A Date for Mad Mary, Darren Thornton’s LGBTQ comedy-drama about a young woman struggling to reconcile her competing identities, effortlessly balances sentimentality and bitterness. Plot beats regularly convince viewers that a sweet, trite film will come to the fore, only for Thornton to plunge his protagonist straight back into misery. A comedic montage suggests the film isn’t all that interested in realism—until a heart-stoppingly bittersweet reflection on self-hatred and the gulf that time creates between former friends blossoms on screen.

Mary (Seána Kerslake) is a volatile young woman whose violent outbursts have just landed her in prison for assaulting a woman at a nightclub. When we first meet her, she’s being released. She lands on her feet—sort of—with a job at a fast-food joint, whilst moving back in with her mother and grandmother. All three women’s lives are faintly miserable,but never so much that the film becomes dour. A Date for Mad Mary is always willing to laugh at their folly, whether it’s Mary’s immaturity, her mother’s desperate attempts to shack up with any man in sight, or her grandmother’s bleak comments about the neighbours and her daughter’s woeful dating life.

Mary is a mess, defined mostly by a blank incuriosity about life and her own emotions. She doesn’t know why she lashes out at strangers in fits of rage, exploding as if she’s just been woken by a cannon shot. She can’t understand why her best friend Charlene (Charleigh Bailey)—now preparing for her wedding—doesn’t want to go on nights out with her anymore. She’s blind to how her destructive behaviour has sown distrust amongst her loved ones. And she can’t, for the life of her, figure out why she has zero interest in finding a date for the wedding, where she’s somehow still the maid of honour.

Whilst her anger remains a mystery to her, the rest is patently obvious to the audience. Watching Mary slowly reach these conclusions should be aggravating, but it’s painful and beautiful in equal measure. Beneath a tortured web of foul language, mood swings, and a contemptuous attitude lie untapped reserves of gentleness. Slow to mature, basic facts of adulthood haven’t yet dawned on her. She’s extreme in her self-absorption, treating first dates like obstacles she can’t be bothered to overcome—confronting suitors with a slack-jawed, dead-eyed hollow stare. They’re just disembodied parts of a blurry procession of people she has no desire to understand.

It doesn’t take a genius to realise Mary’s attractions lie elsewhere, but watching this epiphany take hold is a wonder nonetheless. The realisation that she’s attracted to Jess (Tara Lee), the videographer booked for Charlene’s wedding,opens up a world of possibility and hope. Watching the protagonist’s near-permanent scowl vanish into a genuine smile is like witnessing a sunrise over a distant valley. The story is written across Kerslake’s face—a minor shift in expression reveals exactly what will happen next.

Thankfully, the wider narrative isn’t nearly so predictable. It offers a true-to-life depiction of aimlessness, the weird void of growing up, the affliction of self-ignorance, the boundaries of friendship, and the terrifying risk of love.Thornton and his co-writer brother, Colin, etch out unpredictability by never letting Mary settle. She’s always in motion, as though life itself is daring her to drop her defensive stance. She hardly notices what others are going through, yet seems too disaffected to afford herself pity or reflection.

Many of Mary’s interactions test her patience, forcing her to rein in her impulses around Charlene’s contemptuous friend Leona (Siobhan Shanahan)—who, in fairness, has every right to turn up her nose at such a bratty protagonist.Yet rather than lording over Mary’s recklessness, the film also prods at Leona’s pathetic, behind-the-back ridiculing, as well as the ways an ordered life has turned Charlene into a patronising, small-minded bore. Nobody is perfect; the only one who comes close is Jess, purely because she’s more humble and less self-interested than the rest.

Jess is the only character who could do with deeper psychological exploration, but Mary’s failure to see what makes her tick fits her self-absorption and blossoming sexuality. There’s a richer inner world there that Mary simply can’t process yet. She’s completely lost, but rather than letting the film turn on sexual orientation anxiety, A Date for Mad Mary is mature enough to recognise that the girl of Mary’s dreams isn’t a magical cure-all for her cracked psyche.

Mary is simultaneously a loveable goofball, an irritating, self-absorbed idiot, a physical threat, and a tragic figure. A Date for Mad Mary won’t win awards for structural originality, nor will its modest budget deliver jaw-dropping cinematography. But those aren’t the areas where it stakes its claim. The film’s brilliance comes from recognising that our lives are a chaotic mixture of comedy and drama, and that because we’re often unable—or unwilling—to figure ourselves out, our struggles remain endlessly amusing, pitiful, depressing, and hopeful.

IRELAND | 2016 | 82 MINUTES | 1.85:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: Darren Thornton.
writer: Darren Thornton & Colin Thornton.
starring: Seána Kerslake, Tara Lee, Charleigh Bailey, Denise McCormack, Siobhan Shanahan, Barbara Brennan, Norma Sheahan & Ben Condron.

The post A DATE FOR MAD MARY (2016) appeared first on Frame Rated.

Mere days before the biggest bout of his career, Finnish boxer Olli Mäki (Jarkko Lahti) finds himself overcome by doubt in Juho Kuosmanen’s The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki / Hymyilevä mies. Olli’s spent his whole life training for this moment—a fight for a world title, facing off against American boxer Davey Moore (John Bosco Jr.) in his home country—but something’s changed. Even when standing in a room with his overzealous manager and former boxer, Elis Ask (Eero Milonoff), it’s as if he isn’t there. He’s become disillusioned with press obligations, skips his training regimen to spend time with his new girlfriend Raija (Oona Airola), and finds himself questioning whether this vocation is all it’s cracked up to be.

Based on a true story, this sweet and sensitive film is imbued with so much warmth, richness, and nuance that it hardly feels appropriate to call it a biopic. It resists the lazy sway of cheap sentimental ploys, where loved ones are akin to furniture for the heroic protagonist, padding out their existence without any semblance of identity—a snag in the otherwise enjoyable boxing biopic Cinderella Man (2005).

It isn’t fear of being hurt or killed that motivates Olli’s reticence, but the sense that he’s heading down a path in life that isn’t for him. It’s an internal conflict through which Raija and Elis provide two invaluable perspectives. The former’s a source of radiant beauty and warmth, trusting and loyal to the core. The latter has all the superficial qualities of loyalty, but no interest in who Olli really is. Elis is living vicariously through his fighter, reliving the glory days of his own boxing career.

Olli’s found his own form of glory in a loving relationship; you get the sense he’d follow Raija to the ends of the Earth if necessary. Yet there are no sharp edges to this film; Elis isn’t a two-bit villain, but another struggling figure who can relive his career heights through his client. Nor are there ever any abrupt moments where the script must clunkily announce characters’ intentions or revealing behaviour. It all flows effortlessly, making for just as seductively charming a story as its black-and-white visuals and beautiful cinematography lend to the experience.

The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki prides itself on illuminating the everyday acts of love that give meaning to Olli’s life. There are no showy moments or big declarations of adoration, but love is suffused through this film in the form of charmed and charming smiles in the company of a lover. It’s everything else about this world that demands more of this protagonist than he can offer. Lahti’s lead performance is an extraordinary portrayal of a quietly unsettled man who longs to be ordinary, but finds himself contorted into roles he never sought out.

He’s pushed into boxes and hemmed in by reporters and cameras, with constant press attention and inane questions levelled at him. A documentary crew films him performing his daily tasks, where he appears as stiff as a board, whilst in interviews he looks like he’s planning what he’ll do for the day when he’s free from this figurative jail cell. As Elis is quick to note, even his unaffected modesty does him no favours, instead appearing as ingratitude.

Kuosmanen resists the urge to paint Olli as a wounded or heroic figure. He’s simply a man who wants to be ordinary, but that’s the trick: it’s in this ordinary life that he can envisage a future with Raija that’s more glorious and heroic than any boxing trophy could provide. These developments unfold so naturally as to be the antithesis of didactic, yet, as opposed to the likes of Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine (2025), this film isn’t necessarily interested in subverting expectations. Both films are similar in that they take an unconventional route in exploring a combat sports figure, eschewing uber-simplistic depictions of rugged masculinity or what it means to be victorious in this limited context.

Safdie and Kuosmanen are both quick to fill this gap and remedy the lack of naturalism in a rigid genre about rigid lives. But The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki diverges from Safdie’s latest project in that it’s content with simply mapping onto the low-key nature of its protagonist, rather than looking to make a reverent piece of art out of coming up short. For Mark Kerr in The Smashing Machine, he had to lose to learn that winning isn’t everything. But Olli knows this is true for him from the outset, making the all-important bout an act of resignation rather than passion. It’s a tale told with extreme confidence in the deceptively evocative tapestry of its emotional palette. If it seems low-key or humble, that’s only because it knows better than to look beyond the importance of a wry smile or scolding expression.

What sticks out most from The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki is a brief scene where the protagonist wanders through a circus act, still ruminating on his upcoming fight and his lackadaisical attitude towards it. He’s holding a rubber ball, and if he throws and strikes it against a button, it’ll release a platform on which a circus performer lies, plunging her into a shallow body of water. An alarm is rung, a slew of balls are thrown in the space of a second, the woman falls, and Olli hardly has time to gather his thoughts, his ball hanging limply at his side. As the rest of the onlookers leave, Olli stays behind, silently observing the woman sit down, tired and soaked through, before taking off her wig.

Much of this film’s spirit is contained within this scene: the split second of action, deepening that seemingly eternal anticipation before the act; the immediate lack of interest when the act is completed; the mask of its performer being shorn and the flood of authentic emotions replacing the performance. Olli doesn’t want to perform, whether in the ring or in press obligations for the all-important fight. He isn’t interested in living up to the glorious dreams of fickle fans around him. He knows how lonely it is to step into that ring with only himself to count on.

FINLAND • SWEDEN • GERMANY | 2016 | 92 MINUTES | 1.85:1 | BLACK & WHITE | FINNISH

Cast & Crew

director: Juho Kuosmanen.
writers: Mikko Myllylahti & Juho Kuosmanen.
starring: Jarkko Lahti, Oona Airola, Eero Milonoff & John Bosco Jr.

