Tron: Ares - Movie Review

Director: Joachim Rønning

Cast: Jared Leto, Greta Lee, Evan Peters, Cameron Monaghan, Jodie Turner-Smith

1h 45m

The original" Tron" (1982) was a landmark film for the Disney company, pioneering computer-generated imagery that created a truly unique, neon-drenched aesthetic, forever influencing science fiction and video game design. "Tron: Legacy" (2010) was a visually stunning sequel that attempted to bridge the past and present, alongside Daft Punk's now-iconic, pulsing electronic score. "Tron: Ares", a visual feast for the eyes, substitutes style over storytelling, bringing a sonic assault on the senses. It's a popcorn cinematic experience, an extended music video, a loud, frantic, and gorgeous bridge of scenes that feels like a science fiction industrial rock music video for legends Nine Inch Nails, complete with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's signature blend of heavy synths and menacing rhythms.

The film follows Ares (Jared Leto), an advanced "digital life form" who has crossed the threshold from the computer Grid into the physical, human world. Unlike his predecessors, Ares is not content with simply executing commands. When a hotshot game developer, Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters), discovers that his rival, reclusive CEO Eve Kim (Greta Lee), is searching for and finds the missing pieces to a code that will allow the digital world to exist in the real world, Ares is sent to retrieve the code at all costs. However, against his master's command, he disobeys the order, which leads to a race against time to understand and potentially stop this digital expansion before it destroys the real world.

The phenomenal visual design and soundscape keep "Tron: Ares" from complete collapse. Director Joachim Rønning delivers scene after scene of gorgeous imagery, blending the sleek, digitized designs of the updated Tron universe into the real-world cityscape atmospheres. A light-cycle action sequence, a glowing, frantic race of neon light streams, that adds video game dangers to crowded city streets, slices and dices through cars, and builds unbreakable barriers with every right and left turn. Accompanying this is a pulsing, bass-heavy score, an impressive soundtrack that refuses to let the viewer catch their breath. The music is the film's engine, providing a booming bass with sonic sound tempos that thunder off the big screen. It's an undeniable sonic energy that makes the film feel alive, a kinetic, pulsing rush that keeps the pace fast, fun, and frenzied.

Unfortunately, beyond the dazzling designs and explosive sound, the story within "Tron: Ares" is simplistic and emotionally unsatisfying. The narrative is driven like a video game, with tasks and side quests that characters must accomplish to progress from point A to point B, resulting in minimal character development and little reason to care about what happens to them. They are assigned a simple goal, and they execute it. Stop this, go there, eliminate the threat—simple commands for a simple story. The viewer is merely along for the ride in a step-and-repeat storytelling structure. Without the constant, driving momentum of the visuals and the score, "Tron: Ares" would be a confusing mix of science fiction themes set into action movie mode.

Ultimately, "Tron: Ares" is a visually stunning music video first and foremost, and a confused cinematic story second. It is an amusing, two-hour adrenaline shot if you manage your expectations and surrender to the sheer sensory experience. Go for the popcorn movie setup, turn up the volume, and enjoy the digital light show.

Monte's Rating

2.00 out of 5.00

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Celebrate Burt Lancaster with this classic triple feature

Hollywood legend Burt Lancaster was born 112 years ago in Manhattan, N.Y., on Nov. 2, 1913.  Before Lancaster began his film career in “The Killers” (1946), this World War II veteran worked as an acrobat and sometimes performed his own stunts on-screen.  It’s no small feat that Burt acted in television and movies for 45 years before this Oscar/BAFTA/Golden Globe winner passed away in 1994 at the age of 80.

To celebrate the man on his heavenly birthday, enjoy this classic Burt Lancaster triple feature. 

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“Elmer Gantry (1960) – Burt Lancaster plays the title role, as a con man who talks his way into preaching the gospel with Sister Sharon Falconer’s (Jean Simmons) traveling ministry.  Elmer may be “just a hick from Kansas,” but his magnetic, fearless persona attracts wholehearted applause and adoration from wannabe and true believers, as he asks them to “play ball on God’s team.” 

Gantry, however, is far from a saint.  He regularly drinks, and he’ll leave a one-night stand in the morning and write Merry Xmas on a mirror with her lipstick while she sleeps.  Elmer has an affair with Sister Sharon and then reconnects with Lulu Bains (Shirley Jones), a former lover, who complicates his current standing with Falconer and his budding fame.  

Director/writer Richard Brooks’ movie won three Oscars, including a Best Actor for Lancaster, Supporting Actress for Jones, and Adapted Screenplay for Brooks, in a production that showcases Lancaster’s leading-man gifts of charisma and drive, as he charms the on-screen players and moviegoers.  Will his followers know the truth?  Elmer may be flawed, but everyone is a sinner.  Can Elmer Gantry have a redemption arc?  We want to believe, but either way, the film’s third act will surprise. 

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“Atlantic City” (1980) – Lou (Burt Lancaster) only knows Sally (Susan Sarandon) as the woman across the way from his Atlantic City apartment.  He gazes into her window as she squeezes lemons, catches the juice in her hands, and applies it to her arms, neck, and chest.  Their paths soon cross formally, when her shifty, estranged husband, Dave (Robert Joy), gusts into town, and reaches out to Sally and then, surprisingly, Lou. 

Lou - an aging, former small-time mob hand - runs numbers in his spare time and reluctantly cares for a demanding, cantankerous widow, when Dave asks him to sell a stolen windfall of drugs.  With a new payday, Lou then feels the wind at his back to pursue Sally, a struggling but aspiring card dealer.  

Sally’s sturdy, valiant courage meets Lou’s recent burst of nerve in a captivating character study, as director Louis Malle’s film, which garnered five Oscar nominations, frequently features the crumbling, seedy backdrop of Monopoly City.  These two damaged souls hope to shake their pasts and gamble on a hopeful future, separately or possibly together.   

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“Field of Dreams” (1989) – Director/writer Phil Alden Robinson adapts W.P. Kinsella’s novel and knocks it out of the park.  This beguiling big-screen baseball experience convinces audiences everywhere that an ordinary Iowa farmer, Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner), can cut down a significant portion of his corn crops, build a baseball field, and Shoeless Joe Jackson (Ray Liotta) would then return in his Chicago White Sox uniform and play America’s Pastime.

Costner’s Kinsella takes an enormous leap of faith.  We follow right along with his convictions, as he dodges bank notices, finds elusive author Terrance Mann (James Earl Jones), and reaches out to Moonlight Graham (Burt Lancaster), a doctor who played in Major League Baseball for just one-half inning and never got to bat. 

Acting titans Jones and Lancaster offer outstanding supporting performances for every magical moment of their precious screentime, including Mann’s inspiring baseball speech and Graham’s recollection about his brief stint in MLB.

“They’ll find they have reserved seats somewhere along one of the baselines, where they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes, and they’ll watch the game, and it will be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters.   The memories will be so thick, they’ll have to brush them away from their faces.” - Terence Mann

“It was like coming this close to your dreams and then (watching) them brush past you like a stranger in a crowd.  At the time, you don’t think much of it.  You know, we just don’t recognize the most significant moments of our lives while they’re happening.  Back then, I thought, ‘Well, there’ll be other days.’  I didn’t realize that was the only day.”  - Moonlight Graham 

I’m not crying.  You’re crying.

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Bugonia - Movie Review

Directed by: Yorgos Lanthimos.

Written by: Will Tracy.

Starring: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis.

Runtime: 118 minutes.

‘Bugonia’ Is the Pitch-Black Comedy We Deserve in 2025

Oh, Yorgos Lanthimos. May you never get a diagnosis for whatever’s wrong with you.

“Bugonia” is another dark jewel in the director’s demented crown, an arch-black comedy about humanity’s demise that right now, playing in a U.S. theater in 2025, feels cathartically bleak, a bloodletting for the myriad socio-political humors that ail us.

The Greek filmmaker teams up again with Emma Stone, his muse for his past four films (“Poor Things,” “The Favorite” and “Kinds of Kindness” before this) in an English-language remake of the 2003 South Korean film “Save the Green Planet!” by Jang Joon-hwan. Lanthimos’ take twists the story into a satire of contemporary internet conspiracies, pharmaceutical malpractice and the rapacious greed of the 1%, offering little in the way of redemption we perhaps don’t deserve.

It starts with a plan. Teddy (Jesse Plemons) hatches an unlikely scheme with his loyal gentle giant of a cousin, Don (Aidan Delbis): They are going to kidnap Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), star CEO of pharmaceutical company Auxolith. It’s an unlikely scheme for many, many reasons, not least of which is that Teddy and Don don’t have the air of criminal masterminds. The two live in a rundown home in quiet obscurity, Teddy working a thankless job in an Amazon-like warehouse to care for Don, who’s played with a sympathetic air of impending tragedy by Delbis, who is autistic (if the movie could be said to have a heart, however small and twisted, it’s Don). 

What makes the scenario even more unlikely is Teddy’s motivation: He believes Michelle to be an “Andromedan,” one of an invasive alien species that has infiltrated earth and is threatening humanity’s survival. When he does manage to kidnap Michelle and shackle her in his basement, he shaves her head and slathers her in antihistamine cream (so she can’t communicate with the mothership, naturally) and demands an audience with her emperor at the next lunar eclipse in four days. 

Stone, of course, is great. The two-time Oscar winner and frequent Lanthimos collaborator leans all in with a kind of savagery. CEO Michelle is no wilting flower, and even shaved, slick with ointment and chained to a bolt in the basement floor, she’s a force to be reckoned with.  

But it’s Plemons who dominates every frame he’s in. Sweaty, twitchy, disheveled, soft-spoken but prone to terrifying outbursts, Teddy is a mess of distinctly American neuroses. “Bugonia” gives us hints of a deeper motivating pain: a mother who struggled with addiction, now comatose from the experimental pharmaceutical “cure”; some childhood trauma inflicted by an older boy who’s now a cop; bone-deep poverty and thankless, body-wrecking labor. In his basement is a conspiracy bunker where he’s diagrammed out the internet “research” that’s led him to kidnap a CEO he believes is an alien. “I don’t get the news from the news,” he says without irony. All you can do is laugh. (If the script had been written just a year later, perhaps Teddy would be suffering from AI-induced psychosis after too many late-night conversations with ChatGPT.)

Emmy Award-winning screenwriter Will Tracy’s work, including 2022 horror-satire “The Menu” and television’s “Succession” and “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver,” has over his career reliably skewered the wealthy and rapacious forces wreaking havoc on daily American life. His astute cultural commentary paired with Lanthimos’ swing-for-the-fences tonal and stylistic excess makes for a blistering and bleak experience. 

There is one line from “Bugonia” that rang through my head long through the night after the screening ended. Engaged in a fervent discussion of colony collapse disorder among bees, one of Teddy’s pieces of evidence of Andromedan interference on earth, Michelle counters, “Sometimes a species just winds down.”

Teddy, with his unaddressed childhood trauma and his pain inflicted by the ravages of the American healthcare system and his thankless job and his crushing poverty and his internet-addled brain, feels like just that: a species winding down.  

I walked out of the theater, but it didn’t feel like the movie had ended. 

Barbara’s ranking

3.5/4 stars

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After the Hunt - Movie Review

Directed by: Luca Guadagnino

Written by: Nora Garrett

Starring: Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri, and Andrew Garfield

Runtime: 139 minutes

Julia Roberts’ best performance in years elevates ‘After the Hunt’

Look, you don’t turn to a Luca Guadagnino film for subtlety. 

The director of tennis throuple erotica “Challengers” and “Call Me by Your Name,” the queer coming-of-age romance that launched Timothée Chalamet to stardom by having him become intimately acquainted with an overripe peach, could not define the word “nuance.” That predilection for narrative and emotional garishness arguably makes Guadagnino not the best person to tackle a layered campus drama, the focal point of which is a sexual assault allegation levied by a young Black female student against a white professorial lothario. A little nuance would do a story like the one that drives “After the Hunt” well. 

And yet, in spite of the film’s readily apparent shortcomings, “After the Hunt” is a riveting mess thanks to a smorgasbord of meaty performances and Julia Roberts’ best, most layered performance in years. She’s beguiling as Alma, a Yale philosophy professor on the brink of tenure looking every bit the part, composed and calculated with her swoop of icy-blond hair, crisp blazers, and healed loafers. 

She’s distant but not aloof, inaccessible without being cold in the palace of her mind, and she holds those around her in her thrall: her doting homebody husband Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg), her louche research partner Hank (Andrew Garfield), and her ambitious PhD student Maggie (Ayo Edebiri).

The cohort is perfectly poised for life-defining academic success when Maggie shows up on Alma’s stoop, rain-soaked and sobbing that Hank sexually assaulted her 

The politics are loaded. Alma’s career has been defined by championing female academics in a male-dominated field; she’s worked with Hank for years who, while flirtatious, doesn’t seem to her dangerous, but she clocks the optics of siding with her white male research partner over a young Black woman. Further turning the screws on Alma is mysterious debilitating pain that leaves her retching on all fours – and reaching for a mystery bottle of pills.  

Blessedly, “After the Hunt” isn’t really the he-said, she-said MeToo treatise it advertises itself to be. In the capable hands of Roberts, Edebiri, Garfield and Stuhlbarg (who here, as in Guadagnino’s “Call Me by Your Name,” is the film’s emotional MVP), the film becomes a searing character study. It’s not that Roberts doesn’t believe Maggie; it’s that believing Maggie will force her to confront more than her research partner, something she’s kept locked in a vault. 

So why, then, does “After the Hunt” insist on having its complex, interesting and empathetically fallible characters engage in didactic conversations about “performative discontent” and trigger warnings, reducing generational divides into your annoying uncle’s whiniest Facebook posts about women with septum piercings and how nobody can take a joke these days?  

First-time 30-something screenwriter Nora Garrett gilds the lily of her script with these hot-button discursions, made more grating by her Millennial voice being interpreted through a Gen-X director’s eye. This too-muchness of “After the Hunt” is frustrating because the actors’ performances convey the misunderstanding and frustrations of generational divides without needing to monologue about it in a way that makes the film itself feel like a dissertation. 

But Roberts carries the viewer above all the noise to something more profound, away from generational potshots to a study of the way in which a generation of women has been taught to swallow pain. That pain doesn’t disappear but festers, even as they attempt to benefit from the very patriarchal systems and abusive power structures that hurt them. 

The audience doesn’t need a dissertation to grasp that with Roberts at her best on screen. 

Barbara’s ranking

2.5/4 stars

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Roofman - Movie Review

Directed by: Derek Cianfrance

Written by: Derek Cianfrance and Kirt Gunn

Starring: Channing Tatum, Kirsten Dunst, and Peter Dinklage

Runtime: 125 minutes.

Rated: R

Channing Tatum robs McDonald’s, and steals heart, in charming ‘Roofman’

I never expected to see Derek Cianfrance go full screwball, directing Channing Tatum with both cheeks out crashing around a Toys R Us. But then, I didn’t expect a lot of things about 2025, and here we are. 

Cianfrance, the deadly serious writer-director behind feel-bad movies “Blue Valentine” and “The Place Beyond the Pines,” drops the remaining vestiges of the Cassavetes-esque gritty naturalism that marked his career as one to watch for heartwarming middlebrow populism in “Roofman,” a film that has Tatum running naked through a Toys R Us in full Looney Tunes mode with a Spider-Man backpack.

In a story ripped from early aughts headlines, Jeffrey Manchester (Tatum) is a down-on-his-luck dad whose financial precarity and lack of steady work is tearing his young family apart. After one disappointing children’s birthday party too many, Jeffrey, desperate to win back the love of his children and their mother, picks up some shift work at McDonald’s. More specifically, he breaks into and robs McDonald’s. Actually, a lot of McDonald’s. His process is always the same, breaking in through the roof at night, lying in wait for the morning, then locking the workers in freezers or storerooms while he makes off with the cash.

It's a very successful and lucrative scheme. But while Jeffrey has the conniving brain of a super villain, he hasn’t the heart; he’s such a teddy bear, he gives one employee his jacket before locking him in the freezer so he doesn’t get too cold. 

The loveable lug gets arrested and slapped with a weighty prison sentence, but the scheming doesn’t stop there, and before long Jeffrey has hatched a grand prison escape, hitching a ride out of town and into, of all places, a Toys R Us – the last place anyone would think to search for an escaped convict. Jeffrey does his usual trick, breaking in through the roof and hiding in the in-between spaces. Eventually he finds a roomy, hollow space of store architecture in which to hide in plain sight during the day, behind the bike racks. He makes a kind of dorm room of it, popping on headphones and napping on inflatable kids’ furniture while oblivious families shop all around him. 

This is the best, most charming part of “Roofman,” watching Jeffrey go full “My Side of the Mountain” in the Toys R Us liminal space, surviving on candy and taking baths in the sink of the staff bathroom at night while he tries to outwait the manhunt. 

But one can’t live off pilfered peanut M&M’s forever. A man as golden-retriever-boyfriend coded as Jeffrey eventually needs love. 

Jeffrey’s constant surveillance of the store and its employees leads him to form a little crush on Leigh Wainscott (Kirsten Dunst), a beleaguered but kind-hearted single mom to two teen girls just doing her best under the dictatorial rule of the store’s Napoleonic manager, Mitch (Peter Dinklage). When Leigh announces her church is hosting a toy-donation drive, Jeffrey leaves the confines of the Toys R Us and seizes the opportunity. 

It’s when Jeffrey ventures out into the wider world that “Roofman” wobbles a bit on its parapet. It defies reason even if it’s partially true; the real-life Manchester did, in fact, successfully carry on a double life for a spell, dating a woman named Leigh, going to church, and ingratiating himself with the community he was using as a cover. But “Roofman” takes some liberties with the story, placing Leigh in the Toys R Us and making the otherwise pragmatic woman incredibly incurious about her new beau’s seemingly endless source of income.

Here, Cianfrance’s instincts begin to surface, shifting tones between broad comedy, family drama and existential introspection. “Roofman” can’t quite stay balanced on the tonal tightrope, nor does it seriously grapple with the destabilizing harm Jeffrey’s charm inflicts on every woman with whom he comes into contact. The film, it seems, likes Jeffrey too much to risk souring us on him.

Unlike its protagonist, “Roofman” is a film that leads with a bit too much heart and not quite enough brain. But at least its heart is the right place. 

Barbara’s ranking: 

2.5/4 stars

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“The Smashing Machine” – Movie Review By Jeff Mitchell

Directed and written by:  Benny Safdie

Starring:  Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, and Ryan Bader

Runtime:  123 minutes

Despite Johnson’s and Blunt’s solid performances, ‘The Smashing Machine’ swings and misses

“Winning is the best feeling there is.”  - Mark Kerr (Dwayne Johnson)

Mark Kerr knows winning.  

He was an All-American wrestler at Syracuse University.  When director/writer Benny Safdie’s film begins, Mark is a few years removed from his college days, as this 6’ 1” 255-pound colossus takes his grappling talents to professional mixed martial arts in the squared circle.  While Mark pummels his opponent, he also narrates his feelings about this new sport, including sensing fear in his opposition and his time in the ring being “magical.” 

However, Mark doesn’t obnoxiously yell, scream, or preach his feelings into a microphone, like the late Hulk Hogan during a WWE interview or Kansas City Chief Travis Kelce after a Super Bowl win.  With a matter-of-fact, soft-spoken cadence, Mark (almost) always brings a gentle giant persona when speaking.  He’s either revealing his natural, instinctive soothing side or, perhaps, wanting to be more accessible to John or Jane Q. Public, due to his intimidating muscle-bound physique and the occasional contusions and cuts on his face after a match.  

Safdie’s biopic “The Smashing Machine” depicts Kerr’s fighting career over a few years, beginning in 1997, as UFC experiences its growing pains.  UFC has promoted 749 events as of October 4, 2025, with the first one kicking off in 1993.  While UFC experiences in recent years enjoy rock concert pomp and circumstance, those early days, obviously, didn’t have the breadth of ballyhoo.  

This movie lives in Mark’s era, as Safdie’s film features a blue-collar daily grind, with a lunch pail filled with protein smoothies and painkillers.  

Except for his time in the ring and cage, Kerr’s free-from-fanfare life consists of training on his own (or with his girlfriend, Dawn (Emily Blunt)), preparing meals at home, and sitting on the couch.  Most of his homelife, however, is spent arguing with Dawn, a frustrating antagonist who does not seem to possess the skillsets of a supportive partner or the will to develop them.  

Dawn isn’t the understanding and encouraging Adrian Pennino/Balboa (Talia Shire) from the “Rocky” movies but rather Ginger McKenna (Sharon Stone), Sam Rothstein’s (Robert De Niro) troublemaking and inflammatory demon of a spouse in “Casino” (1995).  

Mark requires Herculean drive and focus in all phases of life to become an MMA champion, but when adversity strikes during a competition and also with his health (through coping with pain), Dawn and he constantly miscommunicate.  

