If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a thousand times: anthology horror movies live and die by story quality. That seems fairly obvious, but you’d be surprised how many coast along doing very little, relying on one segment to do the heavy lifting. I caught the most recent entry in the long-running, newly revived V/H/S series at Beyond Fest 2023. V/H/S/85, certainly maintains a consistent level of quality throughout. Each segment feels of apiece with the others, even having the obligatory framing story be more of a story in its own right than previous ones. However, while each segment is impressive, almost all of them is way too long and drags as a result.

As the title implies, this one’s conceit is that every thing is 1985. The outdated format of VHS for home movies means the Shudder era of the franchise has had to go time traveling. 1994, 1999, and now 1985. Aside from clothes and hair, plus digital tape hiss and distortion, a couple of the segments veer into the realm of “Analog Horror,” which is all the rage with the YouTube kids these days. The one that does that the best—and incidentally is my favorite—is the movie’s framing story. “Total Copy,” from director David Bruckner, is a VHS copy of weird documentary about scientists finding a very strange humanoid figure and trying to communicate with it, showing it old tapes along the way. Rarely is the framing story even a story much less the best in the movie, but series staple Bruckner nails it.

The other big name among the directors is The Black Phone director Scott Derrickson and the story “Dreamkill.” It’s sort of two layers of found footage. First we see a grisly murder from the killer’s point of view. Then we follow a police detective (Freddy Rodriguez) and a forensic videographer (James Ransome) as they go to that selfsame crime scene…days after someone mailed them the video tape. This happens a few times, with the tapes arriving before the murders take place. Eventually the cops find the mysterious mailer, and that kicks the story into another gear. I enjoyed this one for the most part, well made and performed.

The other stories are fun, but I think in every case go on too long. Mike P. Nelson’s story is split in two halves. “No Wake” finds a group of 20-somethings in a boat on a lake at the mercy of a sniper on the shore, while follow-up “Ambrosia” features the sniper afterwards. The central twist of both parts, which I won’t spoil, doesn’t really pay off the way it ought. The brutality of the deaths helps it but it didn’t do much for me beyond that.

Gigi Saul Guerrero brings us “God of Death,” in which a Mexican news program suffers an earthquake. The crew find themselves buried in a sinkhole and have to find their way out as they happen upon strange artifacts of Aztec deities. “TKNOGD” from director Natasha Kermani is the one that had me scratching my head the most. It starts as a taped performance art piece about technology becoming the new religion. Later, the artist on stage enters a very cool retro-looking VR space only to find something terrifying inside.

So, obviously consistency is good, but I do think the fact that the tone and style of each segment is so samey, nothing stands out. It’s all equally impressive, the effects and gore are great. But, aside from “Total Copy” which has to feel like a documentary on some level, we don’t get the super weird or atypical entry. V/H/S/94, for example, has a news report with a rat monster in a sewer that looks way different from the others. Similarly, V/H/S/99 ends with a segment which necessitated the filmmakers create their version of the landscape of Hell. Yes it’s true 85 has no bad segments, it also has no truly great segments.

Still, for fans of this kind of movie and this franchise, V/H/S/85 is yet another fun Halloween season romp. And hey, I hope they keep making these every year! It’ll be on Shudder on Friday, October 6.

V/H/S/85 ⭐ (3 of 5)

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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The term “star-crossed lovers” takes on a new meaning in The Becomers, the new film from writer-director Zach Clark. The movie, which I saw at Fantasia International Film Festival 2023, is gory and fairly upsetting at times, but at heart is a romance, with very weird comedy thrown in. “Weird” is perhaps the best adjective for the movie, but at no point do you cease to understand the heart at the center of the story—that finding your soulmate transcends bodies, space, and suburban death cults. Usually.

The story follows a pair of aliens from a doomed world who end up on Earth, specifically middle America. In the tradition of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, they can only appear in human form if they kill and replicate a living person. So the beginning is pretty gruesome. Everywhere the alien goes and every interaction they have in their new body becomes a sinister experience. Our lead alien narrates the movie, in the voice of Sparks’ lead singer Russell Mael, which adds a particularly strange element.

As we continue on, we learn the alien is looking desperately for its mate. They send a signal out to hopefully find each other again. Though the alien takes on the appearance of several different people throughout the story, the bulk of the time is spent in the body of a suburban housewife (Molly Plunk). In this guise, they piece together from neighbor interactions that the husband (Mike Lopez) might be up to some bad stuff. Worse than killing innocent people to take over their bodies? Maybe.

Part of the fun of The Becomers comes from the aliens having to take on the personas and lives of the people they have overtaken. Plunk’s performance specifically as a worried alien trying not to seem alien is astoundingly good. She has a supremely effective deer-in-the-headlights expression any time she has to speak to a regular human. You can’t help but laugh any time this happens. The escalating wildness of the situations leads to the movie’s best comedic beats.

But at its heart—its surprisingly soft heart—is the story of two lovers looking for each other across the universe, proving they’re stronger together than apart. Clark presents the story as an incidental, though likely intentional, LGBTQ+ allegory. The aliens are in love, regardless of whether they’re in male of female human bodies. It never once becomes an issue for them, and it’s never played for comedy or awkwardness. The exception, of course, is a very purposely gross sex scene utilizing alien physiology while still wrapped in human husks.

I really liked The Becomers and what it has to say about the profoundness of love amid the absurdity of human existence. It’s a tough time for the world. If we can find a person or people to whom we can connect, it’s somehow slightly less bleak. An oddly hopeful message for a movie with so much wanton murder and dissolving body parts.

The Becomers ⭐ (3.5 of 5)

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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For a book written in 1897, Dracula has had an exceptionally long shelf life. As such, the story and especially the title character have made their way to screens both large and small for over 100 years now. Only a handful have made an indelible impact. Often the revisionism of the revisions just come across as so many extra footprints in territory so well-trod it’s a deep furrow. This year alone we already had Renfield which, Nicolas Cage aside, was maybe the worst in decades. However, I was oddly excited for The Last Voyage of the Demeter, a feature-length take on a single, rarely adapted section of Stoker’s novel. Sadly, good premise is almost all there is.

I should hasten to add, it’s not like the movie is bad necessarily. It’s a supremely competent horror-thriller that’s definitely in the vein of studio monster movies that came before. Certain shots and moments are very effective. The decision to make Dracula more monster than man is a fun riff, and the setting certainly sets it apart. But it’s also just loads of plot without much story, characteristics rather than characters, and a pace better suited to action than horror. But without much action either. They make for a pleasant enough two hours without ever engaging much.

The premise is certainly the strongest part. We follow the events of the second major section of Dracula, which features the logs of the captain of the Demeter, a cargo ship making its way from Romania to London with private shipments bound for Carfax Abbey. The captain here, naturally on his personal last voyage before retirement, is Liam Cunningham, who is basically perfect for the character. His first mate is Mr. Wojchek (David Dastmalchian), who will inherit the ship when his mentor leaves. The new arrival is Clemens (Corey Hawkins), a trained physician whose skin color makes him unhireable as such. This is easily the most interesting aspect of any of the characters and it’s little more than backstory.

Other deckhands have names but exist mostly as vampire fodder later in the story. We also, for some reason, have the captain’s eight-year-old grandson Toby (Woody Norman), and a strange stowaway named Anna (Aisling Franciosi), sick with blood poisoning and riddled with bite marks. Wonder what happened to her. Naturally, the strange cargo turns out to be one of your Draculas (Javier Botet), whose makeup and vibe place him somewhere between the angel in Midnight Mass and Barlow from Salem’s Lot. Both, naturally, derive from F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu which is still the movie with the best adaptation of the Demeter story.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter by its very nature is something of a foregone conclusion. It’s right there in the title! The movie also never hides the fact that it’s adapting part of Dracula, so we pretty much know they won’t stop the threat. This isn’t a problem inherently; plenty of amazing movies come from tragedies we know will happen. Frigging Titanic, anyone? The trouble is, the movie seems to entirely rest on the novelty of this being a Dracula movie without any of the typical trappings of such. This is a creature, a bat-thing that can move faster than anyone on the ship. The most tense sequences involve Dracula in an enclosed space, lurking in the shadows. Once he’s outside, which happens very frequently, he’s a CGI swoop.

Like I said, it’s not as though there’s nothing to enjoy or praise here. Director André Øvredal (Trollhunter, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark) knows we want to see Dracula, so gives him plenty of big closeups. We also have a few legitimate surprises when it comes to the fate of some of those Dracula bites. Vampirism as plague is not a fresh idea, but it’s effective here. And I’ll say the siege on Toby when he’s locked in the Captain’s quarters is particularly well done. The problem is the movie seems to exist in spite of this artistry and not for it. The script is overwritten yet all-too spare. Characters talk about things we don’t get to see and speed through things on which they should linger.

If you want a mindless escape with a monster and some jump scares, The Last Voyage of the Demeter is plenty fine. If you wanted a truly fresh take on cinema’s most enduring creature of the night, keep looking.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter hits theaters August 11.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter ⭐ (2.5 of 5)

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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One of the best things about film festivals is you can step into a theater with absolutely no knowledge of what you’re about to see and at the very least leave entertained. Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal is maybe the best I’ve ever been to in this regard. I had a gap in my schedule and decided to step into a new South Korean horror/dark comedy called New Normal and got a cynical, truly brutal experience that feels perfectly torn out of the hell of modern city living. The loneliness, the awkwardness, and the chance that at any moment someone could murder you. It’s fun!

Writer-director Jung Bum-Shik clearly has a point of view with this movie. That is: “the world sucks, and you can’t do anything about it.” Indeed, it’s rare to see a movie with such a sense of downbeat inevitability. The movie depicts snapshots in a four-day stretch of time in Seoul as six different vignettes playout, intersecting and leading to shocking conclusions. I confess that after the first couple stories, the movie’s cynicism put me off. As it went along, it started sinking its teeth into me. The sheer style, exuberance, and seething rage on display—well, I won’t say it “won” me over, but I definitely started to vibe with it.

The stories all run the gamut of the hell of modern society. A single woman contends with a pushy smoke alarm inspector amidst reports of a serial killer. Elsewhere, a middle-school boy decides to help an old lady in a wheelchair for a lot longer than he planned. App-dating proves especially nightmarish on one terrible evening. A hopeless romantic follows a series of clues to hopefully find his perfect match. Then, a creepy loser is obsessed with his hot neighbor and does very dumb things. Finally, a fed-up convenience store clerk kills time posting about murder on a message board. Each has a wicked bite to it, each increasingly more brutal than the last.

New Normal takes familiar public spaces—city streets, gas stations, crowded restaurants—and turns them sinister or accentuates their already sinister aspects. The movie revels in making the situations cringingly funny before hitting us with growing tension and finally the swerve to horror. It never feels rote or perfunctory, and each vignette has its own ambience befitting its lead character. A real standout is the second story, which finds the middle-schooler’s journey into an increasingly foreboding part of the city. This all happens with the orchestral strains of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf underlaid. The final story, too, is exceptionally tragic, even for this movie. The young would-be musician leads her mundane, frustrating life only to decide to turn off the road at the last minute.

It seems a bit like the ethos of the movie isn’t just “F*** the World” (which the movie literally puts on screen several times) but “never take risks,” in any sense of the word. Don’t do things that put you in danger. This can include going down a dark alley or meeting a person for a blind date. It’s not a movie for the faint of heart, and you have to be in the mood for something very dark that plays the darkness for laughs more often than not. But it’s an undeniably effective movie in this regard. I think it showcases the skill and energy of Jung Bum-Shik (whose previous film was the found-footage creeper Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum) exceptionally well. Just, I guess, be careful literally everywhere you go.

New Normal ⭐ (3.5 of 5)

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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We’ve seen tons and tons of time travel stories in our lives, especially as sci-fi fans. Growing up in the late-’80s, I had the one-two punch of the Back to the Future series and Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure basically on repeat on my VHS player. So when I see a movie that tackles familiar ground in a new way, a smart way, and a supremely heartfelt way, it makes me take notice. Jared Moshe’s Aporia, which premiered at Fantasia International Film Festival 2023 isn’t the most polished or most mind-bendy riff on the subject, but it does feature outstanding performances and a firm grasp of the morality of messing with the past.

Judy Greer, who as always is excellent here, plays Sophie, a nursing home nurse with a 12-year-old daughter, Riley (Faithe Herman). Nine months ago, her husband Mal (Edi Gathegi) died by a drunk driver, leaving Sophie and Riley spinning out. Her only help is her husband’s best friend (Payman Maadi) who tells her that he and Mal (both brilliant physicists who lost their jobs) had been working on a machine that might be able to help. It can’t send people back in time, but it can send a small explosive particle back to a particular moment and space. Effectively, it’s a time gun and with it, they can kill the drunk driver before he kills Mal.

Well, wouldn’t ya know it, it works. Mal returns and only those in the room when the time gun fired are aware anything happened. This leads to small changes, however. Sophie is no longer a long-term care nurse, she now works in hospice. The kitchen utensils are in different places. Mal picks up on Sophie’s confusion very quickly and she tells him what they’ve done. From here, we begin a really fascinating exploration of the responsibility one has when messing with time. By killing the drunk driver, they’ve left a woman and child without a husband and father. What can they do to help those affected? Should they do anything?

Aporia doesn’t mess around with attempts at visual effects or too much sci-fi jargon. The machine works, the end. But through its superb performances, it lays bare the grief that would lead to someone using this dangerous machine. It explores the butterfly effect of changing even one seemingly minor thing. The ripples continue out. But when you have such a device, how far can you and should you go? At what point are you done trading one life for another? And is it even up to you to play God? These are all really intriguing suppositions that most time travel movies don’t spend much time on.

It’s not the highest concept movie, and it has a few rough spots with exceedingly obvious ADR’d lines, but the performances and the premise do wonders to keep the audience invested, and make them care. Aporia really worked for me. If you go on for big moral philosophy concepts, and like Greer and Gathegi as much as you should, then it’ll work for you too.

Aporia ⭐ (4 of 5)

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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With the recent naming and surge of folk horror in the movies, we’ve gotten many examples from all over the world. I eat this stuff up with a big ol’ spoon. There’s a reason these movies feels so viscerally creepy. They show us fears that have lasted centuries. Bengali filmmaker Nuhash Humayun has taken this one step further by crowd sourcing Bangladesh’s most prevalent and scary superstitions and fables. The result is Pett Kata Shaw, a four-story anthology of modernized dramatizations of them. I saw it at Fantasia International Film Festival 2023, and it absolutely blew me away. This anthology is a creepy, darkly funny, and profoundly disturbing look at tales passed down in the oral tradition.

What makes these stories work so well is that Humayun depicts each as realistically as possible while still making the otherworldly thing suitably unnerving. The key to any good horror anthology is the pacing and the order. Pett Kata Shaw provides an ebb and flow of styles and stories for maximum effect. And even though the stories come from a culture I knew nothing about, they remain exceedingly relatable and engaging.

The first story relays the fable that jinn, or demons, visit sweet shops late at night. So we find a forgetful sweet shop owner who comes across such a creature—shown mainly as a bearded older man. The poor shop owner’s terror and confusion becomes something entirely else when the jinn grants him a wish. He wants to remember things. But, as jinn are not the most trustworthy, he begins to remember everything. Everything he’s ever seen, read, or lived. Knowing everything isn’t much good if you can’t stop it. This is a wicked little tale with a really upsetting ending.

Second is a very fun and macabre story concerning the legend of the fish-hag, a grotesque creature which resembles a human woman with backwards feet and sharp fangs. She has followed a lonely young man back to his apartment after he catches a big fish. Through his inner monologue we follow his tense struggle with what amounts to a wild animal locked in a room with him. He can’t take his eyes off of the fish-hag, not even to cook her the fish. Supremely enjoyable.

The third story is perhaps the most ambitious. We find a young couple with relationship issues stemming from rumors backpacking in a remote village where an elderly couple relay various local superstitions and how they came to be. For example, if you don’t take two helpings of food, you’ll drown in the river. Or not to wear your hair down at night. We see each of their mini-stories as marionette plays, both gorgeous and disturbing. Each of the superstitions begins to coagulate into a greater meta fable about the grain of truth in each.

And finally we have the saddest of the stories. A young man still reels after his girlfriend’s death by suicide a year before. At the same time, displaced children begin disappearing after visiting the sea. This leads our central character to learn about the myth of the Call of the Night. Some sea spirit calls to people, beckoning them to join it. As we quickly learn, this spirit—if it exists—has a way to exploit its victim’s guilt.

I absolutely adored Pett Kata Shaw, and I’m thrilled Humayun will soon make a feature film (once the strikes are over, of course) with producer Jordan Peele. He has an eye for what maximizes scariness without ever relying on a jump-scare or leading musical cue. I cannot wait for this to inevitably make it to wide release because every horror fan should see it.

Pett Kata Shaw ⭐ (5 of 5)

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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A few years ago, during the second summer of the COVID-19 pandemic, Fantasia International Film Festival’s virtual programming gave us Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes. This indie from Japanese director Junta Yamaguchi was a one-take time-loop movie which had one of the slickest gimmicks I’d ever seen. Cast of likable people, one small location, and webcams being the gateway to two minutes into the future. So cool and fun. Now, at the 2023 Fantasia Fest, Yamaguchi is back with River, a riff on the same two-minute time loop. Rather than a mobius strip like Beyond, this one is like Groundhog Day, two minutes at a time. It’s just as winning, funny, and adorable.

This time around, the action takes place in the gorgeous and serene Fujiya Inn located in the wintry valley of Kibune in Kyoto. Just as the last guests are preparing to leave for the season and the staff are ready to clean up, Mikoto (Riko Fijutani), one of the inn’s waitresses, takes a moment of self-reflection by the babbling river out back. What then transpires is the next two minutes continue to repeat, over and over and over, without any clear reason why. Each time it cycles back, Mikoto is back at the river. The staff of the inn have to figure out what’s going on, and how to break it to the confused patrons.

While the beginning of the movie has a very traditional feel, once the time loops begin, the camera goes handheld and follows the action, without a cut, until that two-minute loop finishes. It’s a thoroughly impressive feat which many of the cast, having been in Beyond, know very well. As the loops continue, the action expands to more places in and around the inn as the characters learn who is affected and who isn’t. With time essentially stagnated, unspoken hopes, dreams, desires, and frustrations come to the surface for all the different people.

At times River is laugh-out-loud hilarious, as the packed Fantasia audience will attest. The waitresses and proprietor, in traditional Japanese kimonos, have to shuffle as quickly as they can around the grounds of this inn to do whatever they need to do before the time resets. It’s especially funny how long it takes them to be frustrated about it. They’re so pleasant and amenable about the whole thing for awhile. As long as the guests are happy! Even the seemingly more upsetting moments become truly hysterical given the overall vibe and attitude of everyone involved. The cast is outstanding, top to bottom. So good, so funny.

Ultimately the story revolves around Mikoto whose almost-boyfriend Eiji (Yoshifumi Sakai), a trainee chef at the inn. He plans to move to France to study French cuisine and hasn’t told her. Arguing in two minute chunks is very silly, but eventually the two decide to make this loop last as long as it can. They try to run as far as they can get before it loops again. It’s truly one of the more adorable happenings in a movie in recent memory. It speaks to those last moments of youth before adulthood takes over. You try to retain the carefree until you physically can’t anymore.

I adored River. While I can’t say it’s better than Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, it’s a lovely companion piece. The romantic comedy angle, vaguely present in Beyond, comes to the fore in River. The earlier movie has a crime angle at a certain point which worked well enough. Here it’s all about character and I think, while the gimmick is less original, I prefer the character comedy over the sci-fiery.

Definitely seek out River as soon as you can, it’s one you’ll want to watch again and again. Perhaps on a loop.

River ⭐ (4.5 of 5)

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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As a fan of spooky things, and also fun, I of course love the Disney Parks’ Haunted Mansion rides. I want to go on more of them. I hear the ones in Paris and Shanghai and Tokyo are really cool. For fans of these rides, specifically the Disneyland one, Justin Simien’s Haunted Mansion movie has plenty of “Oh hey, it’s that from the ride!” moments. Katie Dippold’s script offers a surprising amount of tragedy to go along with the ghosts, which surprised and delighted. There’s even quite a few scare moments that just stay on the family side of the line. And yet, they felt like it needed to mostly be a weird comedy, too. Some of it worked, some did not.

If you’re someone like my mother, you might have asked “Why would they make another Haunted Mansion movie?” To which I’d reply, “Well, the 2003 Eddie Murphy version was notoriously terrible and people still love the theme park ride.” And it seems like this is the raison d’etre. After years of toying with whether they’d give Guillermo del Toro the keys to the spookiest house in Disney’s neighborhood, the company instead decided to play it very, very safe and effectively just retread a lot of the same ground as the first movie. A family moves in, ghosts haunt them, they have to “find a way out” out of the situation.

The family in question is Gabbie (Rosario Dawson) and her son Travis (Chase Dillion) who buy and move into the Gracey Mansion in Louisiana when they find it for cheap on Zillow. Uh oh, it’s very haunted, so they need some help. The seemingly exorbitantly wealthy single mother then assembles a Dream Team of ghost hunters, including the priest Kent (Owen Wilson), psychic medium Harriet (Tiffany Haddish), and professorial haunted house expert Bruce (Danny DeVito). However, chief among them is physicist-turned-tour guide Ben (LaKeith Stanfield) who had invented a spectral energy camera, prior to a personal tragedy. They have to figure out why the ghosts are so aggressive, and why ghosts follow them home.

In addition to all of these people are some of the ride’s more famous ghosts. We have the psychic-in-a-crystal-ball Madame Leota (Jamie Lee Curtis) who helps them, and the Hat-Box Ghost (Jared Leto) who is the movie’s main villain. Want your Black Widow husband killing ghost? She’s there. The portraits of the two guys killing each other in a duel? Here too. Long hallways, stretching rooms, hitchhiking ghosts, all in attendance. And some of them provide legitimately good scares, the likes of which I wasn’t expecting in a Disney movie.

I’d love to say the movie works all the time. Stanfield gives a remarkably grounded, touching performance as a man dealing with profound grief. All good ghost stories have to have an element of sadness, and this one doesn’t shy away from that. The ghosts are never played for laughs, either, which I think is incredibly smart. The Haunted Mansion ride is fun-spooky. It needs to keep that kind of “ooh!” For the most part, this movie does that. And we learn about the ghosts and their history and how to end this weird curse. The plot and emotion are all there.

However, the biggest issue is they hedged their bets by making it a studio comedy. Haddish, Wilson, and DeVito all have chops for days, and some of what they have to say and do is really funny. Especially Wilson, who has some legitimately funny moments. But did we need them? Did this movie need to be a comedy full of improvised or extended jokes? We also get a number of big-name cameos doing especially silly things. Honestly, it felt like Simien (who directed Bad Hair previously) and Dippold (who wrote 2016’s Ghostbusters) had battling sensibilities that ended up both coming out in the finished film. I know I’m a horror guy first and foremost and others’ mileage may vary, but it just felt unbalanced.

I also need to point out some truly bizarre product placement. Every movie has product placement, but because this movie takes place in an old house, it’s harder to have new products just sitting around. So at various points in the movie, one of the characters will say a store or business by name. I don’t know if I’ve ever noticed it to this degree. It happens at some truly inappropriate times and pulled me right out of the story.

Haunted Mansion is not a train wreck or anything. It’s enjoyable enough. Family horror was something I grew up with and I miss it. I don’t think Hocus Pocus 2 was good at all, and this is much, much better than that. I think it could have been very good if it had let some of the zanier comedy fall by the wayside and embrace the family drama and spooky thrills. Stanfield is doing some amazing work here and I think that alone needs recognition. But I think the movie is not funny enough to warrant so much attempted comedy, especially when the ghost elements work so well on their own. Let the grim, grinning ghosts socialize without lame attempts at comedy getting in the way.

Haunted Mansion ⭐ (3 of 5)

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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I still marvel (word chosen deliberately) at the hype surrounding a biopic about the scientist largely responsible for atomic weapons. And not from awards-hounds, either. Blockbuster fans. That is, of course, mostly down to its writer-director, Christopher Nolan. Nolan’s penchant for dizzying narrative structure, enormous visuals, and heart-pounding tension have made him one of Hollywood’s biggest directors. After 2017’s Dunkirk proved his style could apply to historical epics just as well as genre fare, the cinema community couldn’t be more excited for Oppenheimer. And once you start to vibe with its chaotic approach to the material, it really is a wonderful, troubling film.

You should absolutely not expect Oppenheimer to follow typical biopic structure, pacing, or even character introduction. This is a lengthy movie with loads of moving parts. Characters come in and out of the orbit of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, masterfully underplayed by Cillian Murphy. With a few exceptions where the people involved are names you know—Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr—Nolan relies on casting familiar faces and giving them just enough screen time to know they’re important when they pop up much later.

