by ·Comments Off on The End of Oak Street (2026, David Robert Mitchell)

Parents in Spielbergian suburb (Anne, Ewan) have two kids (one played young Aubrey Plaza in My Old Ass, the other played young Oscar Isaac in Frankenstein aka the young twins in The Monkey). The girl is really into Carl Sagan – Cosmos came out in 1980, so when the power goes out those flashlight batteries aren’t gonna last long. And the power goes out because their street gets time-warped into the dinosaur age, and dinos start eating their neighbors.

“Will you stop being so damn optimistic? This is not going to be okay.” Cut to a wide shot with the rooftop blood spatter that used to be their annoying neighbor (acupuncture casualty PJ Byrne of Final Destination 5) is great enough, then I laughed so hard when Ewan got eaten that it’s probably best I didn’t see this with an audience. Ewan had been Tokyo Sonata-ing, secretly delivering pizzas for cash, but now capitalism and pizza don’t exist anymore. The survivors discover a pulsating black hole and jump into it, arriving back in their home era with twenty minutes left to alert anyone worth rescuing before the dinopocalypse repeats. Mitchell’s movies seem more watchable than ever, but less worth taking seriously as time goes on – we’ll see if It Still Follows turns things around.

by ·Comments Off on Terrifier 3 (2024, Damien Leone)

“a Phil Falcone production” – not the disgraced hedge fund billionaire, but the auteur of a PTSD army drama with Tom Sizemore, and defendant of finance disputes over the first movie in this series. Home-invader Santa carrying an axe is nothing new. “Five years prior” cop finds a decapitated clown in abandoned building, it kills him and takes his head, so the backstory is… Art in various forms of headlessness and disrepair tears some people apart to repair himself?

Teen Vic Secret Angel Sienna is still alive from part two, and continuity is a drag. Her uncle Greg (a Goldthwait regular) takes her home to Aunt Jess (Crazy Joe’s wife in The Irishman) and admiring younger cousin Gabby (who has only ever been in Christmas movies, incl this one). Nerd boy Jonathan is also still alive, growing into a not-great actor. But it barely matters – the dialogue is Hallmark-caliber and the production is at “casting Clint Howard” sequel level, following in the footsteps of The Dentist 2, Silent Night Deadly Night 4, Leprechaun 2, and 3 From Hell.

I don’t like that the girl-clown-demon talks, or that the final scene reveals Sienna’s Wolverine healing ability. Not sure how I feel about Art killing a podcaster with a chainsaw while a novelty “Terrifier Christmas” song plays. I’m fine with the cute niece falling into hell despite a really terrible plan to save her.

by ·Comments Off on It Ends* (2025, Alexander Ullom)

Old friends are catching up, go on a drive onto an endless* road, when they turn back they hit a dead end and people from the woods assault them, so they turn around and just drive forever*.

Military guy Tyler’s delivery of “I’m the most well-adjusted person in the vehicle” was possibly my biggest laugh of the year. He’s the first to leave the car to take his chances in the woods, years(?) before anyone else gives up. I didn’t notice until editing the screenshots that the movie goes from widescreen to 16:9 at this point – why?

“This is not real life anymore.”
“Like a drug trip or a wormhole or an ancient curse?”

As the people in the woods diminish, outside breaks can last longer. They never get hungry or tired, the car doesn’t run out of gas, the days go on until some of them give up and become the people in the woods. The time I had to stay at work overnight for a PBS Kids delivery, and I ate a Kind bar and was allergic to it, this is exactly what it felt like.

by ·Comments Off on Anything That Moves (2025, Alex Phillips)

Liam is the local male prostitute, biking between clients, everyone in town paying each other for sex on an app called Snaxxx. His girl Thea is having sex with guy Ray whose kid colored his face with marker, then she pops back into Ray’s apartment real quick and maybe murders him in the brain. Soon all their clients are dying, and Liam is the prime suspect.

There’s a tiny bit of style via split-diopter giallo murderer shots and film-end flares, but I don’t mean to make the movie sound cooler than it is. Already on the run, Liam kills a rapist cop with a rock to the head. Turns out all those closeup on crucifix necklaces weren’t random artsy camerawork, as the cop’s weirdo religious partner is the serial killer. All nearby sex workers are activated via snaxxx alert to come to Liam’s rescue and defeat the crazy cultist, who also appears in this year’s Night Nurse, which I had on the queue but now I dunno.

by ·Comments Off on Resurrection (2025, Bi Gan)

I thought from the film description that the Dreaming Deliriants would be the heroes but the first one we meet, hunted through his illusions, is a stooped decaying opium gobbler asking to be put out of his misery. He has a film projector in his guts, making this a double feature candidate for Cigarette Burns. His guts project him into his favorite silent film and mine: The Sprinkler Sprinkled.

