by ·Comments Off on Exit 8 (2025, Genki Kawamura)

Long-take digital cinema about people stuck in an endless videogame maze of subway tunnels. Not since A Quiet Place has a movie spelled out its rules this clearly on signage, and not since Cube has the puzzle been solved by a late-arriving autistic guy (a kid, in this case).

When a body meet a body passing through the tile. I picked the poster behind them as anomaly, but Escher’s first name really was Maurits:

You have to go through the loop correctly (turn back if you see anomaly, proceed if not) eight times in a row. We switch perspectives from Guy 1 to Kid to Guy 2. Each guy has parental anxiety and they keep stopping to get emotional or else the movie would be shorter. I liked the loop concept more than the psychological details. One run is all anomalies, peaking in an Atonement tunnel flood.

by ·Comments Off on Is God Is (2026, Aleshea Harris)

Good production design – I thought about The Black Phone which opens “DENVER 1978” and spends the next 90 minutes painstakingly creating Denver in 1978, while this one feels free to follow its own rules (they drive a 1970s car, use modern music and speech, nobody has cellphones).

Scarred twin sisters (from Kindred and I’m a Virgo) meeting their real mom Vivica A. Fox for the first time in memory, she says your dad ruined our lives. They track him via a mute strongman lawyer who pays people to beat him up (Don King in Ali) and find he’s got a new life with battered hotwife Janelle Monae and perfect twin boys. The girls follow their path and kill everybody. I didn’t think it was necessary for the dad to grab Racine while he’s burning to death, but I guess revenge is gonna have a cost.

by ·Comments Off on The Cremator (1969, Juraj Herz)

Practically a monologue by our lead guy, who becomes more demented and self-obsessed, devolving from a family man to a family-murdering nazi. He’s a recognizable type too, always talking in circles but without anything of his own to say, picking up outside ideas, internalizing and amplifying them. Sure we got grotesque lenses and fast cuts, but the thing that turns this from a series of scenes into one years-spanning monologue is the terrific transitions, where some Rope-like camera move will have him finishing a thought or a sentence in a new location or month than he started it. Herz would go on to even weirder things, like the vampire car movie.

Cremator vs. cat:

Cremator’s innocent son with his goofy smile:

Wax museum:

Unfortunately not a wax museum:

by ·Comments Off on Hokum (2026, Damian McCarthy)

Movie’s lesson is to bring a cutting tool wherever you go, and that despite The Monkey we should continue making Adam Scott horror movies. McCarthy’s Oddity was a slow burn with a delicious ending, he follows it up with a mostly fun movie with a bum ending, oh well.

Adam is an ornery writer staying at a rural hotel to scatter his parents’ ashes and/or finish his dreary conquistador novel and/or commit suicide. When he gets out of the hospital the hotel is closing for the season, the girl who’d rescued him is missing, and everyone suspects Psilocybin Jerry (David Wilmot of every Irish movie, also sinister boss of Little Joe) of kidnapping her but nobody can find Jerry (Adam strolls up to Jerry’s van and there he is).

I got a couple guys named Fergal and Mal mixed up, but obviously if one character is named Mal he’s the killer. Later on Mal has stuffed the girl in a dumbwaiter, shot Jerry with a crossbow and locked Adam in the burning hotel, all of which is complicated by ghosts in the honeymoon suite and witches in the cellar. Not only is the attempted real-world explanation of Adam’s spooky ordeals bad (he was drugged all along), they also try to make us care about the amended ending of his novel.

by ·Comments Off on Rose of Nevada (2025, Mark Jenkin)

Fishing boat time-warp story drifts from mysterious to calculated and back. George MacKay is a young family man who returns from a few days at sea to an alternate timeline where his wife isn’t around, while his loser/loner coworker (Green Room punk singer Callum Turner) returns to the loving family he never had. This is part of some whispery conspiracy set in place by the locals, aware of the ship’s power, replacing their lost son with an unhappy MacKay. It’s all fine story setup, but after Enys Men I’m mostly here for the colors and textures, and they don’t disappoint.

MDFMDF liked it, Sicinski not as much:

Jenkin still uses apparent light spills at the end of scenes to provide both punctuation and transition … one gets an interesting sense from Jenkin’s films, both formally and thematically, that they are deliberate throwbacks to older ways of life. Compare Rose of Nevada to a film like Leviathan (the fishing one), and you immediately notice how rusty and dilapidated this world, how it’s all on the verge of falling apart. Jenkin is a Cornishman, and so he has an understandable commitment to a rural, minoritarian way of life that must militate against its own extinction. Then again, depicting traditional methods as a ghost story, something long dead but haunting the present, seems like an odd way to make the argument.

by ·Comments Off on Shorts Month 2026: Toons

I intended for “shorts month” to be a single month, but it has jumped the fences, and now we have Infinite Shorts Month.

