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.”

by ·Comments Off on All You Need Is Kill (2025, Kenichiro Akimoto)

Remake of Edge of Tomorrow. The lines and colors are all neat, and especially Rita’s hair – her overall character design is better than Tom Cruise’s. It’s anime, which means angsty teens are saving the world while wearing battle armor, but first Rita has to figure out why she’s caught in a time loop, getting killed by Jim Woodring creatures every day. Halfway through she meets fellow looper Kenji (was Russian Doll based on this?), who will eventually absorb the enemy alien and sacrifice himself. Everything magically works out in the end, because this was a kids movie and I had no business watching it.

by ·Comments Off on The Tale of Silyan (2025, Tamara Kotevska)

People who watch movies for the human drama, the “empathy machine” people, are the overwhelming majority in the arthouse realm, leaving us bird people to scan every title and plot description for some sign of avian life and not bird-as-metaphor. Once a decade we hit absolute gold, and coincidentally the same month H Is For Hawk came out, right around when I was watching the egret of Alamar, this incredible crane movie popped up. This is what the cinema could be: vague stories featuring doc footage of storks eating frogs, and by that measure the greatest movies would be this and The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser.

That said, there’s much time spent on non-crane activity, as the movie contrasts fallen corrupted human economic life with timeless biological bird life. Priced out of farming, a Macedonian man spends his time helping an injured stork.

by ·Comments Off on Henry Fonda for President (2024, Alexander Horwath)

Corey Atad:

It works for several reasons. The Fonda family’s history in the colonies dating back to the 1600s, for one, giving the project a remarkable historical breadth. But there’s also something to Fonda being born as The Movies begin to take shape, with a career spanning the real golden eras of Hollywood filmmaking. He becomes, in the context of this film, a figure through which to understand America’s good spirit, and how it lost out to America’s evil delusions.

After convincing us for three hours that Henry Fonda represents America itself, weaving film and interview clips and bringing in political history and Henry’s outspoken actor kids, the doc closes on a shot of pelicans, affirming its greatness.

by ·Comments Off on OBEX (2025, Albert Birney)

In 1987 a middle-aged guy loves to spend time on the computer. He and his dog watch A Nightmare On Elm Street on broadcast television then “wake up” inside a customized fantasy videogame, rescuing a guy with a TV head and traveling by map. Once the movie gets into game mode, I flashed back to Hundreds of Beavers – which was more ambitious but had totally different manic vibes to this movie’s good-natured dreamscape.

by ·Comments Off on Junk World (2025, Takahide Hori)

I didn’t need the little robot guy from another movie to get an origin story, but “weirdo pervert stop-motion” is one of my favorite genres, so this was great. Starts with a military unit making their way out of enemy territory, then alternates between rewinding to the same actions from a different character perspective (they took to heart the criticisms that nobody understood what happened in the first movie) and crazily escalating the action/stakes. Kickass protector robot gets injured, rebuilds itself as cuddly robot, time travels to distant past, inspires teddybear-cat creatures to create a complex civilization, then sends daughter of the teddycat leader back to the past to protect the military guys inside a red ducky powersuit.

Ducky streetfighters a Freddy-chested supermutant: