is not really that much of a concern, most of the movie is a pretty free-form forum to set these five nutjobs loose so they can bounce against each other in all sorts of mildly humorous/disturbing ways.

 There's jokes about onanism (if you want to see Mikkelsen put on his O-face multiple times, this is is your chance; It's not very sexy), bestiality, all sorts of awkward exchanges and psychological hang-ups. It gets a little tiring, to be honest, but there's always some fresh new madness or a great joke one scene away. Writer/director Anders Thomas Jensen has a kind of unsparing but sympathetic view on these things, focusing on the dysfunctional family aspect and injecting a measure of pathos to the proceeds to undercut the ugliness on display.

 A well acted, well-filmed, funnier and slightly more grounded version of Nothing But Trouble, then. Maybe. Or not really, but I  couldn't stop thinking of it while watching this. I'm on the side that kind of likes that infamous Dan Aykroyd bomb, so it's not really an insult.

Bad Times at the El Royale

 For whatever reason -blame the aggressive marketing push, or the terrible title- I only now got around to watching Bad Times at the El Royale. I should have had more faith in Drew Goddard and the amazing cast he assembled. It's no revelation, and it does like to ramble... but it's an extremely solid, fun, twisty as hell neo-noir.

 El Royale is a fancy hotel near Lake Tahoe, straddling the state line between California and Nevada. That's the hotel's Vegas-like gimmick; they've drawn the state line on the ground, and where it bisects the building the styles change slightly - especially where the color palette is concerned; Seamus McGarvey's cinematography and an excellent production design (Martin Whist, with Michael Diner and Lisa Van Velden in art direction) are a huge factor in why the film works as well as it does.

Warm | Cool

 After a short, 1959-set introduction where a man stashes a bag under the floorboards on one of the rooms, the film jumps ahead a decade to a fateful day when a bunch of strangers arrive at the hotel.

 It's a motley bunch: A priest (Jeff Bridges, making full use of his raspy affability). A young woman lugging huge swathes of bedding around (Cynthia Erivo, whose gets a surprising amount of chances to show off her incredible singing voice). A callous vacuum salesman (Jon Hamm, hilarious in full motormouth mode). A taciturn hippy (Dakota Johnson). After crossing paths in the lobby with each other and the concierge (Lewis Pullman), they head off into their own rooms and their own subplots. Chris Hemsworth will put in a late appearance that makes great use of his rock-star charisma and good looks.

 It's an episodic tale that takes more than a few left turns and seems determined to include all those signifiers of the death of idealism in the sixties; Vietnam, Nixon's ugly mug (and a few Watergate-evoking shenanigans), cults and the Manson killings, the era's casual racism and chauvinism. It's all done with... well, not subtlety, but a surprising amount of care and treated with a seriousness I did not expect from watching the trailers. It's more Coen brothers than second-generation Tarantino knock-off.
 I don't want to oversell it - it's still a pulpy, knowingly ridiculous movie, but it's a serious ridiculous movie.

 Director Drew Goddard does an impressive job of weaving a large amount of stories into a coherent narrative using a load of visual prompts - he also wrote a very solid script that manages to veer in all sorts of wild directions - the seeming premise of the hidden bag is just one subplot here, one that quickly gets subsumed by everything else going on at the hotel. It has an unfortunate tendency to sprawl, though; I can't help but to think the film's almost-two-hours-and-a-half runtime could have easily be trimmed by thirty minutes or so. But I guess the flab goes well with the almost pyncheon-esque abandon the script grafts new ideas in.
 And the the flashback structure, which is one of the biggest offenders in inflating the film's length, pays off in a big way near the end, providing context to a previously underdeveloped character in a manner that's both revealing and affecting.

 The acting is superb all around, the filmmaking propulsive, the sets gorgeous and the constant twists... umm, twisty. It might not be as clever as it thinks it is, but it's clever enough, and a ton of fun besides.

The Wolf House (La Casa Lobo)

  When I was a kid I used to watch a show that would put on all sorts of eastern European animation shorts. Czech madman Jan Švankmajer was a constant fixture, of course, but they had all sorts of crazily creative, obsessively realised nightmare fuel. One short, which I retroactively identified as an adaptation of Maupassant's The Horla many years later upon reading it, kept me terrified well into adulthood.

 Chilean film The Wolf House would have fit right in that show. It kicks off with a prologue where some narration over archival footage explains that this is a sort of cultural outreach program from an isolated German colony somewhere in Chile, one that despite their protestations seems distinctly cultish. They offer a film from their archives, an incredibly creepy artifact to convince everyone that they aren't creepy at all.

 The film is, of course, The Wolf House. It's a cautionary tale about a girl, Maria (voice: Amalia Kassai), who ran away from the Colony because she wanted to play with her pigs and not work. She escapes through a dark forest, evading a Wolf (Rainer Krause) who keeps taunting her, and finds refuge in a small house where she decides to raise the two pigs she finds as humans.
 That's going to be most of the movie: a dark, surrealist cautionary fable that follows Maria and her new family as they try to build a life in isolation under the constant disapproving gaze of the Wolf, who acts as the point of view of the commune- a deeply troubling, paternalistic presence throughout the film.

Maria, in the process of entering the scene.

 It is almost staggeringly beautiful, in a very ugly way. Cameras effortlessly maneuver through rooms as the story is animated through stop-motion painting on the walls, which sometimes morph into 3D models that sprout out of the walls or floor with a disturbingly organic layering that ends up turning into human bodies (think of a non-biological, papier-maché version of Frank's resurrection in Hellraiser). There's never a cut to a finished model, they're always built before our eyes, accruing layers of cardboard, paper and fabric gubbins until they are wrapped up in first skin, then clothing.