The post THE HAPPIEST DAY IN THE LIFE OF OLLI MÄKI (2016) appeared first on Frame Rated.

‘Burnt Offerings has no peer. Better than Rosemary’s Baby, The Other, and The Exorcist.’

That is how The Hartford Courant lauded the 1973 novel by Robert Marasco. 50 years on from its film adaptation, at least two of those other titles have become the definitive terrifying tykes in all fiction. More frightening tales like Phantasm (1979) and So I Married an Axe Murderer (1993) were shot at the Dunsmuir House and have overshadowed this quaint 1976 horror. The Allardyce house of Burnt Offerings could have stood proud, were it not for the encroaching skyscrapers of the haunted house genre.

However, it is hardly a fair contest against successors that have almost certainly cannibalised past haunted houses to build their own. Stephen King praised Marasco for his “near brilliance” and has called Burnt Offerings one of his favourite horror films. Both his 1977 novel and 1980 adaptation of The Shining follow a typical family: a tightly wound alcoholic dad, a devoted housewife, and their relentlessly tormented young boy. That is this story—and they make the same mistake of staying in a spacious, spooky holiday home.

The Overlook Hotel is yet another “hungry house”—a sub-genre dubbed by modern critic Brandon Stanwyck. The Allardyce home is very much an active character, psychically abusing its tragic tenants to grow fat off their suffering. There is little motivation beyond basic sustenance. Suitably creepy residents Arnold (Burgess Meredith) and Roz Allardyce (Eileen Heckart) aid the house. Who owns whom is left open to debate.

They succeed in luring in another meal, despite laying it on thick. Between statements like “the house takes care of itself” and “it’s practically immortal”, the dialogue moves past foreshadowing into obvious warnings that fall on deaf ears. Their behaviour is equally alarming: Arnold tittering at an adorable 12-year-old Davey (Lee H. Montgomery) scraping his knee is sinister enough, but Roz excitedly emphasising that “children are good for the place” is downright unnerving.

Screenwriter William F. Nolan veers too heavily into literalising the metaphor. Arnold tells a one-off character—purely for the audience’s benefit—to observe how a dead plant has grown back right after the first bloodshed. Moments later, patriarch Ben (Oliver Reed) catches his thumb on a champagne screw and the pantry light relights. In case that was not clear enough, Bob Cobert’s eerie score acts as the musical translation of “get it?”. Those who have read the Book of Leviticus will understand from the cutesy title alone that it is a winking nod to a “gift offered to God”.

Director Dan Curtis never relies on venturing into the dark for cheap scares, which would have been easy for the man famous for Dark Shadows (1966–1971). Curtis produced and directed numerous works for television; Burnt Offerings was the third of only four films he made for theatrical release. A number of critics felt his cinematic scope was rather pedestrian, but those were contemporary opinions. Anyone tired of the underlit, muted palettes of modern horror will find an invigorating reprieve in these lush 1970s visuals.

His familiarity with shooting for television never harms the quality of Jacques R. Marquette’s cinematography. Starting in beaming sunlight, the film presents horror as something that can exist and thrive in the day alongside us. Numerous pool scenes make the most of natural lighting to heightened effect—the shimmer of that dazzling blue water could not possibly hide disturbing secrets underneath.

A fascinating aside: Variety reported in 1969 that Burnt Offerings would be directed by Bob Fosse, based on an original screenplay that Marasco subsequently novelised. It would certainly have been something for the legendary director to release this between his Oscar-pleasers Sweet Charity (1969) and Cabaret (1972).

But would it have been better? If Curtis was itching to try something outside of Dark Shadows, he proved far too comfortable repeating himself. The nagging issue with Burnt Offerings is that, for as much as it gets right, it achieves those eerie successes early on and stops there. The film is fond of revisiting its weaker notes too, making for an aggravating experience. The audience starts to feel like the ghosts who have always been there at the Overlook Hotel.

There should be genuine familial warmth before the horror, and it exists here in broad strokes. As with Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall, you can tell right from the start why Oliver Reed and Karen Black were cast. Their family dysfunctions might be genuine actor quirks rather than intentional choices—or, as modern critic Lisa Marie Bowman put it, they are “a family so obnoxious that their own house tries to kill them”.

Mother Marian (Black) admires “the memories of a lifetime”, but all the portraits of past tenants feel more like a trophy collection. That is creepy enough, but she then spends what feels like fifteen minutes staring at these photos. That is when she is not tending to the greenhouse (warranting “such waste!” twice in the first five minutes) or walking up and down the attic stairs to tend to the off-screen, ailing Mrs Allardyce. Black faces a tough job, spending a sizeable number of scenes alone as the house isolates Marian. Curtis knew she was capable after directing her in Trilogy of Terror (1975), but while he afforded her four distinct roles in that project, her one-note house obsession here wears thin.

Ben is the man in charge, initially resisting the siren call because he thinks the arrangement is too good to be true. Paying $900 for a summer holiday home that requires cleaning, maintenance, and feeding an infirm elder is hardly a bargain. Reed suffers from the same problem as Nicholson: he seems on edge before anything supernatural even happens. This dad is one step away from a blistering rage in every family scene. His nightmare of a smiling chauffeur (Anthony James) sends Reed into an eye-bulging, cheek-wobbling panic, transforming him into the house’s biggest threat through his scenery-chewing performance. The story even attempts to restrain him in a catatonic state, which lasts all of two minutes before Reed gurns his way out of his chair.

Ben is not an addict like Jack Torrance, though Nicholson could easily have been playing Reed. Arguably more memorable than the film itself was its promotional tour. Appearing on The Tonight Show, Reed—already notorious for his volatile behaviour—clashed with Shelley Winters. Growing agitated by her interruptions, he shouted at her to shut up before unleashing a fiery rant against women’s liberation. This earned him a free drink, courtesy of Winters pouring it over his head. Co-star Bette Davis never resorted to that, though she certainly hated “that man”, as she exclusively referred to him. “Possibly one of the most loathsome human beings I have ever had the misfortune of meeting,” Davis said of the actor, who bellowed Irish folk songs and rode the food trolley down their hotel corridors.

All this is to say that Reed and Davis do share a camaraderie on screen that belies their off-screen squabbling. The moments between Marian and Aunt Elizabeth are sweet, serving as a nice supporting role for Davis in one of her increasingly frequent “elderly coot” appearances.

“A talented cast was sacrificed to this slop. And the movie even has Artistic Pretensions! The photography is consciously arty, and the dialog is fiercely elliptic, and the filmmakers didn’t even have the courage to approach their material as the silly trash it is.” —Roger Ebert, critic.

In another comparison to The Shining, both the daily maintenance of the hotel and a bad case of writer’s block distract Jack Torrance from the issue of ghosts. Nobody in the Allardyce house, however, has much else to do other than notice its strange occurrences. No subtlety is afforded to an attentive audience. When it takes so many incidents for this family to finally take action, it feels as though Curtis is hitting us over the head.

A strong moment in the shift from happy family to horror victims occurs during a pool scene with Ben and Davey splashing about. Reed’s reddening, contorted grimace as he holds his son under water for a moment too long is uncomfortable in its unrestrained intensity. One might wonder how the film could possibly recover after a child has to draw blood by striking his own father. Yet, it simply fades to night, and everyone goes to sleep. At the very least, Ben wakes in a cold sweat, muttering, “I wanted to hurt him, do you understand that? I wanted to hurt him!”

Surely things cannot return to normality after a ghoulish pallbearer launches coffins at elderly ladies? Yet the house inexplicably allows them to leave for a standard funeral. Later, Ben drags his child through a storm, repeatedly ramming their car into a downed tree—only for a doctor to make a house call on Davey, who is sound asleep once again! Not knowing when a film will end is not inherently bad, but the sheer frequency with which this story resets grows maddening. Davey nearly drowning a second time reverts Marian into a perfectly panicked mother and snaps Ben out of his two-minute catatonia. If this device is meant to create the illusion that the family can overcome the supernatural threat, the resolution feels entirely unearned.

While I rather enjoyed the downbeat ending on a first viewing, it now causes frustration. These constant resets render our leads foolish. Under no circumstances would Ben ever allow his wife back into the house after finally breaking her obsession. Her blasé decision to re-enter one last time ought to be a glaring red flag. Ben forgets that he himself suspected something was amiss with the old woman upstairs, yet both wind up visiting her anyway. The violent finale is so bombastic and mean-spirited that it feels like a precursor to the “Dead Teenager” slasher sub-genre, where one actively roots for these idiots to die after returning to danger so many times.

Writing for Horror Obsessive, the critic known as ‘S’ highlights the then-shocking nastiness: “Davey doesn’t need to be manipulated because he’s already entirely under his parents’ control”. Despite Ben harbouring childhood trauma, there is no such psychological depth given to his boy; the house simply tortures Davey with gas leaks and falling chimneys.”He’s ripe for the taking, the low-hanging fruit of the family. This is why ‘children are good for the place’—they’re simply the easiest to harm.” The boy eventually becomes annoying due to a complete lack of personality. Davey is little more than a cheap plot device and an obstacle for the parents to wrangle with, in stark contrast to Danny (Danny Lloyd), who possesses the titular “shining”.

Nevertheless, the film’s societal anxieties reach beyond the nuclear family. More classic haunted house stories feature unlucky protagonists inheriting property from deceased relatives. The Torrances and the Rolfs, by contrast, are both seeking a temporary getaway from the mundanity of working-class life. One advantage Burnt Offerings holds over The Shining is that while the Torrances never aspired to be hoteliers, the Allardyce estate offers the Rolfs an escapist fantasy of wealthy living. The Rolfs could never afford a place like this ordinarily, precisely because they are decent, ordinary people. The false promise that blood, sweat, and tears can earn a place to call one’s own merely serves up the lower-middle class for the Allardyces to profit from. In the end, perhaps the latest Mrs Allardyce is sitting pretty up in that attic, with the house so lovingly restored. She paid a little more than $900 to keep it—and even then, only until the next unfortunate family arrives.

Burnt Offerings never quite restored itself to full cinematic glory. Opening to a limited theatrical release, United Artists expanded its run two months later, reaching number one at the US box office over its opening weekend. Yet that triumph owed more to a quiet release schedule than genuine popularity, as the film earned only $1.56M against a $2M budget. Today, the Dunsmuir House stands exactly as it did 50 years ago—now a designated landmark on the US National Register of Historic Places. It has achieved immortality without needing to feed on the weddings, receptions, corporate gatherings, and historical reenactments hosted there. One wonders how many of those guests know that this forgotten horror film was once shot within those very walls.

USA • ITALY | 1976 | 116 MINUTES | 1.85:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: Dan Curtis.
writers: Dan Curtis & William F. Nolan (based on the 1973 novel by Robert Marasco).
starring: Karen Black, Oliver Reed, Lee H. Montgomery, Bette Davis, Burgess Meredith, Eileen Hackert, Dub Taylor, Anthony James & Jim Myers.

The post BURNT OFFERINGS (1976) appeared first on Frame Rated.

It’s difficult to imagine anyone watching Brian Helgeland’s A Knight’s Tale and not being thoroughly entertained. The only fair criticism would be that it gives audiences exactly what they want within a fairly traditional narrative structure. Yet, 25 years later, it still feels fresh and is neither a generic costume drama nor a standard sports movie. Despite being unjustly summed up by some as “Rocky on horseback”, it’s differentiated by a precise script crammed with snappy dialogue, plus fleshed-out characters right down to the colourful supporting roles. It’s spectacular, thrilling, witty,romantic, and possibly the best example of deliberately deployed anachronism on film.

When Sir Ector (Nick Brimble) dies, securing food is first and foremost on the minds of his three squires: William (Heath Ledger), Roland (Mark Addy), and Wat (Alan Tudyk). Depending on a win at the next tournament, William argues he’s trained with Sir Ector long enough to compete in his place. It might be a flawed plan, but his friends reluctantly go along with it.

They arrive at the tournament field to the rousing stomp of Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” which seems to blare straight out of the fanfare trumpets. Straight away, we know we’re in the hands of a bold director who isn’t afraid to have fun. Of course, using mainstream pop-rock so prominently goes some way towards evoking how exciting a popular event with jousting and sword fights would’ve felt to a medieval audience. Helgeland curates a classic rock soundtrack throughout. In response to critics stating the obvious, he pointed out that Carter Burwell’s equally rousing orchestral score is just as anachronistic; neither rock bands nor orchestras existed in the 14th century.

William manages to win the joust, but the trio of squires hadn’t thought that far ahead. He’s expected to remove his helmet to receive the prize from the attending Lord, but his obvious youth will betray his assumed identity. Luckily, he’s taken a blow to the head that’s bent his helmet so out of shape it can’t be removed—or so he conveniently claims.They soon realise this will be a recurring problem.

However, on their way to the next tournament, they meet a naked man trudging along the same road. He introduces himself as Geoffrey Chaucer (Paul Bettany), a down-on-his-luck writer who literally gambled away the shirt off his back, along with everything else he owned. William, Roland, and Wat haven’t a clue what a writer is, but they quickly realise a man with such a gambling habit is a liability. They only agree to feed and clothe him when he explains he can forge a Patent of Nobility—the document that will create a new identity for William, enabling him to enter tournaments without having to pass as Sir Ector.

As with the timeslip soundtrack, the vocabulary is modern throughout, sprinkled with a few antiquated colloquialisms for fun, such as Wat threatening to give Geoffrey a “fonging”. A mention of the Battle of Poitiers places the action in the mid- to late-1350s, when the English nobility would’ve spoken French or Latin and commoners spoke Middle English. Geoffrey Chaucer was hailed as the first writer to use Middle English prose as a literary form, as well as being the first to write down some 1,000 words that became part of the English language.

Chaucer’s life is fairly well documented, except for the time he spent travelling in Europe across France and Flanders.It was this mysterious chapter of his life that inspired Helgeland’s script. Scholars enjoy debating his motivations and whereabouts, but who really knows what Chaucer got up to? Perhaps he accompanied an aspiring knight and his entourage to a series of tournaments leading up to the championship in London?

Helgeland started out as a writer, earning his first credit on A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988). He made his directorial debut with his own script for A Slight Case of Murder (1996), an episode for Season 7 of television series Tales from the Crypt (1989-1996). The episode starred Christopher Cazenove, who appears here as William’s father in an emotionally charged supporting role that provides a couple of supremely poignant moments.

Casting directors may have noticed Heath Ledger when he played high-school bad boy Scott Irwin in 10 episodes of the Australian soap Home and Away. Shortly after, he landed the lead as Conor, a Celtic chieftain resisting Roman rule in Roar (1997)—a short-lived television series created by Shaun Cassidy and set in 5th-century Ireland.Ledger’s first big-screen lead was in the teen romcom 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), but A Knight’s Tale is widely considered his breakthrough.

The same goes for Paul Bettany, who makes a memorable entrance by spending a good chunk of his screen time stark naked. He does so with astonishing confidence to great comedic effect, embellished by the understated reactions of his castmates. Even when fully clothed, his young Chaucer remains one of his most accomplished roles. Today, he’s better known for his various incarnations as Marvel’s Vision.

The bulk of the visual effects for A Knight’s Tale was provided by The Mill, which had just completed work on Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000) and would soon become famous for its excellent work on the BBC’s Doctor Who reboot. The VFX crew included supervisor Paul Whybrow, who was working on Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001) around the same time—the first of five Harry Potter films he’d contribute to. Joining him was Gary Cohen, fresh from The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles franchise and likely drawing on his experience of period-set action from First Knight (1995).

The set-piece jousts are handled brilliantly by second-unit director Allan Graf alongside a talented, fearless stunt team. Dynamic, high-impact action is captured with inventive crane shots and inspired Steadicam work. Operators were suspended on wires and flown along the barriers between two charging horses, placing the viewer right in the action as lances shatter into an explosion of shards on impact (they were actually made of balsa wood filled with linguine). Spaghetti Western–style close-ups were inserted, not only for dramatic effect, but to keep track of who’s who when only eyes are visible through the visor slits.

The film’s $65M budget certainly shows on screen, but its main appeal lies in the considerable charm of the principal cast, most of whom were relatively unknown at the time. It marked the feature debut for female lead Shannyn Sossamon, who lights up the screen as the feisty Jocelyn. She catches the eye of both William and his arrogantly obnoxious rival, Count Adhemar (Rufus Sewell). Her chic fashion sense wouldn’t look out of place at a modern society event, signalling immediately that she’s stylish, wealthy, a little avant-garde, and well out of William’s league.

Rufus Sewell had been busy with supporting roles since his debut in Twenty-One (1991) opposite Patsy Kensit, but he first caught wide attention as the paranoid protagonist in the sci-fi noir classic Dark City (1998). Here, he demonstrates great versatility as a deliciously despicable old-school villain who manages to be arch without devolving into a caricature.

Then there’s Kate (Laura Fraser), a farrier—a scenario that isn’t as unlikely as one might assume. Membership of medieval blacksmiths’ guilds was posthumously transferred to widows, allowing them to continue running the forge to provide for their families. However, they weren’t permitted to make armour, making it doubly rebellious when she offers to design and forge a new suit of plate mail for William.

It’s refreshing for a female character to be so narratively essential without serving as a love interest for the male leads.She joins William’s crew and holds her own alongside Roland and Wat as an equal. Crucially, she has a better grasp of courtly etiquette and teaches William to dance so he can accept Jocelyn’s invitation to a celebratory banquet. The evening goes smoothly until Adhemar tries to humiliate William by asking him to demonstrate a dance from his homeland. The scheme backfires when Jocelyn steps in; together, they innovate new moves and rock the dance floor to David Bowie’s “Golden Years” in the film’s most memorable scene.

While anachronisms run riot, many period details are painstakingly accurate and beautifully rendered through clever miniatures and digital composites. The depiction of Old London Bridge, lined with the houses of the wealthy, is impressive. With no surviving 14th-century illustrations, it required artistic licence, yet the attention to detail extends far beyond a brief shot—right down to the heads of executed criminals displayed on pikes over the gatehouse. Another blink-and-you’ll-miss-it detail is the steeple of Old St Paul’s Cathedral, glimpsed alongside the Tower of London beyond the tournament grounds where the high-stakes finale between William and Count Adhemar plays out.

A Knight’s Tale made a splash at the box office on its opening weekend, finishing second only to The Mummy Returns (2001), and went on to earn a respectable $117.5M. It has since attained cult status, with many citing it as a favourite comfort watch. Perhaps it owes its lasting appeal to sharp humour as much as exhilarating action. It never pretends to be anything other than joyous entertainment delivered with heart and a knowing wink. With an excellent ensemble delivering benchmark performances and a simple story told exceptionally well, it feels timeless—refreshingly inventive yet familiar, comfortingly classic, and gleefully postmodern.

USA | 2001 | 132 MINUTES | 2.35:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH • FRENCH • LATIN

Cast & Crew

director: Brian Helgeland.
writer: Brian Helgeland (based on ‘The Knight’s Tale’ by Geoffrey Chaucer).
starring: Heath Ledger, Paul Bettany, Rufus Sewell, Mark Addy, Alan Tudyk, Shannyn Sossamon, Laura Fraser & Christopher Cazenove.

The post A KNIGHT’S TALE (2001) appeared first on Frame Rated.

“No, but that’s a good story. I like that,” was how director John Carpenter shut down persistent rumours that he had retooled his aborted third Snake Plissken film into this original feature. A wasted effort, given that almost every article before and after that interview continues to regurgitate the same copy-pasted hearsay — perhaps to give audiences more reason to like the project, or to justify him still making it. Yet Ghosts of Mars remains a wasted effort built on copy-pasted familiarity. It could have been a good story, but I didn’t like it.

The writing was on the Martian wall when Carpenter was asked whether the recent box-office flops Mission to Mars (2000) and Red Planet (2000) had deterred him, prompting his characteristically carefree retort: “What are you gonna have… Ghosts of Pluto?” It wasn’t astronomical gravity that weighed down this dreary experience. If that seems harsh, the reflexive criticism is for the many die-hard retrospectives attempting to reclaim the film as some lost masterpiece.

