Viewing the manhunt for a killer from the killer's point of view is a good premise for a thriller, one that was done classically by Fritz Lang in M (1931). And M. Night Shyamalan gets off on the right foot by casting the attractive, underrated, and underused actor Josh Hartnett in the lead. He plays Cooper, the psychopath next door, a capable and loving family man whom no one would suspect of being a serial killer called The Butcher. He is just being a good dad when he takes his 12-year-old daughter, Riley (Ariel Donoghue), to a concert by her favorite pop star, Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan), only to find out that the arena is under tight surveillance by the police and the FBI under the supervision of a profiler (Hayley Mills, in the most improbable bit of casting in this or any other year). Will he be able to outwit his pursuers? Do we really want him to? Unfortunately, Shyamalan botches things in working out the plot, in large part by making the concert, of which we see much more than necessary, a crashing bore. The writer-director's daughter, Saleka, wrote and performed her own rather lackluster songs, one of the instances that justify the phrase "nepo baby." She's also not up to the acting demands of the role when she's off-stage. Worst of all, the film ends with a scene that leaves room for a sequel. I'm surely not the first one to suggest that it be called Claptrap?
Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings
A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews
A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews
"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Saturday, March 22, 2025
Trap (M. Night Shyamalan, 2024)
Friday, March 21, 2025
Le Jour Se Lève (Marcel Carné, 1939)
Daybreak, the Anglicized title of Marcel Carné's Le Jour Se Lève, recalls another great attempt at poetic cinema, F.W. Murnau's late silent Sunrise (1927). But where Murnau strove for a kind of allegorical poetry, to the extent of labeling his characters The Man, The Wife, and The Woman From the City, Carné's poetry is rooted in actuality. Jean Gabin plays François, a factory worker who falls in love with Françoise (Jacqueline Laurent), who works in a flower shop. He follows her one night to a music hall, where she watches an act by the animal trainer Valentin (Jules Berry). At the bar, he strikes up a conversation with Clara (Arletty), who was Valentin's stage assistant but has just broken up with him. When he discovers that Françoise is infatuated with Valentin, François lets himself be drawn into a relationship with Clara. Eventually this quartet of relationships will turn fatal. But Carné and his screenwriters Jacques Viot and Jacques Prévert choose to tell the story in flashbacks: The film begins with François shooting Valentin and then holing up in his apartment as the police lay siege to it, trying to arrest him. The film superbly mixes suspense, as we wait for the outcome of François's standoff with the police, with romance, as we learn of the affairs with Françoise and Clara that brought him to this point. It's often cited as a precursor of film noir for its mixture of passion and violence. Gabin is the quintessential world weary protagonist, Berry the embodiment of corruption, and Arletty the woman who's seen it all too often.
Thursday, March 20, 2025
Smile (Parker Finn, 2022)
The rictus that spreads across the faces of those who are about to kill or be killed is probably the scariest thing about Smile, a routine horror movie that has not much going for it other than some committed performances, particularly by Sosie Bacon as the psychiatrist being driven mad by a supernatural being. Horror movie fans accepted it despite a phony premise and some deep inconsistencies in the plotting, so it spawned the inevitable Smile 2, from the same writer-director, Parker Finn, in 2024. You know who you are and whether you want to watch it.
Wednesday, March 19, 2025
All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia, 2024)
![]() |
Kani Kusruti and Divya Prabha in All We Imagine as Light |
Cast: Kani Kusruti, Divya Prabha, Chhaya Kadam, Hridhu Haroon, Azees Nedumangad, Anand Sami. Screenplay: Payal Kapadia, Himanshu Prajapati, Robin Joy, Naseem Azad. Cinematography: Ranabir Das. Production design: Piyusha Chalke, Shamim Khan, Yashasvi Sabharwal. Film editing: Clément Pinteaux. Music: Topshe.
In a film at once delicate and gritty, Payal Kapadia paints a picture of urban loneliness in the lives of three women. Prabha (Kani Kusruti), a nurse in a Mumbai hospital, hasn't seen or heard from her husband for a year since he left to work in Germany. Anu (Divya Prabha), her younger roommate and fellow nurse, is under pressure from her family to accept an arranged marriage like Prabha's, but she's in love with a young Muslim, Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon). Their friend Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), a cook at the hospital, is being evicted from the apartment she shared with her late husband by the construction company that wants to tear it down. When they leave the teeming city to help Parvaty move to the village where she once lived, each of them begins to confront their emotional isolation. Kapaia's film deservedly won the Grand Prix at Cannes, but it failed to attract Oscar nominations, in part because it was produced by an international consortium of companies and the Indian film industry failed to submit it for the awards.
