Eno (2024)

This odd documentary about Brian Eno is billed as “generative” (as opposed, they say, to AI), which means, according to the PR, there are some 52 quintillion distinct random versions—“no viewing is the same twice.” I don’t know how this technology works. Are there 52 quintillion possibilities in physical media or on streaming platforms? The Criterion Channel seems to have answered that for the moment: no. What they’re doing instead is posting a new version every month (for as long as it’s there and I don’t know how long that is). If you look carefully, there’s a credit in the picture for Criterion and the month. I looked at the June, July, and August versions, and it’s perfectly possible I will make a monthly habit of it for as long as I can. The three I saw, each running about 80 minutes, were indeed distinctly different. I’d guess less than half the scenes I saw in any one of them were in more than one. Roxy Music, for example, was severely underplayed in the July version. Eno’s love of Fela Kuti and a brief scene where he gives his full name (Brian Peter George St. Jean-Baptiste de la Salle Eno) were in all three. Also discussions of the Oblique Strategies deck of cards, though they varied. Some recurring scenes occur at different points in the picture. Thus among other things it all seems to be unpredictable by design. It’s refreshing and obviously it fits with Eno’s cybernetic ambient aesthetic in a wry sort of way, but I do have some concerns. It’s clear there is a good more than 80 minutes’ worth of material it can plug in, likely much more. How much goes unseen? How many viewings are recommended for a fuller sense? What are they doing at the Criterion Channel—hitting the scramble button and taking the first version given, or screening more than one to help sort out the better from the good enough? I think it’s safe to say Eno is primarily for Eno fans who already know his work and biography. In fact, there’s a 2011 documentary, Brian Eno – 1971-1977: The Man Who Fell to Earth, that’s probably worth checking into first. While it only covers the ‘70s it is over two and half hours and full of great music and useful information. I suspect the more you know about Eno the more you are likely to enjoy this peculiar exercise—and seeing multiple versions is arguably important too. The interviews are great and so is the music but I found myself missing things I saw only once, such as an anecdote involving Joni Mitchell. Eno may be for fans only, but fans will likely be gratified, especially if they see more than one version. For me, it’s on to September.

Caught by the Tides (2024)

Here’s an unusual picture, a kind of lightly fictionalized, impressionistic memoir of China in this century. It’s directed by Jia Zhang-ke and what makes it unusual is that he has used footage shot by him across this century, both in his personal life and for movies he has made. The only one I can vouch for is Still Life (2006), but I can tell you it’s a great picture, well worth tracking down. Caught by the Tides also includes scenes from Unknown Pleasures (2002) and Ash Is Purest White (2018), which I intend to seek out. All three feature Zhang-ke’s wife, Tao Zhao, who is rendered a silent woman in this picture for some reason, at least until she lets out a yelp in the last shot. By that point I was too muddled to really get it. There are many lovely shots here—notably those from the Three Gorges area and its massive damming project, featured in Still Life—and some reliably nice musical interludes too, EDM at random to juice up the energy, and pop tunes presumably for the nostalgic feels. But it must be said there’s little by way of obvious narrative here—it’s a guess for me (and largely because of what I’ve read about it) that this is even a historical allegory about China at all. My own sense from my Western perspective, and my distance, is that the 2008 Olympics were a certain cultural high-water mark in China. That seems to be supported by the way this movie goes. My further sense is that China continues to be an economic juggernaut poised well for the future. The commitment to EVs and alternative, sustainable energy sources are just obvious examples. Early scenes in Caught by the Tides gradually give way to scenes of the pandemic, where arguably (again supported by what we see) it was taken appropriately seriously, much unlike the US experience. So the movie may be a good place for testing ideas about China. I take Zhang-ke, based on Still Life, as a great filmmaker and now more than ever want to get to some of his other work. But Caught by the Tides felt confused and weak as much as anything, too allusive and ambiguous for me to get a good grip on what it’s all about.

Thelma (2024)

Thelma is a feel-good caper comedy, set in Los Angeles and all dressed up in a pulsing action-movie soundtrack. It’s about the title character, a 93-year-old woman played by June Squibb, who was 94 at the time of shooting. Thelma is fond of her grandson Danny (Fred Hechinger, looking like Kurt Cobain or Scott Evil). He’s a 20something slacker with seemingly all the time in the world to visit and help Thelma with her computer. Later we find out Thelma is actually pretty handy with her electronics. Early in the picture Thelma is victim of a phone scam. Someone purporting to be Danny calls and says he was in an auto accident, almost killed a pregnant woman, and now he’s in jail. She follows the directions to post his bail, which involves mailing $10,000 in cash to an anonymous post office box. Thelma is not stupid but her panic blinds her to all the clues she’s being duped. The money is in the mail before she figures it out. Then she gets mad. Then she gets even. Classic stuff. Parker Posey plays Gail, Thelma’s daughter, Danny’s mother, and a psychotherapist. Clark Gregg is Gail’s husband Alan. Now they are all even more worried that Thelma is slipping mental-wise. But she is already on the case, stealing a friend’s scooter and taking off to monitor the post office box. Her friend, Ben (Richard Roundtree), takes off to help her and to get his scooter back. Her family frantically drives around town trying to find her. Thelma and June Squibb are charming enough, but the movie somewhat painfully wants it both ways on the elderly as figures of both pathos and comic relief. Director and screenwriter Josh Margolin makes this work (to the extent it does) by making it a farce, although he is not above abject pulling at the heartstrings in places. It is based on his own 104-year-old grandmother, whose apartment stands in for Thelma’s place. Thelma is basically a data point in the argument that you can make a suspense movie out of anything. Even an idle look can absurdly ratchet tensions. There is both gunplay and explosions along with gags about old people. A lot of stars in this one also helps put it over: Squibb in the first starring role of her life, Roundtree, Posey, Gregg, Hechinger, and Malcolm McDowell too. An amiable crew. You probably won’t believe a second of it, but you might have a nice time.

