Seattle Film Blog

Good Boy and Other House Pets in Horror: Purrs, Barks, Growls--and Deadly Attacks

2026-04-11T20:32:00.000-07:00

Here's the most recent list I compiled for Crypticon.

As with most previous lists, I started with a preliminary list before turning to social media to crowd-source for more. I'm grateful to everyone who contributed suggestions.

What counts: cats, dogs, guinea pigs, hamsters, mice, rabbits, rats, etc.

What doesn't: chickens, cows, horses, pigs, and other farm animals.

What about invertebrates? Furry mammals preferred!

Previous: Canadian, Spanish and French horror, and the horror western.

A- B

Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979)

Jonesy the cat (pictured above)

Alligator (Lewis Teague, 1980)

Bad Moon (Eric Red, 1996)

Baxter (Jérôme Boivin, 1989)

Ben (Phil Karlson, 1972)

Features Michael Jackson's most touching love song!

The Beyond (Lucio Fulci, 1981)

The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963)

The lovebirds!

The Black Cat (Lucio Fulci, 1980)

Blood Glacier / Blutgletscher, Glazius (Marvin Kren, Austrian, 2013)

C-F

The Cat (Lam Nai-Choi, 1982)

Cat's Eye (Lewis Teague, 1985)

Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942)

Critters (Stephen Herek, 1986)

Cujo (Lewis Teague, 1983)

Based on the 1981 Stephen King novel

The Curse of the Cat People (Gunther von Fritsch and Robert Wise, 1944)

Dogs (Burt Brinckerhoff, 1977)

Eye of the Cat (David Lowell Rich, 1969)

Frankenweenie (Tim Burton, animated, 2012)

G-I

The Gate (Tibor Takács, 1987)

Good Boy (Ben Leonberg, 2025)

Indy, the golden retriever (pictured above right)

Gremlins (Joe Dante, 1984)

The Hidden (Jack Sholder, 1987)

The Hills Have Eyes (Wes Craven, 1977)

The Hills Have Eyes (Alejandro Aja, remake, 2006)

The Hills Have Eyes Part II (Wes Craven, 1985)

House / Hausu (Nobuhiko Ôbayashi, 1977)

I Am Legend (Francis Lawrence, 2007)

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (Mary Bronstein, 2025)

The hamster!

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Philip Kaufman, 1978)

K-O

Kuroneko (Kaneto Shindo, 1968)

Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, 2008)

Weird CGI cat attack

Lost Boys (Joel Schumacher, 1987)

Love and Monsters (Michael Matthews, 2020)

Monkey Shines (George Romero, 1988)

Night of the Lepus (William F. Claxton, 1972)

A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (Jack Sholder, 1985)

Of Unknown Origin (George Pan Cosmatos, 1983)

P-R

The Pack (Robert Clouse, 1977)

The Pack (Nick Robertson, not a remake, 2015)

Pet Sematary (Mary Lambert, original, 1989)

Pet Sematary (Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer, remake, 2019)

Based on the 1983 Stephen King novel

The Plague Dogs (Martin Rosen, animated, 1982)

Poltergeist (Tobe Hooper, 1982)

Primate (Johannes Roberts, 2025)

A Quiet Place: Day One (Michael Sarnoski, 2024)

Frodo that cat (played by Schnitzel and Nico)

Re-Animator (Stuart Gordon, 1985)

Roar (Noell Marshall, 1981)

S-T

The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991)

Darla, Buffalo Bill’s Bichon Frisé

Sleepwalkers (Mick Garris, 1992)

Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1978)

Albert, the blind pianist's German Shepherd

Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (John Harrison, 1990)

David Johansen fights a cat!

They Only Kill Their Masters (James Goldstone, 1972)

The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982)

The Tomb of Ligeia (1964)

Tucker & Dale vs. Evil (Eli Craig, 2010)

V-Z

The Voices (Marjane Satrapi, 2014)

White God (Kornél Mundruczó, Hungarian, 2014)

Willard (Daniel Mann, 1971)

Ben, the rat, pictured above left with Bruce Davison as Willard

The Crypticon Seattle panel Good Boy! (Pets in Horror) takes place on Sat, May 2, at 3pm with moderator Brien Gorham and panelists Todd Johnston, Eric Li, and me. Click here for tickets and more information.

Images from Bloody Disgusting (Sigourney Weaver with Jonesy in Alien), The Guardian (Indy in Good Boy), and the IMDb (Willard poster).

When I Paint My Masterpiece: Steven Soderbergh's Sly Two-Hander The Christophers

2026-04-08T22:30:00.000-07:00

THE CHRISTOPHERS
(Steven Soderbergh, 2025, UK, 100 minutes)

Someday, everything is gonna be diff’rent
When I paint my masterpiece
–Bob Dylan (1971)

The Christophers is a film about art and commerce, and the ways in which they're at cross purposes. It's also Steven Soderbergh's second London film in a row after last year's stylish Black Bag with Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett as married intelligence officers, and the city suits him well.

Granted, the two films don't have much in common, other than that they aim to keep you guessing from start to finish, except the former is a romantic thriller, in the vein of 1998's Out of Sight, whereas The Christophers isn't a thriller at all, though it doesn't lack for low-key thrills.

Lori Butler (Michaela Cole, whose sculptural face is a work of art), an exacting woman in her thirties, works as a food cart vendor. She isn't miserable necessarily, but her life hasn't turned out the way she imagined.

One day, from out of the blue, she gets a call from a former art school classmate with an offer she can't refuse--even if it makes her queasy.

Sallie (Baby Reindeer's Jessica Gunning) and her brother, Barnaby (a perfectly-cast James Corden in a ridiculous patchwork shirt), would like her to complete The Christophers, their elderly father's famously unfinished third series of paintings under that name. Completed canvases in the previous series have sold exceptionally well, and this one will be worth even more after he kicks the bucket. They describe it as a restoration job--Lori has a sideline in art restoration--except they're really asking her to engage in forgery. They figure she won't mind, since he once humiliated her in public.

Their father, Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen in top form) is retired and in declining health, so they plan to pass Lori off as an assistant, so she can gain access to The Christophers and finish them using his original paints and brushes. They neglect to tell her that he can't stand them, and considering that they see him primarily as a flesh-and-blood ATM machine, it isn't hard to see why (to be fair, he also appears to have been a pretty lousy father).

While Lori lives in shared housing with other struggling artists, Julian lives in two side-by-side walk-ups in Fitzrovia filled with art and the detritus of a long life. When they first meet, he doesn't appear to remember her from their long-ago encounter. In fact, it's unclear whether he's eccentric or suffering from dementia. He's sharp in some ways, less so in others.

Lori makes herself useful, though she finds him exhausting. He's so verbose and inappropriately revealing, she can't get a word in edgewise, though she soaks up every detail. The actors generate a palpable friction, while the characters have only their passion for art in common. That's about it. The tension isn't about age or race, but sensibility, since she's a 21st-century woman, while he clings to the politically-incorrect norms of the past.

In a way, though, they're both acting. As Ed Solomon's twisty screenplay continues, he doles out more and more details about two people who aren't as different from each other as they at first appear. Not least because Julian isn't as oblivious as he seems; he's also convinced that his kids had an ulterior motive in hiring Lori. He's not sure what it is, but he suspects that it involves The Christophers, so when he asks her to burn them in the firepit, it's hard to tell if he's testing her--to see if she'll resist--or whether he simply wants them out of his life for reasons that will be revealed later.

In a manner of speaking, the film is a cat and mouse game, because Lori and Julian have clashing interests and intentions, though they both prove pretty proficient at subterfuge. It's one of the film’s biggest strengths: they're intelligent people, and Solomon, who wrote Soderbergh's terrific Detroit gangster picture No Sudden Move, assumes you are, too. Granted, he's also known for Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and Men in Black, and there's plenty of snap and crackle to the screwball-adjacent dialogue.

Solomon also doesn't believe in giving everything away. Julian had a wife and children at a time when many gay men, even those in London's artistic demimonde, lived outwardly as heterosexuals (prior to 1967's Sexual Offences Act, homosexuality was essentially illegal in the UK). He considers it a badge of pride that he was bisexual "when it actually cost you something," though I suspect he was as "bisexual" as Elton John in the 1970s, i.e. not very. We never find out Lori's sexual orientation. And nor does it matter.

Lori's feelings about art matter more, and over the years, she went from being a Julian admirer to a critic as he squandered his talent, but at least he had some, whereas she specializes in convincingly copying other artists. It's a skill to be sure, but it isn't exactly art--not even by her own standards.

For all their differences, though, they're lonely in their own unique ways, but not enough to admit that they would rather have a worthy opponent with whom to spar than an assortment of unworthies. If they never become friends in the conventional sense, they become something just as valuable.

Wikipedia describes The Christophers as a black comedy. I wouldn't, though the back-and-forth is frequently quite funny, and rarely in an obvious way. Sometimes Coel, who plays a fairly humorless character, gets a laugh simply by the way Lori reacts--or doesn't react--to her employer's shameless proclamations and his children's slippery prevarications. Her performance here is nothing like the work she did in her brightly-hued council estate comedy Chewing Gum, though never as dark as anything in I May Destroy You, her Emmy Award-winning exploration into life after sexual assault.

As different as those characters and those projects were, I would imagine Coel wrote them to her strengths–Chewing Gum was an extension of her 2012 one-woman play–whereas in the case of The Christophers, she excels as a once-promising artist stuck in as much of a rut as her 86-year-old sort-of mentor, though I don't believe Solomon wrote the role with her in mind.*

And I don't know if he wrote Julian with Ian McKellen in mind, but it's hard to imagine anyone else in the role, since he gets to use most every color in his considerable paintbox. It's been over a decade since I last saw him on the screen--in Bill Condon's touching Mr. Holmes--so he looks older than I remember, but there's a delightful sequence towards the end in which he rubs his hands together and skips about with glee, and I was reminded that he once appeared as a jaunty vampire in a Pet Shop Boys video.

By the end of the film, which never feels too stagey thanks to Soderbergh's deft direction and fluid camera work--as alter ego Peter Andrews--I was reminded of two other British two-handers, Harold Pinter's adaptation of Robin Maugham's The Servant and Ronald Harwood's The Dresser, even if this relationship isn't quite that antagonistic, though similar differentials are at play involving income, status, and ability (and McKellen appeared with Anthony Hopkins in Richard Eyre's BBC version of The Dresser in 2015).

The Christophers, however, isn't a tragedy. Sometimes a younger person can serve as a mentor or teacher as effectively as an older one, and sometimes the most challenging relationships can prove the most beneficial; the kind in which another person forces you to face the thing you least want to face--the thing you most need to face--and that will set you free in the end.

Once upon a time I assumed, like Lori, that I would become a professional artist. It didn't happen. I had bills to pay, and art wasn't going to get the job done. It doesn't happen for many people, but it made me particular about how art and artists are represented on screen, and Soderbergh's film, by way of Solomon's screenplay--as embodied by two terrific actors--is one of the best I've seen about the challenges and satisfactions of a life in art.

*According to this intervew, he did.

The Christophers opens at AMC Alderwood Mall on Sun, April 12, and SIFF Cinema Uptown on Thurs, April 16. Images from Blex Media (Ian McKellen and Michaela Coel), Film Streams (Jessica Gunning and James Corden), First Showing (McKellen) and Rotten Tomatoes (McKellen and Coel).

The Stranger: François Ozon’s Beautiful Take on an Ugly Crime--and an Enigmatic Criminal

2026-04-02T14:37:00.000-07:00

THE STRANGER / L'Étranger / الغريب
(François Ozon, 2025, France, 122 minutes)

Standing on a beach
With a gun in my hand
Staring at the sea
Staring at the sand
–The Cure, "Killing an Arab" (1980)

Making a film out of Albert Camus' The Stranger is a bold move for any filmmaker, and François Ozon is also the first from France after adaptations by Turkish and Italian filmmakers, though it's not completely surprising that Italy's Luchino Visconti, a left-wing aesthete as fond of European literature as Ozon, gave it a go with a miscast Marcello Mastroianni in 1967.

Camus' novella takes place in Algiers, and centers on Meursault, a Bartleby-like office worker who feels no remorse after murdering a native Algerian in cold blood--in Visconti's film, he's described as a shipping clerk--but he doesn't feel all that great about it either. The author doesn't even give the victim a name; we only know him as the Arab, as if that's all he was.

The book is about the indifference of the universe, to be sure, but it's also about racism. Whether he cares or not, Meursault seems well aware that Arabs are second-class citizens.

Ozon begins his elegant black and white version with a brief newsreel about Algiers under French rule. Camus, who was born to Algerian parents of European descent, published The Stranger in 1942--though he wrote it years before--and died in a car accident 18 years later. Though he spent most of his adult life in France, he didn't live to see Algeria win its freedom in 1962. Ozon, whose grandfather had ties to the country, was born five years later.

After establishing Meursault's milieu, Ozon introduces the young man (played by Summer of 85's Benjamin Voisin, who recalls Breathless-era Belmondo from some angles) after he's brought in for questioning. He enters a holding cell filled with Arab men of various ages. When an older man asks about his crime, the sole white suspect states, "I killed an Arab."

Ozon then shows how we got here, but he's established who we're dealing with, except this isn't a murder mystery, and even the book's Meursault doesn't know exactly why he did what he did. He only knows that he did it.

The story begins, in earnest, when he receives a telegram stating that his mother has died.

In today's parlance, he might say, "It is what it is," but his non-reaction will come back to haunt him as he proceeds to go about his day. He smokes a cigarette, drinks a cup of coffee, shaves, gets dressed, and goes to work. People die every day, and his mother happened to be one of them, though he does put on a black arm band--at the insistence of a friend--which makes him seem more sympathetic than Camus's original conception. It also signals to the world that he has lost someone significant.

Later that day, he takes a bus to his mother's retirement home to keep vigil beside her coffin and attend the funeral. The caretaker, a kindly elderly gentleman (Jean-Claude Bolle-Reddat), sets him up with more coffee, and they share a smoke. During his overnight stay, he finds that his mother had many friends and admirers. (At the trial, his acceptance of coffee with milk will also be used against him; a sign of Algeria's then-inflexible traditions, since only black coffee was considered acceptable while mourning.)

If Meursault isn't sad, he isn't happy either; more like sanguine. Though I wouldn't describe The Stranger as autobiographical, Camus also lost his father, whom he never really knew, decades before his mother, but didn't attend her funeral because he died eight months before her, also in 1960

In the film, Meursault doesn't object to the Christian service, since it's what his mother would have wanted, even if her son--and the author who brought him to life--were atheists. Further, Ozon's By the Grace of God centers on men who had been sexually abused by a priest. Ozon was raised Catholic, but drifted away due to the Church's attitudes towards homosexuality. I don't know whether he's an atheist, but he's definitely not a Catholic. More troubling, since we all mourn at our own pace, is the way Meursault looks at his mother's physically frail, emotionally devastated male companion with disdain.

Afterward, he returns to the city, where he reconnects with Marie (Rebecca Marder from Ozon's The Crime Is Mine and Sandrine Kiberlain's A Radiant Girl), a former typist at his firm, with whom he enjoys an afternoon swim and an evening comedy. There's a line in the film they see, 1938's The Schpountz, that's intended to be funny, though I don't know why. "All condemned men," exclaims Fernandel, "Will have their heads cut off!" He repeats it for emphasis. Meursault doesn't laugh. Though Marie does.

Other notable figures include Salamano (a grubby, touching Denis Lavant), a pensioner who has a love-hate relationship with his mangy mutt, and Raymond (Pierre Lottin from Ozon's When Fall Is Coming), a pimp who has a hate relationship with his Arab girlfriend, Djemila (Hajar Bouzaouit)--she's unnamed in the book--whose brother (Abderrahmane Dehkani) disapproves.

Meursault doesn't judge either man. As much as his radical honesty, his c'est la vie attitude ranks among his best and worst qualities. When the illiterate Raymond asks, he doesn't hesitate to write to Djemila on his behalf, despite the fact that it could lead to more abuse; further, he only has Raymond's word for it that she's unfaithful. In the moment, Meursault prioritizes his friend's need, even though he would never raise a hand to a woman.

If every character has a companion, each relationship is tainted--except possibly for his late mother's.

When widower Salamano's spaniel disappears, for instance, he's bereft even though he spent all his time insulting and even kicking the poor thing. Meursault's relationship with Marie seems idyllic compared to Raymond's, except the love only flows one way. It's not that Marie isn't lovable, but that Meursault isn't capable of love.

I recently came across a film review that describes Ozon's take on the character as neurodivergent, and although I can see why a writer in 2026 would say that, I don't see it that way. He is, instead, someone who is incapable of lying, no matter the cost. His very existence highlights the extent to which the world runs on lies. It is, in other words, an affront.

Since the first hour is essentially a flashback, Ozon occasionally returns to Meursault's time in the cave-like holding cell, except it doesn't add much, other than to remind us that his halcyon days in the sun with Marie will soon come to an end. No more smoking, no more drinking, no more swimming.

In the meantime, Raymond invites Meursault and Marie to join him for a beach-side rendezvous with another couple. Things are going splendidly until the three men run into Djemila's brother and another young man. A fight ensues, the brother slashes his arm, and the youths flee.

Though Meursault wasn't involved in the scuffle, it makes a mark on him as surely as the gash on Raymond's arm. It isn't his problem, but he feels the need to finish what they started, so he sets out, with Raymond's gun, to track the men down. When he finds Djemila's brother, he stares at him in a way that indicates he finds him attractive--this is a François Ozon film after all--and shoots him dead. And almost immediately fires four more shots.

Is Ozon suggesting that Meursault is a repressed homosexual? It's possible, though previous events contradict that reading. The quasi-sociopathic sensualist may not be capable of loving Marie, but he seems to genuinely enjoy sleeping with her. That's even more clear here than in the book, but with Ozon, who's to say: he has a knack for queering most every text.

Left: Frantz, Ozon's other great black and white adaptation

Shots fired, the flashback ends, past becomes prologue, and guards move Meursault to a cell where he meets with a lawyer who warns that the muted response to his mother's death may be used against him. Tellingly, he seems less concerned about the death of the Arab. It's almost as if the murder were pretext for stopping The Man Who Cannot Lie.

After all, the pied noir (European Algerians) of the time understood--and even excused--some forms of racism, but this was harder to comprehend.

Ozon aptly captures the trial's potent mix of comedy and pathos, though it does feature one of the film's few false notes, and that's when Marie has a brief exchange with Djemila. It wasn't in the book, and doesn't need to be in the film, not least because it spells too much out. We already know, by looking at their faces, what the women are feeling. And that's enough.

Though Meursault rejects the entreaties by a priest (played by Anatomy of a Fall's Swann Arlaud, who appeared in By the Grace of God), he won't take no for an answer, convinced that the convict is miserable, but in his way, he isn't. He committed a crime, he'll face punishment. He doesn't question this, and since he doesn't believe in God or sin, all the rest is noise.

All told, Ozon's adaptation, which is beautifully shot by DP Manu Dacosse--a favorite of Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani--and scored by Atlantics' Fatima Al Qadiri, is likely the best we'll ever get of this tough and thorny book, though it's the rare deviation, including a brief epilogue, that works the least well.

The cast, however, is spectacular. Benjamin Voisin, so good in Summer of 85 and even more impressive in Xavier Giannoli's Balzac adaptation, Lost Illusions, doesn't put a foot wrong, though he's almost too good looking for the role. Camus never describes Meursault's appearance, and though I doubt he envisioned someone quite so handsome, it's almost a requirement in order to explain Marie's attraction and to stave off audience revulsion.

In order to adapt the novella, Ozon sought approval from the author's daughter, Catherine Camus. About the film, she has stated, "A remarkable journey through my father's work, rendered with the utmost respect."

Of the three adaptations to date, it has received the most acclaim, though we'll never know what the version with Alain Delon might have looked like, since Visconti wasn't able to pull it off. Then again, Jef Costello, the taciturn hit man he plays in Melville's 1967 Le Samouraï has Meursault-like qualities (and I don't think it's a complete coincidence that Voisin also recalls Delon in Purple Noon). Instead, Visconti cast Marcello Mastroianni, a fabulous actor, but not quite right for the role, and at 43, older than Camus intended.

Voisin brings a certain ambiguity to Meursault that Mastroianni wasn't able to muster. The Frenchman's performance is so subtle that it's likely to be underrated, and at the 2026 César Awards, Pierre Lottin, also quite good, received the film's sole acting win. Nonetheless, Voisin's micro-expressions are ever-changing. His face is never a complete blank or mask, since he's always observing and processing, and only speaks when he has something to say.

The one time Meursault acts without thinking, he does something terrible. Whether it's the glint of the Arab's switchblade, the oppressive heat, his repressed desire, a delayed reaction to his mother's death, or a combination of all of these things, he seals his fate by taking another man's life.

I don't believe there's such a thing as a perfect film, not least when it comes to a landmark like The Stranger, but Francois Ozon's feel for the material, and especially the curious central character, comes through loud and clear, and I can't imagine a better version. It's truly one of the director's best.

The Stranger plays Bellevue's Cinemark Lincoln Square for one night only on Wed, April 8, and opens in Seattle on Fri, April 24, at SIFF Cinema Uptown.

Images from Gaumont (Benjamin Voisin, Pierre Lotin, and Voisin with Rebecca Marder), The New Yorker (Albert Camus as seen by Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum), Amazon (cover of the 1989 edition of The Stranger), New Zealand International Film Festival (Pierre Niney and Paula Beer in Frantz), and Screen International (Voisin contemplates the void).

Born Innocent Pays Homage to Redd Kross, "The Most Important Band in the World"

2026-03-28T14:40:00.000-07:00

BORN INNOCENT:

THE REDD KROSS STORY

(Andrew Reich, USA,

2024, 87 minutes)

"Redd Kross to me will always be one of the most important bands, not just in America, but in the world."--Thurston Moore

Nowadays it seems as if every recording artist, no matter how obscure, has their own documentary, because many do.

With a lot of enthusiasm and a little crowd-funding, an untrained director could shoot an entire film about their brother's band on an iPhone and make it available on YouTube or even Tubi. It might not be any good, but it can be done.

Redd Kross, on the other hand, has fully earned the documentary treatment. They never hit the highest of highs, but considering those who did--some of whom came crashing down with a thud--it feels like a blessing in disguise, because after nearly 50 years, the McDonald brothers are still here. Still writing, recording, and touring. And musically: they still have the goods.

They were also fortunate to join forces with Andrew Reich, an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker well suited to the task. Though Born Innocent marks Reich's directorial debut, he's an experienced television writer and producer (including seven seasons of Friends), a dedicated fan since the early-1980s, and a spectacularly determined individual, because the documentary was 10 years in the making, and it shows through Jeff's ever-changing hairstyles.

Reich begins at the beginning with a look at suburban Hawthorne, CA in the years after the Beach Boys put the town on the map–but once its best days were over.

He uses footage from Penelope Spheeris's 1983 streetpunk film Suburbia to depict the extent to which it had fallen into disrepair. As Redd Kross associate Chuck Kelley puts it, "The American Dream was over in Hawthorne." (Reich doesn't mention it, but Chuck worked at Video Archives with Quentin Tarantino, and served as a music consultant on 1994's Pulp Fiction.)

Jeff (born 1963) and Steve (1967) had a roof over their heads and supportive parents, both of whom appear in the film, so it wasn't all bad. At 15, Jeff was in middle school when they started making music together, which isn't unusual, but what was unusual is that Steve was only 11.

It wasn't just the beginning of the band--first known as the Tourists, then Red Cross, and finally Redd Kross--but the beginning of a run of drummers, which has continued throughout their career. In the film, each one who appears on screen has a number next to their name, like "Keith Morris (#1)," "Ron Reyes (#2)," and "Dez Cadena (#3)." If you know anything about the Southern California punk scene, you'll recognize those names immediately, since all three fronted Black Flag before moving on to other bands, like the Circle Jerks and OFF!, in which Steve, a widely-admired bass player, reunited with Morris while on an extended break from Redd Kross.

Though Jeff and Steve were inspired by proto-punks like the New York Dolls and Ramones--Tommy Erdelyi, aka Tommy Ramone, produced 1987's Neurotica--they skewed more pop than their punk peers. Their music was just as fast and loud, but less angry and more fun. In time, they would become a less-easy-to-classify garage/power-pop/psych-rock hybrid.

If they weren't the only So-Cal punks glued to the boob tube--Black Flag's 1981 "TV Party" is a case in point--they took things further as they melded references from 1960s and '70s sitcoms, like The Partridge Family and The Brady Bunch, and made-for-TV movies, like Born Innocent with Linda Blair, into their work. Their cover of Boyce and Hart's "Blow You a Kiss in the Wind" on 1984's Teen Babes from Monsanto was directly inspired by the version sung by Elizabeth Montgomery, in her Serena guise, on Bewitched.