This bickering couple frequently explains – in no uncertain terms - their individual needs to each other, but neither can satisfy them, which results in exasperation and eventually infuriation by both parties.  

Hence, the necessity for peace in Mark’s personal life is swept up and smashed by Hurricane Dawn, and living with this turbulent weather system can easily forecast misfortune during in-ring/in-cage combat.  

Granted, Kerr contributes to the domestic storm with his OCD tendencies towards meal preparation and household happenings, such as complaining about the cat lying on the couch and Dawn not fulfilling her tree-trimming duties.

Mark’s biggest individual complaint, however, is Dawn’s drinking, when he simultaneously attempts to wean off painkillers, but we only see her drinking once with a friend.  She takes a few aspirin to nurse a hangover on a single occasion.  So, her association with alcohol doesn’t resonate thematically within the confines of a 123-minute picture.

We’re told she has a drinking problem, but it’s not adequately portrayed on-screen. 

Additionally, Mark’s addiction to opiates rises as a central plot point, however, we are only witnesses to one instance of the man using the drug.  There are no other signs of abuse other than suddenly, without warning, Mark ends up in the hospital with his colleague, Mark Coleman (Ryan Bader), comforting him while he weeps.  Kerr, for some reason in this scene, has missing front teeth, but Safdie doesn’t explain this odd visual, as Mark has all his pearly whites in his next on-screen moment.   

What is happening here? 

Our lead is also forced to live in a rehab facility, but the movie only features him walking in and walking out without the potentially thought-provoking and emotional testimonials and physical struggles endured on the inside.  

It seems that “The Smashing Machine” had another 45 minutes of valuable footage left on the cutting room floor that would fill in these gaps and strengthen the connections that Safdie wishes to convey.

Then again, with very little time Mark actually spends in matches (perhaps 15 minutes; it’s difficult to exactly say), another three-quarters of an hour of domestic and addiction messes would further exacerbate the disparity between the physical pugilism and the plights outside it. 

As far as the in-ring camerawork, it’s unremarkable and (mostly, frequently, or perhaps entirely) filmed from outside the ropes from a spectator’s perspective.  It feels distant, and the nondescript, unknown, and unseen fight announcers’ commonplace cadence and commentary don’t add to the experience.  

Where’s the late Fred Willard when you need him? 

Still, Johnson absolutely sells the corporeal confrontations with his decades of wrestling experience under his championship belts.  

Also note that Johnson is in incredible shape for the part, with his inhuman brawn seemingly capable of crushing bricks with his bare hands.  He obviously worked hard in the gym and in rehearsals.  With the nifty but subtle facial prosthetics and his commitment to portraying the (mostly) soft-spoken Kerr, Johnson is entirely believable as The Smashing Machine (and so is Blunt as Dawn).

The famed WWE superstar at some point, after the initial curiosity, melds into Kerr, a grappler grappling with everyday opponents - namely, his relationship, drugs, one example of money concerns (that is never mentioned again), and fighting setbacks – when trying to win in the game of life.  

Winning may be the best feeling there is, but the pedestrian, choppy screenplay and questionable editing and production decisions ruin any chance for victory.  

Unfortunately, “The Smashing Machine” swings and misses.

Jeff’s ranking

2/4 stars

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The Smashing Machine - Movie Review By Monte Yazzie

Director: Benny Safdie

Starring: Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt

2h 14m

"The Smashing Machine" offers ringside seats in the chaotic and brutal world of the early 1990s mixed martial arts through the eyes of a dominant yet troubled figure, Mark Kerr. Known as "The Smashing Machine," Kerr was a two-time UFC Heavyweight Tournament champion and one of the pioneers of the sport, bridging the gap between wrestling and martial arts in the late 1990s. The film marks a dramatic departure for Dwayne Johnson, the former WWE superstar and global action icon, who delivers a career-best performance. Johnson, under heavy makeup, embodies Kerr with a dedication that sheds the familiar Hollywood action hero persona for which he is known. Johnson delivers a rugged yet nuanced and affecting portrayal of a man defined by the intensity of his profession.

Writer/Director Benny Safdie's biopic chronicles Kerr's rise as a professional fighter and subsequent struggles with addiction, tracking his arrival in the high-stakes PRIDE organization in Japan in the 1990s. The film takes a raw spectator's perspective on Kerr's dominance, a seemingly unstoppable machine in the ring with a decisive mentality for winning. However, as the demands intensify, both in the ring with lingering injuries and in personal life with his tumultuous relationship with girlfriend Dawn (Emily Blunt), the story centers on Kerr's addiction to prescription painkillers and, like any cinematic sports story, the comeback. 

Johnson delivers an emotional and imposing performance that is undeniably the film's centerpiece. Johnson's commitment to embodying the fighter goes beyond the prosthetics and the muscles; he captures the duality of Kerr—a powerhouse competitor chasing perfection in the ring, yet profoundly vulnerable emotionally and ultimately isolated outside of it. The moments showcasing Kerr's battle with substance use, primarily his addiction to pain medication, are depicted with a rawness that exemplifies Johnson's performance. He successfully portrays the desperation and the obsessive drive of a Kerr, who sacrifices and destroys himself physically and emotionally to remain the best in a sport.

Despite the intensity of Johnson's performance, "The Smashing Machine" often feels emotionally distant, never willing to venture into the difficult moments to connect the character in a real way to the trials and tribulations that define the journey. Safdie captures the spectacle of the prize fight with unflinching realism; the brutality hits in a way that you can feel the pain, and the realistic fighting moments are incredible. Yet, once the moments in the ring are over, the film seems hesitant to venture beyond the ropes and behind the curtain. The viewer is left feeling like a spectator watching the fight on television or in the stands, observing the significant, brutal events, the wins, the relapses, and the dramatic confrontations, all of which are presented in broad strokes. We witness the downfall but rarely get to immerse ourselves in the quiet, agonizing process of healing, the personal pain, or the daily struggle of recovery, sobriety, and preparation for the subsequent brutal encounter. The film outlines the significant moments in Kerr's life, but seldom delves into the core of the man, the parts that make the machine operate.

Ultimately, "The Smashing Machine" serves as a testament to Dwayne Johnson's ability to handle dramatic material, a definite career highlight for the actor. However, aside from the performance, the film struggles to find its emotional target. While it captures the brutal exterior of professional mixed martial arts, it rarely dedicates the time to exploring the deeper, more complex battles of dependency and identity that Mark Kerr faced in every aspect of his life as a modern gladiator.

Monte's Rating

3.00 out of 5.00

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Anemone - Movie Review

Directed by: Ronan Day-Lewis

Written by: Daniel Day-Lewis and Ronan Day-Lewis.

Starring: Daniel Day-Lewis, Sean Bean and Samantha Morton

Runtime: 121 minutes 

‘Anemone’ unpacks deep trauma in Daniel Day-Lewis’ big-screen return

What a blessing it is to have Daniel Day-Lewis back on the big screen — even if it means having to stomach his delivery of a 10-minute monologue about defecating on a priest. 

The three-time Oscar-winning actor (“My Left Foot,” “There Will Be Blood,” “Lincoln”) retired, to the grief of cinephiles and lovers of fine faces everywhere, after his Oscar-nominated turn as the prissy and precise Reynolds Woodcock in Paul Thomas Anderson’s resplendent 2017 drama “Phantom Thread.” He was only 60 at the time, an unexpectedly early exit for such a celebrated thespian not in want of interesting work. 

We have nepotism to thank for his return. Ronan Day-Lewis, 27, directs his father in his first feature-length film from a script they wrote together, the gorgeously outfitted if narratively opaque family drama “Anemone,” named for the delicately petalled white wildflowers reclusive Ray (Day-Lewis) plants around his solitary cottage in the woods. There he lives as a hermit, tending garden and drinking whiskey in his shelter from the howling wind, half-feral with the isolation when he receives an unexpected visit from his brother, Jem (Sean Bean). 

“Anemone,” to its credit and detriment, is in no rush to tell you what it’s about, lounging in the languid squalor of Ray’s primitive cottage, asking searching questions with no immediate answers. Jem is prayerful, dutiful, Ray gleefully blasphemous. “You’re going to hell, brother,” Jem says. “Family reunion!” Ray quips in reply. 

There are hints like this scattered like breadcrumbs in a dark wood of Ray’s motivation for solitude, suggestions of trauma levied by the brothers’ father, the church and the Troubles. American audiences might struggle to grasp the intimations; a keen grip on the socio-political landscape of 20th century Britain and Ireland, though, helps reveal “Anemone” as a trauma narrative. Slowly, over drunken evenings, midnight dance parties and the occasional brotherly fistfight, it is revealed that Jem is the dutiful husband to Ray’s abandoned wife Nessa (Samantha Morton) and father-figure to Ray’s likewise abandoned son Brian (Samuel Bottomley) and has come to try to entice Ray back to his family and help his son, who’s beginning to unravel as he enters young adulthood.

It’s beyond cliché to say that some actors can make even reading a phone book interesting. Day-Lewis does us one better and makes that interminable priest-defection monologue feel like high art. “Anemone” is an unsurprisingly actorly film, its patient silence interrupted by stitched-together monologues: Day-Lewis, Bean and Morton are given space and time to stretch their powers so that even when the elusive narrative frustrates, the characters keep you invested. 

It's not an insult to call “Anemone” a nepotistic endeavor, merely an observation. How else could a 20-something first-time filmmaker entice actor Day-Lewis out of retirement? But “Anemone” deserves to be engaged with sincerely. Director Day-Lewis approaches the subject of trauma — both personal trauma and historical trauma — in visually striking ways. With an assist from cinematographer Ben Fordesman, who also shot the unsettlingly pretty, emotionally ugly films “Love Lies Bleeding” and “Saint Maud,” “Anemone” interweaves the simple drama unexpected phantasmagorical elements. Strange woodland creatures, spectral visitations and violent weather events serve as gorgeous, unnerving harbingers, portals into the tortured characters’ states of mind. 

There is a whiff of wet-behind-the-ears pretension to some of it, but when everything works in harmony, “Anemone” moves like a prize fighter, dancing around the point for what feels like ages then delivering a knockout uppercut.

Barbara’s ranking

2.5/4 stars

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“One Battle After Another” – Movie Review

Directed and written by:  Paul Thomas Anderson

Starring:  Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Chase Infiniti, Teyana Taylor, Regina Hall, and Benicio Del Toro

Runtime:  161 minutes

‘One Battle After Another’:  The cinematic hits don’t let up for over two and a half hours 

“Viva la revolucion!” – Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio)

The French 75 is an assembly of domestic vigilantes, terrorists, or folk heroes, depending upon your perspective.  Set during a time that resembles modern-day America, these revolutionaries are either a menace to the state of things or freedom fighters embarking on a just conflict against an oppressive regime.  They blow up office buildings, electrical grids, and banks, and they sometimes rob them.  

