Fist of the Condor (El Puño del Condor)

 While Argentina seems to have the South American horror pretty much monopolized, you'll need to cross the Andes to get good action*. Chilean director Ernesto Díaz Espinoza and martial artist Marko Zaror can take credit for that with a trio of diverse and extremely entertaining action films (Kiltro, Mandrill, Redeemer; there's more, but I haven't seen them... yet).

 The Fist of the Condor is something special, though. It's the rare traditional martial arts movie done outside of Asia... I can only think of Kill Bill or Enter the Dragon (if you ignore that was a Chinese co-production); Both of those seem to stretch the 'traditional' part of the definition, though - I'm thinking something that could be a mainstream Shaw Brothers or Golden Harvest picture.

 It's all here, though: wall-to-wall philosophical ruminations, training montages (including a few non-traditional training methods), dramatic zooms, badass posing... varied fights, a monastic protagonist, a wealth of natural settings to frame the action. Stolen martial arts manuals. Ridiculous, themed moves and dialog that threads and weaves throughout the fighting.

 The only thing missing is a terrible English dub, but luckily we've moved on beyond that.

 The plot follows an unnamed warrior (bald-headed Zaror) who's embroiled in a long-running feud with his twin brother (shaggy, long-haired Zaror). Their conflict is over a manual detailing the long-lost martial arts of the Inca; It belongs by rights to the bald brother, who inherited it from his former master Condor Woman (Gina Aguad, Zaror's real life mother!) just before his brother killed her and stole the manual.

 To make things a little more complicated, everyone thinks bald brother still has it - so he gets a couple of challengers coming up to him to try and earn it in combat.

 The movie is fairly straightforward: bald brother takes care of a few opponents, works up the will to go against his shaggy, long-haired brother. Shaggy, long-haired brother sends his first apprentice (a lanky, menacing José Manuel, who also goes unnamed). And because the movie is subtitled Part One, that's pretty much it. There's a lot of voiceover narration as bald brother explains himself and his philosophy, and flashbacks to fill in a little of the sibling's complicated history, lots of glamour shots as people practice or wander in front of some beautiful natural setting or another. Lots of training montages.

 Fights are gritty and relatively low-key (here's hoping they can break out the wire-fu in the next one), but  also quick, brutal and exciting, and they very carefully frame Zaror's physique at all times. They're varied as well, each one pitting Zaror against a different style in an interesting arena of some sort (sandy beach, woodlands, abandoned building). That, and the mythic resonance of Espinoza's knowing, homage-ridden script make it feel a bit more epic than the meagre budget should allow... if you like this sort of thing; Otherwise, you're probably better off watching Mandrill.

 Zaror is an imposing figure and a graceful fighter, but his acting is a little too wooden to anchor the film. Good thing he's got an easy-going charisma going for him; It doesn't make him playing the villain side of the dual role any easier, but it does make up for his monotone narration. There's also a sense of fun running through the film that belies the dead-serious script. It mostly surfaces in Rocco's soundtrack (it ranges from spaghetti western to butt-rock to disco, and is pretty effective), but the glee in each melodramatic reveal, every reversal or dramatic zoom is palpable. "Look," Espinoza, Zaror and co. seem to be saying: "this is what we like, and this is why we like it."

 They make a pretty damn good case.

Paradox (Shā Pò Láng・Tān Láng)

 When Chinese teenager Lee Wing-Chi (Hanna Chan) disappears while abroad in Thailand, his father Lee Chung-chi (Lois Koo), a Hong Kong police detective, decides to follow her to Thailand to put his particular set of skills to good use.

 His particular set of skills are, of course, being a police detective. He strikes a good rapport with the Chinese ex-pat detective Chui Kit (Wu Yue) who's assigned the case, and soon they're working together trying to find the missing daughter; You'd have thought it'd take more paperwork than that, but I'll take it.

 The first lead they find is a red herring, but it sets an extremely promising tone for the rest of the movie: After a clever investigation where they commandeer business CCTVs to trace the missing teen, there's an excellent bar brawl that devolves into a frantic foot chase that's punctuated with a couple of very, very cool moves. The action choreographer is Sammo Hung - this feels a little grittier, a little more brutal than his usual wheelhouse, but the fights are unafraid to break out some silly/awesome maneuvers and slight bending of realistic physics. It's a lot of fun.

 The bust ends up being... well, a bust, though, and Lee becomes persona non-grata and thrown off his unofficial post in the investigation. No worries, he just goes off to do some investigating of his own.

 Both him and Chui Kit, running on parallel tracks, establish that Lee's daughter was kidnapped by an organ-trafficking ring led by a delightfully sleazy American (Chris Collins) who goes around in a short-sleeve t-shirt, suspenders and hat ensemble like a lost member of the Entourage cast, which automatically marks his as a douchebag. That, and leading an organ trafficking ring, of course. 

 Lee, now fallen from grace, gets there through torture: Chui through an investigation that reveals a cover-up within the police and leads to the film's highlight fight scene - a  multi-stage brawl that ends with sidekick Tony Jaa (!), who's possibly got psychic powers (!!), fighting against the organ-trafficking douchebag on a rooftop. It involves children being thrown off buildings as a distraction; Fun!

 But then the film veers towards... if not full-on grimdark, towards all-pervading bleakness; As it happens, Lee Wing-Chi's heart is vital to save an important politician's life, so her fate seems preordained. There's a pivotal car crash that highlights the script's tendency for metaphysical soap operatics (Writers: Nick Cheuk, Lai-Yin Leung). The story hinges on what are effectively extreme coincidences and contrivances, but since it's built off them by design, it comes off as bleak fatalism and karmic retribution.

 This sort of thing doesn't do a lot for me (unless it's much better crafted) but I can't deny the power of that tangle of story threads during that crash scene, or the complexity that's added once it's revealed how much of a rotten father Lee was.

 And at the risk of spoiling the tone it settles on, it's a very pessimistic film. It would have had more impact on me if its tone were more consistent, or if the script had made the tiniest gesture to feeling authentic (the level of political operators we see here would never get their hands as dirty as they're seen here; it's like we're missing a whole layer of fixers) - but if you can look over that sort of stylization, it will probably pack a pretty hefty punch.

 Most of that is down to HK legend Louis Koo - his excellent, layered acting adds a lot to what in the end is a fairly clichéd thriller character. We know he can do shootouts and some stunts, but sadly he doesn't handle himself too well in the elaborate hand-to-hand fights; A decent trade-off, since the movie is more about drama than fisticuffs anyhow. Jaa doesn't get a huge amount to do, but he gets up to some memorable weirdness and a really great fight. Wu Yue is extremely likeable as the moral center of the story and picks up the slack from Koo in the fights department. And Tony Jaa is Tony Jaa; his role here is officially a 'special appearance', but he gets a good fight and some memorable weirdness. As welcome a presence as he always is.

 Wilson Yip's direction is assured and, until some jittery editing during the final fights (mostly to hide Koo's lack of martial arts training) it keeps things cristal clear.

 I only found out after watching it that it is the third entry in the SPL / Killzone series - the only ties are thematic, some elements, and in the talent involved - oh, and in the Chinese title. I guess I should have realized it once the pointed coincidences, heightened melodrama, and the organ traffickers came into play. This one is completely overshadowed in the action department by the first sequel (quality and quantity), but I think it works slightly better as a story; its grimness is uncompromising.

Pandemonium

  Nathan (Hugo Dillon) comes to at the site of a horrific crash in a godforsaken (but very scenic!) stretch of mountain road. The car is crumpled against the rocky curb, a trail of automotive debris leading back to where he was lying in the asphalt.

 At first he marvels at his good luck, but Daniel (Arben Bajraktaraj), another man at the site, quickly corrects him: It turns out both of them died in the crash.

 What follows is a pretty basic black comedy where, after taking a lot of convincing, the two men get into a metaphysical discussion - one that's complicated when two doors pop up out of nowhere: one red and menacing, the other white and non-assuming. Daniel hears heavenly music (harps and trumpets, for fuck's sake!) from the white door, Nathan hears screams and chains wafting out from the other one.

 This leads to the two newlydeads to bicker about the nature of their sins. It ends with a pretty predictable but still funny twist, which unfortunately relies on a pretty hacky bit of misdirection.

 After some waffling Nathan ends up in a hell of the no-nonsense, medieval catholic variety - the type where even minor sins are punished forever. In the anteroom he finds a few corpses, and when he touches them he gets to see a little bit of their lives. Because... Surprise! This is somehow an anthology movie now.

 The first story is about Nina (Manon Maindivide), a little shit girl who lives in a huge manor house with her parents. An early development takes them out of the picture, something that doesn't seem to bother little Nina at all; She goes down into the catacombs to retrieve a huge, deformed man (Carl Laforêt), with whom she bickers while she decides what to do with her parents' corpses. It's a gothic, moody little piece, entertaining in its perversity, but aside from a sharp, nasty exclamation mark at the end it doesn't really go anywhere.

 Then it's Julia's (Ophélia Kolb) turn - a lone mother whose daughter has just committed suicide after being brutally bullied at school. Julia refuses to acknowledge her as dead, and tries to make amends for ignoring the warning signs by taking the corpse out for a holiday - one imagines the saddest possible version of Weekend at Bernie's would follow, but tragically the short ends well before they get to the beach.

 Those two digressions finished we come back to Nathan, who is led to his place of torment by a hellish bureaucrat. There are some developments, a couple of them agreeably bizarre, and it's all wrapped up with a pretty horrifying final shot.

 Those are some pretty decent parts. Unfortunately, they don't add up to much - it feels like mononymic writer/director Quarxx had a bunch of cool images and punchlines, but wasn't able to wrangle them in a satisfying fashion... so the result is a bunch of underdeveloped ideas, stories that lack resolution or proper development, and a structure that feels ill at ease with the anthology format.

 There's a lot going on with the script - the indelibility of sin and rigidity of its punishment, letter vs. spirit of the law, taking responsibility for one's actions... but there's no time to give any of these any sort of consideration, or even any weight.

 It's beautifully shot, though (cinematography by Didier Daubeach, Hugo Poisson and Colin Wandersman) - the first segment up in the mountains stands out as particularly good-looking, and the way a snowstorm slowly but surely turns the world white around the two ghosts - as if their world was already being erased - is a gorgeous bit of imagery, extremely well realised. The acting is good (Maindivide as the little psycho is a lot of fun to watch) and the orchestral soundtrack (by Benjamin Leray) is excellent.

 As good as some of the elements are, I found the whole pretty underwhelming. It feels like Quarxx might have a great movie in him, but sadly this is not it.

YellowBrickRoad

  One morning in 1940 the entire population of a remote New Hampshire town walked North up an unmarked trail, into the wilderness. Only one of them came back, and only a few corpses were found - slaughtered or frozen to death. Or so the opening blurb for horror movie YellowBrickRoad (stylized in all caps, but I don't feel like screaming) would have us believe.

 Seventy years later, three professors (Michael Laurino, Anessa Ramsey and Alex Draper) manage to receive the case files and decide that there might be a book in that old unsolved mystery. They mount an expedition to find the trail and see what might be found, enlisting some help to do so: two sibling cartographers (real-life siblings Clark and Cassidy Freeman) and their intern (Tara Giordano), plus a park ranger (Sam Elmore).

 With the help of a local (Laura Heisler) who insinuates herself into the group, they find the trailhead and start heading up north and strangeness ensues. Subtle at first; GPS malfunctions, impossible map readings, and an old timey melody wafting up from the woods. Soon the music gets a lot louder, though, and our intrepid explorers are driven to murder. Silly, silly murder.

 It's a decent stab at an indie horror flick, a nasty foray into the unexplainable that does a lot with its limited budget. The writer/Directing team of Andy Mitton and Jesse Holland keep things moving and, while a lot of the material feels overtly familiar, there are some fun digressions and some depth to the characterization. The acting is very decent, too.

 But in the end, there's just not enough of anything here; The mysteries are intriguing, and I respect that the film refuses to explain anything away. But I didn't find the strangeness particularly satisfying, either - there's no strong central concept nor a good thematic hook for the modest mayhem that the protagonists get up to. The lack of a proper budget hurts the few scenes that call for special effects, and the actors sadly do not sell what little action there is, especially a neck snapping - a shame, because the scene as written should be pretty upsetting.

 Although YellowBrickRoad takes a few cues from The Blair Witch Project, it doesn't use the first-person gimmick - it looks very professional, though the washed-out palette and crisp digital cinematography (by Michael Hardwick) didn't do a lot for me. Robert Eggers did uncredited work on the design and costume department, though to be honest none of it really registered. Still - his first proper movie!

 The directors would go on to make We Go On together in 2016, which looks interesting, and then they split. Mitton made the excellent The Witch in the Window and The Harbinger. Holland did The Crooked Man, which seems like a goofy Nightmare on Elm Street clone with  Michael Jai White in a Loomis role; I am so up for that.

 And here's a cute detail: Andy Mitton is (or was) in a band called The Real d'Coy along with the two cartographer siblings from the movie (Clark and Cassidy Freeman). Indie rock, of course; If I had to describe it in one word it'd be 'pleasant'.

 This is not a bad debut, and I'm glad it launched at least a few interesting careers.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

 It's a hard movie to talk about without spoiling, but I'll try; You know its bones anyways. Furiosa (Alyla Browne) is a little girl, abducted from her family in a hidden, verdant land in the middle of post-apocalyptic Australia. She will at some point grow up and become a complete, stone-cold badass (Anya Taylor-Joy), lose an arm and gain the trust of a petty tyrant warlord (which she'll betray by sacrificing everything to do the right thing in the next movie).

 Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (sans the Mad Max) fills in those fifteen years by creating an antagonist for Furiosa, the Warlord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth). He's the one responsible for abducting her, he's the one who kills her mother, and he's the one who introduces her - in a way - to Inmortan Joe.

 And what a fantastic creation he is; A megalomaniac asshole with an irresistible swagger who just absolutely knows he's the protagonist of the piece - at one point he starts narrating his own, twisted hero's journey. A truly despicable villain whom the script (by George Miller and Nico Lathouris) provides with a wealth of choice Mad-Maxisms, those wonderfully playful word-nuggets which Hemsworth milks for all they're worth. Also, his main toady is called Smeg. We've reached peak art, people, stop trying. It can only go downhill from here.

 Events follow Furiosa's character as she grows up bouncing back and forth between Dementus and Immortan Joe across five discreet chapters, aided by a mentor in badassery: The previous imperator (Tom Burke). Their mutual loyalty in the face of insurmountable odds gives the movie several kicks of bittersweet humanity.

 This is the first movie in the series where you don't have to do a huge amount of mental gymnastics and overlook a bunch of stuff to slot its continuity with the movie that came before; It's as straight a prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road as we could have expected (not a given, with this director).
 Furiosa is 100% the same character, a lot of the degenerates from the 2016 movie make a return, and it carefully seeds many of the elements that would bear fruit later. Or earlier, depending how you look at it. We get to see how Furiosa loses her arm and where she got the idea for her facepaint (or is that a badge of her station? Hmmm). We go to places only alluded or seen from far off before (both Bullet and Gas town feature prominently). Hell, it even confirms a fan theory about what the Fury Road is.

 Compare this with the previous Mad Maximilians, where each one seemed to be a recounting of a tall tale maybe loosely based around the same historical character. It fulfills its prequel duties admirably without feeling forced, and what's more important, it finds a story to tell that stands on its own merits while also informing and deepening the themes of Fury Road. It's of a piece with that movie, and when we consider it's still one of the best action movies of... well, possibly ever - I can't think of higher praise.