Not content to present anything in full chronological order, Oppenheimer gives us two frame stories. Each presents a different point of view on times in the man’s life and career. The first, dubbed “Fission,” shows us the controversial 1954 hearing which sought to revoke Oppenheimer’s security clearance based on his perceived history as a communist sympathizer. The second, “Fusion,” is the Senate confirmation hearing for Admiral Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.). Strauss had appointed Oppenheimer to the Atomic Energy Commission a few years after WWII. Fission is in color, Fusion in black and white. All the while, we see parts of Oppenheimer’s rise to theoretical quantum physics messiah and his eventually founding and leading of the Los Alamos site development of the atomic bomb which eventually leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The movie is long, and it covers a lot of ground, quite quickly. The music and sound design keep us from ever feeling at ease. Hoyte van Hoytema’s cinematography wavers between huge closeups and massive landscapes, hammering home the micro and the macro of the story at hand. Oppenheimer struggles with his place in history. The movie doesn’t let him off the hook, either. He is both the genius whose tenacity helped end WWII and “become death, destroyer of worlds.” It puts me in mind, in a completely different tone and style, of Hayao Miyazaki’s previous final film, 2013’s The Wind Rises. That film followed the aeronautics genius who wanted to make airplanes, and did so to create the A6M Zero fighter during WWII. Scientists creating and discovering while knowing their work will kill loads of people.

Oppenheimer also contends with the end of an all-too-brief time when scientists and experts were trusted and listened to not just for technological advancement but for policy and morality. As often happens, however, when the people in power see more power on the horizon, they turn their back on reason. The entire project was in Oppenheimer’s hands, the movie details, only for it to be stripped away by the military, the US government, and eventually the nuclear age the moment it was finished. Just like the Space Race was all about beating the Soviets to the moon, the rise of the A-bomb was all to stick it to the Nazis, who had already surrendered by time the bombs dropped.

Not everything about the movie works. While the movie tries to make Oppenheimer’s romantic and sexual relationships—the man was a notorious womanizer—have weight, they end up as nudity-filled footnotes. Emily Blunt plays Robert’s wife Kitty, who gets a good amount to do, but Florence Pugh as his troubled communist girlfriend seems only there for awkward sex scenes. We see next to nothing about any other woman in the story, save Olivia Thirlby as one of the Los Alamos project’s lone female physicists. She doesn’t have a ton of screen time, but she’s there.

Oppenheimer certainly feels like several movies, but it’s to Nolan’s credit that each works as well as it does. The breathlessness waiting for the Trinity bomb test, even knowing it didn’t, in fact, end the world, is one of the movie’s crowning achievements. But equal tension comes from Oppenheimer realizing what he hath wrought. It’s an amazing feat, making a single event seem both like a triumph and a failure. This movie pulls it off.

Like its central figure, Oppenheimer is a complicated, hectic, but altogether satisfying movie that will give people much to think about. I could list all the performances that merit attention, but that would end up just looking like a cast list. Murphy’s grounded, stoic, heavy performance as one of the most complex figures of the 20th century should, and likely will, receive plaudits. Richly deserved. The movie entirely rests on him, and it’s a career highlight in an already excellent body of work. If this is the film that will give Murphy and Nolan their first Academy Awards, it will be well and truly warranted.

Oppenheimer ⭐ (4.5 of 5)

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

The post OPPENHEIMER Is a Harrowing, Chaotic Masterpiece appeared first on Nerdist.

Wes Anderson is a vibe. People always know what they’re going to get with a Wes Anderson movie, and a lot of people like to slag him off because of that. But what’s wrong with having a distinct style? Why shouldn’t filmmakers have their thing to make them stand apart? Almost since his very first film, 1996’s Bottle Rocket, he’s played with the inherently artificial nature of cinema as an artform. In the course of his next 10 films—and 27 years—Anderson’s filmography has gone ever further away from “realism,” into stories, performances, and aesthetic wholly borne out of finding the believable heart at the center of the weirdest of premises.

His latest film, Asteroid City, is not your typical Wes Anderson film. Or, maybe more accurately, it’s the most Wes Anderson film. It hides the real story under layers and layers of artifice and distance to give us a treatise on the American Theatre, UFO culture, and mid-century emotional stunting. It’s also super goofy and plays like a greatest hits of previous Anderson films.

Asteroid City has probably the most packed cast Anderson has ever worked with. His movies always draw attention to their star-studded ensembles. In this movie, he draws your attention to these stars who play characters within characters within framing stories within deliberate obfuscations. Asteroid City is not merely a movie; it’s a documentary about reenactments of behind-the-scenes stories of putting on a stage play called Asteroid City, which we then get to watch in a massive, real outdoor landscape set that couldn’t possibly exist on a stage. Get it?

Ostensibly, the story finds a number of families arriving in the impossibly tiny desert town Asteroid City for a special presentation for scientifically gifted youngsters. Among these families include Jason Schwartzman’s Augie Steenbeck, a grizzled war photographer who recently lost his wife, his genius son (Jake Ryan), and trio of blonde hellion girls. We also have screen star Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson) and her genius daughter (Grace Edwards). Tilda Swinton plays a scientist, Jeffrey Wright a military general, Steve Carell an enterprising motel manager, Matt Dillon a mechanic. Tom Hanks takes on what would probably be the Bill Murray role as Augie’s rich father-in-law.

In addition to all of these characters, these actors also play the actors playing these characters. Remember, this is meant to be a play from the mid-20th century. So we throughout see these people as the “real” versions of themselves. Unlike the actual play, which is in color and widescreen, the behind-the-scenes stories look more like stage play scenes, in black-and-white, and in Academy ratio. Additionally, people like Adrien Brody appear as the play’s beleaguered director, and Edward Norton as its ascot-adorned scribe. All of this comes with Bryan Cranston as a Rod Serling-esque narrator popping in and out to set various scenes.

Each of these different levels of unreality have their own narratives and character arcs. They overlap each other, vying for importance. It’s clear Anderson is playing with the ’50s Actor’s Studio-style living theatre stuff. We have a Thornton Wilder or Tennessee Williams playwright and an Elia Kazan-inspired director. Willem Dafoe plays the analog to a Lee Strasberg-esque acting teacher. These feel less like their own full movie and more like snapshots of the era to give you an understanding of and commentary on the “play” at the center. The way Anderson weaves these stories and characters and layers of reality together constantly reminds you, none of this is real.

And this is why I think, days later, I’m still thinking so much about Asteroid City. I keep thinking this movie will put off people with just how not-real the story at the center is. But that’s entirely the point. Narrative cinema is not real life. It’s fiction. The people in the story are actors. Why should we accept Scarlett Johansson playing Natasha Romanoff but get annoyed that she’s playing a character playing a character in this?

The movie constantly keeps us at arm’s length. It almost dares us to connect with the characters within the play Asteroid City as if they were just people in Asteroid City, even when outlandish things happen. Yet I still did care about the conversations they had, the hopes and dreams and fears. In spite of everything Anderson threw at me to make me not connect, I still did.

So, will Asteroid City work for you? I guess it depends how much you get on board with Anderson’s schtick of late. This seems a natural progression in his live-action work. It’s not just a fake-looking movie with weird characters; it’s a fake-looking movie with weird characters about a fake-looking movie with weird characters. Some people will find it insufferable, some will find it fascinating, others might get something more. But at the very least, you owe it to yourself to see how he peels this particular onion.

Asteroid City ⭐ (4 of 5)

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

The post ASTEROID CITY Is Wes Anderson At His Most Self-Aware and Extra Meta appeared first on Nerdist.

The novelty of seeing robots turning into cars and vice-versa on the big screen doesn’t seem to have worn off for people in the 16 years since the first Transformers movie. Despite the subsequent four movies having pretty paltry critical and audience appreciation, they still made grips of money for Paramount and Hasbro. They are toy commercials after all, so literally seeing toys fighting each other on screen seemed to be all they needed. 2018’s Bumblebee was a shot in the arm the franchise needed. While the five Michael Bay-directed movies got bigger and louder, Bumblebee made it smaller, and gave it more heart.

Now, for the seventh movie, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, they seem to try to split the difference a bit. It takes bits of what worked in Bumblebee and gives us another loud, Earth-ending plot. And the result is fine. It’s enjoyable enough; it’s a lot more of the same. But if you had hoped for either more of Bumblebee‘s tone, or a proper rise of Maximals, you will find yourself a bit disappointed.

The movie takes place in 1994, seven years after Bumblebee. Noah Diaz (Anthony Ramos) is a former decorated soldier who quit the Army when his little brother got sick. Now he’s having trouble paying medical bills and can’t catch a break in the job department. He finally agrees to help his lowlife friend Reek (Tobe Nwigwe) steal a fancy car. That car, a Porsche, happens to be a Transformer. Mirage, to be exact, who sounds exactly like Pete Davidson. New Yawwwwwk.

Seems the Autobots (Optimus, Bumblebee, and Arcee) have a problem. They need to find a way home and a beacon, recently uncovered by a museum intern named Elena (Dominique Fishback), is their key. Unfortunately, it’s literally a key to bring Unicron—the planet-eating Transformer—to Earth. Unicron’s number-one, Scourge (Peter Dinklage) has come to collect, and seems more than a match for the Autobots. Fortunately for them, Airazor (Michelle Yeoh), a Maximal, comes to aid. Together, all the goodies go to Peru to meet the other Maximals and try to thwart Scourge and Unicron.

Lotta names, lotta MacGuffins. It even has a big laser thing shooting up toward the sky. It’s all done well enough, with loads of action and destruction and most of the time enough focus on the characters so you can actually see what’s going on. We get to know a fair amount about our human characters, which I’m sure comes from director Steven Caple Jr. (Creed II). The Maximals, on the other hand, the titular beasts? They don’t factor in much at all. This is still an Autobot movie, for better or worse.

The biggest issues I had with Rise of the Beasts came down to clashes in focus. The movie seems to think the central relationship is Noah and his little brother; it also thinks it’s Noah and Mirage becoming buds. But then it also wants us to care about Noah and Elena, and Noah and Optimus, and Elena and Airazor kind of? None of them really seem to land aside from that first one.

The second biggest issue is that Pete Davidson is very prominent in the movie and just doing his usual schtick but this time as a big car robot. Mirage is a neat enough character, but making him a bro with a questionable romantic history was a strange choice. (Part of that is not in the movie.) And the third biggest issue, for me, a big fan of 1996’s Beast Wars, is just how little the movie actually has for the Maximals to do. Airazor is the exposition, and Optimus Primal (Ron Perlman) offers his namesake a different view on humanity. Other than that, they barely feature. Cheetor and Rhinox might as well not have been there at all. Also Unicron. It’s weird Unicron is in this.

Ultimately, I can’t be too mad at a Hasbro movie made to sell Hasbro stuff. It was probably a little much to ask for a ton of Beast Wars continuity, anyway. So Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is definitely not the worst Transformers movie. I had fun watching it, even if the final act devolves into a robot punch orgy. The soundtrack, made up of ’90s and late-’80s hip-hop absolutely rules. Ramos is good (too good, if I’m being honest) and your kids or younger relatives will have fun. And there’s no oil pee or car farting or whatever, so that’s a step in the right direction. Have I talked myself into liking it? Not really. I’m gonna go have a sandwich.

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts ⭐ (2.7 of 5)

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

The post TRANSFORMERS: RISE OF THE BEASTS Didn’t Rise Very High appeared first on Nerdist.

I was inordinately excited for Hideaki Anno’s very long-awaited Shin Kamen Rider. Not only a 50th anniversary tribute to the 1971 original Kamen Rider series—delayed because of the darn pandemic—but another entry in the writer-producer’s reimaginings of Japanese pop culture legends. Shin Godzilla, which he co-directed with Shinji Higuchi, was the first truly singular Japanese Godzilla movie in decades. Shin Ultraman, which Higuchi solo directed, was a lovely and touching update of the 1966 original series. So a new take on the o.g. Kamen Rider, of which I’m a big fan, made me hope it would be the best yet. It isn’t. It’s not bad; but if you’re looking to get into Kamen Rider, or even see what it’s all about, this ain’t it.

The legendary mangaka Shotaro Ishinomori created Kamen Rider for TV in the early ’70s. During its initial 98-episode run, the style and tone changed pretty drastically. Starting as a dark, moody horror-inspired superhero show, it eventually lightened up considerably. The lead character changed, then changed back, and the legend of cybernetic, insect-themed motorcyclist grew. Anno tried to squeeze too much of that into a single two-hour film. The pace is about 20 mph over breakneck. As a result, the movie loses a lot of nuance, especially in the baddie department.

Shin Kamen Rider begins literally in the middle of a chase. Ruriko Midorikawa (Minami Hamabe) and Hongo Takeshi (Sôsuke Ikematsu) speed away on a motorcycle away from big semi-trucks. Only after they get away to a safehouse do we, and Hongo, get a sense of what’s going on. Ruriko is the daughter of Professor Hiroshi Midorikawa (cult filmmaker Shin’ya Tsukamoto). The professor is a scientist working for the SHOCKER organization, who had promised to help humanity but, go figure, are actually plotting to steal humanity’s life force via human cyborgs with animal themes.

Midorikawa and Ruriko have decided to thwart SHOCKER and designed the latest cyborg, Hongo, to fight them as the Masked Rider. From there, we begin a succession of Hongo and Ruriko attempting to fight the various other “Augs” with beast themes. These follow roughly the same order as the first 13 episodes of the series. A spider, bat, scorpion, chameleon, mantis, and wasp all trek through quickly. All the while, the pair get closer without ever really speaking above a low monotone.

Part-way through the movie, we meet Ichimonji Hayato (Tasuku Emoto), a second grasshopper-themed cyborg whom SHOCKER has successfully brainwashed. People who know the original series will know that he doesn’t remain brainwashed for long.

It’s entirely possible that via reading this you’ve realized one of the major problems with Shin Kamen Rider: way too much plot but almost no story. It’s just learning about the evils of SHOCKER, quick banter with the various kaijin one-by-one, a high-velocity fight sequence, rinse, repeat. On the surface, this is not entirely a bad way to do it, but this outline totally misses some of the best parts of every Kamen Rider episodes. The build up to the showdown, seeing the villain do villainous things is more than half the fun. Yes, the show hangs its hat on its hand-to-hand fight sequences, its monster designs, and the visceral thrill of seeing Kamen Rider in action. But we need to know the stakes and care about the characters for any of it to matter.

I don’t want to compare Shin Kamen Rider to Shin Godzilla or Shin Ultraman too much, but I think the other major problem is entirely down to them. This movie uses the same cinematographers as the previous two movies and has largely the same style of shooting. Government types sit around computers or talk in rooms while big monsters attack and/or a big alien hero fights them.

As a property, Kamen Rider does not lend itself to this type of depiction at all. The action sequences work decently, but are way too dependent on CGI rather than the hallmark of the franchise, which is martial arts battles heightened to a ridiculous degree. Hongo even finds himself tentatively working with anti-SHOCKER government types, which simply does not fit. The surveillance-style shooting that worked so well for Godzilla and Ultraman just doesn’t work here. We need more atmosphere, we need passion and scares. We need some kind of heart! It felt surprisingly cold.

This isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy it at all. The redesigns of the suits are excellent, the sounds and music are all spot-on. I really like the subtle way the beginning of the movie focuses on extreme violence and slowly it becomes less monstrous by the end, much the same way the show did. And moments certainly made the rabid fans I saw it with cheer. References and allusions to the classic series (and other Ishinomori creations) are fun for those who get them. Would it matter at all to anyone who doesn’t?

And maybe that’s ultimately the reason Shin Ultraman spent a year in the festival circuit before becoming a Fathom Event while Shin Kamen Rider bypassed festivals entirely. This isn’t the kind of movie that encapsulates the ethos of the show while replicating some of the best episodes. This movie is for people who know Kamen Rider already and just want to see people put on and take off helmets 500 times while punching viscera out of thugs like so many juiced memberberries.

Shin Kamen Rider ⭐ (2.5 of 5)

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

The post SHIN KAMEN RIDER Is a Fun Time for Fans, But Might Not Make Any New Ones appeared first on Nerdist.

Stephen King’s short stories are some of the bleakest, most upsetting horror fiction of his career. And that’s really saying something. In the same stretch of the early ’70s that saw publication of some of his most celebrated, including “Trucks,” “The Mangler,” and “Battleground,” King gave us “The Boogeyman,” a riff on perhaps the classic nightmare monster. The story is excellent, depicting the titular menace attacking a family and picking it apart person by person. It’s a nasty, fun little story. Adapting it to a feature film, director Rob Savage (Host) keeps some of that, but not quite enough to make it stand out.

Story goes, in 2018 A Quiet Place screenwriting partners Scott Beck and Bryan Woods optioned the King story. After loads of Hollywood production nonsense, which saw other writers come on and leave, the eventual script comes to us from Beck, Woods, and Mark Heyman whose previous feature films are co-writing 2010’s Black Swan and co-writing 2014’s The Skeleton Twins. End of list. Directing duties fell to Rob Savage, the British filmmaker who made a splash in 2020 with the hour-long, shot-on-Zoom horror movie Host. The result feels a bit like A Quiet Place but in a house, with a bit of mental health stuff thrown in.

The movie follows the Harper family; father Will Harper (Chris Messina), a psychiatrist, is trying to solo parent his teenage daughter Sadie (Sophie Thatcher) and elementary-age daughter Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair) following the sudden death of their mother. Will has, as yet, been unable to open up to Sadie about his feelings, leaving her to mostly cope alone. One day, a disturbed man named Lester Billings (David Dastmalchian) comes into Harper’s home office and wants to tell him about the deaths of his children, seemingly at the hands of an unseen shadow force. Oops, now the monster wants the Harper family! Dang it, Lester!

The Boogeyman boasts some solid jump scare moments and a wholly otherworldly monster. It definitely feels more alien than demonic, and it has a similar long-arm-crawly thing that the Quiet Place aliens do. Except instead of attraction to sound, this guy has aversion to light. Savage handles the tension and thing-in-the-dark chills quite adeptly. We never fully get a sense of how this creature operates, but its methods—including warping the sound of loved one’s voices—works in the mix.

The problem is the story. It takes no chances at all in the Harper family drama. We’ve seen this a million times before. Following the death of a parent, the other parent closes off while the eldest child has to be the grown up and the youngest child has nightmares. It’s Horror Movie Setup 101. As good as the actors are, the plot follows such a rote path without taking risks or adding wrinkles. Dad doesn’t believe there’s a monster, so eldest daughter has to try to save the day.

For those who haven’t read the short story, it entirely focuses on Billings relaying the horrifying events to the psychiatrist. That’s where all the horror truly lies as it sees a man forced to watch his children succumb to this monster. That portion of the movie is incredibly brief and the rest feels so underwhelming. It’s like a bit of Insidious; a scosh of Poltergeist; even a little Haunting of Hill House. It never branches out into its own thing.

And I think its biggest failing is it doesn’t go as hard as last year’s Smile which attacked the mixture of demonic curse and mental health/trauma so much more effectively. The Boogeyman isn’t bad, it’s fine. It has a couple of nifty sequences, some good scares. It’s just nothing like as scary as it ought to be. It pulls too many punches, tries to explain too much and not enough. The monster in the closet, under the bed, in the basement—we’ve seen it all before. Without the punch of King’s original prose or macabre sensibility, it’s little more than a passing shiver.

The Boogeyman hits theaters on June 2.

The Boogeyman (PG-13) ⭐ (2.7 of 5)

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

The post THE BOOGEYMAN Gives the Requisite Family Angst and Jump Scares, Not Much Else appeared first on Nerdist.

There’s a reason all of the promos and marketing material for Renfield highlight the seemingly bizarre yet perfect casting of Nicolas Cage as Dracula. Casting him was a genius move, as is the funny conceit of having Dracula’s familiar—the titular R.M. Renfield (Nicholas Hoult)—go to group therapy for toxic codependency. But the trouble is, these elements, good as they are, take up precious little time in the already brisk 93-minute runtime. Would you guess most of the plot has to do with corrupt cops and a drug-trafficking crime family? I wouldn’t, and didn’t. I wish that it did not.

One of the biggest issues for me when watching any kind of higher-concept studio picture is when I can see evidence of major recuts. It’s part of the reason Black Adam felt so off. Renfield is obscenely brief for all the things it wants to do. It boasts a lot of over-the-top, blood-soaked action, but the comedy and drama fall largely flat due to sheer speed. Three credited editors and the barest of stories.

The story follows Renfield who has, since his master’s last defeat, relocated the vampire prince to New Orleans. He has to provide the reconstituting Dracula with a steady supply of fresh blood. But, after so many years, the killing has gotten to him. He begins to attend a group meeting for people in toxic relationships where he gets advice on how to overcome his own from Mark, the therapist (Brandon Scott Jones). This is not good news for Dracula, of course.

At the same time, a traffic cop named Quincy (Awkwafina) is trying to take down the Lobo crime family after they murdered her hero cop father. Due to the family’s influence in New Orleans, and paying off part of the police, even the inept exploits of brash Teddy Lobo (Ben Schwartz) don’t result in meaningful convictions. Renfield and Quincy intersect as Renfield uses his Dracula powers (which he gets from eating bugs) to help her. The movie has a very murky sense of morality as it pertains to these, also. Killing innocent people is wrong. When he slaughters criminals or corrupt officers? He’s a hero. The movie never contends with the inherent hypocrisy of this.

The plot of this movie is a mess, I have to say. Based on a Robert Kirkman story with a screenplay from longtime Dan Harmon acolyte Ryan Ridley, you’d think the pedigree would be there for at the very least an entertaining movie. And let us not forget, you have Nicolas friggin’ Cage playing Dracula! That alone should have made this great. He is great, and all of the things having to do with Dracula directly are fabulous. The production design, costuming, and makeup are all top notch. Cage delivers a new but totally legitimate take on the character, which is impressive after 101 years in movies.

But beyond Cage (and Jones who got the only two actual laughs out of me), and a fine performance from Hoult, there is just a substandard cops-and-robbers narrative with a nigh-invulnerable superhero-type who tears people’s limbs off after eating a spider or some flies. It’s just so threadbare. What could have been a fun character study, a modern riff on classic Gothic characters, becomes a more lighthearted Morbius.

Many people—and certainly a lot of them were in the screening I attended—are perfectly content just to watch Cage revel in his Dracula fangs, but he’s hardly the main character, and everyone else is irritating or boring. Awkwafina can’t decide if she’s supposed to be funny or stoic. Schwartz is playing Jean-Ralphio without any of the charm. And I don’t care about corrupt cops or supremely annoying criminals. Get out of my Dracula movie!

Even the delightfully gruesome set pieces and Cage’s mastery can’t amount to more than a very dumb, not-funny comedy, a not-scary horror movie, and a not-exciting action movie.

Renfield will hit theaters April 14.

Renfield ⭐ (2 of 5)

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

The post RENFIELD Has Top-Form Nicolas Cage and Little Else appeared first on Nerdist.

Beau Is Afraid is a deeply strange movie. You probably think you know that already after seeing the trailers, or just knowing it comes from Ari Aster. Hereditary and Midsommar are very weird, amidst the guttural terror they evoke. But Beau is a different beast. In some ways this feels very of a piece of those earlier movies, their uncomfortable and unsettling interactions and deep, disturbing revelations. At the same time, it’s miles and miles different; it’s an absurdist, surrealist take on everything from city living to overbearing mothers that still manages to have some true horror in its heart. I still have kind of no idea what to make of Beau Is Afraid and maybe that’s the point.

Aster clearly has some personal demons to work through, and to their credit, A24 allowed him to do that. It never once feels like the filmmaker needed to hold back or change things for audience appeasement or anything. Like all of his movies, Beau Is Afraid is not easy to watch. At a minute shy of three hours, it’s also the most arduous, but it never drags. We feel like we’ve been on a journey along with our main character. Aster has called the movie a “Jewish Lord of the Rings,” and that feels apt in a lot of ways. In other ways? Just emotional torture porn.

The movie follows Beau (Joaquin Phoenix), a middle-aged man who lives alone in a tiny little apartment in what I can only describe as hell on earth. Though we never 100% know if what we see is true to the film or only Beau’s perception, but his city block has drug addicts and lunatics and murderers mere feet away at all times. (The latter is a nude guy whom the TV news affectionately dubs “Birthday Boy Stab Man”.) Even more than all of the hilariously awful things all around him, Beau fears visiting his mother. He’s supposed to go tomorrow, however the world seems to have conspired against him.

So much of Beau Is Afraid is this poor guy stumbling from one absolutely terrible problem to the next. After losing his keys and locking himself out of his building, he gets hit by a truck. The drivers of which are a seemingly nice couple (Nathan Lane and Amy Ryan) who nurse him back to health. But they, like everyone Beau meets, seems oddly sinister. Beau’s paranoia grows and with it does the audience’s sense of unease. Aster has crowned himself the monarch of icky feelings, and he’s three for three. While you laugh at the escalating nightmare of Beau’s surroundings, you also tense up at what can only be the inevitable horror to follow.

And follow it does. Some truly WTF moments occur throughout, stuff that had my jaw on the floor and my hands on my face. But easily the scariest part of the move is the looming shadow of Beau’s mother. A luminary in some unknown field, the specter of Beau’s mother haunts everything in his life. We see bits of his upbringing, when she seems utterly devoted to him, but with an edge we can’t quite ascertain. When we see her in the present, she’s scarier than any Dracula or Frankenstein you might see. Zoe Lister-Jones and Patti LuPone play the character in different time periods and they are absolutely stellar, and truly terrifying.