The Girl With the Needle (2024)

I’ve never thought of myself as too particularly squeamish—hey, I look at horror movies and true-crime documentaries all the time—but this Danish picture and period piece, shot in black & white and set shortly after World War I in Copenhagen, seems designed only to make viewers uncomfortable. Male viewers, that is, which might be the source of my troubles. The needle in the title is a knitting needle which “the girl,” a factory worker named Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne) and a full-grown woman, uses to attempt to abort her pregnancy in a public bathhouse. It doesn’t work, and later we get a harrowing birth scene. Still later, we get some breast-feeding scenes that range close to perverse. They were all hard for me to watch. At the bathhouse another woman there, Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm), comes to Karoline’s aid. She tells her that, for a fee, she will take Karoline’s baby after it is born and find it a good home. Sonne is good as the hapless Karoline, but Dyrholm is reasonably the star of this show, or maybe I was just remembering her riveting, convincing performance as the singer Nico in the 2017 picture Nico, 1988 (make it a double feature if you must look at this one). I thought The Girl With the Needle tries too hard to merely shock. Well over halfway through this picture, I still had no idea where it was going, and that was not in a good way. The last words in the picture provide a vital clue: “Inspired by true events.” Any time I see that in a movie—more often placed at the opening—I know how to set my expectations. A lot of it will be unbelievable and, just so, most of The Girl With the Needle is hard to believe. There are good scenes here—notably the confrontation between Karoline and the mother (Benedikte Hansen) of her lover and would-be spouse Jørgen (Joachim Fjelstrup). This matriarch brings in a doctor to verify Karoline’s pregnancy (yes indeed, another uncomfortable scene) and then proceeds to shatter any illusions harbored by Karoline and her son. Jørgen is left weeping and unable to make eye contact with Karoline. But all the extremes about this story and this movie—I didn’t even get to Karoline’s husband, a war casualty—seem to exist purely in a context of unending miserablism. It left me cold. YMMV.

Babygirl (2024)

OK, fair enough, this cheesy erotic BDSM fantasy thriller is hotter than a pistol, sexy as hell, and a pleasure to enjoy exactly that way. You’ll have to ignore or somehow put out of mind your better angels and the movie’s many ancient views of women and men and sex and power. It seems to believe, with so many, that the powerful—especially the powerful women—secretly yearn to be dominated. This seems unlikely when you think about it, given their behavior otherwise (cf., adventures on Epstein Island, or the movie Salo). But it’s popular to think so, much like imagining the powerful will end up burning in hell. But who’s really thinking about anything like that when a movie like this is going on? Nicole Kidman is Romy, a high-flying CEO specializing in warehouse robotics and married to a successful theater director, Jacob (Antonio Banderas). Harris Dickinson (Triangle of Sadness) is Samuel, an intern with a ton of poise and self-possession and a natural dominator. He takes control of Romy sexually and seems to be attempting to take over her life at large. He’s a little scary. Romy struggles with herself but keeps doing whatever he tells her to do. Turning up the sex charge is the kind of thing Kidman has done before and she’s good at it: To Die For, Birthday Girl, and most notably Eyes Wide Shut, among others. Indeed, in many ways Babygirl feels like an intentional reprise or shoutout to Eyes Wide Shut. Though this story takes place over weeks, months, or even years, for example, it is always Christmas in Romy’s living room, with a fully trimmed-up and lighted tree in the corner. The previous feature by director and writer Halina Reijn, the horror show Bodies Bodies Bodies, had some interesting ideas but was too cluttered and strangely focused to really work. She shows a lot of development in Babygirl, but the real stroke, of course, is the casting. Kidman is perfect and has a surprising amount of chemistry with Dickinson, who’s much younger and generally inexperienced than she is in real life too. Romy is the designated bottom here, but Kidman is the star of the show all the way in a tremendous performance. Dickinson, however, can keep up with her, and that has a lot to do with what makes Babygirl work at such exceedingly high levels. You might have qualms about it later regarding gender roles and such, but first you should enjoy the ride.