 The characters are crude, but that just adds to the film's ambiance, and the amount of work and care that's clearly gone into every scene in this movie is astounding - that's part and parcel of stop motion animation, but the homemade quality here is really something else. Directors Joaquín Cociña and Cristóbal León, along with Natalia Geisse, have done an incredible job here.

 The family Maria creates is at first dark haired and dark eyed, but after an accident, they're recreated 'better' with blonde hair and blue eyes - and later are shown wearing lederhosen. Given all the German accents and a few other details, it's not hard to realize what the subtext is here. That's before you read about Chile's Colonia Dignidad, a Pinochet-era compound that was run by a bona fide Nazi; I had actually known about that, but didn't make the connection until after watching the movie and reading up on it online, since I was looking at it more from a cult perspective.
 So... yeah, fun. It works as a fucked-up fable, and gains a whole other load of nastiness from its metatextual elements. It's willfully weird and creepy as hell, but if this sort of madness appeals at all, I'd say it's pretty essential watching.

Cure (Kyua)

 A series of brutal killings rock Tokyo - victims are always found with two cuts carved into their sternum, forming a distinctive X shape. The weird thing: the killers are always caught shortly afterwards, not even trying to hide their crime. Normal people who admit to just... snapping, and killing someone.

 Detective Kenichi Takebe (Kōji Yakusho) and his colleague Sakuma (Tsuyoshi Ujiki), a police psychologist, are at loss, as there doesn't seem to be anything linking the crimes or the criminals; the details of the killings have been kept firmly under wraps as well, ruling out some sort of copycat situation.
 At the same time, we start following an amnesiac (Masato Hagiwara), who drifts from place to place, and eventually is shown to be at ground zero for most of the killings. Once the police figure this out and start investigating him, they find links to Mesmer and animal magnetism, and studies on hypnotism dating back to the nineteenth century.

 Though the film predates the Ringu by a full year, it's easy to see how it shares many preoccupations with J-horror. Not to mention writer/director Kiyoshi Kurosawa would go on to make Pulse (Kairo), my favorite entry into that particular genre.
 Not that it's exactly a horror movie, though I wouldn't object to it being lumped in the genre. It patiently follows its threads from situation to situation, drifting effortlessly from murder to investigation to some of the character's personal lives to another murder and on and on. What sense of urgency there is comes from the detective's deteriorating frame of mind, but the seeming inevitability of a preordained resolution renders his struggle pointless. Things will end as they must.

 It's enigmatic to a fault, but there is an explanation, however loose it may be, to the mysteries it presents. And the central mystery itself is never less than compelling, with no shortage of disturbing imagery - from desiccated monkeys to someone listlessly peeling back a flap of skin over a dead man's face. There's also a few incredibly creepy sequences where the film stock changes as the amnesiac casts his spell over others.
 Cinematographer Tokushô Kikumura is in perfect sync with the director, and his alternatingly static and flowing camerawork adds a lot to the film's (apologies) hypnotic allure.

 Kurosawa had been toiling for twenty years by the time Cure put him on the map internationally (the only movie of his I've seen previous to this one is Sweet Home, an excellent, very energetic Poltergeist-style haunted house yarn).
 Like many other Japanese directors, the guy is insanely prolific: he directed three other movies the year it came out. It's crazy a movie this controlled, that demands so much patience, was only one fourth of his output that year.

 I find it hard to write about a movie that's had so much figurative ink spent trying to wrangle meaning out of it. I've seen it a few times over the  years, and while I personally don't find it as rewarding as, say, Kairo, it's still a deeply peculiar movie- unique, haunting and enthralling.

The Night House

 Top marks for setting the title credits of the movie with Richard and Linda Thompson's Cavalry Cross. Top. Marks.

 The Night House is a solid, weirder-than-it-seems horror movie from director Richard Bruckner, written by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski: the same team would go on to do 2022's Hellraiser. Freed from comparison to a bona fide masterpiece, I think Night House fares a little better.

 Beth (Rebecca Hall) is a high-school teacher who's recently become a widower - her husband, she explains matter-of-factly in a hilariously awkward confrontation she has with a student's mom, rowed out to the middle of the lake in front of her house, got naked, put a gun to his mouth and... pow.
 As you might surmise from the above, Beth is not taking things well. She understandably does not give a fuck about anything, and there's a brazen abrasiveness to the character that's an absolute joy to watch. I  know people who would handle pain in a similar way, and while I wouldn't necessarily enjoy her company in real life, she makes for an awesome horror movie protagonist. That's something, incidentally, the new Hellraiser also did really well; I'm pretty sure I wrote something along these same lines for that movie's protagonist. But that one didn't have Hall, who's on another level.

 Besides her already fraught psychological state, Beth has to deal with the standard imagery for bereaved spouses. Well-worn stuff, but well-realised and relatable, too: Waking up to see an empty half of the bed, with an indentation still visible on the pillow, or the way everyone hushes when she walks into the room.
 Add to that the standard gauntlet of minor haunting stuff, because, well, this is a horror movie. Cavalry Cross is used that way, blasting out of a stereo in the middle of night. She gets waken up by the sound of a gunshot, has some nightmares, sees barefoot footprints around the house, that sort of thing.

 While cleaning out the house her husband built, going through his stuff, she runs across a few weird things that call her attention: Some drafted house plans which include a reversed, mirror-image set of plans, a couple of occult books (one of them replete with labyrinths, full of notes on how to trick otherworldly entities). A picture of her husband with a woman who looks like her, which leads Beth to find a whole raft of pictures of lookalikes. A miniature reproduction of her house across the lake.

 Beth, whose resentment, confusion, grief and acerbic wit provides her with endless reserves of what we Spanish speakers call Mala Leche (a very rude way to describe aggressive ill will, basically) picks at these threads until she unravels the secrets her husband was keeping from her. It's a pretty cool mystery, a lot more convoluted and crazy than the generic ghost story the movie sets up.
 The main problem is... well, the movie gives us enough information to work everything out before it's even halfway done. Maybe I'm too much of a horror nerd, but there were precious few surprises past a certain point.