Still, weeks later I can’t quite put my finger on why it didn’t quite work for me. Without the visceral punch of Hereditary or the folk-horror slow burn of Midsommar, we can see much more of Aster’s true intent. It’s less to tell a story and more to convey a grievance. Even the movie’s one true masterstroke—an extended fantasy sequence presented as an elaborate stage play—fades away quickly back to zany madcappery and on-the-nose metaphor. And while we definitely have the focus on familial trauma that his earlier features had, without the keening sorrow of those, we end up just watching a guy get kicked repeatedly while he’s down. It’s hard not to see the whole movie as an extended riff on Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown.

Beau Is Afraid is funny, scary, profound, upsetting, bizarre, and ultimately arduous. I’d love to say I love it as more than a filmmaker taking a massive swing with the full support of a studio behind him, but I can’t. It left me feeling upset and exhausted, which I think was the goal, but it’s a journey I’m not entirely sure I needed to take.

Beau Is Afraid hits cinemas April 21.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

The post BEAU IS AFRAID Is a New Kind of Unsettling Family Horror appeared first on Nerdist.

Nintendo has worked tirelessly over the past 30 years to fend off the grimy funk of the first Super Mario Bros. movie. Though that dark and drastic take on the material has its defenders (I like it), you can’t deny it’s not the same as the games at all. Ever protective of its enormous library of IP, Nintendo and Shigeru Miyamoto made sure the next Mario movie would be faithful. And Illumination’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie is absolutely a Nintendo game brought to dazzling life. It’s got the characters, world, and adventurous spirit right on the money. But those expecting something akin to The LEGO Movie might be left a bit cold.

Given the roster of comedy actors in the voice roles—especially Chris Pratt as Mario—one might be forgiven for thinking it would hew closer to the massively media literate humor of LEGO. But the jokes in the movie are much more straightforward and clearly aimed at a younger audience. Oh, old-school Nintendo fans will surely squeal at the sheer amount of Easter eggs and references to other titles and bits of Nintendo ephemera. But the story itself is right down the middle, true-blue hero stuff.

The movie opens with Mario (Pratt) and faithful if nervous brother Luigi (Charlie Day) trying like heck to get their new plumbing business off the ground. When a massive pipe bursts in the sewers of Brooklyn the brothers decide to fix it and make their name. Down in the bowels of the city, they find a pipe that sucks them into a magical new world. Luigi ends up in the realm of Bowser (Jack Black) and his Koopa army; Mario finds himself in the bright and cheerful Mushroom Kingdom. Bowser is en route to take over said kingdom and it’s up to Mario, a brave Toad (Keegan-Michael Key), and Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy) to retrieve Luigi and save the Toads. (Luigi is the damsel in this one rather than Peach, which is excellent.)

In order to achieve this goal, the Princess needs to recruit the Kong army. Cranky Kong (Fred Armisen), the ruler of the Jungle Kingdom, refuses unless Mario can defeat his son Donkey Kong (Seth Rogen) in single combat. Badda bing, badda boom, you get a Mario Kart sequence, you get platforming and power-ups, and you get all the sounds and sights you’d expect and hope for in an animated Nintendo movie.

Illumination is the perfect choice to make Mario movies. The animation is absolutely stunning, perfectly embodying the spirit of the games’ worlds. Several frenetic sequences bring what fans of the games know as core Mario stuff to life. We even get several fast-paced action beats that emulate the original 2D side-scrolling games. All of the settings look real—like it’s stop-motion. The colors pop, the action cooks, and you’ll never tire of looking at the whole frame.

Still, I was a bit surprised at how, sort of, unsurprising the movie is. At only 92 minutes, we don’t have much time for anything outside the main plot. The filmmakers packed a lot of Nintendo in that short runtime, and they want to make sure we see all of it. So we only have time for the broadest of story beats. Mario wants to make his family proud; Peach wants to save her people; Donkey Kong wants to prove he’s not just a meathead. It’s very by-the-numbers hero’s journey stuff. Not a complaint, just an observation. I’ll say it again: this isn’t The LEGO Movie. The most out-there stuff happens with Black as Bowser, who sings several love songs about Peach.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie is a very solid IP-driven animated movie. For Nintendo kids, I think it’ll scratch that itch very well. It’s got all the things. For anyone who doesn’t know or doesn’t care that much about Mario, you might find it little more than a colorful kids movie. And that’s fine! It’s fun, bring your children, bring your inner child, have a good time.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie ⭐ (3 of 5)

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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The behind-the-scenes uncertainty regarding the DCEU/DCU changeover has been far more intriguing than the bulk of the films released under the DCEU banner. I’m supremely excited for the future projects new co-CEO James Gunn announced in January. More interesting has been the fact that several films are still due to come out before this change officially happens. Black Adam was not good, and despite what its star maintains publicly, it didn’t perform well enough to continue on. But Shazam! Fury of the Gods might. And the movie itself is charming and harmless enough to remain relevant to the DCU, even though it doesn’t work nearly as well as the first one.

The first Shazam! from 2019 wasn’t quite a breath of fresh air for the DC Extended Universe, but it was a whole lot more fun than most of them. Telling the relatively small story of a kid who gets super powers, and moreover becomes an adult man with super powers, was a delightful comedic spin. Just a kid from Philadelphia who doesn’t know what he’s doing. It had something of a ’90s vibe to the tone and it worked for the most part.

A sequel seemed inevitable, because of course it did. Shazam! Fury of the Gods picks up a few years after the first one. Billy Batson (Asher Angel) and his foster family all have super powers and seem to cause more mayhem than help people. Billy spends most of his time in his super alter ego (Zachary Levi) guise, and tries to hold his five super-sibs together. While some, like Mary (played in both iterations by Grace Caroline Currey), wants to finish college and get a job, Freddy (Jack Dylan Grazer and Adam Brody) just wants to fly solo, or at least with only Billy.

Trouble arises when the Daughters of Atlas (Helen Mirren, Lucy Liu, Rachel Zegler) appear on the scene, demanding the not-dead wizard (Djimon Hounsou) re-forge the broken staff from the first movie so they can steal back their father’s powers from the Shazamily. Each of the Daughters has a different, deadly power, and each has a different level of contempt for humanity. Through the course of the movie, Billy will have to re-learn what it means to be a hero while everyone else has to learn other things.

First the good stuff. This movie mostly retains the level of humor of the first, which was its best feature. The movie smartly pairs Hounsou and Grazer together for large portion of the story and their comedic repartee is consistently good. Freddy got by far the best character arc in the movie. The youngest sister Darla (Faithe Herman) and her superhero counterpart (Meagan Good) is another standout. Hilarious with their upbeat naivete at every turn. A particular moment toward the end got me to blurt-laugh.

I also had a lot of fun with the movie’s big evil creatures. Director David F. Sandberg’s horror roots came through a lot in the first movie and I had assumed they’d be a bit watered down in this one. However, toward the end, we get some huge, gnarly mythical creatures for the family to fight and they scratched that tonal itch.

Unfortunately, the part that worked the least for me was Billy/Shazam himself. We get shockingly little of Asher Angel this time around (who honestly could be a superhero himself) and instead we have Levi’s teen-in-a-man’s-body schtick which I think has just worn a bit thin. He was far more annoying than I remember in the first movie. His ineptitude and emotional immaturity, while occasionally funny, just seemed so much more out of place here. I didn’t buy his arc, all the way up to the end. The villains, well played as they are, also didn’t do much to play off of Billy’s insecurities. Dr. Sivana in the first movie was much more a foil to Billy. The Daughters of Atlas are just angry demigods.

So, despite the humor, the story didn’t grab me the way the first film’s did. With the exception of Freddy, who was the best. Shazam! Fury of the Gods is still entertaining enough and definitely isn’t stupid or badly cobbled together like Black Adam was. And hey, if they make some more Shazam! movies, it wouldn’t be the worst thing. But if you’re hoping for “the first movie but bigger and better,” only one of those is true, and definitely hampers the other.

Shazam! Fury of the Gods hits theaters March 17.

Shazam! Fury of the Gods ⭐ (3 of 5)

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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It’s a new phase in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Phase Five, they tell us. Phase Four, despite a couple decent movies and some quite good TV series, felt a little half-baked. No clear goal or thrust aside from the fallout of Avengers: Endgame. Many outside the dedicated nerd sphere might be forgiven for not realizing the final feature in Phase Four was Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, its final entry period the Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special. Hardly a rousing culmination. Phase Five, however, at least begins with a booming statement. The movie may be Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, but we are in the Age of Kang.

The Thanos of it all has given folks a major question mark going forward. Such a compelling and intimidating villain is hard to follow. And, let us not forget Marvel Studios’ long history of lackluster villains (or great villains who die too soon). They needed to make their next Big Bad just as interesting as Thanos but markedly different. Jonathan Majors’ Kang, it appears on first blush, is just such a villain. Scary, cruel, confident, yet deep and almost remorseful at times. Majors’ glassy-eyed moments between evil deeds gives Kang so much more heft than he might have otherwise.

The usual problem is a villain who seems out of step with the movie; here it’s a hero who feels at odds with the tone of his own film. Paul Rudd is just as charming as ever and moments of Quantumania showcase the dry humor that made his Scott Lang and the first two Ant-Man movies so fun. Here, he and the other main heroes are completely outmatched by the baddies, the colorful and weird Quantum Realm, and the strange characters we meet within it.

Years after the Blip, Scott Lang has written a memoir about his adventures and, though happy, seems rudderless and content to live off his celebrity. Not true for his partner Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) who has relaunched her father’s company and become a pillar of the scientific community. His daughter Cassie (now played by Kathryn Newton) has become a proponent of civil rights, entering the film in jail for trying to prevent police from breaking up an unhoused encampment. She’s fighting for her beliefs, and has become a scientist in her own right. She, along with Hope and Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), have created a satellite to the Quantum Realm.

This news comes to the chagrin of Janet Van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer) who still has not told her family the horrors she witnessed during her 30 years within the Quantum Realm. And she’s right to be afraid; not two seconds after they turn on the satellite does the device suck all five of them into it. Someone has a score to settle with Janet and doesn’t care who else gets hurt along the way. Kang, it’s Kang.

Unlike the first two Ant-Man movies, which balanced family comedy-drama with goofy superheroics and a helping of quantum weirdness, here it’s all quantum. Yes, we have some humor, and a lot of it is really funny. William Jackson Harper, who plays a mind-reading denizen of the Quantum Realm, has a particularly funny few scenes. Bill Murray plays a wealthy former associate of Janet’s and does his Bill Murray thing.

I also need to give special commendation to M.O.D.O.K., aka the former Darren Cross (Corey Stoll). Director Peyton Reed and the actors understand how silly the Mechanized Organism Designed Only for Killing actually is and steer into it beautifully. Stoll’s giant, stretched face is as goofy as it gets and yet they make it work within the context of the movie. As much as I generally dislike when the movies take the piss out of the comic books’ inherent out-thereness, it needed to happen with M.O.D.O.K.

The problem is, despite some very nifty set pieces and some laughs, the meat of the movie is Kang and not with any of the heroes. Is this a problem in general? No. But it seems as though the script attempts to give Scott and Cassie a throughline that sort of fizzles out; Hank Pym gets to do some fun stuff but doesn’t have much in the way of an arc; Janet and Hope likewise seem to start from a place of conflict and it doesn’t go where it should. And for a movie called Ant-Man and the Wasp, Rudd and Lilly share shockingly few meaningful scenes.

As a movie to properly foist Kang the Conqueror onto the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania succeeds and then some. I can’t wait for the next appearance of Kang and/or his many proposed variants. As a movie for the Pym/Lang/Van Dyne family of size-changing heroes? It’s only just fine.

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania ⭐ (3 of 5)

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania hits theaters February 17.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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Pretty much since Lady in the Water, I go into every new M. Night Shyamalan movie with cautious optimism and/or hopeful pessimism. I won’t continually harp on the director’s fallow period, but it has made his last decade or so interesting. While some movies, like The Visit and Split were surprisingly good, he did give us Glass which was very bad. And Old which was… weird. His latest, Knock at the Cabin is maybe his most effective, most satisfyingly troubling in a very, very long time. Not perfect, but damned riveting.

The movie, based on Paul Tremblay’s novel The Cabin at the End of the World, began life as one of the famed Black List screenplays from writers Steve Desmond and Michael Sherman. Shyamalan did a rewrite when he came on board to direct, as he does, and while the movie has some of his trademark weird moments—characters in dire situations talking about unimportant things a major one—the plot retains the taut ambiguity throughout. And the performances, especially from Dave Bautista, really carry the events. It feels like an even less showy Signs in a lot of ways.

Eric (Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge) have taken their 8-year-old daughter Wen (Kristen Cui) to a remote cabin in Pennsylvania (of course) for a getaway. At the start of the movie, Leonard (Bautista) finds Wen catching grasshoppers and tries to make friends before saying some truly menacing things. Leonard’s three “co-workers” then walk up with makeshift weapons out of Mad Max and make for the cabin.

As you’ve probably seen in the movie’s marketing, the four intruders (the other three being Nikki Amuka-Bird, Abby Quinn, and Rupert Grint) tell the trapped family that the apocalypse is coming, and they will need to decide among them which of them will die—and the family has to do the killing, not the intruders—to stave off Armageddon. This came to them in a series of visions, punctuated by plagues and blights leading up to the final end.

It’s a great premise, no question. All four of the intruders convey the anguish of having to take part in this while never letting up on their firm stance that they must, for the sake of humanity. Bautista is truly superb, underplaying his lines, trying to be as unassuming as a giant, muscular, tattooed man with an ax can be. As the plagues escalate, he remains firm even as the others show growing desperation. If his performance wasn’t as strong, the movie wouldn’t work as well.

The flipside of the story is where the movie falters a bit. We need to believe that Eric and Andrew’s love and devotion to each other is strong enough to defy these would-be harbingers. We need to believe just as much in the idea that these are just crazy people targeting a gay couple with an adopted daughter as we do that it’s all really happening. Shyamalan shows us very brief flashbacks to various points in their relationship; while Eric’s family supports him, Andrew’s doesn’t. Andrew’s rage at the world becomes palpable, but I don’t think the movie does enough to make us side with the family over the intruders. And that’s a problem. Their us-against-the-world mentality needs to be the movie’s strongest element.

The tension and, at times, effective ambiguity carry the story for the most part. Chiefly, and this sounds like damning with faint praise, nothing stupid happens. Nobody acts out of character and no winky plot cheats come into play. This was a relief. And yeah, it’s an early February release, so you can’t expect the world, I’ll take a solid premise executed effectively over zany shenanigans that fall flat. It really could have gone the way of Bird Box which was supremely dumb at times despite a great premise. This stays in its lane and succeeds more than it doesn’t.

Knock at the Cabin ⭐ (3 of 5)

M. Night Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin opens February 3.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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When it comes to anthology genre TV, Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone is the one most people hail as the best. It was by no means, however, the only show of its kind. In the wake of Zone, shows like The Outer Limits, Thriller, and One Step Beyond flooded TV in the 1960s. Alfred Hitchcock himself even had two separate series of suspense stories. By the 1970s, however, the well had started to run dry. It’d come back in the ’80s, but the last gasp of the first rash came in the form of Night Gallery, Serling and producer Jack Laird’s pure-horror (within reason) series. All three seasons of this oft-forgotten show are out on glorious Blu-ray from Kino Lorber, and it’s really worth a look.

History of Night Gallery

The production history of Night Gallery is fascinating and super complicated, so I won’t try to get into it too much, but suffice to say, unlike The Twilight Zone, this was not a full Serling joint. He hosts and he wrote a good number of segments, along with producing, however.

The premise of each episode has Serling walking around the titular “Night Gallery,” a huge and mostly empty space with paintings hanging from the ceiling. Each painting is a macabre interpretation of a different story. Serling sets up in front of a painting and gives a trademark opaque introduction for whatever story we’re about to watch.

The Night Gallery Pilot

The first Night Gallery episode was a feature length TV movie. It featured three separate stories; the first, “The Cemetery” is a riff on the M.R. James story The Mezzotint in which a painting changes, indicating something scary will soon attack. It features Ossie Davis as the long-serving butler of a wealthy Southern landowner on his deathbed and Roddy McDowell as the wealthy man’s nephew who stands to inherit everything.

The second story in the pilot is “Eyes,” directed by a young Universal contract director named Steven Spielberg. It finds Joan Crawford as a high society with vision impairments matron who undergoes an experimental surgery that offers her 12 hours to see. And the final story, “Escape Route,” has a fugitive Nazi facing ghostly comeuppance for his past crimes.

The Night Gallery pilot is very straightforward, though executed incredibly well, and was popular enough to get the series greenlit. The interesting thing, however, is that as the show went on, the kinds of stories got a lot wilder, with far fewer “gotcha” twists and more proper horror. The first season consisted of only six episodes, the second a full 22, and the third would be cut down to 30 minutes rather than 60, and has 15 episodes.

The Best Night Gallery Segments

In total, the show had 96 separate segments. Rather than try to talk about all of them, instead I want to talk about some of my favorites, to give you an idea of why I think Night Gallery is so special and why it deserves to be talked about in the same breath as The Twilight Zone.

Season 1, Segment 3b: “Certain Shadows on the Wall”

This is an excellent riff on a classic ghost story. Agnes Moorhead is an aged woman who dies under mysterious circumstances and, inexplicably, her shadow remains on the wall to taunt her sinister brother. This features some truly creepy visuals and mood, great work from director Jeff Corey.

Season 1, Segment 5c: “The Doll”

An adaptation of an Algernon Blackwood story, “The Doll” finds a child’s toy terrorizing a Colonial officer in Queen Victoria’s army. A lot of Night Gallery‘s best segments fit into traditional Victorian, Gothic horror tropes, which coupled with the ’70s TV aesthetic produces an especially unsettling effect.

Season 1, Segment 6a: “They’re Tearing Down Tim Riley’s Bar”

The longest single segment on the show, and also the most atypical. Serling wrote this tale of a has-been salesman (William Windom) who longs for “the good old days” when his life had promise. Upon hearing that his favorite bar will be torn down, the man begins experiencing ghostly visions of the past. This segment earned Night Gallery an Emmy nomination for “Outstanding Single Program” in 1971.

Season 2, Segment 10a: “The Dark Boy”

Night Gallery adapted several “weird fiction” stories from the early 1900s. “The Dark Boy” is one such, adapted from August Derleth’s story of the same name. In it, a young school teacher at the turn of the century takes up a position at a rural community. The welcoming committee tells her she’ll have 16 students, however when she gets to class she learns there’s a 17. Despite her attempts, this boy never seems to get what she’s teaching. Eventually she, and the audience, learn the sad and spooky truth of who this child is.

Season 2, Segments 11a and 12a: “Pickman’s Model” and “Cool Air”

In successive episodes, Night Gallery adapted two H.P. Lovecraft stories. The first, “Pickman’s Model,” finds an artist depicting terrible and nightmarish things in his paintings. Guess what? They’re real. This one would later end up in Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities, which I think is actually the better version.

The second, “Cool Air,” adapted by Serling, turns one of Lovecraft’s very short horror stories into a romantic, supernatural drama. In it, a young woman falls for her father’s colleague. The man has a very specific aversion to heat of any kind, pumping his rooms with a rudimentary air conditioning system. There is, of course, a reason for his needing cool air, and as you might expect, it’s not a happy one.

Season 2, Segment 17b, “The Ghost of Sorworth Place”

Another excellent ghost story for the series. This one sees an American tourist happen upon an estate in Scotland owned by a comely young widow who seems petrified of something. The man soon learns the woman fears the return of her husband, who died one year prior. It’s Night Gallery, so you can guess this probably isn’t just paranoia. The ghost effects here are some of the series’ best.

Season 2, Episodes 20-22

While looking over the segment list, I realized that all seven segments in the second season’s final three episodes are brilliant. They include: a student of sorcery trying to ensure a life of leisure; a “sin eater” in the Middle Ages meeting a grim fate; robots getting revenge for mistreatment; an expat in Borneo plotting a gruesome end to a romantic rival; and a psychiatrist who has to help a scientific genius process grief. All of them are just superb.

Season 3, Episode 2, “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes”

By the third season—saved from cancellation at the last moment—the network mandated the show go to 30 minutes. That meant, aside from two outliers, that was only one story per episode. Generally these episodes are not as good; however, the second episode is a crackerjack entry. It finds a photographer whose latest muse is not merely a beautiful woman, but the beautiful woman whom every ad agency wants as their spokesmodel. The trouble starts when, as the photographer gets more and more money, more and more men end up mysteriously dead. Succubus, babyyyyyy!

Season 3, Episode 6, “The Other Way Out”

An old man lures a murderer to a secluded farm house where the man seeks to enact his revenge. He places the murderer in a pit with no way out. All the old man (played by Burl Ives, no less) tells his prisoner is that he’ll be dealt with when “Sonny” arrives. We learn the extent of the murderer’s crime and hear his pleas for mercy, only to be met with an absolute gut-punch when Sonny indeed arrives.

These are just some of the best episodes of the show. Give it a look and see for yourself. All three seasons of Night Gallery plus the pilot movie are available on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber. Just as they did with The Outer Limits and Kolchak: The Night Stalker, they’ve poured dozens of hours of commentaries and extras for fans of horror media and old American TV. They are the best sets of their kind on the market.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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I will readily admit that I belonged to the camp of thinking that James Cameron’s Avatar sequels would never come out. Sequels seemed a shoo-in soon after the massive success of the 2009 first movie; each successive year when the Avatar 2 would get pushed back and another two or three sequels added, it seemed much less sure. But here we are, 13 years after the first movie, with Avatar: The Way of Water. The world of cinema has changed immeasurably in that time, as has the world at large. Almost all of the MCU, all of Disney Star Wars, five Fast & Furious movies, and the entirety of A24 have debuted since the first movie. Do we need, in 2022, more Avatar movies? That answer will depend very much on what you look for from cinema.

Avatar: The Way of Water feels like it should have come out in 2011 or ’12. I mean that in a number of ways. It jumps right back into the story from the first one with almost zero recap of the events of the first movie or its characters. It begins with a montage of scenes and moments covering huge swaths of the characters’ lives in the many in-world years after Avatar 1. (At the time we only called it Avatar.) And while the special effects evidently needed tons of time to catch up to where Cameron wanted, the story and characters didn’t get such attention.

We follow Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), now fully fastened within his Na’vi body and living a life with Neytiri (Zoe Saldana). They have four children, including two boys, a little girl, and the daughter of comatose Dr. Grace Augustine’s (Sigourney Weaver) Avatar. That daughter, the adolescent Kiri (also played by Weaver), has some kind of attachment to alien world Pandora beyond that of other Na’vi. The Sullys have led various missions against the human military, still intent on exploiting Pandora’s many inexplicably beneficial natural resources.

The main action begins when many of the human villains from the first movie, including Stephen Lang’s Col. Miles Quaritch, effectively return from the dead, their consciousnesses uploaded into avatar bodies. He has a score to settle with Jake Sully and his family. This leads our heroes to leave their familiar forest home for the coast, with the hopes of joining new Na’vi tribe, the Metkayina. The move doesn’t go well for the Sully children. They all endeavor to make friends with other kids and commune with the ocean creatures. Naturally, the baddies encroach on this would-be harmony and various new mysteries about Pandora arise that will probably be addressed in the subsequent 19 movies Cameron has planned.

So. Where to begin? Avatar: The Way of Water is really a movie of two parts. One part is the visual presentation. I will mince no words here when I say, this is the best looking performance capture, CGI-rendered vistas, and 3D technology I have ever seen. It is positively gorgeous to look at. Sweeping action and gorgeous scenery populate much of the movie’s 192-minute runtime. Many times during the proceedings I was positively in awe of what I was looking at. Especially once the action shifts to the water, where massive whale-like creatures swim in bioluminescent expanses, every texture, every ripple or sprig of fur moves as it should.

This kind of visual effects wizardry has gotten so much better since 2009. The characters are so uncanny in their lack of uncanny valley. Some of the movie is in a higher frame rate, to smooth out the action even more and make it seem even more realistic. This, I will say, took a while to get used to, especially because it changes pretty regularly throughout the movie. But by the end, when the action really ramps up, I never had a problem. While so many Hollywood movies recently have had to rush through CGI to upsettingly slapdash results, Avatar: The Way of Water‘s extra long gestation ensured as realistic, as believable, and as thoroughly stunning an imaginary world as has ever made it to screens.

While the visuals have far surpassed even the already gorgeous 2009 original, the plot, story, and characters remain remarkably staid. All of the problems the original have are present here. The lone exception, I suppose, is not needing to fully explain the premise. The villains are, excuse the phrase, cartoonishly evil. They’re either over-the-top capitalist stereotypes who would kill or maim anything if it means a profit, or they’re bloodthirsty monsters who just want to kill innocent things. This manifests in an especially lengthy and graphic sequence in which the massive, gorgeous whale-like creatures we have spent time swimming with are victim of a hunting expedition. It’s so long and truly upsetting.

Cameron’s own environmentalist leanings, especially his love of ocean life, comes to the forefront here. He ensures we all cheer when these nasty SOBs meet a righteous end from the dual efforts of the Na’vi and other creatures. And look, I’m on board with the message! I completely agree with all of this, but it’s profoundly unsubtle.

At the same time we have all the same pseudo-Indigenous Peoples yikes from 13 years ago. The phrase “go full Na’vi” is uttered by the colonizers infiltrating the tribes. The mélange of stereotypes of various real-life Indigenous and tribal peoples just feels incredibly out of touch in 2022. None of that has improved. And worse, while the Na’vi are still scantily clad and highly sexualized, most of the characters in question are children. All of this is just in service of a pretty rote narrative about fathers and sons. Seen it.

So, for days now since I saw the movie, I’ve fought with myself. Is Avatar: The Way of Water a movie I would call “good?” It certainly has a lot to recommend on the filmmaking side of things. It really is an overwhelmingly beautiful movie to look at. But as a story, as characters you can attach yourself to, it’s very two-dimensional. It works much more as a theme park attraction, a journey to a world of wonder and grandeur. But then we have a great deal of unfortunate stereotypes and graphic (though fake) violence.

I’ll say this: if you are someone for whom the original Avatar was enjoyable, and especially if you are someone who enjoys 3D movie experiences, then go see it. See it on the largest possible screen, in 3D. I don’t think the movie works well enough without these things. A day or so after I saw it, I forgot about it, but while I was watching, in the moments the visuals really took hold, it’s breathtaking. But I need more than that. I doubt the next three films will deliver anything more robust.

Avatar: The Way of Water ⭐ (2.5 of 5)

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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Cozy whodunit shows and movies are like a warm blanket on a winter’s night for me. A savvy detective figuring out heinous crimes in the most pleasant way possible just fills me with happiness. As such, Rian Johnson’s outstanding 2019 film Knives Out, with its rich family squabbles, social commentary, and twisty doughnut hole in a doughnut’s hole mystery really hit the spot. I’ve watched it many times since release. It’s as comfortable as Chris Evans’ sweaters. What’s this? More whodunits featuring Southern gentleman detective extraordinaire Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig)? Hoorah! But while Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery offers a lot of the same scrumptious twists and class warfare satire as the first, Johnson takes the zaniness up so high it very nearly toppled the whole affair.

I do applaud Johnson for not doing just the exact type of thing again. Knives Out had that lovely, chilly east coast autumn vibe. The old-money mahogany house at its center was the perfect central locale. The mystery was heightened and fantastical to a point, but it felt pretty grounded overall. Glass Onion goes completely another direction. The action takes place mainly on a tech billionaire’s lavish private Greek Isle. His gaudy mansion would make Francisco Scaramanga think it was too much. The suspects and victims of this world aren’t just wealthy 1%-ers, they’re ridiculous caricatures of the vapid, out-of-touch celebrity billionaires of the world.

I won’t spoil any of the movie’s many twists and revelations, so don’t worry. The basic set-up finds bored detective Blanc among a group of influential people invited to the private island of notorious tech tycoon Miles Bron (Edward Norton). These included Governor Claire Debella (Kathryn Hahn) who’s in the middle of a bid for Senate; Lionel Toussaint (Leslie Odom, Jr.), the head scientist at Bron’s company; Birdie Jay (Kate Hudson), a vapid fashion icon whose assistant Peg (Jessica Henwick) has to keep her from her phone; Men’s Rights YouTuber Duke Cody (Dave Bautista) there with his bikini-clad girlfriend Whiskey (Madelyn Cline); and Andi Brand (Janelle Monae), Bron’s company co-founder whom he kicked to the curb.

This eclectic group of people have all assembled to play Bron’s elaborate murder mystery weekend where he himself is the victim. But, as you probably expect from the kind of movie it is, each of the guests has a reason to want Bron out of the way. It’s not as simple as that, naturally. When the movie’s plot really kicks in, Glass Onion becomes just as—excuse the pun—layered as Knives Out, with double-bluffs and misdirection aplenty. This is great, and Craig once again delivers uncovering-the-clues monologues like a Poirot or Jessica Fletcher.

The problem, for me, is that the set-up felt too much like a farce. Bron’s comical island and even what his company does bordered on science fiction. Each of the attendees is less a character and more a reflection of Johnson’s attitude toward dumb rich people. And look, I agree with him! New-money buffoons trying to act like they’re artists or dreamers or whatever are absolutely worthy of ridicule. They truly are cartoonish in real life. For whatever reason in the film, it just felt forced and the social commentary even more on the nose than in Knives Out.

Ultimately, I think Johnson made exactly the movie he wanted to, heightening the conceit he laid out in the first movie, and going in a completely new direction. This is much more an out-and-out comedy, especially for the first 45 minutes or so. The added zaniness and bombast that Knives Out used sparingly is much more at the forefront here. The performances, especially Hudson’s, are absolutely hysterical, and I laughed plenty. I just think for me, there’s very little of the cozy whodunit here, much more Hollywood.

Glass Onion is absolutely worth watching, and it’s a hell of an enjoyable time at the movies. Rian Johnson doing his thing, clearly on his own terms, with full backing from Netflix, is something all filmmakers should get to do. But if you hope for more of Knives Out‘s subtler, homier take on the genre, as I did, you’ll be left without your comfortable sweater.

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery ⭐ (3 of 5)

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

The post GLASS ONION Is a Bigger, Zanier, Less Satisfying KNIVES OUT appeared first on Nerdist.

At this point we’ve seen roughly 19 million superhero movies of all shapes, sizes, and stripes. It’s so many that we can’t, much as the filmmakers might wish us to, take each one purely on its own merits. Each one is compared, favorably or not, against what came before. Iron Man had a much easier job than Thor: Love and Thunder. The DCEU has double the pressure; we compare them not only to the other movies in its own franchise, but against the MCU. The long-gestating Black Adam, the latest such entry, has several things in its favor: A huge global star in Dwayne Johnson and characters audiences haven’t seen on the big screen before. While a lot of the movie works, the whole can’t escape the messiness of trying to add to a franchise rather than tell a good story.

No two ways about it, Black Adam has a tone problem. You notice this from the first few minutes of the movie. We get a historical backstory of a young slave in the fictional country of Kahndaq who fights the tyranny of the evil king and eventually gets the powers of the Shazam wizards. We then cut to modern day Kahndaq where the high-tech mercenary faction Intergang has the country under military occupation. Khandaq has a high quantity of a fancy blue mineral that does some-such.

It’s here we meet Adrianna Tomaz (Sarah Shahi) who wants to retrieve a crown from ancient times and, during a skirmish with Intergang and a turncoat associate, she awakens Teth-Adam (Dwayne Johnson), the fabled Champion of Kahndaq. Teth-Adam then obliterates Intergang with enough ruthless efficiency to make the Spanish Inquisition jealous. These first few scenes really make it seem like the movie’s going to go for the usual dark-and-gritty version of anti-heroics. Not so. Well, not entirely.

After Teth-Adam falls in with Adrianna and her brother and son, he destroys some more mercs, this time in the center of the city. This draws the attention of Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) who calls in Hawkman (Aldis Hodge) to capture this high-level threat. Hawkman brings in a small battalion of Justice Society members, including his old friend Dr. Fate (Pierce Brosnan) and new recruits Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell) and Atom Smasher (Noah Centineo). Hawkman is very much of the mind that heroes never kill. Since Adam kills people, he must be a villain.

At this point I thought, oh, I was wrong. This is a movie for younger people. Sure the beginning is violent, but the tone now feels a lot more comedic, a lot more focused on youthful exuberance and right over wrong. Given the movie’s ties to Shazam! it makes sense. Adrianna’s son has a very John-Connor-in-Terminator 2 dynamic with Teth-Adam, and Atom Smasher is a goof, so that must be it. And yet that didn’t seem right either.

This is my main issue with Black Adam. It feels like two or three different movies all vying for supremacy. One movie is an occupied country looking for its savior in the form of this fabled mythical hero. Another is an ancient demigod attempting to balance his own inner rage and murderous impulses to find the path toward heroism. And yet another is a Justice Society team-up movie that features fun action and cameos while teaching a broader lesson about how “superheroism” is naïve in the face of real-world evils.

Of those, the movie that works the best for me is the Justice Society one. The dynamic between the members is a lot of fun, and with only four members they each get moments to shine. Hodge’s Hawkman comes to the fore as the second lead of the movie and owns that spot, while Brosnan’s Dr. Fate has by far the best scenes. The problem is, this isn’t a JSA movie, it’s Black Adam. Somehow, and despite having goddamn Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as the lead character, Adam is astoundingly one-note. Most of his actual story and character development comes either in flashback or through narration. The scenes of Adam on screen are basically just him looking grim and then punching or shooting lightning at people.

One also can’t ignore how oddly stitched together everything is. The degree to which scenes require characters to deliver ADR’d lines just to tell us what’s going on is staggering. Hardly any scenes, especially early on, are allowed to breathe, and only the JSA members get quieter moments of reflection or self-doubt. This is the problem when you’ve set up your lead character to be all-powerful and all-confident. Adam comes out of the tomb fully formed, able to speak perfect English, and uninterested in learning anything.

That said, if you’re a DC fan who has been excited to see these characters on the big screen engaging in action, you won’t be entirely disappointed. The fight scenes are fast and generally exciting, and it feels—in a mostly good way—like Injustice matches. I also felt like the end of the movie works a lot better than the beginning, despite the usual superhero movie weak-villain problem.

So while it wasn’t nearly as bad as I feared—it’s not Morbius by any means—it isn’t a triumph either. Black Adam is a movie that can’t decide on an identity, a point of view, or a message. Is killing good or bad? Are the Justice Society allies or colonizers? Do the people of Kahndaq need a champion or can they do it themselves? The movie never reaches anything like a satisfactory conclusion, but you can bet DC and Warner Bros. hope you won’t notice.

Black Adam ⭐ (2.5 of 5)

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

The post BLACK ADAM Tries to Do Too Much and Not Enough appeared first on Nerdist.

Throughout Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin, a film version of an earlier unproduced stage play, the rural island community comments on and even sees and hears the Irish Civil War on the mainland. It seems both incredibly close and all too far away, the problems of people both other and the same. The screams of mortar fire in a war of brother versus brother could well be the titular banshees, signifying the breakdown of even the simplest forms of fraternity. After all, the movie is just about one guy not wanting to be another guy’s friend anymore.

The film seems a bit like an outlier for McDonagh’s cinema, but it’s right at home with his earlier playwrighting pursuits. All of his early work deals with darkness in small Irish communities at some point in the past. The Banshees of Inisherin isn’t as slick as In Bruges, as zany as Seven Psychopaths, or as hard-bitten as Three Billboards. Is a slower, more lyrical affair, but one that for me captures the best of the auteur’s sense for small problems blown out of proportion to startling degrees. It’s easily my favorite since In Bruges and a lot of that has to do with the same two lead actors.

Colin Farrell plays Pádraic, a simple sheep farmer on an island off the west coast of Ireland in the 1920s. He’s a self-proclaimed nice person who loves spending his afternoons with his best friend Colm (Brendon Gleeson) down the pub. One fateful day, as Pádraic calls on Colm as he always does, his friend doesn’t go to the pub with him. He doesn’t want to sit with him at the pub. In fact, Colm eventually tells Pádraic, he doesn’t want to spend time with him at all anymore.

This, to Pádraic, is completely unbelievable. Why wouldn’t Colm want to be his friend anymore? The only real answer Colm can provide is that Pádraic keeps him from focusing on his music, composing and playing fiddle. Is that enough to warrant cutting off someone in a town of like 80 people? Pádraic’s book-learned sister Siobhan (Kerry Condon) thinks the whole thing is ridiculous, but no amount of reason can change Colm’s mind. Naturally, the sweet Pádraic is devastated, not least because he has to now hang out with the town fool Dominic (Barry Keoghan). Is it so wrong to be nice? Is creating art worth losing friends? How long can this feud last? You’d be surprised.

The long and short of it is The Banshees of Inisherin is a brilliant, moving, funny, and deeply tragic movie that will make you feel bad while you’re laughing. The omen of disaster looms large over each argument between Pádraic and Colm, just as the war rages across the narrow sea. Townsfolk say “Oh, the fighting will end soon” but we know well here in the future that that isn’t the case. McDonagh even gives one character a line about “why are they fighting each other when they could be fighting the English,” and you can’t help but laugh derisively.

Farrell and Gleeson are nothing short of wonderful. Gleeson as the stoic instigator of this strange Cold War conveys both a life of frustration and ultimate kindness of character despite everything. Farrell gets to play the confused, endlessly optimistic one who begins to harden as his bitterness at the situation grows. Condon and Keoghan are also brilliant, with the latter delivering one of the twitchiest performances in years.

The Banshees of Inisherin feels like putting on a favorite sweater that happens to have just fallen in a mud puddle. It’s chilly and unsavory but you still get a sense of the warmth and comfort underneath. I think everyone involved deserves awards consideration. It’s quite simply one of the best movies of the year.

The Banshees of Inisherin ⭐ (4.5 of 5)

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

The post THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN Is a Surprisingly Dark Treatise on Friendship appeared first on Nerdist.

I watch a lot of horror movies. From old to new, from spooky ghosts to gory zombies. I have a lot of fun with the scary things genre, as I think do most horror fans. I can count on one hand the number of movies I have seen in a theater that have not just given me a chill, not just made me jump, but that thoroughly unnerved me to my core, had me watching from through my fingers, and that left me unsettled and shaken for hours, days after. Friends, the latest of these is Smile, the feature debut of writer-director Parker Finn.

You’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen the marketing. Smile tested so well for Paramount that the studio bumped it up from streaming service original to theatrical release. But if you think the movie is nothing but a series of people with scary, evil grins, you’re very wrong. It’s much more clever, much more frightening, and ultimately more uncannily disturbing than even those upsetting trailer images would have you believe.

The film follows Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon), a young psychologist working at a hospital psych ward. She has a lovely house and a fiancé (Jesse T. Usher), but she can’t sleep and works tons of overtime. We learn from the beginning that when she was a child, her mother overdosed. Rose has never forgiven herself for that. Just as she’s about to finally leave for the day, she takes on one more patient. Laura (Caitlin Stasey) is absolutely terrified. She says some thing that wears people’s faces with a evil, exaggerated grin is out to get her. Only she can see it. Moments later, Laura convulses and when Rose calls for help, she sees Laura staring at her, with a huge smile. Laura then kills herself in front of Rose.

Naturally this is all sorts of traumatizing, but quickly Rose begins experiencing horrifying visions, missing time, and dreams that feel real. She suspects that she, too, like her patient and many people before her, have fallen under the thrall of some demonic presence. No one believes her, except eventually her police detective ex-boyfriend (Kyle Gallner). Either way, no one who has been Smiled has ever survived more than a week.

So much about Smile works to perfection to maximize terror and dread. The opening sequence, with Laura that makes up a lot of the movie’s marketing, is a perfect short film in and of itself. Finn’s penchant for slow panning shots across nothing before finally revealing something scary means every moment has the potential to frighten. Within that, he also peppers in plenty of jump scares that don’t feel cheap. I know some people are against jump scares across the board, but Rose is meant to be on edge the whole time. She’s traumatized and it seeps into her every waking moment. That is incredibly tough to pull off effectively, but Bacon’s amazing performance and the cinematography and music heighten everything. Especially the music. Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s score is bone chilling and contributes so much to the movie’s icky feeling.

Jump scares are always effective, at the very least to make the audience jump. That isn’t why Smile works so well, and worked so well on me. Finn exploits a very particular fear: one of the uncanny. Things that seem normal, average, and even safe, but have an unexplained otherness to them. Every shot of the seemingly idyllic spaces Rose inhabits suddenly have an ominous, foreboding presence. Liminal spaces that seem at once everyday and off. And Finn fills those spaces with the most uncanny thing of all: distorted human faces.

In much the same type of uncanny horror mangaka Junji Ito delivers, Smile shows us grotesque perversions of a smile, seemingly the sign of happiness and warmth. Ito gives us these full-page, hyper detailed images, which is unique to manga. Finn manages to give us that same effect by having the smiler look directly into camera, into Rose’s POV. The fact he manages to do this with minimal CGI or special effects (except for the obvious) is especially impressive. It’s just the actors. Anyone’s face could have this rictus grin, with hate behind the eyes.

Finn also ties the uncanny to the very, very real. The running theme of mental health, of people living their regular, “perfect” lives and hiding from their loved ones’ mental health needs. Each time Rose confides in someone close to her only to be met with “you’re just tired” or “you sound crazy,” it stings anyone who has dealt with depression or anxiety in the past. Childhood trauma looms large. I think the film does a great job drawing the horror out of these situations and not hiding behind the supernatural for everything.

So I can’t say whether or not Smile will work for you the same way it did for me. It happened to check every box of things that get under my skin. I cannot say I enjoyed the experience, but days later I’m still thinking about it, still living in the unsettled feeling it gave me. It’s just wall-to-wall dread peppered with moments of sheer, unambiguous fright. That’s what you want from a horror movie, isn’t it?

Smile hits theaters September 30.

Smile ⭐ (4.5 of 5)

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

The post SMILE Is an Unrelenting, Uncanny Horror Experience appeared first on Nerdist.

People can gripe about how franchises have ruined movies, and to a large extent I agree. No longer can popcorn movies just exist on their own terms without someone in the studio thinking long-term monetization. But if someone can explore more aspects of a film’s story in a way that adds without retreading, that can be tons of fun. We should welcome movies like Pearl, a companion/prequel to X which came out earlier this year. Did it need to be as good, as weird, and as surprising as it is? Absolutely not. But it is, and we can thank Ti West and Mia Goth for that.

Writer-director Ti West has always been eclectic with his films. From the slow burn Satanic Panic throwback of The House of the Devil to the quiet dread of The Innkeepers to a supremely upsetting religious cult horror in The Sacrament. He has never been content to make the same type of movie over and over. Hell, he even made a comedic revisionist western with In a Valley of Violence. So I wouldn’t ever think he’d rest on any kind of laurels. But knowing Pearl was effectively made in tandem with X, you’d think there’d be more similarities in tone or structure or even kinds of scares. But no! They are thematic and narrative partners, neither derivative of the other.

It isn’t strictly necessary for you to have seen X to enjoy Pearl, but it does heighten the experience of both. Star Mia Goth (who co-wrote Pearl with West) played double duty in X, the ’70s-set slasher movie on the set of a no-budget porno film, as both Maxine, the starry-eyed young starlet and Pearl, the octogenarian matriarch of the farm on which the porn shoot takes place. Goth’s portrayal of Pearl in X, in heavy old-age makeup, was supremely unsettling and eerie. As that movie goes along we learn the depth of both Pearl’s bitterness at life and her bloodthirsty psychopathy. The parallels between the characters gives X a lot of its pathos, with Pearl the clear standout character.

As Pearl begins, we see the same farmhouse, same environs as X, but this time it’s 1918. West films the setting through the glossy, oversaturated haze of a young Pearl’s hopes and dreams. The old-Hollywood glamour of the opening credits lets us know farmgirl Pearl wants, needs, so much more than this provincial life. She wants to be like on of the dancing girls she watches in the picture show’s follies reels. Pearl knows there’s something great and special within her; she needs someone to see it and whisk her away.

Unfortunately, 1918 is one of the worst times to want to do anything. Her new husband Howard is off fighting in World War I while a deadly pandemic rages at home. Pearl resides on her family farm under the domineering thumb of her German expat mother Ruth (Tandi Wright). Her father (Matthew Sunderland) is in near catatonia after contracting the Spanish flu and Pearl must take care of him and help maintain the dwindling farm.

Pearl sees her ticket out of town in two forms. First, the Bohemian projectionist (David Corenswet), with his suave demeanor and knowledge of Europe. Second, in an upcoming audition for a dance troupe to entertain people throughout the state. Her mother, however, knows there is something “special” inside her, and is terrified by it. I really applaud the film for not making Ruth just the hateful matriarch but giving her a deep well of sadness and lost dreams hidden behind stern German pragmatism. But since the movie is through Pearl’s eyes, we see Ruth as the villain, something which I caught myself thinking and laughing, considering I’d seen X and know where the story is going.

And even though I did know—and most people watching will know—it never feels like a foregone conclusion. We weirdly do want the best for Pearl, despite the opening sequence where she cheerily kills a passing goose with a pitchfork. The movie’s horror comes not from a body count or jump scares but in the slow but steady deflation a young woman’s hope for a brighter future. What else could she do but go all Lizzie Borden?

Goth’s performance is this movie. She sells every single line and manages to be tragic and terrifying beneath the masque of bright, All-American pluck. West and Goth clearly get along swimmingly and they trust each other. So much so that many scenes, especially toward the end, are extended single takes of Goth unleashing her soul and being as emotionally vulnerable as a person can be on screen. It’s phenomenal! If Mia Goth isn’t at least in contention for some kind of acting award this year, between both X and Pearl, then there really is a problem.

Pearl is less a prequel and more a variation on a theme. It plays out so much more like a tragi-comedy with splashes of intense violence than X‘s ’70s-homage to slasher horror and pornography. Pearl also deals a lot with female sexuality, which is a big theme of X, naturally. The two films play wonderfully off each other. West continues to prove how malleable his style and tastes are while still playing generally in the horror realm. Two Ti West films in a single year is spoiling us but we’d love to see it happen again and again.

Pearl ⭐ (4 of 5)

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

The post PEARL Provides a Gory, Glorious Counterpoint to X appeared first on Nerdist.

I’ll be the first person ever to say Mad Max: Fury Road was not only a revelation but a masterpiece of cinema. (No one has ever said that before me, don’t Google it.) Its mastermind, George Miller, proved yet again he’s a tremendous visual storyteller with a particular sense of the fantastic. It’s easy to pigeonhole him into action, but he also gave us the Babe and Happy Feet movies. He contains multitudes. For Miller’s first post-Fury Road outing, Three Thousand Years of Longing, he definitely turned out something different. However, it didn’t quite succeed in the timeless romance it (apparently) tried to convey.

I wanted to unabashedly love this movie, and for a little while I thought I might. It’s all about the power of stories and narrative and the value of attaining your heart’s desire even at the expense of everyday comfort and stability. It has a sumptuous visual sense (not surprising) and stars two superb actors essentially talking in one room for most of the runtime. It’s atypical, for sure, but it could have been as amazing as one would hope. But it also trades in some highly questionable stereotypes, size-shaming, and ideas about what constitutes humor. By the end, it turns into a ham-fisted romance.

Tilda Swinton plays Alithea Binnie, a renowned scholar of narrative, who ends up in Istanbul for a conference. As chance would happen, she gets an ornate but dirty bottle from a shop. When she cleans it, she releases an ancient Djinn, played by Idris Elba. The Djinn quickly learns English and attempts to get Alithea to make three wishes. He needs someone to make three wishes or he’ll never be free. Trouble is, of course, that Alithea is outwardly a perfectly contented person who longs for nothing. Or does she? To prove his point, the Djinn tells her his story of how he wound up bound to mortal wishes, and how love has kept him trapped for 3,000 years.

Essentially, this discussion makes up two-thirds of the movie. Flashbacks to the Djinn’s ensnarement and how each time someone frees him from his bottle, love and human foible sends him back. Some of these stories have intrigue of their own, specifically a war-obsessed Sultan who only finds peace through stories. Another explores a woman effectively imprisoned in a tower. Her sole desire is to learn all that the outside world has to offer. These scenes all have a fairy tale quality to them, as they should, though I think they never hit the heights, either in presentation or narrative, of something like Tarsem Singh’s The Fall.

The trouble is that the story of Alithea and the Djinn isn’t particularly interesting beyond the obvious and a late second act development seems to come out of nowhere and never fully feels believable. And that’s a shame because the entire movie seems predicated on the chemistry the two characters are supposed to have that I just never fully bought.

Additionally, sad to say, Three Thousand Years of Longing has particularly antiquated ideas about what people will find funny or strange and what is or isn’t a peculiar fetish for people. And, most egregiously, despite all of the character’s initial assertions early in the movie, the story seems to make it clear that people cannot be fulfilled or content unless they have romantic love. It’s 2022! It’s belittling to suggest if someone says they are happy alone they’re secretly lying about it, deep in their hearts.

I like George Miller a lot. I’m glad he got to make this kind of clearly personal movie before he returns to the barren wastes with Furiosa. I hope he gets to tell stories about telling stories forever because in general we need more art like that. But sadly Three Thousand Years of Longing wasn’t what I had wished for.

Three Thousand Years of Longing ⭐ (2.5 of 5)

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

The post THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF LONGING Isn’t Quite What We Wished For appeared first on Nerdist.

At this point, we’ve got nearly 70 years of kaiju and giant monster movies baked into the fiber of our cinematic brains to know the basic order of events. A giant beast attacks, a group of humans from different government organizations come together to fight it, they succeed, end of movie. Sometimes you can throw in a good kaiju to battle it; also a space giant named Ultraman if ya nasty. But ultimately, you know what you get. But what about what happens after? This monster just destroyed half of a city, what is the cleanup effort? What about the corpse? That question lies at the center of Satoshi Miki’s new film What to Do with the Dead Kaiju?, which played Fantasia Film Fest 2022.