Alien: Romulus (2024)

The seventh feature film in the Alien franchise was directed and cowritten by Fede Alvarez. Alvarez, 47, has proved himself in the horror realm (Don’t Breathe) and inserting himself into ongoing franchises (the 2013 Evil Dead). So maybe he was a natural for making the best Alien movie in nearly 40 years. In fact, part of his shtick here is drawing skillfully on the first two movies even as he gleefully careens around a barrage of excellent original SF predicaments. He uses the spooky confines of decrepit spaceware floating in space, as in the first picture, and he composes a closeup shot of our hero Rain (Cailee Spaeny) confronting one of the creatures in profile, as in the second. Rain’s android friend Andy (David Jonsson) saves her from one attack saying, “Get away from her. You bitch.” But my favorite hark to the past is reviving Ian Holm from the first picture as the android Ash. They had to obtain permission from the estate of Holm, who died in 2020, to use his likeness (from the Lord of the Rings shoot). The rest is busy-busy special effects. It closes a neat circle in the larger enterprise. Ash is just as deceptive and manipulative here as he was in 1979. Romulus also gives us a new word for the alien (or at least new to me), mostly replacing “xenomorph” with “parisitoid.” Whatever. The picture runs nearly a full two hours but rarely flags. Romulus is intense and can be scary and it was a relief that Alvarez never goes jokey on us, which would probably not be hard with this “perfect organism” we know so well now that we could likely pass a pop quiz with ease on its properties: the face-hugger stage, the chest-bursting stage, the unstoppable acid for blood, the speed and cunning. There might be a little more biology to Romulus, as some cross-breeding happens between alien and human, which I’m pretty sure is new. The result is suitably horrifying, though weirdly too reminiscent of Terminator CGI to truly enjoy. I liked Romulus nearly as much as the first two pictures in the franchise, Alien and Aliens, which is not a low bar. Forget 3, Resurrection, Prometheus, and Covenant. Romulus should be your next stop after the first two.

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (2024)

There are a number of things about On Becoming a Guinea Fowl that I’m not sure I understand, notably the title and some of the details in the opening scene. For me the picture falls into a genre of “film festival movies,” proved out by the awards it has won from Cannes, Chicago, London, and other film festivals. The opening scene is vividly, self-consciously visual: Shula (Susan Chardy) is returning home at night from a costume party. She wears a spangled helmet with dark glasses and an outfit that looks like inflated parachute fabric. She notices a body lying in the deserted and lonely highway. It is her Uncle Fred and he’s dead. Then Shula’s cousin Nsansa (Elizabeth Chisela) shows up. She appears drunk, knocking at the window of Shula’s car, but Shula ignores her. Lots of activity and visuals here, but the point of the movie has little to do with how Uncle Fred died on that highway, something we never learn. Instead, what we learn is that Uncle Fred was a rapist who preyed on female members of his extended family, often when they were underage. Guinea Fowl affirms how universal this type of domestic abuse is, reaching into Zambia, Africa, in much the same way that Women Talking witnessed it in a Mennonite community in Bolivia. It’s not just Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein in the US—it’s everywhere. Some of the reasons it continues are shown in Guinea Fowl. The women of the extended family, all the aunties, blame Uncle Fred’s widow because she would not cook for him. It makes no sense, but that’s their story and they’re sticking to it. Thus, director and writer Rungano Nyoni offers a panoramic view of these crimes and family responses. Shula knows better than the aunties that it is Uncle Fred who is responsible for what he has done and no one else. But she’s in the minority. As the movie goes along, more and more victims come forward with their stories. One of the girls, Bupe (Esther Sangini), tries to tell her mother in a video she records on her phone what Uncle Fred did to her, but her mother doesn’t want to hear it or believe it. For that generation, the sole tragedy here is that Uncle Fred has died. As for Bupe: “He’s dead now,” she says. “So it’s OK.” On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is marred slightly by distractions such as the opening scene that I don’t really see as necessary. But it has a familiar (and depressing) story to tell, it sticks close to the truths of sexual abuse, and the performances are great across the board, a winning ensemble. The picture won awards from film festivals because it deserves them even if it’s not the most artfully written screenplay. Check it out if it makes your local film festival. It’s also on HBO Max.

Eephus (2024)

I recently recharged the love side of my love/hate relationship with the Seattle Mariners. Having followed them closely for weeks and months this past season, and finally suffering the perhaps inevitable result, a baseball movie struck me as just the thing for cheer. Eephus, however, is not a typical sports movie, which of course more often focuses on the escalating drama of a championship run, with lots of rousing and/or tender moments in the last third. See The Bad News Bears, Hoosiers, Rocky, Bull Durham. etc., etc. Eephus has its quotient of sentiment, focusing on the last ballgame played at a field slated for demolition, making way for a new school. It’s Massachusetts, it’s October, and only a handful of spectators are on hand. The players are obvious amateurs, mostly middle-aged and older guys not remotely in physical shape. The pitcher for one side drinks beers between innings and often falls down. The slapstick did not particularly work for me. IMDb classifies Eephus as both “drama” and “comedy,” which in this case feels like a hedge because it’s hard to know what this movie is. It reminded me a lot of pictures like director Wayne Wang’s 1995 Smoke, or director and writer Jim Jarmusch’s 2003 Coffee and Cigarettes, full of random characters saying wry, eccentric things to one another. One odd fellow in the dugout here, a relief pitcher, gives us the full lowdown on the “eephus,” a high-arcing curveball that falls into the strike zone and throws off a batter’s timing. The pitch is extremely slow, clocked under 60 mph, and not used often. I guess it’s a metaphor. But Eephus also has some interesting surprises, such as voiceover narration from master documentarian Frederick Wiseman and a cameo by Red Sox / Expos pitcher Bill “Spaceman” Lee, who pitches an inning. The game is barely tracked as such though we get enough information to understand it’s going into extra innings, which is where the heavy metaphors really start. They play on into the dark, then light the field with their car headlights and play on some more. I came away from Eephus more puzzled than anything, but it’s quite possible I would like it more with another look. It’s that kind of movie.

Nickel Boys (2024)

Nickel Boys is an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning 2019 novel, based on the infamous revelations of the Dozier School in Florida, a reform school that turned out to be highly abusive of its wards, up to and including unmarked graves of boys murdered and buried there. Their parents were told they ran away. The Nickel Boys story focuses on two Black teens sent to the fictional Nickel Academy in the mid-1960s, during the height of the Civil Rights era and the beginning of US involvement in Vietnam’s civil war. Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson) strike up a friendship that helps them endure and survive the harsh miseries. Director and cowriter RaMell Ross indulges so much film school technique getting there (though note he never studied at a film school) that it’s tempting to call the picture experimental. The roving, fluid, handheld camera, pointed everywhere and going in and out of focus, plunges us into the story directly, into the cold water at the deep end. Nickel Boys is so impressive to watch that in many ways the details of the narrative come by osmosis. The camera often just embodies Elwood’s point of view and as often hovers close to him, right behind, like someone crowding him on the subway. It comes unstuck in time as well, as Kurt Vonnegut might explain it, following Elwood 10 years after these events and in the present day as well, before returning to Nickel in the ‘60s again and further hopping around. Nickel Boys has little time for explanations, it’s definitely confusing, but Ross distributes his clues lucidly enough to help us keep up, which by itself gets to be thrilling in a way. I’m not always sure what the creative camera contributes to the story—a second viewing may help with that—but it’s certainly pure dazzling cinema, exuberant and celebratory, never dreary as these stories too often threaten to become. Numerous black & white clips from the 1958 picture The Defiant Ones, with Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier as escaped convicts shackled together, seem to be making the point. Unfortunately, the high technique battles a little as distractions from the larger themes and dramas of racism and brutality, and how far we have not come. It might be exactly what Ross was intending because I came away from Nickel Boys with the sense of having experienced something intense, something more than just another sad story from the workaday South.

Monkey Man (2024)

Monkey Man is the first feature by director, cowriter, and star Dev Patel, better known as an actor for his performances in Slumdog Millionaire, The Green Knight, and many others. He also gets some help or maybe just inspiration from co-producer Jordan Peele. Monkey Man is standard action fare, with a story approximately as old as spaghetti westerns or the Bible. As a child, the Monkey Man (Patel, credited as “Kid”) witnessed the death of his mother at the hands of a corrupt police captain. It takes a while to find out, but he’s on a tortuous path for vengeance. Mother killed in front of his eyes, a lifelong quest for revenge. “My name is [Monkey Man]. You killed my [mother]. Prepare to die.” Stop me if you’ve heard this before. He’s poor, living on jobs waiting tables and as a fighter in no-holds-barred boxing ring matchups, where he wears a monkey mask. The Monkey Man is small but he’s fast. Bigger opponents often just miss him and can’t land any blows. But he is regularly humiliated, because he is the scripted loser in these bouts in the ring and always required to take a dive (getting a bonus if he bleeds). Monkey Man boasts lots of active and handheld camera work and any number of well-choreographed fistfights, with some gunplay but mostly the hand-to-hand combat. In the grand old kung fu tradition he is able to take on dozens at a time and rarely misses taking them down, though he does get his own many beatdowns. Attempting to escape the scene of one of his crimes he’s hit by a sniper, bangs off a roof, and lands in water. It looks like a puddle, but it’s quite deep. Finally he is rescued by a strange cult. A drug scene follows in which a wise old man (or shaman, perhaps) administers him something and guides him through a place that is mythical and legendary and full of personal memories of his mother and so on. He is soon ready to fulfill his destiny as ... Hanuman, the Monkey Man. This will involve lots of fighting. He trains for it coached by a tabla player. All the chicks where he’s staying, even the older women, dig that training the most—a ridiculous scene, but hold on, Monkey Man moves fast. You won’t be surprised by anything in this story (making me think Peele’s influence was minimal) but you might find some entertainment in the hypnotic fighting scenes. I know I did.

