Outcome

Keanu Reeves and Jonah Hill

Jonah Hill's Outcome is a toothless Hollywood satire destined for obscurity. Keanu Reeves stars as Reef Hawk, a top flight Tinseltown star returning to his career after a five year hiatus brought on by various addictions. As part of his rehabilitation, Hawk is making amends to figures from his past who he has let down, ranging from his mother (a game Susan Lucci) to his first manager (Martin Scorsese). However, his comeback is threatened when Hawk is blackmailed by someone who has got a hold of a compromising video from his past. 

Mr. Hill, who wrote the screenplay along with Ezra Woods, also appears as Hawk's lawyer. Unfortunately, Jonah Hill the director indulges Jonah Hill the actor in a number of scenery chewing scenes that reek of self-indulgence. There is some smart repartee in the film. I did enjoy Ivy Wolk's wry asides and David Spade is well cast as a weasel. However, Hill has little visual imagination and most of the cast, especially Cameron Diaz and Matt Bomer, are stranded in rote roles. Outcome is not funny enough to be an effective farce and not insightful enough for any dramatic payoff. The fact that Hawk can't remember the incident that he is being blackmailed about makes one wonder what the big deal is. If it was established early on that Hawk was enjoying sexual congress with a dog on the video or something of that nature, then his panic would be understandable. As it is, it is hard for the audience to maintain sympathy for a handsome and rich character who is not really under siege. Once the nature of the video is revealed, the somewhat less than shocking nature of it renders much of what has gone on before as superfluous. A description that would fit the entirety of Outcome to a tee.                                    

Little Trouble Girls

Jara Sofija Ostan

Urška Djukić's Little Trouble Girls is one of the most promising feature debuts of 2025. This compact Slovenian film tells the story of shy and sheltered Lucija and her sexual and psychological awakening during a summer choir retreat at a convent. A short scene of Lucija riding in a car with her mother displays her repressed background, as her mother expresses her disapproval of girls Lucija age, sixteen, wearing lipstick. Once at the convent retreat, Lucija falls under the spell of the choir's queen bee, the more mature and sophisticated Ana Maria (Mina Svajger). Ana Maria, who would qualify in the US as a mean girl, leads Lucija astray with sapphic come-ons and by urging Lucija to join her in ogling the construction workers toiling at the convent.

Lucija is, at first, intrigued by Ana Maria, but, ultimately, becomes justifiably repulsed by her manipulations. She makes the mistake of tattling on Ana Maria to her choir master (a suitably spineless Saša Tabaković). The conductor treats her not with understanding, but disdain. He reacts by humiliating Lucija in front of the choir, criticizing her, admittedly pinched and hesitant, singing. Lucija becomes persona non grata within her peer group. Director Djukić manages to elicit marvelously unaffected performances from her young cast. She crowds the frame in the interior sequences to suggest the dual nature of adolescent intimacy: both alluring and suffocating. She gives the film a palpable feel of sensuality, foregrounding the throb and heave of bodies. When Lucija masturbates in a bathroom stall, Djukić provides a close-up of her thorax, writhing with forbidden pleasure. When Lucija spies on a particularly hunky worker, Djurkić provides a point of view shot from her perspective of the man's muscular arm, shimmeringly beautifully in the sun. The outdoor sequences in the film, workers toiling at the construction site or bathing in a stream revel in the plein air beauty of natural light.

Jara Sofija Ostan and Mina Svajger: intimacy that is both alluring and suffocating

The role of music in the film also is a clue to the ambivalence with which Djurkić regards beauty, both sacred and profane. Nearly all of the choir's songs are paeans to the Almighty. They are beautiful, yet practiced and rote. True aural beauty is experienced only once in the film by Lucija when she happens upon a sextet of nuns singing in glory to God. The open hearted beauty of their singing reflects the nuns' inner devotion, something the members of the choir cannot approach. This sequence also sets up the extraordinary last shot of the film in which Lucija feeds upon grapes as Sonic Youth perform the gleefully blasphemous song that provides the film's title. Earlier, Ana Maria tells Lucija that they must eat sour grapes as expiation for their sins, but, by film's end, she has been revealed as a false prophet. Lucija, now outside of the web of her sinister peers, can enjoy the fruit and her solitude for their own sake. She may not adhere to the strictures of a holy order, but she has learned that the world is awash in sin. This is something Sonic Youth, no strangers to Catholic guilt, convey also. The key line in the song Little Trouble Girls is "...I'm really bad." Once an individual has accepted that man is born in sin, that knowledge is liberating whether one is seeking expiation or not.
               

