by ·Comments Off on 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026, Nia DaCosta)

This one is set 28 days later than 28 Years Later. Our kid Spike has been kidnapped by the Jimmy Gang run by Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal, spends most of the movie semi-panicking since his new friends have a kill-or-die policy and they like to torture local homeowners to death for no apparent reason. They plan to grow in numbers and take over the land, but their plan seems mathematically challenging, since you have to kill a Jimmy in combat to become one. Spike Jimmy does make friends with Girl Jimmy (Erin Kellyman, a ghost in The Green Knight), who finds out about Ralph Fiennes and thinks he might be Crystal’s dad Satan.

Fiennes, meanwhile, spends his days hanging out with anesthetized alpha-zombie Samson, and spends his nights dancing to Duran Duran in his bunker. He makes a deal with Crystal to put on a show and impress the others. But things start to turn sour in Jimmyland, with loyalties in doubt, then Jimmy kills the Jimmy who was gonna kill our Jimmy.

Dr. Ralph and the Jimmys destroy each other, leaving zen zombie Samson partially dezombified, and Jimmy Spike running off with Jimmy Kelly. Being an immediate sequel with no new characters, DaCosta (Candyman 3) goes through the motions of setting up part three part three, which is apparently gonna star the ur-Jimmy Cillian Murphy.

by ·Comments Off on Alpha (2025, Julia Ducournau)

After a flashback scene with her drugged-out dad uncle, stoned teenage Alpha gets a tattoo at a drug party, then it won’t stop bleeding. She inevitably will catch the medusa virus going around that’s turning people to stone, but first she’s gonna become unstuck in time and live her past/present life with her troubled uncle.

I liked the range of weird tones in Titane, the dark humor in Raw – this one is all grim all the way, following lives of pure misery, and whenever something almost positive happens it gets interrupted. Didn’t I see another movie recently where the final shot was the poster image? Only Alpha and boyfriend Adrien and uncle Amin (Tahar Rahim of A Prophet) have character names, none for mom Golshifteh Farahani or nurse Ella McCay.

Sometimes the world vibrates and assaults Alpha. Her teacher (a Nocturama lead, above) has a boyfriend with the stone disease. Uncle Amin takes the girl for a dreamed night on the town to Nick Cave’s “The Mercy Seat,” but even in the dream he has fits, then vanishes. Mom tries to deal with Amin, helping him to live or to die. The boyfriend got the same tattoo (minus the constant bleeding) and didn’t tell anyone. Despite the big fantasy epidemic, the movie is mostly handheld-cam family/teen drama, and feels long.

by ·Comments Off on BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions (2025, Kahlil Joseph)

Multimedia hyperlink cinema done right. A reporter boards a futuristic superyacht, hears various stories and maybe becomes unstuck in time and experiences some of them.

Guest directors/writers/DPs take on different sections, Joseph acting as curator, with the cinematographer of Arrival and editor of Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Reminded us of Adam Curtis and Dahomey and a hundred other things. It’s very difficult to explain – fortunately, Robert Daniels is on the case.

by ·Comments Off on Send Help (2026, Sam Raimi)

The first Sam Raimi movie since Drag Me To Hell, from the writers of Freddy vs. Jason. Humiliated office worker Rachel McAdams has the upper hand when a plane crash kills all her idiot coworkers except Dylan “Twinless” O’Brien, who cannot build shelter or a raft or find his own food, but still tries to pull rank on her. Fun back-and-forth as they poison each other, and she tries to stay lost by avoiding rescue boats. Despite the all-natural setting Raimi doesn’t know it’s even possible to make a movie without adding ugly CG characters, in this case a wild boar, but thankfully non-CG is Rachel’s pet cockatiel, which survives the mayhem.

by ·Comments Off on Faces of Death (2026, Daniel Goldhaber)

Watched this meta-remake because I trust the Pipeline guy, and Director Daniel did not let me down even if Writer Daniel (and his Cam co-writer) strayed increasingly into dumb-ass territory. I find his internet thrillers less compelling – let’s blow up some more pipelines.

Barbie Ferreira of Euphoria is a viral-snuff-video survivor who now reviews flagged violent videos all day for shithead boss Josh (of multiple LaKeith Stanfield movies) until she uncovers a serial killer who’s recreating scenes from Faces of Death (1978). Killer Arthur (a power ranger) takes over the second half, killing her roommate (of Cocaine Bear), as Arthur and Barbie turn the tables on each other repeatedly until his inevitable (captured on video) death.