Some reviews espouse values calling it a schlocky, camp, retro throwback. Carpenter himself conceded that “the name of the movie is Ghosts of Mars; I figured the campiness would be self-explanatory.” A few years later, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino collaborated on their drive-in double feature Grindhouse (2007). While aesthetically overt, there are two clear attempts to make quality cinema. Rose-tinted critics of Ghosts of Mars insist that naysayers simply aren’t clever enough to appreciate the ill-defined subtlety of Carpenter recycling his greatest hits for a blatant misfire.

There is comfort in familiarity when rewatching a filmography — like ‘Leo pointing’ at the long opening credits roll in that signature Albertus font, accompanied by Carpenter’s self-composed soundtrack. Beyond nostalgia, there is real value in engaging with the sincerity of an auteur indulging his passions. We like it because he does. One could easily imagine Carpenter listening to fans over the years extolling their favourite parts of his commercial flops, assuming that combining those elements would guarantee a box-office home run.

The body-snatching tropes recall The Thing (1982), whilst the possession elements come straight out of Prince of Darkness (1987), complete with a villain resembling Alice Cooper’s cameo. A classic Western siege echoes Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), and the supernatural twist mirrors The Fog (1980). Meanwhile, the matriarchal world-building reflects his pivotal role in the ‘Final Girl’ trope movement with Halloween (1978). Yet, as JoBlo critic Andrew Hatfield noted, Carpenter lacks the musical ear of Alan Howarth, the writing prowess of Debra Hill, and the visual eye of Dean Cundey. It was these collaborators who elevated Carpenter’s iconic visions, not his filmic influences alone.

Despite critical reclamation attempts, Carpenter’s stellar catalogue, and a misquoted Aristotle, the whole of Ghosts of Mars is far from greater than the sum of its disjointed parts. The first five minutes consist of boring setup from characters who aren’t even in the main cast.

Carpenter is clearly attempting to have fun within a straightforward structure: Statham explains how he found three survivors in a flashback, those survivors then flashback to how they survived, and the entire overarching narrative is framed as one large flashback. Yet that initial framing device — a tribunal hearing — adds nothing. A character says that a place looked like a slaughterhouse, and Carpenter deems it necessary to show the tribunal ask, “Slaughterhouse?”, before cutting right back. Our protagonist, played by Natasha Henstridge, tells the tribunal — and the audience — that they took a suspect somewhere and went outside to have a look around outside. The film then fades to them outside having a look around. There is “show, don’t tell”, and then there is “tell, but also show”. These exhaustive interruptions are no sign of style but a desperate script padding to reach feature length.

Even before the tribunal, establishing text informs us that the year is 2176, Mars is 84% terraformed, and under a matriarchy. Does that last part tie into the ghosts, the planet, or the plot? According to one retrospective, Carpenter didn’t want his female action heroes to have to “prove themselves before people took them seriously”. Respectfully, you control the writing. Star Trek has demonstrated for decades that men can respect women in the future. It comes across as a lazy shortcut by Carpenter and co-writer Larry Sulkis to avoid the actual work of distinguishing their protagonist within an ensemble cast.

“I’m as straight as they come” and just as dull when it comes to Lt. Ballard (Natasha Henstridge). The model-turned-actress made her debut as the divine yet deadly alien in Species (1995), but she is woefully miscast here. Courtney Love was originally set to star until her foot was run over by her boyfriend’s ex-wife, and the filmmakers made no attempt to hide that Henstridge was their second choice. She had one advantage: prior knowledge of the film via her fiancé, Liam Waite, who had already been cast. By all accounts, she genuinely tried. Alleged arguments surfaced between star and director over understated performances, lack of direction, and Carpenter’s candid admission: “There was a basketball game on television and I wanted to get out of there.”

An on-set report revealed that Henstridge suffered for her art as one of several cast and crew members who fell ill. Special effects artist Greg Nicotero described the harsh conditions: “the middle of the desert, freezing wind coming in, rain, and it was really hard.” Carpenter sympathised, noting that they “had to shut down for three or four weeks. It wasn’t just a cold; she had to stay home.” This mirrors the production of The Thing, where FX artist Rob Bottin was hospitalised with double pneumonia, a bleeding ulcer, and exhaustion — though his condition was attributed to a seven-day work ethic, and Henstridge blamed back-to-back filming schedules rather than the gypsum mine location.

Regardless of her popularity in Hollywood at the time, Henstridge was only 27, which explains her total lack of authority as team leader. While she could command a scene in Species, for as many badass moments she’s graced here to literally strongarm people into submission, she often withdraws and takes orders from her inferiors. And this is when she’s conscious — between drug-induced stupors and being knocked out — Henstridge spends an inordinate amount of screen time asleep.

That’s what teamwork is for, which the writing also struggles with. Ghosts of Mars plays it safe as critic John Kenneth Muir observed, “Carpenter’s narratives often feature a heightened sense of ‘male bonding’ or camaraderie among ethnically diverse characters.” None of that chemistry exists here as the principal cast share no rapport. Henstridge is not alone in her struggle, as nobody understands what tone Carpenter is going for. It becomes every actor for themselves in a bid to project their individual charm.

In only his second American acting role, Jason Statham was passed over for the lead but secured a supporting role that gives more commands than Ballard. Clea DuVall appears to subvert the matriarchy as a fresh-faced rookie who freezes at the sight of blood. Ice Cube is sorely underplayed and incapable of the brooding intensity of Kurt Russell. Neither side of the “cops aligning with criminals” dynamic delivers the necessary charisma. Pam Grier is there, and then she gets her head cut off.

Things do not improve once they get their asses to Mars. The first 45 minutes are, frankly, boring as Hell. Transforming a New Mexico gypsum mine into the plains of Mars thanks to gallons of red food colouring is a sign of the relentless efforts and sizeable $28M budget. But even with reliable cinematographer Gary B. Kibbe (In the Mouth of Madness), Ghosts of Mars looks no better than a direct-to-video Tremors (1990) sequel. The few moments of genuine fun Carpenter appears to have involve shooting handheld DV camera footage for the roaming Martian ghosts’ perspective.

Editor Paul C. Warschilka undermines the atmosphere with endless fade transitions and a droning score. While some critics have praised the dreamlike tone, it induces sleep rather than building tension. Almost acknowledging this pacing issue, Warschilka arbitrarily switches editing styles: Ballard and Jericho find Kincaid (DuVall) pointing a gun at a knocking door — spooky — and Henstridge orders her to fetch Commander Braddock (Grier). An abrupt Star Wars-style wipe cuts to the same location as Grier enters. Just have her be there in the first place to presever any chance of suspense.

Some vocal defenders champion these decisions. Imagine the cult longevity of The Thing if it had continually cut to Kurt Russell safely back home retelling what went down in Antartica: as the dog is brought in, it cuts to Russell reminiscing, “but what we didn’t know was that the dog was an alien,” or after spotting the spider-head crawling away, he asks for Keith David, who arrives via a wipe transition. Yeah, that classic film would never have survived the critical drubbing it already received.

Beyond technical shortcomings, a fundamental question remains: what is Ghosts of Mars? As a horror-action-Western pastiche, it fails across every genre. Carpenter gives the audience less than a minute with the strange woman knocking on the door before Ballard narrates, “It was almost like she was possessed.” Trapping Ballard outside, alone and unarmed, provides an ideal setup for slasher horror — even if we already know she survives. Instead, she fights a single guy, scavenges a sword and wire to scale the wall to safety, and the entire sequence is infuriatingly dragged out with fades, turning her survival struggle into a leisurely stroll. The master of horror seems possessed by the spirit of Alan Smithee.

Action eventually arrives, albeit in the form of aimless gunfire. Pam Grier’s head on a pike and the reveal of Big Daddy Mars (Richard Cetrone) and his war cult — set to a thrashing, motif-free soundtrack by Carpenter, Steve Vai, Robin Finck, and Buckethead — offer quality brainless entertainment. KNB EFX Group spent countless hours scarifying and mutilating over a hundred extras in death-metal attire, working from late afternoon to early morning in the freezing mine.

The Martian miners look suitably intimidating as individual freaks, but they lack the overwhelming collective power of an unstoppable horde. CGI buzzsaws still pack a punch — DuVall’s unceremonious decapitation reliably elicits a laugh — but this carnage is intermittent amid the with the sluggish melee. Carpenter, lacking confidence in the choreography or attempting to ride the wake of The Matrix (1999), shoots the fight scenes in slow motion. Again, it’s concerning to see a veteran director rely on such gimmicks to stretch a film to feature length. Any claim to artistic vision is undermined by clumsy cross-cutting between Cube fighting Big Daddy in slow motion while Henstridge fights a goon at normal speed.

Carpenter has always loved Westerns. In the 76 years between the epic travelling gun battles of Stagecoach (1939) and Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), Ghosts of Mars fails to carry the torch. But still, focusing solely on its visual shortcomings ignores Carpenter’s underlying thematic and historical ambitions.

“M: Colonization and imperialism are a component of this film. Are you cognizant of actual events from history? JC: That’s what science fiction is. It becomes pretty dull if you try to create a future that doesn’t resonate with us. We need to recognize something in the film and attach ourselves to it.”—John Carpenter, interviewed for Blackfilm.com

When our fearless hero, Lt. Ballard, declares in her rallying speech, “This isn’t their planet anymore!”, one cannot help but question whether modern mindsets are simply too woke for a film of its time, or whether the director is subverting a taboo that has endured for generations. There is certainly an attempt to evoke the classic “hostile indigenous population” trope by having their ancient spiritual culture possess the colonists and turn them against one another. Carpenter was ‘unfortunate’ enough to be ahead of his time by mere weeks, as the destructive forces of tribalism and savagery were about to re-emerge in America.

Critic John Kenneth Muir posits with self-assured authority that “it appears that a little context is necessary for an understanding of the film’s modus operandi.” An enlightened audience may well appreciate Carpenter’s cinematic influences, but homage is ultimately secondary to core entertainment value; it cannot elevate the intrinsic quality of a film. Many people hate Rob Zombie’s Halloween films — with Carpenter himself leading the vocal opposition — yet the extenuating context of Zombie’s work being a remake of Carpenter’s original classic does not automatically make it superior.