Presence (2024)

Director Steven Soderbergh continues active in his so-called retirement since 2013 with the star-studded spy movie Black Bag and this somewhat unusual ghost story. Lucy Liu is impressive as Rebekah, the mama bear head of this family unit of four. She has a decided, unhealthy preference for their son Tyler (Eddy Maday). She’s doing everything she can to launch him into life with all the advantages, including buying a home and moving into a school district that will work better for him. The dynamic forces husband and father Chris (Chris Sullivan) to take on defending their daughter Chloe (Callina Liang), who recently lost her best friend to a drug overdose and has begun showing signs of misbehavior due to the grief. Chris keeps suggesting things like new therapists, new treatments, new drugs, but Rebekah insists what she needs is time. She might be right, in a way, but mainly she doesn’t really seem to care. They have bought the haunted house (not knowing it is haunted, which even the realtor doesn’t seem to know, though she might be lying) because it puts Tyler in a school district where he can compete more effectively as an athlete—Rebekah’s idea. What makes Presence unusual is that it is largely told from the point of view of the ghost. It takes a little while to figure out. At first the swirling camera just seems like the restless camera Soderbergh has frequently resorted to, but gradually the conceit becomes more obvious. It’s a pretty good story about a dysfunctional family, though as a ghost story it’s somewhat cliched, turning to grief and trauma as the single source of all the supernatural business. And there are convenient and familiar plot developments we’ve seen a lot, such as a serial killer with a fiendish manner of killing. But Soderbergh has skills, and Presence builds to a high peak of intensity that makes it a reasonably good movie overall (likely helped a little by a short running time under 90 minutes). I’m a little tired myself of the grief and trauma freight train running through so much horror these days, but I’d say Presence is worth a look—more for the dysfunctional family, harrowingly detailed, than the clumsy and helpless ghost, which mostly comes to feel like a device.

Heretic (2024)

The directing and screenwriting team of Scott Beck and Bryan Woods is responsible for the ongoing franchise, A Quiet Place. This is a trial by faith—two young women Mormon missionaries versus well-informed religious skeptic Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant), home at his leisure. The young women knock on his door to ask if he has heard the good news of our savior Jesus Christ. He has indeed. It’s pouring rain. He invites them in. They can enter only if another woman is present. He says his wife is at home with him, baking blueberry pie. They cross the threshold. These young women don’t know it yet, but they are in big trouble. Mr. Reed says his wife, who is suddenly shy, will be with them shortly. The blueberry pie smells delicious but later they learn it’s just a scented candle. He confronts them, diplomatically, with awkward questions about polygamy. It’s all quite uncomfortable. Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) is defensive and reflexively tries to explain the Mormon position. It’s soon evident Mr. Reed has them trapped. The storm outside has grown more intense, with snow. The front door is locked and the key to their bike lock is in their coats, which Mr. Reed has taken and put somewhere. Sister Paxton (Chloe East) attempts to flatter and mollify him but he’s got them now. The main point of Heretic, of course, is Hugh Grant—with impeccable manners and stammering appeal (as always). His light-hearted bantering style morphs from charming to menacing though he doesn’t actually change that much. He’s just Hugh Grant, as we know him, but now full of religious thought and philosophy, and aggressive about it. As things get worse one of the victims cries, “Why do you do this?” With an answer that incidentally helps explain our present political predicament, he responds, “The question is, why do you let me?” Indeed. There’s some gore here, not much, but Grant typically makes the most of it. The basic idea seems to be the casting against type, turning everyone’s favorite British romantic lead into a monster. It’s fun to see Hugh Grant having so much fun, but we’re already seen this kind of religious debate many times in the movies (Dogma, First Reformed, Rapture, The Seventh Seal). Basically this one is for Hugh Grant fans and/or the religiously curious almost exclusively.

Trap (2024)

I have hung back on probably most of the movies made by M. Night Shyamalan, but I’ve always been at least a little bit on his side. I respect his almost robotic commitment to twisty “surprise” developments—good for viewer appeal and expectations. The Sixth Sense completely fooled me. I’ve only seen it once but still mean to get back to it. I thought Unbreakable, with its dedication to comics culture, was pretty good too, but I admit I started involuntarily rolling my eyes a lot with Signs, The Village, and The Happening and haven’t followed closely since. I see with Trap that surprises are still part of the shtick, but even more there’s a nicely drawn boffo suspense drama element out of Alfred Hitchcock or Brian De Palma, along with a continuing ability to draw talent for the cast. He also takes little cameos like Hitchcock—who doesn’t like that? (not everyone) In a somewhat nepotistic move, Trap features Shyamalan’s daughter, singer Saleka Shyamalan, as pop star Lady Raven. The first half of the picture is set at one of her concerts and feels much more like a concert film—I’m saying that like it’s a good thing. Cooper (Josh Hartnett) and his 12-year-old daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue, possibly the best or certainly the most fun player here) are going to the Lady Raven show as reward for Riley’s good grades. Cooper notices a large number of police and security forces at the arena. It turns out they have information that a serial killer on the loose, the “Butcher,” is at the show and they are determined to bring him down there. The arena show itself is the trap. Shyamalan has said he wanted to make a movie that would be like The Silence of the Lambs going on at a Taylor Swift show. He almost gets there. The leader of the law enforcement operation is Dr. Josephine Grant, a severe criminal profiler with an accent that makes her sound like Dr. Ruth. She’s played by Hayley Mills, my favorite casting inspiration here, who appeared as an adolescent in the early ‘60s in a number of Disney movies, including The Parent Trap. The identity of the killer in Trap is not particularly hidden but it’s the kind of thing you may as well discover for yourself. To be clear, you shouldn’t expect anything believable in Trap. Shyamalan is good at very movie-movie types of moments—visual reveals, swirling camera, stirring orchestral soundtrack, high points of suspense. Trap is a lot of fun but the key is that you shouldn’t think very hard about anything you see.