Director/writer Paul Thomas Anderson didn’t have to rob a bank to make his tenth film, “One Battle After Another”, but his big-budget action flick allegedly cost well over $100 million.  Well, the studio’s spending certainly shines and booms on the big screen. 

For much of the 161-minute runtime, “Battle” feels like “Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning” (2023) meets “Midnight Run” (1998) meets “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” (1991), where Col. Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn) attempts to hunt down the French 75 and especially our lead, Bob.  Lockjaw does not intend to arrest the “75” and place them in custody.  

In a relentless pursuit, Lockjaw is playing for keeps.

Anderson demonstrates early in the first act that Lockjaw and his platoon mean business, when one of the 75, Mae (Alana Haim from “Licorice Pizza” (2021)), is – spoiler alert – viciously and efficiently killed, much like smashing a fly with a newspaper and discarding it in the trash. 

“Battle” dives headfirst into government (perceived or real) overreach and the violent battles against it, immigration, and race.  

The audience doesn’t witness the initial tyranny that causes the revolutionaries to begin combat, as the film opens with Bob (previously named Pat), his girlfriend, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), and company committing a montage of destructive illegalities.  Still, the “State” responds with coordinated extractions and ferocious attacks, as seen by Mae’s demise, and Bob/Pat, Perfida, Deandra (Regina Hall), and the rest find themselves on the run. 

When pricey theatrical endeavors confront grand ideas, filmmakers can struggle to balance both their ambitious production plans and compelling character studies within a single movie.  However, Anderson successfully manages this delicate celluloid scale, a daring tightrope walk, with care.

First, he doesn’t bog down the former with lengthy histories of atrocities on both sides.  Instead, he conveys the long, painful “war” through his characters’ battle-fatigued facial expressions and the clashes that exist in the here and now, while also including the never-stressed Sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio Del Toro) and his immigrant community mainstay, as well as a secret society where diversity isn’t tolerated.   

Second, with the plethora of car chases, explosions, and stressful, winding on-foot pursuits, “Battle” is grounded in a personal mano a mano conflict between Lockjaw and Bob stemming from the opposing sides of the State vs. Rebels confrontation and the affection for Perfidia.  Lockjaw and Bob’s disagreement comically begins when Bob commits a harmless but also aggressive physical gesture.  

A rivalry is born! 

The dichotomy between Lockjaw and Bob is as evident as the sun rising from the east.  Aside from their stark philosophical and political differences, Lockjaw’s stringent, dedicated, and manicured appearance and strict posture contrast with Bob’s pot-smoking, casual, and frequently-trying-to-catch-up (while wearing a flannel bathrobe) persona.  

Costume designer Colleen Atwood and the 12-person makeup team must have had a ball making this movie! 

Anyway, Anderson shoots and pens this two-man confrontation (and includes Bob’s daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti) as a critical character) with Lockjaw’s T-1000 mindset versus Bob’s The Dude (from “The Big Lebowski” (1998)) outlook taking center stage.  Penn and DiCaprio take PTA’s cues and run with them – with gravity and humor - in utterly compelling Oscar-worthy performances. 

Expect an anxiety-driven, thrilling, and provocative time at the movies, with some gentler moments playfully dancing on occasion.  For instance, after about 45 minutes of composer Jonny Greenwood’s constant and taxing piano work, the audience gratefully meets Willa in the Sensei’s class with Steely Dan’s “Dirty Work”.   I said silently, “Oh, good.  I love this song.”

Hey, when witnessing a revolution, it’s refreshing to take a moment to appreciate Donald Fagen and Walter Becker. 

Jeff’s ranking

3.5/4 stars

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Best of TIFF 2025 – Part Two

The 50th Toronto International Festival (TIFF) certainly offers movies that will compete for Oscar gold in March 2026, but this fabulous cinematic lineup has countless other options for professionals and fans of all ages.  

This proud Phoenix Film Festival critic has caught 46 films in total at the festival.   On Sept. 12, the Phoenix Film Festival published five of my favorites.  Here are five more: The Best of TIFF 2025 – Part Two. 

Thank you for reading.  See these movies!

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“Calle Malaga” – Carmen Maura is fabulous as Maria, a senior determined to remain in her home and, more importantly, live her best life in director Maryam Touzani’s lovely drama set in Tangier.  Maria’s daughter, Clara (Marta Etura), sells her mother’s possessions and plans to unload her home, but Maria intends to stay and buy back her things with a delightful and enterprising strategy.  In addition to making new friends with her new venture, Maria leans into Abslam (Ahmed Boulane), the pawn shop owner who has her possessions, and Sister Josefa (Maria Alfonsa Rosso) for several touching and comical moments.  Touzani and Maura remind us never to give up and to embrace the here and now. 

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“Good Boy” – Tommy (Anson Boon) is a menace.  In an opening montage that seemingly extends forever, Tommy rampages across an unnamed UK city, drinks mass quantities of alcohol, uses drugs, curses, picks fights, and seemingly enacts every horrible behavior under the sun short of killing someone.  Well, Chris (Stephen Graham), a husband and father who lives on a spacious country estate, steps in to “correct” Tommy’s atrocious conduct.  Director Jan Komasa chronicles Tommy’s new living arrangements in a bizarre but engaging drama that poses several questions about Chris and his family’s backstory as well as this defiant young man’s future.  Graham (“Adolescence” (2025)) delivers a fascinating performance, and Boon capably matches this on-screen surrogate dad’s drive and problematic discipline methods.

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“Sound of Falling” – Director-co-writer Mascha Schilinski’s haunting epic captures everyday and disconcerting milestone events over multiple generations, for over 100 years, in Northern Germany.  Schilinski frequently shifts back and forth between the periods at seemingly natural breaks but also without warning as connections between individual traumas of each era slowly materialize.  With a sprawling 149-minute runtime, stunning imagery, an astonishing sound design, and no easy answers, “Sound of Falling” resonates as a tragic work of art and an emotional maze that needs multiple viewings to absorb, see, and hear all its intricate details and messages.

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“Train Dreams” – Joel Edgerton is Robert Grainier, a lonely soul who sets roots in Idaho during the early 20th century, earns a living as a logger and railroad hand, and finds a new sense of purpose when he meets and falls in love with Gladys (Felicity Jones) in director Clint Bentley’s beautifully constructed, acted, and shot picture of an ordinary man’s journey.  Since Robert is a man of few words, Bentley introduces key supporting characters – played by Clifton Collins Jr., Kerry Condon, William H. Macy, and more - throughout the picture who enter our reserved lead’s world and add contemplative words to enrich his perspective.  Narrated by Will Patton – who also recites Denis Johnson’s audiobook – “Train Dreams” has some feels of Terrence Malick’s “A Hidden Life” (2019) and Robert Redford’s “A River Runs Through It” (1992).

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“Whistle” – Eighty-eight years ago, Snow White encouraged us to whistle while we work, and the contestants of the Masters of Musical Whistling competition are following her lead!  Director Christopher Nelius’ documentary seems like a Christopher Guest mockumentary as several creative, imaginative, and eccentric domestic and international personalities descend on Los Angeles to compete for the World Champion whistler title.  Often stressed-out but capable taskmaster Carole Anne Kaufman runs the event like a third-world leader or a caring mom (depending on the moment) to support the whistlers and entertain the audience.  Meanwhile, Nelius offers in-depth profiles of the contestants – like Yuki, Lauren, Jay, and Anya – both off-stage and on-stage during their biggest moments.  Odd, funny, and charming, “Whistle” is a harmonious 84-minute doc.

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HIM - Movie Review

Director: Justin Tipping

Starring: Tyriq Withers, Marlon Wayans, Julia Fox, Tim Heidecker, Don Benjamin and Jim Jefferies

1h 36m

"HIM", a new film directed by Justin Tipping, which filmmaker Jordan Peele produced, arrives with a slick aesthetic that explores the inherent connection between the brutality of sports and horror stories. The film builds a compelling atmosphere around the intense mentality of elite-level athletes; however, while visually striking with its construction, the narrative steps out of bounds on its way to the endzone, favoring style over substance. Despite the standout performances from its lead actors, an intense Marlon Wayans steals the show throughout; "HIM" builds its ideas on the shoulders of rich horror characteristics, but ultimately doesn't have much to say in the end.

The film centers on Cameron Cade (Tyriq Withers), a talented young quarterback whose promising future is abruptly jeopardized by a career-threatening injury. Still wanting to make an impact, Cam accepts an invitation to train at the compound of his hero, Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans), an aging eight-time championship quarterback whose legendary status has earned him the moniker "GOAT" (Greatest of All Time). What begins as a mentorship quickly spirals into a dark, isolated, and disorienting journey. Cam uncovers the sacrifices demanded by the relentless pursuit of greatness.

Director Justin Tipping composes "HIM" with undeniable style; it functions at moments like a highlight reel with perfect beat drops and flashy camera moves in the vein of a Hype Williams hip-hop video from the late 90s. The narrative broadly establishes a metaphor around the brutality of sports, particularly football, positioning it as a sports spectacle that often borders on the horrific, as examined in one scene showing the grotesque results of competition on the lower extremities. "HIM" highlights the physical abuse of athletics, the consistent pressure to perform at the highest degree, and the combative nature of the game, where the players' mentality for winning is a battle of life and death. 

"HIM" excels prominently with its striking visuals and performances from its two lead actors, Marlon Wayans and Tyriq Withers, both combining a sense of coolness and chaos that makes their sports personas feel genuine. Director of Photography Kira Kelly's work creates a visually slick and vivid sports experience, while Wayans delivers an electrifying and increasingly unsettling performance. The blend of football highlights, religious iconography, and occult musings creates a strong visual impression. Still, ultimately, they are just tools that attempt to add mystery to the narrative, which never quite knows what it is trying to be or say. 

Unfortunately, "HIM" gets lost in its own stylistic ambitions, sacrificing substance for spectacle with a narrative that feels confused and empty of any voice. The initially strong themes lose their impact as the plot veers into a nightmarish fever dream for the emerging football star. The story becomes increasingly abstract and confused, pushing to the goal line ending that showcases a bizarre cult ritual, but mostly highlighting how striking bright red blood can look against pure white outfits. Again, the style of "HIM" is the captain of this team. 