 It's very well made, though, with an extremely original 'monster' that kind of makes this flawed movie essential. You know how horror movies use negative space to enhance tension? Well... without spoiling anything, the villain here uses it in a... different way. It's a brilliant, mind-bending conceit I'd never seen before, and Bruckner, his effects team and cinematographer Elisha Christian do a pretty great job of bringing to life. That's worth a lot.

 While the mystery doesn't surprise, it's an excellently creepy movie throughout, with a great handle on creeping dread and a sparingly used but very effective jump scares. The monster is a little too talky for my taste, and that really hurts its mystique, but other than that that and a few other minor issues is a very solid horror movie elevated by Hall's performance and one hell of a concept for the adversary.

 You know how they could have made it better, though? They should really let Cavalry Cross play all the way through. Or least until the guitar solo. #ReleaseTheThompsonCut.

The Menu

 The Menu is an agreeably mean-spirited satire with some very easy targets: foodies, high cuisine, and rich people - it could be subtitled The Service Industry Strikes Back. It spreads the bile around, though, by making the avenging chef (Ralph Fiennes) and his cultish staff into absolute nutters; not to mention their restaurant charges more than fifteen hundred dollars for dinner. Fuck those assholes.

 The dinner in question is an exclusive affair where a bunch of rich people are ferried over to an island restaurant for an evening of fine dining. Among the  cast are a has-been actor (John Leguizamo) and his assistant (Aimee Carrero), a couple of food critics (Janet McTeer and Paul Adelstein), some random finance bros and rich people (one of them played by Reed Birney, who reminded me a lot of Dan O'Herlihy; I kept waiting for him to say "Chef, you're fired!"). Most importantly, there's also a rich young foodie douchebag played by Nicholas Hoult (I did say this movie picks some very easy targets); He's only important because of his plus one, a last-minute replacement after he broke up with his girlfriend. Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy) is the odd one out in the group in that she doesn't take any bullshit, notices all the stuff the others miss, and is generally the voice of reason. A great final girl, in other words.

 The first few plates go relatively smoothly, though there's already some slight trolling there - such as a course of breads where only the accompaniments are served (bread is poor man's food, you see) or the chef theatrically sending the food critic an oversized plate of poorly prepared/cracked emulsion (don't ask me). Then there's a death, and the evening's entertainments begin in earnest.

 The main fun in the movie is the suspense part - the premise is completely ridiculous, but putting aside a few jabs at the attendees and some fun stylistic choices, the film presents itself at all times as a serious thriller, with Margot trying to navigate both groups to try and avoid what's clearly going to be a massacre. Picking apart what's going on (and why) is also fun, though the revelations alternate between humorous and a bit underwhelming.
 Director Mark Mylod has a good handle on tone, with most of the jokes underplayed to fit the playful, murderous tenor of the the script. Things are kept relatively classy, with a couple of bloody highlights. As for the script (by Seth Reiss and Will Tracy - both veterans from The Onion*), it's pretty sharp and not afraid to get ridiculous. Any agenda or ideology is quickly smudged as sympathies shift; It's the better film for it.

 Fiennes plays a mean psychopath, both menacing and weirdly vulnerable; Anya Taylor Joy makes for an extremely relatable, likeable protagonist, and everyone else - especially Leguizamo, who gets a lot of sympathy playing a douchebag who knows full well how much of a douchebag he is - are great if a bit cartoony. Poor Nicholas Hoult gets saddled with the most exaggerated character, a sycophantic, shallow moron whose big moments sometimes ring a bit too shrill against the slightly more subdued characters others are playing. Then again, he gets one of the best visual gags in the movie. Swings and roundabouts.

Take my word for it, this is a very funny movie.

So... yeah. The Menu tempers its humor with a nicely evil edge, and its horror with a beyond silly premise, some fun asides, and pretty effective satire. And I'll stop now before I'm possessed to inject a culinary reference.
 You're welcome.

*: Will Tracy also wrote Save the Green Planet with Joon-Hwan Jang, which is a crazy thing to have on one's resumé. Much respect.

The Killer (2023)

 In the abrupt, kind of cheesy/kind of awesome title sequence to David Fincher's The Killer, there's a quick montage of assassination methods - from basic (poison in the coffee) to pretty funny (handling a live snake). Blink and you'll miss a frozen baby in a fridge; This is a pretty glamorous film, because anything directed by Fincher and starring Michael Fassbender is never going to look anything less than fucking amazing - but... yeah, this one's about a guy who's willing to put a baby in the freezer if he gets paid enough.

 The killer (Fassbender) has rules. As he stakes out a Parisian penthouse waiting for his target to show, he tells us all about them, at length, along with the ins and outs of his craft and his philosophy: how waiting for stuff to happen sucks, that nothing makes sense and if he hurries some deaths along, what's the problem? Also, the advantages of killing someone up close over an 'Annie Oakley job'. Turns out the killer has a hankering for a good drowning.

 Note that at no point does he mention bullshit, transporter-style rules about not shooting women or not making babecicles; Instead, he warns against empathy and to 'stick to the plan'.

 Things go tits up during the Paris job, and his target survives. Not without consequence: When The Killer makes it back to his hideout in the Dominican Republic, he finds someone's broken in and tortured his lady friend (Sophie Charlotte). Instead of cutting his losses, he decides to come out of the shadows and make sure no one is ever in a position to do the same again (to him) - neither his handler (Charles Parnell), the contractors sent after him (Tilda Swinton and Sala Baker) nor the person who took the original job (Arliss Howard). As he goes along he's constantly explaining his actions and his philosophy in a stream of narration that at some point starts sounding like maybe he's trying to convince himself.

 The movie is structured into chapters, each one a target, each one with a different setting, feel and texture. Because The Killer loves to show off, all of them take a weirdly, compellingly procedural feel, but they're built around exposition, a sort of philosophical debate, a terrific close-quarters brawl, or puzzle solving. The film takes its time getting anywhere but the direction is so precise, and Fassbender is so good, it never feels like it's wasting yours.

 It's an action thriller with a, honestly, pretty low action quotient and a heavy emphasis on the psychology of the character and the minutiae of The Killer routine. This is a little bit of a problem since the character is basically a cypher, someone who's basically brainwashed himself into being a consummate professional in his chosen field. Good thing that his chosen field is inherently interesting and bound to fuck anyone up, then. What with all those freezer babies* I keep hearing about.

 Fincher could make punchy genre stuff like this in his sleep, and the cinematography (courtesy of Erik Messerschmidt) is very slick. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross contribute a cool synth soundtrack.

 The script by Andrew Kevin Walker (based on French comics by Alexis Nolent and Luc Jacamon) does a good job of switching things up and gets a lot of clever touches in (I liked how events would frequently interrupt The Killer's internal monologue; there's a wry sense of humor running through the film). It also doesn't forget to spike any sympathy that might develop towards the protagonist with the odd horrific killing, adding a splash of discomfort to the proceeds.

 If it ends up feeling a little bit hollow, well, that's OK - couldn't be otherwise, as it's partly a character study on a character who's desperately needs to believe he is hollow. The film around him has so much going for it that it's a moot point anyhow.

 *: Seriously, I'd love to know more about how that frozen baby came about. Is that from the comic? Was it in the script? Did someone pitch it while brainstorming ideas for the title sequence? Does Fincher think about this as his frozen baby movie?

The Eternal Daughter

 Here's another languid movie where Tilda Swinton can't get any sleep because of sudden noises and nothing much ever happens. I swear, I did not choose it as the follow up to Memoria on purpose.

 This time around it's a ghost story, complete with a reedy retro horror soundtrack and a near-empty hotel set adrift among mist-covered woods; It's a miscalculation, and I'm going to spoil something in the honest belief that it will improve your chances of enjoying this: this is not a ghost story*. It spends a lot of its running time trying to convince you that it is, but most of it is smoke and mirrors deployed not to convince the protagonist that something phantasmagorical is happening, but to convince you, the viewer. It all comes to nothing.

 The story follows Julie Hart (Tilda Swinton) and her mother Rosalind (Tilda Swinton), who go to a large hotel in the middle of nowhere for a few days to celebrate Rosalind's birthday along with their dog Louis (Louis). Julie is a filmmaker, and she's trying to write a movie about her mom but is unsure how to approach it - critically, she's intimidated by even the prospect of making it. Her mom, meanwhile, reveals that the hotel used to be owned by her family; A lot of their conversations circle around the memories each room they visit awaken in her.

 Their tête-à-têtes are the heart of the movie, and have a fair bit of psychological heft. They get along well enough, but there's a little bit more going on under their extremely polite exchanges, heavy with expectations and other undercurrents. It's all gentle, well observed and obviously very personal to writer/director Joanna Hogg, although the dialog scenes are hurt by the blunt cutting scheme made necessary by having a single actress play two parts and no money to liven things up with CGI trickery. A lot of the lines are a little too didactic as well; it kind of makes sense once what's going on is explained, but it makes some of these scenes a little too stilted.

 Not that much of the movie is dedicated to their conversations. Most of the rest is all about that pointless misdirection in a gothic key: atmospheric torch-illuminated jaunts that don't ever really develop a sense of mystery or menace, a missing dog scare, bumps in the night.
 There's a late-game twist that's pretty easy to see coming, but it at least explains Julie's weird mannerisms during the movie in an affecting way. Unfortunately, by then the film has spent too much time and energy into putting on genre drag that was never really effective in the first place. The framing displaces the lovely relationship drama that should have been at the center, leaving behind an overall feeling of disappointment.

*: Except in a very loose, metaphorical way - one that shortchanges any genre considerations.

Memoria

 Memoria is a befuddling surrealist jaunt from Thai writer/director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, set in Colombia, shot in English and Spanish. If you don't tune into its extremely relaxed wavelength, it's a rough one to endure.

 Jessica (Tilda Swinton) is awakened from sleep one night by a loud, booming noise, one that only she can apparently hear. Eventually it gets frequent enough that it doesn't let her sleep.
 That's not the only weirdness that starts following her around: incidents include car alarms going off and electric lights flickering in her vicinity, or an instance of her remembering someone as dead that everyone else assures her is perfectly fine.

 Jessica takes it in stride. She's concerned, obviously, and tries to investigate a little, aided by people she meets and befriends on the way (an anthropologist played by Jeanne Balibar and a sound engineer by Juan Pablo Urrego). Mostly, the movie is content with drifting from scene to extended scene, many of them seemingly extraneous, eventually moving from Bogotá to the wooded hills where she finds another friendly stranger (Elkin Díaz) who shows her how malleable the line between death and sleep can be, and later some memory-related strangeness. Don't expect anything to make proper, lucid sense - especially the explanation for the noises that kicked off the story; Dream-logic and poetic association rule here.

 It's a very well-crafted film. Weerasethakul has a knack for finding gorgeous, interesting-looking imagery (cinematographer: Sayombhu Mukdeeprom), many of the film's digressions are enthralling, the sound design is stellar and the central mystery - even when it's clear it's not going to have a traditionally satisfying resolution - is interesting.
 I found I soon lost my patience with it, though. It's a slow, slow movie, one that holds its mostly static shots for a very long time and pads its two-hour-plus run time with seemingly filler scenes. And while beautifully shot, there's almost no... I don't know, flaming football game or folk tales about hairy jungle spirits, no overt weirdness, just the sense that something is slightly off; That's obviously the intent here, but if you're not fully under the film's spell there's very little to hold on to.