Beyond their obsession with self-described "psychotic garbage culture," they were relentless about calling and networking, and regional fame came early.

They were just getting their feet wet when Hollywood's Posh Boy Records came calling. Things got off to such an auspicious start that David Bowie showed up to their first gig. It's possible he was there to see Black Flag rather than Redd Kross, but it's likely he got to hear their beach movie-inspired classic "Annette's Got the Hits," a firm Rodney on the ROQ fave.

When fame comes fast for a band, though, there's always a dark cloud waiting around the bend. It's the way of the world, though nothing about Redd Kross conforms to cliché–there's often a twist–and at 13, Steve was kidnapped by a fan. It's amazing he emerged from the experience mostly unscathed. His abductor would not be so lucky.

The band would pick up where they left off, but they were growing tired of the whole punk thing, and set themselves apart by growing out their hair and their songs (by a minute or two). It wasn't the done thing at the time, at least not for musicians outside of the hard rock and hair metal scenes.

Unfortunately, Jeff also developed a serious drug problem. Though the brothers admit they were hopped up on speed while recording Teen Babes, things would become so bad for Jeff that he declines to go into any detail, while Steve is succinct: "It was a nightmare." It seems wise that Reich spoke to the brothers both together and separately, because Steve proves more forthcoming when it comes to their most painful experiences.

Left: Jim Blanchard poster for a 1987

KCMU-presented show at the Central Tavern

Though many fans assumed the band were hopped up on hallucinogens while recording Neurotica, their trippiest album, they actually made it after Jeff emerged from rehab. Even if it features some of their catchiest melodies, the album made a big impact on the Seattle scene of the 1980s, possibly because they found the sweet spot (pun intended) between the tough, anthemic rock of KISS--they even covered "Deuce" on Teen Babes--and the bubblegum psych of Tommy James and the Shondells. That isn't to say they sounded like Cheap Trick or Sweet necessarily, but they're in the same ballpark, and their exuberant live shows went down a storm in the Pacific Northwest.

In the film, Reich speaks with a number of PNW (or former PNW) musicians, including Mark Arm and Steve Turner of Mudhoney, Buzz Osborne and Dale Crover of the Melvins (with whom Steve has played bass), Kim Thayil of Soundgarden, Jeff Ament of Pearl Jam, Matt Cameron of Soundgarden and Pearl Jam, and the entirety of the Fastbacks. No one from Nirvana puts in an appearance, though the band, especially on 1991's Nevermind, came closest to forging a similar hard-meets-soft alchemy, but with less of the groovy, tambourine-bedecked vibe that set Redd Kross apart from the PNW milieu.

It's no surprise that major labels took notice, and the band signed with Atlantic, which released 1990's Third Eye, the album on which they adopted a more overtly peace-and-love look in combination with a cleaner sound.

I was pretty disappointed, and in retrospect, Jeff and Steve don't seem all that thrilled either, though hearing songs like "Annie's Gone" live really emphasizes the fact that sterile production rather than the songs or performances deserves the blame. (At the time, I was music director at KCMU, and though I added the album to rotation, the brothers saw my dispirited comment sticker while visting the station, and even quoted me on the air!)

In the '90s, they were hanging out with more of a movie-oriented crowd thanks to Steve's relationship with Sofia Coppola. In fact, that's her on the cover of Third Eye with a mask obscuring her face and strategically-arranged hair keeping the censors at bay, unlike the then-contemporaneous topless cover art for Jane's Addiction's Nothing's Shocking or Boss Hog's Drinkin', Lechin' & Lyin'. When sales didn't live up to Atlantic's expectations, the band segued to Mercury subsidiary This Way Up through which they released two more full-lengths, Phaseshifter and Show World, before packing it in.

The brothers were burned out, and went their separate ways. As they put it in a song off their first EP, "Burn out, something once for fun, burn out, now I can't get it done." That might have been the end of that, except it wasn't.

Just as drug addiction didn't destroy the band, an extended break didn't either. Granted, I wouldn't blame them for reforming simply to play some anniversary shows before going away again, but that's not what happened.

Instead they came roaring back with all-new material on their 2012 Merge Records debut, Rehearsing the Blues. They've since released a second album on the label and a double-LP set on In the Red. Though the pandemic put the kibosh on a tour behind 2019's Beyond the Door, they're on the road at the time of this writing and they'll be continuing on through late June.

There's a lot to like about Redd Kross, but until I watched this documentary I didn't appreciate what a significant role women have played in their musical lives. It's yet another characteristic that sets them apart both from their brethren in the So-Cal punk and PNW grunge scenes. Consequently, a lot of women appear in the film, including Nina Gordon of Veruca Salt, Lulu Gargiulo and Kim Warnick of the Fastbacks, the late Kim Shattuck of the Pandoras and the Muffs, filmmaker Allison Anders, and Jeff's wife, Charlotte Caffey of the Go-Go's, and Steve's wife, Anna Waronker of that dog. Not too surprisingly, Jeff and Charlotte's daughter, Astrid McDonald, is a musician.

Even at the height of their glam era, I don't believe that Jeff and Steve cared that anyone might think they were gay or fey or girlish. Some speakers go so far as to claim that hair metal bands like Guns N' Roses and Poison took their cues from Redd Kross. I have no idea if this is true, but members of those Sunset Strip outfits were known to frequent their shows.

At 84 minutes, Born Innocent: The Redd Kross Story doesn't cover everything, but it's a fast-moving, entertaining ride that ends up being inspiring, and even a little touching, without any heavy-handedness on the part of either director or subjects, but fans will absolutely need the special edition home-video version, since the extras include a commentary track plus deeper dives into Jeff's record collection, their participation in Dave Markey's Lovedolls films, and live performances from most every stage of their career, including an unplugged living room session where it's just Jeff and Steve playing and singing super-catchy songs that will never grow old, no matter the vicissitudes of time and taste.

Born Innocent: The Redd Kross Story is out now on DVD and two-Blu-ray set through MVD. Additional extras include featurettes, reproductions of original handbills, and an essay from Andrew Reich. Also out: the band's oral history, Now You're One of Us, written with Dan Epstein. Images from the Born Innocent Kickstarter (poster image and "Burn Out" cover art), Al Flipside via Pop Matters (on stage in 1979), Hake's Auctions (Redd Kross "Linda Blair" poster), and Wanda Martin via Lyndsanity (Jeff and Steve in 2024).

Lost and Found Film Reviews: The Orphanage, Not Forgotten, and The Skin I Live In

2026-03-21T14:08:00.000-07:00

Since I recently posted a list of Spanish horror films, I checked to see if any of my reviews of these and related titles had disappeared from the internet, and I found three. Not Forgotten wasn't made by a native Spanish speaker, but it fits in well enough in terms of cast and even director, since Paz Vega is Spanish, the film is set near the Mexican border, and Dror Soref is of Spanish descent.

THE ORPHANAGE / El Orfanato

(Juan Antonio Bayona, 2007, Spain, 105 minutes)

It's only his first feature film, but Spain's Juan Antonio Bayona [now known as JA Bayona] has already figured out the secret to a successful supernatural thriller--emphasize character over special effects. Like Walter Salles's 2005 Dark Water remake and Alejandro Amenábar's 2001 The Others, The Orphanage pivots on a pretty woman and an unusual child.

When her old orphanage goes on the market, Laura (Belén Rueda, Amenábar's The Sea Inside) and Carlos (Fernando Cayo) settle in with their son, Simón (Roger Príncep). Once acclimated to the remote seaside surroundings, they plan to re-open it as a home for special needs children.

Meanwhile, their seven-year-old doesn't know he's adopted or that he has a life-threatening illness. He does, however, have a lot of imaginary playmates. When Simón disappears without a trace, his parents contact the police, but to no avail. Because Laura has been hearing odd noises and having strange visions, including the one pictured above, they proceed to consult a medium.

Aurora (Geraldine Chaplin, speaking perfect Spanish) is convinced they aren't alone. Carlos has his doubts, but Laura makes like a detective and revisits her childhood--through photographs, home movies, and exploration of the spooky stone manor--to determine who or what abducted her son.

Produced and presented by Guillermo del Toro, The Orphanage is less fanciful than his works, though it does bear a vague resemblance to the ghostly Devil's Backbone. There are a few gory make-up effects, but Bayona mostly preys on our fear of the unknown to craft a first-rate fright fest.

NOT FORGOTTEN

(Dror Soref, 2009, USA,

96 minutes)

In sleepy Del Rio, near the border between Texas and Mexico, strange things are afoot.

In the scene-setting prologue, writer/director Dror Soref's supernatural-tinged mystery-thriller offers a glimpse of black magic and brutal murder before introducing Jack Bishop (The Mentalist's Simon Baker), a widowed loan officer, his beautiful Mexican-American wife, Amaya (Paz Vega, Sex and Lucia), and his rebellious 12-year-old daughter, Toby (Chloë Grace Moretz, who previously appeared with Baker on CBS series The Guardian).

After Toby disappears during soccer practice, the tight-knit townspeople come together to track her down. While the cops, including Amaya's cousin Casper Navarro (Michael DeLorenzo) and Detective Sanchez (The Shield's Benito Martinez), pursue leads, the media reports on the growing Santa Muerte sect (a Christo-Pagan religion centering on blood sacrifice), and Amaya persuades her skeptical husband to consult a South of the Border psychic. In the course of the various investigations, it transpires that Jack and Amaya have been hiding crucial details about their respective pasts.

After a slow and steady build-up, events take a turn for the weird and violent as Jack comes closer to finding his daughter at the same time the authorities come closer to finding out his true identity. Soref's second feature presents a twisted ride into the dark night of one man's divided soul. Best known for his amiable television work, the versatile Baker reveals a more intense side little seen since George Romero's 2005 Land of the Dead.

THE SKIN I LIVE IN / La Piel que Habito

(Pedro Almodóvar, 2011, Spain, 120 minutes)

For his maiden voyage into horror, Spanish maestro Pedro Almodóvar leaves the gore behind for a plunge into psychologically disturbing territory.

If the director suggests more than he shows, the human body still takes center stage, starting with Toledo plastic surgeon Robert Ledgard (a chillingly understated Antonio Banderas) who did his best to restore his wife to her former glory after a fiery car crash, but his efforts were in vain.

Since then, he's concentrated on perfecting a skin substitute that repels damage. Like Dr. Frankenstein, he's a single-minded obsessive, and even his housekeeper, Marilia (Marisa Paredes, in her fifth film with Almodóvar), describes him as "crazy," but that doesn't dim her devotion to him any less.

After tragedy re-enters Ledgard's life, he finds the perfect subject on which to test out his superhuman skin. Almodóvar begins in the present before backtracking to explain how Vera (Elena Anaya, Sex and Lucia) came to Ledgard's attention. Now, he keeps her locked in a room through which he observes her every move via surveillance cameras and one-way glass.

At all times, she wears a surprisingly flattering nude body stocking in order to heal properly, and spends her days reading Alice Munro novels and making Louise Bourgeois-inspired sculptures until Marilia's hotheaded son drops by, at which point the household dynamics spin out of control.

In adapting the late French writer Thierry Jonquet's 1984 crime novel Mygale, aka Tarantula, Almodóvar has embarked on his own perfectly-controlled project.

Like the lovely Vera, the film offers cool, attractive surfaces, but the secret behind the woman and the world she inhabits will chill you to the bone.

Images from Rex/PicHouse/Everett via The Guardian (Belén Rueda and ghost kid in The Orphanage), Slackerwood (Simon Baker in Not Forgotten), and the IMDb (Antonio Banderas and Elena Anaya in The Skin I Live In).

Ghostly Orphans, Nude Vampires, Fascism Run Amok: Survey of French and Spanish Horror

2026-03-15T10:40:00.000-07:00

Here are two more lists I compiled for culturally-specific panels at Crypticon.

I didn't do any crowd-sourcing in these instances, so I'm more familiar with many of these films. Co-panelist and Crypticon programmer Jason Weiss came up with even longer lists; I've incorporated his Mexican and Spanish suggestions and may add his French ones later, in addition to other updates. For now, the first list ends in 2018 and the second in 2019.

As usual, I've ignored most sequels, though a few films, like [Rec], have spawned several. In order by release date, plus director, notable writers and/or cast members, country of origin (where relevant), and a few notes.

Previous lists: Canadian horror and the horror western.

SURVEY OF FRENCH HORROR

- Les Vampires (Louis Feuillade, 1915-16)

- The Beauty and the Beast / La Belle et la Bête (Jean Cocteau and René Clément; Jean Marais, 1948)

- Diabolique / Les Diaboliques (Henri-Georges Clouzot; Simone Signoret, Véra Clouzot, and Paul Meurisse, 1955)

- Eyes Without a Face / Les Yeux sans Visage (Georges Franju; author Jean Redon; Édith Scob and Alida Valli; composer Maurice Jarre, 1960)

Other works: abattoir documentary The Blood of Beasts / Le Sang des Bêtes (1948; included with the Criterion Collection edition). May have influenced: Seconds (John Frankenheimer, 1966) and Face/Off (John Woo, 1997).

- The Nude Vampire / La Vampire Nue (Jean Rollin, 1970)

- Daughters of the Darkness (Harry Kümel; Delphine Seyrig, English-language, Belgian, 1971)
- Malpertuis (Harry Kümel; Orson Welles, Sylvie Vartan, and Jean-Pierre Cassel, Dutch, 1971)

- Trouble Every Day (Claire Denis; Vincent Gallo and Béatrice Dalle, 2001)

- High Tension / Haute Tension (Alexandre Aja; Cécile de France, Maïwenn, and Philippe Nahon [from Gaspar Noé’s I Stand Alone; we also mentioned Noé's Irréversible], 2003)

Also: The Hills Have Eyes remake (Aaron Stanford, 2006) and Mirrors (Keifer Sutherland; co-written by High Tension's Grégory Levasseur, 2008).

- Martyrs (Pascal Laugier, 2008)

Influenced: Us (Jordan Peele had Lupita Nyong'o watch it to prepare).

- They Came Back / The Revenants (Robin Campillo, 2004)

Serialized as The Revenants / The Returned (2012-2015). Other work: BPM (Beats per Minute) (Cannes Grand Prix, César Award for Best Film, 2017).

- Inside / À l'Intérieur (Julien Maury, 2007)

- Amer (Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, French-Belgian, 2009)

- The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears / L'Etrange Couleur des Larmes de Ton Corps (Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, 2013)

- Raw (Julia Ducournau, 2017)

- Let the Corpses Tan / Laissez Bronzer les Cadavres (Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, 2017)

- Revenge (Coralie Fargeat; Matilda Lutz, 2017)

English-language films with a French pedigree: Jacques Tourneur's Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie, and Night of the Demon; and two with Catherine Deneuve: Roman Polanski's Repulsion and Tony Scott's The Hunger.

SLICING UP EYEBALLS WITH SPANISH-LANGUAGE HORROR FROM LUIS BUÑUEL TO GUILLERMO DEL TORO AND BEYOND

Unlike the French films, many of the Spanish titles were dubbed into English, so only so many are actually in Spanish, even as the filmmakers are all native Spanish speakers, though--just to confuse the issue further--I've included made-in-English films from Spanish-speaking directors. I've also listed the mostly-free services by which I streamed some of these titles.

- Un Chien Andalou / An Andalusian Dog (Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, Spanish, 1929)

- Drácula (George Melford, Carlos Villarías as Conde Drácula, Cuban/American, 1931) [YouTube]

- The Body Snatchers / El Ladron de Cadaveres (Fernando Mendez, 1957)

- The Vampire / El Vampiro (Fernando Mendez, 1957)

- Macario (Roberto Gavaldón, 1960)

- The Awful Dr. Orloff / Gritos en la Noche (Jesús Franco; Howard Vernon, Spanish, 1961)

Generally considered the first horror film produced in Spain.

- The Curse of the Crying Woman / La Maldición de la Llorona (Rafael Baledón, 1961)

- The Exterminating Angel / El Angel Exterminador (Luis Buñuel, 1962) [YouTube]

- Even the Wind Is Afraid / Hasta el Viento Tiene Miedo (Carlos Enrique Taboada, 1968)

- The Book of Stone / El Libro de Piedra (Carlos Enrique Taboada, 1969)

- The House That Screamed / La Residencia (Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, Uruguayan, 1969) [Tubi]

- Night of the Bloody Apes / La Horripilante Bestia Humana (René Cardona, 1969)

- She Killed in Ecstasy / Mrs. Hyde (Jesús Franco, 1971)

- Vampyros Lesbos / Las Vampiras (Jesús Franco, 1971)

- The Blood Spattered Bride / La Novia Ensangrentada (Vicente Aranda, 1972)

- Tombs of the Blind Dead / La Noche del Terror Ciego (Amando de Ossorio, Spanish, 1972) [Vudu]

- The Corruption of Chris Miller / La Corrupción de Chris Miller (Juan Antonio Bardem [Javier Bardem's uncle], 1973)

- Count Dracula's Great Love / El Gran Amor del Conde Drácula (Javier Aguirre, 1973)

- The Holy Mountain / La Montaña Sagrada (Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1973)

- Horror Rises from the Tomb / El Espanto Surge de la Tumba (Carlos Aured, 1973)

- Spirit of the Beehive / El Espíritu de la Colmena (Víctor Erice, Spanish, 1973)

- A Virgin Among the Living Dead (Jesús Franco, 1973)

- Bloody Moon (Jesús Franco, 1974)

- Let Sleeping Corpses Lie / No Profanar el Sueño de los Muertos (Jorge Grau, 1974)

- Blacker Than the Night / Más Negro que la Noche (Carlos Enrique Taboada, 1975)

- Satanic Pandemonium / Satánico Pandemonium (Gilberto Martinez Solares, 1975)

- Who Can Kill a Child? / ¿Quién Puede Matar a un Niño? (Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, 1976)

- Alucarda / Alucarda, la Hija de las Tinieblas (Juan López Moctezuma, 1977)

- Arrebato / Rapture (Iván Zulueta, 1979)

- Aunt Alejandra / La Tía Alejandra (Arturo Ripstein, 1979)

- Night of the Werewolf / El Retorno del Hombre Lobo (Jacinto Molina, 1981)

- In a Glass Cage / Tras el Cristal (Agustí Villaronga, 1986)

- Poison for the Fairies (Carlos Enrique Taboada, 1986)

- Anguish / Angustia (Bigas Luna, 1987)

- Edge of the Axe / Al Filo del Hacha (José Ramón Larraz, 1988)

- Santa Sangre / Holy Blood (Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1989)

- Cronos (Guillermo del Toro, Mexican, 1993)

- The Dead Mother / La Madre Muerta (Juanma Bajo Ulloa, 1993)

- El Día de la Bestia / The Day of the Beast (Álex de la Iglesia, Spanish, 1995) [Vudu]

- Profundo Carmesí / Deep Crimson (Arturo Ripstein, Mexican, 1996)

- Tesis / Thesis (Alejandro Amenábar, Spanish-Chilean, 1996) [YouTube]

- El Espinazo del Diablo / The Devil's Backbone (Guillermo del Toro, 2001)

- The Others / Los Otros (Alejandro Amenábar, 2001)

- The Backwoods / Bosque de Sombras (Koldo Serra, 2006)

- Pan's Labyrinth / El Laberinto del Fauno (Guillermo del Toro, 2006)

Shout-out to Doug Jones, star of at least five Guillermo del Toro films.

- [Rec] (Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza, Spanish, 2007)

- Los Cronocrímenes / Timecrimes (Nacho Vigalondo, Spanish, 2007)

- El Orfanato / The Orphanage (JA Bayona, Geraldine Chaplin cameo, Spanish, 2007)

- [Rec] 2 (Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza, 2009)

Geraldine Chaplin made seven films, including Cría Cuervos (1976), with then-partner Carlos Saura--and over 30 films with Spanish-speaking filmmakers. Ana Torrent from Cría Cuervos stars in Spirit of the Beehive.

- Julia's Eyes / Los Ojos de Julia (Guillem Morales, 2010)

- Kidnapped / Secuestrados (Miguel Ángel Vivas, 2010)

- We Are What We Are / Somos lo Que Hay (Jorge Grau, 2010)

- Juan de los Muertos / Juan of the Dead (Alejandro Brugués, Spanish-Cuban, 2011) [Hulu]

- The Skin I Live In / La Piel Que Habito (Pedro Almodóvar, 2011)

- Sleep Tight / Mientras Duermes (Jaume Balagueró, 2011)

- Here Comes the Devil / Ahí va el Diablo (Adrian Garcia Bogliano, 2012)

- Witching & Bitching / Las Brujas de Zugarramurdi (Álex de la Iglesia, Spanish, 2015) [Prime]

- The House at the End of Time / La Casa del Fin de los Tiempos (Alejandro Hidalgo, 2013)

- Mama (Andy Muschietti, Argentinian, 2013)

Muschietti would go on to make It (2017) and It Chapter Two (2019).

- Shrew's Nest / Musarañas (Juanfer Andrés and Esteban Roel, 2014)

- Psiconautas, los Niños Olvidados / Birdboy: The Forgotten Children (Alberto Vázquez and Pedro Rivero, animated, Spanish, 2016)

- The Untamed / La Región Salvaje (Amat Escalante, 2016)

- We Are the Flesh / Tenemos la Carne (Emilano Rocha Minter, 2016)

- El Bar / The Bar (Álex de la Iglesia, Spanish, 2017) [Netflix]

- Veronica / Verónica (Paco Plaza, 2017)

- La Casa Lobo / The Wolf House (Joaquin Cociña and Cristóbal León, Chilean, stop motion, 2018)

- Vuelven / Tigers Are Not Afraid (Issa López, Mexican, 2017) [Prime]

- The Platform / El Hoyo (Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia, Spanish, 2019) [Netflix]

- La Llorona / The Weeping Woman (Jayro Bustamante, Guatemalan, 2019)

Note: the Spanish Civil War took place between 1936-39. Related: Francisco Franco held power between 1939-1975. A number of these films, like Spirit of the Beehive and Pan's Labyrinth, make reference to these developments.

Crypticon Seattle 2026 runs Mar 1-3. Images from Rotten Tomatoes (Édith Scob in Eyes Without a Face), Cineccentric (Simone Signoret and Véra Clouzot in Diabolique), Film Forum (Delphine Seyrig in Daughters of the Darkness), Movieposters.com (María Silva in The Awful Dr. Orloff), BFI Player (Patricia Morán in The Exterminating Angel), and The Criterion Collection (Doug Jones and Ivana Baquero in Pan's Labyrinth).

Jenny Agutter's Schoolgirl Gets a Sentimental Education in David Greene's I Start Counting

2026-03-07T23:22:00.000-08:00

I START COUNTING

(David Greene, UK, 1970, 105 minutes)

David Greene's vivid, haunting film is a coming-of-age tale, a folk horror, a serial killer thriller, and a decidedly Catholic take on sex and death.

Though only 16 at the time, Jenny Agutter was not an inexperienced actress, but she brings an impetuousness to the role that makes her performance especially compelling. Though she grew blonder over the years, she has long, brown hair here and a makeup-free face; she acts even younger, which is appropriate for 14-year-old Catholic schoolgirl Wynne.

Drawing from UK writer Audrey Erskine Lindop's 1966 novel, Greene by way of screenwriter Richard Harris (not that one) never explains what happened to her birth parents or her foster father, and it doesn't really matter.

Wynne has a foster family consisting of a mother (A Clockwork Orange's Madge Ryan), a brother a few years older (I Could Go on Singing's Gregory Phillips), and another brother (The Spy Who Loved Me's Bryan Marshall) nearly 20 years her senior; younger brother Len (below right) suggests that their mother is divorced when he mentions that she didn't like her husband.

An older man (Billy Russell), an unbelievably noisy eater, joins them for meals and nights around the telly. Though Greene doesn't spell it out, he's their rather eccentric grandfather, first introduced through a frosted glass window fondling his pet mouse and looking more like a peeper than a relation. Maybe even both.

Wynne's social life revolves around her flirtatious friend, Corinne (Coronation Street's Clare Sutcliffe in her feature-film debut), who favors miniskirts. Wynne is no shrinking violet herself, though she dresses more modestly.

Greene opens on a bucolic scene: a serene pond, a walking path, and ancient trees that suggest a fairytale, but without any special effects. The folk-tinged baroque-pop theme song, also titled "I Start Counting," that plays over the opening credits makes everything seem slightly surreal.