"HIM" boasts undeniably intense yet amusing imagery, which ultimately overshadows its narrative and thematic depth. While it begins with a strong premise and visual impact, the film struggles to maintain its grasp on what it's trying to convey, leaving a void where a deeper examination of the dark side of sports could have been explored.

Monte's Rating

2.00 out of 5.00

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Best of TIFF 2025 – Part One

The 50th Toronto International Festival (TIFF) certainly offers movies that will compete for Oscar gold in March 2026, but this fabulous cinematic lineup has countless other options for professionals and fans of all ages. This proud Phoenix Film Festival critic has caught 38 films so far. Here are five of my favorites: The Best of TIFF 2025 – Part One.

Thank you for reading, and I’ll see you soon, Phoenix!

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“I Swear” – A total crowd-pleaser! Robert Aramayo delivers an endearing performance as John Davidson, a real-life Scotsman with Tourette’s, in a heartbreaking, hilarious, tender, and emotional biopic. Director/writer Kirk Jones (“Waking Ned Devine” (1998)), Aramayo, and the terrific supporting cast – led by Maxine Peake, Peter Mullan, and Shirley Henderson – wield these emotions and more in a film that dives headfirst and close-up into Davidson’s struggles that began during his teenage years. Unwanted verbal (and sometimes physical) outbursts could occur at any second, which obviously leads to John’s constant anxiety – but also the sympathetic audience’s - in anticipation of ill-timed, unsavory moments, as we curse the disorder and hope for a cure as much as Davidson does.

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“The Last Viking” – Anker (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) robs a bank, and just before the police arrive, he instructs his younger brother, Manfred (Mads Mikkelsen), to hide the money.  Manfred, however, isn’t entirely reliable due to his mental illness, and when the system releases Anker from prison, the pair embark on a dysfunctional treasure hunt for the loot!  Director/writer Anders Thomas Jensen pens several colorful characters in a kooky, wild, and violent dramedy that is paired with a haunting Viking tale.  Mikkelsen’s physical comedic gifts and flawless timing lead to utterly flabbergasting moments, but the famous “Casino Royale” (2006) villain also carries convincing dramatic depth when playing the ever-so-fragile Manfred.

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“No Other Choice” – Man-soo (Lee Byung-hun) is content, fulfilled, and living his best life!  He’s a long-time executive with a paper company and lives in a beautiful, spacious home with his loving wife and two children.  However, Man-soo’s happy reality falls into jeopardy when he loses his job, and the bills pile up.  Director Park Chan-wook (“Old Boy” (2003), “The Handmaiden” (2016)) and Lee determine that our lead’s desperate times call for extreme actions.  You see, Man-soo has “no other choice” in this entertaining and unpredictable experience, and Park spins his cinematic gifts into the idea that one unfortunate corporate judgment can crumple a secure existence into a precarious, unstable one.

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“Obsession” – Have you ever had a crush on someone who didn’t reciprocate those feelings?  Welcome to Bear’s (Michael Johnston) world!  He’s in love with long-time friend and co-worker Nikki (Inde Navarrette).  Bear seems forever stuck in the friend zone until he makes a wish for Nikki to love him, and guess what?  His request comes true!  Unfortunately, Nikki doesn’t just suddenly adore Bear; she’s obsessed with him in director/writer Curry Barker’s creepy, insidious horror flick.  Barker plays a lot with lighting, relationship anxieties, and taxing anticipation (for the worst) with this nightmarish bond, one in which Bear realizes that breaking up is not an option.  Navarrette – in her first big-screen horror role - is frighteningly exceptional as the fanatical Nikki. 

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“Sirat” – Director/writer Oliver Laxe’s searing and surreal road-trip movie feels like “Mad Max: Fury Road” (2015) meets “Tracks” (2013), and this comparison does not do this movie justice.  Set in the desolate, despairing Moroccan desert, a distressed father, Luis (Sergi Lopez), searches for his daughter.  He travels with his young son, Esteban (Bruno Nunez Arjona), to a rave in the middle of nowhere with the hopes of finding her.  After this rhythmic party breaks up, the fish-out-of-water parent-child duo follows a small group of counter-culture attendees to the next one.  However, gas stations, convenience stores, and fast-food joints are nonexistent on this barren landscape, as the on-screen ensemble hopes that they don’t also become missing.   

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“Relay” – Movie Review

Directed by:  David Mackenzie

Written by:  Justin Piasecki

Starring:  Riz Ahmed, Lily James, Matthew Maher, Eisa Davis, and Sam Worthington 

Runtime:  112 minutes

‘Relay’ translates into a compelling small-scale thriller in a massive and crowded New York City 

“This is the Tri-State Relay Service.”

A relay service is a communication program for the deaf and non-speaking communities.  The service provides a method for the aforementioned persons to receive and send phone calls.  An individual machine – that can sit in a home or business – has a small keyboard and an analog display that reveals the conversation between two parties.  

If one relay user wishes to converse with a hearing or speaking individual, a liaison, who acts like an old-fashioned operator, calls that person, manually voices the message, and can “relay” a typed memo back to the originator.  

In a 21st-century world of the Internet, YouTube, and smartphones, the text telephone was invented in 1964.  The first relay service was established during the 1970s. 

This valuable 20th-century innovation plays an enormous role in director David Mackenzie’s (“Hell or High Water” (2016)) “Relay”, obviously, since the technology is the name of his compelling small-scale thriller in the massive metropolis of New York City. 

During the first act, Sarah Grant (Lily James), a bright, young executive, meets with a lawyer.  Sarah is desperate and explains that she stole company documents that prove that their bioengineered foods would or could harm humans who consume them.  The attorney initially believes that she is a whistleblower, but she insists that she wants to avoid trouble and return the documents. 

Return the documents?!!?

Who can she turn to?   

The barrister knows someone. 

“I’ve never met him.  That’s kind of the point.” 

Ash (Riz Ahmed) is that person.  Through especially covert means, Ash is a fixer.  With intricate planning and espionage-level gadgets, Ash can bring two parties together for an agreement, where crucial information can be exchanged without harm to someone like Sarah.  

Ahmed was mesmerizing as a rock drummer who loses his hearing in the deeply affecting “Sound of Metal” (2019), but Ash is not deaf when frequently relying on the relay machine and service in “Relay”.   

However, one might question Ash’s hearing or speech state.  Unless this critic missed it (which is entirely possible), Ash doesn’t speak for the first 28 minutes (or thereabouts) of Mackenzie’s film.  Instead, we see this silent operative work with his first on-screen client, Hoffman (Matthew Maher), and plan his safe getaway after returning documents to a pharmaceutical CEO (Victor Garber) in a modest NYC establishment.  Ash keeps a copy of the company’s returned records under lock and key as a safeguard for Hoffman’s protection.  

“If anything should happen to me, then….”

Since Ash doesn’t utter a word (or much of one, if again, this critic missed it) for the first half-hour, you might be glued to the screen watching our lead’s every meticulous step.  He works alone, like a private detective but with spy-like skills, and his mind seems to be playing a dozen matches of chess simultaneously while operating – on the outside - with the cool efficiency of a cyborg cruising on autopilot.  

Ash uses relay as a prime method of communicating with his clients to preserve his anonymity when tendering sensitive negotiations and high stakes.  Relay is dependable, safe, and used throughout the film as engaging cinematic exchanges between Ash and his clients and interested third parties.  However, for most of the film, his attention and work are squarely focused on Sarah, who badly needs his help.  

Ash is constantly communicating with Sarah and three reps from her previous employer, the biotech company.  However, Dawson (Sam Worthington) and his two associates aren’t long-time white-collar executives who belong to country clubs or own second homes in The Hamptons.  They are hired guns, the muscle to reacquire the valuable research that Sarah pocketed, and if they scare (or possibly harm) her, well – in Dawson’s mind – that’s life in the big city. 

Worthington doesn’t play Dawson as a cartoonish heavy but rather a determined, informed villain who doesn’t use violence (at least initially) but seems awfully capable of taking extreme measures.  Dawson and his stooges face off – from a distance – with Ash and Sarah.  

Sarah is attractive, naive, and frightened, and even though the two don’t meet in person quite yet, Ash sees photos of her online, and through their conversations, she develops into a damsel in distress for Ash.  She’s more than just a benign customer in his world.

Justin Piasecki’s screenplay reveals Ash’s vulnerabilities through two confidential group settings and another moment in a local pub.  He’s a loner in both his personal and work life, so these two small assembly scenes dictate his only real connections.  

Hence, when this lonely heart begins to connect with Sarah, we entirely believe it. 

“Relay” also connects with the setting.  New York City’s streets are bustling.  People from all walks of life are walking everywhere.  Corporate offices stand alongside modest, moody speakeasies, late-night Asian cuisine spots, and crowded convenience stores.  

Even though Ash wishes to be faceless and nameless in his work, he freely moves about The Big Apple without concern and becomes “lost” in a sea of people and concrete.  Mackenzie and cinematographer Giles Nuttgens film on location and use the crowded urban environment as another character, and often use random individuals looking at (or approaching) Ash, Sarah, or even Hoffman as immediate or potential threats, and these moments swell our anxiety.  

Danger could come from anywhere, and we feel the concern for Sarah’s and Ash’s safety.  Thankfully, this job is not Ash’s first rodeo, but when the heart is potentially in play, working with Sarah places him in a hazardous arena for the first time; this helps translate “Relay” into a clever and stressful experience.

 Jeff’s ranking

3/4 stars

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“Americana” – Movie Review

Directed and written by:  Tony Tost

Starring:  Sydney Sweeney, Paul Walter Hauser, Halsey, Simon Rex, Eric Dane, Gavin Maddox Bergman, Christopher Kriesa, and Zahn McClarnon

Runtime:  107 minutes

‘Americana’:  Tost’s feature film debut is a wild, violent yarn that ties in colorful characters and an elusive shirt

A Ghost Shirt.  

The definition of Americana in Merriam-Webster is - materials concerning or characteristic of America, its civilization, or its culture. 

In director/writer Tony Tost’s wild and violent crime story, his first feature film, the aforementioned article of clothing – a relic from the Lakota people - is a slice of Americana, and an assortment of colorful, memorable South Dakota (although filmed in New Mexico) characters hope to secure a massive payday.  

In a 2023 interview with (YouTube) “The Successful Screenwriter”, Tost said, “Tarantino and The Coen Brothers are obviously so storytelling-baked into my DNA.”  