Financially, the trajectory was clear. Carpenter’s preceding film, Vampires (1998), cost $20M and recouped roughly the same amount. His final feature, The Ward (2010), cost $10M and recovered just $5.3M. Yet even those figures eclipse the disastrous performance of Ghosts of Mars, which cost $28M and grossed a paltry $8.7M at the US box office, eventually crawling to a $14M global total. Carpenter has always taken negative receptions to heart, and it could hardly have helped that this film extended a commercial slump dating back to They Live (1988)— his last feature to turn a profit.

Reflecting on the period in 2022, Carpenter recalled his reaction to seeing behind-the-scenes footage: “God, I’d aged. Tired and ancient. I thought, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’ For me, it became not worth it. And I didn’t want to say that about movies. Movies are my first love, my life.” Cinefantastique magazine witnessed that fatigue firsthand during a set visit, leaving bewildered after asking the director: “Why should our readers see this film?”

“I have no idea, Probably your readers shouldn’t go. In fact, I think it’s smart not to go. And probably smart to go to see something else instead! Truly, stay home and watch BUFFY, man. Don’t go to see my films. People watch my movies and at the end they come out and say, ‘My God, they’re letting that guy direct? If he can direct movies, then I can become president.’ That’s what they think. The head of my fan club lives under the Hollywood freeway in a cardboard box. You DO NOT want to see my movie!”—John Carpenter.

Having peacefully retired from the exhausting realities of feature directing, John Carpenter now spends his time playing video games, even co-creating the title John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando. He co-wrote the graphic novel Cathedral with his wife, Sandy King, and regularly tours performing his iconic film scores and original compositions alongside his son, Cody. Perhaps an IGN promo summarised his current outlook best: “Now that Ghosts of Mars is wrapped, Carpenter is looking to take it easy. His main focus now is watching basketball. ‘NBA season is starting up, I can’t wait.'”

USA | 2001 | 98 MINUTES | 2.35:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: John Carpenter.
writers: John Carpenter & Larry Sulkis.
starring: Natasha Henstridge, Ice Cube, Pam Grier, Jason Statham, Clea DuVall, Joanna Cassidy, Richard Cetrone, Rosemary Forsyth, Liam Waite, Duane Davis, Lobo Sebastian, Rodney A. Grant.

The post GHOSTS OF MARS (2001) appeared first on Frame Rated.

Writer-director Jane Schoenbrun is clearly a talented filmmaker, whose own queer, non-binary journey has provided the jumping-off point for their work. Schoenbrun’s previous feature, I Saw the TV Glow (2024), was an allegorical tale about the dangers of repressed gender dysphoria and trans identity, wrapped up inside the story of two lonely high-school students who bond over a late-night, surreal 1990s show called The Pink Opaque. That movie proved to be a critical smash; however, its subject matter and deliberately oblique narrative style left it far removed from the mainstream crowd.

Schoenbrun’s latest, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, whilst more accessible, may still prove too bizarre for some viewers. Personally, I found it—for the most part—a hugely enjoyable and fascinating piece of cinema. This is largely down to the chemistry of its two leads, alongside its sharp satirical take on the slasher genre and bold exploration of queerness, sexual awakening, and desire.

The title’s a nod to the Friday the 13th era: like those actual films, Camp Miasma was a big hit that was followed by a string of increasingly bad sequels. Decades later, a young queer director named Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder) gets hired to reboot the franchise. Chasing inspiration, she heads to the remote camp where the original was shot and tracks down the reclusive Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), the actress who played the original final girl. From there, it soon stops being a nostalgia trip. As Kris and Billy dig back into the old movie, the mythology of Camp Miasma starts bleeding into real life, whilst a strong relationship quickly develops between the pair.

Camp Miasma’s killer is first revealed to us through a brilliant introductory montage showing lurid videocassette covers and posters. Nestled amongst this fake-franchise ephemera sits a wind-up toy: a little version of Little Death.This murderous villain is the Miasma universe’s take on Jason Voorhees, wearing a camera-like box for a mask and a white plastic forensic-style jumpsuit, armed with a large spear.

Coming from the mind of Schoenbrun, it’s no accident that this odd-looking individual is called Little Death—in French, this translates as la petite mort, meaning a brief loss of consciousness post-orgasm. When Little Death slays their victims, glorious, over-the-top geysers of blood explode into the air.

This is obviously the director having fun at the expense of those 80s and 90s splatterfests. Yet later on, the killer’s origins are revealed: they were bullied and drowned for being gender-fluid. All of a sudden, this homage to past slashers becomes a clever stab—pun intended—at transfeminine-coded horror villains such as Psycho’s Norman Bates and Sleepaway Camp’s killer, Angela. Alongside those films, Schoenbrun’s self-confessed love of the genre is all too apparent, with touches of David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) cleverly deployed along the way.

Much like Schoenbrun’s last film, this might not be everyone’s cup of tea. Admittedly, as much as I admired that film’s ambition, its pacing was too slow, and its indirect storytelling made it hard for me to connect emotionally. Here, despite complex themes of sexual and personal identity sitting alongside a deconstruction of the slasher genre, the movie plays out like a trippy fever dream that stays with you long after the credits roll.

Whereas the director’s previous film was shot through a prism of pain and rage, the focus here has switched to joyous discovery and pleasure—and its tone has shifted appropriately to something far more playful.

In lesser hands, this film could have been a complete disaster. However, Schoenbrun keeps all the script’s interesting thematic elements intact whilst having fun with horror fandom and remake culture—particularly in one hilarious scene involving a Zoom meeting that shows how narrow-minded studio execs clearly fail to understand Kris’s deeply personal concept.

Visually, it’s stunning. Eric Yue’s 35mm cinematography gives everything a warm, dreamy glow. The woods and old camp buildings feel beautiful one second and genuinely off the next; meanwhile, a rough-around-the-edges, grainy aesthetic is used for the old Camp Miasma footage.

Whenever the film drops into the Little Death sequences, the camera gets properly off-kilter: drifting and wobbling, as though you’re watching from somewhere you shouldn’t be. Sound does a lot of heavy lifting, too. Little Death’s laboured breathing becomes its own character almost instantly, setting an eerie, suspense-filled atmosphere.

Throughout all the technical achievements, the performances by stars Gillian Anderson and Hannah Einbinder take this film to another level. Anderson’s in typically top form as Billie Presley. Directly channelling Gloria Swanson’s tragic, forgotten star Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard (1950), she moves across the screen wearing a velvet turban and full makeup with a hypnotic grace and power that commands attention from minute one.

I hadn’t come across Einbinder’s previous work as a stand-up comedian or her starring role in HBO’s Hacks (2021-26), but she more than holds her own against Anderson’s powerhouse performance. Einbinder’s Kris effortlessly comes across as shy and lonely, yet through her clumsy awkwardness she remains funny and captivating. Together, the pair’s sizzling chemistry is entirely believable.

Ultimately, your enjoyment of this movie depends on your own sensibilities. If you’re looking for a straight-up, entertaining horror-thriller, you’ll come away sorely disappointed. However, if you like films that are challenging, thought-provoking, and different, I urge you to seek it out. I doubt you’ll see anything like this for quite some time. Sure, it’s messy and weird, and perhaps there’s too much going on at times for it to be completely satisfying, but it’s undeniable that it’s sexy, funny, romantic, and completely original.

CANADA • UK • USA | 2026 | 112 MINUTES | 1.85:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

writer & director: Jane Schoenbrun.
starring: Gillian Anderson, Hannah Einbender, Jack Haven & Patrick Fischler.

The post TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA (2026) appeared first on Frame Rated.

Just outside Albuquerque, New Mexico, Wile E. Coyote (”have brain, will travel”) continues his never-ending quest to catch the Road Runner, the remarkably fast, long-legged bird who communicates via beeps. As scholars of cartoons will know, he uses various contraptions from the Acme Corporation in his quest, such as rocket-powered roller skates and Rube Goldberg devices. These invariably fail, causing Coyote to one day enlist a lawyer, Mr Avery (Will Forte), a schlubby bottom-feeder experienced in getting a few hundred dollars a suit for Acme’s cartoon customers.

What he doesn’t know, however, is that Acme’s hotshot lawyer Buddy Crane (John Cena) is sitting on a conspiracy concerning the corporation’s testing laboratory. Soon, Coyote, Avery, and the latter’s ambitious young niece Paige (Lana Condor) find themselves in a legal drama to rival 12 Angry Men (1957) and To Kill a Mockingbird (1962).

Well, maybe not. Coyote vs. Acme is instead a funny mix of animation and live action that surpasses the original Space Jam (1996). (Yeah, I said it, wanna fight about it?) The story’s surprisingly involved for a film like this. It mixes the cartoon and “real world” elements brilliantly; rarely since Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) have they been integrated so seamlessly.

Forte, whose character is, of course, named after Looney Tunes animation legend Tex Avery, gives a strong performance. He intuitively knows to treat the cartoons like fellow actors rather than trying to be a cartoon himself. The Looney Tunes stars are well-utilised. Wile E. Coyote emerges as a genuine persona with a array of funny gags, whilst the use of “cartoon physics” is delivered with superb comedic timing. The film strikes a neat balance between a detailed plot and animated zaniness.

Coyote vs. Acme was at the centre of controversy in 2023 when it became one of several projects that Warner Bros. Discovery tried to shelve indefinitely for a tax write-off. The others were the superhero film Batgirl and an animated prequel to Scoob! (2020), titled Holiday Haunt. Coyote vs. Acme was the only completed film, although reports suggest both Batgirl and Holiday Haunt were in post-production and near completion.

Few corporate decisions are truly surprising, but this case illustrates that Disney doesn’t hold a monopoly on boorish contempt for audiences and creatives. Spending upwards of $70M on a film only to shelve it for tax purposes is a mind-boggling waste of time, effort, and resources.