Tuesday, March 18, 2025
Big Eden (Thomas Bezucha, 2000)
Cast: Arye Gross, Eric Schweig, Tim DeKay, Louise Fletcher, George Coe, Nan Martin, O'Neal Compton, Corinne Bohrer. Screenplay: Thomas Bezuch. Cinematography: Rob Sweeney. Production design: Stephanie Carroll. Film editing: Andrew London. Music: Joseph Conlan.
Monday, March 17, 2025
Only the River Flows (Wei Shujun, 2023)
![]() |
Zhu Yilong in Only the River Flows |
Cast: Zhu Yilong, Chloe Maayan, Hou Tianlai, Tong Linkai, Kang Chunlei, Wang Jianyu, Zishi Moxi, Liu Baisha, Yang Cao, Zhou Qingyung. Screenplay: Kang Chunlei, Wei Shujun, based on a novel by Yu Hua. Cinematography: Zhiyuan Chengma. Art direction: Zhang Menglun. Film editing: Matthieu Laclau.
Moody, absorbing, and sometimes enigmatic film about a detective (Zhu Yilong) haunted by a series of murders in a town in rural China. Wei Shujun's direction and Zhiyuan Chengma's cinematography make the most of the gloomy, oppressive setting.
Sunday, March 16, 2025
The Gorge (Scott Derrickson, 2025)
![]() |
Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy in The Gorge |
Cast: Miles Teller, Anya Taylor-Joy, Sigourney Weaver, Sope Dirisu, William Houston. Screenplay: Zach Dean. Cinematography: Dan Laustsen. Production design: Rick Heinrichs. Film editing: Frédéric Thoroval. Music: Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross.
The Gorge is a horror/sci-fi thriller so formulaic that although it has a screenplay credited to Zach Dean, it could have been scripted by AI. The heroes are a couple of loners played by Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy, who predictably fall in love after being on the opposite sides of the titular chasm that separates them. The villain is the military-biotech industrial complex, personified by Sigourney Weaver, who seems to be making a late career out of movies about supersoldiers. None of it makes much sense, but if you want a movie that just chugs along filling time, you could do worse.
Saturday, March 15, 2025
Amadeus (Milos Forman, 1984)
Of all human phenomena, genius may be the most puzzling. What combination of heredity and environment produced a Shakespeare, a Leonardo, a Newton, a Mozart? For the Antonio Salieri of Peter Shaffer's play and the screenplay he based on it, the only answer has to be God. And his jealousy of Mozart leads him to a rejection of God and an attempt to destroy God's creation, whom he sees as a giggling, smutty-minded clown unworthy of the musical talent God has lavished on him. Amadeus is not a biopic; Shaffer called it a "fantasia" based on the lives and careers of Mozart and Salieri, and he plays fast and loose with the details of both. That has disturbed many who know the facts, but the sumptuous entertainment of the movie almost justifies the distortions and prevarications of the story it tells. That it's filled with Mozart's music is certainly most in its favor, and the performances of F. Murray Abraham as Salieri and Tom Hulce as Mozart add to it. Sometimes a beautiful lie is more satisfying than the truth.
Friday, March 14, 2025
Planet of the Apes (Tim Burton, 2001)
I almost stopped watching Tim Burton's remake of Franklin J. Schaffner's 1968 classic Planet of the Apes when one character called another "the Homo sapien." Can we all get it into our heads that the taxonomic phrase "Homo sapiens" is singular? (If there were a plural it would be something like "Homines sapientes" -- Latinists may correct me if I'm wrong.) But pet peeves aside, I found Burton's version entertaining enough, with its sly references to the original film: One of the apes reverses a line spoken by Charlton Heston in the first film, saying "Get your stinking hands off me, you damn dirty human!" And Heston himself has an unbilled cameo as the dying father of Thade (Tim Roth), in which he reprises in a different context his line, "Damn them! Damn them all to hell!" The apes in the remake are more simian, with better ape-like behavior and movements. And the satiric edge feels sharper in an era in which government-sanctioned discrimination seems to be on the rise. But the narrative is a bit of a mess, especially the fudged-up ending, which could never have the impact of the revelation at the end of the 1968 film. It got a Razzie as the worst remake of the year and probably deserved it, but it's not unwatchable, thanks to some good performances, especially by Helena Bonham Carter, Michael Clarke Duncan, and Paul Giamatti, who never let the makeup do the acting for them.