Juror #2 (2024)

We can’t say with certainty that Juror #2 will be director Clint Eastwood’s last picture, but he turns 95 this year so it’s not outside the realm of possibility. As a dedicated middlebrow filmmaker, Eastwood—like his spiritual brother Ron Howard, who we first knew in our living rooms as Rowdy Yates and Opie Taylor—makes pictures that make people feel good, with optional additional moral instruction. That’s the long and short of it: Unforgiven, American Sniper, Gran Torino, Sully, Million Dollar Baby, the paired Letters From Iwo Jima and Flags of Our Fathers, etc., etc. Within his wheelhouse Eastwood has turned out to be a pretty good filmmaker—better than Howard. Juror #2 was originally intended as a direct-to-streaming release, which might have been more appropriate given how much it relies on a coincidence that makes any reasonable person howl. Nicholas Hoult (the silvery-lipped Nux in Mad Max: Fury Road and the boy in About a Boy) plays Justin Kemp, a recovering alcoholic whose wife is third-trimester of a high-risk pregnancy after previous miscarriages. He’s called to jury duty on a case where (gasp!) he and not the man on trial turns out to be the wanton vehicular homicider in question. Oh such dilemma. I mean, it’s set in a small town in Georgia, Ocilla, so sure, it’s possible. But it’s so constantly hard to believe. Screenwriter Jonathan A. Abrams is really pushing it here and Eastwood is too for accepting this ridiculous premise as remotely plausible. Toni Collette (The Sixth Sense, Hereditary, also with Hoult in About a Boy) plays it with her usual skill as the prosecutor who bears one of my favorite character names of all time, Faith Killebrew, which puts me in mind of the Minnesota Twins. J.K. Simmons and Kiefer Sutherland pile on with additional star power. Simmons is good in the sour hangdog way he usually is. Sutherland, as a semi-corrupt and somewhat unbelievable AA sponsor, is remarkably bad, reminding us that his usual signal of intensity, hoarse whispering, has been failing him for a while now. Is Juror #2 dramatic and engaging? Sure, I guess so. I mean, I watched the whole thing even while carping to myself about plot points. Eastwood could have picked worse ways to do a swan song, if that’s what this is. But that’s an insight that could well appear in the dictionary definition of “damning with faint praise.”

Oddity (2024)

Oddity is a stylish, low-key horror exercise that mixes up a dash of folk horror with a notably impressive performance by Carolyn Bracken as identical twins. They are so distinct it’s hard to know they’re even sisters, let alone twins, let alone the same person. One, Dani Timmins, was married to the night physician at a nearby mental institution in the country, Dr. Ted Timmins (Gwilym Lee). Early in the movie she is brutally murdered one night by an escaped lunatic while Timmins is at work, the work of the one-eyed Olin Boole (Tadgh Murphy), subject of a 2013 short by director and writer Damian McCarthy. The other, Darcy Odello, is a witchy self-proclaimed psychic who is blind and does not believe that Boole killed her sister. Darcy’s specialty is reading objects, preferably personal items like rings and watches that have touched the skin of the people about whom she draws information. She runs an antique shop that sells only cursed items (one is the toy monkey used by Stephen King in his story “The Monkey”). It’s no place for shoplifters. The curses are removed only with legitimate purchases. Sometimes, she says, customers return with purloined items, begging her to take them back. Within a year of his wife’s death Dr. Timmins is already living with another woman, a woman he works with and knew before the murder. Darcy does not like this development and inserts herself into the life of Dr. Timmins and his new gal, Yana (Caroline Menton). She shows up at their spooky weird mansion with a gift: a wooden life-size statue of a man that is grotesque and horrific. This is basically the folk horror element, drawn, says McCarthy, from Jewish lore about golems. Oddity is unlikely to send anyone into paroxysms of terror but it has its share of jump scares, which are not entirely cheap, and a pervasive air of dread. Bracken modulates her performance—Darcy is generally meek and mild, but there’s a great deal going on underneath that and it peers out effectively. She can be quite unexpectedly fierce and commanding. The last image is almost perfect, set up across the length of the movie and presented slowly, quietly, playing with our expectations—and then delivering.