 I do however think that this one is at a slight disadvantage - it would probably kick all sorts of ass to watch them in chronological order, but Fury Road is more perfect as a standalone movie, while this one gains a lot of power from knowing how things will shake out, the resonance certain actions will have. Not to mention a few visual references to other movies in the series.
  So I'd still recommend watching them in the order they came out, with this one as the capstone.

 The action is brutal, thrilling, elaborate, imaginative, and it made me laugh out loud multiple times with excitement (and also just laugh out loud, because a lot of it *is* pretty damn funny). Cars crumple in every which way, things explode real good, and bodies are hurled around with abandon, often while on fire. There may be nothing quite as memorable as the pole cats, but I won't hold it against a movie that is as wildly inventive with its violence and stunts as this one is.

It looks great in motion, very stylized - some (not a lot) of it looks a little too aggressively artificial but, well, that's a trait it shares with part Fury Road, and we later learnt from the internet that absolutely all of that movie was 100% real, absolutely no CGI or digital trickery except for some colour grading (I especially like that part they shot in Australia's famous fire tornado zone; All those brave stuntmen definitely didn't die in vain).

 And it's shot beautifully. George Miller keeps making a case for being one of our greatest living directors, and the crew he's assembled keep justifying how essential they are. The blocking on some of the action sequences, the way the camera tracks a character while, say, showing a motorcycle circling and later crashing messily behind them (action designer: Guy Norris), or the way heavy colour filters are used to give the desert a hellish bent (Cinematographer: Simon Duggan, the rare newcomer to the series), or the way the footage is cut in a way that keeps building up a hellish, chaotic energy while still keeping the action crystal clear (editors: Eliot Knapman and Margaret Sixel). And the music (by Tom Holkenborg), even without the Doof Warrior to provide it diegetically (except for a cameo), is incredible.

 There are so many wonderful, weird, detailed and beautiful inventions and developments here that are so idiosincratic to the way George Miller's brain works. So many indelible images. I adore that he very pointedly makes it so that the  movies don't fit perfectly together - even if it's an almost straightforward prequel/sequel duet, they still feel like whoever's telling the story is assembling it from different sources at some point in a distant future... and every so often says 'oh fuck it, this doesn't make sense but it's too cool to leave out'.

 George Miller is a very smart cookie who's obviously thought a lot about what makes stories work. He's even made a movie explicitly about that.
 The guy was blessed and talented enough that he could create a modern-day classic in Fury Road, a story that many of us have internalized the same way our predecessors did the tales of Cú Chulainn, Odysseus, Coyote or the Monkey King*.

 With this movie he both delves into that classic and heightens it, providing a number of shots and scenes that echo what came before - what will come after, strengthening its impact. It might not tell as perfectly a self-contained a story, not quite, but its power - alone and paired with its sequel - is undeniable. The Saga in the subtitle is warranted.

 Make it epic? Fuck that, he's made it mythical.

*:  Insert .gif of someone making exaggerated wanking motions while rolling their eyes here.

The Wild Goose Lake (Nanfang chezhan de juhui)

 A series of escalating petty rivalries within a motorbike-stealing cartel result in Zhou Zenong (Hu Ge) shooting a cop to death. The police mobilize en masse and track him down to Wild Goose Lake, a remote lakeside community where crime runs rampant.

 When the police offer 300000 yuan to anyone who turns Zhou in, he hatches a plan with a couple of close associates to be "handed in" for the reward money - he's got no illusions that the police (which the movie frames in parallel with the criminals several times) will let him live, so he might as well leave his estranged wife some money after he's gone. But because everyone involved has a criminal record, they have to enlist the help of Liu Aiai (Gwei Lun-mei), a 'bathing beauty' - a sex worker who makes a living from lakeside tourists to act as the informant.

 Meanwhile, the asshole who stirred the shit that got Zhou into the whole sorry mess is still around, with eyes on the reward as well. As for everyone else, that amount of money might give people ideas... maybe shift some loyalties.

 The plot is loose, even a little disjointed, and it leaves a lot open for the viewer to interpret. Writer/director Diao Yinan doesn't really neglect the twisty, pulpy plot, nor the expected lurid action. But his attention wanders easily, and the meticulously composed scenes often follow its characters while they go on with their lives without doing anything that might impact the story - if it wasn't so carefully crafted, it'd look heavily improvised.

 It's wryly funny as well - there aren't any real jokes in the script, but Yinan has a real appreciation for the ridiculous. The most over the top example is an unorthodox (and very bloody) use Zhou finds for an umbrella, but there are a few minor sight gags, humorous (at least to me) abrupt cuts and surreal tableaus. Elsewhere the script bogs down (in an enjoyable way) to show, say, some of the finer points of motorcycle stealing (in a scene that reminded me, not for the last time in the movie, of Emily the Criminal), or an improvised disco night where the dancers, for lack of a light-up floor, wear light-up shoes.

 The film is structured as a series of flashbacks and flash-forwards as the various characters and the police circle around each other warily. There's next to no exposition, and none of the main characters are very expressive; You're expected to keep up with all the various factions (or not).

 This complexity does give the film a jittery, paranoid vibe. The suspense tips over into violence several times over; Short bursts only (don't expect complicated choreographies or extended shootouts), but what's there is enjoyable and doesn't shy away from getting a little silly.
 More than anything else, it's an exercise in mood-setting, with almost every languid, morose scene dripping with neo-noir atmosphere (cinematographer: Dong Jinsong).

 I'm not that convinced of its substance, but with this much style, it's a moot point. It requires some patience, but I liked it a lot.

Out of Darkness

 A small clan of stone-age hunter-gatherers venture into a blasted, barren land in search of a new home. They're led by Adem (Chuku Modu), a steely figure who poses as a saviour but is more of a sociopath. Following him are Geirr (Kit Young), Adem's younger brother and almost polar opposite - scrupulous and indecisive; Adem's very pregnant partner Ave (Iola Evans) and their son Heron (Luna Mwezi); Rounding out the group are the foragers - Beyah (Safia Oakley-Green), a young foundling whom Adem's been eying greedily, and an old, bitter exile by the name of Odal (Arno Luening).

 Their expedition is not going well. Food is scarce in this new land, which is hitting pregnant Ave particularly hard. Odal is not afraid to point out how bad things are, and while his family stands behind him, Adem's leadership is constantly, quietly called into question.

 The illustrious leader doesn't help things by using his authority as a blunt instrument; Particularly, he gains young Beyah's enmity by borrowing a page from ex-president Trump's book of courting methods and grabbing her by the pussy.

 Was this ever a thing? I don't remember it happening in any movie from the eighties, where being a sex pest was often portrayed as an endearing character trait; Thank you, Mr. Trump, for your contributions to popular culture. It's made even more horrible here because Beyah is just going through her first period.

 So things aren't looking great even before young Heron is abducted by some unseen threat. His father goes berserk and starts making a series of decisions that end up tearing the group apart. Meanwhile, whatever it is that's lurking in he mists hasn't gone anywhere.

 Shot during COVID on desolate Scottish moors, it seems like this film (originally known as, uh, The Origin) has had every bit as rough of a time as the story it portrays. After what must have been a gruelling shot (as someone who once tried to cut through a very small patch of the Scottish highlands, I couldn't help but to wince in sympathy at a few shots of the clan wading through the soggy brush), the film then spent a year and change in limbo before getting unceremoniously dropped on streaming services. It deserves better.

 For starters, it's a bleakly beautiful film. Director Andrew Cummings and cinematographer Ben Fordesman make the most of the natural environments they're shooting on; As with any survival tale, the foreboding, inhospitable landscape is as much an antagonist as whatever it is that's stalking our protagonists; When Adem says he'll hunt down something to eat to his starving retinue, the others only have to look around to put the lie to his words.