Thursday, March 13, 2025
Green Fish (Lee Chang-dong, 1997)
A young man (Han Suk-kyu) finishes his military service and returns home, but on the way there he gets involved with a beautiful woman (Shim Hye-jin) with underworld ties. Fine performances and razor-keen editing animate this fascinating noir drama leavened with dark humor and superbly atmospheric cinematography and music.
Wednesday, March 12, 2025
Napoleon Dynamite (Jared Hess, 2004)
Napoleon Dynamite, a sleeper hit that became a cult film, is as deadpan and droll as a Wes Anderson movie. Is it a postmodern parody of a coming-of-age story, a John Hughes movie for millennials? Or is it just silliness? Or all of the above?
Monday, March 10, 2025
Glengarry Glen Ross (James Foley, 1992)
Sunday, March 9, 2025
Port of Shadows (Marcel Carné, 1938)
![]() |
Jean Gabin and Michèle Morgan in Port of Shadows |
Cast: Jean Gabin, Michel Simon, Michèle Morgan, Pierre Brasseur, Édouard Delmont, Raymond Aimos, Robert Le Vigan, René Génin, Marcel Pérès, Jenny Burnay, Roger Legris, Martial Rèbe. Screenplay: Jacques Prévert, based on a novel by Pierre Mac Orlan. Cinematography: Eugen Schüfftan. Production design: Alexandre Trauner. Film editing: René Le Hénaff. Music: Maurice Jaubert.
Marcel Carné's Port of Shadows is a variation on the old trope of the stranger come to town. In this case, the stranger is an army deserter named Jean (Jean Gabin) and the town is Le Havre, where he hopes to hop a freighter and leave the country. Instead, he gets involved with a beautiful young woman named Nelly (Michèle Morgan) and finds himself depending on the kindness of strangers, one of whom is so kind as to commit suicide and leave him with a suit of clothes, an ID card, and some money. Others, including Nelly's guardian, Zabel (Michel Simon), and his gangster associates, are not so kind. It's a movie that goes a long way on the atmosphere created by Eugen Schüfftan's cinematography, Alexandre Trauner's set designs, and the slangy poetry of Jacques Prévert's dialogue. Oh, and there's a cute little dog who falls in love with Jean, too. Maybe the quintessential French film, the way Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) is the quintessential American movie, Port of Shadows has plenty of admirers, but a good many people also think its Gallic Weltschmerz takes it well past the point of self-parody.
Saturday, March 8, 2025
Juror #2 (Clint Eastwood, 2024)
Clint Eastwood's Juror #2 is the kind of courtroom drama that could have been made any time in the history of American movies, including when the Production Code was most sternly in effect. Which is to say that it's a throwback to an era in which audiences were not expected to question its obvious inconsistencies and falsifications but just sit back and be entertained by the predicament into which its protagonist is cast and expect it to be resolved satisfactorily. The premise is this: A man named Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult) finds himself on a jury in a murder case but gradually realizes that he may be the one who killed the victim and has in his hands the fate of the man (Gabriel Basso) accused of the crime. Meanwhile, his wife, Allison (Zoey Deutch), is in the seventh month of pregnancy, having miscarried before. And the prosecuting attorney, Faith Killebrew (Toni Collette), is in the midst of a campaign for D.A., and wants to secure a conviction no matter what. Add to this the unsavory background of the accused, a group of witnesses to an altercation between the accused and the victim in a bar, and a man who claims that he witnessed the murder, things look pretty solid for the prosecutor. But Justin's conscience won't let him vote for conviction. At least not yet. It's a movie in which suspense is more important than coherence, drama more significant than actuality. Eastwood's no-nonsense filmmaking obscures the nonsense of the story, and the performances give it a specious emotional credibility. (Though I could have done without the sore-thumb obviousness of Collette's Southern accent, when no one else the cast was attempting it.)
Friday, March 7, 2025
Shockproof (Douglas Sirk, 1949)
![]() |
Patricia Knight and Cornel Wilde in Shockproof |
Two great stylists of film, Douglas Sirk and Samuel Fuller, met on Shockproof and collided with the Hollywood studio system. The movie, about a by-the-book parole officer who falls for a sexy parolee, was supposed to end with the officer (Cornel Wilde) going rogue for love of the parolee (Patricia Knight), which he does for a while until the movie fizzles into a wholly unconvincing upbeat ending. It's a "curate's egg" of a movie: Some of it is very good -- the noirish parts written by Fuller, and the touches of Sirkian melodrama -- but on the whole it stinks.
Thursday, March 6, 2025
Monkey Man (Dev Patel, 2024)
Producer-writer-director-star Dev Patel's Monkey Man is so obviously modeled on Chad Stahelski's John Wick (2014) and its sequels, that it's no surprise when a character in the movie name-checks it. Monkey Man has the same energy, the same world-building ambiance, and in Patel a hero with much the same kind of low-key charisma that Keanu Reeves's Wick possesses. There's even a dog that befriends the hero. Which is not to say that Patel's hyperviolent knock-off isn't a worthy successor to its predecessor. If action movies with a lot of clear-cut villains that get their bloody comeuppance after making the hero's life hell are your thing, Monkey Man will do the job better than most.
Ali (Michael Mann, 2001)
![]() |
Will Smith in Ali |
Cast: Will Smith, Jamie Foxx, Jon Voight, Mario Van Peebles, Ron Silver, Jeffrey Wright, Mykelti Williamson, Jada Pinkett Smith, Nona Gaye, Michael Michele, Joe Morton, Paul Rodriguez, Barry Shabaka Henley, Giancarlo Esposito, Lawrence Mason, LeVar Burton, Albert Hall. Screenplay: Gregory Allen Howard, Stephen J. Rivele, Christopher Wilkinson, Eric Roth, Michael Mann. Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki. Production design: John Myhre. Film editing: William Goldenberg, Lynzee Klingman, Stephen E. Rivkin, Music: Pieter Bourke, Lisa Gerrard.
What's the point of a biopic when the subject is as vivid, widely known, and frequently profiled as Muhammad Ali, especially when he was still alive when the movie about him was made? Michael Mann's Ali certainly doesn't answer that question. It might have explored his very early years, since the film hints at tension between Ali (Will Smith) and his father (Giancarlo Esposito) and since those years were the crucible in which the Civil Rights movement, in which Ali took a central role, was being formed. There are glimpses of this -- Ali's recollection of the lynching of Emmett Till, which took place when he was 13, only a year younger than Till. But the film begins in 1964, when Ali was 22. There's a lot of telling rather than showing when it comes to Ali's experiences outside of the boxing ring. This is not to say that there's no substance to Ali, but rather that much of what's in the film is already familiar to us. The film also shies away from confronting the issue of corruption in the boxing world, just hinting at the shady history of figures like promoter Don King (Mykelti Williamson). Still, it's a very watchable if somewhat overlong movie, with Smith evoking a good deal of Ali's charisma and backed up by a solid, immensely talented supporting cast. It flopped at the box office, but earned Oscar nominations for Smith and Jon Voight, who deftly plays broadcaster Howard Cosell, just hinting at Cosell's oft-caricatured mannerisms.
Tuesday, March 4, 2025
Venom: The Last Dance (Kelly Marcel, 2024)
![]() |
Tom Hardy in Venom: The Last Dance |
Monday, March 3, 2025
Dancer in the Dark (Lars von Trier, 2000)
Say what you will about Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard, 2024), but both its musical numbers and the melodramatic narrative that encompasses them are better than those in Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark. So why, other than that it was made first, does von Trier's film seem like the more substantial achievement? Both are formally audacious and, as far as audiences and critics are concerned, radically divisive. Dancer in the Dark goes over the top in both absurdity (people dancing on death row) and performance (Björk's raw emotion), but are either of those enough to earn the kind of ridicule and acclamation the film engendered? I was lukewarm about Emilia Pérez and I'm baffled by Dancer in the Dark, but is that enough for me to call the latter a masterpiece? Or is it just an astonishing cinematic dead end?