The Substance (2024)

I had fair warning that The Substance would be gross, and it is, living up to its body horror and monster horror labels. Demi Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, an aging movie star now celebrity aerobics instructor with a line of videos and cable-TV show appearances (think Jane Fonda, I guess?). Moore was around 60 when this picture was shot and, while “she’s in great shape for her age” (and still likes taking it all off too), it’s not hard to see, all things considered, why Elisabeth might be tempted by the appeal of the mysterious “The Substance” product, an underground drug and procedure that produce ... Margaret Qualley, as “Sue.” There’s a lot of detail associated with this premise—only one activation per person, seven days of a stabilizing regime, and mandatory switching back and forth every seven days. As usual with anything that involves seven days in a horror show, they’re not fooling around with these rules. You really shouldn’t break them. But break them, of course, they do. The Substance is associated with a lot of “You Are One” mumbo-jumbo messaging with the instructions that the principals pay no attention to. We, the helpless viewers, can’t help thinking they really should abide by the rules. There’s not very much that’s original in The Substance, a mash of stories involving Cinderella, Carrie, and others. Break the rules and your horses turn into pumpkins in the middle of the prom. But The Substance has its moments. In fact, at two hours twenty minutes, it has at least 30 minutes of too many moments. If you’re there for the special effects you might enjoy every minute of it. I was intrigued by a lot of it. The whole way of getting the drug is suitably big city (Los Angeles) urban nightmare, though implausible. The problems between Elisabeth and Sue and how each can harm the other are interesting surprises. There’s not much by way of characters. Dennis Quaid is notably bad as Harvey, their manager. At least he seems to be having fun, but I winced every time he was onscreen. In many ways The Substance is just the latest chapter in the story of Demi Moore’s love for her own body, which I think ultimately has to be taken as wholesome. Margaret Qualley does not appear nearly as comfortable with the nudity but she’s a trouper. The Substance was nominated for the big prize last spring but ultimately only came away with a Cannes Film Festival award for Best Screenplay, and most recently got some Oscars love too. Worth a look if you’re not particularly squeamish.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)

Furiosa is a worthy addition to the Mad Max franchise, which now also includes comic books and graphic novels, video games, and soundtrack albums. For me, it’s also where the franchise veers close to becoming an exercise strictly for continuity freaks, the people who insist not only on seeing all the Marvel or Star Wars or whatever movies, but also in a specific prescribed order. Furiosa, fifth in the franchise, is a prequel to the previous, 2015 installment, Mad Max: Fury Road. I feel like I already know much more than I want to about such geographical points of interest as the Citadel, Gastown, the Bullet Farm, and the mysterious Green Place. Don’t get me wrong. I may sound tired and cynical, but there are plenty of stunts and much glorious action in Furiosa. It pairs well with popcorn. Tom Holkenborg’s score is as moody-good as he gave us in Fury Road. Furiosa attracted stars such as Anya Taylor-Joy (The Queen’s Gambit, The VVitch, Last Night in Soho) and Chris Hemsworth (Thor movies, Avengers movies, etc.). Tom Burke gets the designated Mel Gibson role. Furiosa is a young girl living in the all-women (mostly women?) Green Place who is kidnapped while out in the desert. It was important to Green Place people to keep their location secret. This young Furiosa (Alyla Browne) is captured and held for years by one Dementus (Hemsworth). Then she grows older and becomes the fierce and big-eyed Taylor-Joy. There are new vehicles here to enjoy and some impressive new stunts too, as I say. But it’s kind of the same old thing—racing down desert highways and fending off attacks. There’s usually a reason for going from one place to the other, but I kind of lost track of them here. The beauty of Fury Road is the simple clarity of it. Furiosa has complications that don’t bode well for the franchise. On the other hand, George Miller is the creator, director, and single indispensable figure in all this, and he's 79 now, even older than Donald Trump, so we’re not likely to get a lot more from him. It’s possible he will sell it off to Disney or something, but in that case probably only the continuity freaks will stick around for more. Here's my stack-ranking of the five Mad Max movies: 1) The Road Warrior (Mad Max 2, 1982), 2) Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), 3) Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024), 4) Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985), and 5) Mad Max (1979). Unusual franchise in that the first is the worst by far.

I Saw the TV Glow (2024)

I Saw the TV Glow works in a slow and dreamy David Lynch key, heavy on the soundtrack and with music videos shoved in all part of the package. There are sinister horror undercurrents aplenty in this story of two fans of a ‘90s TV show called The Pink Opaque. We see scenes and hear plot points about the show, which is a little bit X-Files and a little bit Pete and Pete, with jolts of aimless meaninglessness for effect. The setup seems to be two girls on psychic adventures with monsters. In 1996, two youngsters, 7th-grader Owen (Ian Foreman and then Justice Smith) and 9th-grader Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) bond over the show, which runs on a USA Network-like cable channel on Saturday nights at 10:30 p.m. Owen has a home situation that makes it hard for him to look at it—there is a sad arc to his family over the years but we never get very much information, especially about his strict stepfather. Owen sneaks over to Maddy’s when he can to look at the show with Maddy and Maddy’s friend Amanda. Later Maddy makes videotapes of the show for Owen. It’s their favorite TV show ever. When both are in high school, Maddy wants to run away and she wants Owen to come with her, but he hangs back. Then Maddy disappears—police investigation, presumed dead. We don’t get much information about this either, but it sounds serious. When Maddy shows up eight years later Owen can’t believe it and begs her to tell him what happened, where she has been. She appears reluctant to say but finally admits it has something to do with the show. She has been living inside it or something. It seems unlikely but ever more unhinged plot developments suggest otherwise. It’s also possible she’s insane. I’m not sure it all adds up but I’m not sure that matters. I was interested in the first place because I’d found an earlier movie intriguing by director and writer Jane Schoenbrun, 2021’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. It’s fully steeped in the self-proclaimed dark corners of the internet such as “analog horror,” the topic of numerous youtube channels, and plays to them well. I Saw the TV Glow is attempting something similar with ‘90s cable entertainment shows and VHS swap-abouts, but with much more ambition than mere parody or mimicry. I’m not sure it’s such a fruitful direction, but I found at least this one to be engaging, mysterious, even cosmic and awe-inspiring in a way that is only slightly ironic.