Ruslan and Ludmila

                Natalya Petrova                 

Aleksandr Ptushko's Ruslan and Ludmila, from 1972, is an epic Russian fantasy film. It is an adaptation of Alexander Pushkin's fairy tale in verse which catapulted him to fame in 1820. The film is fairly faithful to the original poem, excising only a minor subplot and a number of ironic asides. Ptushko, who started as an animator, has been compared to everyone from Walt Disney to Mario Bava, but I think the best analogy is Ray Harryhausen. Like Harryhausen, Ptushko is a wizard in regards to design and practical effects, but is rather stodgy in the handling of his players. At times, Ruslan and Ludmila is as static as an opera production. This was Ptushko's final picture after a near half century career of fantastical films.

The film opens in a  castle in Kiev where Prince Vladimir is announcing the betrothal of his daughter Princess Ludmila (Natalya Petrova) to her beloved, the military hero Ruslan (Valeri Kozinets). However, an evil wizard, who we later learn is named Chernomor (Vladimir Fyodorov), snatches Ludmila away on her wedding night and imprisons her in his psychedelic lair. The decor of which is totally flip city, including a garden (above) which resembles a frosted H.R. Puffnstuf terrarium with stalagmites. Ruslan and three other less suitable suitors are tasked with rescuing Ludmila. Despite a tiger, evil henchmen, a wicked sorceress, the decapitated head of a giant and treachery, Ruslan accomplishes the heroic task while finding time to repel a Pecheneg army from the gates of Kiev. This hero's journey ends with Ruslan and Ludmila pledging their troth. 

Valeri Kozinets and Natalya Petrova

Ruslan and Ludmila lumbers along at a slow pace during the course of its 150 minutes. Viewers over ten may experience a soporific effect at times, but the film's longueurs have a benefit or two. The film's dialogue is largely dubbed and this, along with its slow pace, brings out the musicality of Pushkin's verse. There are also moments when individuals and choruses burst into song. Tikhon Khrennikov's stirring score helps bind together this pokey film without alluding to Glinka's opera. The accumulated aural effects helps turn the flick into a hymn to Russian nationalism, much like Alexander Nevsky and many other Soviet films. That Kiev is the citadel of Russian pride in the film has an extra resonance amidst Putin's invasion of the Ukraine. Since the founding of the first Slavic state Kievan Rus', around 900 CE or so, Kiev has been viewed as a part of the Motherland in the mind's eyes of Russian nationalists. This is further amplified by the status of Pushkin as the preeminent Russian author in his homeland. Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov, and others may have gotten more ballyhoo in the West, but Pushkin is, rightly, revered in Russia as the father of modern Russian literature. All subsequent Russian authors are in his debt, as Dostoyevsky acknowledged in his famous 1880 speech about Pushkin.

There is an important aspect of Ruslan and Ludmila that may escape non-Russophiles. The evil wizard Chernomor's power lies in his beard. All Ruslan has to do is chop it off and the wizard is helpless. Now, as with Samson, one can look at Chernomor's bristles as a symbol of virility and potency, but there is a specific Slavic slant to this symbol. Peter the Great, the first Tsar to look to the West as a model of progress, instituted a controversial beard tax during his reign because he thought beards symbolized Russian backwardness. This was one of many examples of the tug of war in the Russian psyche between Western progressivism and traditional Russian nationalism. Pushkin was particularly sensitive to this tension. One of his best poems, The Bronze Horseman, culminates with a statue of Peter the Great chasing the narrator like a hell hound on his trail. Ruslan and Ludmila succeeds primarily as spectacle, but it contains a multitude of signifiers that shed light on the Russian character. The Deaf Crocodile disc looks spiffy.

Vladimir Fyodorov