 Fractured sightlines are also used very effectively - the dark just beyond the campfire, whispers and footsteps somewhere in a thick mist, a tense bit of late-film spelunking. Despite some jump scares and the aftermath of a particularly nasty bit of ultraviolence, it's not a horror movie, not in any traditional sense. Think of it more as a tense, slightly depressing indie survival suspense film and you'll probably avoid some disappointment; There's a lot more bickering and scene-setting than meaningful action,

 Cummings adds a couple of stylistic flourishes - one of those inverted landscape sweeps that never fails to amuse me; "We're turning your world upside-down... literally!" I imagine the director intoning theatrically while it plays. But hey, I like how it ends up looking, so I shouldn't make fun of it. Other than that there are a few striking panoramic compositions, but it's not a very showy movie. The few fights are chaotic, which fits the material.

 The music by Adam Janota Bzowski is also really good, slowly devolving into an atonal mess as it goes along. And the acting's pretty great all around; Oakley-Green, in particular, is intense and very believably fierce.

 The script is basic but very solid, with good tension-building from both within and without. I'm also really predisposed to like a movie that a) invents a language for its characters, and b) proceeds to use solely that language, with subtitles for us non-speakers. Ballsy.

 There's a fairly heavily-telegraphed twist in the third act that recontextualizes the movie a little bit... and it left me thinking that, given the spread of themes it ends up juggling, the Trumpian reference is very deliberate.

 It's not that hard to see the twist coming (the movie being set 45000 years ago actually was a big tip-off for me), and it's more than a little wobbly - the series of contrivances that needed for it to happen the particular way it happens feel pretty manipulative. But it's a decent idea and it adds a welcome kick to the movie when it most needs it.

Perpetrator

 Perpetrator is an interesting surreal horror movie thing from writer/director Jennifer Reeder. I arrived at this one after liking Night's End, her previous feature (yay for auteur theory!); While that one was a fairly straightforward film that went off the rails towards the end, Perpetrator's a film that barely has any rails from the beginning.

 It's got a simple plot that provides some very basic structure, but then it's happy to forget about it for a while and provide all sorts of weird diversions. And it definitely has themes, but they are, again, all over the place, and never get a lot of traction. It's a cagey, ornery film that focuses on the feel it's trying to communicate rather than on any mundane concerns like coherence or plausibility.

 Jonquil 'Jonny' Baptiste (Kiah McKirnan) is a delinquent teen with huge hair (which, in a nice touch, keeps changing shape throughout the film) who's introduced breaking and entering. The earnings from her modest heist go towards paying the rent, as her father has some unspecified illness which seems to have left him invalid.
 After a nasty attack of whatever it is he's got, Jonny's dad sends her over to live with her aunt (Alicia Silverstone, giving a wonderfully unhinged performance), and to a new school run by a rampaging misogynist (Christopher Lowell, also very funny) who delights in screaming at the girls that they're dead after he mock-kills them in a school shooting drill (announced over the intercom as 'code massacre - level bloodbath!'. Oh, and a bunch of girls around Jonny's age have been disappearing recently around her new neighbourhood. Just a small detail, nothing important.

 Jonnie is also developing some sort of supernatural power - her aunt, who acts as a sort of paranormal tutor, describes it as 'extreme empathy' and calls 'the forevering' which we can all agree is a really stupid name that we will never mention again. In practice, Jonny mostly uses it to make digital-looking ripples course through her face and to weird out other people.
 When it's an acquaintance's turn to go missing, Jonny decides to harness her newly discovered powers towards  constructive ends and hatches a pretty stupid plan to find the (pregnant pause) Perpetrator.

 That almost sounds normal! But, as mentioned, the film constantly veers off on (often funny) little tangents, and doesn't really pay a lot of attention to its own plot. It's not that much more egregious at it than, say, the last few Mission Imposibles, except that in those movies the story goes down the toilet so Tom Cruise can jump off some really high place - here instead you get a scene where Jonny is forced to eat a lipstick (a scene that, incidentally, really grossed me out). And there's never any pretense that the story makes sense.

 There's a tangle of feminist messages running through the script, none of them subtle, but the main thrust of the movie seemed to me to be about young people figuring things out and banding together against the previous generation (even the sympathetic older women are flawed and kind of part of the problem). Critically, there's a shift in Jonny's attitude as soon as she gets her superpowered empathy; I've seen way worse ways to signal maturity.

 Blood and other bodily fluids flow freely, and there's a tiny bit of body horror (grafted anuses which later turn into vaginas; Freud would have a field day here). But it's not particularly gory and it never even tries to be scary, either, though it's got a good handle on atmosphere (cinematographer: Sevdije Kastrati). I guess you could say it will not conform to genre norms (badabum-tish!).

 So... it's a mess. An interesting, entertaining mess that's full of weird little vignettes that never seem to pull in the same direction. Some of them are funny, some of them are insightful; None of them boring.

Winchester

 "Inspired by true events"

 Hollywood to English translation: Tidal wave of bullshit incoming.

 Anyone with an interest in supernatural odds and ends might be familiar with the Winchester mystery house. It begun its life as a large farmhouse, and it was slowly expanded into a haphazard mansion of 500-odd rooms and twisty passages by the heiress of the Winchester fortune (as in Winchester rifles), who designed the extensions and oversaw construction herself. Reputedly it's one of the most haunted houses in the US - the strange architecture was supposed to confuse and trap the ghosts of the victims of the fruits of her family business; As you might imagine that reputation was created whole-cloth half a century after her death to lure morbid tourists. Even the more innocuous factoid that says the construction work on the house carried on without reprieve for years, day and night, is completely made up. Oh well.

 Not that there's any danger of anyone ever taking anything presented in Winchester, the fictionalization of this fiction, seriously. It's an incredibly silly movie.

 One fine day in 1906, or so the movie would have us believe, The Winchester company approached Dr. Eric Price (Jason Clarke) to evaluate Sarah Winchester's (Helen Mirren!) mental health with a view to remove her from the board of directors.

 Dr. Price is a really fun character; His tragic backstory will predictably weigh the plot down later, but he gets a great introduction as a laudanum junkie entertaining three hookers with prestidigitation and crappy self-help hokum, and he remains a bright and agreeably agnostic presence for most of the movie. When confronted with a barrage of spooks and haunts in the house, for example, he just assumes he's tripping balls.

 The good doctor arrives at the house (it would only be called the mystery house when it was turned into a tourist attraction) and meets the lady of the house's niece (Sarah Snook) and her young son (Finn Scicluna-O'Prey), who, despite good performances, are only ever there to give the film a child in peril plotline.

 The niece explains to Dr. Price that he'll need to follow the house rules, which is an excuse to lay out the more earthly elements of the house mythology (confusing architecture, a ridiculous staircase, trap corridors, a horde of people working on it at all times), with a few very cheesy jump scares to (not very subtly) hint at the supernatural component of the story.

 Once the doctor finally starts running his sessions with the Winchester scion, he finds out she's a fiercely intelligent and willful old woman who nonetheless entertains a bunch of truly batshit notions. To wit: the spirits of the people killed by the rifles that bear her name come to the house, where she lures them into rooms custom built for them, and she tries to talk them into shedding their earthly burdens. Or something like that. It's a needlessly complicated metaphysical construct that makes entirely too much cheesy sense: on the one hand it's stupid enough to make you wince, on the other it lacks any mystery whatsoever.

 The fun arrives with a murderous spirit that is not willing to talk things over. His arrival coincides with the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake (which did actually topple a tower in the house) and it adds some sorely needed urgency to the movie. But the script (by Tom Vaughan and directors Michael and Peter Spierig) can't really find a satisfying way to handle the plot, leading to some ridiculous developments that are neither satisfying nor scary nor wholly fun. It's kind of interesting, at least?

 The story is a bust, but the script is not a complete loss. The characters are mostly well written and their dialog is engaging (except when providing exposition); This is the rare horror movie that's better when nothing fantastical is happening. All the actors do a great job, too - pretty much a given, with the talent involved.

 And the surfaces of the film are also top-notch. The directors were given mostly free reign to shoot in the real Winchester mystery house, and they, along with their regular cinematographer Ben Nott, beautifully capture the bizarre mansion in moody, creepy detail and elegant camera sweeps. If only their talents were in service of a better script... Still, can't really absolve them, seeing as how they did enough revisions to it to be credited as co-writers.