I hate to play the parent card here, but it’s particularly egregious given the wider world context. Thankfully, public pushback prompted Warner Bros. Discovery to let the film be optioned to other distributors, and Ketchup Entertainment stepped up. At one point, Discovery allegedly considered deleting the film entirely—an appalling prospect. To quote the coyote, there’s a limited number of signs.

It isn’t that I’m arguing Coyote vs. Acme is a masterpiece; rather, tens of millions of dollars and immense creative effort were nearly destroyed for accounting purposes. This fate likely befell Batgirl and Holiday Haunt. Marie Antoinette didn’t actually tell the peasants to eat cake, but had she done so, it would be less of a justification to storm the Bastille than a studio torching vast sums of time and money.

Besides, the film is genuinely good. Directed by David Green (Earth to Echo, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows), it was written by Samy Burch (May December) from a story co-developed by James Gunn.

The hybrid integration is magnificent. Previous live-action/animation hybrids have been hit-or-miss. As appalling as Warner Bros.’ wastefulness is, their rationale stemmed from the dismal box office performance of Space Jam: A New Legacy (2021), which returned just $163.7M against a $150M production budget (before marketing costs).

The difference, of course, is that Space Jam: A New Legacy was utterly terrible—featuring Porky Pig rapping, Granny performing Matrix parodies, and bloated basketball scenes crammed with random corporate intellectual property (including the droogs from A Clockwork Orange).

Coyote vs. Acme is a triumph by comparison. Green crafts classical Looney Tunes gags with sharp timing that honours Tex Avery’s legacy—such as the classic painted-tunnel illusion. It surpasses the original Space Jam by better understanding the franchise’s core style. Nostalgia aside, the 1996 film hasn’t aged particularly well, relying heavily on crude jokes, awkward sexualisation, and weak celebrity cameos.

Coyote vs. Acme dispenses with those crutches. The acting is solid, John Cena makes a delightfully campy villain, and there’s a properly constructed plot. While the emotional beats don’t always land, the story never devolves into mawkishness. It’s a fun, witty, and clever trip to the cinema that does right by the Looney Tunes legacy.

USA | 2026 | 103 MINUTES | 2.39:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: Dave Green.
writers: James Gunn, Jeremy Slater & Samy Burch (based on 1980 New Yorker magazine article ‘Coyote v. Acme’ by Ian Frazier).
starring: Will Forte, Lana Condor, Tone Bell, Luis Guzmán, Martha Kelly, P.J Byrne, Eric Bauza (voices), Kenneth Choi & John Cena.

The post COYOTE vs. ACME (2026) appeared first on Frame Rated.

There’s a hierarchy within the traditional high school movie: a sub-genre encompassing a remarkable range of tones and sensibilities. Some are earnest and perceptive; others remain exuberant and outrageous. Yet, the films that continue to reverberate across generations all share a common objective. Whether it’s John Hughes’s The Breakfast Club (1985), Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused (1993), or Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade (2018), they capture something emotionally authentic about adolescence. They render teenagers’ anxieties, desires, and insecurities into something recognisable, allowing audiences to empathise with the high school experience long after leaving it behind. An often overlooked and underappreciated entry into that pantheon of American teen cinema is Allan Moyle’s Pump Up the Volume.

Pump Up the Volume was born from Moyle’s fascination with the pirate radio stations that once operated off the British coast, alongside a tragic figure from his formative years. The writer-director attended school with a classmate who published an underground newspaper from his basement, distributing it around the school. Tragically, the troubled teenager eventually took his own life. The loss profoundly affected Moyle, who channeled these memories into a screenplay originally titled Radio Death. It followed a young pirate radio presenter who promises to end his life during his final broadcast. The project underwent a significant transformation when producer Sandy Stern (Being John Malkovich) took an interest in the script, helping Moyle reshape its bleak premise into something more liberating. Backed by New Line Cinema and retitled Pump Up the Volume, what emerged was a subversive high school film that transformed Moyle’s fascination with pirate broadcasting, teenage alienation, and institutional hypocrisy into a provocative celebration of rebellion.

After moving to a dull Phoenix suburb, Mark Hunter (Christian Slater) starts a pirate radio station, broadcasting from his parents’ basement. By day, Mark is an awkward outsider who struggles to socialise with his classmates. By night, he assumes the outrageous alter ego “Hard Harry”, using his anonymous broadcasts to rail against societal hypocrisy and his school’s underhanded practices. Although his audience doesn’t know his true identity, Mark develops a loyal following among students who recognise their own frustrations in his irreverent monologues. The stakes rise when a troubled student contacts the station seeking advice about suicide. Mark attempts to reason with him, but the following day, the young caller takes his own life.

The tragedy devastates Mark, leaving him consumed by guilt. Convinced he failed the one person who truly needed him, he decides to shut down the station. In what he intends to be his final broadcast, Mark drops his provocative persona and apologises for not doing more. Rather than wallowing in despair, he urges his audience to face their problems instead of surrendering to suicide. As bootleg tapes of the broadcast circulate throughout the school, students begin openly voicing their grievances, challenging both teachers and parents. The growing disruption catches the attention of the authorities, who set out to identify and silence “Hard Harry”. However, their investigation exposes a far more serious abuse of power within the school itself.

Arriving at the height of Christian Slater’s career—nestled between Young Guns II (1990) and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991)—Pump Up the Volume is frequently overlooked in discussions of his filmography. Yet it’s arguably one of his most entertaining turns. The role is essentially a dual performance, and he navigates both sides of Mark’s personality with deceptive ease. Initially, Slater portrays the character as withdrawn and socially awkward, embodying the familiar adolescent struggle of being caught between internal insecurities and external expectations. However, his performance comes alive once Mark retreats behind the microphone and transforms into “Hard Harry”. Drawing on the theatrical intensity he brought to J.D in Heathers (1988) while echoing the volatile radio presence of Eric Bogosian in Talk Radio (1988), he endows “Hard Harry” with a chaotic charisma. Behind the microphone, his body language transforms and his voice acquires an authority almost incongruous with the boy who struggles to speak up in the classroom. It’s one of the trickier roles of Slater’s early career, requiring him to inhabit both a painfully introverted teenager and a flamboyant personality, but he handles it with aplomb.

As demonstrated in his earlier cult hit Times Square (1980), and further explored in Empire Records (1995), Allan Moyle possesses a rare gift for treating teenage angst as something far weightier than mere adolescent melodrama. He recognises that teenagers don’t rebel simply because they’re young and hormonal; they grow angry because the educators entrusted with their development care more about control, while their parents routinely dismiss their concerns as youthful irresponsibility. That insight places Pump Up the Volume comfortably alongside John Hughes’s finest work. Much like The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), it captures the emotional intensity of adolescence and the weight of social expectations imposed by schools and parents. Unlike Hughes’s classics, however, Moyle’s protagonists don’t rebel by rejecting social cliques or skipping class; they do so by broadcasting their frustrations across the airwaves, sharing carefully selected tracks, and challenging the Federal Communications Commission by pretending to masturbate on air.

Beneath Mark’s outrageous monologues and feigned sexual antics, Pump Up the Volume is most affecting when it genuinely listens to its young characters. As a storyteller, Moyle understands that navigating the space between adolescence and adulthood is equal parts exhilarating and despairing. Yet, unlike many 1980s high school comedies, he treats that contradiction with genuine sincerity. Perhaps the film’s most poignant moment of vulnerability occurs when a gay teenager calls the station. What begins as a description of a tentative romantic encounter is gradually revealed to be a cruel homophobic prank orchestrated by his classmates. When the caller finishes, he asks: “So I guess you think I’m a faggot wimp, right?” Rather than ridiculing him or offering superficial advice, Mark responds with deep compassion, reassuring him that there’s nothing wrong with being confused and that the real fault lies with those who sought to humiliate him. It’s a striking moment of solidarity that encapsulates the film’s emotional heart. For all of Mark’s posturing, he possesses far more empathy than the adults trying to silence him in the name of “public decency”. He understands that people deserve to be heard—especially those who feel completely alone.

That isn’t to say Moyle’s screenplay is flawless. The narrative is occasionally undermined by a few plot points that strain credibility. For instance, it’s hard to believe Mark’s parents wouldn’t notice their son broadcasting from their basement using equipment that was hardly discreet by 1990s standards. Equally, the high school’s elaborate scheme to expel underperforming students seems unlikely to survive scrutiny once exposed. More significantly, the film loses momentum once Nora (Samantha Mathis) discovers Mark is “Hard Harry”. Until this point, Mark’s anonymity is central to the film’s tension: his broadcasts allow him to forge an identity separate from his awkward school persona, while giving listeners the freedom to voice their own frustrations. Once Nora uncovers his secret, the story sidelines its most provocative ideas to settle into conventional teen romance. Fortunately, these minor missteps don’t derail the film’s 100-minute runtime.

The enduring appeal of Pump Up the Volume three decades on lies in its prescient portrayal of teenagers finding their voices and building a community from scratch. Mark’s anonymous broadcasts directly presage the millions of teenagers who would later hide behind online avatars and anonymous handles to find like-minded peers. The film remains an unmistakable product of its time, standing on the threshold of the digital age several years before America Online introduced millions of households to the web. Teenagers still relied on fanzines and indie publications to discover bands and discuss social issues, while local ad columns and tape-trading networks allowed young music fans to exchange cassettes and help obscure acts find an audience outside their home towns.

Viewed through a contemporary lens, Mark’s analogue methods serve as an early prototype for the digital landscape that emerged at the turn of the millennium. His fiery monologues on suburban conformity and institutional corruption wouldn’t look out of place on YouTube today, while his carefully curated playlists are the direct precursors to modern Spotify mixes. In retrospect, Moyle anticipated a fundamental truth: our urge to broadcast our frustrations and insecurities springs from the hope that someone, somewhere, is listening. Beneath the impulse to be heard is an even deeper need to be understood—and to know we aren’t alone.