Vocalist Lindsey Moore, about whom little is known, recalls Vashti Bunyan, which may have been intentional–Vashti's Jagger-Richards cover "Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind" debuted as a single in 1965–while predicting mesmerizing vocalists like Sarah Nixey of Black Box Recorder, Florence Shaw of Dry Cleaning, and the late Trish Keenan of Broadcast–the latter, as it turns out, were big fans of experimental composer Basil Kirchin (The Abominable Dr. Phibes). His brassy, dissonant score for Greene's 1967 The Shuttered Room, with Carol Lynley and Oliver Reed, is also a treat.

As cinematographer Alex Thomson, an Oscar winner for John Boorman's 1981 Excalibur, pans in on the pond, it becomes clear that something isn't quite right, even before he reveals what's wrong with this pretty picture: a brief glimpse of something partially obscured by underwater flora–the face of an attractive young woman staring sightlessly through dead eyes.

In only a few seconds, Greene establishes that things are not what they seem. The forest is quite lovely, but a serial killer is on the loose, and no young Berkshire County women, including Wynne and Corinne, are safe.

With her family, however, Wynne feels secure. She's the only Catholic, and she's fairly devout. There's a crucifix above her twin bed, and she dutifully confesses to a priest–not that she has much to confess. She's a teenager, though, and strange, possibly sinful feelings are stirring inside of her.

Boys her own age take an interest, but she couldn't be bothered--they have no chill. Corinne fancies her brother Len, a handsome lad who works at a swinging record store and hangs out with a local dealer (Michael Feast, having a ball), indicating that he enjoys the occasional lysergic escapade.

Len isn't a bad guy, but he could be, which is germane to Greene's non-didactic, non-judgmental take on a teenager's libido blinding her to the danger in her midst. It's one thing, after all, to be curious about a serial killer, a common teen obsession, but it's another to court his attention, and that's what Wynne does, under the pretext that he would never hurt her.

Granted, there are other men in her life, like the priest (Lewis Priander) and the solicitous conductor (Simon Ward) she and Corinne run into most every time they take the bus to her old neighborhood where they like to muck about in the condemned, two-story home in which Wynne grew up. This state of affairs suggests both a reduction in income and encroaching gentrification, since the Kinch clan now live in a tower block in bland, suburban Bracknell, parts of which appears to be under construction.

Then there's George, the virile 32-year-old brother who lives at home, presumably to help support his family. Even the blond, blue-eyed conductor is handsome, giving Wynne yet another crush option, except he mostly makes eyes at Corinne whose miniskirts rise up when she sits down, though it's something he also criticizes, admonishing, "Your skirts are too short."

When George gazes longingly at a black-and-white photo of him and a young woman, Greene suggests a lost love (a flashback reveals a fatal fall). He's single now, and gainfully employed. He also dotes on Wynne, who has developed a major crush, which would be bad enough, except she also believes he's the killer, since he's been leaving clues about a secret life.

From the start, Greene confirms that she's right about the secret, but doesn't explain whether or not he's the killer--until the end--but what should scare Wynne away, compels her. The director doesn't provide a reason, and nor is it necessary. The film would be less intriguing, less resonant if he did.

If you were ever a teenage girl, you probably had a crush at some point on the worst person. Not the worst in terms of their persona, but the worst for you. We've all been there. Though a man could have written the novel, I'm not surprised that a woman did, and though it would have been interesting to see how a woman would have adapted it, Greene always honors Wynne's perspective, as blinkered as it may be. Everything unfolds through her eyes.

George prepares for each day with the bathroom door open, so she watches him shave and put on his shirt, but nothing more intimate than that.

One day, she notices scratches on his back, presumably from a woman's nails. Later, since she spies on him whenever she can, she catches him placing a package in the garbage cans outside their building. When she gets the chance, she snatches the bundle and brings it back to her room, where she opens it up to find a cream-colored sweater with a sizable blood stain.

She doesn't tell Corinne, she doesn't confront George, and she doesn't inform the authorities; she simply ramps up her campaign of surveillance. Greene suggests that it's possibly even a turn-on. A contemporary filmmaker might be more explicit, but I prefer his subtlety and restraint.

She has fantasies, for instance, like one in which her hand slides under her crisp, white sheets while thinking about George--and as Christ looks down from the cross above--or when she's taking a bath, and he walks in, and places a hand on her shoulder. She quickly comes to, which keeps Greene on the right side of the censors, but also suggests that she doesn't know what would happen next. She's a virgin, and it's possible that Corinne is, too, though she brags that she's had sex seven times. "Seven!," she yells.

Wynne also asks George questions designed to trip him up, but phrased so that they sound as innocuous as possible. It mostly confuses him. "You're a funny little biscuit," he responds to one of her odd inquiries. He knows about the crush, but seems oblivious to her suspicions.

In addition to fantasies, Greene inserts flashbacks, like one in which Wynne remembers George handing her a silver foil-wrapped box for her birthday, while everyone looks on eagerly. She opens it to find a white rabbit with red eyes and a Victorian outfit. I believe he's meant to recall Lewis Carroll's White Rabbit–which makes Wynne Alice and the forest her Wonderland.

The rabbit is, frankly, pretty scary-looking, but Wynne hugs and even sleeps with it in a way that suggests she's still a child, and also that she associates the creature with the handsome human who gave it to her. If anything, she appears to imagine she's embracing his body rather than that of a toy.

To protect George, she returns to the old house and incinerates the sweater using the cast iron stove. Each time, Greene makes it clear that someone is both following and spying on her, whether she's with Corinne or not.

We learn more about George when Wynne visits him at work. The film's only nudity is plastered all over the wall: dozens of nudie cuties. It's yet another sign that he prefers adult women, though she barely notices. She's so besotted that she believes love is all he needs, explaining, "When people have people who love them, they don't have to worry about anything." Later, she tells him, "I understand you, and I don't want anyone to hurt you."

In other words, he'll stop the strangling once he accepts Wynne as his savior. He never takes the hint, because he always sees her as a child.

That doesn't mean her crush has no basis in reality. George may not see her as an adult, but he sees her in a way no one else does. She's neither alone nor lonely, just a little odd, and he's always happy to humor her oddities and to give her a ride whenever he has time. He even tells her she's pretty, though she seems more embarrassed than flattered by the compliment.

As her campaign heats up, she makes mistakes, finds out things she wishes she hadn't–not necessarily what she expected–and gets in trouble, but Greene never overplays his hand.

(The scene in which she overindulges in George's hooch is hilarious.) Wynne even tries to seduce him, the most cringe-worthy thing she could do. I've gone to bat for melodrama, but that isn't what's happening here. Though not quite a kitchen sink drama, it's more grounded than that, but nor is it a tragedy or full-blown cautionary tale. Unlike some women in the film, Wynne will live to make more mistakes in the future, but falling for another potential murderer seems unlikely.

I went into I Start Counting cold, other than an encounter by way of Kier-La Janisse's wonderful 2021 documentary, Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror–I credit her for encouraging me to track it down–and didn't know how things would end, but the metaphor of the house in the woods becomes crystal clear. (Though it doesn't appear in Janisse's 2012 book, House of Psychotic Women, the film would fit right in.)

The storyline is neither wholly unpredictable, nor otherwise. Wynne gets an education in adulthood, sex, and life, and it's consistently gripping, due largely to Jenny Agutter and her touching vulnerability combined with a certain fearlessness, but everything–and everyone else–lives up to it.

Compared to the films with which it shares thematic similarities, like Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, Jerzy Skolimowksi's Deep End, and even Hitchcock's lurid Frenzy (which features Madge Ryan), I Start Counting is a gentler proposition, but what it suggests about the lure of danger, the compulsion to control the object of one's affection, and the invincible power of love, is every bit as dark. It's just that it's filtered through an adolescent worldview.

In her commentary track, Samm Deighan mentions an earlier Hitchcock film: 1943's Shadow of a Doubt with Teresa Wright and Joseph Cotton. Though it didn't occur to me until she mentioned it, she's right. Uncle Charlie is more problematic than George, but the film also revolves around a young woman's affinity for a man to whom she just happens to be related.

Hitchcock made the film during the height of the production code, and he had to be more circumspect than Greene, though I don't recall any sexual spark between the two, but like Wynne, Charlie sees her uncle as something other than who he actually is, while the elder Charlie–they share the same name–makes her feel seen. She may bring out his best qualities, but that doesn't change the fact that he's a bad man. Nor does it mean his affection for her is insincere, assuming a sociopath is capable of affection, and therein lies the tragedy, because she loves him, but he's beyond redemption.

In short order, Agutter would go on to star in Walkabout, Logan's Run, and An American Werewolf in London–setting hearts aflame all the while–but she doesn't just play a minor in Greene's film. As she reveals in the interview included with the restored Fun City Editions Blu-ray, "He told the entire crew not to swear in front of me." It's doubtful he issued the same proclamation regarding Clare Sutcliffe. Though she successfully passes for an obnoxious, self-obsessed teenager, Sutcliffe was a full decade older than Agutter–and five years older than the more mature-looking Gregory Phillips.

I've continued to enjoy the now-73-year-old Agutter's performances on British television shows that often turn up on PBS, like Spooks–MI-5 in the States–and Call the Midwife, now in its 15th season, in which the actress who once appeared fully nude in a Nicolas Roeg picture at 16, plays Sister Julienne, a fully-covered Mother Superior. She does quite a nice job, too, in a role with faint echoes of the devout schoolgirl she played 56 years ago.

I Start Counting is now out of print in the States, though a Region 2 edition exists through the British Film Institute, and it's packed with twice as many extra features, including the 2020 interview with Agutter and Deighan's informative, context-rich commentary. Used copies of the former now go for as much as $129.99 on eBay, though less expensive copies abound.

I have faith that the film will return to home video in the States in the not-too-distant future. Thanks to Kier-La Janisse and other influential enthusiasts, it's unlikely to ever disappear completely and consistently likely to discomfort and bedazzle each new viewer who makes its acquaintance.

I Start Counting and The Shuttered Room are both available on YouTube.

Images: ithankyou (Jenny Agutter), Mondo Digital (Billy Russell, Madge Ryan, and Gregory Phillips), the IMDb (Berkshire forest, Agutter in forest, and Agutter and Bryan Marshall), Trailers from Hell (Agutter and Clare Sutcliffe), The Kim Newman Web Site (Agutter and Marshall), Fopp (Agutter and creepy rabbit), Cinema Retro (Agutter and Marshall), American Cinematheque (Teresa Wright and Joseph Cotten), and eBay (Walkabout).

Christmas Slashers, Bloody Proms, and Teenage Werewolves: Best of Canadian Horror

2026-03-01T21:16:00.000-08:00

Since I posted a list of horror westerns last year after moderating a panel at Crypticon, I figured I should probably post lists from other subgenre or country-specific panels in which I've moderated and/or participated over the years.

In every case, I put together a preliminary list before crowd-sourcing for more. I compiled this Canadian one in 2018 for a panel called Horror From Around the World. Since then, Jason Weiss and I have moderated panels on French and Spanish horror; I'll also post those lists at some point. If you see any key Canadian titles missing, please feel free to let me know.

In order by release date, plus directors and notable cast members.

1960s - 1970s

The Mask (Julian Roffman; cowriter Slavko Vorkapich, 3-D, 1961)

Cannibal Girls (Ivan Reitman, 1973)

The Pyx (Harvey Hart; Karen Black and Christopher Plummer, 1973)

Black Christmas (Bob Clark; Olivia Hussey, Keir Dullea, Margot Kidder, and Andrea Martin, 1974)

Ilsa; She Wolf of the SS (Don Edmonds, 1975)

Shivers (David Cronenberg, 1975)

Sudden Fury (Brian Damude, 1975)

House by the Lake/Death Weekend (William Fruet; Brenda Vaccaro, 1976)

The Haunting of Julia (Richard Loncraine; Mia Farrow, Keir Dullea, and Tom Conti, 1977)

Rabid (David Cronenberg; Marilyn Chambers, 1977)

Rituals (Peter Carter; Hal Holbrook 1977)

The Brood (David Cronenberg; Samantha Eggar and Oliver Reed, 1979)

1980s - 1990s

The Changeling (Peter Medak; George C. Scott, 1980)

Prom Night (Paul Lynch; Jamie Lee Curtis and Leslie Nielsen, 1980)

Terror Train (Roger Spottiswoode; Jamie Lee Curtis, Ben Johnson, 1981)

Happy Birthday to Me (J. Lee Thompson; Melissa Sue Anderson and Glenn Ford, 1981)

My Bloody Valentine (George Mihalka, 1981)

The Pit (Lew Lehman, 1981)

Scanners (David Cronenberg; Jennifer O'Neill and Patrick McGoohan 1981)

Curtains (Richard Ciupka and Peter R. Simpson, 1983)

Of Unknown Origin (George Pan Cosmatos, 1983)

Videodrome (David Cronenberg; James Woods and Debbie Harry, 1983)

The Fly (David Cronenberg; Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis, 1986)

Pin (Sandor Stern, Terry O'Quinn, 1988)

Tales from the Gimli Hospital (Guy Maddin, 1988)

Careful (Guy Maddin, 1992)

Kissed (Lynne Stopkewich; Molly Parker, 1996)

Cube (Vincenzo Natali, 1997)

Top of the Food Chain (John Paisz; Campbell Scott, 1999)

2000s - 2010s

Ginger Snaps (John Fawcett; Katherine Isabelle, 2000)

Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary (Guy Maddin, 2002)

Cube Zero (Ernie Barbarash, 2004)

Ginger Snaps Back (Grant Harvey, Katherine Isabelle, 2004)

Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed (Brett Sullivan; Katherine Isabelle, 2004)

Pontypool (Bruce McDonald; Stephen McHattie, 2009)

Splice (Vincenzo Natali; Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley, 2009)

The Wild Hunt (Alexandre Franchi, 2009)

Tucker and Dale vs Evil (Eli Craig; Tyler Labine and Alan Tudyk, 2010)

American Mary (Jen and Sylvia Soska; Katherine Isabelle, 2012)

Enemy (Denis Villeneuve; Jake Gyllenhall and Sarah Gadon, 2013)

Back Country (Adam MacDonald, 2014)

Black Mountain Side (Nick Szostakiwskyj, 2014)

Pyewacket (Adam MacDonald, 2017)

What Keeps You Alive (Colin Minihan, 2018)

Thanks to all who contributed suggestions, especially my Seattle Film Critics Society colleague, Sara Michelle Fetters, who often writes about horror at Moviefreak.com. All images from the IMDb (Olivia Hussey in Black Christmas, Claudette Nevins in The Mask, and Georgina Reilly in Pontypool).

Abbie Cornish Astonishes in Australian Filmmaker Cate Shortland’s Debut, Somersault

2026-02-23T19:33:00.000-08:00

SOMERSAULT

(Cate Shortland, Australia, 2004, 106 minutes)

In her directorial debut, Somersault, Australian filmmaker Cate Shortland turns the idea of the unlikable protagonist on its head by portraying her central character with the kind of empathy this young woman craves.

Sixteen-year-old Heidi (Abbie Cornish with white-blonde hair and eyebrows, lending her a look both feral and ethereal) has been coasting through life on her looks. She doesn't appear to have any particular interests, though she does carry a scrapbook and a glue stick with her wherever she goes.

The film has hardly begun when she seduces her mother's boyfriend, Adam (Damian De Montemas). She starts by asking about his tattoo, touching it, and giving him a kiss. Things proceed from there–until her mother, Nicole (Olivia Pigeot), catches them in the act. After making herself persona non grata, Heidi catches a bus from Canberra, where Shortland grew up, to the alpine resort town of Jindabyne where she knows exactly one person.

When her attempt to stay with the former fling goes awry, Heidi drops by a local watering hole, and finds Sean (Ben Tate), another man with whom to crash, though he's mostly just looking for a good time. She gives him what he wants, but it's unclear if it's also what she wants (Cornish, 21 at the time, has several nude scenes). After Sean and his friends--who appear to be skiers--head back to Sydney, she's on her own again, looking for a job and a place to stay.

She meets Joe (Avatar's Sam Worthington with a spiky mullet), the son of a wealthy farmer, at a rustic diner. They banter for a bit, and though he seems to find her attractive, he isn't exactly swept off his feet, possibly because of the age gap. Convinced they made a connection, she insists on coming home with him, but things end much as they did with his predecessor. Fortunately, kindly motel manager Irene (a warm, maternal Lynette Curran) gives her a temporary place to stay: her metal-head son's old apartment.

Heidi gets a job at a petrol station next. Though she and Joe meet again, it's hard to tell if he just likes sleeping with her, or if he likes her as a person.

He's more reserved, and as it turns out, has problems of his own. The actors have chemistry, though–quite a bit. Since Heidi doesn't have any friends, there's a sense that she doesn't know how to relate to women her own age, with the possible exception of her coworker Bianca (Hollie Andrew).

This isn't the kind of film where the director focuses exclusively on the central character. Once Joe enters the scene, Shortland shows what he gets up to when he isn't with Heidi. He has one friend, an older gay man (Erik Thomson), who doesn't judge him, and another, a straight man around his age, who does. That friend considers Heidi low class, loose–a slut.

There's another man in town, Bianca's stepfather (Paul Gleeson), who shares the same sentiments, because Heidi flirted with him when she was looking for a job, a decision she comes to regret. He engages in a form of sexism that may not be overt, but it's definitely insidious, and leaves her feeling more like an outsider than ever. Though it's hardly great that she put the moves on her mom's boyfriend, this confused young woman is more than her worst impulses. If anything, she makes the tightly-wound Joe uncomfortable, because she wears her heart on her sleeve.

In Jindabyne, Heidi comes to find she can't run away from her problems when the primary problem is her. It doesn't mean she deserves the treatment she receives, or that she doesn't deserve happiness, just that she needs to learn to have more faith in herself and not to let others define her.

Fortunately, none of this is heavy-handed. Heidi does eventually have a breakdown, but it forces a necessary reckoning. By the end, she isn't so unlikable after all. At the very least, she's more understandable. Nonetheless, in looking through the film's original reviews, I found that women responded more favorably to the film. Two male critics went so far as to describe Heidi as "trampy," which makes me think they missed the point of the thing (kudos to Scott Tobias and Neil Young for their more considered responses).

As for Cornish, she's quite astonishing, whether singing "The Clapping Song" to herself while wandering through the forest or dancing in her skivvies to Alvin Stardust's "My Coo Ca Choo," she's always alive in the moment.

I get why Australian actors who made their mark at home would move to the United States where they can secure work that pays better and reaches more people. It worked for Nicole Kidman and for a while it worked for Eric Bana and Simon Baker, too, though both actors eventually returned to Australia where, to my mind, they’ve been doing more interesting work.

Since she moved to the States, Cornish has been working steadily, and for all I know she's perfectly happy, but I believe she's given her best performances in Australian films, like 2006's Candy with Heath Ledger and, especially, Jane Campion's 2009 Bright Star with Ben Whishaw.

In the States, she's worked on more commercial projects that have asked less from her to the extent that Somersault might startle anyone only familiar with Sucker Punch, Limitless, or Prime Video's Jack Ryan, because she absolutely holds the screen in an intensely challenging role.

Unlike her leading lady, Cate Shortland has worked primarily in Australia. A surprising exception was Marvel's 2021 standalone feature Black Widow with Scarlett Johansson. On the basis of her previous, modestly-budgeted features, that's not a move I would have seen coming, though her track record as a director of women-in-peril films led Johansson to insist on her, telling Variety that 2012's World War II-set Lore is "a perfect film."

Actors and directors sometimes meet at just the right time, and that was the case with Shortland, who was making her first feature after several shorts, and Cornish, who was playing her first lead after several supporting roles.

Somersault is an exceptionally fine film, eminently deserving of restoration and rediscovery. It's beautifully shot by The Hunter's Robert Humphries and scored with delicacy and restraint by Sydney outfit Decoder Ring, resulting in something simultaneously electric and affecting in its depiction of the kind of young woman too easily dismissed as "easy" when she's anything but.

Somersault plays New York's Metrograph through Feb 28 and opens at Austin Film Society Mar 8 and Toronto's Paradise Theatre Mar 13. No Seattle dates yet–if at all–but it comes to VOD Mar 27. Images from Film Movement via Reverse Shot (Abbie Cornish and Sam Worthington), Google Play (Cornish), TV Guide (Cornish and Lynette Curran), and AFI (Cornish).

What’s Cooler Than Cool: Michael Almereyda’s Vampire Tale Nadja with Elina Löwensohn

2026-02-12T23:42:00.000-08:00

NADJA

(Michael Almereyda, USA, 1994,

93 minutes)

I say what's, what's cooler than being cool? (Ice cold)

--Outcast, "Hey Ya!" (2003)

The essence of 1990s cool, Michael Almereyda's black and white mood piece infuses German Expressionism with post-punk attitude. "Nights…nights without sleep," Nadja (Romanian-American actor Elina Löwensohn, who had appeared in Schindler's List the year before) intones at the outset as the filmmaker superimposes her image over fog-enshrouded New York City.

Almereyda then catches up with Nadja on a date explaining that she doesn't have to work, because she comes from money. Her father didn't have to work either, and for the same reason. The night ends with Nadja feeding on her date. She may not have to work, but to survive: she needs to feed.

Cinematographer Jim Denault shot the sequence in Pixelvision–a toy camera created by Fisher Price–and the effect is more arty than scary even as the ravenous vampire ends up with blood all over her face. I was also reminded of surveillance footage, something which will play into Almereyda's 2000 ultra-paranoid, modern-dress version of Hamlet with Ethan Hawke.

As Nadja's late-night perambulations continue, she drops by an underpopulated, Edward Hopper-esque diner where she asks Lucy (actor-turned-author Galaxy Craze), an androgynous-looking woman, for a light, and they proceed to smoke and engage in a rather personal conversation for two people who just met. She appears to be looking for a friend when she confesses things like, "I'm so alone," but as the evening continues, their platonic rapport turns sexual--even though Lucy isn't exactly single.

While Nadja flirts, fucks, and feasts her way across the city, Van Helsing (Peter Fonda in longhair-hippie mode) kills her father and plots with his nephew, Jim (Martin Donovan), Lucy's oblivious husband, about how to eliminate more of her kind. To him, vampires are "raving idiots, insane, monsters, deformed, the walking dead." A silent movie-style flashback, which evokes F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu, suggests he used to feel otherwise.

(Since Fonda also plays Nadja's father in flashbacks, it's worth noting that the Beatles took inspiration for 1966's "She Said She Said" from Fonda's declaration, "I know what it's like to be dead," while tripping on acid.)

Beyond Murnau, Almereyda drew from Bram Stoker's Dracula, André Breton's semiautobiographical novel Nadja, Carl Theodor Dreyer's gothic horror Vampyr, and Lambert Hillyer's Dracula's Daughter, a stylish 1936 film about an aristocratic foreigner (below) seeking out London's prettiest necks.

Though Nadja seems lonely, she has a male companion, Renfield (Almereyda mainstay Karl Geary), but he's more like an assistant--"a slave," as she puts it--than a friend or lover. She also has a twin, Edgar (Jared Harris with passable Romanian accent), except he's in a sort of coma, though it isn't clear if he's a vampire or just severely anemic. His nurse Cassandra (Suzi Amis), Jim's sister, serves as his companion. (Three years after starring in Titanic, Amis married James Cameron, and stopped acting around the same time. It's possible she doesn't miss it, but seeing her again made me a little sad.)

With Nadja's help, Edgar gets better, while Lucy, who has fallen under her sway, gets worse. What appears to be a case of vampirism, however, turns out to be more of a psychic ill, since Nadja, like Countess Marya in Dracula's Daughter, can also communicate and control minds telepathically.

Though Nadja could rest on her laurels after hypnotizing Lucy, she sets out to make Cassandra her next victim, which leads the nurse to flee Edgar's abode, except no one can ever really escape the vampire. The chase leads to the twins' Romanian castle at which the entire extended family will meet.

I'm not certain how Almereyda decided which sequences to shoot in 35mm and which in Pixelvision, though it seems more random than not with the exception of the more violent encounters. Then again, Nadja follows his second feature, 1992's Another Girl, Another Planet, also with Löwensohn, which Jim Denault shot entirely in Pixelvision before transferring to 16mm.

There isn't a lot to Nadja, but if you surrender to its spell, a good time awaits, and I found the final sequence quite transcendent. It also predicts the cool-cat vampire tales to come, like Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive, which takes place in the beautiful ruins of Detroit and Tangier, and Ana Lily Amirpour's Farsi-language A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, which transfers Persian and French New Wave aesthetics to suburban Bakersfield.

Nonetheless, the story of its making is nearly as compelling as the film itself, since David Lynch and then-wife Mary Sweeney produced and funded the picture--Lynch also cameos as a loopy morgue attendant--and Peter Fonda, who would receive a richly deserved Oscar nod for Victor Nuñez's Ulee’s Gold only three years later, was so enthusiastic about the project that he flew to New York on his own dime and volunteered his services (not the done thing for an actor at any level). I would like to think that Van Helsing's reflective sunglasses are a nod to his mirrored shades in the era-defining Easy Rider.

