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 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 Rose of Nevada (2025, Mark Jenkin)

Fishing boat time-warp story drifts from mysterious to calculated and back. George MacKay is a young family man who returns from a few days at sea to an alternate timeline where his wife isn’t around, while his loser/loner coworker (Green Room punk singer Callum Turner) returns to the loving family he never had. This is part of some whispery conspiracy set in place by the locals, aware of the ship’s power, replacing their lost son with an unhappy MacKay. It’s all fine story setup, but after Enys Men I’m mostly here for the colors and textures, and they don’t disappoint.

MDFMDF liked it, Sicinski not as much:

Jenkin still uses apparent light spills at the end of scenes to provide both punctuation and transition … one gets an interesting sense from Jenkin’s films, both formally and thematically, that they are deliberate throwbacks to older ways of life. Compare Rose of Nevada to a film like Leviathan (the fishing one), and you immediately notice how rusty and dilapidated this world, how it’s all on the verge of falling apart. Jenkin is a Cornishman, and so he has an understandable commitment to a rural, minoritarian way of life that must militate against its own extinction. Then again, depicting traditional methods as a ghost story, something long dead but haunting the present, seems like an odd way to make the argument.

by ·Comments Off on The Hourglass Sanatorium (1973, Wojciech Has)

After Saragossa Manuscript, another Wojciech Has movie full of madness, beautifully filmed, and based on an eccentric novel, which didn’t really work for me. Jan Nowicki (Barrier) goes to a time-warping hospital to find his not-dead-yet dad, then wanders through fantastical episodes, full of delirious clutter (and copious cobwebs) in the tradition of Szulkin and Hard to be a God.

Opens with our guy getting directions from a blind train conductor, ends with him having become the conductor – I guess it all makes sense if you’d read the Bruno Schulz novel, or else making sense isn’t the point. I wasn’t expecting a musical number, but he visits the Jewish neighborhood and they can’t help themselves.

Smart guys like Jake and Yui and PD got it, I’m more on Paul‘s side.

Helmeted protag with his dead father and carnival birdheads:

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 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 Cuckoo (2024, Tilman Singer)

Hunter Schafer (Kinds of Kindness) just lost her mom and is reluctantly stuck with her dad’s family for the season, working for suspicious Dan Stevens at a secluded German hotel where people are always barfing in the gift shop. Sometimes there’s an attack or a freakout and the whole movie gets stuck in a fluttery time loop. She’s joined by Lando (Jan Bluthardt from Singer’s also-cool Luz) who wants to eliminate the alien creatures Dan is fostering, which include Hunter’s half-sister, so she’s now trying to save her family from both these men and the evil mom-aliens with her one good arm, a knife, and a half-working walkman as protection from alien time-screams. Gets a little bit too explainy – I’m looking for my bizarre rural euro-sci-fi to be narratively calibrated somewhere between this and Earwig.

With this and Longlegs, murderous moms are in vogue:

Hunter’s music sounds cool, too:

by ·Comments Off on The Beast (2023, Bertrand Bonello)

A new Bonello is one of the few things to get me into theaters this year (thank u Movieland for carding me twice before I was allowed to watch this). No real crowd for a French film on a nice weekend, but it’s still nice when the movies are big and loud. I guess we’ll never get to see Coma, huh?

Lea Seydoux meets George MacKay (star of 1917, I don’t remember him from Marrowbone) across three time periods, which are only slightly cross-cut, and only mildly bleed into each other due to a mind-erasing procedure in a robot Under the Skin room in the future-set sequence. In order to get decent jobs, people need to have their personalities (and latent memories of past lives) psychically purged – she aborts the procedure, then is horrified to learn that he went through with it. Previously she was a greenscreen actress (the movie opens with this scene, out of order, so it can be bookended with her Laura Palmer The Return screams) who gets stalked and killed by incel George. Before that they were seeing each other in secret before drowning together when her husband’s doll factory caught fire. So it’s got some of my least-favorite storylines (murderous rightwing youtuber, emotionless dystopian AI future), put together in a compellingly strange way, and with delicious details (present-day Lea maliciously smashing a ming vase and blaming the earthquake, plagued by World of Tomorrow-caliber Trash Humpers popup ads on her laptop).

Based on a Henry James story, and weirdly not the only 2023 French adaptation of this story to have scenes set in a nightclub. There’s also a Delphine Seyrig version directed by a guy that I just learned this morning is a sex creep, and a semi-adaptation by Truffaut as The Green Room.

Brendan Boyle found different Twin Peaks connections:

In the film’s best moments, particularly the one that closes the 2014 section and pays off the use of Louis as threat, her ability to play fear and desire together thoroughly redeem any of Bonello’s shortcomings — shortcomings that vanish when real suspense takes over. The bravura direction that climaxes Gabrielle’s house-sitting stay in Los Angeles brings her together with Louis once more in a sequence that unites the awful violence of Nocturama’s conclusion with the most elliptical aspects of Lynch’s filmmaking and the repressed, heart-stopping romanticism of Wharton and James. Here, MacKay plays the hateful, homicidal Louis as suddenly unsure of himself, as if recalling his own past and future identities — a chivalric archetype tragically twisted by his own shortsightedness into an instrument of calamity, like the doppelgängers of Kyle MacLachlan’s Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks: The Return.

And Michael Sicinski helpfully reminds me that despite the rave reviews I’m reading now, in the moment I was antsy and annoyed over the second half of the movie (2014/2044).

The first half of Bonello’s film was electrifying because it postulated something I’d never considered possible: What if Leos Carax’s Holy Motors, instead of being a mind-bending one-off, was actually the beginning of a whole new way of conceiving narrative cinema?
…
Considering where this film begins, [the 2014 section] feels like a copout: a recognizably Lynchian thriller … It’s still strange, sure, but it is recognizably a movie, which is disappointing in this context. Maybe this was Bonello’s intention, to display our shared present as the shallowest, least compelling timeline.

by ·Comments Off on Quantum Cowboys (2022, Geoff Marslett)

Live and/or animated actors and props over distressed rotoed backgrounds, all talking philosophy and quantum physics, like Waking Life: The Western. The infinite universes concept ties into the animation/visual style changing from scene to scene, shot to shot – it doesn’t always work but it’s a big swing. Funny unintentionally as often as on purpose, which was often enough to keep me watching. Announces itself as Part One of The Arizona Antilogy (def: “a contradiction in terms or ideas”).

Our guys are Frank and Bruno, and I can’t prove that writers Marslett and Howe Gelb meant this as a Franklin Bruno reference but I’m gonna assume so. Frank is caught in a time-loop, robbing a store which leads to the death of singer Blackie (Gelb), and his buddy (doing a silly accent) is trying to save him from fate at the hands of killers-from-the-future (who go around the Old West claiming to have written Led Zeppelin songs), then Lily Gladstone helps them sort it all out. There’s an interdimensional camera crew which includes Gary Farmer, plus scenes with Neko Case (the reason I’m watching) and veterans of other surreal westerns. There’s a Timecrimes-ish bit, an it-was-all-a-dream bit, ends on a Schrödinger’s cat joke.