If you liked the disaster movie vibe and bureaucratic red tape of Shin Godzilla, then you’ll love the same bit with a satirical edge of What to Do with the Dead Kaiju? When the movie begins, the giant reptilian monster lies dead. Who knows why it died. All the Japanese government knows is it’s dead and lying there. Every department thinks it’s a different department’s job. The military doesn’t really know what to do. It’s up to a small group of young, smart underlings at various positions throughout the cabinet.

What makes Miki’s film so engaging is the way it deftly straddles the line between satire/parody and legitimate disaster film. A million people are in the cast but they each manage to stand out, and even if you forget character names, you get their characters completely. The Prime Minister seems like a genuinely noble dude who wants to do right by his people. The problem is, all the other ministers look at the kaiju’s rotting corpse as something to garner tourism dollars. Or, once that seems less likely, as a way to make other department heads look bad.

The closest we have to main characters in the movie constitute a love triangle. Yukino (Tao Tsuchiya) works for the health minister. She’s married to Ame (Gaku Hamada), a former military guy who moved into the government. Their marriage isn’t all that strong, however; especially not when Arata (Ryôsuke Yamada), a former colleague of theirs and suitor for Yukino, reappears. The movie very much leaves it to the younger generation to do anything useful, but even they feel the weight of government inefficacy and spin.

Essentially, What to Do with the Dead Kaiju? escalates its problems in the environmental and governmental. After they decide to strip the meat from the rotting corpse because it’s starting to smell, a blister begins to grow on the body. The blister, they learn, has a noxious gas within it. (The government needs to decide the official smell of the gas, either puke or poop, or perhaps a mixture.) So do you pop the blister? What will happen to the surrounding area if the gas proves to be toxic? Or, as happens, the gas is actually spores for enormous fungi? The issues are both granular and ridiculous.

I will say, for as entertaining as I found the movie, I think it maybe overstays its welcome ever so slightly. By the middle of the second act, it seems like the escalation had reached its natural end, and yet we still had a ways to go. As fun as new characters popping in are—like Rinko Kikuchi (Pacific Rim) as a badass government operative and Joe Odagiri (Kamen Rider Kuuga) as a rockstar munitions expert—they eventually run the risk of dragging rather than heightening.

Still, I enjoyed What to Do with the Dead Kaiju? a lot. It has a lot to enjoy for people for whom Godzilla movies are second nature. The jokes on the genre land super hard, but they land just as well if you mistrust government red tape. Would you trust the US to effectively clean up a natural disaster, kaiju or otherwise?

What to Do with the Dead Kaiju? ⭐ (3.5 of 5)

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

The post WHAT TO DO WITH THE DEAD KAIJU? Is a Razor Sharp Satire appeared first on Nerdist.

You’d be hard pressed to find a horror director as beloved in most circles as the iconoclastic, gore-loving Italian director Dario Argento. He completely shifted the burgeoning giallo movie filoni with his 1970 debut The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. He turned that genre on its head five years later with Deep Red. In 1977 he made the symphonic, technicolor nightmare Suspiria, then spent much of the ’80s making hyper violent, hyper stylish giallo-slasher hybrids to mostly excellent results. And then a switch flipped. His output in the ’90s was spotty, and after 2001, you couldn’t find even a decent movie much less a good one. His newest, the long-awaited Dark Glasses, played at Fantasia Fest this weekend and is easily his best in 20 years.

That is certainly not a ringing endorsement. Six of Argento’s last eight movies were, in my opinion, quite bad. Even if we were charitable and say 1998’s The Phantom of the Opera and 2012’s Dracula 3D (his two worst by a country mile) were noble swings for the fences, how do you explain things like the tepid The Card Player or the truly disappointing Giallo (the most on-the-nose of titles)? Dark Glasses had been a script Argento tried to make for quite a long time. He’s 80 years old, and hasn’t made a movie in a decade. The deck was surely stacked against him, and though the movie itself is a mild success, in the scheme of his recent career, it’s an unbridled triumph.

The story gives you a hint at how long the script has been knocking around. Diana (Ilenia Pastorelli), a sex worker in Rome, crosses paths with a murderer going around killing sex workers. While trying to drive away from him, she collides head on with a family sedan. The parents in the car die leaving a 10-year-old son orphaned, while Diana loses her sight. As more of her friends, and even some police officers, fall victim to the murderer, Diana teams up with the now-orphaned son Chin (Andrea Zhang) and a Very Good Dog to take him down.

From a plot and character perspective, Dark Glasses feels right at home with gialli of the early ’70s. In fact, it bears more than a little resemblance to Argento’s own The Cat o’ Nine Tails from 1971. It’s a little ridiculous, but certainly much less ridiculous than many other of Argento’s own films. It’s got sex, it’s got violence; I don’t know if you remember, but it has a dog. Not only that, but it has a Goblin-esque score from Arnaud Rebotini and effects from frequent collaborator Sergio Stivaletti. This is what you want from an Argento movie… to a point.

What feels sorely lacking here are the directorial flourishes that made Argento the legend he is. Dark Glasses is 86 minutes, far shorter than most of the director’s best work. Those movies relish in the murder set pieces, luxuriate in artifice of cinematic carnage. This one does not. It’s bare bones, right to the point, and allows the characters to move the story. It’s not a bad thing, by any means, but for those expecting or hoping for a return to form, a giallo to rival his heyday, it might be a bit of a disappointment.

Argento’s last truly good film in my opinion was 2001’s Sleepless. That’s 21 years for people counting. He hasn’t made a passable movie since 2007. With the bar that low, Dark Glasses more than surpasses it. Truly I’m just relieved the director made a decent movie again. I’ll gladly take a modest Argento outing at this point. At least we know he’s still got the spark.

Dark Glasses ⭐ (3 of 5)

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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For a very long time there were only two really good Lovecraft movies. You had Re-Animator and From Beyond, both directed by Stuart Gordon. That was it. Oh, people tried to make Lovecraft movies, but they failed to grasp what makes H.P. Lovecraft’s cosmic horror compelling. It’s more than just tentacles and viscera. Recently, a small collection of Lovecraftian horror movies have come out that finally manage to understand the bleak nihilistic weirdness. The Void, The Empty Man, and Underwater each get at aspects of cosmic horror and I love them in their own way. Certainly Annihilation too. Now, thanks to Fantasia Fest 2022, I’ve seen the next great Lovecraftian horror, Rebekah McKendry’s aptly named Glorious.

Glorious is a brilliant little chamber piece (which is a pun that will make sense in a moment) in which effectively one character in one location can contend with everything from nervous urination to impending universal damnation. It manages to contend with enormous, unknowable cosmic entities and personal guilt and recompense without ever spending much time outside of its main setting. And it’s all about a glory hole! I should also note one of the movie’s exec producers is none other Barbara Crampton, the star of Re-Animator and From Beyond.

Ryan Kwanten stars as Wes, a guy reeling from a bad breakup who finds himself on a windy mountain road. He spends the night at a rest stop where he gets way too drunk where he inexplicably lights his trousers on fire and wakes up on the ground. We’ve all been there. He finds his way into the men’s room and enters a stall. On the wall of the stall is a crude drawing of a weird tentacled monstrosity with a glory hole for a mouth. The man in the next stall (J.K. Simmons) starts up a conversation with Wes which quickly turns very weird. He’s not a man at all, he says, but a cosmic god from beyond human perception who needs Wes’ help to avert the total destruction of everything. Typical men’s room stuff.

McKendry and her writers Todd Rigney, Joshua Hull, and David Ian McKendry, understand a fundamental thing about Lovecraftian cosmic horror: it’s enormous and mind-melting, but it’s also very silly. Giant floating masses of sludge with a million eyes that can wake up and destroy the very idea of our reality…that’s just kinda silly! Part of the wonder and horror of Glorious is the premise. It shouldn’t work, it shouldn’t elicit anything more than derisive laughter, but because the movie centers the horror on the very relatable (at least for a bit), we buy it.

Kwanten’s performance is excellent, conveying the building confusion, anger, and ultimately brain-bleeding fear of the situation. Lovecraft’s heroes always go mad at the revelations they make, but Wes is almost too self-centered for that. It creates a fascinating dichotomy. Having a voice as reassuring and yet menacing as Simmons’ to relay the outlandish information helps too. They play off each other exceedingly well, even though they surely were not in the same room for their performances.

As the movie goes along, we learn a bit more about both the nature of Wes’ breakup and what will happen if he refuses to assist the god. Wes’ backstory runs the risk of pushing the movie a bit too far into tropey horror territory. However, it doesn’t and manages to stay firmly planted in the horror of weirdness camp. At only 78 minutes, the movie never overstays its welcome nor pushes the premise too far. It’s beyond impressive what McKendry is able to do with limited space and resources. I was really knocked out by it, and will happily add it to the “Good Cosmic Horror Movies” list where it belongs.

All Glory to the Glory Hole!

Glorious ⭐ (4.5 of 5)

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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People took up all sorts of new hobbies and passions during the pandemic. We had to do something to quiet the existential dread on all sides. For me, I started inhaling Japan’s long-running Ultraman series at a feverish clip. I adore the mix of sci-fi morality plays with kaiju-fighting suitmation. I’ve watched what can only be described as a metric buttload of it. Dozens of seasons, hundreds of episodes. I love it. That’s why when the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal announced it would host the North American premiere of the long-gestating Shin Ultraman feature film, I did a little dance. Director Shinji Higuchi and writer-producer Hideaki Anno’s follow-up to the record breaking Shin Godzilla not only lives up to the hype, it perfectly encapsulates what’s so great (and less great) about the Ultraman franchise.

You could not pick a better pair of creators to tackle a big screen version of Ultraman. Hideaki Anno has devoted most of his professional life to paying homage to it in some way. He directed and starred in a live-action short when he was in school. His Neon Genesis Evangelion is basically an anime version of giant kaiju battles. Shinju Higuchi spent much of the early part of his career doing special effects for the ’80s Godzilla movies and was the special effects director of the astonishingly good Gamera trilogy in the ’90s. You can feel the love and respect for Eiji Tsuburaya (special effects wizard who created the Ultra series) in every frame of Shin Ultraman, while connecting it to the bureaucratic world of Shin Godzilla.

The movie centers on the SSSP, a small group of scientists and investigators who are in charge of dealing with the myriad kaiju threats against Japan. A funny moment early on reveals that it’s only Japan that has to deal with kaiju threats, so the rest of the UN has largely left them to it. The SSSP leader Tamura (Hidetoshi Nishijima from Drive My Car) does his best to deal with the many ministers who have a say in kaiju dealings while his team finds solutions to an increasing number of threats. Early on in the film, seemingly out of nowhere, a silver giant appears and fights the kaiju, destroying it. The SSSP designates this new being “Ultraman.”

Quickly thereafter, a new recruit joins the SSSP. She is Hiroko Asami (Masami Nagasawa), a go-getting federal investigator, whose new partner is the enigmatic Shinji Kaminaga (Takumi Saitoh). Very quickly, various intelligent aliens make their presence known and attempt to broker deals with Japan for their own benefit. It seems now that Ultraman has appeared, Earth is the prime target for takeover. The SSSP have to deal not only with clandestine aliens and giant monsters, but also the media blitz surrounding them once footage reveals Kaminaga is Ultraman.

Those of you who’ve never watched any of the Ultraman series probably assume Ultraman himself is on screen a lot. Not so. In order to save costs in the mid-’60s, Ultraman was usually only ever in the final act of the episode. Until then, the SSSP (or the science/kaiju-defense team of the season) dealt with it on their own. This forced the show to focus on the characters rather than the threat for most of the runtime. Shin Ultraman is no different. The five core members of the SSSP are very well defined and updating them to a government group with laptops instead of uniformed people in high-tech tanks and jets is a great method for bringing the world of Ultraman into the more realistic, disaster-focused realm of Shin Godzilla.

The movie feels very episodic, intentionally. At nearly two hours, the action splits between various alien threats, each more perilous than the last. They build on each other and, we do learn, all have a connection, but again, the movie isn’t about the villains or the fights; it’s about how the SSSP members deal with threats. The cast are excellent, especially Nagasawa and Nishijima. Saitoh has the difficult task of being the alien in a human form, but gives it real depth and pathos.

Higuchi’s directorial flare comes through here in fascinating ways. Though he has a history with effects, I was much more impressed by the way he shot the SSSP and bureaucrat scenes. The camera angle changes at various points in a given scene to all manner of angles. It gives the impression of surveillance cameras rather than cinema. You feel paranoid that the team has eyes all around them, and really they do. They are the focal point of a growing global crisis. Five people in a room have the weight of everything on them.

Strangely, I was less wowed by the effects material. Make no mistake; it looks good. The updated designs of the creatures and of Ultraman really work. The action feels smooth and kinetic. My problem is that, as the movie goes on, it feels more and more CGI and less like CGI approximating people in suits. This is surely my practical effects bias, and I know CGI is more cost effective for these kinds of things. Still, I couldn’t help being reminded that all of this was in a computer and not—as every series has done since 1966—the work of model makers and suit performers.

Sniffy pretention aside, I think Shin Ultraman is a handsome, effective, and certainly loving riff on the original Ultraman series. It references everything you would hope it does, and throws in a few surprises too. While I don’t think it redefines the form like Shin Godzilla, I think it marries the hopefulness of the source material with our dour reality in a great way. The movie made a bajillion dollars in Asia so I’m hoping it gets a decently wide release in North America. It deserves to be seen big.

Shin Ultraman ⭐ (4 of 5)

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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You’ve never seen a movie quite like All Jacked Up and Full of Worms. It premiered this past weekend at Montreal’s Fantasia Film Festival, and it’s quite unlike anything you might expect. Oh, sure, it’s a bit like David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch; it has a soupcon of Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. But writer-director Alex Phillips has fully and completely made a gross-out drug-taking body horror movie for the COVID-19 set. Everything is a bit crappy, nothing’s very good, you may as well go eat worms. It perfectly encapsulates the kind of millennial nihilism in which we find ourselves. While the world falls apart around us, we may as well lose our minds.

The brain stickiness of the title All Jacked Up and Full of Worms is one of the most apt in recent cinema. The characters are all bored out of their minds, unhappy with their lot, and content to eat, snort, or (God help me) inject earthworms into their bodies for the apparently hallucinatory effect they have. They do worms to forget, to hope, to get through their horrendously dismal lives. But as dark and squalid as the events of the movie are, and as sort of repugnant as most of the characters are, Phillips and the cast make everything so much fun.

Roscoe (Phillip Andre Botello) is an aimless motel maintenance man whose girlfriend is a hippie with a live-in lover. He’s tired of all the trappings of his relationship and just wants reality. Meanwhile, his buddy Benny Boom (Trevor Dawkins) is nothing but delusional. He wants to be a father but has no wife or girlfriend, or really anyone, to make that happen. Instead, Benny thinks he can manifest a child in what is probably the grossest way possible. I’ll allow you to discover just how but suffice to say it involves an inanimate object. After an unsuccessful tryst with a prostitute, Benny comes upon some worms, which he and Roscoe “do” and go on a wild trip.

Also in town are a murderer in clown makeup and his girlfriend who also like to do worms. They keep intersecting with Roscoe and Benny at the most inopportune times. As the trips pile up, Roscoe and Benny reflect on their respective failures of lives and hallucinate that what they watch on TV is real. Fiction and non-fiction blend as they spiral deeper and deeper into oblivion.

The movie is disgusting in the most engaging way. Believe me, no matter what’s going on in your life, odds are you can look at Roscoe and Benny and realize you have it better. They aren’t good guys, in the traditional sense, but we do grow a kind of affection for them. I wouldn’t necessarily say we hope for the best for them, but they do inspire a degree of sympathy despite their best efforts.

Phillips’ take on depression and self-destruction is an absolute wild ride. I am not here to say everyone reading this will like All Jacked Up and Full of Worms, but that isn’t its aim. This is not a “crowd-pleaser,” but if you join the crowd, you might find its repulsive ennui quite pleasing in its way. If you get a chance to see it, you absolutely must. It’s a real trip.

All Jacked Up and Full of Worms ⭐ (3.5 of 5)

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

The post ALL JACKED UP AND FULL OF WORMS Is the Weirdest Movie You Have to See (Fantasia Fest Review) appeared first on Nerdist.

People overuse the term “Lynchian.” Almost nobody and nothing is like David Lynch’s movies. The lone true exception to that rule, if you ask me, is Peter Strickland. The British filmmaker has given us some of the strangest, darkest, most unsettling films this side of Mulholland Drive. Always, and this sets him apart from Lynch, Strickland brings in an air of Eurocult. His stories of mundane people in bizarre scenarios, coupled with oppressive ambient noises and vibrant colors. His latest, Flux Gourmet, is unfortunately a bit of a step backward for me. While he ups the absurdity and grossness, he loses some of what made his previous features so captivating.

Though I’ve still never seen Strickland’s debut film, 2009’s Katalin Varga, I wholly love his subsequent three. 2012’s Berberian Sound Studio was a nightmarish look at feeling like an outsider as a nervous English sound recordist goes to Italy to oversee the post-sync on a new arthouse horror movie. 2014 saw Strickland offer The Duke of Burgundy, a story of a sub/dom lesbian relationship that hearkens back to Bergman’s Persona. And in 2018, Strickland gave us In Fabric, his most outward horror offering about an evil haunted red dress that kills whoever wears it.

All of these movies are weird. I compared Strickland to David Lynch; they were never going to be super straightforward. But within that weirdness is a true visual and auditory master who knows how to unsettle an audience even as he shows absurd and at times comedic scenarios. With Flux Gourmet, all the weirdness is there, as is the ability to make the audience uncomfortable, but gone is any semblance of the dark or cerebral. Instead, it’s a skewering of pretentious artists done in a pretentiously artistic way. And the results are…mixed.

The action takes place fully within the walls and grounds of an English estate which houses an artists residency devoted to “sonic catering.” What could that be? Well it’s sticking various technology into food to create discordant noises. It’s performance art, sort of. But in this world, it’s apparently a thing that exists. The curator of this conservatory is Jan Stevens (Gwendoline Christie) and the current art collective she has at the manor consists of the domineering artist Elle di Elle (Fatma Mohamed), her punk of a surrogate stepson Billy (Asa Butterfield), and her ex-girlfriend Lamina (Ariane Labed). None of them really get along, and Elle constantly butts heads with Jan Stevens. A quite funny running gag is Elle always says Jan’s full name whenever she enters a room, sort of like Seinfeld ruing the name “Newman.”

Witness to all of this is a self-proclaimed “hack” writer named Stones (Makis Papadimitriou) who is the resident chronicler of each session. He serves as the movie’s narrator as well. Stones, unfortunately for him (and us), has some kind of stomach issue that makes him constantly gassy. Out of politeness, he holds it all day until the middle of the night when he can evacuate his bowels. Except he sleeps in the same barrack as the artists and the bathroom is attached. Oh dear. Throughout the story, he sees the manor’s live-in doctor, the decrepit and pompous Dr. Glock (Richard Bremmer) who quotes classic literature and berates Stones for being a writer and not recognizing it.

And that’s kind of the movie. We watch the entire three week intensive and see the various performances, rehearsals, and constant squabbling of the characters. The performances employ a lot of Strickland’s trademark ambient noise and strange visuals, and after every performance, Stones has to observe the traditional post-performance orgy which is just part of the conservancy. The characters almost never give an inkling that what we see is weird or absurd, even though we in the audience can think of nothing else.

I’ve seen various other critical reactions to Flux Gourmet shout out a thread of horror in the movie, and I just don’t see it. All of Strickland’s previous films absolutely did have an element of horror to them. This one, for me, is certainly grotesque and uncomfortable, but it never goes into anything approaching horror for me. And because of that, and the fact that this is easily Strickland’s most straightforward story, means that it never rose above pure absurdism for me. The characters are fine, but their plights never feel real. It’s just ridiculousness and bickering over weird pretentious stuff.

This is certainly not to say Flux Gourmet is wholly without merit. It’s still a Peter Strickland movie and he still has a definite sense of coupling strange things with mundane attitudes. His films are endlessly fascinating even if in this instance the whole didn’t outshine the momentary discomforts. (One performance focusing on Stones’ stool sample is particularly repugnant.) I know for some this is Strickland’s most effective film, but for me it lacks the macabre, hallucinatory pleasures of his earlier works.

3 out of 5

Flux Gourmet hits theaters June 24.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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Pixar rightly owes a lot of its success to the massive phenomenon of the original Toy Story in 1995. It wasn’t merely a cute family film, it was a sea change for the entire animation industry. So it only seems reasonable that, despite several other huge hits and Oscar winners, it’s a Toy Story character, specifically Buzz Lightyear, who would get a sort of semi-spinoff almost 30 years later. But while Lightyear plays like a fun, surprisingly heady science fiction adventure, its references (and subversions) of Toy Story lore actually hold it back from true greatness.

Buzz Lightyear is certainly the character Disney has gotten the most mileage out of since ’95. He has his own ride at Disneyland. He had his own animated series in the early 2000s. Buzz Lightyear was the coolest toy in the movie and remains the coolest to this day. So it certainly isn’t that they made a movie about the “real” Buzz Lightyear that’s the problem. More, it’s that too often it feels the need to call back to things we know from Toy Story.

Co-written and directed by Angus MacLane, Lightyear begins with a chyron telling us that *this* is the movie Andy watched that made him want a Buzz Lightyear toy. That fact sort of doesn’t make sense given what we see later, but no matter. Buzz (Chris Evans) and his best friend, Commander Alisha Hawthorne (Uzo Aduba), begin on a scouting mission to find a habitable planet for their biodome ship of cryogenically frozen humans. The planet turns out to be hostile and Buzz, refusing any help, attempts to blast off but hits a mountain. The massive spaceship is grounded.

Buzz’s basic mission from here is to test various new fuel sources to see if any of them can reach hyperspace. The trouble is, each time he makes the four minute test flight, due to time dilation, four years pass on the planet. While everyone else has settled, he’s still trying to escape. His only friend, besides Alisha, is Sox, a cute robot kitty cat. (It wouldn’t be Pixar without a cute character the audience would die for.) Eventually he returns from a test flight to find the evil Emperor Zurg (James Brolin) and his robot army occupying the planet. Can Buzz, and a team of rookies, save them?

As I said before, Lightyear has surprisingly deep sci-fi ideas. It plays a lot more like Interstellar than Star Wars in a lot of ways. Which is great! Buzz is a Flash Gordon-esque hero in an Arthur C. Clarke story. Excellent juxtaposition there. We also see a major theme of devoting so much to your work—or to just one idea of happiness and worth—that you miss what happiness you could find elsewhere. In 2022, that feels incredibly resonant. The movie sticks a finger in the eye of the “failure is not an option” idiom that plagues too many people. Failure, the movie reminds us, is a natural part of growing and learning. As Samuel Beckett said, “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Visually, Lightyear continues Pixar’s unmatched streak of truly gorgeous animated films. MacLane wanted to give the movie a “chunky” sci-fi quality from movies of the ’70s and ’80s. He really succeeded there. Each time Buzz returns from a test flight, the technology is that little bit different. The ships, flight suits, and user interfaces change incrementally during one of the best montages in the studio’s history.

Once Buzz reaches the very far future, during Zurg’s occupation, he meets a trio of volunteers who have managed to escape. We get Izzy (Keke Palmer), Alisha’s now-grown granddaughter; Mo (Taika Waititi) who is basically just Taika Waititi in a spacesuit; and Darby (Dale Soules), an elderly felon on a work release program. Buzz will of course need to learn to trust anyone but himself if this mission is to succeed, which leads to your inevitable character growth. Typical Pixar, but not in a bad way.

So then why do I have any misgivings? This is a solid sci-fi action movie with gorgeous visuals. Well, the movie lost me a little in two distinct ways. First, just the fact that they felt the need to say “this is the movie Andy watched in 1995,” because, respectfully, no it is not. They didn’t make anything like this in 1995. As far as I remember, the initial idea was that this was the “real” Buzz Lightyear, but I think they lost that thread and tried to make it make sense within the context of Toy Story. This may seem like a nitpick, but this is absolutely not a “movie-within-a-movie” when the whole idea of the toys’ mythology is that it’s silly Buck Rogers-style adventure serials. Too much of it is different in Lightyear for it to truly be that.

Second, and much more egregious honestly, is that it can’t get out of its own way in terms of referencing the things we saw in the Toy Story films. Buzz says the lines he says in Toy Story, but not just the lines his toy buttons say. He says the lines Buzz the toy says to Woody and the other toys. It didn’t feel like cute nods to the Pixar progenitor, it felt shoehorned just so we would go “Oh, I see why the toy said that.” WHO CARES? Once or twice is fine, but it happens throughout.

Yes, I am aware this is a legacy spinoff movie from a popular franchise, but the movie does such a great job of standing on its own two feet, it feels like needless nostalgia grab. This is not to say I didn’t appreciate some of the subtler visual nods—the “realistic” version of Buzz’s Space Ranger suit especially—but unlike a lot of Pixar movies, I was never lost in the world of the movie. Instead the movie got in the way of its own magic for “nudge nudge, wink wink” references and subversions.

Lightyear is ultimately a very fun, enjoyable summer flick. It has some tremendous visuals and Michael Giacchino’s score is typically superb. I just wish it had truly been a Buzz Lightyear adventure and not a movie referencing Buzz Lightyear adventures.

3.5 out of 5

Lightyear hits theaters June 17.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

The post LIGHTYEAR Soars When It Breaks TOY STORY’s Gravitational Pull appeared first on Nerdist.

I was only two years old when Top Gun came out, so I missed the fervor. I knew it was popular, and that my mom watched the VHS tape a lot, but that’s sort of it. A fun relic of the mid-’80s, when movies could be enormous budget titans without any specific franchise aspirations. Tom Cruise, you don’t need me to tell you, is maybe the biggest movie star in the world. Still. So why, after 36 years and with legacy sequels being all the rage, wouldn’t he want to revisit one of his early triumphs? The result, the long-delayed Top Gun: Maverick, feels like a throwback to both the ’80s and the pre-pandemic movie days in a mostly great and unexpected way. High art? Never. Unrivaled action movie? You bet your ass.

I want to front load this review with some brass tacks: Top Gun: Maverick has the very best and most exciting aerial action I think I’ve ever seen. It more than rivals the original film’s jet fighting prowess. Any time Maverick is behind the stick of a fighter, performing some ridiculous maneuver and teaching a new batch of Top Guns how it’s done, the movie is bliss. Visual, aural, hyper-sensorial bliss. The story, on the other hand, is for the most part incredibly rote, but in a very “it’s a movie” way.

We catch up with Captain Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Cruise) as a test pilot for a program destined for closure in a military world reliant on drones. He still doesn’t follow orders, even though he’s almost 60. A character even points out early on that at his age and service record he ought to be at least a two star admiral, if not a senator. He’s got one last assignment before he’s discharged forever: get a roster of Top Gun graduates ready for the most dangerous and seemingly impossible mission of their lives.

Among the possible mission members are Hangman (Glen Powell), a cocky a-hole; Phoenix (Monica Barbaro), the requisite no-nonsense one; Bob (Lewis Pullman), a meek but capable engineer; and Rooster (Miles Teller), with whom Maverick has a history. Yes, Rooster is the son of Goose from the first movie, which you can tell by his mustache and ability to play piano. We also meet Cyclone (Jon Hamm), the academy’s commanding officer and requisite authority figure with whom Maverick can butt heads.

Top Gun: Maverick does something really interesting with its story, at least partially. While a lot of it feels like a retread of the first movie or completely beholden to nostalgia, we also get the feeling that we’re not watching the second movie but the fifth; Maverick has clearly had decades-worth of adventures we don’t get to see but feel very natural. The movie’s love interest is Penny (Jennifer Connelly), the new owner of the bar on Top Gun Island, and she and Mav have a history the movie doesn’t spend too long explaining. It’s just something we need to take as read. All we can do is wonder what Maverick did, and that’s okay.

The movie has a quaintness to it which seems to work in its favor. Though it’s the United States Navy, it’s not about the military industrial complex; just like the original film, the baddies are some unnamed foreign power with advanced weapons and aircraft. But it’s not the plane, it’s the pilot, a point the movie seems keen to remind everyone of all the time. It has a starry-eyed love for piloting as a skill, something which will always win out against remotes.

Though Maverick’s prowess never once comes into question, the movie does wrestle with the notion of Pete Mitchell getting older, not to mention other members of the original cast both in and not in this one. Tom Cruise is old. He’s in amazing shape and can do all the stunts, but he’s an old guy. This feels like a big step for him to admit it on screen, even if fleetingly. As the movie progresses, he flies older and older planes, as though acknowledging relics are still capable of greatness, even without the flashy bells and whistles.

So, it’s definitely too much of a retread of the original (or a grab toward nostalgia for it). We get a shirtless beach sports scene for no reason. The movie opens with a near-identical aircraft carrier montage with “Highway to the Danger Zone” on the soundtrack. Miles Teller may as well be doing Anthony Edwards cosplay. It’s okay, but it doesn’t need to go that hard into it. That said, they change it up enough and Maverick as a character really works here. He’s regretful of some of his past mistakes, doesn’t want to lose anyone else, but he also doesn’t really know how to change.

Couple that with some fan-effing-tastic airplane stunts and edge-of-your-seat action sequences and it’s a pretty solid win. Seriously, those fighter sequences, from beginning to end, are worth all the nostalgia grabs alone. Go see it on a big screen with amazing sound and you’ll definitely feel the need for speed.

3.5 out of 5

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Instagram and Letterboxd.

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The Northman‘s attention to period detail is perhaps the most impressive of Eggers’ whole career. The scope of something like this is massive, utilizing the vast, frigid landscape of Iceland to explore several different cultures melded through pillaging and slavery. Norse, Celtic, Rus, and Pict characters all occupy the screen at the same time and they each feel different in their own particular way. I never once doubted the veracity of any element on screen. It truly feels like a journey through history.

What doesn’t quite have the same feeling of immersion is the story. A young Norse prince named Amleth witnesses his father, King Aurvandil (Ethan Hawke), murdered at the hands of his uncle Fjölnir (Claes Bang). Amleth’s mother, Queen Gudrun (Nicole Kidman), is therefore taken as Fjölnir’s new queen. Though Amleth is himself sought for death, he escapes in a boat, vowing to return one day to avenge his father, rescue his mother, and kill his uncle.

Years later, Amleth is a Bear-Wolf Viking raider, now in the ab-having portrayal of Alexander Skarsgård, the beefiest Skarsgård. After ransacking a Russian village, Amleth overhears a tale of King Fjölnir’s loss of his kingdom. He is little more than a town chieftain in Iceland, but Amleth’s hatred and fire for vengeance has not died. Amleth disguises himself as a slave, and joins a caravan heading to Fjölnir’s town. Along with a cunning young Rus maiden named Olga (Anya Taylor-Joy), Amleth plots the slow destruction of his uncle and everything he holds dear. But, as is always the question, will revenge truly sate his bloodlust?

This is one of the oldest stories in the world. I don’t mean just because this movie takes place in the late-9th century AD; you have seen this story before. It’s Conan the Barbarian, it’s Hamlet, it’s at least 50% of all spaghetti westerns. The revenge story cannot exist without effectively turning the avenger into a beast who has to choose whether to succumb to their hatred or go down a more forgiving path. The body count goes way up while they decide, naturally.

Certainly it’s not like The Northman is wholly without the trademark Eggers touches. The moments when the movie truly shines are when the narrative brings in elements of folklore and superstition. When Amleth begins his nighttime raids of his uncle’s farm, we get a bit of the Norse magic and mysticism. Fjölnir’s elder son Thórir (Gustav Lindt) believes it to be the heretical magic of the Christian slaves they’d acquired from Ireland. Olga uses “Earth magic” she picked up in Rus. We see Norse ritual sacrifices to the god Freyja. It’s a fascinating mélange of different influences.

While the movie definitely has its fair share of cool elements like that—Björk as an eyeless seer is a standout, and Willem Dafoe as a weird jester-meets-mystic is another—it all too frequently feels like they are at the mercy of the narrative, which is as rote and pedestrian as it gets. I love a good revenge story, don’t get me wrong, but The Northman feels trapped by it rather than using it to explore any other greater themes.

Both The Witch and The Lighthouse explore some fascinating avenues of toxic masculinity. They show us men who are in various ways impotent and unable to enact the change in their own lives. Which, of course, leaves them open to the otherworldly forces which inhabit the forest or the sea that surround them. Here, the toxic masculinity feels both horribly destructive and unchecked. Adult Amleth is a ball of rage from his first appearance to his last, literally roaring or howling like the animals he emulates. His actions therefore lead other men—notably, but not limited to, Fjölnir—to reply in kind. This does feel like the men here are in their own ways impotent, but we never see an opposite. Brutality begets brutality and, justified or not, brutality is all there shall be.

The cast is excellent, the cinematography from Eggers’ regular collaborator Jarin Blaschke is gorgeous, and everything about the time period feels perfect and rich. And yet, I can’t help thinking about how much more David Lowery seemed to do with his Arthurian riff, The Green Knight, last year. It too is a hero’s journey of sorts, about a man with an unsure future attempting to follow or upend his fate. But it’s so much stranger, so much more interesting in a number of different ways, and seems to use its mystical and mythological elements to a greater level of effect.

The Northman is a gorgeous, textured depiction of its place and time, with so much to recommend it on both sides of the camera. I just wish it had found something deeper to show us, a more nuanced story to tell than what we get. And it’s not like there aren’t plenty of opportunities. A couple of moments in the story had me saying “Oh wow, that’s interesting!” But they ultimately only broke the rhythm of the typical genre conventions briefly. The flow of the revenge movie could not be contained for long.

If you have any interest in seeing a visual interpretation of a Viking epic at its pinnacle, I would recommend seeing The Northman wherever has the best sound and projection near you. It’s a beautiful looking movie. However, don’t go in expecting the unpredictability of The Witch or The Lighthouse, to which The Northman simply can’t hold a candle, or torch.

3 out of 5

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

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Any Doctor Who fan will tell you one of the joys of the series is when a past Doctor shows up to aid (and usually bicker) with the current Doctor. Despite having 13 (or really 15 or 16 depending on who you ask) Doctors at this point, team ups have been relatively few. Usually it’s only a major anniversary that gets that kind of crossover. But if you happen to be an Ultraman fan, these kind of team-ups happen pretty regularly. That doesn’t make them any less special, however. Perhaps none of the crossover Ultraman movies feels more like a glorious love letter to the fans and the history than Superior 8 Ultra Brothers, now out on Blu-ray from Mill Creek.

Note: like most Japanese titles, this movie has several translations. Mill Creek uses Superior 8 Ultra Brothers, but the literal title is Great Decisive Battle! The Super 8 Ultra Brothers, and other releases have it as Superior Ultraman 8 Brothers. So, you know, call it whatever you want.

Since 2019, Mill Creek Entertainment has released pristine complete box sets of most of the Ultra series shows. Of the 31 official seasons that exist, the distributor has released 23, plus a few other specials and things. It’s incredibly impressive how quickly all of these have found their way to fans in North America. And since I’ve become a voracious consumer of these releases, a movie like Superior 8 filled me with the exact same fuzzy feeling that the Doctor Who 50th anniversary special, “The Day of the Doctor,” did in 2013.

The greater Ultra universe deals a lot with parallel dimensions, which this movies focuses on specifically. The idea here is “Ultraman” as a concept can persists in the human hosts even in universes where it’s a TV show. Kind of funky, but it really works. It brings together four of the Showa era Ultras with four from the Heisei era. It’s legitimately a melding of generations, bringing together many different cast members.

The Showa Ultras in question are: the original Ultraman (1966-67); Ultraseven (1967-68); Ultraman Jack (1971-72); and Ultraman Ace (1972-73). The Heisei ones are: Ultraman Tiga (1996-97); Ultraman Dyna (1997-98); Ultraman Gaia (1998-99); and Ultraman Mebius (2006-2007). Mebius was the most recent new Ultra at the time. It’s especially interesting, then, that it’s not Mebius who takes the lead in the film. It’s stead it’s Tiga, and specifically his human host Daigo (Hiroshi Nagano), who drives most of the action.

The movie begins in 1966, on the very day of the premiere episode of Ultraman. Three young boys, Daigo, Asuka, and Gamu, run through their town, excited to check out a brand new TV series. We come back to these children later in the film, as adult Daigo remembers a time when the three met a young girl with red shoes at the very moment they all wished about what their futures might hold. This is key to the journey of not only Daigo in the movie but seven of the eight Ultra Brothers.

In nearly all of the Ultra shows, and certainly all eight of the lead-up series for the movie, a main character in human form works for a space/science/defense agency that investigates alien and paranormal activity. While there are many characters on those teams, it’s the main hero who turns into the Ultraman. This is either because they ARE an Ultra in human form (Ultraseven specifically), or usually because the Ultraman has fused with the human. For Earth-protecting reasons, you see.

That is one of the few immutable constants about the series. What makes Superior 8 Ultra Brothers so interesting is that it supposes a universe in which none of that is true. There are no giant monsters to fight, so none of the human hosts need to work for any such alien defense force. As such, their lives have largely been normal, often unfulfilling. Daigo wished to be an astronaut but is now a tour guide in Yokohama. Asuka wished to be professional baseball player, but gave up after high school. Gamu wished to be a scientist who could build great space traveling ships, but didn’t quite make it either.

As a grown-up, Daigo begins having strange dreams, in which giant monsters attack and elder members of the community become Ultramen. That can’t possibly be true, right? Well, wouldn’t ya know, the lines of dream and reality blur and a real Ultraman, Mebius, arrives to do battle with a real kaiju. After taking his human form, Mirai Hibino, Daigo takes Mebius around to see the Ultra Brothers, except in this universe, they’re all just old guys. But surely the spirit of Ultraman can break through!

This is not a movie with a lot of twists and turns. You pretty much know from the title that all eight people will turn into Ultramen by the end to fight ever enormous monsters. This doesn’t make it any less enjoyable when it does happen. Before that happens, there’s a surprising amount of drama and pathos as the mysterious villain wreaks havoc on Yokohama and Daigo and the others question their life choices.

Superior 8 Ultra Brothers has so many lovely meta moments as well. Each of the four Showa Ultras’ jobs in this parallel universe reflect the real actor’s passions and post-acting life. The lead actress from each of the shows are there as well, and where applicable, the real life children of these actors play their kids in the movie. It feels like a family affair all around. Especially exciting for me is a brief cameo by kaiju movie legend Kenji Sahara reprising his role as Jun Majome from the Ultraman precursor series Ultra Q.

Anyone who has kept up with the Mill Creek releases as I have will find this movie an absolute treat, a reward for following these stories for season after season. But even if you have never seen an Ultraman series before, the movie gives enough context, and it’s standalone enough, that you won’t have any trouble enjoying it. Not to mention all the great practical effects work and suitmation, which is a hallmark of all Tsuburaya Productions.

Bottom line, I think Superior 8 Ultra Brothers is a great introduction to the franchise. If you’ve never seen any before, this will give you a taste of eight different shows. It also works as a fantastic celebration of, at the time they made it, 42 years of one of Japan’s most enduring shows.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

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Roughly 95 million comic book movies come out every year, and they obviously can’t all be good. Intellectual property holders make them all, from the best to the worst, as a means of making money, furthering the brand. Occasionally you get some that transcend the mere commerce of it all. Recently we’ve had stuff like The Batman, The Suicide Squad, and Spider-Man: No Way Home, which are all very different, with different artistic goals, but all succeeded far more than they had any right to. And then there’s Morbius, a perfunctory, sloppy, paint-by-numbers attempt to remind audiences that Sony has the rights to these Spider-Man villains and by golly they’re going to use them.

We had a bet in the Nerdist offices about whether Morbius even existed given how long ago it finished shooting. Recent interviews with director Daniel Espinosa indicated Avengers: Endgame hadn’t even come out when they were shooting, and that feels like a lifetime ago. At any rate, the movie does exist and is here for people to see. And that’s about it. It’s not particularly good, but it’s also not so incompetent as to elicit laughter, nor so baffling as to produce consternation. The movie doesn’t make any sense, don’t get me wrong, but it’s the kind of nonsense that we’ve seen before, so nothing really stands out that much.

Michael Morbius (Jared Leto) has suffered from a debilitating blood disease for his entire life. Apparently his condition requires so many treatments so often that as a child he has to live in a special hospital in Greece run by a kindly physician (an absolutely wasted Jared Harris). Early on, another young boy with the same affliction moves in to the bed right next to Michael. His name is Lucien, but Michael calls him Milo. Cut to 25 years into the future and Morbius is a famed biochemist who has spent his entire life attempting to cure his and Milo’s illness. Grown up Milo (Matt Smith) is very wealthy for reasons and has bankrolled Morbius’ work.

Eventually Morbius and his colleague-slash-love-interest Dr. Martine Bancroft (Adria Arjona) hit the jackpot through a strange source. They create a serum using vampire bat DNA. Morbius injects himself and very quickly he gets better. Well “better” is a relative term, of course. He also has an inexplicable reaction which bestows upon him several incongruous bat powers. He’s super strong and agile, natch. His hearing becomes a kind of (his words) “bat radar,” even though the word sonar has existed for a long time. His appearance changes instantly and then goes back to normal depending on the last part… he needs to inject blood to stay alive. Ruh roh.

And that’s kind of the movie. Morbius becomes a monster but doesn’t want to be one; Milo becomes and monster and loves it. CGI versions of them jump around with CGI vampire faces creating some kind of CGI smoke (?) for some reason. The dialogue and characterizations are absolutely inert while the action scenes are little more than digital noise. Tyrese Gibson and Al Madrigal show up as federal agents (or detectives, the movie seems confused) who ostensibly investigate the rampant vampire murders, but whatevs, man.

The lone bright spot in the otherwise turgid excuse for a movie is Matt Smith who actually gives a performance. He seems to relish his time as the villainous vamp so very much. A scene halfway through finds Smith dancing around his penthouse, admiring his new physique and powers and it is nothing short of delightful. He’s too good of an actor not to give it his all, but next to the plank of wood that is Leto, he’s a beacon of excellence. The whole movie should have been about him.

Morbius is just not good. There’s no two ways about it. It just feels lazy and unfinished. Milo has no last name; we never know what kind of disease he and Morbius have; they can’t seem to agree on what Morbius’ vampire face should look like from scene to scene. I didn’t like the first Venom movie but at least it felt like someone made it; Morbius feels like a movie that was willed into existence by the incepted dreams of Columbia Pictures execs. It needs to be in order for one more member of the Sinister Six (who are just antiheroes, obviously) to join the squad.

Waste not one more ounce of time thinking about Morbius, friends. It’s not worth it.

2 out of 5 solely for Matt Smith

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

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We live in a rarified air as Batman fans. Every few years we get a new Batman, a new adventure in the streets of Gotham City. And the character, though rigid in his moral code (hopefully), is incredibly malleable in terms of adaptations. Mega-campy or shockingly realistic, Batman can fit any style. But that also means everyone has their own Platonic ideal of a Batman story, depiction, and aesthetic. Though I’ve definitely enjoyed most movies that have featured the Caped Crusader, my specific favorite take on the character has never hit the big screen. Until now. Matt Reeves’ The Batman is, for me, the very best Batman movie ever made.

Now I know that’s a big, bold statement. For most, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight is number one with several bullets. That’s a good movie, no question. But for all its visual prowess, I don’t think it got the characters right. That series tries to make Batman realistic to a fault, foregoing all but the most necessary (and often the most preposterous) of fantastical elements. Reeves’ take on Gotham City is grounded and gritty but still rooted firmly in comic book mentality. And, chiefly for me, it’s an actual detective story plot. Finally, the “World’s Greatest Detective” gets to earn that title on film.

The Batman also takes heavy influence from horror. It’s not merely that Batman as a character uses fear, the way he has since his inception. The movie itself feels like a crime-horror story, like Fincher’s Se7en or (very pointedly) Zodiac. It’s intense and thrilling, but also suspenseful in a way I had not expected.

We open with Bruce Wayne (Robert Pattinson) having donned the Batman persona for two years. Two years patrolling the streets of Gotham, but feeling like he has hardly made a difference. Certainly not a positive one. On Halloween night, someone calling themselves the Riddler (Paul Dano) murders the mayor on the eve of an election. He leaves a message for “The Batman,” and Lt. Jim Gordon (Jeffrey Wright), who is the vigilante’s lone supporter in the GCPD, brings in the mysterious crime fighter for help.

As clues turn up, and more prominent members of Gotham’s high society end up dead, Batman begins down to unravel a seedy plot involving the rich and powerful on both sides of the law. During his investigation, he crosses paths with Selina Kyle (Zoë Kravitz), a petty thief and a cocktail waitress at the Iceberg Lounge. The Iceberg’s owner, the mob enforcer the Penguin (Colin Farrell), works for mob boss Carmine Falcone (John Turturro), and both know more than they let on. The Riddler’s motives have something to do with all of these people, and with Bruce Wayne and his slain parents. But what?

The Batman is the first film that really makes Gotham City feel like a lived-in city collapsing under its own corruption. The denizens of the city in the comics pass in and out of Batman’s purview as he, Gordon, and Selina try to get to the bottom of the Riddler’s terrifying machinations. To Matt Reeves and cowriter Peter Craig’s credit, though the movie is very long (nearly three hours), the story and characters are strong enough to support its considerable weight. The story goes many places, but all of it feels necessary.

This certainly isn’t just a comic book writ large. This version of Gotham City is a vibe unto itself. This is maybe the gloomiest version we’ve ever seen. But unlike the Tim Burton movies, it still feels like a real place. Cinematographer Grieg Fraser makes the darkness in the heart of the city seep out into every frame. If not for the bright contrasts of fire or sunset, you might thing Gotham is a city without hope. But for all the movie’s brutality, the story is about finding hope where you can, even in the face of oppressive badness.

Whenever a new actor takes over the role of Batman, their ability to pull it off is front and center in people’s minds. Robert Pattinson’s take on Batman is unique among the screen versions. This isn’t a Bruce Wayne who pretends to be a playboy to cover up his nocturnal activities. This is a Bruce who is a complete recluse, fully devoted to the ideal of his Batman project, a self-proclaimed agent of vengeance with no other thought in mind. As such, he’s the first version of the character who feels more himself as Batman than Bruce. He seems uncomfortable in any clothes that aren’t the Batsuit or his slovenly disguise for reconnaissance. He emotes through the mask, which is truly a feat.

Kravitz and Wright are wonderful in their takes on Catwoman and Gordon, respectively. They end up as Batman’s two most trusted allies in this particular war. Though they’ve had a romance in both Batman Returns and The Dark Knight Rises, the Batman/Catwoman would-be relationship here feels the most well rounded, the most endemic to the characters. Kravitz and Pattinson have bananas good chemistry which I absolutely did not expect.

But what is Batman without his villains? These run the gamut. Farrell is essentially doing a Robert De Niro impression the entire time underneath his heavy makeup. It’s silly, but it’s also somewhat endearing after awhile. His Penguin is the closest the movie has to true comic relief, yet he still feels incredibly dangerous.

Dano as the Riddler is nothing short of terrifying. His screen time is limited, especially early on, but this only gives his appearances, and especially his distorted vocal performance, a great deal of heft. Making the Riddler akin to the Zodiac Killer is definitely a choice, but it pays off in interesting ways. Once we learn the true breadth of his scheme, it’s a real shock and adds a different kind of horror to the already scary portrayal.

If the movie has one aspect that felt underdeveloped, it’s the relationship of Bruce to his faithful butler Alfred Pennyworth (Andy Serkis). Serkis is excellent, a sort of Guy Ritchie take on the manservant father figure, but I could have used a lot more of it. But the movie is packed, and I’m hoping we get more in future installments.

I’ve already gone on and on, but suffice to say I bloody loved The Batman. This isn’t just a new take on a popular comic book character, it’s a fully realized vision for a world. One like we’ve never gotten before. Reeves has already said he’d love to do his grounded take on the more fantastical villains like Mr. Freeze or Clayface, and boy am I here for it. This movie is smart and sexy and scary in equal measure, and Michael Giacchino’s driving score feels as much like a Baroque piano concerto as it does a superhero theme.

This isn’t a slavish adherence to comic book lore by any stretch; more, it keeps the most important elements of who these characters are and takes them in their own direction. Batman uses his brain as much as his brawn, and even when he’s knocking seven bells out of thugs, the compassion and innate heroism rings true. He’s not a right-wing power fantasy, he’s a damaged individual trying to make a difference in a terrible world. One man standing up for what’s right. That’s the most Batman thing there is.

4.5 out of 5

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

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I remember being so excited by the first trailer for Kenneth Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express. Rather than try to update Agatha Christie’s 1934 novel to modern day, Branagh steered directly into the lavish period setting and populated it with a cast of stars and great character actors. On paper, I expected that to be one of my favorite movies of 2017. Instead it was an awkward, overly glossy, needlessly indulgent experience that seemed dead set on putting flashy CGI in the way of the mystery. But I still enjoyed it, in spite of all that. Now we finally have the long-delayed sequel, Death on the Nile, which goes even further into what doesn’t work and mines a lot less enjoyment.

Death on the Nile was originally supposed to come out in December 2020. It didn’t for various obvious and less obvious reasons. Now its cast, containing some very hot actors of the moment, have had a pandemic’s worth of news showing them to be less than worthy of acclaim. That’s an uphill battle right there. Armie Hammer specifically has to be very handsy with a couple of the women in the movie. It’s more than a little uncomfortable to watch given allegations against him. 20th Century opted not to reshoot his scenes, I think largely because they couldn’t. He’s in the background of every single scene whether he has any lines or not.