Almereyda also stacked the deck with alt-rock and trip-hop, but while working on the restoration with Arbelos, he axed the Portishead and My Bloody Valentine tracks to make way for more of Simon Fisher Turner's shimmering score. This will surely disappoint fans of the original version, though Fisher Turner's score really is pretty terrific, and it was probably quite a coup in 1994 to secure the services of Derek Jarman's favored composer.

The central character, however, remains the same. When it comes to vampire films, the casting is crucial, and Bucharest-born Elina Löwensohn, with her Louise Brooks-meets-Anna Karina good looks, spectral intensity, and deadpan affect is as perfect for the role of Nadja as Hungarian-born Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó, aka Bela Lugosi, was for Count Dracula.

Nadja, in a new 4K edition, opens at The Beacon Cinema on Fri, Feb 13. Images from Le Cinema Club (Elina Löwensohn), Center for Contemporary Arts - Santa Fe (Löwensohn and Galaxy Craze), MUBI (Gloria Holden), Indiewire (David Lynch), and Arbelos / Grasshopper (Peter Fonda).

The Return of Los Golfos ("The Delinquents"): Carlos Saura's Searing 1959 Neorealist Debut

2026-02-08T18:30:00.000-08:00

LOS GOLFOS / The Delinquents

(Carlos Saura, Spain, 1959, 84 minutes)

Los Golfos is one of the most uncompromising films I've ever seen about the trap of poverty.

Carlos Saura, in his feature-film debut, doesn't even make his protagonists especially likeable, though they're always engaging. He simply shows them building to a plan that could set them on the path to prosperity–or leave them with nothing. There's no middle ground; it's either success or failure.

Granted, the Spanish title translates as The Delinquents or The Hooligans, but Saura, who began as a director of documentary shorts, isn't being strictly metaphorical, and nor does his film, which he shot on location in Madrid's less photogenic neighborhoods, qualify as exploitation fare. It falls squarely in the neorealist camp, something I wouldn't say about his more stylized flamenco films, like 1983's Oscar-nominated musical Carmen.

And unlike the American B-movies of the time, these guys aren't tricked out in leather to race around on motorcycles. They're just trying to get by.

It's always a risk to hitch your wagon to a star, but it's the best option around, so Juan (Óscar Cruz) has been training to become a matador, and his friends will do anything to help him out. Juan is taking a risk, too–the biggest, really–because not everyone is cut out to be a matador. He's also motivated by a porter job that has him lugging heavy baskets of produce.

For what it's worth, Juan has no reservations about plunging banderillas (long pointed sticks) into bulls' backs. What might seem like animal cruelty to an outsider–and I'm not saying that it isn't–is par for the course for the aspiring matador, who doesn't come across as much of a deep thinker.

For anyone who struggled with Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar, which centers on an abused donkey, or Albert Serra's bullfighting documentary Afternoons of Solitude, which features several abused bulls, Los Golfos could prove a tough sit, though Saura mostly focuses on life outside the ring.

Right: Peruvian bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey in Afternoons of Solitude

At first, I assumed the quintet was acting primarily out of loyalty and friendship, but it's only toward the end that it becomes clear they're looking to become part of a matador's entourage, which doesn't exclude loyalty and friendship by any means, but Juan is as much a potential meal ticket as a friend.

Though the film has abundant Spanish flavor--plaintive flamenco guitar, heartrending folk singing--the narrative could have just as easily centered on a basketball player in Harlem, a football player in South Central, or any number of other athlete-in-the-city combinations. Some professional players are more than happy to share their largesse with the hometown crew.

The film begins as one of the youths robs a blind merchant, the first sign that they aren't stealing from those who can take a hit, but from those who need the money as much as they do. If anything, their victims come across as more sympathetic, but that's Saura's point: they're victims, too. Victims of a system that benefits from their exploitation–little surprise that the film was censored in Spain, even after a well received premiere at Cannes.

Later, they steal parts from trucks and motorcycles to sell for cash, and they rob a man who's simply going home from work. For what it's worth, they aren't armed, they don't kill anyone, and they don't inflict any permanent injuries, but they're as forceful and intimidating as necessary.

They also have a moll in Juan's self-possessed girlfriend, Visi (María Mayer), who assists with some of their schemes, like the time she lets a patron cozy up to her at a bar while Ramón (Luis Marín, a standout among the mostly non-professional cast) attempts to lift an unattended wallet. As Juan tells Visi after a night of romance–a sequence censored in Spain since they're pictured in bed–"If I'm lucky and I win, I'll get you out of this place."

Marín also appears in the terrific 1957 short, La Tarde del Domingo, a damning portrait of a family of oppressors from the perspective of their put-upon maid (Isana Medel); it's included with the new Radiance release.

To Saura's credit, there are no weak links in the cast. Because he keeps exposition to a minimum, it took me a while to sort everyone out, but that has nothing to do with the performances. The filmmaker found young men with distinctive features and personas, who work well together, though most--Marín aside--would leave acting behind afterward.

The risks intensify when Juan meets with promoter Don Félix (Arturo Ors) to inform him he's ready for competition. Don is happy to oblige, but only if he pays 20,000 pesetas upfront. I'm not sure if he's taking advantage of Juan's inexperience or if it's pay-to-play for all first-timers, but Juan and his friends decide it's worth the price to send him on his way to fame and fortune.

Since petty crimes won't add up quickly enough, they plan one big score instead. Nothing works according to plan, but these delinquents are relentless, and they won't let anything stand in their way. Since Los Golfos is neorealism bordering on noir, they'll have more unpleasant surprises ahead.

Saura ends on a note of cruel irony. That isn't to suggest that he's cruel, though you could see it that way, since the director created the pitiless scenario (he wrote the screenplay with director Mario Camus and journalist Daniel Sueiro). If anything, he had to tone down the politics, since the censors rejected the previous anti-fascist projects he had proposed.

In Michael Eaude's Saura obituary for The Guardian, he states that "its implicit critique of the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco meant that it was forbidden in Spain for another couple of years." Because the 1962 release was censored, it had to be pieced together for this 4K restoration, so it's fortunate the missing elements were accessible, thus restoring it to the version that netted a Palme d'Or nomination at 1960's Cannes Film Festival.

In the history of Spanish cinema, Carlos Saura is often placed, chronologically, after Luis Buñuel–who also worked in France and Mexico–and before Pedro Almodóvar as the top three filmmakers. (Saura, who dedicated Peppermint Frappé to Buñuel, also considered him a friend.)

The Criterion Collection has reissued five of his features, including 1976's stunning Cría Cuervos… with his one-time companion Geraldine Chaplin; four of those films are available exclusively as part of box sets, while 13 are currently streaming on the Criterion Channel.

So, he's hardly an unknown quantity, and it isn't hard to see many--though not all--of his films. Nonetheless, I hadn't heard of Los Golfos until Radiance reissued it last fall, and I'm not sure why, but I think it's a combination of a troubled afterlife and because it doesn't quite fit with the rest of his 44 non-fiction and narrative features, even though he was a fairly restless talent with wide-ranging interests.

It's a tough-minded picture fueled by fury that doesn't just speak to Spain in 1959, when it was made, but to any country in which young, working class people have few opportunities to better themselves–a situation hardly unknown in the United States, especially in its more impoverished regions.

For my money, it bears comparison with José Antonio Nieves Conde's Surcos ("Furrows"), Luis Buñuel's Los Olvidados ("The Forgotten Ones"), and Fellini's semiautobiographical I Vitelloni ("The Layabouts"), and deserves nearly as much acclaim as those celebrated early-career films.

Los Golfos is out now on Blu-ray with author and curator interviews, two short films (including 1955's La Llamada), a handsome booklet featuring an excellent essay, "And the World Goes Round," from British critic Mar Diestro-Dópido, and other contextual extras. Another winner from Radiance Films (available in the US via MVD). Images from Slant Magazine, Pere Portabella (Óscar Cruz), Grasshopper Films / The New York Times (Andrés Roca Rey), Blu-ray.com (Luis Marín), the IMDb (Cruz with María Mayer and Arturo Ors), and Gianni Ferrari / Getty Images / Le Monde (Carlos Saura in 1966).

Writing a Life: Kristen Stewart’s Triumphant Directorial Debut, The Chronology of Water

2026-01-28T21:55:00.000-08:00

THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER

(Kristen Stewart, USA, 2025, 128 minutes)

"It's all a series of fragments, repetitions, pattern formations…"

Kristen Stewart's full-length debut, an empathetic adaptation of The Chronology of Water, adheres to the fragmentary form of Lidia Yuknavich's 2011 memoir, a recollection of the incidents that shaped a troubled and ultimately joyous life, but not always in chronological order (it follows Stewart's 2017 short Come Swim). It isn't, after all, how we remember things, and both book and film play like a swarm of vivid memories.

They aren't Stewart's memories, but after eight years and 500 drafts of the screenplay, she must have felt as if she had earned joint custody.

Much like RaMell Ross's adaptation of Colson Whitehead's Nickel Boys and Mary Bronstein's If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, even individual sequences are fragmentary, since DP Corey Waters often skews the 16mm compositions.

Instead of full-frame bodies or faces, he captures parts of the whole, frequently emphasizing texture over shape. It's a sensual approach, though so intimate it can prove disorienting until the fragments take fuller shape and start to cohere thanks to editor Olivia Neergaard-Holm's intricate work.

The film begins with a stillbirth. Lidia's older sister, Claudia (Thora Birch), comforts her as she (Imogen Poots) processes a loss she associates with water–she associates everything with water–because Lidia is, or was, a competitive swimmer. As she crumples to the shower floor, and as the water continues to flow, blood that once sustained a life now runs down the drain.

One minute, she's an adult, and then she's a child with an alcoholic stay-at-home mother (For the People's Susannah Flood) and an abusive architect father (German actor Michael Epp, convincing as a native Pacific Northwesterner). Swimming is something she's good at, and it's also an escape. Other coping mechanisms include journaling, collecting rocks, and re-reading her sister's copy of Vita Sackville-West's St. Joan of Arc.

The film continues to toggle between childhood and adulthood (Angelika Mihailova and Anna Wittowsky play Lidia as a child, while 35-year-old Poots successfully passes for the high school and college-age Lidia).

Since the fragments are so brief–even more so than the book's short chapters–sporadic voiceover provides an internal monologue; an expression of Lidia's feelings rather than a delivery system for exposition. Composer Paris Hurley, who provided the score for Rose Glass's pulpy thriller Love Lies Bleeding with Stewart, contributes to the sense of unease and discomfort.

Lidia's dad, who recalls Jon Hamm on Mad Men, is a handsome creep; a reminder that not all sexual predators are unattractive men who can't hold down a job; they exist, too, but this kind is more likely to get away with it.

Claudia leaves home as soon as she can, leaving Lidia defenseless until she goes away to college. For all her mother's faults, the real-life Yuknavich extends little sympathy to an unhappy woman who suffered from crippling depression compounded by a painful disability, a philandering husband, and an unsuccessful battle with the bottle. Lidia and Claudia deserved better to be sure, but Dorothy did, too, and her options were even more limited.

For Lidia, her mother's native Texas--Austin rather than Port Arthur--represents freedom, but left to her own devices, she develops an insatiable appetite for sex, drugs, and drink; a problem for any young person, but especially an athlete on scholarship. She also falls for Phillip, an aspiring musician, who tells her, "It's my father and my brother who have the real voices" when she compliments his singing–a bit of an inside joke, since he's played by Earl Cave, the son of Nick Cave (if anything, he is a better singer).

Phillip is a good guy, but all Lidia knows is bad guys, so she keeps fucking up, but he has an inexhaustible capacity for forgiveness, and he becomes her first husband. There will be others after that relationship runs aground, as well as relationships with women, including a college friend (Esmé Creed-Miles), transgressive novelist Kathy Acker (not featured in the film), and an older dominatrix (nicely played by post-punk musician Kim Gordon).

By the time Lidia ends up at the University of Oregon, where Ken Kesey (an excellent Jim Belushi) becomes her mentor, she's a mess, but so is he, with his great novels long behind him. In Lidia's memoir, she details his many shortcomings, but he encouraged her talent–Kathy Acker did, too–and it seems unlikely her book would exist without his fatherly guidance.

Sometimes when two people meet while one is on the way up and the other is on the way down, they click in the middle. It's about timing as much as shared interests and compatible personas. If Lidia and Ken had met at a different time, they might not have been able to connect in the same way.

Claudia aside, none of these relationships are built to last until Lidia meets Andy (Charlie Carrick), a writing student 10 years her junior who will become her husband and the father of their child. Just as Stewart and her spouse, producer Dylan Meyer, have collaborated on projects, like this film, Yuknavich and Mingo have worked together, most significantly on their own independent press.

Beyond the fact that this is a well-made film from a neophyte writer/director who appears to have learned well from the art house auteurs with whom she has worked, like Olivier Assayas (Personal Shopper) and Kelly Reichardt (Certain Women), it's exceptionally well cast. Thora Birch hasn't had the easiest time of it since her American Beauty/Ghost World days, and she honors the faith Stewart, who also started out as a youth actor, puts in her.

Everybody else is pretty great, too, but Imogen Poots is fantastic. It shouldn't be news that she's a very good actor--from 28 Weeks Later to last year's Hedda--but she convinces in all of Lidia's many guises, including champion swimmer, reckless drunk, and established author and mother.

Right: Ken Kesey to the left and Lidia Yuknavich to the right; he and his graduate students publishd a 1990 book called Caverns.

It's often said that the book is better than the film, because it's often true, and The Chronology of Water, which started out as a short story, wouldn't have been possible without Lidia's life and work--something that affected Stewart so deeply she reached out years ago to visit the author, and the two became friends. As Stewart told Kate Dwyer, Yuknavich "changed or at least helped shape my relationship with expression itself; not a small thing.'

So, it isn't completely fair to say that the film is better than the book, but I preferred it, because Lidia can be a very performative writer. That isn't to suggest she's insincere, though she does classify herself as an experimental writer, an outlier. Her book always makes sense, and there's nothing wrong with a varied writing style, but as a screenwriter, Stewart cuts out a lot of the showy stuff to focus on the essence of incidents. It's not about making Lidia more likeable, since she does plenty of unlikeable things to herself and others, but about making her more relatable–and less eager to impress.

A few years ago, Stewart acknowledged that she was having a hard time finding funding for her film, and it led to a lot of hand-wringing from critics in light of her achievements as an actor, but she found a way--filming in Latvia and Malta, for one thing--and she also found a distributor--The Forge--but not one of the big names you might expect, so her debut hasn't gotten as much attention as it deserves, despite a six-minute standing ovation at Cannes and praise from the likes of Sheila O'Malley and Richard Brody.

Things might have been different if Kristen Stewart had cast herself, but she made the best choice, the right choice, in casting UK-born Imogen Poots to play all-American fuckup-turned-bestselling-novelist Lidia Yuknavich.

She could have put herself front and center, and it might have pleased financiers, but she chose to honor the story of a woman who made sense out of her life through writing. I couldn't say for sure, but I believe the film served a similar purpose for its maker, who has really done herself proud.

The Chronology of Water, which opened in Seattle on Jan 9, returns for a run at SIFF Film Center thanks to the Grand Illusion Cinema on Jan 30 and Feb 1, 12, and 18. Images from MK (Imogen Poots), Kino-Zeit (Poots and Thora Birch), Les Films du Losange / The Daily Beast (Susannah Flood, Michael Epp, and kids), The Forge (Flood), Variety (Jim Belushi), and Hawthorne Books (Ken Kesey, Lidia Yuknavich, and other students).

Joy Wilkinson Reinvents the Erotic Thriller for a New Era in 7 Keys, Her First Feature Film

2026-01-18T11:45:00.000-08:00

7 KEYS
(Joy Wilkinson, UK, 2024, 94 minutes)

For her feature-film debut, British playwright and television writer Joy Wilkinson (Dr. Who, Lockwood & Co.) crafts a riveting erotic thriller.

It begins as Lena (Emma McDonald, The Serpent Queen), a working-class single mother in London, dresses up for a night on the town–complete with oversized hoop earrings and short, fitted dress–to meet a man she met on a dating app. With a history of abandonment, she's eager for connection.

She waits and waits, but he doesn't show, so she commiserates with Daniel (1917's Billy Postlethwaite, rangy son of Pete Postlethwaite), whose date also ghosted him. "It's a big city full of assholes," she reasons (McDonald and Postlethwaite previously worked together in Paul Hart’s 2019 musical version of Macbeth and Wilkinson’s 2021 short "The Everlasting Club").

Daniel keeps the key–or copy of the key–to every place he's lived, and he's lived all over the city, so she suggests they sneak into each one. He's put off by her assertiveness, and at first she seems like the predator, but he eventually relents. It injects excitement into her life, on the one hand; on the other, visiting his past helps Lena to better understand this stranger. It works until it doesn't. Then it all goes to shit.

Lena didn't tell Daniel she has a seven-year-old son--she and his father share custody--and Daniel didn't tell Lena about his sociopathic tendencies, because why would he? He's a sociopath, and what starts out as an unexpected, adventurous date turns into a perilous battle for survival.

For a $300K debut, 7 Keys is stylish, but not slick, with each section represented by a different color scheme and a score that ranges from suspenseful to ominous as Lena and Daniel reveal more of themselves, through words and actions, and the situation escalates from erotic to horrific (the film was shot by Mary Farbrother and scored by Max Perryment).

If the ending could be more satisfying, the acting is always compelling, particularly from the charismatic Emma McDonald. Until he turns aggressive and demanding, Daniel is more withdrawn by comparison, which Lena initially reads as timidity or cautiousness.

Neither victim nor superwoman, she takes risks to be sure–loneliness can do that to a person–but she's strong and resourceful, yet also openhearted and nurturing. Wilkinson doesn't press the point, but they're valuable qualities for a single mother...though her ability to read social cues could use work.

In her director's statement, the filmmaker explains the thinking behind a scenario both symbolic and plausible: "I've always been fascinated by keys. They're mythic objects in stories, unlocking secret places, other worlds, and even in our world, they have a magic. Children can't be trusted with them, which fueled my childhood fears of being homeless and my obsession with finding a home, primal drives that still fill my dreams and nightmares." She adds, "Keys had power to unlock new experiences. Illicit things."

The end result plays like a post-millennial take on the 1990s erotic thriller with a woman of color given greater agency than the sidekick roles of yore. Lena reminded me of Stephanie Sigman's Laura in Gerardo Naranjo's original Spanish-language Miss Bala or Matilda Lutz's Jen in Coralie Fargeat’s blood-soaked Revenge.

Those films have more gore, but all three women, accustomed to being underestimated, find reserves of strength when tangling with men too dazzled or tradition-minded to understand what they're up against.

There's no slut-shaming here, just a story about loneliness in the big city and a vulnerable woman's desire for companionship gone very, very wrong.

7 Keys premieres on VOD Jan 27, 2026. Images from the Jeva Films via IMDb (Emma McDonald) and Mashable (McDonald and Billy Postlethwaite).

Nia DaCosta Brings Thrills, Chills, and Duran Duran to 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

2026-01-14T20:56:00.000-08:00

28 YEARS LATER: THE BONE TEMPLE

(Nia DaCosta, 2026, USA, 109 minutes)

What has happened to it all?

Crazy, some'd say

Where is the life that I recognise? (Gone away)

--Duran Duran, "Ordinary World" (1993)

Danny Boyle's 28 Years Later, the third film in a series--and first in a new trilogy--that began with 2002's 28 Days Later, ended with a cliffhanger that left some delighted and others pissed. Count me among the delighted.

As last year's film came to an end, young Spike (the terrific Alfie Williams), who gets separated from his newly-widowed father (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, missing in action this time around), has endured all manner of cancerous and rage-infected calamities and come out the other side, fully intact.

Left: Spike and Jamie running from rage zombies in 28 Years Later

Then he runs into the bejeweled and velour track-suited Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O'Connell, fresh from Ryan Coogler's Sinners and back for more villainy). Jimmy calls his followers Fingers: platinum blond cretins who look like a cross between the Feral Kid in Mad Max 2 and the towheaded terrors of Children of the Corn. (Though he previously recalled odious British entertainer and notorious pedophile Jimmy Savile, they've toned down that look this time around.)

The end. That was it. Until 28 days later...in film time.

Nia DaCosta, who was behind last year's revitalized adaptation of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, picks up where Boyle left off with Spike's induction into a hyper-violent subculture where every kid is a "Jimmy," a miniature version of their megalomaniacal leader, who reports to a never-seen "Old Nick."

Spike is a brave and resourceful boy, but unlike his new companions, he's neither sadistic nor stupid. He will, however, do what it takes to survive–and possibly even to escape–even if it means murdering a fellow human being.

Miles away lies the Bone Temple, an ossuary created by Dr. Kelson (a fired-up, iodine-coated Ralph Fiennes).

I assumed he wasn't alive at the end of the previous film, but Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland--who wrote every film in the series except 2007's 28 Weeks Later--never definitively confirmed his fate, and DaCosta has, essentially, handed the sequel to the madman and the doctor.

No offense to 15-year-old Williams--13 when the two back-to-back shoots began in 2024--but when you've got two uninhibited, road-tested talents like O'Connell and Fiennes at your disposal: it's the right thing to do.

The result is a film that dispenses with the world-building to amp up the weird and the funny with even more what-the-fuck moments than before.

Once again left to his own devices, the good doctor becomes obsessed with Samson (6' 9" ex-MMA fighter Chi Lewis-Parry), the big, hulking, frequently nude "alpha" introduced in the previous film. True to form, Garland doesn't spell things out any more than necessary, but the brilliant, if lonely eccentric detects--or dearly wants to detect--the slightest trace of residual humanity in this vicious, bug-eyed creature, so he comes up with a plan to calm him down, and from there, to try to quell the psychosis that animates his kind.

Though DaCosta didn't call on Scottish band Young Fathers, like Boyle--who first hired them for T2 Trainspotting--she introduces a side of Dr. Kelson previously unexplored, and it involves pop music, because he keeps a set of 1980s and '90s records in his bunker along with a functional player, so while he's toiling away on a project that could have monumental ramifications for the dwindling dregs of humanity, he has Duran Duran in all their synthy glory to buoy his spirits.

Just as Fiennes gave his all to the record producer he played in Luca Guadagnino's shockingly good La Piscine remake A Bigger Splash–in which he does a snaky sashay to the Stones' "Emotional Rescue" that has to be seen to be believed–he ups the ante here in ways sure to put a smile on the gloomiest of faces (he also joins Lewis-Parry in a bit of full frontal).

I've never seen a Shakespearean actor let his freak flag fly so high. Dr. Kelson's pop fandom is the light to the film's considerable dark, because it's otherwise as gory as the previous one--if not more so--with spine-snapping, chest-flaying, and plenty of Jimmy's upside-down cross version of "charity."

Everything comes together at the end with an electrifying showdown involving Jimmy Crystal, Dr. Kelson, Spike, and a surprising new friend (The Green Knight's Erin Kellyman, a kick in the pants) the kid made along the way.

If you're all about themes, Garland, most recently of the unsparing docudrama Warfare with co-director and Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza, has your back with cynical thoughts about religion, groupthink, and whatnot, but I enjoy this series for the enthralling fusion of action, ingenuity, and vivid characterizations.

I appreciate the larger themes, but they aren't what keep me coming back, and this entry offers an additional attraction: the return of Jim, the bicycle courier from the first film. I can't imagine Cillian Murphy, who won an Oscar for Christopher Nolan's 2023 Oppenheimer, would return after 24 years unless he had sufficient confidence in Garland's screenplay and DaCosta's direction, but he appears in a touching story line that seems likely to expand in the third (technically fifth) and final film to be directed by Danny Boyle.

Granted, the state of today's world, even without real-life rage zombies wreaking havoc, has had me tearing up at most anything, but the sight of Jim safe and sound–for the moment–made me a little misty.

From her 2018 debut Little Woods through Hedda, with stops along the way for The Marvels and a Candyman sequel, Nia DaCosta has a solid track record, but there was no guarantee she was going to pull off this high-stakes sequel in such fine style, but I'll be damned: she does. And then some.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple opens in Seattle on Jan 15 at SIFF Cinema Downtown and the usual AMC and Regal suspects. Images: Dexerto (Jack O'Connell and the Jimmys), People / Credit: Miya Mizuno (Alfie Williams and Aaron Taylor-Johnson), Sortiraparis (Ralph Fiennes), Reactor (Chi Lewis-Parry), and The Seattle Times / Sony Pictures (Fiennes and O'Connell).

Blood's Thicker Than Mud: Jim Jarmusch’s Unsentimental Father Mother Sister Brother

2026-01-08T23:24:00.000-08:00

FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER
(Jim Jarmusch, USA, 2025, 110 mins)

You see, it's in the blood, both kids are good to mom,

blood's thicker than the mud.--Sly & the Family Stone (1971)

After dancing to the beat of his own minimalist, post-punk drum for 45 years now, I wouldn't expect filmmaker and musician Jim Jarmusch to turn into a sentimentalist just because he's entered his eighth decade and, thank goodness, he hasn't. That would be a pretty disappointing turn of events.

Much like 2005's Broken Flowers, though, in which Bill Murray's aging Lothario attempts to locate the son he never knew, Father Mother Sister Brother finds the 72-year-old filmmaker in a reflective, stock-taking mood.

Though he's always kept his personal life to himself, Jarmusch has been in a partnership with producer/director Sara Driver for nearly 50 years, and the same daughter who inspired him to cast Selena Gomez in 2019's The Dead Don't Die, is now in her 20s. (For those unfamiliar with Driver's work, I suggest starting with her very good Jean-Michel Basquiat documentary.)

In the first story, Father, two adult children, Emily (Mayim Bialik, most recently of Jeopardy!) and Jeff (Adam Driver, so terrific in 2016's Patterson) take a road trip to rural New Jersey to visit their estranged father (Tom Waits, who first worked with Jarmusch on 1986's jailbird picaresque Down by Law).

Neither is looking forward to it. To them, he's just an old coot who's been cadging them for money for years. If anything, Jeff is the softest touch, while Emily is more skeptical (the actors are very good together). Only four years older than Jarmusch, Waits looks even older, though it's always a treat to see him on screen, especially in the films of Jarmusch and the Coen brothers, who have the best handle on his well-honed comedic skills.

The three proceed to have an awkward, but not completely unpleasant visit filled with water and tea–Father isn't exactly living large. Or is he? It's clear they don't trust the guy, but they don't really know him either, since he keeps surprising them in various ways. It feels like there's something he's trying to say, possibly about his estate, since Jarmusch makes the most of pregnant pauses–something he's been doing since at least 1984's Stranger Than Paradise–but the conclusion relies more on actions than words.

Mother presents a parent-child relationship from another perspective as a proper British mother (Charlotte Rampling) waits in her Dublin home for her daughters, Timothea (Cate Blanchett, reuniting with Jarmusch after 2002's Coffee and Cigarettes) and Lilith (the ever-versatile Vicky Krieps), to drop by for a visit. The former looks like a square in her oversized glasses and sensible shoes, while the latter looks like a Fassbinder player with her pink hair and fake fur coat (though Catherine George designed the costumes, producer Saint Laurent, the French design house, made them).

Another awkward tea party ensues, though not for the same reasons. Most everything Lilith tells her mother, a successful author, is a lie. She wants her to think she's a heterosexual with a wealthy fiancé, but she doesn't appear to be or to have either of those things (Irish actress Sarah Greene assists with the charade). Though Father has a conclusive ending, this story doesn't, other than to establish that the sisters, differences aside, get along well enough.Their mother, however, is like a stranger, though Timothea puts up a better front than Lilith, who may never meet with her approval.

The film ends with Sister Brother in which twins Skye (Pose's nonbinary Indya Moore) and Billy (Luka Sabbat, who made his feature debut in The Dead Don't Die) reconnect in Paris after the death of their parents (they're at least the second set of non-white twins to appears in a Jarmusch film after Spike Lee's siblings, Cinqué and Joie, in Coffee and Cigarettes).

One has short hair, while the other has long dreadlocks, but they both favor black leather jackets. They're also younger than the other siblings, in addition to more thoughtful and less anxious. If the brother swears by his daily micro-dose regimen, the drug-free sister is fine with the occasional shot of espresso.

While paying their respects to the now-empty flat in which they grew up, they have an exchange with the landlady (Françoise Lebrun from Jean Eustache's The Mother and the Whore, a Jarmusch favorite). It's a brief, but touching moment that wouldn't work as well with another actress.

If their parents also come across as mysterious, there's less tension here with the not knowing; with the fact that there was a lot about their American-born parents they didn't know–and now they never will.

Father Mother Sister Brother is Jarmusch's fourth anthology film, though I wouldn't say it completes a quartet, since it's as different from the tales of cultural dislocation in 1989's Mystery Train as the dark nights of the driver-and-passenger souls in 1991's geographically-diverse Night on Earth as the comic vignettes about addiction and obsession in Coffee and Cigarettes.

Granted, there's a lot of driving in this film, shot by Frederick Elmes and Yorick Le Saux from the front seat, so it feels like we're in cars with the characters as roads in New Jersey, Dublin, and Paris stretch ahead of them into futures unwritten.

Like Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colours Trilogy, in which a pensioner struggles to place a bottle in a recycling receptacle in each film, Jarmusch includes certain details in each section: color coordination (Mother is fairly horrified), a Rolex that may or may not be real, toasts with water, tea and espresso ("Can you toast with tea?," asks the literal-minded Jeff), tables laden with beverages shot from above, and skateboarders snaking in front of and around moving vehicles before slowing down and speeding up again.

The film begins and ends with an electric guitar-and-synth score from Jarmusch and German-British artist Anika (they both record for Sacred Bones). The music returns between each section alongside imagery that recalls Jeremy Blake's interstitials for P.T. Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love.

Anika also sings a couple of covers in her heavily-accented style, Classics IV's "Spooky," which appears in its original form, as well, and Nico's "These Days." If a little wobbly on the former, she's quite effective on the latter. I'm not sure if there's any significance, but both songs debuted in 1967.

Since it premiered at the Venice Film Festival last year, where it won the Golden Lion, some critics have described Father Mother Sister Brother as a return to form, which seems like another way of saying that they didn't like The Dead Don't Die, his sole foray into zom-com territory, except Jarmusch's filmography has always had its ups and downs, so I wouldn't go that far.

All told, it's one of his most understated films, even as it asks some of the biggest questions, like, "Can we ever really know our parents?" And, "Can we ever really know our kids?" In each case, the answer is a resounding no.

Since I know little about Jarmusch's off-screen life, I couldn't say whether he took inspiration from his relationships with his parents or with his daughter, but only the third chapter asks: "Does it really matter?" He doesn't hesitate to provide a definitive answer...though yours may be entirely different.

Father Mother Sister Brother opens in Seattle at SIFF Film Center on Jan 9. Image from The New Yorker via Bethuel / Vague Notion / MUBI (Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat), Consequence (Tom Waits and Mayim Bialik), AP News (Françoise Lebrun), and First Showing (Moore and Sabbat).

Grzegorz Królikiewicz's Through and Through Flips the Script on the True Crime Narrative

2026-01-02T22:59:00.000-08:00

THROUGH AND THROUGH / Na Wylot

(Grzegorz Królikiewicz, Poland, 1973, 74 minutes)

Why would a couple kill three people who never did them any harm?

In his 1973 feature debut, Polish filmmaker Grzegorz Królikiewicz, who began as a documentarian, provides a spectacularly expressive answer to that question. The result, as cultural critic Ela Bittencourt aptly puts it in the essay included with the new Radiance release, is "complex and invigorating."

I tend to think of experimental films as those without a clear-cut narrative or in which the narrative is scrambled. That isn't the case with Królikiewicz's film, which plays out in chronological order, and has a beginning, a middle, and an end, in addition to two distinct characters, but in most other respects, it's an experimental feature or, more accurately, a narrative feature that incorporates experimental or avant garde techniques.

I say this not just to set the scene, but because I was dazzled by the high-contrast black and white images and discordant sound design, but also confused and frustrated, since I couldn't, at first, figure out who these people were and what was going on. To be sure, things happen, but Królikiewicz prioritizes impressions over conventional narrative beats.

Left: Jan and Maria Malisz

To Polish viewers at the time, it might have made more sense, since Królikiewicz drew from an actual case. Granted, by 1972, when he made the film, the story of Kraków couple Jan and Maria Malisz was old news, since the crime they committed took place in 1933. Nonetheless, the film premiered on the international stage at Cannes where it met with a warm reception.

In their physicality, 25-year-old Jan (Man of Iron's Franciszek Trzeciak) and Maria (Anna Nieborowska) are a study in contrasts. He has thinning hair, a wide forehead, and rounded features, whereas she has straight hair with severely-cut bangs and sharp, angular features. His face is open, hers closed, but the camera loves them both, and they're always compelling even when it isn't clear what's going on, not least since, like New York crime-scene photographer Weegee, DP Bogdan Dziworski often surrounds them with negative space to emphasize their isolation from everyone else, including Jan's judgmental younger brother (Camera Buff's Jerzy Stuhr).

Królikiewicz depicts a few critical weeks in their lives, opening with a raucous house party in cramped quarters that plays like something out of an Aleksei German or Robert Eggers film; it's possible they both live on the same street, or even in the same building. The revelers eat, drink, puke, exchange unpleasantries, and, in one case, pass out before Jan breaks it up.

Right: A party to which you would not want to be invited.

An aspiring illustrator and architect, Jan arrives the next day, late and unshaven, at the photography studio where he works as an assistant as Janusz Hajdun and Henryk Kuzniak's string-laden score merges with a disturbing squeaking sound–from some kind of machinery, perhaps–that gives way to something more ominous when his boss lets him go.

The director then catches up with Maria, who appears to be waiting for someone, or maybe she just met up with them. She has leaves in her hair as if she slept on the ground, an indirect way of revealing that she's a sex worker. She straightens out her clothes and combs her hair loudly–the loudest, more aggressive hair-combing I've ever heard–but then, as the expression on her face grows angrier, the sound drops away to nothingness.

Królikiewicz continues with these intriguing, if inscrutable vignettes. Jan and Maria visit a church, presumably to get married, followed by an administrative building, where they have an unsatisfying encounter, culminating in a sequence in which Jan sits on a park bench at the bottom of a hill to meet up with Maria. When she arrives, he hits her with a white bird of some kind, a pigeon or a dove, though I have no idea why. (This sequence was deleted from British prints due to 1937's Animal Rights Act.)

Each encounter, together or separately, is more miserable and humiliating than the last. More often than not, there's no dialogue, just classical horns or violins that give way to something more atonal or even just sound effects like children whispering, dogs barking, or clamorous bell-ringing.

It's all meant to be unsettling, and it is, not least the way Królikiewicz places nearly as much emphasis on the texture of objects, like a particularly rough-hewn table, as the posture of a body or the planes of a face. It's disorienting, to be sure, but it doesn't feel like art for art's sake, so much as an attempt to show a claustrophobic world through jaundiced eyes. A despondent individual isn't likely to spend much time looking up at the sky when they could be staring at a splinter-laden table or the muddy ground.

Jan becomes so despondent he attempts to take his life, but Maria rescues him in the nick of time. For all its challenges, the film is never dull, though this sequence had me on the edge of my seat. It's no spoiler to reveal that Jan doesn't die, because he hasn't yet committed the crime that will make him infamous, but he's lost all hope. In rescuing him, Maria doesn't simply do a good deed--she confirms that she still has faith in their future.

When things don't get better, though, they scheme to rob the postman who delivers pension payments. While their neighbors see the 30-year-old as a bearer of good news, they see him as a living, breathing bank. Even if you sympathize with their plight, it's not like they're targeting a well-endowed institution or wealthy landowner who can absorb the loss. On the contrary.

Until this point, Jan and Maria have exhibited a propensity for violence, but not murder, and nor do they plan to kill anybody, but everything goes so horribly wrong that they end up killing the postman and their elderly property owners (their names were Walenty Przebinda and Helena and Michał Süskind).

Only the couple's 47-year-old daughter survives (the braces on her legs suggest polio). The sequence is so frenzied and fractured, it's hard to tell what's going on, not least since the POV alternates between victims and perpetrators. In a way, Michael Powell's 1960 Peeping Tom predicts what the director is doing here, just as it would also predict how Richard Brooks handles the brutal murder that concludes 1977's Looking for Mr. Goodbar.

Though they make their escape, the police catch up to Jan and Maria soon enough. The film ends as they present their respective cases. This remarkable sequence concentrates so intently on their words and faces, that most everything else, including judge and jury, literally fades away into the darkness. The two finally have the chance to explain themselves, and they do. I won't say what happens other than that their undying love for each other comes through loud and clear. Though the murder reveals them at their very worst, they're at their best here, but by then it's too late.

It isn't mentioned in the film, but after Jan's passing, interest in his work took off.

It's the Van Gogh Syndrome in full effect--Jan might not have turned to such a deperate, futile act if people could have seen the value of his work while he was still able to benefit, though I would imagine his infamy juiced its value. Further, Through and Through isn't the only film to depict a Polish artist whose reputation grew in the wake of a horrific murder. Surrealist painter and photographer Zdzisław Beksiński, however, was the victim and not the perpetrator. Jan P. Matuszyński recreates the whole sordid affair in his 2016 docudrama, The Last Family. If less successful as a film, Beksiński's paintings are quite extraordinary.

In the illuminating interview included with this release, Walerian Borowczyk biographer Michał Oleszczyk claims that comparisons to Arthur Penn's 1967 Bonnie and Clyde and Leonard Castle's 1970 The Honeymoon Killers, both inspired by real cases, make sense, but don't quite fit, and I'm inclined to agree, though I'm not convinced that Terrence Malick's elegiac Badlands, also released in 1973, proves more fitting. Near as I can tell, Charlie Starkweather, both in person and as portrayed by an electric young Martin Sheen, was a bad seed, whereas Jan was an artistic soul who lost his way.

Over the years, critics have also cited Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Jean-Luc Godard.

Królikiewicz taught seminars on the French filmmaker, and I can see similarities with 1960's Breathless, which was also inspired by a real case, and 1965's Pierrot le Fou, which also features lovers on the run. The Crime and Punishment comparison proves misleading, however, because unlike Raskolnikov, neither Jan nor Maria has any interest in getting right with God. Though the director's feature hews closer to Italian Neorealism than French (or even Czech) New Wave, he shared Godard's interest in abstraction, ellipses, and misdirection.

In his interview, Oleszczyk goes on to proclaim Through and Through the best Polish film--pretty high praise considering the competition, some of whom are still going strong, like Jerzy Skolimowski, Agnieszka Holland, and Paweł Pawlikowski, all of whom have received Academy Award recognition--in 2014, Pawlikowski won the Best Foreign Language Film award for Ida.

One way or the other, though, it's a singularly shattering achievement.

Through and Through makes its Blu-ray debut courtesy of Radiance Films. Though Królikiewicz passed away in 2017, cinematographer Dziworski oversaw the film's 2K restoration. Supplemental features include three short films–"Everyone Gets What He Doesn't Need" (1966), "Brothers" (1971), and "Don't Cry" (1972). In her excellent essay, "Altered States: The Cinema of Grzegorz Królikiewicz," Ela Bittencourt proclaims 1993's The Case of Bronek Pekosinski as the director's masterpiece, so I hope Radiance gets around to that one, too. I found this paper useful for my research.

Images from Cinema Crazed (Anna Nieborowska), Krowoderska.pl (Jan and Maria Malisz), the IMDb (Franciszek Trzeciak and Nieborowska, alone and with revelers), and Mabumbe (Trzeciak with Jerzy Block as "Old Man").

Lost and Found Film, Book, and Music Reviews: The Aura, Fame Whore, Radio On, and More

2025-12-23T16:54:00.000-08:00

Between 2005 and 2007, I contributed reviews, interviews, and other features to Resonance, a Seattle-based magazine dedicated to music, movies, literature, and other arts. In 2008, it ceased publication after 14 years. Here are four of my video reviews, plus a couple of movie-related reviews.

THE AURA

(Fabián Bielinsky, Argentina, 2005, 129 minutes)

The final feature film from Argentina's Fabián Bielinsky, who was felled by a heart attack in 2006 at the age of 46, starts out much like his 2000 debut, Nine Queens, but soon segues into something altogether stranger.

It's also more of a character study, and Bielinsky has conjured up one heck of a character, an unnamed epileptic taxidermist (Nine Queens' Ricardo Darín) with a photographic memory. After his wife splits the scene, his colleague Sontag (Alejandro Awada) convinces him to go on a hunting trip.

During their foray into the woods, the men argue, Sontag leaves, and the taxidermist suffers a seizure. As he convulses, he experiences "the aura," a moment of intense clarity before the plunge into darkness.

When he returns to consciousness, he's disoriented and startled by a sound. Is it Sontag, a deer...or something else? In his confused state, he pulls the trigger. Near the body of the deceased, he finds an eerie dog and plans for a robbery. He absorbs every detail.

Like the hunt, the ensuing heist doesn't go as planned, but The Aura isn't a mere morality tale; it's weirder and thornier than that. That there will never be another keenly-observed movie from its visionary maker is an undeniable tragedy. (IFC)

Click here for the longer version.

FAME WHORE

(Jon Moritsugu, USA, 1997, 73 minutes)

Wooden acting, clunky dialogue, and gaseous humor (a crank caller and big imaginary beagle bring the noise). So it goes with this grainy 16mm film from indie auteur Jon Moritsugu (Mod Fuck Explosion, Terminal USA).

The 1997 satire's titular whores include surly tennis champion Jody (the obnoxious Peter Friedrich from Moritsugu's 2002 Scumrock), trust fund dilettante Sophie (the robotic Amy Davis, Moritsugu's wife) and kindly, yet creepy canine placement officer George (Victor of Aquitaine doing his best Crispin Glover imitation).

Their desperate need to succeed has all the narrative drive and technical expertise of a glorified home movie--one featuring a soundtrack by indie-rock royalty Dub Narcotic Soundsystem, Emily's Sassy Lime, and Barbara Manning--but a home movie, nonetheless. Some people find this kind of thing charming. They should get out more. (Modulus Studio Arts)

RADIO ON

(Christopher Petit, UK, 1979, 104 minutes)

As the Modern Lovers once exclaimed, "I'm in love with the radio on / it helps me from being alone late at night." In "Roadrunner," front man Jonathan Richman had 1950s America on his mind; in Radio On, critic-turned-filmmaker Christopher Petit transfers that phenomenon to 1980s England, exchanging exultation for something more enigmatic.

The result is Get Carter gone post-punk: TV actor David Beames plays a London DJ trying to unravel the mystery of his brother's demise.

Instead, he meets a succession of travelers who share his feelings of loneliness and loss. Shot by frequent Wim Wenders cinematographer Martin Schäfer (Kings of the Road), Petit's first feature is a monochromatic road movie that captures a time of Bowie in Berlin, Kraftwerk on cassette, Wreckless Eric on the jukebox, and Police-era Sting (above) as an Eddie Cochrane-obsessed gas station attendant.

Radio On would make for the ideal double bill with Border Radio, the restless debut, also in black and white, from fellow Wenders acolyte Alison Anders.

Like the 1987 Anders film, which was co-directed by Kurt Voss and Dean Lent, the journey trumps the destination--Bristol in the case of the former, Mexico in the case of the latter. Petit's cinematic project may be chillier, but the patina of time only makes it seem cooler than ever. (Plexifilm)

CINEMA 16: EUROPEAN SHORT FILMS
(Various directors, 10 countries, 2007, 218 minutes)

Democracy rules in Cinema 16 as up-and-comers rub shoulders with established filmmakers. Previous UK-only installments of the series focused exclusively on British and American work. Now Warp Films widens their scope to encompass an entire continent. Spread over two discs, this portable film festival offers 16 short films plus commentary tracks.

The earliest selections include Ridley Scott's 1958 ode to truancy "Boy and Bicycle," starring his younger brother Tony Scott (left), and Jan Švankmajer's 1971 Lewis Carroll-inspired "Jabberwocky." The rest are more recent, like Andrea Arnold's 2003 Oscar-winning "Wasp," which packs all the emotional complexity of a feature film into an economical 23 minutes.

Cinema 16's combination of big names and promising neophytes, like playwright-turned-director Martin McDonagh (2004's profane "Six Shooter”), serves as an ideal introduction to today's art house--with nary a tightly-corseted literary adaptation to spoil the fun. (Warp Films)

CATCHING THE BIG FISH: MEDITATION, CONSCIOUSNESS, AND CREATIVITY

(David Lynch, USA, 2007, 192 pages)

David Lynch explains the title metaphor of his short, punchy book, Catching the Big Fish, as follows: "Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you've got to go deeper." The famed director proceeds to describe his creative process through the prism of Transcendental Meditation.

Catching the Big Fish consists of 83 koan-like chapters, most less than a page in length. Lynch makes a point and then moves on.

Those readers looking for explanations may leave disappointed, but Lynch has always insisted that all interpretations of his work are valid, and he isn't about to start spilling their secrets now--hence no director's commentaries on any of his Criterion Collection releases.

Granted, the director dubs his nightmarish debut, Eraserhead, "my most spiritual movie," but doesn't say why. Mostly, he reveals how he keeps the ideas coming, while staving off the "Suffocating Rubber Clown Suit of Negativity." And really, who wants that in their life? (Tarcher/Penguin)

YOU'RE GONNA MISS ME (Original Soundtrack)

(Roky Erickson solo, with the 13th Floor Elevators, and with the Aliens, 2007, 12 tracks, 38:05 minutes)

Though he found fame 30 years ago, 2007 will go down as the year of Roky Erickson--the year of this one-of-a-kind musician's resurrection, that is.

After decades lost in a schizophrenic haze (exacerbated by electroshock therapy), Roky's brother, Sumner Erickson, established a trust and secured his sibling with the help he needed. Now Roky's playing out again, there's a new book about his wild and wiggy Elevators, and Keven McCalester has unleashed the six-years-in-the-making documentary You're Gonna Miss Me.

Though the soundtrack covers ground similar to essential Roky anthology I Have Always Been Here Before, collectors should note the inclusion of two previously unreleased tracks: stripped-down versions of "For You (I'd Do Anything)" and "Goodbye Sweet Dreams"--both of which provide the blueprint for Austin neighbor Daniel Johnston's entire career. (Palm Pictures)

Images from Mubi (Ricardo Darín in The Aura and Tony Scott in Boy and Bicycle), American Genre Film Archive (Victor Fischbarg and giant beagle in Fame Whore), Cineform (David Beames in Radio On), and Kinship Goods (Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity cover art).

Two Filmmakers Have Adapted Donald Westlake’s The Ax, but One Got It More Right Than the Other: No Other Choice vs The Ax

2025-12-20T13:57:00.000-08:00

NO OTHER CHOICE / Eojjeolsugaeopda / 어쩔수가없다
(Park Chan-wook, Korea, 2025, 139 minutes)

"I subscribe basically to the theory that a movie is not the book it came from, and in almost every case it shouldn't be the book it came from...

The responsibility for a movie is not as easy to define as the responsibility for a novel."--Donald Westlake to bank robber Albert Nussbaum in 1974

For nearly as long as I've been watching them, I've associated movies with books, and not just in a general sense, since every year offers hundreds, if not thousands, of literary adaptations, but in a more personal one, i.e. if I'm sufficiently interested in an author or filmmaker–ideally both–I'll read the book before seeing the film. It's especially helpful if I plan to write about it.

Reading the book beforehand helps me to understand the author's intent, which may or may not align with the filmmaker's, but it comes with drawbacks, too. The most obvious is that the film may not live up to the book, which happens more often than the film that surpasses the book, though it's unrealistic to expect every detail to make it onto the screen.

On the other hand, it's why we have so many limited series. You want the entire book spelled out for you? There are directors and streamers more than happy to comply. Length aside, another drawback is that the film may not hold any surprises, no matter how artfully executed, though if it's sufficiently engaging, knowing the outcome shouldn't spoil the show.

All of this is to say that I read Donald Westlake's 1997 suspense novel The Ax before seeing Park Chan-wook's loose adaptation, No Other Choice, and now I kind of wish I hadn't.

Before explaining why, I have to admit that this is the first book I've read by the author, though I've long been familiar with his birth name, in addition to his best known pen name–Richard Stark–and some of the films adapted from the Westlake/Stark bibliography, especially Point Blank, The Hot Rock, The Actor, Made in U.S.A. (though Jean-Luc Godard neglected to clear the rights), as well as The Grifters, the first-rate Stephen Frears neo-noir for which he adapted Jim Thompson's 1963 novel.

Putting his stamp on a work of literature, such as The Ax, is nothing new for Park, a former film critic who previously adapted a Japanese manga (Oldboy), a 19th-century French shocker (Thirst), a 21st-century potboiler set in Victorian England (The Handmaiden), and a spy story from the 1980s (John Le Carré’s Little Drummer Girl, his first English-language series).

The deeply-saturated look of the new film rhymes with his previous work, especially the high-contrast lighting and inky blacks that make the vibrant colors pop, but though he preserves the darkly comic tone, he loses the subtlety of Westlake's matter-of-fact prose by amping everything up to 11.

Granted, Lee Byung-hun (Park's Joint Security Area, Netflix's Squid Game) goes all in as Yoo Man-su, an upper middle-class paper mill manager who turns to desperate measures after his employer downsizes him out of his position and into a labor market with little need for his specialized services.

Man-su's solution is just as fiendishly clever as it is in the book–eliminate his competitors one by one–but Park has added lashings of sadism and gore that make for an exciting time at the cinema, while also giving the impression that this suburban father was always a murderer at heart; too much time on the unemployment line has brought his killer instinct to the surface.

That's fine as far as it goes, but there's nothing sadistic about Burke Devore in the original novel, and that's the point. None of this comes naturally to him, and it troubles his conscience, but not enough to make him stop. In fact, killing becomes his 9-to-5 business. Not a hobby, not a pastime, but a j-o-b, and his body count is even higher than that of his on-screen counterpart.

Park is such a strong visual stylist that it comes as little surprise that he ditches the first-person narration of Westlake's novel such that Lee does more showing than telling, so it's fortunate that he's such a magnetic performer. Son Ye-jin as Man-su's wife, Mi-ri, also makes a vivid impression as a woman who starts to put two and two together, whereas Burke's wife, the family's sole breadwinner, never figures out what's going on (she isn't stupid, just busy). She cheats on her husband, too, unlike Mi-ri, who also takes a job as a part-time dental assistant–but doesn't sleep with the boss.

I won't list every way the film differs from the book, though many of the changes don't register as improvements, not least the disturbing scene in which Man-su buries a victim up to his neck and force-feeds him to death.

All that said, No Other Choice always feels like a Park film. Something similar could be said about Stanley Kubrick's many literary adaptations, which revolved around–and even depended on–the creative liberties he took with the source material. And I do mean that as a compliment to the younger filmmaker, even if I didn't enjoy this particular take as much as, say, the lush and devious Handmaiden.

This brings me to Costa-Gavras's 2005 adaptation, Le Couperet, aka The Ax, which hews closely to Westlake's novel in all the ways Park's doesn't, right down to the narration. The look also differs from the latter, which has heightened touches, like the inventively-staged scenes of domestic surveillance. Costa-Gavras keeps everything grounded in reality, though he possibly loses too much of Westlake's drily comic tone through a combination of the writing and César-nominated actor Jose Garcia’s more noirish performance, akin to François Cluzet in 2006 thriller Tell No One.

Though I disagree with this categorization, The Ax has been classified as a horror story in some quarters. If Costa-Gavras's adaptation plays like a black comedy-noir hybrid, with Garcia's Bruno Davert (below) as the regular guy in over his head, Park's film really does plunge into horror territory.

Costa-Gavras's more literal approach does not, however, make for a dull time at the cinema. In fact, it's considered one of the Greek-French director's finest films, though it didn't make as much of an impact in the States as it did in Europe, or as much as earlier films, like 1969 Oscar winner Z with Jean-Louis Trintignant. (Costa-Gavras's son, Romain, who found fame through his provocative videos for M.I.A., has become a talented director in his own right.)

The affection between the couple in the earlier film (with Karin Viard as Marlène) is never in doubt, but there's more tension in their marriage and their children are older, whereas Park made the daughter a non-verbal, grade school prodigy, mostly I guess to emphasize the expense of cellos and lessons. With Man-su out of a job, everyone suffers–they even have to give up their Netflix subscription (how will they be able to keep up with Squid Game?!). Park also gives them two dogs, precious companions from which they have to part once Man-su's severance payment dwindles to nothing.

These added details may have made the made the film more appealing for some, but I believe the book got it right the first time, because Westlake trusts his audience more. My point isn't that directors shouldn't adapt books as they choose. They absolutely should. I just wish Park had put more faith in the author's text, and made fewer or better alterations. The narration, for instance, is no small thing, and was possibly intended to invoke or even subvert Jim Thompson's reliance on slippery, first-person narrators, not least since Westlake had adapted the author only seven years before.

Like most Park productions, No Other Choice has its pleasures, and it's possible my anticipation was too great due to the union of author and director, but it feels like a disappointment, especially compared to 2022's dazzling Decision to Leave. Not a major one, but a disappointment, nonetheless. Fortunately, Park brings it home in fine style, and that's hardly a minor matter, because it's as key to the narrative as the audacious premise.

Both films also boast excellent ensembles, particularly the actors who play the competitor-victims, like the two Ax standouts: German actor Ulrich Tukur (The White Ribbon) as a kindly, if despondent suit salesman with a bad combover and bespectacled Dardenne brothers regular Olivier Gourmet (The Promise, The Son) who makes the fatal mistake of commiserating with the oddly sympathetic fellow who trespasses on his property, presumably to pick up job-hunting tips.

I can't imagine that either filmmaker believes that unemployed middle managers should start bumping off their competitors. Not that I've seen either make a statement to that effect, but I wouldn't say it's needed.

In the book, it's more obvious that Burke Devore's cruel, if practical solution is intended as satire, and that was bound to get buried in these live-action interpretations. Then again, it isn't a dream in Donald Westlake's novel. Burke never wakes up to find his slain competitors alive and well, and regardless as to which version of the story you prefer: Burke/Man-su/Bruno's solution, as horrible as it is, is also just a little…relatable.

The late David Bordwell had a lot to say about Westlake and the movies.

After a one-day screening at the Pacific Science Center's IMAX Theater on Dec 8, No Other Choice opens for a regular run at SIFF Cinema Uptown on Thurs, Jan 1 (all screenings through Jan 4 will be in 35mm). Images from the IMDb (Lee Byung-hun, Cha Seung-won, Lee Sung-min, and José Garcia), Amazon (The Ax cover art), and World of Reel (Lee and Son Ye-jin).

Adam Volerich's Directorial Debut, Drink and Be Merry: A Christmas Movie for Those Who Usually Abstain (from Christmas Movies)

2025-12-07T16:48:00.000-08:00

DRINK AND BE MERRY

(Adam Volerich, 2025, USA,

97 minutes)

For those with a minimal tolerance for holiday fare, Drink and Be Merry just might be your new favorite Christmas movie.

Though it's hardly as dreamy or surrealistic, Adam Volerich's low-budget debut is a worthy successor to Tyler Taormina's 2024 Christmas Eve in Miller's Point in terms of its strikingly original approach to a holiday that presents emotional, financial, and other challenges for some of us.

Not to be a total Grinch, but my patience for Christmas songs, movies, and tropes that I've seen and heard over and over again for decades on end grows thinner every year, so I get pretty excited when a film deviates so clearly from the usual cutesy, materialistic, or soap operatic playbook.

The $80,000 film also looks and sounds fantastic, thanks to top-flight cinematography from Volerich and Jack Mannion and production design from Christina Coleman. The glowing Christmas lights help, but all of the spaces are inviting, and the filmmaker, a podcaster and Rutgers professor, makes inventive choices involving black and white stock and practical effects.

The use of chapters and minimal sets lends Drink and Be Merry the feel of a filmed play, somewhat comparable to Richard Linklater's recent Sardi's-set Blue Moon–which was filmed entirely on a sound stage in Richard Rodgers actor Andrew Scott's native Ireland–though considerably more down-scale and rooted-in-real locations.

I won't say too much about the plot, since this is mostly a dialogue-driven piece, though compared to Peter Hujar's Day, which revolves around two people in one apartment, Drink and Be Merry is practically maximalist–no shade whatsoever to Ira Sachs' two-hander, which I greatly enjoyed.

Volerich, whose name may be unfamiliar, has filled his feature with familiar faces from numerous films and television shows, and the entire cast is very good, especially Yellowstone actor Jefferson White, who co-produced.

Basically, we spend a few days around Christmas 2019 with White's down-on-his-luck actor Chet, mostly at the New York dive bar he owns and operates, but also at the second-story apartment he shares with his "Ma" (a warm and delightful Siobhan Fallon Hogan).

Along with White and Hogan, I was particularly struck by the way the film doubles as a character actor showcase, and every performer, in all their idiosyncrasies, gets the chance to shine. These mostly post-middle-aged actors deserve bigger parts than what they usually get, and they earn Volerich's faith, especially The Wire veterans Delaney Williams, who played Jay Landsman, and Brian Anthony Wilson, who played Det. Vernon Holley. Between the two, they–mostly Wilson–have 284 credits at the IMDb.

Really, though, they're all impressive. Actor and stuntman Billy Smith (pictured above left) has appeared in two Martin Scorsese and two Clint Eastwood films, whereas actress and writer Sophie Zucker (Dickinson, The Chair Company) adds some prickly, youthful energy to the proceedings.

To be clear, Chet, who strung up the lights, loves Christmas, though he doesn't love his life, which hasn't turned out quite like he hoped, but it's the older regulars who supply most of the film's hard-bitten, low-key comedy.

Though they tease Chet about his Christmas cheer and his one lousy bit part, they see him as someone who still has time to get himself out of the ruts in which they feel stuck. If you can't tell, this is also a film about the way men talk to each other about sensitive issues, mostly by talking around them or by making jokes that aren't really jokes, because it's easier than being open and vulnerable.

Granted, romance even blooms for one of these sadsacks before sputtering out. Still, it's better to have a moment of happiness than none at all.

Nonetheless, this isn't a depressing film, even if it isn't as jolly as your average Christmas outing--not least because most everyone has a problem with the bottle, though that's a given with a barfly film. If anything, the bartender and his customers have each other, which is also better than having no one at all. One even turns out to have a pretty great partner, and a mishap near the end suggests he might stop taking her for granted.

If the characters are throwbacks in terms of language and belief systems, Volerich shows them learning to become more open-minded. Though I wouldn't describe the film as a noir or as an homage to independent filmmaking in 1970s New York, it may appeal to fans of those forms.

The closest analogue that comes to mind isn't a Christmas movie at all, but rather the Ross brothers' hybrid documentary Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, which takes place entirely in a set-bound dive bar.

To quote the director's statement: "You know this bar. Maybe you were a regular. Maybe you were just passing through. But you sat, and you sipped all the same. The Bartender treated you well. The Barflies bantered with each other. And the Jukebox was already playing someone else's song. Wood paneling. Dirty bathrooms. Cheap drinks. No food. Cash Only."

If you spark to that description of the many dive bars across the country that have stumbled, struggled, and shuttered due to the pandemic, gentrification, and other obstacles, I recommend seeking this one out.

Drink and Be Merry is currently making its way across the US. No Seattle dates, but it's available on VOD (Prime and Fandango at Home), Blu-ray, and DVD through X4 Pictures. Images: Adam Volerich/Bearly There Media.

Douglas Sirk: In Praise of Melodrama

2025-12-05T22:11:00.000-08:00

Another piece I wrote for Reel News, SIFF's now-defunct publication for members, in 2002 (it was never online, because that was a different time). I've lightly revised it from the original text and added new images.

Long live melodrama, and let us stress the quality of Douglas Sirk.

--David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film

Although his directorial career lasted for over 40 years, including the German films he made in the 1930s and 1970s, Douglas Sirk (1900-1987) is best known for the melodramas he made for Universal between 1954 and 1959, including such enduring classics as Magnificent Obsession (below right), All That Heaven Allows (above), Written on the Wind, The Tarnished Angels, and Imitation of Life. (All That Heaven Allows and Written on the Wind are now available on DVD from The Criterion Collection.)

That isn't to suggest there aren't other entries in his filmography that are worth a look, like 1947's Lured with an excellent Lucille Ball or 1949's Shockproof with a screenplay from Samuel Fuller, but few are as well known or as widely appreciated. If it could be said that any one person did everything they could to give melodrama a good name, it was Douglas Sirk.

As Todd Haynes (Poison, Velvet Goldmine) explains in the production notes for his unapologetically Sirkian new film, Far From Heaven, "While the look and style of those '50s melodramas are anything but realistic, there's something almost spookily accurate about the emotional truths of those films. They are hyperreal, that's why we call them melodramas. Because they are about the kinds of things that are close to our private, personal lives, like falling out of love with somebody.”

Since Sirk's heyday, unfortunately, melodrama has, for the most part, fallen into disfavor. Nowadays, to describe a film as "melodramatic" implies that it's over-done: the acting too "big," the music too loud, the story line ridiculous, if not completely implausible. In the 1979 BBC documentary, Behind the Mirror: A Profile of Douglas Sirk, portions of which appear on the All That Heaven Allows DVD, the director agrees when host Mark Shivas suggests that Sirk meant the term literally: as a marriage between music and drama, as opposed to drama that is, like the title of Nicholas Ray's scathing 1956 attack on middle-American complacency: Bigger Than Life.

The All Movie Guide describes melodrama as a genre that focuses on "human emotion, illness and physical hardship." Further, it is often "critical of social and political climates and mores but can include domestic portrayals which are romanticized." D.W. Griffith's 1914 Birth of a Nation and Lewis Milestone's 1944 The Purple Heart are cited as examples. It's also noted that, "Lucid distinctions exist between good and evil, hero and villain, right and wrong, and rule oriented society." Fortunately, such distinctions aren't always so clear in the films of Sirk and those he has inspired.

Born in Hamburg in 1900 (or 1897 according to some reports) to Danish parents, Claus Detlev Sierck moved to Munich to study law after the First World War, then later to Hamburg to study philosophy. His life as a director began in Germany; first in theater, but then in film once the Nazis began to exert their censorious ways. His theatrical background should come as little surprise; Sirk's work has always been very "theatrical" in the best sense of the word. Along the way he changed his name to the more Teutonic-sounding Detlef Sierk.

In 1934, he was hired by legendary movie studio Universum Film AG (UFA), and they released his first feature film, April, April!, the following year.

But then, in 1937, the left-leaning Sirk and his Jewish wife, Hilde Jary, fled Germany altogether for short sojourns in France, Holland, Spain, South Africa, and Australia, eventually settling in the United States, some time between 1939 and 1943. His directorial reputation preceded him.

That Sirk would go on to make some of the most quintessentially American motion pictures of the 1950s isn't what makes him unique. That, once ensconced in the States, he would change his name to something less Germanic isn't either. The same could easily be said of his German-born UFA compatriots Billy Wilder and, to a lesser extent, Fritz Lang--not that Lang was a lesser director, just that "quintessentially American" are two words that don't fit the monocle-sporting Lang or his Expressionistic work quite so comfortably. But Sirk wasn't an auteur in the same way as Wilder and Lang, which may go some way towards explaining why his significance and influence have taken so much longer to grow and to take root in the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder in the 1970s and Todd Haynes in the 2000s.

Right: Douglas Sirk and his wife, actress Hilde Jary

In that sense, Sirk would almost seem to have more in common with French-born B-movie maestro, Jacques Tourneur (Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie). Like Sirk, Tourneur wasn't known as much for his taste in material as for the stylistic miracles he worked with the screenplays he was given such that he could, time and time again, make one cinematic miracle after another out of the studio-generated material that came his way.

That said, Sirk would, like Billy Wilder in Double Indemnity, go on to work with Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in 1956's There’s Always Tomorrow, one of non-fiction filmmaker Errol Morris's favorite films. As with Tourneur, Sirk wasn't known for casting the biggest stars, or at least the most critically acclaimed--Tourneur's stellar noir Out of the Past with Kirk Douglas and Robert Mitchum, is a rather notable exception to the rule.

Not to take anything away from the handsome Rock Hudson (Magnificent Obsession) or glamorous Lana Turner (Imitation of Life), but Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman they were not. Then again, it's hard to imagine those Hitchcock stars fitting as neatly into the artificiality of a Sirk production.

On the other hand, although Turner's Lora is on screen more than anyone else in Imitation of Life, which was remade, like Magnificent Obsession, from John M. Stahl’s 1930s version, and gives one of her finest performances--it's the lesser-known Susan Kohner as the light-skinned daughter of Lora's Black maid (Juanita Moore) who steals the show. Consequently, she and Moore would garner the film's only Oscar nominations. (Surprisingly, Kohner would not capitalize on that early success. Her subsequent filmography may be sparse, but her writer/director sons, Paul and Chris Weitz of American Pie and About a Boy fame, seem fully prepared to make up for that).

Prolific and openly gay producer Ross Hunter was behind these films and others that Sirk, the closeted Hudson, and Turner made, whether together or separately, including 1959's Pillow Talk with Hudson and Doris Day and 1966's sub-Sirkian Madame X, which gave Turner one of her last juicy roles. Sirk and Hunter made a total of 10 films together, many shot by Sirk's "secret weapon," Russell Metty, including Imitation of Life, his last American film and biggest commercial success.

Meanwhile, Sirk's films with Hudson total an impressive eight. While he can't lay claim to having discovered the former Roy Harold Scherer Jr., many have credited Sirk for Hudson's matriculation from contract player to leading man.

Sirk was preparing to direct another film with Turner and Kohner when he was beset by health problems and the production was shelved. Instead of whiling away his days by the pool, he returned to Germany where his health improved, leading to speculation that the refined intellectual--who hasn't just been described as "Brechtian," but who actually worked with the progressive playwright early in his career--had literally grown sick of Hollywood. And he never looked back, though he would eventually exchange Germany for Switzerland, where he spent the last several years of his life.

Right: Doris Day, Rock Hudson, and Ross Hunter on the set of Michael Gordon's Pillow Talk

The late-1950s, though, was an odd time for Sirk to leave the States, just as his work was starting to find favor with the influential critics-turned-filmmakers of the French New Wave, like François Truffaut. Although they wouldn't burnish his reputation to the same degree as that of other commercially-successful directors, like Howard Hawks or Alfred Hitchcock, the seeds were planted for a full-blown critical reassessment.

As Truffaut wrote about the Technicolor extravaganza Written on the Wind, as featured in the 1994 essay collection The Films in My Life, "This is movie-making unashamed of what it is, with no complexes, no hesitations, simply good workmanship." Like American film critics David Thomson and Andrew Sarris, he was also fond of Sirk's 1940s potboilers with George Sanders, but feels he really blossomed in the 1950s--much like that lilac bush in 1944's Summer Storm--and was impressed by his bold use of color. "They are," he theorized, "the colors of the Twentieth Century, the colors of America, the colors of the luxury civilization, the industrial colors that remind us that we live in the age of plastics." And with that, he would also predict the affluent end of 1960s America as depicted in Mike Nichols' The Graduate.

In the pages of the same journal, Cahiers du Cinéma, Jean-Luc Godard would commend 1958's A Time to Love and a Time to Die, as excerpted in Barbara Klinger's Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk, for his "delirious mixture of medieval and modern, sentimentality and subtlety, tame compositions and frenzied CinemaScope."

In Jonathan Rosenbaum's 1995 essay collection Placing Movies, the Chicago Reader critic claims that Sirk's Erich Maria Remarque adaptation (left) would, in turn, become "an important source for Les Carabiniers (1963), particularly the shooting of a partisan woman who denounces her assassins (a Russian peasant in Sirk's film, a French girl quoting Mayakovsky in Godard's)."

The UK caught on in the 1970s and sang Sirk's praises in the pages of Screen, by way of a retrospective at the 1972 Edinburgh Film Festival, and in the publication in 1971 of Jon Halliday's interview collection Sirk on Sirk.

Around this time, more significantly, his American work made a deep impact on young German actor and filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder. As Thomas Elsaesser elucidates in his essay, "A Cinema of Vicious Circles" from the Museum of Modern Art's 1997 Fassbinder compendium, "Fassbinder's discovery--documented in an essay he wrote in 1971 on six Sirk films he had just seen--proved momentous; it rehabilitated a then almost-forgotten director and renewed interest in a genre that was to gain considerable critical prominence in subsequent years: the Hollywood family melodrama."

Regarding Written on the Wind, his favorite of the six, Fassbinder (pictured with Sirk to the right) sums up his attraction: "The good, the 'normal,' the 'beautiful' are always utterly revolting; the evil, the weak, the dissolute arouse one's compassion." (Gosh, it almost sounds as if he's describing his own work.) About Dorothy Malone's Marylee, a "bad girl" with heart, a searing performance for which she would receive an Oscar, he wrote, "I love her as I rarely love anyone in the cinema."

Robert Stack, who found a new kind of fame in the 1990s as the ghoulishly stone-faced host of Unsolved Mysteries, would also receive a nomination.

About The Tarnished Angels (below left), an adaptation of William Faulkner's Pylon, which featured many of the same actors and was shot in B&W CinemaScope, he wrote, "Sirk looks at these corpses with such tenderness and radiance that we start to think that something must be at fault if these people are so screwed up and, nevertheless, so nice. The fault lies with fear and loneliness. I have rarely felt fear and loneliness so much as in this film."

Fassbinder's The Merchant of Four Seasons, released the same year as this essay, was his first to fall directly under Sirk's sway. He would even go on to work with him after his return to Germany to teach. Elsaesser goes so far as to describe Sirk as "the perfect elective father for the fatherless Fassbinder."

With 1973's Ali, Fear Eats The Soul, the acolyte would up the ante by taking on All That Heaven Allows. In the original, Jane Wyman's upper class widow falls for Rock Hudson's younger man, who happens to be a gardener and a bohemian.

Her college-aged kids and country club associates do all they can to put a kibosh on the relationship. What is her (individual) happiness worth compared to their (collective) reputation? Very little, apparently. In Ali, Fassbinder complicates the situation further by adding race to the mix, since the younger man is an Arab (Fassbinder's lover El Hedi ben Salem).

Fassbinder by way of Sirk cleared the way for Pedro Almodóvar, François Ozon, and Todd Haynes, who, unlike Hudson, have made little effort to hide their sexual orientation, but then, they grew up in very different times, let alone countries. In Elvis Mitchell's New York Times review of the Spanish filmmaker's latest, Talk To Her (Hable con Ella), he notes, "Mr. Almodóvar's purview started out as a lewd, slapstick version of the heightened melodrama of the 50's director Douglas Sirk: if Magnificent Obsession had starred a sexual Lucille Ball. But the director has moved past candy-colored Fassbinder with a sense of humor." (And Ball really did work with Sirk.)

Mitchell seems to feel that Almodóvar has only really come into his own by moving away from the frenetic Sirk-isms of his early work and, since I'm also more enamored of his more recent films, like 1995's The Flower of My Secret (La Flor de mi Secreto), 1997's Live Flesh (Carne Trémula), and 1999's Oscar-winning tearjerker All About My Mother (Todo Sobre mi Madre), I'm inclined to agree.

Really, though, it's more that Almodóvar has thrown off the freneticism, never a part of Sirk's oeuvre, while hanging onto the rest, like the focus on women--including trans women and those of "a certain age"--and a brilliant use of color. All About My Mother, after all, much like Imitation of Life, revolves around an actress and mother and the women in her orbit, though I believe Sirk's influence has been more of a boon for Ozon and Haynes.

Though the French filmmaker adapted his most recent feature, star-studded musical murder mystery 8 Women (8 Femmes, below), from an obscure 1960s stage play by Robert Thomas that feels like Agatha Christie with a side of kink, it sure looks like Sirk, right down to the deer in the snow at the beginning--an obvious tip of the chapeau to All That Heaven Allows, which Ozon claims to adore. As he explained to Paris Expatriate earlier this year, "I love his movies. They are very simple but very stylish. I love the color, the mise-en-scène. He makes a Greek tragedy out of a simple story."

It doesn't hurt that one of Ozon's previous films was a 1999 set-bound adaptation of Sirk protegé Fassbinder's play Water Drops on Burning Rocks (Gouttes d'eau sur Pierres Brûlantes) or that he had already made another, 1998's Sitcom, about a suburban family with some rather serious problems (dad's a giant rat!). Granted, the latter is more black comedy than melodrama, but the idea of a beautiful home that feels like a prison provides a link with Sirk.

The 1950s-set 8 Women, with its kitschy jewels-and-flowers opening with all the words in pink script, essentially reproduces the falling-diamond opening to Imitation of Life. The period outfits, including furs and leopard-print coats, and immaculately-coiffed divas--Catherine Deneuve, Fanny Ardant, and Isabelle Huppert in the Agnes Moorhead role--only serves to confirm the connection. The comparisons to Almodóvar don't hurt much either.

Then there's Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven. Sirk, whose adherents include gay filmmakers John Waters--All That Heaven Allows is his favorite film--and The Deep End's Scott McGehee--a big fan of Written on the Wind--may not have been gay himself, but as Haynes joked to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel this fall, "He was a German intellectual, so he was close, I guess." He adds that producer Hunter was "a flamboyant gay fellow in that period."

Though Haynes takes Fassbinder's lead in using All That Heaven Allows as a jumping-off point, his film is even less of a remake. As he explained to Eye Weekly prior to a sold-out screening at the Toronto International Film Festival--even Roger Ebert was shut out--it isn't "about the '50s in America. It's about filmmaking in the '50s in America and the language of Hollywood filmmaking at that time. Everything is filtered through a California-sound-stage mentality."

Haynes reunites, after Safe, with Julianne Moore for the story of Cathy, a well-off housewife living a life of "quiet desperation" in 1950s Connecticut--my hometown of Hartford, to be exact--until confronted by the sexual confusion of her husband Frank (Dennis Quaid) and a "forbidden" attraction to her sympathetic black gardener, Raymond (24's Dennis Haysbert).

Says Haynes, "Creating a '50s-era melodrama today and playing it straight, smack in the midst of this pumped-up, adrenaline-crazed era, might seem a perplexing impulse. Yet the strongest melodramas are those without apparent villains, where characters end up hurting each other unwittingly, just by pursuing their desires. To impose upon the seeming innocence of the 1950s themes as mutually volatile as race and sexuality is to reveal how volatile those subjects remain today and how much our current climate of complacent stability has in common with that bygone era."

And yet, by making such a film in 2002, he can tackle these subjects with a greater degree of, well, frankness--hence the name of Quaid's character--than Sirk or his 1950s contemporaries George Cukor or Vincente Minnelli ever could, including an on-screen kiss between Quaid and a male paramour. It goes without saying that that would have been unthinkable during the Production Code-era in which Sirk produced his most lasting works.

By reviving his legacy with such obvious affection, while commenting on it at the same time--an acknowledgment that many of Sirk's best films were commentaries at heart--Far From Heaven seems likely to stand as the ultimate homage to his work. If it encourages even a few curious viewers to seek out All That Heaven Allows, let alone other Sirk masterworks, Haynes will have done more than enough. That it's destined to rank among the year's best is the coconut-covered icing on the red velvet cake.

There will always be those who write off Sirk as glossy and insubstantial, while others revel in his work due to its perceived "subversiveness," as if everything must have a hidden meaning and nothing can be taken at face value, but as Sirk once said, "There is a very short distance between high art and trash." I believe his true worth lies in the way he transformed that trash, or "rather impossible" material, as he charitably put it, into art.

As Fassbinder exulted, "I've seen six films by Douglas Sirk. Among them were the most beautiful in the world." And in that beauty, he found truth. As Andrew Sarris predicted in The American Cinema, "Time, if nothing else, will vindicate Douglas Sirk as it has already vindicated Joseph von Sternberg. Formal excellence and visual wit are seldom as appreciated at first glance as are the topical sensations of the hour." Clearly, that time is now.

Kathleen Fennessy writes about music and film for Amazon.com, The All Music Guide, and Tablet. She considers Todd Haynes' psychodrama Safe one of the finest films of the 1990s and wouldn't mind if the filmmaker worked as often with Julianne Moore as Douglas Sirk did with Rock Hudson.

Images from Sicilia Queer Film Fest (Jane Wyman in All That Heaven Allows), The Criterion Collection (Wyman in Magnificent Obsession), They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? (Douglas Sirk with Wyman and Rock Hudson), Cinémathèque Suisse (Sirk and Hilde Jary), Sabzian (Susan Kohner and Juanita Moore in Imitation of Life), Shutterstock (Doris Day, Rock Hudson, and Ross Hunter on the set of Pillow Talk), Slant (John Gavin and Lilo Pulver in A Time to Love and a Time to Die), College of Film and the Moving Image (Sirk and Rainer Werner Fassbinder), Letterboxd (Hudson and Dorothy Malone), The Guardian (Brigitte Mira and El Hedi ben Salem), The Film Experience (Isabelle Huppert), Screen Slate (Julianne Moore), Critic Film (Sirk in His Later Years), and Vocal Media (Far from Heaven closing credit).

Nanfu Wang Builds a Thriller Around a Chinese Women's Rights Activist in Hooligan Sparrow

2025-11-29T14:25:00.000-08:00

This review originally appeared in Bob Ham's Portland film screenings newsletter Daily Projections some time on or after September 14, 2016.

HOOLIGAN SPARROW

(Nanfu Wang, 2016, China/USA, 84 minutes)

At times, Nanfu Wang's vertiginous documentary, Hooligan Sparrow, feels like a spy thriller as she does her best to keep up with Chinese women's rights activist Ye Haiyun, code name Sparrow, her unstoppable subject.

There are clashes with police, government stooges, and other antagonists who aim to curtail Sparrow's activism and to force Wang to stop filming.

Instead of opinion editorials and other conventional forms of communication, Sparrow engages in high-risk activities in a country infamously adverse to free speech. Aside from videos, protests, and photo projects--some featuring art world star Ai Weiwei--she once offered her services to migrant laborers for free in order to publicize the plight of sex workers.

Wang, who lives in New York, returns to her native China to document Sparrow's work. She swiftly finds that national security agents are monitoring her actions, simply because she's walking around with a video camera, so she switches to concealed micro-cameras.

When they meet for the first time, Sparrow and her sister activists are organizing a protest against a Hainan Province principal who coerced six underage girls into prostitution.

Sparrow's attorney, Wang Yu, notes that China's protection laws for women and children are not strictly enforced. Furthermore, there's a loophole in the child prostitution law that allows government officials to skate free (the principal explains that the 11 to 14-year old girls were intended as "gifts").

Wang continues to document the outcome of their action. Though they garner messages of support across the social media sphere, Sparrow suffers beatings, arrest, detention, raids, and death threats. A group of men, presumably paid government thugs, even holds up a banner outside her apartment building that reads, "Sparrow, you whore, get out of the city."

The police, who seem to see her as a nuisance, do little to help, despite the fact that her 13-year-old daughter could also really use their protection.

The situation becomes even more fraught when Sparrow's apartment manager kicks her out, and no other building will take her, even as she travels to two other provinces to secure housing. At the same time, the police are questioning everyone who knows the filmmaker. Sparrow copes by depending on the kindness of family members, while Wang evades detection by avoiding hotels stays, train travel, and all other transactions that require identification.

If Wang never gets to the bottom of the reasons why Sparrow has decided to risk her life for a cause--other than the fact that Chinese women can only benefit from her advocacy--it doesn't weaken her film in any way.

Instead, she provides a you-are-there look at the risks one Chinese activist faces on a daily basis. Though the hazards can be disheartening, it's hard not to notice that she's rarely alone. From her daughter and boyfriend to her friends and associates, Sparrow is never completely isolated. Whether that will be enough in the years to come is an open question, but she's launched a movement that can only gather strength with time.

Images from Austin Film Society (Sparrow alone and with associates) and Doc NYC (Nanfu Wang). Hooligan Sparrow is available on DVD from Kino Lorber and on VOD from Amazon, Apple TV, and other digital platforms.

A Look Back at Four Emerging Master Filmmakers of 2002: Park Chan-wook, Julio Medem, Jacques Audiard, and Miike Takashi

2025-11-25T14:39:00.000-08:00

In honor of Park Chan-wook's Donald Westlake adaptation, No Other Choice, I've revived a piece I wrote for SIFF's Reel News about the festival's 2002 quartet of Emerging Masters. Park was joined by Julio Medem, Jacques Audiard, and Miike Takashi.

I was first introduced to the South Korean filmmaker's work when SIFF programmed Park's third feature, 2000's Joint Security Area, aka JSA, and I've been a fan ever since (SIFF also introduced me to Audiard's work when they programmed his second feature, A Self-Made Hero, in 1997).

I'm glad Park is still going strong, with eight features since 2002's Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, first in a trilogy with Oldboy and Lady Vengeance, though I regret that both Reel News and Emerging Masters are things of the past. (This piece has been lightly revised from the original text.)

THE LATEST CROP: SIFF'S 2002 EMERGING MASTERS

Each year SIFF selects four directors from around the world who have, within the span of a decade or a handful of films, established themselves as potential cinematic masters. This series celebrates outstanding talents whose films reveal an original vision or point of view and a grasp of craft that sets them apart from the preponderance of filmmakers, clearly establishing them as artists of a high order.

These are directors with the ability to break into the mainstream of American filmgoers' consciousness in the near future.

Past honorees have included Tom Tykwer (Wintersleepers, Run Lola Run), François Ozon (Under the Sand, 8 Femmes), and Michael Winterbottom (Welcome to Sarajevo, 24 Hour Party People).

PARK CHAN-WOOK

First out of the gate is Park Chan-wook, dubbed a "giant in the Korean movie world" by The Korea Times. Park is the director and co-writer of powerful political thriller Joint Security Area (Gongdong Gyeongbi Guyeok, SIFF '01), which became the biggest box office hit in South Korea within weeks of its release. JSA (pictured above) was also a local Seattle favorite, where it won SIFF's New Director's Showcase Special Jury Award and was a Runner-up for the Golden Space Needle Audience Award for Best Film.

Although some critics have compared it to Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon--high praise indeed--the twisty, masterfully shot (in Super 35mm) motion picture reminded this viewer more of John Frankenheimer's iconic Richard Condon adaptation The Manchurian Candidate, but with a greater sense of humor.

Park was born in Seoul and graduated from Sogang University, a Jesuit institution, with a degree in philosophy. He also worked as a film critic and started directing in the early-1990s (The Moon is…the Sun's Dream, Trio), but JSA was the first of his feature films to gain worldwide exposure.

As The Korea Times notes, "His works have always been about socially neglected people, such as the three heroes in Saminjo (Trio): a struggling saxophone player playing gigs in cheap nightclubs, an uneducated tough guy, and a single mother."

Even before the release of JSA, Park was working on the screenplay for his latest release, riveting crime drama Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (above), which, like JSA, was shot in widescreen and, like Trio, concerns a group of "socially neglected people," and the ways in which their lives intersect.

Sympathy reunites Park with two favorite actors: Song Kang-ho (Shiri, SIFF ’00, The Foul King, SIFF '01) and Shin Ha-kyun (Save the Green Planet!). He has cited the hard-boiled detective fiction of American writers Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammet, and Ernest Hemingway for its inspiration.

JULIO MEDEM

Like Park, Spain's Julio Medem didn't start out as a filmmaker--not formally, at any rate--but as a medical student at Basque Country University. While there, however, he wrote about film for a San Sebastian newspaper.

Medem bridged the gap--some would say gulf--between film criticism and filmmaking by teaching himself cinematography using his father's Super 8 camera and shooting a series of inventive short films in the 1980s before releasing his full-length debut, Vacas (Cows, SIFF '92), in 1991. He was off to an auspicious start. The Basque-set historical fantasia won an award for Best New Director at the 1993 Goyas (the Spanish Academy Awards).

From his short films to his most recent feature (left), Medem has continued to reveal a boundless fascination with fate, romance, and the fine line dividing reality from illusion.

He has become known and renowned for the sensuality, lyricism, and sophistication of his imagery, inspiring comparisons to such stylistic brothers-in-arms as Gabriel Garcia Marquez (100 Years of Solitude), Carlos Saura (Carmen), Raoul Ruíz (Time Regained), Luis Buñuel (That Obscure Object of Desire), and David Lynch (Mulholland Drive) with a little Emir Kusturica (Underground) thrown into the mix. Empire has described him as a director of "daring intelligence, stylish invention, and visual dynamism."

As he explained to The New York Times' Leslie Camhi in 1999, his approach towards each film is largely visual and intuitive: ''When I'm working, if I come up with something that has a very clear and concrete meaning, I almost always put it aside.'' Medem has long been a favorite of SIFF audiences, who have been able to enjoy every one of his films thus far--although The Red Squirrel (La Ardilla Roja, SIFF '94), which was supposed to be part of 1993's slate, was, unfortunately, delayed until the following year--many would probably agree, however, that it was worth the wait.

His other films include Tierra (Earth, SIFF '97), nominated for the prestigious Palme d'Or at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival, The Lovers of the Arctic Circle (Los Amantes del Circulo Polar, SIFF '99), nominated for a Golden Lion at the 1998 Venice Film Festival and Best Screenplay at the 1999 Goyas, and, his most recent, Sex and Lucia (Lucía y el Sexo), nominated for Best Screenplay and Director at the 2002 Goyas.

JACQUES AUDIARD

France's Jacques Audiard was, essentially, born into the world of film, since his father is screenwriter Michel Audiard (The Night Affair), a favorite dialogue writer of French great Jean Gabin. Michel passed away in 1985.

His son got his start as an editor, playwright, and screenwriter before turning to directing with 1994's acclaimed See How They Fall (Regarde les Hommes Tomber), winner of the Best New Director Award at the 1995 Césars (the French Academy Awards). The intense noir received precious little exposure in the US despite the participation of Jean-Louis Trintignant (The Conformist) and actor/director Mathieu Kassovitz (Amélie).

Like Audiard, Kassovitz is a second-generation cineaste--his father is writer/director Peter Kassovitz.

It was, in fact, the uncanny resemblance between Trintignant and the elder Kassovitz that led Audiard to again cast the veteran actor in his darkly comic 1996 follow-up, A Self-Made Hero (Un Heros Très Discret, SIFF '97).

Kassovitz, who made 1995's La Haine, his own well received directorial debut, had already been cast as Resistance "hero" Albert Dehousse; Trintignant was added as the same character in later years. A Self-Made Hero went on to win the Best Screenplay Award at the Cannes Film Festival.

With his latest film, Read My Lips (Sur Mes Lèvres), Audiard takes a more direct, less stylized approach than that of A Self-Made Hero. The kinetic psychological thriller is marked by impressive performances from Vincent Cassel (Kassovitz's La Haine and The Crimson Rivers, SIFF '01) and Emmanuelle Devos (La Sentinelle, SIFF '93) and concerns the unconventional--and potentially deadly--relationship that develops between an insecure, hearing-impaired secretary and an aggressive, recently-paroled ex-con. It resulted in another success for Audiard, winning awards at the 2002 Césars for Best Writing, Best Editing, and Best Actress (Devos). Audiard was also nominated for Best Director and Cassel for Best Actor.

All the while, Audiard has continued to write for other directors, including Tonie Marshall's Venus Beauty Institute (Vénus Beauté, SIFF '00), another multiple-César winner, and Read My Lips looks set to increase Audiard's steadily growing and richly deserved international reputation.

MIIKE TAKASHI

Last, but certainly not least, is Japan's Miike Takashi, who got his start by assisting legendary director Shohei Imamura (The Eel) in the 1980s.

Since then, the tireless Miike has directed countless made-for-video and television productions, honing his considerable chops all the way. Starting in the mid-1990s, he has increasingly been at the helm of theatrical features, such as The City of Lost Souls (Hyôryuu-gai), Dead or Alive (Hanzaisha)--which features what must surely be one of the most infamous opening sequences of all time--and Ichi the Killer (Koroshiya 1), among others.

The word "prolific" often accompanies mention of his name, along with other such colorful words and phrases as "graphic," "hallucinatory," "jaw-dropping," and my personal favorite: "flamboyantly weird," but don't be fooled by that first word. As Sight & Sound's Tony Rayns, an early champion, has noted, Miike is prolific in the way that Rainer Werner Fassbinder was prolific, if closer in spirit to Joseph H. Lewis. "Almost all of [his films] are interesting and some of them phenomenal," Rayns raved.

The best way to describe Miike, however, is probably the simplest: anything goes. There's literally nothing this man won't try.

As such, he's been compared to everyone from Seijun Suzuki (Tokyo Drifter) and Takeshi Kitano (Hana-bi) to Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction) and even the "Godfather of Gore," Herschell Gordon Lewis (Blood Feast).

His themes include those associated with Japanese actioners from Suzuki's 1960s cult classics to today--primarily the yakuza and the drug trade--but a surprising number of his films are more than just hyped-up action fare, since he also takes the time to grapple with discrimination against foreigners, both non-Asians and non-Japanese Asians, and other more sober-minded topics.

As for versatile, well, The Happiness of the Katakuris (Katakuri-ke no Kôfuku), just happens to be a family-oriented musical, though one unlikely to be mistaken for The Sound of Music anytime soon, despite the mountain-setting similarity. Zombies, stop-motion animation--Happiness has it all.

To date, Miike's most significant cinematic achievement must surely be the artful, if extremely disturbing Audition (Odishon, SIFF ’00), which won the FIPRESCI Award at the 1999 Rotterdam Film Festival "for its narrative freedom, technical mastery of genre and the inventivity [sic] of an important new and prolific director." (That word again!) It's the film that put Miike over the top, as it were, with raves in The New York Times and other major publications. He couldn't have been more pleased. As he exclaimed to BBC Online's David Wood in 2001, "This [success] is something I am very excited by. I like to work hard and to work fast, refining my skills, but to have a film receive such a good response worldwide goes beyond my wildest dreams."

And, with that, here's to more powerful thrillers, wild dreams, weird nightmares, and other delights from this year's crop of Emerging Masters at SIFF: Park Chan-wook, Julio Medem, Jacques Audiard, and Miike Takashi.

Kathleen Fennessy writes about music and film for Amazon.com, All Music Guide (www.allmusic.com), and The Stranger. She has also contributed to Microsoft Cinemania, Film.com, and The Anchorage Times, among other websites and publications. She has been a SIFF volunteer since 1994.

No Other Choice plays IMAX theaters for one-night only on Dec 8 and returns for a regular run in Jan. Images from the IMDb (Park Chan-wook with Lee Byung-hun, Shin Ha-kyun, Song Kang-ho, and Lee Yeong-ae on the set of Joint Security Area, Julio Medem and Paz Vega on the set of Sex and Lucía, and Miike Takashi in Hostel), Rotten Tomatoes (Park and Song on the set of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance), DVD Talk (Cows), Variety (Jacques Audiard / Courtesy of Shannon Besson), Metacritic (Mathieu Kassovitz in A Self-Made Hero), and Screen Slate (Happiness of the Katakuris).

The Eurospy Genre Lives Again in Bruno Forzani and Hélène Cattet's Dazzling, Dizzying Pastiche Reflection in a Dead Diamond

2025-11-16T22:11:00.000-08:00

REFLECTION IN A DEAD DIAMOND / Reflet dans un Diamant Mort

(Bruno Forzani and Hélène Cattet, 2025, Belgium/

Luxembourg/Italy/France, 87 minutes)

Belgian filmmaking couple Bruno Forzani and Hélène Cattet recreate and recontextualize the imaginative Eurospy films of the 1960s and '70s–with lacings of Italian comic book and Mission: Impossible iconography–in the stylish, fast-moving action thriller Reflection in a Dead Diamond.

The prototypical version of these films featured rugged men and glamorous women, mod outfits, bold interiors, inscrutable storylines, disorienting dubbing, and swinging scores. Forzani and Cattet's followup to 2017's horror western Let the Corpses Tan revolves around men chasing after diamonds--and each other--and the women who help or hinder their quests…before giving way to something more multi-layered and self-referential.

Over the course of their 24-year career, the duo has mastered the art of the outré assemblage through tactile closeups, multiple exposures, colored gels and filters, animated sequences, bursts of intense violence, and vivid sound design–heavy on the squeaking latex–that conjures up images of Toby Jones feverishly hacking away at produce and other squishy items in Peter Strickland's Berberian Sound Studio. (Fittingly, Strickland voices one of the screams in The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears.) Their fourth feature film is no different.

Further, most effects appear to be practical, which definitely adds to the appeal. There's a certain weightlessness to computer-generated effects that has always kept me at arm's length; everything in a Forzani-Cattet production, no matter how outlandish, feels palpable and weighty.

They begin with Diman (Italian actor Fabio Testi, Monte Hellman's Road to Nowhere), a retired spy at a hotel café on the Côte d'Azur sipping a cocktail while watching a brunette beauty (Sophie Mousel) soaking up the sun.

Throughout the film, they intercut closeups of his brown eyes, a signature Sergio Leone move (though Testi doesn't appear to have worked with the spaghetti western pioneer). It's something they've been doing since their 2009 directorial debut, Amer, so it also counts as their signature move.

When the brunette takes off her bikini top and reclines, the sun catches a certain diamond piercing, something that never appeared in any James Bond movie, even as this one incorporates tropes associated with Sean Connery's iteration of the British spy…and that of his brother Neil, who starred in Alberto De Martino's 1967 Eurospy entry Operation Kid Brother, an inspiration Forzani has described as "very pop, very psychedelic, very fun."

Diman wears a holster and gun under his white suit jacket, a nod to Dirk Bogarde's desperately lonely composer Gustav von Aschenbach (left) in Luchino Visconti's Thomas Mann adaptation Death in Venice, and carries an attaché case filled with spy gizmos, like a silver ring with laser eye that allows him to see through walls and other surfaces.

When the brunette, a guest at the same luxury hotel, disappears, the septuagenarian ex-spy sets out to solve the mystery. In the film, she appears to leave for a yachting excursion with John (Yannick Renier, Jérémie Renier's older brother), a handsome spy convinced she has information he needs about his client, oil baron Markus Strand (Koen De Bouw, star of the original Belgian Professor T), so he attempts to torture it out of her.

When that gambit fails, his female associate (Céline Camara) attempts to seduce Strand while wearing a silver grill and a Paco Rabanne-style palette shift with a red jewel in the center that does interesting tricks, like dispatching a ninja crew in a sequence that reminded me of Elia Suleiman's black comedy Divine Intervention in which one Palestinian woman puts five Israeli men in their place. In this case, even the palettes have powers.

John also has one of the fancy rings, which he uses to see through a poker hand--cheater!--suggesting that he's a younger version of Diman, or that Diman is imagining all of these things. John also walks a red carpet, attends a press conference, and re-enacts the torture scene on a movie set, suggesting that his every action is staged and directed. Or that Diman, possibly suffering from dementia, can't tell the difference. Not until the end credits did I clock that John's last name is Diman, so yes, same guy, but that doesn't unlock the intentionally-ambiguous screenplay's every secret.

In its early stages, the women in the film don't make out too well.

Instead of the asphyxiating gold paint of Guy Hamilton's Goldfinger, one ends up coated in black oil paint--like one of Yves Klein's cobalt-clad human paintbrushes--and things only get worse from there, though everything is too stylized to qualify as misogynistic, especially once Forzani and Cattet introduce the Satanik-inspired Serpentik (mostly French-Vietnamese choreographer Thi Mai Nguyen, but sometimes Barbara Hellemans, Sylvia Camarda, or other performers), a latex-clad sphinx who obliterates a roomful of manly men with her metal talons, stiletto heels, and hook-filled extensions.

As Forzani told Anton Bitel in 2020, "When we made our short films, in one… it was a man who was killed, in the other it was a woman. We wanted to be equal in the violence [both laugh], and in the male and female aspect."

Throughout, there's plenty of crushed glass and torn flesh–Amer used sea salt in similar ways–recalling both Lucio Fulci and Miike Takashi, though possibly more inventive than either. And that's just scratching the surface–pun intended–since there's also naked sword-fighting, murder by foosball, comic book panels that come to life, a Black opera singer (singer/actress Kezia Quental) inspired by Diva's Cynthia Hawkins--the filmmakers even include Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez's "La Wally" on the soundtrack--an eye-popping op art carpet, and Maria de Medeiros in platinum blonde hair and deep red lipstick. (Sadly, some critics have conflated Quental, also Black, with Camara, even though the two women don't look much alike.)

Forzani and Cattet have studied their gialli and fumetti neri well.

Though the films are otherwise quite different--no zombies appear in this one--I'm also fond of Michele Soavi's 1994 fumetti neri adaptation Cemetery Man, which sprung from the pages of Italian comic book author Tiziano Sclavi's 1991 novel Dellamorte Dellamore. Sclavi's work, however, came later, unlike Mario Bava's 1968 Danger: Diabolik, an adaptation of Angela and Luciana Giussani's Diabolik series, to which Reflection in a Dead Diamond pays direct homage.

Though few lines struck me as funny–not least because Bruno Forzani and Hélène Cattet prioritize imagery over dialogue–a number of abrupt or unexpected edits made me laugh, even as the actors always play it straight. If they never wink at the audience, the filmmakers and steadfast editor Bernard Beets do just that with their clever juxtapositions, ensuring that things never get too heavy no matter how close they dance to the edge.

DP Manuel Dacosse, who shot all four of their features, also deserves credit for his stellar work for the duo, in addition to other strong visual stylists, like Lucile Hadžihalilović (Évolution) and François Ozon (Peter von Kant).

For those not tuned to their fantastical, fetishistic frequency, this thing will be a chore–even at 87 minutes–but for the rest: a bloody good time awaits.

Reflection in a Dead Diamond plays SIFF Film Center on Dec 3 thanks for the fine folks at The Grand Illusion Cinema. Images from JustWatch (a pack of ninjas), the IMDb (poster for The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears), The Gay and Lesbian Review (Dirk Bogarde in Death in Venice), Rotten Tomatoes (Fabio Testi), and Melbourne International Film Festival (Céline Camara).