 I mean, they could have removed the (multiple!) jump scares featuring spooky roller skates, at least.

 

 Yes, it's an extremely dumb movie that's not nearly as much fun as it should be. But it's handsomely made, and engaging, in its own daft, intermittent way. It's a shame that it seems to have driven the Spierig brothers away from making movies, because their technical work here (and elsewhere) is excellent.

Outlaw Johnny Black

 The long-in-development Outlaw Johnny Black has been touted a spiritual sequel to the excellent 2009 Blaxploitation spoof Black Dynamite, but a direct comparison won't be kind to the former. Where Dynamite was pacey, irreverent and overstuffed with wild ideas, Outlaw is a little ponderous, earnest and mostly wholesome.

 Still funny, and entertaining, mind, and it comes by its earnestness honestly. Michael Jai White stars, directs, and co-writes with Byron Keith Minns, who also has a significant role; Their passion for the material is clear, and it's one of those movies you can tell people had a great time making. But it's about as different a spoof as you could imagine. It shows so much reverence and love for the genre that I think it works better as a light-hearted Western movie than as a send-up of one. It does deploy every now and then the sort of non-sequiturs, sharp observations and over-the top humour its predecessor traded in freely, but here they feel a little out of place.

 Johnny Black (Jai White) is one of those cool, badass, slightly amoral antiheroes who roams the plains in the late nineteenth century hunting for vengeance - he's after the racist asshole who killed his father, one Brett Clayton (Chris Browning, effectively menacing).

 He's got a literal bullet with his target's name on it, and as he rides into a town he signals to the town undertaker that his professional services will be needed before long. An excellent, very genre-savvy introduction. Black's there because he knows that the local bank will be hit by Clayton's gang. However, he intervenes to save a couple of Indians from a gang of hoodlums, and is soon running away from the law.

 On the run and without a horse (the poor animal literally kicks the bucket, in a pretty funny throwaway visual gag), the outlaw's rescued by a pastor (Keith Minns) who's on his way to take over ministerial duties on the small mining town of Hope Springs and to meet up with a sweetheart he's been corresponding with for years. Things don't work out, and after the pastor is left for dead after an Indian attack, Black pulls a Sommersby and takes over his identity.

 The plan is to fake it at Hope Springs until he can abscond with the church's money, but of course the complications start piling on quickly.

 The first complication is Bessie, the pastor's sweetheart, played by Erica Ash - followed by her sister, Jessie (Anika Noni Rose), whom Black falls for almost immediately. But he's also expected to tend to the towns spiritual needs, something to which his temperament is humorously unsuited for. The other main complication is that the original pastor wasn't as dead as Black thought - after an uncomfortable, cringe-inducing farce with his Indian attackers (all the Indians in the movie are pointedly played by very conspicuous non-native Americans), the priest manages to make it to Hope Springs, where Black manages to coerce him to go along with his plan.

 There's also the matter of local land baron Tom Sheally (Barry Bostwick), who knows there's oil near the pastor's house and is threatening to invoke WWRBBM (White Woman Raped By Black Man - an acronym which, hilariously, everyone in the movie knows well) to get a posse to come burn the town down unless he gets the deed to the land.

 It's a slow-moving, classical plot that hinges on a very predictable spiritual awakening for the titular outlaw (who, to be fair, was never particularly evil to begin with). But it's carefully crafted and engaging enough that its earnestness actually becomes a strength; The scene where Black has a very public epiphany, spurred by memories of his father giving a sermon on forgiveness, is particularly effective and graceful.

 Elsewhere, the movie slows to a standstill - there is absolutely no reason this film needed to be a hundred and thirty minutes long. It doesn't help that the tone is all over the place, with Airplane! style gags thrown in along with more character based- and extremely broad humour and shameless mugging to the camera. Some of said mugging is pretty funny, like when poor, heartbroken Bessie aggressively cries at Black. But there are some real stinkers mixed in, too.

 The cast do a lot to elevate the material. Michael Jai White is one seriously charismatic dude, and he has crack comedic timing. Byron Keith Minns is also very funny, and the ensemble cast that the film has assembled is mostly excellent - whether it's a one-joke character like Bessie and Jessie's slow-witted brother (Eme Ikwuakor) or a more sympathetic, layered character like an ally played by Kevin Chapman. 

 Action-wise it does pretty well. There isn't a huge amount of it, but it does run the gamut: gunfights, a gratuitous bar brawl, horse falls, horse-dragging, and all the stunts you'd expect out of a true-blooded Western; You can tell the crew was itching to do a lot of these. There's also a little bit of martial arts, with a couple of very quick but cool demonstrations of Jai White's skills, and a very funny Jackie Chan-style slap/quickdraw fight.

 The direction is unshowy and competent; Despite some nice scenery early on and some stylistic references like dramatic zooms, it's not a particularly visually appealing movie, which, just like not letting the martial arts run amuck, seems like a considered decision. By design, it works best as a slightly corny, meat-and-potatoes Western movie that just happens to have quite a few jokes thrown in.

Come Drink With Me (Da zui xia)

 A gang of ruthless criminals led by Jade-Faced Tiger (Chan Hung-lit) ambush a government convoy as they cross some beautiful rolling hills, aiming to set their leader free. Their target ends up not being there, but they take the governor's son as a hostage instead.

 Back in their temple hideout, they send out runners to tell the governor that unless their leader is released, they will kill his son in five days. As they set out to wait, nervous whispers spread among their number of the menace of the governor's hidden blade, a ruthless law enforcer called Golden Swallow. This prompts Jade-Faced Tiger, who wasn't aware of this menace, to say: "I'd like to meet him".

 Cut to a lone woman (Cheng Pei-pei) making her way to an inn during a thunderstorm. Once she arrives there, a number of the bandits clear out the locals and slowly circle around her while she remains perfectly poised. Jade-Faced Tiger's second-in-command (Lee Wan-chung, always smiling) sits down with her, recognizing her as the governor's emissary, but she refuses to negotiate, insisting instead that the bandits turn themselves in.

 Thus follows a crazily good (and extremely influential) scene where a series of fights break out at the Inn as the Bandits test this mysterious woman... who of course turns out to be none other than Golden Swallow. At first they attack her "covertly" by "serving" her a jug of wine (throwing it at her head), or saying that they'll pay for it hurling coins at her like shuriken (which she catches with a chopstick; Seriously, this scene is so cool). When she foils them they come at her overtly with swords and throwing knives, and she easily fights them off by wounding each of them in their right hands. The fight is overtly stylized, but the camera tracks everything beautifully and Cheng's balletic style looks great on camera, if unconvincing as a credible fighting style.

 And the next scene, with all the bandits sitting around a table with their hands bandaged, is the perfect gag to cap it off. I can't overstate just how good this is. A stone-cold classic character introduction.

 It didn't even register that she's disguised as a man until they start referring to her as a 'he' - and even then, I wasn't sure if that was the case or if they were making fun of her for  being a tomboy. She's later 'outed' when she visits the temple in dress, but this is a very overt reminder of the cultural distance that these films have for me; Part of it is the stylization, part of it is being used to women dressing in more masculine clothes (her outfit here looks pretty unisex to my modern gaze) but come on, I could never buy anyone could possibly mistake her for a man, especially after hearing her talk.

 No matter. Golden Swallow harries the bandits, increasingly leaning on the help of handsome local beggar Drunken Cat (Yueh Hua). But she takes on more than she can handle when she tries to confront all of them at an excellent temple showdown (for my money, the most exciting fight in the movie), and Drunken Cat saves her and takes her to his secret hideout (a beautiful secluded forest cabin soundstage) to nurse her back to health... revealing himself to be a kung fu master in the process.

 This is where the film pivots, turning Golden Swallow's story into a side-story as the main plot turns out to be one of those martial arts school beefs between Drunken Cat and the corrupt abbot (Yeung Chi-hing) of the temple the bandits are holed in.