Longlegs (2024)

The recent horror joint Longlegs is uneven but has its points. Is it worth seeing? I don’t know. It’s a serial killer picture and, even though I get the feeling it is looking for comparisons to The Silence of the Lambs, it’s actually much closer to Zodiac, with a killer, Longlegs by self-designated name, who somehow provokes family murder-suicide slaughters from a distance and then taunts police with cryptographical messages and evident knowledge of the murders held back from the public. This puts the idea even closer to Charles Manson, although that comparison is dismissed by investigators in the picture. Longlegs has done in double-digits numbers of families this way. The FBI has been investigating because no one is quite sure how he’s doing it, or even if he is. The forensics mostly don’t support it. But his taunting does. It’s an intriguing mystery that holds our attention. The FBI investigators include Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), who, in many ways, has the stock flat affect of a neurodivergent person. She also appears to have psychic powers, which she wants to deny. But she knows things and can’t account for how she knows them. They run her through batteries of tests. She’s psychic all right. Meanwhile, over in the coincidence bargain bin, Harker’s mother Ruth (Alicia Witt) is a blood-of-Jesus evangelical who might have something to do with the case and certainly appears to have something to hide. She is just a little too interested in it. Nicolas Cage as the devil-worshiping Longlegs has pulled yet one more basically original, manically insane character out of his big bag of tricks. He chews the scenery in a somewhat restrained way here, wearing a woman’s wig, but make no mistake. He is chewing the scenery as usual—it’s his stock in trade, his whole shtick at this point. How do I keep ending up at his movies? But he’s well deployed here by director and writer Oz Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter, low-key but worth a look). The narrative at large, however, is a bit of a muddle, unable to decide whether it’s about serial killing or devil worship or why not both? Or maybe family trauma too, with the long face. It’s full of too many cheap jump-cut scares, but arguably that’s the kind of stuff we’re here for anyway and thus we deserve it. I never spill drinks anymore at these things.

Baby Reindeer (2024)

[spoilers?] I heard it a lot of different ways about this relatively compact Netflix miniseries (seven episodes, 235 minutes) ... hilarious! scary! triggering! cringy! how dare he! ... which motivated a peek, which immediately sucked me into the whole thing. It’s a wild ride, the true story of a comedian—Donny Dunn, played by Richard Gadd, who wrote Baby Reindeer and stars in it, based on his auto fiction stand-up routine—and the stalker who tormented him, the trans woman he loved, the industry connection who raped him, the ex-girlfriend’s mother he lives with, and just why all this was happening to him. Questions, questions. Baby Reindeer looks insanely modern to a fogy like me. I’m sure Danny Dunn has nothing to do with it, for example, but I had to think about it. It’s not likely Gadd even knows who Danny Dunn is. For me, Jessica Gunning as Martha Scott the stalker steals the whole show. She is the epitome of large and in charge, with an eerie cackling laugh and a firehose of verbiage. She is life-of-the-party funny and charming. It takes a while to notice the mania never stops or even slows down and then to notice she seems to have some aggressive agenda. In fact, one of the problems of beset-upon Donny is that many people have a hard time believing Martha is not harmless. But she is not harmless. She is not harmless at all. She is scary as hell when the mood roars up on her. Gunning often had me pinned to my seat with her various brilliant fugue states. The rape story—all due content warnings, pay attention now—is the centerpiece of the story in many ways, the central motivating trauma. The relative kid-gloves treatment of the assault, bracketed by content warnings and information about support lines, seemed overplayed to me. But I can also think of some scenes I’ve seen in my life where I might have benefited from such consideration, so kudos on balance. The show is gracefully packed to the gills with representation. Nava Mau as Teri, Donny’s trans girlfriend, is very good, a fine performance and good chemistry with Gadd. Donny’s (and Gadd’s) confusions are more understandable than I can say—more understandable than I can imagine. Baby Reindeer is thoroughly entertaining—I really liked some parts of Donny’s stand-up routines, all figuratively drenched in flop sweat. But it is not an easy show to watch, as it touches deep chords and often feels like some invasive biopsy of emotion. I recommend it enthusiastically but be sure to heed the content warnings.