 Memoria is too interesting to dismiss - there's plenty of interesting sequences or intriguing snippets of meaning - and the central performance by Swinton is great, even when she's forced to speak in (excellent, but heavily accented) Spanish. To be honest, I almost found it too much of a chore to get through, and I still can't say whether I actually liked it - but I am glad I stuck with it.

Game Night

  Max (Jason Bateman) and Annie (Rachel McAdams) are a loving couple who met over and share a love for competitive boardgames - quizzes, Jenga, charades, Risk, Pictionary... you know, shitty, entry-level boardgames. I'm not going to bring up Eurogames because they're obviously after party games with more direct competition, but they've spent years running a weekly game night and haven't even gotten to stuff like Apples to Apples or Quiplash.

 Amateurs.

 Ahem. So. Max and Annie have a pretty stable group of friends they have over to play stuff (Lamorne Morris, Kylie Bunbury and Billy Magnussen, plus some random plus ones), all the while trying to avoid having to invite their creepy policeman neighbour (Jesse Plemons), whose hilariously awkward attempts at being social and the ways they're shot are one of the highlights of the movie.

MVP

 Their routine is thrown into disarray when Max's overachieving brother Brooks (Kyle Chandler) comes into town. their relationship is... well, pretty unhealthy, what with Brooks casting shade on Max every chance he gets. So after some pretty entertaining, low-key games of one-upmanship, Brooks invites everyone over to their house for their next game night and promises a special surprise.

 The surprise being that he's hired one of those augmented reality outfits to put together a mystery game for everyone to solve. The prize to whoever solves it first: his Corvette Stingray. Soon after that announcement a couple of thugs break in, beat up Brooks, and kidnap him.
 The other players (which now include a very funny Sharon Horgan as Billy Magnussen's current plus one) of course assume this is all part of the game, and set out to win in several different ways. Max and Annie cheat by tracking Brooks' phone, Ryan and Sarah decide to find the outfit that put the game together and bribe their way to victory, and Kevin and Michelle play properly while bickering about a newly revealed marital indiscretion.

 What follows is a ridiculous mix of chases, reveals, twists, more reveals, more twists, all accompanied by some pretty great jokes as the crew butts heads with actual, dangerous criminals played by Danny Houston and Michael C. Hall. 

 Directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein direct with a lot of energy, crack comedic timing and a lot of visual flair and inventive shots (a rare thing in modern comedy; at a guess, it was a big factor in netting them the chance to direct the D&D movie). The script, by Mark Perez (reportedly with some extensive rewrites from the directors) has exactly the right mix of running gags, cutesy character moments and clever/silly conceits*, providing an excellent opportunity to watch a bunch of ridiculously attractive people (plus Jesse Plemons) put themselves into (and sometimes dig themselves out of) a bunch of goofy situations.
 All tied up with a very cool synthwave soundtrack courtesy of Cliff Martinez.

 At the risk of using a horrible adjective, it's fucking delightful.

 I'm eagerly awaiting the sequel where the game night crew play Talk to Me. Or a crossover where the Dungeon & Dragons sequel pulls back and shows that the game night crew are playing that movie's characters.

*: Such as the big action scene essentially being a game of keep away.

The Man from Rome (2022)

 The Man from Rome is a relatively high-budget but weirdly low-energy ecclesiastical thriller, a faithful adaptation of Arturo Perez Reverte's 1994 novel La Piel del Tambor (international title: The Seville Communion) that fails to convey any of its charms.

 The story concerns a small, condemned church in Seville that's hosted a couple of suspicious accidental deaths. That remains a minor issue until a hacker attacks the Vatican servers, infiltrating the Pope's personal computer and leaving a message stating something to the effect that the church will continue killing to defend itself.
 So the supreme holiness (Franco Nero!) assigns an agent (Richard Armitage) from the Vatican's intelligence agency to go investigate the matter. Unlike with Nero's other pontifical outing, he doesn't act like a sidekick to the protagonist. Point: The Pope's Exorcist.

 Once The Man from Rome arrives in Seville, he discovers things are considerably more complicated. A large conglomerate of interests led by an evil bank is trying to clear out the area the church is in for some real estate development (they must already have demolished all the orphanages and community centers), opposed by a plucky priest and nun duo (Paul Freeman and Alicia Borrachero) plus the beautiful aristocrat  (Amaia Salamanca) who's bankrolling them.

 Sussing things out takes a while, especially because new complications are added in at every turn; The script is credited to director Sergio Dow, Adrian Bol, Beth Bollinger and another five writers - that's never a good sign - and it manages to cram in most of the plotlines of a twisty, complex five-hundred-page novel into a two-hour runtime. Judging by the result, it wasn't a great idea: the constant churn of developments and revelations trivialize almost everything that happens, with none of the narrative threads ever getting the time or attention needed to develop properly.
 It's watchable, though. Armitage makes for a very agreeable protagonist, a soulful Bond-alike: suave, charismatic and ridiculously competent. The backdrops are beautiful, and there's always enough going on to sustain interest, even if the mysteries are a bit of a letdown. I also personally find its 'computers are magic' approach hilarious, as is usual with any attempts to try to represent hacking in a cinematic way. Digital aging visualization programs are part of every hacker's toolkit, because of course they are.

 Director Sergio Dow keeps things professional, tasteful and pretty impersonal - there are plenty of nice backdrops (cinematographer: Aitor Mantxola), but none of the shots are really memorable. Same goes for the music by Roque Baños. The acting is a mixed bag, with a lot of Spanish actors struggling to be convincing in a foreign language (everyone speaks English here.) It's a Spanish-Italian-Columbian coproduction shot to its detriment entirely in English to court international markets.

To be honest I've never been a huge fan of this particular novel (even at the time; it came in between La Tabla de Flandes and El Maestro de Esgrima, both of which are much, much better), but it deserved more than this, a slavish translation. People who complain about minor characters getting cut out of the Lord of the Rings movies, take note.

The Stronghold (Bac Nord)

 French action thriller The Stronghold is named after a large housing project in Northern Marseille where criminals parade proudly outside, doing criminal shit out in the open, and the police don't dare to tread.
 That's the international version; It's originally titled after the name of the police force that has that beat under its jurisdiction.

 The film follows the exploits of three cops working in the area, a lively bunch of larger-than-life action heroes that wouldn't be too out of place in a Fast and Furious film. You've got the leader, Greg (Gilles Lellouche), circumspect and stoic. Yass (Karim Leklou), the family man, the one with scruples. And last but not least Antoine (François Civil), the rookie-ish young 'un whose topknot marks him as kind of a douchebag.

 They're not above bending the law a little and abusing their authority when it suits them, but that's ok because deep down they care, so their corruption is mostly played for laughs. If that sort of thing bothers you, well... it gets way worse; If you can roll with that it mostly works because despite having the visual language of a gritty, more realistic policier, the movie's tone is pretty heightened, much closer to am over-the-top action movie.

 After establishing their day-to-day routine of catching petty criminals and sometimes going above and beyond expectations (and common sense) to make more of a dent in the criminal element, Greg is approached by his boss (Cyril Lecomte) to plan a huge raid on the the titular criminal stronghold.

 But. To get some critical information, they need to pay an informant (Adèle Exarchopoulos) with five kilos of hash. Because the boss rightly balks at giving them the drugs from impounded evidence (as he rightly points out, it would go right back into the streets), the heroic trio makes the brilliant decision to steal the drugs from consumers. With the boss's implicit approval.

 It's a bone-headed, ridiculously stupid decision, so evidently wrong on so many levels that I thought was setting up a left turn at some point... and that's only partially correct. In the short term their stings go off almost without a hitch, even when they do it in the dumbest possible way, just parking around the corner from a dealer's den and straight out stopping anyone who comes from that direction and stealing their shit.

 When the dealers come out they basically posture and then run away, no other consequence; how the hell they could keep their turf is never explained. It's hilarious.

 After that and a light-hearted montage of drug acquisition, the trio gets the intel they need and we get to the film's centerpiece. The raid itself is an excellent collection of choppy, nervy action sequences; I mean, it's not credible by any measurement (the number of criminals on any given scene depends on script needs entirely), but it's well put together, fun and tense in equal measure. And it's a big success; the sting nets a bunch of high-level criminals and a lot of merchandise.

 So our heroes become public heroes as well... until the other shoe drops. Turns out they were under investigation by internal affairs the whole time, and the powers that be for some reason have a dim view on their drug-hijacking hijinks.

 From there the movie becomes a Serious with capital S police drama, as the world turns against these completely blameless individuals and Greg, Yass and Antoine try to fight the rap and prove themselves.

 It's a deadly serious movie about some very silly shit. It uses action movie clichés to lionize its three protagonists, so when they're held up to scrutiny it's presented as the biggest injustice ever. All of which is torpedoed because... well, what the fuck did they expect? I loved it when the news mention that the people they incarcerated might be released if they're indicted. Extremely manipulative stuff for a certain kind of viewer, like the judge letting a killer go in a vigilante movie.

 But once again it works out because it's so damn over-the-top. I think playing it so seriously is the right choice; Once you get into its loopy mindset and accept the guys as a bunch of Dirty Harrys, you can enjoy the effective police drama elements without taking it as seriously as it's apparently intended.
 The action is good for what it is - don't go in expecting good choreography or cool stunts, as director Cedric Jimenez shoots for a more immediate, disorienting effect with mostly interesting results; it's not my favorite style of action, but it fits the movie and what's happening is clear at all times. Some good car and foot chases, and a good sense of fighting overwhelming odds.

 The script (by Jimenez and Audrey Diwan) also finds space for some humor, the highlight being a completely strung out juvenile offender who keeps insulting the cops until they find a song on the radio he likes. The acting is very solid across the board, with the main trio selling their differing balances between world-weariness and idealism, and it's fun to watch their extremely macho bonding. It's very much a lad's movie.

 I had Cedric Jimenez in the doghouse for so badly botching the HHhH adaptation. To be honest this doesn't even begin to make up for that, but taken on its own, and on the spirit I think it's proffered it's a pretty decent watch.

Shepherd

 A young man (Russell Owen), recently bereaved and under obvious distress, decides to accept a shepherd job in a barren isle off the cost of Scotland (The Isle of Mull, posing as a much smaller island). A laconic captain (the always welcome Kate Dickie) takes him and his dog Baxter  (Shuggie) there, uttering all sorts of ominous pronouncements on the way ("Something's haunting you, Mr. Black. I can see it. I hope you get the chance to confront it.")

 Egads.

 For a while, as Eric settles into the derelict cottage the job comes with, and it looks like the movie might slow down and breathe a little. It doesn't last long.
 Soon the poor guy is suffering nested nightmares, being followed around by a woman in black, or dealing with low-level haunted house shit. When it's not that, hints of his dark, troubled past bubble up or Captain Fisher phones up with some more vague accusations. There's also a mystery, of sorts (it never goes anywhere) with a bunch of journals an artistic soul left behind; you know, the type of person who'd draw some pretty ravens by a warning about a witch; "She's here!"
 Even if it's at a glacial pace, there's always something going on in this movie. It's a constant, slow-motion barrage of very tame weirdness and psychological distress.

 Shepherd's a (mostly) gorgeously mounted gothic tale that struggles with the tale part. It's a tone exercise that, grasping for a story, settles on cobbling together hoary clichés, shopworn imagery, and nothing much beside. Maybe if we smother it in dour solemnity no one will notice.