 As soon as kung fu masters are introduced late in a story, that's it; They'll suck up all the air in the room. It's as if Dirty Harry had a sidekick that suddenly turned out to be a superhero; it's all but impossible for the roles not to be suddenly inverted.

 It's a disappointing development, but the film survives it. Golden Swallow becomes a deuteragonist, but she still gets a chance to shine and her story is (mostly) resolved in a satisfactory way. More importantly, Drunken Cat is an engaging character in his own right, and his story is pretty cool too. The script (by King Hu and Ting Shan-hsi) keeps the two storylines thematically linked with an emphasis on honour and forgiveness.

 As with most early wuxia I've seen, the fights prioritize stylization over realism, and the editing sometimes looks a little off, but technically they're all extremely accomplished. The combat is varied, well choreographed, and full of fun moves and touches (I love how someone falls into water  in the foreground not once, but twice - causing exaggerated splashes to come from off-camera). It's often brutal, with the big battles getting surprisingly bloody.

 The scenery is also varied but always very colorful (cinematography: Tadashi Nishimoto) and it features some lovely on-location shooting and the sort of elaborate soundstages I adore in these movies. Most importantly, despite some abrupt cuts, the action is crystal clear, with the camera always perfectly positioned to capture everything in an engaging way. It looks so good, with so many cool shots, that narrowing all the captures I took of this to just two was difficult.

 This - the last movie Hu would make with the Shaw Brothers - is widely considered one of the best Wuxia movies. I not going to argue; Golden Swallow's introduction alone will ensure this one sticks with me for a long time. And it's impossible to to overstate how influential it would become.

Feline Eulogy

 Here's a story about my cat:

 You know how cats will often bring 'offerings'? Our cats weren't much for that, but when they did it, they went big. They brought in fish, which we think they stole or were gifted from people fishing in the river out back, and a clutch of live baby hedgehogs. One of them once herded a live wild hare through our cat-flap; We're still not sure how he managed that.

 While Pandæmonium, the male one, brought live mice in and lost them all over the place, Delirium was too effective a huntress to share her kills with us, except for the one time she brought a trophy:

 A huge rat head - just the decapitated head, which she dropped right in the middle of our kitchen floor facing upwards. It looked, for all intent and purposes, as if it were just poking its head up from a hole. Only a few drops of blood spoiled the illusion.

 It was made even funnier because otherwise she was the most poised, dignified feline you could imagine; Everyone called her Princess, and she held court on our whole street.

 We named her after a Sandman character, but we should have called her May; she's a horror movie cat.

The face of a killer.

 Here's another horrific fact which we've been forced to become acquainted with in the last couple of years: between modern medicine and their sheltered lives, these days cats live way beyond their sell-by date. Their internal organs just aren't made to last that long. Delirium stopped eating properly a few days ago, and due to other conditions she was already under two kilograms - skin and bones. So we've had to make the decision every pet owner dreads.

 For a second fucking time, after Panda got cancer a few years ago. This afternoon will be her last.

 Eighteen years is not a bad run... I guess. She deserved a century.

 I thought I might as well celebrate her slasher glory days in this modest way. Here's to you, Delirium. Your reign was long and absolute, and none whom raised your psychotic urges ever saw you coming.

 We'll miss you.

Beyond Skyline

 Skyline has a severe case of unlikeable characters; And as it's a movie that asks us to spend a lot of time with them... well, it absolutely is a deal-breaker. Seven years after that, writer Liam O'Donnell returned with a sequel, this time as a director as well. His fix for the first movie's problems? Casting Frank Grillo as the lead. Problem solved.

 It helps that O'Donnell keeps the character drama to a bare minimum, as this time around the script seems to recognize we're here for the alien invasion thread, not some idiot bickering. But Grillo is always an asset - it's not just that he's a very credible action protagonist, his world-weary pleasantness gives the movie a huge boost. I couldn't be arsed to give half a nugget of shit about any of the bozos in the first movie, but Grillo's easy charisma got me invested in his (fairly standard) family problems almost immediately.

 He plays Mark Corley, an LA cop who's on a never-explained hiatus. He's just picked his son Trent (Jonny Weston) from the department, a surly twenty something with attitude problems, and is on his way home in the subway when the alien invasions from the first movie hits the city. (Having recently watched Skyline, it seems to me that the subway looks a little too busy for the early AM - but as the script soon makes clear, this is not a film that's particularly concerned with plausibility. Fair enough!)

 The switch in perspective to allow us to witness the invasion from a ground level is a pretty cool idea, and the first act of this movie is basically a streamlined version of Skyline once it finally got going: a group of survivors evading the aliens to get to an extraction point. We get the Cliff's notes to the alien capabilities: a hypnotic blue light that lures helpless humans to their tractor beams, large humanoid tanks (yes, the big aliens are basically mechs) and a large human-harvesting mothership that can rebuild itself after a direct hit from a nuke (spoilers for Skyline). It's a distilled version of the first movie's events, better in pretty much every respect, not the least because all the character drama goes out the window in favour of action-movie interactions. Mark and Trent are joined by a cute TSA employee (Bojana Novakovic, who was so good in The Hallow; She's pretty much reduced to eye candy here) and a blind veteran (Antonio Fargas).

 The extraction fails miserably, leaving a reduced cast abducted in the mothership. After a crash landing the action moves to the jungles of Laos, where Mark teams up with local drug traffickers (which include Iko Uwais and Yayan Ruhian!) to (in no particular order) save his son, whose brain has been transferred into an alien drone, protect the daughter of the protagonists of the first movie, whom we meet as a baby and is growing at an exponential rate, and finally maybe find a way to defeat the aliens. No pressure.

 Like the first movie, this is a budget effects showcase which relies a little too much on CGI. But in pivoting towards being a more of a straightforward action vehicle*, this sequel gains a sense of fun. The hand-to-hand action is very decent; O'Donnell's penchant for more immediate, unstable handheld takes doesn't show it very well, and the fights are almost always with CGI-enhanced aliens against blue screens - but the choreographies, which seem to have been devised by Uwais, Ruhian and their frequent collaborator Very Tri Yulisman, are fast and brutal. There are a few pretty cool stunts, including people being thrown through walls and furniture, which is always cool.

 The shootouts aren't quite as good, with the guns themselves feeling very underpowered (must be a trade-off for having infinite ammo), and no squibs, just CGI. Speaking of, most of the blood is done in post-production, and it looks particularly terrible. The alien vehicles and creatures are still cool, although the focus on quantity of F/X shots over quality means that some of their big scenes are a little ropey. Still pretty impressive for its budget level, mind.

 We also get a little exposition on the alien invasion and why they're going around harvesting people and using our brains to run their machines - it's not good sci-fi by any stretch, but I appreciate they're making an effort. Also appreciated: the craziness of the endings on both movies, with this one following up on the fate of the baby Mark was protecting in an awesomely batshit (if iffily rendered) epilogue.

 I can't resist a movie where someone gets their arm torn off and they just keep fighting with their other one. Beyond Skyline is a solid B-movie elevated by some choice craziness and a lot of energy. I may have jumped the gun on revisiting the series - the fourth one, which will feature a Debt Collectors reunion to add to its The Raid reunion, will apparently only come out in 2025 - but until then, I guess I have one more to look forward to.

*:Relatively straightforward - it's still about an American ex-cop teaming up with a Laotian drug cartel to fight off an alien invasion.

River (Ribâ, nagarenaide yo)

 Director Junta Yamaguchi and writer Makoto Ueda's follow up to their delightful Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes doesn't stray too far from their first film together. This time around they focus on a sleepy town that gets trapped in a two-minute time loop - think Groundhog day, but with an ensemble cast in Bill Murray's situation. And the short length of the loop makes a huge difference, too.

