by ·Comments Off on The Woman in the Yard (2025, Jaume Collet-Serra)

Something is up with mirrors, and mom realizes the woman in the yard is her own confused, chicken-murdering self, or rather her suicidal ideation incarnate, and that she’s trapped in the mirror world, like if Us was 100x less interesting and featured Nosferatuan shadow-snatching. Yard Woman never seems to do anything, but all the pets are dead and everyone’s hurt and she’s spreading family discord, letting the days go by. Her first words are “how did I get here?” Mom saves the day by time-tunnelling into the gun locker(?). Cameo appearances: before dad’s fatal car crash they park outside a movie theater showing The Mirror Has Two Faces… and was that a Uneeda Biscuit canister in their shed?

by ·Comments Off on The Monkey (2025, Oz Perkins)

“A bit annoying and overwritten,” was my first thought, before landing on “uniquely idiotic.” But the opening sequence features Adam Scott with a flamethrower, so among all the sorry humor and sub-Final-Destination Rubegoldbergian kills, we get a few undeniable pleasures. Also some nice long cross-fades, and a couple of possible Bruce Campbell references. Skeleton Crew has now birthed two and a third theatrical films (The Mist, The Raft) plus some anthology horror episodes and apparently a Guy Maddin version of Here There Be Tygers?? That’s what the wiki says, though the lboxd description of Maddin’s Tygers sounds as faithful to the King story as The Lawnmower Man.

The Streaming:

Anyway, the monkey… twin boys (nu-Fregley in an animated Diary of a Wimpy Kid) inherit the thing, it kills their babysitter (not that they’re even aware) and their mom and uncle, then 25 years later their aunt, as they grow into twin Divergent Theos who are trying to find the monkey in order to kill each other. This latter part is supposed to be in the present-day, but all the phones still have cords. Also starring Orphan Black as their mom… Young Timothee Wonka as one twin’s kid… Elijah “Wirt” Wood as a guru stepdad… Sarah “daughter of Eugene” Levy as the aunt… and Rohan “no relation to Bruce” Campbell.

Horses:

by ·Comments Off on Caught by the Tides (2024, Jia Zhang-Ke)

Mark Asch:

What constitutes “realism,” when reality itself has changed so vastly, so comprehensively? The elasticity of the term is the defining quality of Jia’s filmography, which, in telling the story of people living through immense social change, variously reaches for strange effects, formal wooliness, and reflexivity. His films are a canvas stretched across the frame of a world forever in flux.

Vadim Rizov:

Li has aged much more dramatically than Zhao but both their transformations over nearly a quarter-century are inevitably poignant. Does that generate anything beyond a reflexive effect? I think so; Caught by the Tides is a multiverse manifestation rather than nostalgia trigger — or, at least, this is a lot of neat footage, and it’s fun to see it find a home. Above all else, Zhao is a seemingly infinite performer whose affect hasn’t really been unpacked yet. Her stony unreadability is broken by unpredictable responses to others, manifestations of interest punctuating the deadpan surface of inscrutable women who, over the long haul, are reconfigured as martyrs or stoic survivors. Caught by the Tides reminds us that we’re all lucky as viewers that she and Jia found each other; it’s maybe the actress-director partnership of the ages.

by ·Comments Off on Paul (2025, Denis Côté)

Told K this isn’t a doc when she asked, but it turns out all of Paul’s social media stuff is real, oops. Paul’s in his oversharing era with public video diaries and Q&As with followers. The #1 thing I like about the movie is the record-crackle sound on certain edits.

by ·Comments Off on Black Bag (2025, Steven Soderbergh)

Spy/hunter Fassbender gets five potential spy/leakers together (including his wife Cate Blanchett) and pits them against each other, while he and Cate carry on like a low-budget True Lies. The rare movie where the polygraph test is the best scene. I accidentally just watched Naomie Harris’s earliest and latest movies about havoc caused when an internal science experiment is freed from its lab.

by ·Comments Off on Vulcanizadora (2024, Joel Potrykus)

Back to basics, just Joel and Joshua Burge alternately amusing themselves with fire or glowsticks and driving each other nuts in the woods. As their growing tension and weird vibes and the movie’s awesome poster indicate, the end goal is a double suicide, but squirrely Joel can’t follow through, so his head is exploded by a supercharged firecracker while Josh gets a half-hour coda of legal issues and regret. Really messed-up movie, a perfect addition to the Joel/Josh canon.

–
Ludovico Testament (1999)

Best-case scenario of early homemade short films. This is exactly the sort of lifesize stop-motion that I would’ve made in my VHS-cam days if I’d seen The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb the year it came out instead of eight years later.

–
Gordon (2007)

Gordon takes his kid to the playground and dies unexpectedly, then comes back a few months later as a zombie, his face deteriorated but his suit still in nice shape. Family has moved away, and nobody can stand to look at him, so he bums around town to Beck’s “He’s a Mighty Good Leader,” his teeth and fingernails falling out, then returns to his grave.

–
Joel Calls Indie Film Type Dudes (2020)

Conceptual comedy, Joel calls all the industry people in his phone to ask how the quarantine is going for them, then doesn’t listen to their responses and hangs up in a hurry. The joke is on Alex Ross Perry, who gets called four times, each time listing him as the director of a different film.

–
Unemployees (2023)

Dani and Kandy are slacker idiots with an ill-thought-out plan to get jobs and be fired then collect unemployment. After stints in an office, a factory, and a cafeteria (all filmed at Grand Valley U in Allendale MI) they take a field labor gig and discover that money does grow on trees – but trees that cause horrible skin infections.

by ·Comments Off on Mission: Impossible 8: The Final Reckoning (2025, Christopher McQuarrie)

This is what I imagine the Fast & Furious movies are like: filling the gaps between action scenes with sappy talk and meaningful glances between friends and family. When everyone shuts up about how meaningful are their relationships and how many times we’ve saved/endangered the world, the highlight is two nearly wordless action scenes in vehicles. In the submarine I think Cruise says one thing (“torpedo tube”), and the plane fight gets better when Esai stops supervillain-monologuing.