Hat Cop breaks out a murder suspect during the prison ball. The suspect Lady-From-Shangahis himself into a mirror room, escapes the cop and stabs him in the ear – there’s much more ear stabbing in this movie than I would prefer. Think I see the train car from the short.

Twenty years later he’s an ex-monk named Mongrel helping to loot a temple, has the power to destroy rocks with his fingers. He spends the night and meets the Spirit of Bitterness who wants to reach enlightenment by hearing how the guy killed his rabid father.

Ten years later the Deliriant vanished into nothingness, but we see him at a bus station – he’s a scammer who picks up a kid to do card tricks. This ends with a cinephiliac long-take section where he spends the last night of 1999 with a vampire girl he just met. Then the hunter from the beginning(?) infiltrates his final dream to make him think he’s at his mother’s side. This feels like a reference to Spielberg’s AI, but also, the Sprinkler gets Sprinkled yet again. I know this all reads as nonsense, but these are the notes I took while watching this movie, and I’m sticking with ’em. Music by M83 in a rare side gig from his brother Yann G‘s movies.

A true cinephile uses all the aspect ratios:

by ·Comments Off on Blue Heron (2025, Sophy Romvari)

Older brother Jeremy is acting up, parents are worried. Little sister Sasha is probably more focused on living her life, dad sees family as a distraction from his computer. They go see herons at a nature center and learn that after the birds raise their kids, the bond between parents dissolves, hmmm. Jeremy goes missing, is found by mom, shoplifts and is brought home by the cops, is sometimes sweet and mostly blank or hostile. Child psychologist is little help, the parents agree that he’s an asshole. Then a lady arrives holding a clipboard, that’s never good. “She suggested that she takes him away and I said yes.”

Sudden flash-forward and Sasha is a filmmaker presenting the case of the brother to a current-day group of social workers. What do we know now that we didn’t know then? Then Grown Sasha is the clipboard woman, stepping back into her house to visit Young Sasha and her parents.

Sophy for Sight & Sound:

I love when a film brings you into an experience rather than just telling you a story. It asks you to dissect the construction as you are participating in the watching of it.
…
It’s quite nihilistic in some ways. You want there to be an outcome that benefits the characters, but I’m a realist. I wanted to show the artistic exploration, but then cut short the emotional catharsis because it’s not a rescue mission that she goes on. If anything, it’s a research mission. Oftentimes when you do research, you don’t find what you’re looking for.

by ·Comments Off on Dragon Dilatation (2024, Bertrand Mandico)

Another part of the Conann expanded universe, this one entirely in split-screen. Funny to watch this experimental remake of his previous film right after Funny Games US. The first half is a ballet adaptation containing music videos and animated bits. After Puppet Petrouchka becomes a ghost, each character gets a solo dance and debrief.

The butt-faces remind me of Tsukamoto, but the film is dedicated to Terayama Shuji:

Part two, The Deviant Comedy, is a victory lap through the Conann story with our buddy Rainer, and some changes (did any of the women have bat-wings for arms in the previous films?).

by ·Comments Off on The Samurai and the Prisoner (2026, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)

Castle Lord Masahiro Motoki (lead of Gemini and Bird People In China) betrays the country’s bigwig warlord and imprisons his messenger (Cloud scammer Masaki Suda). Lord MM hopes for victory with help from some alliances, but the movie isn’t focused on military strategy but minor mysteries that plague the lord until he has to ask his imprisoned envoy for help: a murder, a transformed severed head, a missing teapot. All this non-action culminates in an extended confession by the lord’s wife (Yuriko Yoshitaka from Noriko’s Dinner Table) who staged all three mysteries. She and the prisoner convince lord MM to run away from the castle and live a long life drinking tea instead of continuing to fight. Movie looked great, my first Kiyoshi movie in theaters since Tokyo Sonata, but it does go on, I wasn’t so invested in the mystery plot, and I had to laugh when I realized it’s showing some of the same events as Kitano’s Kubi.

by ·Comments Off on Chronovisor (2026, Auen & Walker)

Like Bohdanowicz and D’Ambrose remaking Blair Witch – a research film with cathartic psychedelic ending and good thriller music throughout. “Filmed in gorgeous 16mm” per Hard Light but I dunno, I thought the interiors looked like hell.

Mubi:

The object is the titular Chronovisor, a device invented by one Father Pellegrino Ernetti that could allegedly pick up signals from long-past events and visualize them, as if translating history from waveforms into a crudely visualized form of TV. But both Ernetti and his invention are real, part of a historical rabbit hole the American filmmaking duo stumbled down and constructed a fictional edifice around, resulting in a film about the act of reading which slowly transforms into, by film’s end, video art.