It would be remiss to ignore the film’s extraordinary soundtrack, which acts as an anthem for a generation’s rage and refusal to conform. At a time when Hollywood relied on polished, studio-approved pop for teen cinema, Moyle assembled a soundtrack as rebellious as Mark’s broadcasts. It’s an infectious blend of underground punk, grunge, and hip-hop that captures the turbulent musical landscape of American youth culture at the dawn of the 1990s. Bands like Sonic Youth and Pixies feature here long before Nirvana’s Nevermind triggered the alternative rock boom, while tracks by Ice-T and Above the Law capture the moment hip-hop was penetrating suburban America—before landmark records like A Tribe Called Quest’s The Low End Theory or Dr Dre’s The Chronic pushed the genre into the global mainstream.

Unfortunately, Pump Up the Volume didn’t become the smash hit New Line Cinema anticipated. Although critics praised the film, its box office performance fell short. After earning a modest $1.6M on its opening weekend, the studio doubted it would recoup its $5M budget. While it eventually grossed $11.5M, it was pulled from cinemas prematurely. Yet, much like Mark’s pirate station, Pump Up the Volume found its true audience on VHS and late-night television. It gradually became a touchstone for a generation shaped by early-90s grunge culture, beloved for its irreverent spirit and fierce celebration of individuality.

USA • CANADA | 1990 | 102 MINUTES | 1:85:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

writer & director: Allan Moyle.
starring: Christian Slater, Samantha Mathis, Scott Paulin, Ellen Greene & Anthony Luke Lucero.

The post PUMP UP THE VOLUME (1990) appeared first on Frame Rated.

The story follows Naim (Joe Bird), a young man who moves with his mother Arlene (Mia Wasikowska) to Leviticus, a small Australian industrial town. Written and directed by Adrian Chiarella, the film tracks Naim as he falls furtively in love with local boy Ryan (Stacy Clausen). However, when he sees Ryan being intimate with the pastor’s son Hunter (Jeremy Blewitt), jealousy turns into an act of betrayal. The church, of which Naim and his mother are members, conducts a conversion therapy ritual incorporating mysticism. Soon, Ryan and Hunter are pursued by malevolent doppelgängers of their hearts’ desire, while Naim grows closer to becoming the ritual’s next target.

I wish Leviticus were more engaged with its namesake. As it stands, the film feels as if it were named purely because the filmmakers are vaguely aware of the Bible’s anti-gay verse. It’s a much weirder, richer book than a simple interpretation can cover, and I probably would’ve liked the film more under a different title—like& Doppelgänger, or even 18:22, referencing the specific verse.

I wanted richer characterisation and deeper religious or mythological themes; the characters felt a shade thin and the themes a touch vague. I might be making a genre error, though. At its heart, this is a love story with horror trappings, and it will no doubt resonate with younger queer audiences. I liked the romance well enough.

The cinematography beautifully evokes a small, working-class industrial community: smokestacks billowing within huge, fenced-off plants; the sky perpetually burnished to a late-summer glow; crabgrass dividing the tract houses. It suits the romantic mood and underscores the story’s coming-of-age themes as the characters reach childhood’s end. It reminded me of Daniel Clowes’ use of colour to similar effect in his 1997 graphic novel Ghost World, which was bathed in the muted blues of 1990s TV screens at night.

The mood and atmosphere are probably the most developed “characters”, which presents a problem. None of the people in Leviticus are particularly detailed beyond their plot function. Naim has a brief conversation with his mother about liking “psytrance” (psychedelic trance—a fast, hypnotic form of electronic dance music), and that might literally be it.

Unless I missed something, every other character moment is directly tied to the plot. Ryan doesn’t even have the sliver of backstory that Naim and Hunter receive. We don’t see any family for him (perhaps they were in the crowd at the conversion ritual). Blond, curly-haired, muscular, and unfaceted, Ryan reads more like a fantasised projection of burgeoning sexual cravings than a flesh-and-blood human with deep interiority.

Although Hunter at least gets a family, he’s essentially just Ryan with different-coloured hair. Scenes where they throw stones at each other as a prelude to intimacy are clearly meant to evoke the punishments set down in Leviticus, yet they strike me as a little silly—like a straight writer’s conception of gay male intimacy, where touch must be filtered through aggression. That’s probably unfair; Chiarella is a gay man, and I have as much experience of extremely religious outback industrial towns as I do of alien planets. Nonetheless, the characters felt undeveloped and not especially “queer”—a consequence of that missing detail, since there are obviously a million ways to be queer.

This lack of characterisation extends to the town itself. There’s surprisingly little theology in a film named after an entire book of The Bible. What does Hunter’s dad really think about his son and the horror he subjected him to? Again, we get only enough to push the plot forward. One scene of homophobic mob violence is bizarrely inconsequential; the attackers live in the town, yet show no interest in following up on the event. This makes the setting feel less like a community gripped by religious mania and more like a painted backdrop.

My complaints about engagement with Leviticus as a historical text are really a “me” problem. The title is ultimately used as shorthand for religious homophobia, though it’s jarring to find so little religion in a film marketed on it. Even if the characters merely used that single verse to justify hatred without understanding the Bible, that would still be a strong thematic point. It calls to mind the old Family Guy joke where Brian accuses Stewie of “judgementally quoting Bible verses when you don’t even know how to read,” to which Stewie replies, “Welcome to America, Brian.”

You shouldn’t judge a film for what it isn’t trying to be. (Can you tell that’s exactly what I’m about to do?) Still, if I were making a film called Leviticus, I’d set it in a town of the same name, led by a preacher obsessed with the idea that the book’s dictates are a manual for living that must be obeyed, even in the 21st-century. He discovers that his son—our protagonist—is having an affair with an oddly rootless boy. An orphan, perhaps.

He tries to convince his son that this boy is a mirage, a demon sent to tempt him away from the light. Just as Jesus didn’t come to abolish the laws of the prophets (Matthew 5:17), we must pay obeisance to those laws by structuring our lives around Leviticus.

At first, these rules are relatively innocuous: tabernacle maintenance (Leviticus 6:12), taking the Lord’s name in vain (19:12), or principles for feasting (23:2). But as the pastor sees immorality proliferating, the rules become increasingly unhinged, until a woman is stoned to death after being perceived to approach an animal for sex (18:23). Soon, the pastor’s son and his boyfriend plan their escape, pursued by mysterious doppelgängers summoned by a strange old exorcist…

Alternatively, if you want to focus exclusively on 18:22, make the pastor a Fred Phelps figure—the late Kansas leader of the Westboro Baptist Church, whose psychopathy regarding homosexuality made other bigots look sane. That would yield a three-dimensional antagonist, a psychological portrait of monomania, and a lesson on why sacred texts shouldn’t be monopolised by the fearful and foolish.

To return to my central thesis, though, perhaps I’ve made a category error. The acting is good; there’s a funny moment near the end involving a convenience store clerk, alongside some lovely romantic scenes. My favourite is a moment of heavy petting on the back of a bus that escalates into something more intense. It neatly illustrates how these characters must snatch relief where they can, forbidden from their homes and standard romantic spots. It’s sweet, tender, and highlights what this movie really is: a young adult love story with a bit of horror dressing.

AUSTRALIA | 88 MINUTES | 2.39:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

writer & director: Adrian Chiarella.
starring: Joe Bord, Stacy Clausen, Jeremy Blewitt & Mia Wasikowska.

The post LEVITICUS (2026) appeared first on Frame Rated.

Sergio Leone defined the Spaghetti Western with A Fistful of Dollars (1964). A surprise international success, it became the first of his landmark Dollars Trilogy and reshaped how Italian filmmakers approached the genre. In the decade that followed, around 500 westerns emerged from Italy, usually as co-productions with Spain, France, and Germany. Most of these movies were made in the second half of the 1960s, before the formula tired and the Italian giallo rose to prominence in the early-1970s.

Since Hollywood’s inception, westerns had dominated American screens, both big and small, revising frontier history with narratives and stereotypes that framed colonial settlers as ‘pioneers’ who tamed the West. This stilted idealism lost some of its gloss under the scrutiny of a counterculture backlash during the era of the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and peace protests.

Unencumbered by America’s self-mythologising, Italian directors approached the West as raw material to be dismantled and reassembled—a vast canvas for human-scale stories where morality was a line drawn in shifting sand, and the definitions of hero and villain existed on a sliding scale. As a youngster, Sergio Leone was enthralled by classic Westerns. His ambition to follow in his film-director father’s footsteps was confirmed when, aged 10, he appeared in one of his movies. By 18, he had dropped out of law school to pursue a career in cinema.

The Italian Civil War provided the backdrop to those formative years. The realities of conflict disillusioned him with the black-and-white virtues defined in Hollywood movies, leading him to realise that cinema was closer to myth or fairytale than historical reality. So, whilst still hoping to capture the magic of the John Ford westerns he had devoured as a child, he looked east to Japanese cinema to inform his approach to the genre.

A Fistful of Dollars was a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961). In Leone’s westerns, the drifter with preternatural gunslinging skills is templated on the wandering rōnin—an established staple of samurai movies. With a script by Luciano Vincenzoni, reputedly written in nine days, For a Few Dollars More (1965) was rushed into production to capitalize on the buzz surrounding the first film. Although not a direct sequel, it established Leone as a consummate stylist forging a new direction for an entire genre. Few directors leave their mark so boldly upon cinema, but it was his next film that many cite as the greatest western of all time—and I confess, up front, that I concur.

Vincenzoni was given another chance to write the third instalment based on a story by Leone, who once again looked to Japan for inspiration. While not directly based on any single predecessor, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly shares clear parallels with Hideo Gosha’s feature debut Three Outlaw Samurai (1964)—itself influenced by westerns—forging a trans-Atlantic-Pacific fusion.

By the time The Good, the Bad and the Ugly went into production, the audiovisual lexicon of the Spaghetti Western was firmly established. The distinctive treatment of the human face as a landscape, and the landscape as an externalisation of psychological terrain, was introduced to international audiences with A Fistful of Dollars. That film picked up on a fresh cinematic language already creeping into Italian pulp cinema, equally exemplified by Duccio Tessari’s A Pistol for Ringo (1965). Interestingly, Tessari and his screenwriter, Fernando Di Leo, contributed to both films while they were in parallel production.