Like in just about any Quentin Tarantino film, Tost’s on-screen players frequently engage in lengthy exposition to help define their personalities and highlight their motivations.  “Americana” includes a non-linear element, a catchy soundtrack with current and way-back-when tunes, and sudden bursts of carnage that explode (sometimes) out of nowhere from both disreputable and (supposedly) virtuous characters.  

“Americana” also breathes in modest western locales, like in “Blood Simple” (1984), where felonious plans are quietly considered and debated in pubs and humble abodes.

The movie first introduces us to Mandy (Halsey, the pop singer), her younger “brother”, Cal (Gavin Maddox Bergman), and her boorish boyfriend, Dillon (Eric Dane).  Straightaway, Dillon gins up nasty vibes towards the elementary school-aged Cal and Mandy, which results in a pair of violent episodes.  This scene introduces us to Cal’s tireless insistence that he is actually Sitting Bull, just reincarnated, and this Caucasian kid frequently carries a bow and arrow and always dons a blue war bonnet minus the feathers.  

Proceeding in a chapter format, we are whisked across town to a diner where Lefty Ledbetter (Paul Walter Hauser), a stout, gentle, soft-spoken fella (with a cowboy hat and full beard) speaks from the heart (with Cliff Notes handy), and Penny Jo (Sydney Sweeney), a waitress with a stutter, but with dreams of living in Nashville and singing country music, listens.  

These acquaintances are a pair of sweet, kind souls, and they both share the passive quality of allowing life to run them over.  However, when they learn of a priceless Lakota Ghost Shirt running around town, they grab life by the horns and attempt to poach it for themselves.  

In contrast to Dillon, Roy (Simon Rex), a greedy collection dealer, Fun Dave (Joe Adler), and Hiram Starr (Christopher Kriesa), a ruthless businessman with cult-leader intentions, Lefty, Penny Jo, Mandy, and Cal are righteous protagonists, but not entirely.  

No one in this movie is free of sin, not even Cal. 

Everyone mentioned, but Hiram partakes in a race to “capture the flag” for this elusive garment, and add Ghost Eye (Zahn McClarnon) to the mix, who simply wishes to return the shirt to his people.  

The entire cast superbly dives into their respective roles, and Sweeney and Hauser’s vulnerabilities, Halsey’s fight, Bergman’s singular focus, and McClarnon’s quiet, steadfast determination are the mesmerizing highlights across the 107-minute runtime.  

As the search marches on, some participants/combatants courteously inquire about retrieving or paying for this particular apparel.  Ignore these pleasantries because force – in the form of firearms and other weapons – will be used to secure the Native American attire. 

Despite rooting for Mandy, Cal, Lefty, Penny Jo, and Ghost Eye, it’s truly anyone’s guess who will win the day, because in this unpredictable labyrinth of ragtag desperation, the villains seem to have an equal possibility of raising the clothing trophy.  

The Ghost Shirt may be the most obvious and celebrated piece of Americana in “Americana”, but before the film’s conclusion, so are hilarious sight gags, a collection of walking wounded and lethally wounded, a sidebar of atrocious abuse, a pseudo-“Kill Bill: Vol. 2” compound, and a genuine outpouring of on-screen and audience emotion.    

Jeff’s ranking

3.5/4 stars

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Celebrate Eric Bana’s 57th birthday with this engaging triple feature

Eric Bana turns 57 years young on August 9, and this talented, charismatic Australian-born actor has lit up the big screen for 28 years.  To celebrate Eric’s birthday, here is an engaging triple feature that showcases the man’s thespian gifts, including one role that earned him the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts’ Audience Choice Award! 

Happy Birthday, Eric!  Thank you for your work. 

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“Chopper” (2000) – Mark Brandon “Chopper” Read’s surname is apropos, because this violent Melbourne (Australia) criminal wrote his autobiography while in prison.  In director Andrew Dominik’s pugilistic, and sometimes surreal, biopic, Eric Bana – in his first big-screen leading role - plays the infamous and paranoid title character, a brute who would rather violently lash out at his enemies and friends through several preemptive, shocking strikes rather than wait around for their potential assaults. 

Dominik and Bana do not feature this real-life ruffian jotting down notes in a spiral notebook or typing away on a Remington typewriter during the often vicious 94-minute runtime.  Set from 1978 to 1991, the director and actor showcase Chopper’s gift of gab and curse of obsessive mistrust while in jail and roaming Melbourne’s streets.  The production sweats in (mostly) bleak or ordinary surroundings while Chopper feels in constant crisis.  

He confides with his girlfriend, Tanya (Kate Beahan), that he should take “some time to be normal.”  

Mark certainly does not engage in customary behavior as he constantly creates his troubles with fellow prisoners or several civilians in his path, as his fists, knives, or guns are his tools of choice.  Chopper even sits in a chair and demands that another convict cut off portions of his body, like a demented, heinous session at the barber shop in a crucial moment that demonstrates our lead’s abnormal brain patterns.  No worries, Bana allegedly gained significant weight to play Mr. Read, so it all evens out.  Okay, not really.  Still, this uneven but engrossing character study is worth carving out just over 90 minutes on your schedule to experience Bana’s disconcerting portrayal. 

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“Hanna” (2011) – Hanna (Saoirse Ronan), a slender 16-year-old, fires an arrow into an enormous deer that falls in the open snow.  She stands above the four-legged mammal and utters, “I just missed your heart.” 

Our young, blonde-haired lead seems usually and emotionally cold in the frigid temperatures, and the reasons for her icy persona soon become clear.  

Her father, Erik (Eric Bana), suddenly approaches her and exclaims, “You’re dead.”

The two begin hand-to-hand combat in a kinetic, aggressive exercise that results in Hanna lying beside the deceased deer and wondering why she failed in her mission, even though she caught the bounty for numerous suppers in their isolated log cabin, located somewhere in Northern Europe (and filmed in Finland). 

Hanna’s mother, Johanna (Vicky Krieps), has passed away, so Erik and Hanna are each other’s only family.  Instead of regular chores, Dad teaches Hanna to shoot guns, speak several languages, engage in close-quarters fighting, and offer nightly lectures, like explaining the size of blue whales and exploding stars.  The movie later reveals Erik’s hazardous profession, one that requires lethal force and high intellect, as he relentlessly attempts to share his extensive knowledge with Hanna in a lifetime course of the Girl Scouts on steroids, along with a hydrogen bomb or two. 

Erik and Hanna prepare for some unknown mission, one against CIA agent/executive Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett), and the wily but dutiful teenager sets the hazardous pursuit in motion, where the pair split up but will eventually rendezvous in Berlin.  

Ronan is a wonder as the ever-capable fighting machine and puzzle solver, as she finds herself in a massive concrete Black operations facility and then out into the world for the first time.  Hanna might have more worldly knowledge than 100 MBAs, but she completely missed her childhood and simple comforts like electricity.  Director Joe Wright spends more time than needed on Hanna’s journey with her new and temporary surrogate British family on holiday, but these moments attempt to showcase her unique talents and naivete.  

Meanwhile, Wright also frequently volleys over to Erik’s travels.  This dangerous gent, on occasion, will reveal his combative skills that would make Neo (Keanu Reeves) green with envy, in Bana’s uber-capable and calm yet relentless performance.  Additionally, Erik’s talents feel even more impressive while witnessing Hanna expertly handle her pressures for hundreds of miles towards her hopeful destination in Germany.  

“Hanna” might have a few misses, but this action movie beats to a genuine heart.

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“The Dry” (2020) – Director Robert Connolly’s riveting noir is set in a parched small Australian town, Kiewarra, under scorching hot and bright skies.  It hasn’t rained in 324 days, and Connolly and cinematographer Stephan Duscio’s camera captures the brown, cracked earth desperate for a quench of water.

However, the dry village suddenly becomes soaked with death.  A family was murdered.  A mother, a father, and a little boy are dead, and the deceased dad could be the suspect.  The patriarch, Luke, is a former best friend of Aaron Falk (Eric Bana), a federal policeman.  Aaron lives in the big city, but he travels to Kiewarra to attend the funeral. 

A lethal mystery lingers in the air, but now that Aaron is home, thoughts of a fateful day – 20 years earlier - repeatedly enter his mind.  A teenage girl, Ellie, was found drowned, and Luke and Aaron, teenagers as well, were thought to play a role in her demise.  

Ellie was Aaron’s girlfriend.  

“The Dry” is filled with this captivating present-day whodunit and the persistent agony of the painful past, and Aaron finds himself in the center of both.  Some locals are pleased to see Aaron, but others are straightaway convinced he’s guilty of (or was involved with) Ellie’s passing.  

Connolly and casting director Jane Norris did a crackerjack job of casting Bana as the conflicted, tortured, and professional lawman forced to face his past and push through the noise, threats, and mystery of the here and now.  

As Aaron searches for clues and asks questions, Connolly and Bana introduce us to small-town residents, like Luke’s parents (Bruce Spence and Julia Blake), his old friend, Gretchen (Genevieve O’Reilly), an antagonist named Grant (Matt Nable), and a young police sergeant (Keir O’Donnell) who partners with our troubled lead.   At 117 minutes, “The Dry” doesn’t splash and spray with a reckless pace.  Instead, Connolly and Harry Cripps’ script, based on Jane Harper’s 2016 novel, matches the tranquil, peaceful, and wide-open environment but with an undertow of anxiety and secrets.  

With a pitch-perfect cast and an absorbing mystery, this modern-day noir doesn’t wither under the blazing sun. 

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“Architecton” – Movie Review

Directed and written by:  Victor Kossakovsky

Starring:  Michele De Lucchi and Victor Kossakovsky

Runtime:  98 minutes

Kossakovsky builds a compelling arthouse look at our imperfect relationship with natural resources in ‘Architecton’ 

In “Gunda” (2020), Victor Kossakovsky’s previous documentary, he traveled to a Norwegian farm and filmed the life of a pig named Gunda and her piglets.  He focuses his camera on intimate spaces and captures, at exceptionally close range, his four-legged subjects’ daily routines, which induce smiles at times and concerns during others under the transparent embrace of nature. 

Kossakovsky’s new doc, “Architecton”, looks at nature as well but embarks on a completely different scope, a broad, wide-ranging approach that addresses the planet, and specifically, nature’s stone and its relationship to man’s conversion of it to cement.   

“Architecton” is a sweeping, arthouse epic in which Kossakovsky shoots numerous natural landscapes, like enormous mountains and their associated mountainsides, but also strip mines that depict man’s industrial impact on the environment.   These manufactured excursions have a purpose, of course, which is to extract stone and crush it to create cement, the prime ingredient for constructing housing and corporate buildings. 

Victor takes a cynical view of this chief component of construction and modern architecture.

In an October 2024 interview with (YouTube) laserhotline, he says, “We live in a time of fast food, and there are two ingredients (in) fast food, sugar and cement.” 

He adds, “Maybe in a thousand years’ time, people will call our time, not (the) Iron Age, not (the) Stone Age, not (the) Ice Age, but (the) Sugar and Cement Age.  This is our time, and we consume a lot of sugar and cement.” 

Additionally, in the same interview, Victor wanted to portray stone as “not dead, but it’s something alive in a way.”

Watching this interview provided helpful insight into Victor’s perspective before walking into “Architecton”, because his experimental style doesn’t follow traditional filmmaking blueprints.  The only spoken words are conversations between Italian architect Michele De Lucchi and some workers building a circular stone garden on his property.  He speaks to another architect or builder who manually moves large stones by hand and a wheelbarrow in an entirely different place, and has a brief conversation with Kossakovsky about what it all means.

The film doesn’t feature an expose on McDonald’s or Jack in the Box.  Instead, the audience witnesses a constant array of sequences that stimulate thoughts about the natural world and the ways that humans impact it through consuming stone.   Many moments feature mountains and strip mines, but Kossakovsky also introduces images of structures built during the last century and this century and compares them to ancient edifices that have stood or partially stood for hundreds or thousands of years.  

The often-spoken phrase, “They don’t make things like they used to,” will come to mind.  

The film includes a sophisticated machine that pours cement and forms a new wall, which is juxtaposed within the camera frame against an artist attempting to shape a modest stone sculpture with an iron bar holding the rocks in place.  This young man tries to express his ideas through the iron and stone artwork, but “Architecton” also includes the needless, destructive force of man by starkly revealing catastrophic rubble in broad daylight of an Eastern European war transpiring right now.  

Kossakovsky travels to Ukraine, Turkey, Lebanon, Italy, and other unknown spots around the globe.  Actually, the only two known locales that someone can easily recognize are Ukraine and Italy, and the film doesn’t label where we are at any time.  It’s poetic but also a bit frustrating.  This critic needed to look up the other locations afterward.  As Victor and cinematographer Ben Bernhard shuttle around to uninhabited settings and some inhabited ones, accompanied by composer Evgueni Galperine’s score, which feels like a beautiful mash of 21st-century industrial instrumentals and operatic tones.  Just think of the music in the opening to Werner Herzog’s “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” (1972) as Spanish conquistadors march on narrow paths in mountainous Peru.  

The harmonization between the visuals and music feels profound, timeless, and Biblical throughout the 98-minute presentation.  Still, Victor frequently yanks us back to our present, where a resonant but unassuming stone circle is formed in Italy, or wrecked neighborhoods are crumbled like matchsticks and need to be rebuilt.  

More cement!

“Architecton” screened at a July Phoenix Film Society event, and the first audience member to describe the film called it “stunning.”  

Here are some other words that come to mind:  scenic, exploratory, awe-inspiring, comparative, earthy, contemplative, and symbolic. 

Non-linear and vague are a couple of other adjectives, and “Architecton”, with its arthouse flair, is not for everyone, but Kossakovsky is a cinematic artist, whether he devotes his time to a family of pigs on an isolated farm or travels to far-reaching spots to ponder man’s relationship to natural resources.

Jeff’s ranking

3/4 stars

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The Fantastic Four: First Steps - Movie Review

Dir: Matt Shakman

Starring: Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Joseph Quinn, Julia Garner, and Paul Walter Hauser

1h 55m

From the very beginning of "The Fantastic Four: First Steps," it's assumed that the Marvel audience is familiar with these characters. Much like the recent reboot of DC Comics "Superman", the story of Reed Richards aka Mr. Fantastic (Pedro Pascal), Sue Storm aka The Invisible Girl (Vanessa Kirby), Johnny Storm aka The Human Torch (Joseph Quinn), and Ben Grimm aka The Thing (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) has already established a long history of franchise experience within the superhero movie universe. The story of the Fantastic Four has been told in the 1990s, with a Roger Corman-produced odd yet comical B-movie effort, the 2000s with two films starring Jessica Alba and Chris Evans not as Captain America, and the 2010s with a much maligned production but with a fantastic cast starring Kat Mara, Miles Teller, Jamie Bell, and Michael B. Jordan. Director Matt Shakman wastes no time, curating an ingenious introduction that quickly explains the backstory everyone already knows, the cosmic radiation that made the four humans fantastic, the beloved heroes and public figures they have become, and the announcement of an unexpected pregnancy that Sue announces to Reed that leads them into the pulse of the story with "The Fantastic Four: First Steps". It's one of the best introductions of recent memory of any of the Marvel Cinematic Universe films. 

While Reed and Sue prepare for the arrival of their new team/family member, Reed, an ever-critical thinker and problem solver, is concerned about how the cosmic radiation will influence the development of their unborn child. Before Reed can conduct much research, a herald in the form of a silver entity, immediately recognizable to comic book fans as the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner), arrives with a message from an ancient cosmic entity known as Galactus (voiced by Ralph Ineson) concerning Earth's impending destruction. The impulsive Johnny Storm chases the harbinger to the edge of Earth's atmosphere, realizing that the Silver Surfer is much faster and powerful than any foe they have faced to this point. The Fantastic Four devise a plan to venture into space and eliminate the threat, hopefully saving Earth. However, while on their mission and within a planet-destroying spacecraft, the Fantastic Four are offered an exchange for salvation from Galactus, who realizes that the heroes harbor something more desirable than all of planet Earth. In exchange for Earth's salvation, Galactus requires the child of Reed and Sue. 

Part of what makes Matt Shakman's film work so well is its emphasis on character and the dynamic that connects their heroic personalities and everyday lives, as they live as abnormal superhumans. Shakman cut his teeth in both theater and episodic television. The process of understanding and building emotional nuance on stage and throughout the run of long-form television helps make these superheroes feel grounded and relatable. Specifically, the connection between Reed Richards and Sue Storm is an impressive credit to actors Pedro Pascal and Vanessa Kirby, who have incredible chemistry throughout the film. As the threat to their family grows greater, with numerous failed attempts at saving Earth, the anxiety and fear displayed both individually and as a couple is a highlight of the film. Pascal, whose characterization of Reed Richards is cold and calculated, and unknowingly, at times, insensitive. At the same time, Kirby is protective, empathetic, and ready to act at a moment's notice for those she loves. Add strong supportive roles from Joseph Quinn as Johnny Storm, an impatient yet wholeheartedly supportive sibling, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Ben Grimm, the steadfast supportive rock of the entire team and film. 

The design of "Earth 828" in "First Steps" is enjoyable. With a vintage-inspired aesthetic that draws design qualities from various eras, including the 1950s and 1960s, yet incorporates technology-enhanced materials, the film's world is creative in nearly every scene. The addition of robot helper H.E.R.B.I.E., who makes pasta, assists with daily chores, and helps drive the spacecraft out of danger in a tense scene, is a charming addition to the environment. 

While much of "The Fantastic Four: First Steps" works, with an excellent cast and impeccable design, unfortunately, the story lacks the sustaining power to reach a satisfying conclusion. The emotional stakes involving the jeopardy of Earth in exchange for Reed and Sue's baby never seem very threatening, especially within the realms of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And Galactus, a giant that glides through New York City with reckless abandonment, rarely seems like much of a threat even when the cosmic entity stomps and swipes away the Fantastic Four's aggressive attacks. You can sense early in the film that the Fantastic Four will be around for a while, that they will serve a greater purpose than anything that could happen in this film. 

"The Fantastic Four: First Steps" succeeds due to its attention to character development, featuring standout performances from the core Four, and its phenomenal production design that sets it apart from other Marvel Cinematic Universe films. While it very obviously feels like a setup for future Marvel phases, it's still an enjoyable adventure that hopefully influences the creative decisions of the movies that will follow. 

Monte's Rating

3.50 out of 5.00

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“Oh, Hi!” – Movie Review

Directed by:  Sophie Brooks

Written by:  Sophie Brooks and Molly Gordon

Starring:  Molly Gordon, Logan Lerman, Geraldine Viswanathan, John Reynolds, and David Cross

Runtime:  94 minutes

Gordon, Lerman, and the film’s initial premise earn a refreshing hello, but ‘Oh, Hi!’ wears out its welcome

“Islands in the stream.  That’s where we are.  No one in between.  How can we be wrong?” – “Islands in the Stream” (1983), performed by Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers

“I did something bad,” Iris (Molly Gordon) says. 

Shortly after Iris utters this statement to her best friend, Max (Geraldine Viswanathan), during the opening minute(s) of director/co-writer Sophie Brooks’ film, “Oh, Hi!” immediately jumps to 33 hours earlier to retrace our heroine’s steps toward her regretful action. 

Brooks’ rom-com features two amiable 20 (or early 30) somethings, Iris and Isaac (Logan Lerman), and basks in the glow of a blossoming relationship and young love during a weekend trip to a picturesque Upstate New York farmhouse.  The locale, in a town called High Falls, is complete with sunny skies, relaxing winding roads, a strawberry farm, and plenty of rolling hills.  The spacious, out-in-the-country Airbnb sits on a huge lot, complete with a picnic table and stunning views.  The flirty, open-minded duo share affectionate chemistry, and magic is in the air. 

However, this harmonious getaway can’t last the entire 94-minute runtime without conflict.  Rather than introduce an outside element – excluding an oddball Gen X noisy neighbor (David Cross) – Brooks reveals a relationship fly in the ointment between Iris and Isaac that triggers our heroine’s path towards horrible judgment and dating dysfunction.  

“Oh, Hi!” explores an intriguing premise within the unsuspecting walls of this small-town homestead, where hurt feelings lead to damaging decisions.  The film’s second and third acts open up dialogue about miscommunication and divergent expectations.  Mixed signals – either unintended or deliberate – become a lightning rod for thunderous debate with the attractive duet.  

Gordon and Lerman capably navigate Iris and Isaac’s journey (and Brooks and Gordon’s script) from pure bliss to troubling angst, as one character suddenly dives into a deep pool of irrationality while the other bathes in nuance to coax the unreasonable partner toward the safer, shallow end.   

The discourse surrounding early courtship and gushy feelings feels familiar, but distinctive distress soon transpires within the scenic, rustic domicile.  

Actually, the events are not unique, as they mimic an iconic 1987 novel and its 1990 film, but the specific book and movie will not be revealed in this review.  