Hope You Like Me: Nobuhiko Ôbayashi’s Biker Musical Melodrama His Motorbike, Her Island

2025-11-04T22:31:00.000-08:00

HIS MOTORBIKE, HER ISLAND / Kare no ōtobai, kanojo no shima
(Nobuhiko Ôbayashi, 1986, Japan, 90 minutes)

Welcome to my island
Hope you like me, you ain't leaving.
–Caroline Polachek (2023)

Nobuhiko Ôbayashi, who passed away in 2020 at 82, was one of Japan's foremost antiwar filmmakers, a master of the experimental short film (for both theatrical and advertising purposes), and the go-for-broke genius behind the most bonkers horror-comedy musical ever made–though Miike Takashi's multimedia zom-com Happiness of the Katakuris comes close.

That's only a sampling of Ôbayashi's many talents, but most people probably know him best for House, aka Hausu, one of the Criterion Collection's crown jewels, to the extent that they've even produced a perennially popular, bright orange, cat-face t-shirt. I doubt we'll see a t-shirt for, say, Au Hasard Balthazar any time soon, but I swear I would wear it if they produced one.

I'm unaware of any antiwar messaging embedded in His Motorbike, Her Island, his 17th motion picture, but Ôbayashi was an endlessly inventive filmmaker, and I wouldn't put it past him.

Nor is the film thoroughly experimental, though it incorporates avant-garde techniques–freeze frames, jump cuts, varied aspect ratios, and rhythmic shifts from black and white to color.

(In an archival interview included with the new release, Obayashi acknowledges that he added the cuts simply to get the run time under 90 minutes in order to screen as part of a bill with director/producer Haruki Kadokawa's crime thriller Cabaret.)

All told, it's one of his most accessible efforts, though still unconventional by most any standard, then and now. In Ôbayashi's nouvelle vague-inspired take on the Japanese biker movie, future v-cinema star and Miike favorite Riki Takeuchi (Dead or Alive), in his feature debut, plays Koh Hashimoto, a music student, part-time delivery driver, and motorbike obsessive in Obayashi's native Onomichi. There's a girl in Koh's life, his boss's younger sister, Fuyumi (Noriko Watanabe), but his bike always, always comes first.

Though screenwriter Ikuo Sekimoto drew from Yoshio Kataoka's 1977 novel, the way Koh consistently refers to his bike as a Kawasaki W3 plays like the handiwork of a man who made thousands of television commercials.

Koh, in other words, comes across like a pitchman. It's funny, but not in a way that makes him seem like the butt of a filmmaker's joke–though he's a fairly single-minded fellow–and I may be reading more into it than I should, but the fact that it's a Japanese make rather than an American one, like Harley Davidson, feels like home-country pride on Ôbayashi's part, though Japanese biker films do tend to favor Kawasaki, Honda, and Suzuki.

In his opening narration, Koh declares, "My day-to-day life at the time was a complete mess," indicating that the film will recreate past events. He goes on to describe his dreams as "monochrome," a partial explanation for the extensive use of B&W, but not a complete one since Ôbayashi often switches between the two within sequences in a way that seems more stylistic than thematic. He admits as much in the archival interview, explaining that an all-B&W film might have seemed pretentious or nostalgic, so he considered using B&W for past and color for present, but in the end he opted for a more random scheme, much like a B&W manga with the occasional color panel.

After Kho gets in a scuffle with his boss, Hidemasa (Tomokazu Miura), who insists that he formalize his makeout sessions with Fuyumi, Koh decides he would rather spend time alone with his motorbike, which excites him more, so he visits nearby Iwashi Island where he meets Miyoko (Kiwako Harada, older sister of Tomoyo Harada who appeared in several Ôbayashi films, including The Girl Who Leapt Through Time). She admires his bike and snaps a few pictures. It's a fleeting encounter, but she makes an impression.

When he returns, Kho takes up with Fuyumi again, but without much enthusiasm.

During a night-time biking excursion, they pass a nude couple on a bike–a possible reference to the cover of Flower Travellin' Band's 1970 album Anywhere. Fuyumi looks shocked, but Koh, inspired, asks her to take off her clothes. This makes her deeply uncomfortable, but she strips down to her lingerie. Later, they have sex, but she cries before and after. Not exactly a great start to a relationship.

On another break that establishes his loner tendencies as much as his unhappiness with Fuyumi, Koh visits a mountain spa, where a nudie cutie catches his eye. When she turns around, he realizes it's Miyoko, aka Miiyo.

She's everything Fuyumi isn't, and he's smitten. She's ebullient, uninhibited, and recalls Jennifer Connelly with her flowing black hair and thick brows. After the bath, he gives her a ride back to the inn where she's staying.

He's finally ready to break up with Fuyumi, which leads to a joust with Hidemasa, a fellow motorbike enthusiast. Kho wins the fight, which Ôbayashi depicts in quick, abstract cuts. Later, he drops by local speakeasy Michikusa to blow off some steam with Ogawa (Ryōichi Takayanagi), his best friend.

To his surprise, they run into Fuyumi, who sings a sad song from the stage. Ogawa doesn't understand why he would break up with such a sweet girl. "All she knew was crying and cooking," Koh sniffs, and indeed, she cries the entire time before running off the stage. Unlike Koh, the widower in Miike's Audition would have been thrilled to meet such a delicate flower.

Finally single, Koh is thrilled to receive a letter and photographs from Miiyo (they would probably be texting today). During their first phone conversation, he gets out his guitar and sings her a song, the first indication that he's also a songwriter, and the second that this film doubles as a musical. Miiyo invites him to visit her island. "I felt very close to this strange girl," he says in voiceover.

That night, Koh dines with her and her grandfather (Takahiro Tamura), who admits that he spoiled her, before joining them for the Obon Festival where the islanders sing and dance in traditional garb to honor the dead.

Back in town with Miiyo, Kho visits Michikusa to find that things have changed. Fuyumi, of all people, is now the house vocalist. No longer dressed in loose, girlish clothing, she wears a fitted red dress and a more sophisticated hairstyle. Miiyo, who shares her interest in singing, goes on stage to perform Koh's song, "Sunshine Girl." (Harada also sings the film's theme song, "Living for Your Love.") Instead of getting jealous, Fuyumi marvels, "She's a great girl." Ôbayashi never explains this shift in confidence, but suggests that the breakup with Koh freed something in her.

Though he once told Miiyo, "Don't be jealous. You’re no match for S3 horsepower," she was, in fact, jealous, and so, unbeknownst to him, she reached out to Ogawa who helped her to secure a midsize license. Now she can go out riding with Koh, Hidemasa, and his other biker friends.

Koh doesn't know what to think about this development, and fears she'll get hurt, though she impresses his biker buddies--"She's one of those motorbike prodigies," Hidemasa enthuses, "people like you just don't have the gift"--as she takes one lap after another. She next sets her sights on a 750cc license.

Though Koh harbors chauvinist tendencies, Miiyo can be reckless. She always wears a helmet, but loves to race around in the rain. Then again, she and Koh live in a damp region. He gets so upset during one excursion, that he slaps her and calls her an idiot. She slaps him back and adds a few punches for good measure. (Fortunately, he only does that once.) "You're gonna die," he laments. Instead, she disappears–taking his bike with her.

Until that point, Ôbayashi has leaned as heavily on the film's action set pieces as its melodrama, but things don't converge the way that combination might suggest. The film isn't a narrative version, for instance, of Jan and Dean's classic 1963 teen-tragedy single "Dead Man's Curve."

In her very good commentary track, Samm Deighan explores the 22-year-old Miiyo's death drive, an understandable reaction, though I didn't see it that way. She's such a bright and lively presence that I didn't sense any desire to die, though the scenario isn't worlds away from David Cronenberg's Crash or Julia Ducournau's Titane. It's hardly that extreme, and there's no body horror, but both Koh and Miiyo relate to their bikes in a sexual way, even if Ôbayashi handles this with more PG-rated subtlety than not.

Not long before Miiyo disappears, for instance, she embraces Koh's bike–in the rain, of course–as if it were a human being or an extension of his body, which isn't too far off the mark (she's also wearing a wet white t-shirt without a bra, bringing yet more sexuality to an-already charged scenario). And when she's racing around, she's in her element to the extent that it's quite possibly a turn-on. If she gets hurt, in other words, it was worth the risk, which isn't the same as wanting to die, though Sekimoto's screenplay suggests that she's going to and that it will have been worth it.

Someone dies at the end of His Motorbike, Her Island, so it's a tragedy for them, but Koh and Miiyo remain intact, or at least that's how I read things. There's just enough ambiguity to suggest that the final sequence is a daydream or a fantasy, though the film lacks the supernatural phenomena, like possession and time travel, frequently associated with Ôbayashi's work.

Mostly, the film is a good time with fun characters--initial boorishness aside, Koh can be quite the charmer--and that includes Fuyumi and Ogawa, who also come into their own. Biker movies tend to exclude women, to make them bystanders, or to push them to the front as in 1970's Stray Cat Rock: Delinquent Girl Boss with the immortal Meiko Kaji, but Nobuhiko Ôbayashi's unique take splits the difference. It's only when Koh meets a woman who loves bikes as much as he does that he can truly love another human being.

It's fitting then that, once reunited with both Miiyo and his bike, a life dominated by monochrome dreams finally springs to full, vibrant color.

ICYMI, I wrote about another biker movie last year.

His Motorbike, Her Island is out now on a Cult Epics Blu-ray loaded with extras. Beyond the informative commentary track and illuminating interview, the release includes visual essays on the Japanese biker movie and Nobuhiko Ôbayashi's hometown. Images from Hollywood Theatre (Kiwako Harada), The Criterion Collection (House t-shirt), DVD Beaver (Riki Takeuchi), the IMDb (Takeuchi and Harada), The Cinematheque (Noriko Watanabe), an X/Twitter (Tomokazu Miura with Takeuchi and Harada).

Bruce Springsteen, Nebraska, Deliver Me from Nowhere, and the Familial Ties That Bind

2025-10-22T13:36:00.000-07:00

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE

(Scott Cooper, USA, 2025, 119 minutes)

Bruce Springsteen has been a part of my life for over 50 years.

So I'm not a neutral observer when it comes to Deliver Me from Nowhere, the musician's first officially-sanctioned biopic (and an adaptation of Del Fuego-turned-music scholar Warren Zanes' book, The Making of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska). Fortunately, for him, for me, for anyone who considers themselves a fan–even for the merely curious: it's very good.

*****

Prior to 1980's The River, I don't remember hearing Springsteen on the radio. I'm sure many listeners did, because Columbia released singles that hit the Hot 100, but my primary radio source while growing up in Alaska was a Top 40 station (ironically, I would become a late-night DJ after college at KWHL, an AOR station founded in 1982). I was also addicted to countdown programs, like the Casey Kasem-hosted American Top 40 and the show Solid Gold, but Springsteen, in the 1970s, was mostly perceived as an album guy.

Granted, he released more than two dozen singles over the course of the decade, so some may have a different recollection, not least when one of those songs was his signature number, "Born to Run," except the single peaked at #23, which seems inconceivable from today's perspective. (Consequently, I may have heard the song as a grade schooler, but it made no impact at the time.)

Things would change in the early-1980s, by which time Springsteen was already a bonafide star. It's just that he became stratospheric and inescapable, not only on radio, but on the nascent MTV. In the 1970s, he was the subject of countless magazine and television profiles--including the cover of Time in 1975--so I knew full well who he was, but living in Anchorage, prior to the construction of the George M. Sullivan Arena, means I never got the chance to see one of his famous give-the-people-their-hard-earned-money's-worth live shows. My Bay Area-based dad, on the other hand, did get that chance.

And that's where I'm going with all of this, because it was my dad, really, who introduced me to Springsteen's music. I was aware of the guy before Dad tuned in, but I hadn't heard much. My parents were divorced, so I don't know when it started, but when Dad liked a record, really liked a record, he would play it over and over again (a trait I inherited). This could have been irritating if I didn't share his taste to some extent, but I did; my parents' respective record collections combined with my incessant radio listening, TV watching, and music magazine reading–yes, I was the kid who slept with a transistor radio under their pillow–helped to shape my musical taste.

Dad became obsessed with Born to Run, and so I heard it often when I came to visit. I have this vague recollection of other records, including bootlegs, and tales of epic Oakland shows, but it all comes back to his third album. I wouldn't say I became a fan then and there, but I liked what I heard. Left to my own devices, The River was the album that made me a fan.

I wasn’t always close to my dad. He was a bright, funny guy with stories for days, but he was also a drinker and a smoker who filed bankruptcy twice and likely died from his habits--both his heart and lungs were shot when he suffered a fatal heart attack in 2010.

I don't mean to sound judgmental; he didn't have an easy childhood, and Vietnam fucked him up, to the extent that he never talked about it, and I didn't even find out he served "in country" until after his death; I only knew about his less-eventful time with the Air Force in Hawaii. I have no idea if "Born in the U.S.A." meant anything to him, but I'd like to think it did.

Like many an Irishman–his parents were the immigrants, but Dad grew up in a strict Catholic household in Queens–he was a raconteur, but he wasn't wild about reliving his past, and nor did he have any interest in therapy, so I only learned about some of his more painful experiences in bits and pieces.

The result was a father somewhat akin to the one Springsteen grew up with (the part-Irish musician also grew up in a devout Catholic household; like my dad, he would leave the religion behind as soon as he could). If his reliably dependable mother inspired him, his father, who had fought in the pivotal Battle of the Bulge during World War II, was a different story.

Right: Bruce with Douglas and Virginia "Ginny" Springsteen

The elder Springsteen drank and smoked and appears to have loved his family, but didn't always know how to show it. He scared his wife and children when he got drunk--Springsteen had two younger sisters--and sometimes got physical.

My dad wasn't that bad. He never hit me or my mom, but he scared the shit out of me when he was angry–he yelled, threw breakable objects, and said awful things–so much so that I stopped talking to him for a brief period in the 1990s. I told him we were through unless he got help. He later offered an apology filled with so much shame and regret that we were able to start over. We were never again as close as when I was a kid, but we became closer than we had been, and we were in a good place when he passed.

I didn't mean to make this about me or my dad, but those are the thoughts and feelings the film brought up, because it's more affecting in the father-son moments than in the artist-manager moments, which defied my expectations based on everything I had read beforehand. I regret that I missed the New York Film Festival premiere with Springsteen in attendance–not least when he burst out in song–but writer/director Scott Cooper and star Jeremy Allen White were on hand at the next day's screening, and it was great to see it on a huge screen with a big, enthusiastic audience.

Granted, the line to get in to Alice Tully Hall was considerable, but I arrived early, much as I did when Springsteen made a stop at Seattle's Elliot Bay Bookstore in 2016 for a meet and greet around his memoir, shockingly titled Born to Run (I jest; of course it's called Born to Run). That line went on forever, but no one seemed to mind. I'm grateful I got to share that once-in-a-lifetime experience with Michelle Byrd and our late friend Bill Kennedy.

Left: Me and Bruce

To my mind, it isn't surprising that Succession's Jeremy Strong was cast as Jon Landau, a Rolling Stone writer who became Springsteen's manager in 1974, but White and Stephen Graham weren't the most obvious choices for their respective roles, setting aside White's bankability in the wake of Emmy-winning series The Bear–let alone a Calvin Klein underwear campaign–but they're both up to the task; if anything Strong's take on Landau as a level-headed, if fiercely loyal advocate makes him less engaging, though he gets the best line, which I won't share here (for my money, Roy Cohn in The Apprentice provided a richer opportunity for his brand of theatrics).

Cooper opens with Springsteen as a 10-year-old living with his father and mother (Gaby Hoffman, also very good) in Freehold, New Jersey. He distinguishes past from present by shifting back and forth from black and white to color. There's nothing innovative about this approach, though Masanobu Takayanagi handles it exceptionally well (the Japanese-born cinematographer was responsible for a previous male weepie, Gavin O’Connor's 2011 Warrior). New Jersey native Matthew Anthony Pellicano Jr. as the young Springsteen hits all the right notes as a watchful boy who longs for his father's approval, but will defend his mother from him as necessary.

There's also a possible thematic reason for the B&W, and that's because it fits with the world Springsteen depicts in some of his songs: an America shaped by the Civil War, the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and the like.

Granted, most of his album covers are in full color, but Born to Run, The River, and Nebraska were all built around monochromatic photographs, in addition to the cover of his memoir.

There are also references in Deliver Me From Nowhere to Charles Laughton’s B&W Southern Gothic masterpiece Night of the Hunter, one of the cinematic inspirations behind Nebraska, alongside Terrence Malick's full-color Badlands, which provided the title, since Charlie Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, played in the 1973 film by Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek, hailed from the state (and the 1950s spree killers were largely depicted in B&W).

Cooper introduces the adult Springsteen long after he has become a star. In fact, he opens with a sweat-drenched concert before introducing the musician's childhood. From there, he shifts to Springsteen's time in Colt's Neck, New Jersey in 1981 where he has rented a cabin to spend time out of the public eye and work on the album that would become Nebraska.

This mostly consists of reading, watching old movies on television, sitting in with musician friends at the Stone Pony, and staring at a pad of paper on which lyrics begin to materialize, though with each new impression or experience, he scratches out words, starts again, and repeats the process.

To Cooper's credit, none of this is boring. If anything, it's a reminder of how hard songwriting can be, even for some of the most accomplished artists.

In the process of listening, watching, absorbing, and re-contextualizing, Springsteen, who always had an eye on the punk scene--even if he was never part of it--discovers NYC electronic duo Suicide's self-titled debut. Though he had sung about Vietnam veterans before, it's hard not to imagine that the harrowing "Frankie Teardrop," which features in the film, had an influence on "Born in the U.S.A.," since he also wrote that song during his Colt's Neck residency. (His yelps on the ominous "State Trooper" are pure Alan Vega.)

In the meantime, Springsteen meets with Landau in diners and works with a recording engineer (the always-welcome Paul Walter Hauser), who helps him to shape what is essentially a home recording, so he has to convince Landau this isn't as crazy as it sounds, and Landau has to convince Columbia's Al Teller (David Krumholtz), who wants more hits, like The River's "Hungry Heart," which doesn't make him a bad guy, necessarily–he's just doing his job–but for a time Columbia isn't on board with whatever the hell Springsteen is doing out in the boonies. As he explains in his memoir, Nebraska "would distort, feed back and declare revolution on the common materials of recording," and so he categorically rejects that approach.

We know how this story ends, but Cooper's trick is to make the film feel suspenseful while retracing the steps it takes to get there, including incidents from Springsteen's childhood which play into the album, in addition to the nomadic life he leads before settling down, later, with Patty Scialfa.

Cooper, who made 2009's Crazy Heart with Jeff Bridges–along with several genre-oriented features–does all of these things, and White is fully convincing throughout, not least because he isn't doing a Springsteen impression.

His blue eyes have been made brown and his light brown hair has been darkened, but he doesn't speak exactly like Springsteen, who has always had a drawl. I detected a little in a backstage exchange with Graham, who plays Douglas "Dutch" Springsteen, but for the most part, he doesn't sound much different than he does on The Bear or the 11 seasons he spent on Showtime's Shameless; both feature more of a place-less accent than one specific to Chicago.

Of greater importance: he makes Springsteen sympathetic, which isn't as easy as it sounds. There's a reason so many musician biopics begin before the artist has become a star. We share in their excitement when they play their first concert or cut their first record, but this isn't that kind of film.

Cooper skips Springsteen's years as an isolated high school student or the decade he spent as a struggling twentysomething musician. He's rich and famous, but other than the cabin rental and a vehicle purchase, he isn't extravagant with his earnings. It's just that he doesn't have to worry about money, like most of us. If fame has changed him in some ways–the craving for privacy, for instance–it hasn't corrupted him, and that's no small feat.

This is also where things become more complicated, in ways Cooper may not have intended. First of all, I get why composite characters are incorporated into fact-based narratives, like Elle Fanning's "Sylvie Russo" in James Mangold's A Complete Unknown–a stand-in for Dylan's Freewheelin' Bob Dylan cover costar Suze Rotolo–but I'm less forgiving when it's a substantial part, and that describes "Faye Webster" (Australian actress Odessa Young), the ardent fan Springsteen hangs out with in Colt's Neck.

Is she based on one person or several? (In his memoir, he mentions "a lovely 22-year-old," and leaves it at that.) Did he really date diner waitresses and single mothers at the height of his fame? It's possible, though I believe it's also intended to confirm that he's a man of the people.

That said, Faye actually pursues him. She approaches Springsteen after a show at the Stone Pony, after a mutual acquaintance introduces the two, and makes it clear that she would like to see him. He seems intrigued, but tells her he's seeing someone. Near as I can tell, it's a white lie, because Cooper doesn't depict him breaking up with anybody, but he does eventually give her a call, and there's no suggestion that he's two-timing a steady.

They proceed to become something of an item. Faye and her five-year-old daughter live with her parents, and she seems to see in the Jersey native-made-good a potential husband, father, and provider.

Prior to the end of his residency, though, he breaks up with her. I found Faye convincing as a fan and as a woman who finds him physically attractive, but Cooper's screenplay suggests that she also sees him as a way out of a dead-end existence. It doesn't make her a gold digger, but since there's no mention of his wealth, I wasn't sure how we were meant to take any of this.

Chances are, he was never interested in a serious relationship, but failed to make that clear to Faye, which is a shitty thing to do when the income disparity is so vast, let alone when he connects with her daughter in a way that any single mother would hope a prospective partner would. It means he doesn't just let down a lonely, lovelorn woman, but a fatherless child, too.

Young isn't bad, but she comes close to Jersey Girl stereotype with her bleached hair, tight jeans, and brassy manner. I'm sure it's how the character was written and directed, but this aspect of the film rings least true, even if Springsteen did date someone exactly like her. And yet…Faye plays like a character from one of his songs, so I can't get too aggrieved.

Stephen Graham’s portrayal of Dutch, on the other hand, elevates what could have been a stereotype or a villain into something more nuanced. He doesn't come across as a complicated man, but rather a volatile one and, later, as one beaten down by years of disappointment and regret.

There are American actors who could have played the part, but the Lancashire-born Graham was a masterstroke of casting, because his stock in trade is gangsters, mentors, father figures, and working-class blokes.

He first caught my attention in Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York (he would later appear in The Irishman, which seems fitting). If Leonardo DiCaprio and, especially, Cameron Diaz seemed out of place in this 19th-century underworld, Graham fit right in as an Irish-American pickpocket.

That history and those skills inform his work here. Just as it took Springsteen years to recognize that his father suffered from depression, it took him years to recognize that he had inherited the same predisposition. For men of Dutch's generation, and even for my dad's, alcohol was the most socially acceptable way to keep the demons at bay. Springsteen figured out what was going on before it was too late. His father didn't, but at least the son had the means to make sure his needs were met in his twilight years. (For all she suffered, his mother, Adele, never divorced Dutch.)

I'll never know what my dad would think about this film, or about Springsteen's memoir, in which he talks openly about his struggle with depression. It's possible that he wouldn't care to dwell on the darker chapters in a favorite musician's life, but I'd imagine he would have admired the thought, care, and creativity he poured into one of his more personal albums. It also saddens me that I can't ask Charley Cross, the founder of the Springsteen fanzine Backstreets, which ceased publication in 2023 after a 43-year run. Cross died suddenly last August. I would have loved to compare notes with the foremost expert I knew.

Deliver Me from Nowhere burnishes the man's myth to some extent, and Warren Zanes' book is there for the reading for anyone who wants a more detailed picture of the period Scott Cooper depicts, but there are only so many musician biographies that have moved me in the same way. It's a portrait of a famous artist to be sure, and I wouldn't say that it completely breaks the mold, but it's also a portrait of masculinity in crisis in the form of the father and of the son who tried, and largely succeeded, to do better.

My father's house shines hard and bright

It stands like a beacon, calling me in the night

Calling and calling, so cold and alone

Shining 'cross this dark highway, where our sins lie unatoned

--"My Father's House," Nebraska (1982)

Bruce Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere opens on Thurs, Oct 23, at Regal Meridian, AMC Pacific Place, the Varsity, and other area theaters.

Images from Rolling Stone/20th Century Studios/Everett Collection (Jeremy Allen White), Amazon (original book cover), Festival Peak (Born to Run album cover), Pinterest (Dutch, Bruce, and Ginnie), Movie Mezzanine (Badlands), Wikipedia (Suicide album cover), the IMDb (Jeremy Allen White and Odessa Young), and Simon and Schuster (Born to Run book cover).