Ennio Morricone’s music is vital to the Dollars Trilogy’s cohesive milieu, particularly when married with the opening credits by motion-graphics legend Iginio ‘Gigi’ Lardani. Their distinctive mix of solid pop-art colours, rotoscope animation, and dynamic typography set the tone for all three films, though the main theme for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly remains the most iconic. Its familiar cue, built by oscillating between just two notes, echoes across global pop culture and has been sampled or covered by at least 150 artists, including Hikashu, Sly & Robbie, Kylie Minogue, Le Sserafim, and—my personal favourite appropriation—Cameo in Word Up!

Apart from songwriters for major Hollywood musicals, it was unusual for a film composer to become a household name. Even the equally iconic James Bond Theme, first heard in Dr. No (1962), didn’t bring Monty Norman comparable fame. By contrast, Ennio Morricone’s soundtrack album for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly entered the Billboard charts on release in 1968 and stayed there for more than a year, peaking at No. 4. It was surpassed that same year only by Hugo Montenegro’s Moog synthesiser cover, which reached No. 2.

The first time we hear this distinctive phrase, it arrives as a strangely tuneful howl that could be a coyote, preceding an extreme close-up of a weather-beaten face (Al Mulock) that looks as parched and dusty as the landscape it blocks from view. He is one of three bounty hunters closing in on a ramshackle shack. When they enter, a series of shots ring out before Tuco (Eli Wallach) crashes through the window to the same two-note phrase—only this time as a distinctly human yell. The frame freezes as Tuco ruptures both cinematic space and time, labelled by onscreen text as “the ugly”.

The next, equally suspenseful set-piece introduces Angel Eyes (Lee Van Cleef), who coolly walks into an adobe homestead and menacingly eats soup at a man named Stevens (George Gonneau). Duly intimidated, Stevens reveals a lost chest of Confederate army gold and mentions another man, Bill Carson, who supposedly knows its whereabouts. The pursuit of Carson is the MacGuffin upon which Leone hangs the narrative, using a treasure-hunt structure to guide the characters through a landscape of greed, war, and happenstance.

The doomed Stevens offers to double Angel Eyes’ fee. Angel Eyes explains that he always completes a job once paid, then shoots Stevens and one of his young sons before returning to his client and shooting him too—leaving himself as the only living person who knows Carson’s name. The freeze-frame for Angel Eyes carries the label “the bad”—a slight understatement given the chilling precision Van Cleef brings to the role.

There are differing interpretations regarding the translation of ‘ugly’ from the original Italian title, Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo. Buono directly translates as ‘good’, whereas brutto can mean ‘rugged’, ‘bad’, or ‘ugly’. Cattivo undeniably translates to ‘villain’ or ‘the bad guy’. The order of the title and the onscreen labelling were changed from the Italian version; it seems “the ugly” was originally intended for Angel Eyes, referring to his irredeemable malevolence rather than Eli Wallach’s appearance. The title was meant to suggest a gradient from good, to bad, to worse.

We pick up Tuco’s tale as he is apprehended by another trio of bounty hunters, only to be ‘rescued’ by a mysterious stranger known as Blondie (Clint Eastwood). After handing Tuco over and collecting the reward, Blondie waits for the hanging and, just as the noose tightens, shoots and severs the rope. Following their escape, he shares the money and suggests they repeat the risky scam, as the bounty on Tuco’s head will have increased. When their second attempt nearly goes disastrously wrong for Tuco, Blondie decides to keep the cash and abandons his partner in the desert. Up to this point, their bond has been purely transactional.

It is more than 25 minutes into the movie before we receive confirmation of who “the good” is supposed to be, but Blondie isn’t good in any conventional genre sense. Western heroism usually relies on notions of honour, loyalty, and virtuous behaviour. Unlike his two counterparts—the ugly and the bad—Blondie is ‘good’ merely because he operates within the law, despite having exploited and betrayed Tuco, whom he ultimately leaves alive and free.

Leone cleverly breaks the narrative into an episodic structure, introducing the three main characters through distinct vignettes where Morricone’s music asserts itself as part of the narrative architecture. Leone commissioned the score ahead of filming, as he had for the previous two entries in the Dollars Trilogy; his collaboration with the composer was effectively part of the writing process. To guide the pace and performances, he would play the corresponding themes on set while shooting key scenes, later editing the film directly to the score.

That iconic cue becomes a recurring motif, but it is rendered differently for each character. The clear tones of a flute accompany the ‘good’ Blondie; a bass ocarina—which sounds like a deeper, breathier flute—signifies the sinister Angel Eyes; and edgy human voices accompany the ‘ugly’ Tuco, highlighting him as the most human of the three. In many ways, Tuco is our protagonist: he is the first and last character we see, and he enjoys the most screen time and dialogue.

Wallach’s performance is physical and expressive, often blending pathos with comedic resilience. His face betrays intentions that contradict his dialogue, revealing unexpected psychological complexity in a man pretending to be driven solely by base appetites. As a founding member of New York’s Actors Studio, Wallach trained in method acting under Lee Strasberg alongside Marilyn Monroe and Marlon Brando. Wallach and Brando are often credited with introducing naturalistic method acting to the western—a genre more accustomed to restrained stoicism. By contrast, both Eastwood and Van Cleef appear cool and calculating; in this way, Leone cleverly subverts familiar stereotypes.

This mini-portmanteau, which gradually draws the three leads together, mesmerises us for roughly half an hour. Yet it feels as though we are only just getting started, leading us to mentally discount this opening against the three-hour runtime. When the film was sold to television across various territories, this extended duration proved problematic. Most versions shown on the small screen during the late 1960s and 1970s were severely curtailed. Scenes of brutality and the sequence depicting prolonged suffering under the desert sun were trimmed, whilst extreme close-ups were deemed too visually shocking for television and removed. One pertinent scene—in which Angel Eyes shows an unexpectedly human side, genuinely moved by the plight of wounded soldiers dying without care or comfort—was also excised from international cuts.

Furthermore, an entire, narratively essential segment was almost completely removed in most territories to bring the film under two hours, closer to the standard 90-minute feature length. For instance, in the days before home media restored the theatrical cut, many viewers never saw the full narrative leading up to the spectacular bridge sequence. The prolonged beating Tuco suffers in the army camp was deemed too violent, and the time he and Blondie spend amongst the ranks was thought to drag.

On the contrary, this sequence represents the very heart of the movie, and Leone clearly thought so too—he had to have the entire bridge set rebuilt after an army explosives expert detonated it prematurely on the first attempt. The bridge’s destruction serves as a cathartic climax where the shifting power dynamic between Blondie and Tuco finally finds balance as both men contemplate the absurdity of war. At least their personal conflict is driven by a clear goal and potential gain, just as Angel Eyes’ cool, professionalised violence is driven by intelligence. By contrast, the countless deaths on both sides of the Civil War appear utterly meaningless. Every soldier who dies believes he is fighting for his nation’s future, yet they are the very ones tearing it apart. The two warring factions remain locked in a stalemate over strategic control of a bridge; Blondie and Tuco, unburdened by ideology, agree on a solution that breaks the impasse, allowing them to pass and resume their search for the gold.

It is here that Leone’s anti-war views—formed during his youth at the intersection of the Second World War and the Italian Civil War—become palpable. The drunken Union captain (Aldo Giuffrè) gives voice to this despair in the face of widespread death. Ironically, the bridge his battalion defends should symbolise connection—a transition from past to future. Instead, it stands as a barrier. Leone stages the battle without romantic heroism, stripping the conflict of any noble illusion. It becomes a deadly farce in which humanity is subsumed by the machinery of war.

There is a conspicuous absence of women throughout the narrative, a trait common to much of the western genre leading up to the 1960s. There are exceptions, of course, but even prominent female roles were typically restricted to love interests, mothers, or damsels requiring protection. Occasionally, they might be in the thick of the action, helping to reload the hero’s rifle, but here the narrative is deliberately masculine.

This choice can be understood through several lenses. The story follows three loners navigating a war-torn, lawless country—a journey that would have been practically difficult for a solitary woman at the time and would have added unnecessary narrative complexity. Furthermore, the film confronts war, violence, greed, and murder: negative human traits closely linked to toxic masculinity rather than the traditional, nurturing qualities of the feminine principle. One could argue that those who survive to the closing credits have, to some extent, tempered their purely aggressive impulses. Alternatively, the gender balance may simply reflect the all-male writing and production team.

Once Blondie and Tuco’s explosive intervention ends the battle, they resume their tense partnership, as each holds a crucial piece of information regarding the gold’s location. This leads them to a massive cemetery where Angel Eyes, tracking them through his own investigation, sets the stage for Leone’s signature three-way stand-off.

Like the army camp and bridge sets, the vast cemetery was constructed by the Spanish army on location. Leone wanted the graveyard to appear immense and surreal for his mythic finale, accompanied by what may be the greatest piece of film music ever composed. Ennio Morricone’s emotive The Ecstasy of Gold, featuring the transcendent vocals of Edda Dell’Orso, is deployed in perfect harmony with Tonino Delli Colli’s astonishing cinematography. Long lenses pan and swoop, tracking Tuco through a delirious swirl where reality dissolves into a dizzying blur. For a moment, he exists within an abstract psychological state where the world yields to pure cinema.

This mastery of form explains why the film continues to resonate today. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly stands as a technically brilliant western that doubles as a profound exploration of the human condition. Yet, it is never weighed down by its grandiose themes, remaining emotionally devastating, witty, thoughtful, and—above all—immensely entertaining.

ITALY • SPAIN • WEST GERMANY | 1966 | 178 MINUTES | 2.35:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH • ITALIAN • SPANISH

Cast & Crew

director: Sergio Leone.
writer: Luciano Vincenzoni, Sergio Leone, Agenore Incrocci & Furio Scarpelli..
starring: Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach, Lee Van Cleef, Aldo Giuffrè, Antonio Casas, Rada Rassimov, Aldo Sambrell, Enzo Petito, Luigi Pistilli, Livio Lorenzon, Al Mulock.

The post THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY (1966) appeared first on Frame Rated.