–
Hittin’ the Trail for Hallelujah Land (1931, Rudulf Ising)

Some Steamboat Willie action, Black-coded animal creatures sing and dance, but either there’s nothing in here worth banning this cartoon for 100 years, or my version is edited. Finds time in its seven minutes for multiple overboard rescues, a girl’s Uncle Tom getting spooked by graveyard skeletons, and a dastardly kidnapper.

–
Sunday Go to Meetin’ Time (1936, Friz Freleng)

Okay this one is significantly worse, all chickens and dice, with at least three Fetchits in the cast. Guy named Nicodemus conks his head, dreams himself in hell for skipping church, awakening after a Satan serenade. Fun fact: the very evil GoToMeeting app was named after this film.

–
Uncle Tom’s Bungalow (1937, Tex Avery)

Long metafilm setup and some good Tex body-deforming animation can’t save this one, about a slave dealer trying to repo Uncle Tom after a couple of four year-olds buy him then fall behind on their payments.

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Isle of Pingo Pongo (1938, Tex Avery)

Pretty good, as far as rubbery character animation goes, but mostly in service of dumb puns and boring stereotypes. Stars a pre-Porky stuttering guitarist.

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Porky’s Building (1937, Frank Tashlin)

Porky and his competing contractor bid the same amount for the new city hall, so the city awards them both the contract. This is a new loophole I wasn’t aware of! It’s man rabbit vs. machine, but the other guy gets greedy and his equipment explodes.

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Porky’s Railroad (1937, Frank Tashlin)

Porky’s old steam engine is being retired in favor of a sleek new model, so he challenges the new guy to a race. Second one of these in a row to remind me of the John Henry steel-drivin’ man. A bull speaks in a Popeye voice. Animation by Bob Bentley, of the Philadelphia Bentleys.

–
Scaredy Cat (1948, Chuck Jones)

Late Porky, with Sylvester afraid of their new mouse-haunted house.

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Beep, Beep (1952, Chuck Jones)

Timely: Coyote’s back in theaters this week. Second Road Runner cartoon, possibly first appearance of Acme?

by ·Comments Off on The Black Phone (2021, Scott Derrickson)

Set in 1978 Denver, this is one of those movies where the bulk of the effort was put not into scares or the story making sense, but in lovingly recreating 1978 Denver. Young “Albert” Finney is a bullied baseballer schoolkid with a typically drunk/abusive dad (Jeremy Davies of Spanking the Monkey), when all the kids in town start getting abducted by Ethan Hawke, who then grabs Finney. Now the kid has to escape from the basement before he gets murdered.

Best part of the movie is Grabber’s mask, which has a different expression every time we see it. Worst part is the titular phone, through which the kid’s dead classmates call and offer clues that help him escape, while the police are being as useless as they were in Weapons. Why did Grabber even install that ghost phone down there? Glad to see Ziggy as Grabber’s brother, a conspiracy nut who lives above the child-dungeon and gets killed for discovering it (?). I was only half paying attention, playing with my new glasses. Derrickson initiated the direct-to-DVD era of the Hellraiser franchise, and this is at least his second Ethan Hawke missing-children serial-killer movie after Sinister.

by ·Comments Off on Saint Laurent (2014, Bertrand Bonello)

Mixes up chronology and split-screens engagingly in the last quarter, but it’s too little too late after a 150-minute biopic about a fashion guy. Yves is the A Very Long Engagement boy, his life/business partner is not-blonde-anymore Jeremie Renier, and the hottie who comes along threatening to overturn the whole situation with his hotness is Louis Garrel, while Lea Seydoux and The Emperor of a Thousand Planets hang around without much to do. Very attractive surfaces here, but it hurts to watch this a week after The Captive.

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Where Are You, Bertrand Bonello (2014)

Bert is happy to self-montage and discuss his films on a surface level (such as their runtimes, opening and closing shots), or show himself moping around a house, and vaguely (via subtitles) answering the question of the title (he doesn’t know, doesn’t want to know).

by ·Comments Off on Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026, Jane Schoenbrun)

Self-analyzing cinema, Scream without the thrills. Kids in the Hall sense of humor with stunt-cast harbinger Kevin McDonald. “There is a hole at the bottom of the lake where the movies come from.” Sleepaway Camp and Friday the 13th both exist within this movie, they’re both mentioned, but they’re also ripped off (Friday sequel titles, Sleepaway closing shot) by the fake Miasma franchise. The middle quarter of this is just Camp Miasma Part 1, featuring a long-take massacre to Counting Crows’ A Long December, which has never felt longer: digital kills combined with film texture and VHS love (return of the Videodrome flesh slot from TV Glow). I liked it, of course – the fantasy of going inside your favorite horror franchise to make out with Gillian Anderson.