The roommate has two copies of Independence Day on VHS:

and two of The Sixth Sense:

by ·Comments Off on Redux Redux / How to Shoot a Ghost

Redux Redux (2025, Kevin & Matthew McManus)

A great concept turned into an unfortunately bad movie with boring music. I watched on fast-forward.

The Block Island Sound directors cast their sister as a multidimensional force of vengance, hopping parallel universes in search of a world where her murdered daughter is still alive, taking out serial killer Jeremy Holm each time before moving on, until she picks up one of his survivors Stella Marcus and they get to repeatedly save each other.

with Jim Cummings of Snow Hollow as her hookup:

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How to Shoot a Ghost (2025, Charlie Kaufman)

Earned this half-hour movie with the time saved from fast-forwarding Redux. This one has some good words and some good images, making it better than the last Kaufman short I saw (from the same writer). The whole emotional journal of being a ghost in Greece doesn’t come together, but Kaufman and Jessie Buckley deserve a belated victory lap after I’m Thinking of Ending Things.

by ·Comments Off on The Testament of Ann Lee (2025, Mona Fastvold)

Ann Seyfried totes her little brother (Lewis Pullman of a Salem’s Lot remake) as she discovers a Christian sect called the Shakers, marries Chris Abbott but can’t have kids, gets arrested and returns as their messiah, moves to America and leads the group as they grow and inevitably diminish, since her main rule is strict celibacy. The US arrests her for being a treasonous witch but releases her for lack of evidence, then vigilantes burn their place down and murder a bunch of them – this country was cursed from the start.

A musical of the best sort, the looping rhythmic hymns reminding me of Lungfish songs. I assume the great Seyfried won all the awards, but I’m clicking on the awards link and getting distracted by which movies the Golden Globes consider a “musical or comedy.”

by ·Comments Off on John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office (2025, Almereyda & Stephens)

Altered States: the documentary. Lilly invented the isolation tank, did psychedelic drugs, got naked, and “regressed through generational time.” He survives experiments with dolphins, the US government, hollywood, LSD, and the isolation tanks, only to go insane on ketamine (“hourly injections of ketamine inspire increasingly apocalyptic visions”). Besides Altered States, works based on his studies include Ecco the Dolphin, Day of the Dolphin, Holy Mountain, and probably parts of the Hitchhikers Guide series.

I’d hoped this would be more formally exciting, some kind of Experimenter storytelling with Invention vibes, but it’s more a traditional doc (with archival footage, talking head interviewees, and clips from related works) covering their shared interests in oddball scientists and American un/popular history.

Lilly may have been a wealthy weirdo dolphin torturer whose science wasn’t so scientific, but per Filmmaker:

One of Coincidence Control’s clear takeaways is that universal reverence for dolphins and whales, and how their preservation became a stand-in for caring about the environment as a whole, is a direct and uncomplicatedly laudable part of Lilly’s legacy.

by ·Comments Off on Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (2025, Matt Johnson)

“This is going to be a copyright nightmare. If you’re watching this in theaters, thank your lucky stars.” Annoying handicam fake-doc transforms into a very good Back to the Future ripoff. Narratively goes through great lengths only to loop around itself and accomplish nothing. I laughed for five straight minutes during the CN Tower lightning rod sequence.

Calum Marsh:
It didn’t surprise me to realize that this movie was largely built around unused webseries footage, because they have so much footage and in fact entire scenes and episodes of content that wound up on the cutting room floor. It’s such an incredible, inefficient method of working but it’s the only way to get stuff this good, and it’s a veritable goldmine when combined with their team’s compositing and VFX work, which is peerless at this budget.

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The Chronology of Water (2025, Kristen Stewart)

A new feature of this blog: bonus sub-post about the 130-minute movie I watched for 15 minutes before getting annoyed or exhausted and putting on a genre film of decent length. Seems very well put together, a fragmented narrative with striking images and upsetting music loops, also seems like a trauma/abuse story that I don’t wanna endure for another 115 minutes, hence Nirvanna. Josefina called it “a better Lynne Ramsay movie than the one Ramsay released that same year.”