 Technically, at least, it excels. Writer/director Russell Owen has a real eye for composition and keeps things lively, always with an eye towards constantly driving the screws in. And while it's always a bit too obvious in its intent, a little crass, the film gets by on looks: Cinematographer Richard Stoddard makes the unusual choice to film with a lot of curved lenses, even in interior shots, and lavishes a lot of attention on the gorgeous windswept hillsides and moors. Along with a sometimes overbearing score by Callum Donaldson, the visuals and style-over-everything mindset ensure that the atmosphere goes a long way to salvage a lousy script.

 The acting is great as well; Owen sells his character's funk convincingly. Dickie, meanwhile, make a huge impression with a tiny part as a sort of one-woman Greek chorus/pack of furies; This character, complete with her awesome wardrobe (Costume design by Gigi Siegel) belongs in a much more fun movie than this one.

 

 Even the ace visuals stumble towards the end, as escalation requires more than the meagre budget allows; Few movies manage to do convincing CGI fire, and Shepherd is not one of them. The climactic scene where we finally see the root of Eric's trauma fares much worse - a very funny instance of supposedly horrifying cartoon physics. Good thing I wasn't invested in the plot, huh?

 Maybe that's too mean. There's a lot to like here, it's just that it's in service of a completely uninspired, vacuous core. I do hope everyone involved gets more chances, I'd love to see what these people would do with a story worth telling.

The Belko Experiment

 It starts out as another day at the office; A diverse roster of white-collar characters go though the very familiar morning rituals of arriving at a modern workplace.
 There's a few unusual things here, though: this particular office building is behind a walled compound on the outskirts of Bogotá, Colombia, there's a bunch of very unfriendly guards making everyone nervous, all the local employees are being sent back home.
 Oh, and later we learn that all employees accepted to have a surgically implanted tracker in their skull. That's never a good sign.

 In any case, it's as close to another day at the office as those (admittedly pretty alarming) conditions allow. That's until steel plating slides across all the windows and exits, and a voice comes over the PA system to calmly explain that unless two people are murdered in the building within the next thirty minutes, there will be severe consequences.

Spoiler: She doesn't make it.

 So it's one of those 'throw a bunch of people together and try to get them to kill each other' kind of thing. What's neat about this one is its economy; It's only twenty minutes into the movie when the murder deadline hits, and the implants inside four employees' heads explode. Within that time we've been introduced to most of the movie's main characters, and several key relationships have been set up: There's nice guy Mike (John Gallagher Jr.), his love interest (Adria Arjona), the COO (Tony Goldwyn), two maintenance guys (Michael Rooker and David Dalmastchian), a stoner cafeteria worker (Sean Gunn) and a nasty asshole (John C. Mcginley, doing a great job at being hateable). It also introduces a bunch of faces that will later pop up in the background; "Oh, hey, it's that guy/gal!"

 It couldn't possibly do justice to the eighty people enclosed in the building, but the film manages a sprawling cast of extras pretty well.

 After the first round of deaths, the voice comes on again to say that if thirty people aren't dead within the next two hours, sixty people's heads will 'splode. And we're off to the races.

 The battle lines are drawn fairly quickly - extreme pragmatists versus idealists - although, as Mike points out early, who the fuck would ever believe that whoever's running this will let anyone get out alive?

 As always in this tiny subgenre, It's neat to see how the cast spreads out along the morality spectrum. Once the majority opts for basic human decency (a nice touch), the COO, who makes a convincing, rational case for mass murder, leads a group to try and seize an armoury protected by a security guard (James Earl) who's firmly on the "no murder" side of the equation. Things get very bloody. 

 The Belko Experiment is a nasty piece of work. Gleefully misanthropic and genuinely upsetting, it's a great example of an exploitative school of script writing that I call 'finger in the ass' - A deeply manipulative premise designed entirely to make you uncomfortable. I normally resent that, but damn if it isn't successful here; Everything from the basic setup to many of its particulars is unpleasant, and the film doesn't skimp on gore or horrifying imagery (expect mass executions and physical and psychological distress - sexual violence thankfully isn't a factor given the short timeframe.)

 Director Greg McLean does great job switching between the film's multiple stories while keeping forward momentum. I'm guessing he also brings a big heap of grimness to the material (based on his other movies) that helps give the film its queasy energy. Gunn's script is superb, keeping the black humor and clearly satirical take that runs throughout the material under control, and making enough of the characters likeable so that it hurts when they get die (often in humorously abrupt ways). He also keep things relatively believable, especially in the first half of the movie. Things spiral out of control in ways that make sense.

 There's an abrupt ending that kind of stretches credulity, complete with an entirely underwhelming explanation for... well, everything that happened, and even sets up a sequel. It's understandable why the crew thought it was necessary, but I'd argue it undermines the rest of the movie. But other than that and some abrupt tone switches, this is an excellent low-budget worksploitation film.

Terrified (Aterrados)

 The poltergeists in Terrified do not fuck around. At first they seem happy just taunting poor Clara (Natalia Señorales) with voices from the pipes and banging from the other side in the wall. That's until her husband Juan (Agustín Rittano) finds her later that night being hurled telekinetically from wall to wall, face smashed to a pulp.

 The same spooks are content to harass neighbour Walter (Demián Salomón) with more standard ghostly hijinks; moving his bed at night, making all sorts of noises, and generally causing disorder. The poor guy is a nervous wreck (it's never explained why he just doesn't go to a hotel or something), and spends his time at work trying to get a paranormal investigator to go check his house.

 He finally succeeds convincing her when he gets footage of a mysterious naked emaciated man wandering around his house; By the time she finally pops up, though, Walter's gone missing.