And unfortunately, Branagh doesn’t help matters. The first half is so full of unnecessary computer generated scenery and weirdly elaborate nightclub and party scenes that all we can do is look at the glamorous cast and shrug. I truly do not understand why there needs to be swooping cameras over clearly computer-rendered vistas. Is it just to illustrate how rich all these rich people are at a time when opulence was more opulent? It looks at times like a more restrained version of Baz Lurhman’s The Great Gatsby. Only slightly more restrained, I assure you.

The story finds fastidious master sleuth Hercule Poirot (Branagh doing a Belgian accent) on holiday in Egypt. Almost unbelievably, he finds his friend Bouc (Tom Bateman) also in Egypt with his mother (Annette Bening doing an English accent). Poirot quickly finds himself at a honeymoon party for wealthy socialite Linnet Ridgeway (Gal Gadot) and her not-wealthy new husband Simon (Hammer, doing an English accent).

We quickly meet a series of other party guests, all of whom, conveniently for a murder mystery, have some reason to want Linnet dead. Her former fiancé, Dr. Windlesham (Russell Brand doing a slightly different English accent); her socialite-turned-communist godmother (Jennifer Saunders doing an American accent); Linnet’s lady’s maid (Rose Leslie doing a French accent); her lawyer cousin Andrew (Ali Fazal); her schoolmate Rosalie and Rosalie’s blues musician aunt (Letitia Wright and Sophie Okenado, respectively, each doing an American accent). You get the point. Lots of suspects.

Chiefly among the possible suspects of the potential murder, however, is Jacqueline de Bellefort (Emma Mackey). She’s Linnet’s former friend and Simon’s former lover. Jackie followed the couple across the world in the vain hope of luring Simon back from Linnet. With all of these people around her, Linnet very rightly feels unsafe and wants to go home. But it’s her honeymoon! Maybe a private riverboat trip down the Nile will be good and not full of murder. Foreshadowing.

Luckily, I suppose, Branagh front-loads Death on the Nile with all the stuff I really disliked. All the overly complex CGI establishing shots, all the vapid rich people being way too sexual for 1937, all the ham-fisted exposition. Finally, mercifully, the actual death takes place on the Nile and we get the prerequisite Poirot-interrogates-everyone scenes. This is where the movie begins to feel like a Poirot story. Branagh is able to ratchet up the tension very nicely. I almost forgot—almost—by the end of the movie that the solution was very clearly and obviously set up earlier. That was fairly deflating.

I definitely don’t think the release and success of Knives Out in 2019 did any favors for Death on the Nile. It reminded everyone what’s fun about a whodunit—the cast of disreputable characters, a charming and quirky detective, actual twists and mystery—without needing all the glitz and hokeyness. The discrepancy would have been more apparent had Death kept its original 2020 release date, a mere year after Knives. Even given an extra 14 months, it feels packed with spectacle for the sake of it and only works when it finally focuses on the messy characters at the center.

With a couple of anti-science conspiracy theorists and an alleged sex-offender in the cast, it’d be hard to recommend Death on the Nile. Sadly even without those negative factors, the movie isn’t particularly engaging. The novelty of a big screen Poirot movie that carried a lot of Murder on the Orient Express isn’t here for Death, and while I do think Branagh makes for a good Poirot, he fills the movie with too much fluff and ridiculous extravagance to ever really work.

2 out of 5

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

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Trauma, as we all know, can be inherited in some form or another. Be it national, societal, or deeply personal, the adage “the sins of the father are visited on the son” remains as true today as ever. Because of this, and a growing acceptance and exploration of mental health, the horror genre has sought to tackle this hereditary grief in earnest over the past few years. And luckily for us viewers, this examination has given us some excellent and chilling movies. One fans simply mustn’t sleep on (har har) is the recent German movie Schlaf, or Sleep. The movie is available now from Arrow Video in one of the best single-title editions I’ve seen in a long time.

Director Michael Venus uses surrealist visuals and dream logic to peel back the layers of sins of a particular kind of German, all the way back to the Third Reich. Though that’s a lot to unpack for any one film, Venus does a masterful job of centering the events on one family and a little town full of secrets. Using the concept of dreams and nightmares allows him to utilize symbolism and allegory all the way through, but keep the emotions real and grounded. It’s a haunting film I haven’t been able to shake.

Marlene (Sandra Hüller), is a flight attendant who has horrifying recurring nightmares about a place she’s never been to. When she learns the place is actually real, she goes to check it out and suffers a breakdown. While she recuperates in a psychiatric ward, her daughter Mona (Gro Swantje Kohlhof), worried her mom’s psychological issues will appear in her, goes to the idyllic village of Stainbach to investigate. Why would this town have such a hold on Marlene?

Well, it turns out Stainbach, despite seeming like a nice vacation spot, has a lot of secrets. It seems the three most prominent leaders in town have recently all died by their own hand, glimpses of which Mona sees as she tries to get closer to the truth. Marlene’s nightmares begin to bleed into Mona’s waking life, and the elder generation sweep more and more of the sordid past under the rug. All the while, a mysterious blonde woman named Trude seems to have some hold over everyone, awake or asleep.

I don’t obviously want to give too much of the plot away, but I also kind of can’t? Sleep is the kind of movie that is more felt than understood. This is the feature debut for Michael Venus and it’s truly a staggering piece of work, visually and thematically. Co-written with first time screenwriter Thomas Friedrich, Sleep explores such heavy topics as fascism, misogyny, abuse, murder, and mental health. It’s not an easy watch on any level, but it’s explored with such a deft touch, and with such rich and well-rounded characters, that whether you fully grasp it all does not impact your enjoyment.

As though Arrow knew the movie had so much going on that it might need some examination, the Blu-ray edition comes complete with several outstanding extras to help you further appreciate Sleep. Filmmaker and author Sean Hogan and author and critic Kim Newman break down the film in a fascinating feature length audio commentary. Critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas takes a look at the fairy tale and dream imagery of the movie in a video essay. A second video essay from critic Anton Bitel explores the depiction of Germany’s national trauma explicit in the movie. And anthropologist, dream researcher, and filmmaker Louise S. Milne discusses the movie’s dreams and folklore in an lengthy interview. It’s really all you could possibly want to truly appreciate this complex and stirring film.

Sleep hits Blu-ray January 24 in North America, though you can stream it now on the Arrow Player app. Watch this movie, folks. It’s not your typical horror movie, in the best possible way.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

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Though the subgenre itself has existed for decades, the term “Folk Horror” is relatively new. It also doesn’t have any one definition. All it really means is horror based in some way on folk traditions. This can mean folklore, “old religion” (i.e. pre-Christianity), or just the general fear of people with different beliefs. Filmmaker Kier-La Janisse explores all the myriad forms and history of Folk Horror in her amazing documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror. To go along with the home release of that film, Severin Films put out an amazing box set of 19 films. Now, horror streaming service Shudder has included a number of these films, plus the documentary, to stream right now.

I pre-ordered the Severin box set, All the Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror, pretty much immediately once they announced it. It’s one of the best and most thoroughly researched and curated box set I’ve ever seen. Tons of extras, a terrific companion book full of information and essays, gorgeous presentation. I would highly recommend it to anyone. But I also know not everyone loves dropping two bills on a box set of movies you’ve never seen. So I’m going to take you through the offerings from the box set available right now on Shudder.

First and foremost, if you watch nothing else, I implore you to watch Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched. Yes it’s over three hours long. However, it’s nicely episodic to watch in chunks. It’s an essential watch. Do not skip this one.

The Folk Horror Big Three

Though not included in the box set, the documentary starts with explorations of “The Big Three” folk horror movies. All three came from England and give us the basis, at least here in the West, for the subgenre. Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General from 1967 depicted a real-life, self-appointed “Witchfinder” named Mathew Hopkins (played by Vincent Price at his most despicable). During the English Civil War in the 1600s, Hopkins roamed the villages and countryside enacting horrible tortures on whomever he wanted, using the accusation of witchcraft as an excuse.

Next is Piers Haggard’s 1971 movie The Blood on Satan’s Claw, a movie that shows a group of young people in the 18th century who are in league with the devil himself, going fully into debauchery, torture, and sacrifice. Haggard himself is believed to have coin the term “folk horror” in an interview some years later, though that’s not entirely accurate.

And finally the most well-known, and easily the best, of the bunch. Robin Hardy’s 1973 movie The Wicker Man. Try to forget the terrible Nicolas Cage remake from a decade ago; the original Wicker Man is easily one of the most upsetting and strange movies of the canon. A puritanical police constable heads to the small rural island of Summerisle on a tip about a missing girl. The residents don’t seem to know what he’s talking about, and he judges their “pagan” beliefs as they prepare for their annual harvest festival. Bad times ensue.

Shudder has all three of these movies available to stream.

Eastern European Folk Horror

The movies I perhaps knew the least about going in to the box set were the ones from Eastern Europe. They also happened to be among my favorites. They tend to deal with rural communities dealing with some version of famous monsters.

The Serbo-Croatian movie Leptirica (or The She-Butterfly) is a lively and quick 65-minute movie from 1973 in which a notorious vampire plagues a village, killing each milliner in succession. A young man unwittingly takes on the danger of becoming the next milliner in order to impress the wealthiest landowner in town so that he might marry the man’s daughter. It does not go well for him.

We also have two really great Polish movies. The first is a 1970 movie called Lokis, which is a decidedly handsome slow-burn movie set in the 19th century. A professor travels to Lithuania at the behest of a young count. When he arrives, he learns that the count’s mother has gone mad after suffering a bear attack in her youth. The peasants all believe the count is himself the offspring of the bear, and grisly (ha) attacks seem to bear (ha) that out.

Finally we have Wilczyca, or She-Wolf, from 1983. It takes place in 1848 and follows a cavalry officer who agrees to look after a nobleman’s house and wife during a forced exile. The countess, we learn, is a lustful creature who quickly takes up with an Austrian army captain. The cavalryman is convinced she is the reincarnation of his own wife’s vengeful spirit, promising to return as a she-wolf to haunt him.

Russian Folk Horror

There’s only one Russian movie, but it’s a doozy. 1967’s Viy based on the Nikolai Gogol story of the same name is the first horror movie from the Soviet Union. It follows a young orthodox priest who agrees to sit vigil over the body of a young village girl who died under mysterious circumstances. For three nights he must do this. Turns out, the young girl was a witch, and each of the three nights she rises to seduce him. He must withstand her demonic intentions and combat the growing forces of darkness that attack him. Truly amazing effects for the era, and one of the best Gothic chillers ever made.

Folk Horror from Scandinavia

If you’ve seen any Ingmar Bergman movies, you know there’s always an air of horror to even the least horrific movie from Scandinavia. But they also make real horror movies! Two such movies appear in the box set and also on Shudder. The first is a 1958 Norwegian movie called Lake of the Dead, which finds a group of friends staying at a remote and chilly cabin in the mountains near a lake. They go there to join their other friend, but arrive to find him missing and his dog dead. The cabin has a curse on it, evidently, following a local legend where a man went mad at the cabin, killing his sister and her lover before drowning himself in the lake. So maybe that happened again?

The second is a very strange Icelandic TV movie called Tilbury from 1987. It takes place in 1940, during a time when the British occupied Iceland as a base of operations during WWII. Our hero returns to Reykjavik to do manual labor for the British Army and discovers his childhood crush is evidently dating a repulsive British officer named Tilbury. As there’s a language barrier, the name Tilbury sounds a lot like the creature “tilberi” from Icelandic folklore. The creature is a disgusting little incubus thing, which the movie explains in detail but I’ll let you to discover this on your own.

Italian Folk Horror

You know ya boy loves himself some Italian horror movies. The two in the box set, however, are much different from the usual Lucio Fulci or Mario Bava offering. The one I hadn’t seen before is called Il demonio from 1963. This is sort of a rural Italian take on the witchfinder-style story. A woman is in love with a married man in her village. He sleeps with her all the same, and then rejects her outright. She then attempts to place a hex on him and wishes for his wife to die. She’s not actually a witch, but it doesn’t stop the supremely Catholic community to proceed as though she is. Il demonio features an absolutely brilliant performance by Dahlia Lavi which is worth the watch alone.

The other Italian movie, Dark Waters from 1993, is decidedly more supernatural but no less Catholic. A young Englishwoman travels to a remote island convent to uncover some kind of familial connection and finds the villagers have communed with some kind of eldritch abomination and taken to sacrifice and torture to appease it.

Australian Folk Horror

Two fascinating Australian folk horror movies are on Shudder. The first is Alison’s Birthday from 1981 in which our titular heroine returns home to her aging aunt and uncle’s place for her 19th birthday. Her boyfriend comes with her, but the parental figures seem less than pleased with this. Strange things happen in the days leading up to Alison’s birthday and it appears Alison is next in line for a religious sacrifice. Oops!

Next up is more historical drama than straight-up horror. Celia from 1989 finds a young girl in 1950s rural Australia blurring the lines between reality and fiction, folklore and history, during a particularly fraught time in the country. The Communist red scare and the very real law in Australia in which pet rabbits were taken from their owners blend with Celia’s reading about terrifying fairy tale creatures called “hobyahs.”

North American Folk Horror

To close us out, we have a couple of movies from Canada and the United States. The Canadian movie, Clearcut from 1991, finds a white lawyer traveling to Northern Ontario to join the indigenous population in their protesting of a logging companies clearcutting of old growth on their land. The lawyer believes himself to be sympathetic to their cause but he quickly learns the anger of indigenous people when a rogue man named Arthur (the amazing Graham Greene) kidnaps the logging company president and forces the lawyer to tag along on what amounts to a fight for survival. Is Arthur a militant, or the vengeful spirit of oppressed indigenous people? Maybe both?

And finally, the newly rediscovered American movie Eyes of Fire from 1983. It follows an adulterous priest in the 18th century frontier who leaves with his followers to “the promised land,” which devolves into lust, madness, pagan vengeance, and hallucinatory terror. Though virtually unseen until recently, Eyes of Fire is what many consider the seminal American folk horror movie.

There you have it, friends. A huge swath of movies to check out. Some may not be your thing, but the variety alone makes this collection well worth your time. Be sure to check out Shudder’s whole catalog of folk horror titles, encompassing far more than we’ve discussed here.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

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Italian directors during the heyday of movie production in that country had to be versatile. Rare were people like Sergio Leone or Dario Argento who could only make a handful of movies in a specific genre and be considered huge successes and major artists. Most of the time, they had to direct whatever was popular at the time. Generally they also made a lot of movies, churning them out in rapid succession. That said, not all Italian directors were good at everything. Mario Bava, for example, was an amazing director of horror and suspense, but made some truly lousy westerns.

I remember when I first got into Italian movies back in college, seeing the name of director Umberto Lenzi on horror schlock like Nightmare City and the revolting Cannibal Ferox. I all but wrote him off as a result. Years later, however, I discovered some of his earlier works. His string of fascinating giallo movies with Carroll Baker have become some of my favorites. He’s also one of the very best at the poliziottesco, or the Italian cop-action-crime movie. One of these major titles in his catalogue, 1976’s Free Hand for a Tough Cop, is now out on Region B Blu-ray from Fractured Visions. It’s a supremely fun and action-packed movie.

One thing up front about these poliziotteschi is that they were borne out of a very turbulent time in Italy. They called them the “Years of Lead,” referring to all the political and social upheaval. I wrote about Arrow’s box set called The Years of Lead here. A lot of these police movies had a political edge, like Sergio Martino’s Silent Action which also came out in ’76. Lenzi’s actioners tended to be less about political corruption and more about horrible, violent criminals. They tend to be hyper violent and some, like The Tough Ones and Almost Human, are deeply unpleasant. Luckily for those with weaker stomachs, Free Hand for a Tough Cop is not as rough.

The movie centers on Police Inspector Sarti (Claudio Cassinelli) who is quickly running out of time to rescue a wealthy businessman’s chronically ill young daughter. The crime boss Brescianelli (Henry Silva) has kidnapped her and is holding her for ransom, using her need for kidney dialysis as a way to get the money quick. The problem, the police have no idea where Brescianelli is, and the criminal world has clammed up.

In order to get inside dirt on the underworld, Sarti stages an elaborate jailbreak for Sergio Marazzi a.k.a. “Garbage Can” (Tomas Milian), a petty thief and confidential informant. Sarti hopes that with Garbage Can, and a small cadre of hired goons, they can track down Brescianelli and rescue the girl before time runs out. And before the goons get wise that they’re working for a cop.

Milian is a Cuban-born actor who became a big star in Italian genre cinema. Though notoriously tough to work with because of his method acting, Milian was a staple of Italian westerns and, later, the poliziotteschi. Lenzi made a total of six movies with Milian, all of them poliziotteschi. And in each, Milian played some sort of criminal, often the most vile, frothing, disturbingly violent of the bunch. Here, however, Garbage Can Marazzi is a playful trickster, a lowlife who loves being a lowlife but has a heart of gold and a knack for using his brains to get out of jams. It’s really great to see Milian in this context. Sure, he overacts a bit, but you can’t help but get a kick out of Garbage Can.

Lenzi’s great prowess as a director comes in full-blooded action sequences. Car chases, elaborately staged shootouts, and quick-cut fistfights in his movies are some of the best in the genre. The beauty–or maybe the health and safety nightmare–of Italian moviemaking at the time is how they were able to perform hair-raising car stunts in and around the actual busy streets of Rome. They look dangerous because they are. They look fast because they had to be. Nearly 50 years removed, they still pack a wallop.

If you’ve never seen a poliziottesco, I’d say Free Hand for a Tough Cop is a pretty excellent one to start with. It’s got a lot of comedy, feeling at times like a buddy movie from the ’80s. The action is top notch, and the bad guys are awful without being repugnant. It ends with one of the best shootouts of the genre, and the whole thing hangs together because of the charismatic performance of Tomas Milian. You never thought you’d hear so many people call someone Garbage Can, but this is the movie that proves you wrong.

The Blu-ray is out now from Fractured Visions, a UK distributor. The movie is presented in a 2K restoration from the original camera negative. Extras include several interviews with cast and crew, an interview with Umberto Lenzi’s daughter Alessandra Lenzi, a video essay, and two commentary tracks. It’s absolutely worth a look.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

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I’m going to say a potentially incendiary thing: Mario Bava is the best underrated director of all time. The Italian cinematographer turned director was one of the most prolific in his era. Though he directed movies in all kinds of genres, his forte was horror, creating some of the most visually interesting, creepiest films in the canon. Despite all of this, Bava was never appreciated during his time, looked over for young upstarts like Dario Argento. With his final film as a director, Bava’s Shock certainly bears some of the hallmarks of Argento’s brand of horror. But thanks to Arrow Video’s new Blu-ray presentation, we can appreciate an unsetting, surreal swansong from a true artist.

I remember seeing Shock maybe a decade or more ago on Netflix. I don’t remember thinking all that highly of it, despite a few effective scares. Over the years, I’ve become a massive fan of Mario Bava and his innovative filmmaking techniques and understated exploration of scarred psyches. Almost all of his movies have made their way to Blu-ray, and Shock represents the last of his major works to arrive. Even later than some of Bava’s offbeat non-horror output.

Shock is both a ghost story and a murder mystery, combining both of Bava’s most beloved styles, the Gothic and the giallo. Many balk at calling it one of the director’s best, owing to a number of outside factors. It was a deliberate attempt by the producers to ape the success of Argento. Prog rock band Libra provided the score, doing their best Goblin impression. It stars Daria Nicolodi, Argento’s romantic and creative partner, right after the dissolution of both relationships. And, chiefly, only a reported 75% of the movie was actually Mario Bava’s work. The rest was the work of Mario’s son and longtime assistant, Lamberto Bava. It was Mario’s subtle effort to give the younger man the push to feature directing he needed.

All of that setup out of the way, let’s talk about what’s actually in the movie. The story follows Dora Baldini (Nicolodi) and her young son Marco (David Colin Jr.) who move in to a very large, somewhat dilapidated house with Dora’s new airline pilot husband Bruno (John Steiner). The house is where Dora used to live with her first husband, Carlo (Nicola Salerno), Marco’s father, prior to his death.

Right from the get-go things seem off. Marco has an imaginary friend who we quickly learn is Carlo’s ghost. Dora has strange and upsetting hallucinations of a putrefied hand brandishing a boxcutter that she doesn’t quite understand. Bruno believes it’s just the stress of moving coupled with the buried trauma about Carlo’s death. However, it’s clear there’s more going on, both corporeal and supernatural. The truth surrounding Carlo and his apparently haunting/possession of Marco leads to horrifying truths and Dora’s ever-fracturing mind.

While Shock doesn’t bear many of the visual hallmarks of a Mario Bava horror film (most notably the lack of expressionistic colorful lighting), it does share much in common with his earlier ghost stories. The ghosts in Bava’s films are usually representations of the lead character’s scarred and depraved psyches. Bava’s 1963 film The Whip and the Body features a woman who continues a sadomasochistic relationship with her cruel suitor even after his death. The taunting image of the killer’s dead wife haunts him in the 1971 film Hatchet for the Honeymoon. And in 1966’s Kill, Baby, Kill, the little ghost girl holding a town in panic is acting out the anger of her vindictive mother.

The ghost in Shock may just be Dora’s hallucination, but that doesn’t quite explain Marco’s truly disturbing behavior, who seems to relate to his mother both with hatred and lust. Which only even partially makes sense if it’s Carlo acting through him. In this way, Shock bears more than a passing resemblance to Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, except instead of governess and charge, it’s mother and son. One of the movie’s standout sequences finds Dora alone in her bed, experiencing some kind of orgasmic supernatural pleasure achieved by tying Nicolodi to the bed facing a fixed camera and rotating the entire rig so her hair moves as though floating.

Nicolodi gives a truly outstanding performance in Shock, perfectly encapsulating a woman on the edge of sanity. In truth, Nicolodi wasn’t far off from this herself. As I learned from Bava biographer Tim Lucas’s wonderful audio commentary and a video essay from critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Nicolodi had developed anorexia as a result of the stress and anguish stemming from her breakup with Argento. She’s incredibly frail in the movie, and seemingly channels all of her trauma into the role. By the actress’s own accounts in later years, Bava’s warmth and professionalism on set helped her during that exceedingly tough time.

While Shock is often criticized for its sparse plot and odd atmosphere, the Bavas cannot draw criticism for their effective and eerie in-camera effects. The movie is a surreal triumph and nearly every one of the scariest moments comes from a piece of design or nifty camera trick. Most famously, a terrifying moment where Marco runs toward his mother and becomes Carlo’s ghost in the same shot. It’s a very simple idea that, if done improperly, would have completely failed. The camera move needed to be absolutely precise to achieve the proper impact. Judge for yourself if it did.

Mario Bava made a number of classic and indelible movies during his long career, and it’s a shame that Shock is rarely listed among them. The performances are wonderful, and the story expects the audience to infer more than learn directly. This adds to the overall unease and growing tension. It’s exactly what I like from a ghost story and the filmmaker’s work in general. Shock is due for a reappraisal and thanks to Arrow, I hope it becomes the minor classic it ought to be.

The Blu-ray presentation is gorgeous, with a complete 2K restoration from the original 35mm film. The extras are wonderful, in keeping with Arrow’s usual high standards. It’s worth buying Blu-rays of any kind just for a commentary track by Tim Lucas. His tracks are thoroughly researched and always entertaining. When the movie in question is a Bava film, of whom Lucas is the world recognized authority, it’s all the better.

Heller-Nicholas’s video essay offers an in-depth examination of the movie’s visual symbols, most notably the large sculpture of a hand which is omnipresent and ties directly into the ghostly hand of Carlo, pulling the strings of the plot, as it were. Additional extras include interviews with Lamberto Bava, co-screenwriter Dardano Sacchetti, and critic and genre expert Stephen Thrower. If you’re a scholar of genre cinema or would even just like to know more about a movie you’ve just seen, you truly cannot do better than Arrow’s extras, and these specifically.

I love Mario Bava, and all of his movies deserve a deeper analysis. But Shock represents a master craftsman working at the end of his career under atypical circumstances who managed to turn in a thoughtful, creepy movie in an age of bombastic set pieces and excessive gore. Give Shock a chance and it will reward you.

Shock arrives on Blu-ray from Arrow Video on January 18.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

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Physical media forever! Look, I’m not so naïve as to think all that many people out there are going to choose to buy discs instead of stream things. It’s nearly 2022, a very futuristic sounding year. I get it. But, there are just certain pleasures a digital purchase simply cannot out perform a real thing. As such, this is a list of the best Blu-ray box sets of 2021, in no particular order. The ones I found to be the most worth-the-space on your respective shelves. Certainly there are a lot of great physical media distributors out there, so this list is by no means complete. These were just the ones I liked best. Do not begrudge an old fuddy duddy his small pleasures.

Once Upon a Time in China: The Complete Films

I love the fact that Criterion continues to surprise and delight with its ever-growing catalog of eclectic and disparate film choices. Their move into the realm of Hong Kong action cinema in recent years has been especially exciting. A few years ago they put out Jackie Chan’s first two Police Story movies; last year they gave us the complete Bruce Lee. Now they’re back with writer-director-producer Tsui Hark’s historical epics, Once Upon a Time in China, being the breakthrough franchise for up-and-coming Wushu champion Jet Li.