 The film is anchored around the staff and guests at a traditional country inn (a ryokan, if that means anything to you) - specifically Mikoto (Riko Fujitani), who works there as a maid - as they start adjusting to their new bizarre reality. As soon as the two minutes are up, they get sent back to whatever they were doing at the start of the loop - physically reset, but with their memories left untouched; Mikoto goes back to standing by the river that runs behind the inn, for example, while a guest always finds himself in the bath (and for the first few loops is seen running around half-naked). 

 Hilariously, after they get a handle on what's happening, the staff decide to keep running the inn to the best of their ability and make their guests' stay as pleasant as possible given the circumstances; As far the owner sees it, the inn's weathered snowstorms and floods, so a time loop is just a new challenge that they need to face together.

 As you'd expect from the creative team behind it, River is exceedingly clever in both form and content. It is a much more cinematic film than Beyond..., with some nice cinematography (courtesy of Kazunari Kawagoe) to go with its sometimes manic handheld shots, and it mimics the script's time loops by having the film consist of a string of two-minute one-take-scenes*. For a while it even matches each side of the edit between the scenes by shooting Makoto in the same position, from the same angle as the locations switch.
 Ueda's script expertly adds complications as it goes along, and paces the introduction of new characters with the clever (and very cute) conceit that people who were doing a monotonous action (like eating rice) take longer to realize what's going on before they go out looking for an explanation.

 Because the premise is much simpler than on Ueda's previous script, this one finds much more time for comedy: a full-on farce as the already freaked-out staff has to deal with their even more freaked-out customers, a gentle romantic story between Mikoto and a co-worker boyfriend (Yuki Torigoe) who is about to move out to France, and even some very, very slight and quickly dispelled darkness as a couple of the locals experiment with death.

 There's a sweet theme in that some of the characters feel like they are at fault for causing the time loop - the sense that time is leaving them behind, and a staunch refusal to let anything get too heavy; There's no situation that can't be resolved by talking it over. It's both cute and very cutesy, if that makes sense. A cosy movie. That sort of thing often repels me badly, but I liked this one well enough.

 The two-minute length of the loop is a genius touch: it's just enough time for people to get together and start working towards something just before the loop ends, and the movie mines a lot of laughs from the exasperation of people getting interrupted by it before they go back to whatever it was that they were doing.

 It does get a little histrionic, repeatedly providing the harried staff with bite-sized crises that fit the loops' durations a little too neatly, but there's enough variety to the situations and a sense of progression that it never really hurts the movie.

 Familiarity is a little bit of a problem. The film shares a lot of the crew with Beyond..., and there are a lot of shared plot elements as well; the way people adapt to their situation is carried over, as is their willingness to start playing around with the new rules of their reality. The ending is... well, I'm not a fan of the direction they took with it, but it's satisfying in that it gives everyone something to work towards together, and it suggests that both movies might exist in the same universe somehow.

 There are also some issues that the script fails to explain. At one point it begins snowing, which the characters do address, but later when the snow is gone no one comments on it. Easily understandable given a budget film's usual constrained shooting schedule, I guess. Less forgivable are a couple of chase scenes where the hunters give their quarries a ridiculous amount of lead time. A few of the scenes are also very improv-theater like, with conversations where both characters oversell their lines a little too hard.

 Overall, though, it's pretty funny and extremely likeable, if a bit lightweight. It's been a good few years for Groundhog-Day-alikes, what with Palm Springs, Boss Level and Happy Death Day; This one's the cleverest out of all of them, but also the one that has the least impact. Still a great way to spend two minutes over and over and over again.

 *: I didn't time them because I reasoned "why wouldn't they do it that way?" However, a few of the scenes do feel shorter; If I ever rewatch it I'll come back and comment whether the movie follows its own rules or not.

Night's End

 Night's End is a pretty cool low-budget horror movie that goes off in a pleasingly batshit tangent; I've got a soft spot for those.

 Ken (Geno Walker) is trying to rebuild his life after having some sort of breakdown - one so bad it ended his marriage and practically left him agoraphobic. He spends his days as a shut-in in a newly rented, fairly spacious flat, following a carefully delineated daily routine (exercise, coffee, tomato soup, gardening)  in between putting up videos on Youtube to see if one of them gets big enough to earn a following. Tips for divorced dads, keeping lawns and hedges, that sort of thing - write what you know, I guess.

 While on a video chat, a friend (comedian Felonius Munk) asks him about a detail in the background Ken didn't even notice: a taxidermized bird falls off a ledge, as if pushed by an invisible hand.

 Intrigued, he mentions the incident to his ex-wife and her new husband (Kate Arrington and her real-life husband Michael Shannon). Anyhow: both of them are hooked on ghost-hunting shows, so they prod Ken into investigating his possible haunting.

 The movie alternates between observing Ken's daily life, following his amateur paranormal investigation, and seeing how the two mix with catastrophic results. The haunting itself is a little cheesy, but the movie is thick with atmosphere, and Ken's an interesting character - instead of the expected bundle of nerves, Walker plays him as an anxious but soft-spoken, mellow man who internalizes just about everything before putting on a brave face to conference with his loved ones. He sells his character's fragile state while still being really good company.

 Director Jennifer Reeder keeps the supernatural very low-key - banging on doors, footsteps echoing throughout the apartment, and vague figures in the background (which Ken sometimes doesn't even get to see). She anchors the film with Ken's routines and uses them throughout as a pretty cool visual shorthand to show the toll the haunting it's taking on his mental health.

 As events develop Ken's relationships get strained, but with the aid of a dodgy parapsychologist Colin Albertson (Lawrence Grimm) he develops a following big enough to attract the attention of a popular ghost-hunting website. At some point along the line a second, much more dangerous presence inserts itself in the haunting.

 The script (Brett Neveu) is slow, methodical and pretty clever, though the supernatural side of things is a little too standard-issue to become really interesting. Luckily the characters are empathetic, likeable and interesting enough to pick up the slack until the film swerves in a... let's call it fairly unexpected direction. There's a very appealing wry sense of humour running throughout the whole thing.

 Visually, it looks great - especially for a film of this budget, shot within the pandemic. Reeder and cinematographer Christopher Rejano fill Ken's apartment with lurid lighting, and all the shots that come to signify the passing of time in Ken's isolated life - Orchids in the foreground while night falls outside his newspaper-covered windows, tomato soup slowly bubbling over - look great.

 The videoconferencing conceit suffers a little from the Dragonball Z syndrome by the end (each and every person in the peanut gallery has to chip in and get a little comment in as they watch from afar), but it's the only time where it doesn't feel natural. 

 The acting is very enjoyable, in the sense that it's just nice spending some time with these people. Shannon plays a self-described cheeseball and he's great as always; So is everyone else. Lawrence Grimm, especially, is clearly having a blast as the occult expert who seems to be modelling himself at least a little bit after Dr. Strange. 

 It isn't, sadly, very scary; the ghost stuff is too familiar,  and while what comes afterwards is certainly bold, it's unlikely to make anyone lose any sleep. It is a lot of fun, though - think of it as an extremely deadpan horror comedy.

Max Payne

 The Max Payne games are known for properly introducing bullet time into gaming (only a couple of years after The Matrix). They also had cheesy stories told through crappy comic book-like interludes and an all-pervading, wonderfully campy noir-style narration. Its inspirations are blatant and cinematic, and the movie basically pitches itself: lots of John-Woo-style action and a simple, pulpy plot delivered with over-the top noir affectation.

 And to be fair, Max Payne: The Motion Picture does deliver, for five minutes or so. The first scene features Max Payne (Mark Wahlberg) sinking into the frozen depths while delivering a monologue about how the bottom is lined with corpses and they're reaching out to him and he'll soon be one of them and blah blah blah.

 It's fun! It even looks kind of good, in that Hollywood-trying-too-hard-to-be-cool kind of way. And then the scene is over, the title card comes up, and the voiceover is mostly abandoned for the rest of the movie.

 The script (by Beau Thorne) strings together scenes that seem to be written by a fourteen-year-old with next to no connective tissue - logic leaps and weird segues abound. I'm not going to talk about plot holes, because there's more hole than plot here. Characters appear and disappear and serve no clear function, there's a surreal element that turns out to be some sort of shared hallucination... it's an absolute clusterfuck.

