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.

by ·Comments Off on TV/Q3/2026

Smiling Friends season 3 (2025)

Animation-wise episode six is the greatest, one of multiple agency origin stories.

Beef House (2020)

Pretty good fake sitcom. The People’s Joker director worked on this.

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.