The series follows the legendary Chinese folk hero Wong Fei-hung, a martial artist and physician who had already been the subject of dozens of movies in the country. Tsui directed four out of the six movies; Li plays Wong in four of the six movies. The two men bring out the best in each other. The movies are not only outstanding, fast, exciting action films (hello fight choreographer Yuen Woo-ping), but a real exploration of Tsui’s feelings toward Chinese history. Tsui is ethnically Chinese, born in South Vietnam, educated in the United States. As a result, he brings an outsider perspective and is both reverent and critical of China’s history. Even going on 30 years later, Once Upon a Time in China feels ahead of its time.

Years of Lead – Five Classic Italian Crime Thrillers

Of all the Italian genre movies that I’ve fallen in love with over the past decade, the poliziotteschi, or Italian crime films, have been the ones that took the longest. Italy, which had enjoyed a decade of swinging progressiveness during the ’60s, was moving toward political unrest by the 1970s. Crime shot up sharply, terrorism from both far-left and far-right factions threatened the citizenry, and violence was always a hair’s breath away. This period, the “Years of Lead,” was tumultuous to say the least.

The poliziotteschi films reflected this unrest and ran the gamut from fun car chase movies to tough, downbeat crime flicks. This box set from the good folks at Arrow Films gives us five lesser known, but truly entertaining and thought-provoking movies from that period. For a full breakdown of the set, check out my review here.

The Eurocrypt of Christopher Lee Collection

Staying in Europe, Severin’s excellent (and thorough) box set explores some of the films horror icon Christopher Lee made in mainland Europe in the ’60s. Some of Lee’s most interesting films come from this period and the set includes three Italian movies, two West German movies, and a Polish horror anthology series he hosted in the ’70s. Three of the movies I think are absolutely worth it for any genre fan. Castle of the Living Dead and Crypt of the Vampire, both from Italy and released in 1964, and the German film The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism from 1967. Despite the latter’s salacious name, it’s easily my favorite of the set, with a gorgeously chilly Bavarian setting and lush color which highlights some of the gorier moments.

Neon Genesis Evangelion: The Complete Series Limited Collector’s Edition

One of the most important, influential, and ponderous anime ever, Neon Genesis Evangelion has never looked as good as it does now thanks to this new Blu-ray set from GKIDS and Shout! Factory. The complete series limited collector’s edition includes: all 26 episodes, plus both of the original movies, in both the new updated subs and dubs and the classic subs and dubs fans remember from the 2000s. If you like the show, this is the best way to see it and hear it.

Future Boy Conan The Complete Series

And speaking of GKIDS and Shout! Factory, they’ve teamed up for a real treat. The directorial debut of one Hayao Miyazaki (heard of him?!) the 26-episode series is at once a dark, post-apocalyptic adventure and a happy, lighthearted kids show. Oh, anime. The show originally aired in 1978 and hasn’t been easy to come by in North America until now. Boasting a brand new English dub and subtitle translation, the HD presentation on this set is absolutely stunning. You can absolutely see Miyazaki’s trademark mix of whimsy and dourness on display. It feels like a great companion piece to his later feature, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. No wonder he became the greatest animated filmmaker of all time.

The Daimajin Trilogy

Staying in Japan, we have a fascinating trilogy of kaiju movies that all came out within the same calendar year. Each of the films has a different director, different-ish story, and different characters. Well, mostly different characters; they’re all period-set, samurai historicals that happen to end with a giant living statue god wreaking havoc on those who would do harm to his worshipers. The product of Daiei Films, the same company that made the much more traditional Gamera series, the Daimajin trilogy are generally straight forward drama films punctuated by extended third-action kaiju destruction, some of the best in the genre. For a full rundown of this set from Arrow Films, click here.

Thundarr the Barbarian Complete Series

Most of the sets in this list from 2021 have a ton of extras or value added material. This one is on here just because it surprised me and I love it. I’d never seen Thundarr the Barbarian prior to getting the Blu-ray set this year and so I assumed, wrongly, that it would be a bit like The Herculoids or the original Space Ghost. Excuses for limited-movement animated action. But boy was I wrong. It only lasted 21 episodes, but it features some of the wildest post-apocalyptic scenarios I’ve ever seen. The titular Thundarr travels the wreckage of the Earth with his companions, Princess Ariel and the large, bestial Ookla the Mok. It mixes swords and sorcery with science fiction and technology. It’s a hell of a lot of fun. Click here to check out my full Thundarr the Barbarian review.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

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Throughout his career as a filmmaker, Guillermo del Toro has shown us the darkest parts of humanity. Generally he uses the lens of the outsiders, the unwanted children and the perceived monsters. In all of the director’s best films, he mixes fantastical elements with the harsh, often violent, reality of the world. In his latest, Nightmare Alley, it’s all harsh reality. The only fantastical elements are the outright fraudulent, the work of hucksters and charlatans. As a result, it’s also the bleakest look at humanity he’s ever put to screen.

Del Toro and Kim Hunter adapted William Lindsay Gresham’s novel of the same name. The book had already been adapted to the screen in a 1947 film noir at Fox. The movie, which was to be swashbuckling hero actor Tyrone Power’s shift to “serious” films, was too bleak even for a noir. Its setting of sideshows, carnivals, mentalist performances, and faux spiritual readings is not the typical backdrop for such a picture. But it seems, in 2021, the perfect vehicle for del Toro. He has, time and again, shown the utmost love for such things.

The movie follows a drifter named Stan Carlisle (Bradley Cooper) who happens upon a traveling sideshow. He falls into a job, first as grunt labor and then as a barker for Madam Zeena (Toni Collette) and her phony mentalism act. The head of the sideshow, Clem (Willem Dafoe), takes a shine to Stan. He shows him all of the seedier parts of the business. That includes medical oddities and the Geek, a strictly illegal act where a bestial man bites the head off a live chicken. Meanwhile, Zeena’s drunkard husband Pete (David Strathairn) teaches Stan the ways of mentalism. Stan’s natural showmanship takes over. Eventually he and another carny named Molly (Rooney Mara) branch out on their own using Pete’s dangerous mentalism scheme.

When they reach the big city, Stan thinks he can land the bigger fish in the form of powerful judges and businessmen. Though specifically forbidden from doing “spook shows” where he pretends to communicate with the dead, Stan thinks he can make the big money making rich people believe he can speak to their dead loved ones. It’s a particularly risky move. He has to enlist the aid of psychiatrist Dr. Lilith Ritter (Cate Blanchett), who has her own motives. Richard Jenkins plays a particularly powerful man Stan would be very foolish to try to swindle.

First and foremost it should be said that this version of Nightmare Alley is not as good, or as upsetting, as the ’47 original. Sure it can show more blood and more explicitly convey themes the earlier film simply couldn’t. But what it lacks is the urgency, the spark of unbridled insanity from characters like Stan and Lilith that made the original so disturbing. While the story, like all good noirs, is about doom from beginning to end, we never get the sense in this version that Stan might have something else up his sleeve that could get him out of the scrapes.

That said, it’s clear what del Toro cares most about. The best scenes here are the early ones with Stan ingratiating himself with the sideshow folks, learning about that very specific world of making yokels believe they’ve gotten their money’s worth. There is something horrific and yet, like all the best del Toro movies, strangely beautiful about the carny life. This stands in contrast to the gorgeously recreated Art Deco offices and hotels that permeate the second half. They seem foreboding, like a world Stan ought to realize he doesn’t belong in.

I think Nightmare Alley is perhaps del Toro’s most handsome production. Everything about the visual presentation is outstanding. Dan Laustsen, who also shot Crimson Peak and The Shape of Water, does a masterful job of weaving the camera around the settings, never straying far from Stan himself. Nathan Johnson’s score also lends itself to the heavy feeling of longing and dread that permeates the entire story.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the cast. The performances are quite good, and particular plaudits must go to Cooper who is in, I think, every single scene in the movie. There is no question that Stan Carlisle is the tragic hero(?) of the movie. Cooper displays the kind of swagger necessary for someone who believes himself to be the smartest guy in the room. Blanchett is, well, she’s Cate Blanchett and therefore amazing, though I do feel like she’s playing a femme fatale in a 1940s movie while everyone else is playing in a movie set in the 1940s. Not a complaint, given the character, but a bit jarring.

What stands out most is that, unlike the earlier del Toro movies, there isn’t anything like the kind of magic or whimsy that he tends to inject. There is no fantasy here, aside from the delusions of grandeur in Stan’s own mind. His overt fantasies have monsters—ghosts, fairies, an ancient fish-man-god—but always we learn that humans are the real monsters. Here it’s all humans, so they’re all the real monsters. It’s simply about the degree to which they’re monstrous. What’s grotesque is how people treat each other, and the violence that can erupt when others see them for what they truly are.

Nightmare Alley is a fascinating, troubling movie that mostly succeeds and offers us a look at a world obsessed with horrors of the real life variety.

3.5 out of 5

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

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Folk horror is enjoying a massive resurgence these days. Things like Midsommar and The Witch have proven eerie, rural scares have a place in our modern sensibilities. But more than just witches or cults, I’ve loved seeing the influx of contemporary-set horror films that utilize a particular piece of folklore from whatever country makes the movie. I’m thinking of things like the 2019 Irish film The Hole in the Ground which played with the myth of the changeling. Another is the excellent Guatemalan film La Llorona which uses a myth of a ghostly woman to explore themes of real-world atrocities. Add Lee Haven Jones’s Welsh-language film The Feast to that austere company. It’s exceptionally creepy.

The Feast is a movie that really got under my skin. It’s an incredibly slow build that crescendos in one of the most brutal and effective final acts in any recent horror film. I’d never seen a movie, or much of anything, in the Welsh language. It has a beautiful, lyrical sound to it, which undercuts the growing dread that starts building from minute one. On the surface, it’s a movie about bougie rich people getting their comeuppance. Looking deeper, it reflects the growing disdain the Earth herself must have toward those who think so little of nature.

Set in an idyllic (quite modern) estate in the pastures of Wales, The Feast depicts the hours leading to a dinner party. The family who own the house are politician Gwyn (Julian Lewis Jones), his socialite wife Glenda (Nia Roberts), and their two grown sons. Gweirydd (Sion Alun Jones) is an alpha male doctor who trains nonstop for an iron man competition. Guto (Steffan Cennydd) is a London hipster with substance abuse problems. The dinner party is a not-so-secret gathering of a land developer and local farmers so Gwyn and Glenda can broker a big development deal.

Enter into the equation Cadi (Annes Elwy), a local girl Glenda has hired to be the help for the event. We know something is up with Cadi immediately. We see her walk up to the house rather than drive; she has a dreamy, uneasy air about her. She almost never speaks, and anyone who’s paying attention (which the family is not) would clock that she’s a little off. Any time she finds herself alone, Cadi looks through the family’s belongings. She even tries on Glenda’s jewelry, laughing in the mirror.

The only time Cadi shows much emotion around the family is when Gwyn comes in with a pair of rabbits he shot for the meal. The sight of these dead animals causes Cadi to run out of the house, becoming violently ill and sobbing. The movie never hides the affinity Cadi has with the natural world. Instead, it holds back until almost the end to explain why and how. This allows the tension to ratchet up continuously as stranger and more disturbing things befall our unaware party.

Everyone in the movie is wonderful, but special commendations should go to Roberts who perfectly portrays both vulnerability and avarice; and Elwy who feels like she really is in a hypnotic daze throughout. This is not a movie that holds back anything, and the moments of gore and repulsion are shocking and prolonged, and so the cast needs to be able to ground it. They do so superbly.

Director Lee Haven Jones (whom you might know from his work on Doctor Who), shows a deft hand at the drama as well as the outright horror. He shows us a lot without it ever feeling gratuitous. And he manages to make some pretty unseemly characters sympathetic and even tragic.

The Feast is a movie well worth seeking out if the recent spate of horror appeals to you. It finds its own unique spin on the subject and will stay with you, and your psyche, long after it’s over. It just might make you reconsider your next rare steak.

The Feast hits theaters Friday, November 19.

4 out of 5

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

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Any time some beloved piece of media rolls up to the remake/reboot/reimagine altar, fans tend to get very nervous. With good reason; will said remake tarnish, taint, or otherwise topple the good name of the thing? Netflix’s live-action Cowboy Bebop has been a topic of speculation for quite a long while. Each new piece of information or shot of a costume, the question as to whether it would be a straight remake of the 1998 anime or not has been on many lips. I was as skeptical and worried as anyone. But now having seen the whole thing, I can assure you all: it’s really good. How’s that for a review?

Having said it’s good, I feel the need to immediately follow that up with a caveat: this version of Cowboy Bebop draws heavily from the anime but it is inherently not a carbon copy. Yes, a lot of the characters’ given circumstances and personalities are intact. Obviously visually the characters and settings are pretty damn close to the anime. There’s all the wonderful Yoko Kanno music you love. BUT, and this is key, the live-action Bebop is a remix, not a cover.

Times are different. The kinds of stories a Japanese animated series could tell in 1998 are not exactly the kinds of stories a live-action serialized drama on Netflix can tell in 2021. Naturally; it would be silly not to adapt, adopt, and improve (where applicable).

The first episode of this new Cowboy Bebop remakes the first episode of the anime, “Asteroid Blues,” almost entirely. The differences are minor. They include a lengthy action prologue of Spike Spiegel (John Cho) and Jet Black (Mustafa Shakir) hunting a bounty. Faye Valentine (Daniella Pineda) who doesn’t come in to the anime until the third episode, also joins the first episode, as a rival bounty hunter. Other than that, it’s largely the same.

But it’s from here that this new Cowboy Bebop really makes its own mark on the material. Spike’s past plays a huge part in the series, not only as backstory but as proper plot. His rival Vicious (Alex Hassell) is more than just a grunting adversary. Here, he’s an unhinged gangster with delusions of grandeur and an inferiority complex. Julia (Elena Satine), the third prong of this love triangle, has so much more inner life and agency of her own. These two characters, for me, rise way above what they got to do in the anime. They aren’t echoes of the past, but living, vibrant characters.

As for our main trio of heroes, their exploits are still largely episodic, but their relationship and growth feel modern and more realistic. Jet, a former police officer who left in disgrace, has an ex-wife and a daughter he’s trying to do right by, even if his bounty hunting gets in the way. Spike has stayed largely silent about his past, knowing Jet’s hatred of the Syndicate would likely lead to the dissolution of their partnership. Cho and Shakir are absolutely phenomenal and embody Spike and Jet to perfection.

But for me the undisputed standout of this very stellar main cast is Pineda as Faye. She in a lot of ways had the hardest job, taking a character from the anime who is equal parts annoying and eye candy and managed to make her a fun-loving con woman who is incredibly capable and yet deeply sad. Faye and Spike start out greatly disliking each other but eventually grow to have real respect and camaraderie. She gets to be heroic and hilarious and vulnerable and just owns every scene she’s in.

I definitely don’t want to give away much else about the story or how it does or doesn’t compare to the original anime. That’ll be for after the thing comes out. But what I will say is it looks great; the action is fun; it’s consistently humorous. It makes me excited to watch more when season two (hopefully) comes out. And as a live-action adaptation of an anime, that’s something of a minor miracle.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

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Whether at a dinner party or on a first date, you’ve probably had to answer the old “if you could live in any time in history” question. If your answer is any time pre-penicillin, you’re wrong. But few would probably think “London in the 1960s” is anything other than a great, super swank answer. The music, the fashion, the art in general; it was a very cool and hip time. It’s easy to romanticize this bygone era coming up on 60 years removed, to think it was so much better than now. If Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho is to be believed, it was maybe worse.

Last Night in Soho is at once a love letter to film, music, and style of the 1960s and a cautionary tale about succumbing too much to their supposed glamour. Living in the past is dangerous, whether you actually lived through it or not. Wright and co-writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns weave an interesting, mostly effective narrative about a girl both literally and figuratively out of step with her present, focusing instead on the shadows of yesteryear. Some of those shadows are darker than others.

Focus Features

Thomasin McKenzie plays Ellie, our heroine, obsessed with everything about the ’60s. She lives a relatively simple life with her grandmother (’60s icon Rita Tushingham). But soon, she gets accepted to attend a prestigious London fashion design school in Soho. After arriving, she finds that her whole vibe doesn’t really go with the fairly nasty girls in her dorm. So, she finds a bedsit for rent in an old building. The owner (Dame Diana Rigg, obviously another ’60s icon) seems nice enough, and Ellie loves the room. The one hiccup, not mentioned in the advert, is that each night after going to bed, Ellie finds herself suddenly transported to the 1960s. She travels to the past as the mirror reflection of a gorgeous young woman named Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy).

Sandie, we quickly learn, is an aspiring singer. She fearlessly attempts to put herself in front of the owner of the hottest club in town. First, however, she has to win over Jack (Matt Smith), a talent manager. He’s suave, dashing, and a little bit dangerous, which Sandie (and Ellie) find irresistible. As visions of Sandie’s life overrun Ellie’s nights, her days in fashion school find her replicating Sandie’s style, both in designs and in her own look. She gets a job at a pub when her new lifestyle becomes too expensive, which introduces Ellie to a number of colorful characters, including a pervy older gentleman (Terence Stamp, just another ’60s icon).

Focus Features

Naturally, the good times don’t last forever. Ellie’s visions of Sandie and Jack take a dark turn and the dream world (if it is a dream) begins to bleed into Ellie’s waking life. A mystery arises about Sandie’s existence and solving it becomes Ellie’s sole pursuit. Even if everything else in her life begins to fall apart.

Wright has always infused horror into his films. Obviously Shaun of the Dead is a horror comedy, but both Hot Fuzz and The World’s End have heavy horror elements along with the action, sci-fi, and comedy. Last Night in Soho is a fantasy-drama with comedic elements that steadily march toward horror as the runtime continues. It never lets up once the horror starts.

The scenes of Ellie inhabiting Sandie’s life are easily Wright’s most impressive. He keeps finding ways to put Sandie near a mirror and for doubling to put Ellie in a version of the action. The first scene in the nightclub in particular is sumptuous, allowing the vibe of the swinging ’60s to wash over the screen with vibrant colors and lavish staging. You want these scenes to last forever, which they of course can’t, which is of course the point.

Focus Features

While the entire setup and execution works incredibly well, once the mystery and horror take over, it loses a bit. I was surprised to find the care and attention paid to the dream not carry over into the nightmare. Which is a shame considering the movie’s theme is nostalgia for the past never living up to reality. The picture book version of 1960s Soho feels much better realized than the seedy reality. And I have to say, the mystery at the movie’s center didn’t do much to hold my interest once it took control.

This is not to say the horror doesn’t work at all. Wright’s visual acuity is too good not to enjoy visual references to Mario Bava’s colorful murder set pieces in Blood and Black Lace or Roman Polanski’s claustrophobia in paranoid thriller Repulsion. He creates these striking, expressionistic tableaux which hearken back to a number of classic horror films and styles. The scares are effective, and stronger than you might expect. But I couldn’t help feeling like the story itself took the easy way out more than once despite set-ups that feel like they might be more poignant and complex.

Focus Features

Misgivings aside, I still greatly enjoyed Last Night in Soho, and I hope it ushers in a new era in Wright’s filmography. One where he can branch out from direct references into something with more to say. It definitely has more substance than Baby Driver, but it can never quite get out of the trap of all that 1960s style.

3 out of 5

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

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Horror as a genre is always a response to the real life culture and social happenings of a particular time and place. Slasher movies in the ’80s reflected the conservative surge in the US at the time. The giallo in Italy made the most of a post-fascist loosening of censorship. And horror made in Spain during the regime of Franco had to specifically depict other countries as the source of fear and derision. Cultural context for horror is maybe the most fascinating part of studying those trends, and perhaps none is as fascinating as the “Coffin Joe Trilogy,” a trio of Brazilian horror movies using the country’s staunch Catholicism to its advantage.

N.T.M

Coffin Joe, an English translation of his Portuguese name Zé do Caixão, is the creation and persona of Brazilian writer, director, and actor José Mojica Marins. The character is an undertaker who terrorizes communities with his penchant for violence and belief that his own bloodline is perfect and must be continued through impregnating the perfect woman to bear him a son. Coffin Joe wears a black suit, cape, and top hat, and has a thick beard and grotesquely long fingernails.

Though he only appeared in three official movies, Marins appeared as Coffin Joe in several other movies, three television series, various music videos, and even had his own comic book series. He’s generally considered “Brazil’s National Boogeyman,” which is quite the feat. But what makes Coffin Joe so interesting is not his look, but his attitude. In a country as religious as Brazil, its his Nietzschean and atheist beliefs that make him so terrifying, and it’s always through Catholicism that he is defeated.

The first appearance of Zé do Caixão came in Marins’ 1964 movie At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul, the very first horror movie produced in Brazil. The townsfolk hate Coffin Joe for his atheism and violent ways, but they fear him for his strange physical prowess and allure. The movie begins with Joe delivering a monologue directly to camera:

What is life? It is the beginning of death.
What is death? It is the end of life.
What is existence? It is the continuity of blood.
What is blood? It is the reason to exist.

This immediately stands in stark contrast to one of the major tenets of Catholic Christianity. Death is not, for Catholics, the end of life. Belief in God is life everlasting. The blood, in Coffin Joe’s worldview, and specifically perpetuating his “superior” blood is the key to immortality.

Throughout the movie, he beats, maims, and kills various people and takes women into his grasp as possible vessels for his superior blood. The proper authorities continually attempt to punish him through the laws of man, but he evades prosecution. Eventually, he does meet his end not by angry villagers, but by the apparitions of his victims returning to banish him to Hell.

Paranaguá Cinematográfica

Many horror monsters, specifically vampires, use demonic or Satanic imagery, and crosses and holy water—instruments of Catholic God—are the tools for their destruction. But Coffin Joe is specifically not a disciple of the devil. In the 1967 sequel This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse, Marins presents Joe as an enemy of both God and Satan, equally. He’s an atheist, he doesn’t believe in any of that. Catholics believe in the devil and Hell; they are the punishment for wickedness. But Coffin Joe thinks it’s all ridiculous and simple-minded.

We find out at the beginning of the movie that Coffin Joe did, in fact, not die at the end of the first film. After a lengthy stay in a hospital, he goes back to his wicked ways, even more determined to find the perfect woman to bear him a son. He kidnaps several women and subjects them to horrible torture, looking for the one who will show no fear. Apparently fear is not superior. He feeds the ones who scream to venomous snakes.

Paranaguá Cinematográfica

Eventually, Joe finds a woman, Laura, who shares his belief in “continuity of blood” and begins an affair with her. He, naturally, kills all of her family who stand in their way. Laura becomes pregnant, but a complication means only one, she or the baby, will live. They both agree that the child should live, but the surgery fails and both Laura and the son die.

What’s particularly fascinating about This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse and its relationship with religion comes about halfway through the movie. Joe learns that one of the women he fed to snakes was pregnant, and he feels guilty. Even a sadist like Coffin Joe knows children are the key to continuity of blood. That night, he has a vivid nightmare—in color!—of his trip to Hell, where he sees the torture that awaits him. At the end of the movie, after a townsperson shoots him, a priest comes to him and begs him to repent and accept Jesus into his heart, which he does just as he dies.

Even more so than the first movie, the second movie is all about the need for Catholicism and belief. God and the Devil essentially team up to thwart Coffin Joe at the end of the movie. Coffin Joe therefore becomes both the monster and the victim in this instance. He’s a horrible murderer, but even he cowers at the might and majesty of Christian deism.

After a 40-year hiatus, Marins wrote, directed, and starred in the final official Coffin Joe movie, 2008’s Embodiment of Evil. It finds Coffin Joe, who again didn’t actually die, released from a maximum security asylum through legal kerfuffling. Forty years away from society means Sao Paolo has changed dramatically. More people are atheists, living hedonistic lives. Coffin Joe still wants to find a perfect woman to bear him a son, but now he has many acolytes willing to help him, and many women who want to be his chosen bearer.

Embodiment of Evil is not nearly as good or interesting as the earlier films, in my opinion. Given that it’s 2008, the Gothic atmosphere of the ’60s films are largely gone and we instead have over-the-top gore, copious nudity, and a general heavy metal vibe. Even still, however, Marins reflects the changing attitude of the time. Not only are the ones who oppose him now all the older generations and a militant young priest, but they’re all direct victims of his past crimes. No more is the mere sin of his beliefs enough to damn him. If anything, the perceived piety of those against him is the crime.

20th Century Studios

It’s also the only one of the three movies where Coffin Joe succeeds. Yes, he dies (he always dies), but his efforts to continue his bloodline come to fruition. The movie ends with eight of his potentials showing up to his grave, each pregnant. The implication is not that God will smite the wicked, it’s that the wicked will inherit the Earth.

José Mojica Marins passed away in February 2020, at the age of 83. He left behind a truly wild persona and a legacy of horror spanning nearly 60 years. The Coffin Joe Trilogy doesn’t represent the most strictly terrifying, nor the best made horror movies ever, but their point of view and iconography are so strong and singular that they deserve a place in horror history.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!

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