 Max Payne (by the way, I'm really struggling not to type that in all-caps every time!) is a punisher-like figure who's lost his wife and baby son to a home invasion. He's the type of cop everyone seems to hate, because... well, it's no mystery - he's a completely unlikeable dick: all of Wahlberg's intensity, none of his charm. His only friend is an old partner of his dad's called B.B. (Beau Bridges), who's now working security for the same big pharma company his wife was working for when she died. Hmmmm.

 Max Payne starts off assigned to the cold cases desk, a plot point that has absolutely no purpose or payoff. Off-hours, he spends his time busting the balls of people in the underworld trying to find out more about his family's murder. Through a series of unrelated and highly contrived events he ends up discovering an extremely stupid and very poorly conceived conspiracy in which a designer drug caused a bunch of soldiers to go nuts... or something. Seriously, the plot seems to have been put together by locking a bunch of idiots in a room for a couple of hours along with a printout of the Wikipedia page with the plot synopsis for the first Max Payne game and a mountain of cocaine.

 This could all be redeemed if the movie had good action, but Director John Moore has no eye for it either. The action is choppy, poorly staged, and often... boring. It only nods to the game's famous bullet-time gimmick a couple of times, one of them consisting of Max Payne literally bending over backwards with a shotgun while a guy shoots at him and misses by quite a few meters, hitting some stuff in the foreground. And it goes on and on and on. It looks like ass, and conceptually, it's one of those scenes where you can't help but wonder what the fuck everyone involved was thinking.

 The other bullet time sequence is of Max Payne shooting an unarmed man. Seriously, what the fuck.

 The practical effects team did a good job, though. I often bemoan the lack of squibs and bullet impact detonations in modern cinema, but here in MaxPayneland the art is alive and healthy. It gets a workout in an early, very ridiculous scene where Max Payne blows open all the stalls in a public restroom with a hand cannon, but their main showpiece is when a private army shoots up a whole office building floor; As action, it's shit: Max Payne's main move there is to bravely run away, and the soldier's aim is sub-stormtrooper - but there are a ton of squibs detonating all over the place, glass breaking, etcetera. It's like they got the background for a John Woo sequence just right, they just forgot to include anything interesting going on.
 Another point in favour: It does have some nice atmosphere, despite the plot's best attempts to piss it away; Credit the director with some of that, and cinematographer John Sela (David Leitch's go to guy, most recently seen in The Fall Guy). It doesn't go far enough to develop into a proper sense of style, but the wintry palette and the constant, chunky snowfall does look pretty good.
 Other stylistic flourishes don't fare as well. There's a fade to red effect to underline some violence that is laughably bad (and again, just on one scene and then forgotten), and the whole angel hallucinations are, with a single mildly cool exception, a non-starter.

 I have to say I like the idea of extracting a proper neo-noir out of the game's shooter fantasyland... but that intention means nothing when the execution is this poor. The movie is so disjointed it reeks of studio meddling, but the director's on record defending it as a good film.

 Well, at least it doesn't, like the games, have interminable scenes of Max Payne walking on razor-thin blood lines. Those were the worst.

 And shit, I guess this means I now need to catch up with Tim Olyphant's Hitman movie, too.

Audition

 Just in case you're not aware of Takashi Miike's Audition: go watch it now. It's best to go in knowing as little as possible about it... other than the fact that it might be best to avoid it if you're not up for a little grisly mayhem.

 The film follows Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi), a middle-aged widower and successful businessman who decides it's time to remarry. Yoshikawa (Jun Kunimura), a friend who works in the film industry suggests that the best way to meet and covertly woo prospective candidates is to hold an audition; he holds the right for a made-for-TV drama, and suggests that Aoyama sits in with him during the audition process; Aoyama, to his eternal shame, accepts enthusiastically.

 Early on in the process, Aoyama is impressed by one of the applicants, Asami Yamazaki (Eihi Shiina), whose introductory essay strikes him as unusually touching and mature (it's pretty morbid, but hey). He pretty ignores all the other hopefuls, and when he finally interviews Yamazaki, he basically blurts out some compliments - it's an uncomfortable scene, but she seems to take it well.

 From there, they start dating. As it turns out Yamazaki wasn't particularly interested in landing the role, and seems to genuinely like Aoyama. And for his part Aoyama, despite agreeing to the audition and some horrible sentiments expressed during the search (he compares finding Mrs. Right to getting a new car, for example), is revealed to really be searching for an actual connection. It doesn't excuse him, but this is probably the best possible result for the whole creepy, abusive audition scheme. 

 Except that there are warning flags all over the place. His buddy and partner in audition crime Yoshikawa just doesn't like Yamazaki, and can't follow up on any of the references on her resume. Oh, and we also get a few inserts of Yamazaki at home, motionless, waiting for the phone to ring, while a cloth sack in the background writhes. This is not going to end well.

 Yamazaki disappears while she and Aoyama take a weekend break at the coast, which takes us into the investigation phase of the film as Aoyama starts following up on what little he knows of his love interest. The search leads him to some pretty dark places, as the film's tone veers from light-hearted comedy to more standard Miike territory. By which I mean: we get a shot of a severed tongue flopping around in the floor.

 By the end we reach a grand guignol climax which is what the movie is best known for, and despite losing its luster to the casual violence of the causal violence we've been subjected to in mainstream entertainment within the last decade (not to mention the French New Extremity), it's still powerful, cruel, and shocking. Not the least because of everything that came before.

 I'd also like to highlight the fever dream that comes before that scene, which is creepy, illuminating and hilarious in equal parts (this may be the only time we'll ever see suspense being generated from a man trying to avoid a blowjob).

 It's hard to talk about Audition without unduly spoiling it or saying anything that hasn't been said a hundred times before. I think the most important thing, though, is that this is a legitimately great movie, and not just in the 'cult' sense that it's crazy and shocking. There'd be nothing wrong with that, obviously, but this movie doesn't need those qualifiers; The third act craziness is integral to the film, and it only adds to its tragicomic energy, all-pervading sadness, and surprisingly sophisticated themes.

 The script (by Daisuke Tengan, based on a novel by Ryu Murakami) takes its time and patiently maps out Aoyama's character through his actions. It has a subtlety and complexity that leaves more modern genre exercises that touch upon similar themes (like, oh, I don't know, Barbarian or Promising Young Woman) looking simplistic and too on-the-nose.

 This is a story about a man who uses predatory tactics for... well, not the right reasons, nothing could justify that - but there's nuance to his character and the script smartly underlines his humanity. It strikes a good balance between condemning his actions and personality (a key late scene shows some truly callous behaviour at a past conquest) and making us cringe at the consequences; The shitstorm that he unleashes is both provoked, deserved, and out of all proportion. Meanwhile Yamazaki ends up being a brilliant movie monster (kiri kiri kiri) that is also a broken, tragic figure who operates under mistaken assumptions and commits several unforgiveable acts - hardly a feminist avenging angel.

 Technically, it's unimpeachable. Director Takashi Miike and his usual collaborators make the first half of the story - a slow burn drama/comedy - endearing and very, very funny, with editor Yasushi Shimamura being a key player; Some short, slightly glitchy editing schemes, interspersed with more traditional, cinematic long takes, give the story a lot of energy, as well as becoming important later when missing chunks of  those scenes come back to give characters more context. It meshes nicely with some of Miike's non-traditional choice of shots like having characters in a conversation alternately talk straight to the camera.

 By the time wire saws and acupuncture needles come up, we're completely invested in the story. That's the key ingredient in the ending's uncanny intensity, aside from Miike's obvious directorial chops. Audition is often lumped in with J-Horror and... well, it's understandable - especially as it was produced as a follow-up to the seminal The Ring by some of the same companies - but it's more of a genre outlier, along with Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure. Any way you slice it (or pierce with acupuncture needles) though, it fully deserves its classic status.