 The most horrifying - or, terrifying, I guess - event is reserved for poor Alicia (Julieta Vallina), whose ten-year-old son digs himself out of his grave after getting rolled over by a bus and props himself, unmoving, at the dinner table. After leaving muddy footprints everywhere. Fuck that noise.

 Funes, the policeman in charge of the scene (Maximiliano Ghione) contacts Jano (Norberto Gonzalo), another policeman who seems to have experience with this sort of thing to help out. Jano in turn runs into Dr. Albreck (Elvira Onetto), the paranormal expert from the previous story as she's taking pictures of Walter's house, and brings her up to speed. Recognizing  that this sleepy Buenos Aires neighbourhood is somehow turning into some sort of locus of paranormal activity, they bring in a Yankee (George Lewis) and set up shop to try and figure out what the hell is going on, one of them stationed on each house. The ghosts don't take it well at all.

 It's a very episodic movie that doesn't ever really cohere into a whole and doesn't end up offering a satisfying narrative -  but the individual elements are so well made that it doesn't really matter. It's creepy as hell, tense, cheerfully nasty, and features some beautifully mounted jump scares. A fun time, in other words.

 Writer/director Demián Rugna and his crew work wonders with a low budget, offering up some neat ghosts, a fair amount of gore, and some pretty effective framing. The characters aren't very memorable, but the script does a good job of making them sound fairly authentic, and the actors sell their parts pretty well. Some of the scenes feel a bit stretched out - there's a lot of arguing, for example, about what to do about the ambulatory corpse - but other than a few scenes like that the film moves at a fair clip.
 There's also a good sense of mystery. Some possible explanations are bandied about, but the entirely fallible experts in this film don't ever clarify anything - there's no apparent motivation, no sense of a plan or rules, no seeming goal to the manifestation. Sometimes ghosts are just evil.

Books of Blood (2020)

 Books of Blood is the second adaptation of the title story (The Book of Blood) in Clive Barker's 1984 non-blood book of stories Books of Blood. It follows 2009's interesting but flawed Book of Blood. All three are about a guy who gets used as a book. Not of blood, but a bloody one.

 I consider myself a lapsed Barker fan, and I completely missed this one until now - that might be because it's a "Hulu original", a service that doesn't exist here in the UK. It has the distinction of being the last Touchstone Television production made before that producer was swallowed whole by Disney.

 Yes, it's a TV movie, but I guess these days that means that it was made for streaming, so there's no shortage of gore or swears. The budget is pretty limited, though. It clearly had aspirations to become a pilot for a series or the first of several anthology films, a la V/H/S, but that never happened.

 After a short prologue where a bookseller tries (unsuccessfully) to not be murdered by some thugs by giving them the location of a book that's purportedly worth millions, we launch the first story: Jenna.

 Jenna (Britt Robertson) is a troubled young woman recovering from some unspecified trauma with her family. Whatever happened, it left her hyper-sensitive to sound, forcing her to wear noise-cancelling headphones.
 Jenna runs away and hops on a bus to San Francisco, but she keeps seeing someone following her. Trying to escape her pursuer, she ends up in a bed and breakfast run by a friendly older couple. Her paranoia ends up being justified when she makes a series of horrifying discoveries, and the reveal of the horror elements of the story is a fun one... but by the time they arrive it's too little, too late. The story is poorly constructed, and meanders back and forth along its forty-minute runtime providing plenty of red herrings and unnecessary detail but no clear reason to care about anything that's happening.

 The second story, Miles, is a loose but fairly faithful adaptation of the original The Book of Blood tale. In it a scientist (Anna Friel) who's recently lost a seven-year old to Leukemia, is confronted by a medium  (Rafi Gavron) who says he can help her get in touch with her son.

 The seance goes well, and the scientist and the medium end up in bed, and also later launching a foundation to promote investigation into paranormal phenomena. The medium is a fake, though, and ghosts are not known to be very forgiving.
 This one is actually pretty good, despite some ropey CGI and a cheesy spooky kid. It plays around with chronology a little in ways that are fun and help the story flow a little better, the characters are good.

 The last story - Bennett - follows the gangsters from the introduction as they search for the Book of Blood, which takes them to the same house the second story took place in; in a fun twist, the ghosts taking their revenge on the medium also turned the whole neighbourhood into a sort of post-apocalyptic haunted wasteland. Things do not go well for either thug. This one's an extremely loose adaptation of the short story On Jerusalem Street from the source material, but aside from a couple of neat scenes and checking back in with characters from the other stories, it's a non-starter.

 Finally, there's a sort of epilogue that explains what was up with Jenna from the first story, and her ultimate fate. It's a remarkably fucked-up finale that does a lot to redeem how boring the first segment was.

 Director Brannon Braga and Cinematographer Michael Dellatorre don't manage to inject a lot of personality into the film, but it's not a bad-looking either and there's some great aerial footage. Their big score is a cliffside building with giant windows that allows us to see two groups of characters going about their life separately, like two vignettes in a comic book; The movie doesn't find a way to use it in any meaningful way, but it still makes for a couple of great shots.
 The effects are too CGI-dependent for their own good, and at this level of budget that can get to be a pretty big liability. The gore, despite being graphic, is pretty tame compared to what you'd expect from a Barker adaptation; It also carries none of his trademark horniness, with the film's sole sex scene fading tastefully to black - this is especially egregious after a pretty sensual, non-conventional bit of foreplay as the scientist rubs down the medium looking for hidden devices. Meanwhile, the script (by Braga and Adam Simon) fails to capture Barker's energy, choosing to deliver home-brewed lifeless dialog despite being given a few opportunities to quote the original author verbatim.

 The acting, however, is pretty good, with both Robertson and the ever-dependable Friel turning in good performances.

  So... yeah, I don't know. This is definitely a mixed bag. It ended up winning me over, but it's still pretty damn slight; For anyone interested in this story I'd recommend the 2009 edition. Or better yet, the original books, which also include the