The second act presents a duality of thoughts between Iris and Isaac’s relationship and the ultimate resolution to unglue a sticky situation, which then pastes Iris’ pal, Max, and her boyfriend, Kenny (John Reynolds), in the mess. 

Brooks and Gordon deserve kudos for introducing a clever and perilous premise for our affable couple after initial hopes of a picturesque holiday.  

Unfortunately, the narrative’s bid to free all concerned parties from the muddle is underwhelming and languishes in safe decorum even though the wacky solution is awfully unbelievable.  (Yes, the solution is safe, but also unbelievable.)  “Oh Hi!” takes welcome risks within the dating sphere but doesn’t go far enough.

Additionally, the second act is purposely designed to be agonizing as one of the leads drones on about their personal history way too long.  The lengthy exposition/exploration into relationship-repair feels too drawn out, and it becomes an exhausting experience rather than a curious one.  Brooks devises an intended madness here, but one could argue that the folly runs around the same circle rather than climbing towards more heightened questions.  

Then again, for moviegoers wholly invested in Iris and Isaac mending their relationship or tearing each other apart, the aforementioned second-act trek and far-fetched third-act resolution could be a fascinating, eye-popping, and popcorn-consuming theatrical experience.  

Or perhaps “Oh, Hi!” would work better as a short film than a feature-length one.  

Not everyone will agree.

On the other hand, “How can these two islands, Iris and Isaac, be wrong?”   

Well, let us count the ways.

Jeff’s ranking

2/4 stars

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Eddington - Movie Review

Dir: Ari Aster

Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Luke Grimes, Emma Stone, Austin Butler, William Belleau, and Michael Ward

2h 28m

The newest film from writer/director Ari Aster, the mastermind behind some of cinema's most compelling films of the last decade, including "Hereditary", "Midsommer", and "Beau is Afraid", returns with a challenging movie that reflects the complicated realities of recent pandemic-era memory—focused with a wild-eyed gaze on commentary centered on topics such as COVID-19 protocols, mask mandates, and Black Lives Matter. "Eddington", a fictional small town on the border of a Tribal community in New Mexico, is Ari Aster's most grounded film while also being the most dense with ideas, both intriguing and infuriating. There is much to admire about an artist engaging in difficult conversations and displaying the ugly truths about society, forever changed by a fear of the unknown and a crumbling trust in the political structure. Ari Aster's film is divisive, in a good way, and reflective in its pacing, tone, and story structure of the ever-changing chaos felt during the years lost during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) is a world-weary Sheriff in the small town of Eddington, New Mexico, a tight-knit community that reaches its boiling point over new mandates for public health protection in early 2020. At the center of the conflict, which is driven by both public policy and a long-held personal vendetta, are Sheriff Cross and Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal). Sheriff Cross's wife, Louise (played by Emma Stone), and the Mayor have a history, which infuriates the Sheriff whenever political ads for the Mayor's reelection campaign appear on television. The contemptuous relationship between the two men only grows more radical as the world around them unravels with the invading paranoia surrounding the worldwide pandemic and social media outcry over police brutality that sends the Eddington townsfolk into protest. 

Writer/director Ari Aster meticulously composes "Eddington" with a strong emphasis on its visual language, an impressive design that has highlighted the director's work since "Hereditary". The town of Eddington feels like a maze in the early part of the film, as Sheriff Joe Cross encounters resistance from the bordering Tribal police department for not obeying mask mandates on tribal land, and responding to disorderly conduct calls at Mayor Garcia's bar, which leads to an altercation. Director of Photography Darius Khondji ("Uncut Gems") builds paranoia into every right turn and empty street in the city while also showing the desperation of Sheriff Cross as the driving scenes grow more erratic and panic-driven as the town folds in on itself. Aster's ability to build tension into any scene, whether complex or straightforward, is a masterclass in how to emphasize characters and movements within a scene. 

The diverse cast in "Eddington" brings the odd mix of characters to life. Joaquin Phoenix delivers a standout performance in the film. Phoenix, whose choices of characters in films are always fascinating decisions, adds so much to the composition of Sheriff Joe Cross's descent into paranoia and madness. It's infuriating to watch the character grow more desperate, but also quite funny. Phoenix has excellent comic timing, both with the stammering of words and the intention of movements. Pedro Pascal is also interesting, playing a do-good political figure who, regardless of saying all the right things, still feels untrustworthy. The chemistry between Phoenix and Pascal is magnetic whenever the two actors are on screen together. Emma Stone, playing the role of Sheriff Cross's lonely and fed-up wife, Louise, and Austin Butler, who arrives as a cult-like leader who spouts conspiracy theory rhetoric, are underwritten but still effective in their performances whenever on screen. 

There is so much going on in "Eddington", with social, political, and personal commentary built on commentary about feelings and perspectives from the not-too-distant past. These story movements create abrupt plot twists and turns, culminating towards a finale that feels like it can only end one way: violently. Still, Aster builds fascinating metaphors throughout the film, ideas that have stuck with me days after watching the movie. The classic Western story characteristics are updated in the modern but still lost-in-time town of Eddington, with a white cowboy-hat-wearing Sheriff who is desperately resisting change, protecting antiquated ideologies as if it were a showdown at the O.K. Corral. The neighboring Native American community police team, who do everything right, abide and enforce all the right laws to protect their people, yet are consistently undermined about where their land boundary is located and disregarded when they try to operate within the realms of what is right and good, getting so close to solutions only to be taken out at the knees and pushed back behind everyone else. Aster brilliantly, perhaps over abundantly, builds these conversations into the entire structure of the story. 

"Eddington" may feel like a joke someone will inevitably respond with "too soon" after you tell it. All the feelings of anger, frustration, fear, and mourning people felt when forced to shelter in home, while watching death tolls increase, while fearing for the lives of friends and family you could only talk with through a window, while watching protests for the protection of Black lives, and many more feelings every single person felt in different ways while we all lost two years of our lives to a world-changing event; Ari Aster takes all this, turns the mirror, and forces the viewer to watch all these feelings come to life again in a small, seemingly inescapable fictional town in New Mexico. Instead of thinking an intelligent, challenging film like this is a joke told "too soon", perhaps, as cinema has always done, maybe it’s more appropriate to call it a cautionary tale, a warning to remember how we behaved, who we let have power, and how we responded when our beautiful world was threatened by forces both within and out of our control.

Monte's Rating

4.00 out of 5.00

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“To a Land Unknown” – Movie Review

Directed by:  Mahdi Fleifel

Written by:  Mahdi Fleifel, Fyzal Boulifa, and Jason McColgan

Starring:  Mahmoud Bakri, Aram Sabbah, Mohammad Alsurafa, Angeliki Papoulia, and Monther Rayahneh

Runtime:  106 minutes

 ‘To a Land Unknown’ spotlights a gritty and anxious refugee conundrum in one of the planet’s most famous cities

Athens, Greece’s capital, enjoys millions of tourists every year.  The City of the Violet Crown offers plenty of attractions, like the Parthenon, the Acropolis, the Temple of Hephaestus, and much more.  

Chatila (Mahmoud Bakri) and his cousin Reda (Aram Sabbah), two 20-somethings, are Athens’ tourists, but not in the traditional sense. 

The unemployed Palestinian refugees attempt to earn a living by stealing purses, swiping merchandise from local businesses, and through other nefarious means.  

Chatila anxiously hopes to reach Germany to start a new life and open a café.  Reda, a recovering heroin addict, is along for Chatila’s ride and will find some blue-collar work in Deutschland, possibly as an enforcer if anyone messes with his cousin’s café. 

The men need passports, and a local, Marwan (Monther Rayahneh), can forge documents for the right price.  

Our flawed protagonists need cash.  

Outside of his petty misdeeds, Chatila devises a couple of grander schemes for big paydays, and his plans include allies/pawns, such as a lonely single Greek woman, Tatiana (Angeliki Papoulia), a 13-year-old Turkish boy, Malik (Mohammad Alsurafa), and a few others.  

The cousins face extremely long odds for success, and director/co-writer Mahdi Fleifel, Bakri, and Sabbah envelop and cloud the audience with feelings of doom and dread.  

Fleifel’s gritty and captivating modern-day crime indie pulls moviegoers into a ground-level conundrum where two refugees frantically yearn for a new home, a new country.  Chatila and Reda crave to land in a new land and find a fresh start, but achieving their goals without deception, crime, and harsh transgressions remains unknown.   

Fleifel’s film feels raw and authentic and is set mostly away from Athens’ glamour and natural beauty.  The script pits Chatila and Reda on a butte’s peak during a couple of brief scenes overlooking the historic locale, but almost every other on-screen minute spends time in coarse, untidy urban housing centers, which are not unique to Athens, as similar economically distressed districts can be found in just about every metropolitan center on the planet.

Cinematographer Thodoros Mihopoulos and location manager Sonia Koulepi critically contribute to the film’s purposely designed dour mood, as the working-class or poverty-driven city streets, residences, and shops are flush with gloomy grays, and sometimes, apartments have open windows that allow the heat or sticky fingers to enter unabated.  

The young men’s chances for finding honest employment and building wealth and prosperity in their current surroundings (and with their associated mindsets) seem slimmer than meeting Zeus, Apollo, and Aphrodite in person.

Bakri and Sabbah have only a few acting credits each, but they deliver convincing performances that effectively portray their characters’ misery and hopelessness.  Chatila and Reda sport makeshift beards, unkempt attire, and exhausted, frustrated personas, as a life of petty crimes is the only option to reach the Promised Land in their minds. 

At one point, Reda says, “We are bad people,” but Chatila justifies their actions for the greater good.  

Well, not the greater good but THEIR greater good.  Chatila also proposes making up for their trespasses and lies with future good deeds, but Reda dismisses his cousin’s declaration as mere talk.   

Fleifel, Fyzal Boulifa, and Jason McColgan’s script also knowingly toys with the audience regarding the morality levels of our two lead characters.  They are both imperfect men, but the movie swings back and forth in depicting which one is more ethically damaged, creating frequently shifting thoughts of empathy and dissatisfaction for Chatila and Reda throughout the film’s 106-minute runtime. 

Despite their questionable judgment, we’re rooting for the cousins to reach their goals, but with a profound wish that they minimize the harm directed toward strangers and colleagues who encircle their modest orbit.  

Will karma catch up with them?  

Chatila and Reda may or may not be too quick for the aforementioned karma, which effectively places our leads and moviegoers under duress.  Granted, “To a Land Unknown” is not as stressful as living through the 430 BC Athens plague, but this movie is light years away from a pleasant holiday jaunt to the Parthenon.

Jeff’s ranking

3.5/4 stars

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