L'Empire

Fabrice Luchini

Bruno Dumont's L'Empire is a pleasantly lunatic vision, meshing Dumont's beloved northern France settings with a science fiction parody. Two dueling extraterrestial clans seek to renew their legacy by assuming a human form and propagating in the Côte d'Opale. Mythic themes are parodied and burlesqued: rival dynasties, star-crossed lovers, and an anointed child preordained to lead the next generation. Unlike the George Lucas efforts it mocks, L'Empire offers genuine spasms of violence and sex. The aliens races are equally eager to decapitate with their light sabres and to copulate in their newly acquired human flesh. The cheekily comic couplings occur in nature, on land or sea, in landscapes worthy of Courbet.  

The two warring clans are monikered the 0s and the 1s, the building blocks of our digital age. The 0s have a spaceship that looks like Versailles. They have a patriarch (Fabrice Luchini) and resemble, in their non-human forms, merde emojis without  Gallic charm. The1s have a mother ship that resembles Reims Cathedral and resemble rays of light. Dumont is parodying the French dualism that has dominated it national discourse even before Descartes posited a mind/body split. French discourse and French humor have never really caught on in the States and L'Empire opened here with barely a ripple.

Dumont contains this film within his own cinematic universe of northern France seen before in his mini-series L'il Quinquin. As in that project, he strikes gold with youthful performers. Based on her previous work, I expected  a fierce and committed performance from Anamaria Vartolomei, but Dumont gets equally compelling work from newcomer Brandon Vileghe. Only Fabrice Luchini overdoes it, but what can you expect when Luchini is playing a character named Belzébuth. 

Crime 101

Mark Ruffalo and Chris Hemsworth

Bart Layton's Crime 101 is the most satisfying noir in some time. Layton has relied heavily, but not slavishly, on Don Winslow's sleek and superb novella. A number of critics have compared this new film to Michael Mann's Heat, but the surface similarities between the two films, both are LA based heist flicks, are simply that. Heat, like most Michael Mann films, is focused on the mythos of machismo. I revere Heat, but, frankly, that daylight robbery of the bearer bonds or whatever the hell they were is ludicrous. Now I enjoy the kinetic rush of the sequence, but it is not, in any way, a realistic portrayal of how and where to go about an armed robbery. Nevertheless, the whole tone of the film is mythic rather than realistic, so why carp. Winslow's novella and Layton's film(s) are more interested in realistic characterization than mythic figures. At the end of Heat, the cop upholds his duty and nails the perp. That is not what happens at the end of Crime 101. The cop in the Layton film knows the beast of societal justice must be fed, but he ultimately follows his own code.

Every character in Crime 101 masks his true self. This Layton makes plain in the scene in which Halle Berry goes through her daily make-up routine. One's true self is irrelevant to one's success in society. This is as true for the cop (Mark Ruffalo) as it is for the insurance agent (Ms. Berry) and thief (Chris Hemsworth). It is when these character put down the masks they have constructed for themselves that they can find a sense of commonality. The main problem I have with this movie is Chris Hemsworth. He's ok when the mask is in place, but he telegraphs his character's moments of vulnerability. Think of Brad Pitt in this role and you might see what I mean. I also felt that Nick Nolte's performance is disastrous. It was like watching Willie Mays when he played for the Mets. Otherwise, the ensemble is superbly cast and at the top of their game. Excellent work from Ms. Berry, Mr. Ruffalo, Barry Keoghan, Monica Barbaro, Corey Hawkins, Tate Donovan, and Jennifer Jason Leigh. The score by Blanck Mass is spine tinglingly effective without being obtrusive.

The Best of Robert Duvall

1931 -- 202

                                     To this day, I still think Lonesome Dove was my best part.

1)     Lonesome Dove                                       Simon Wincer, etc.                                   1989

2)     Apocalypse Now                                      Francis Ford Coppola                              1979

3)     The Great Santini                                    Lewis John Carlino                                  1979

4)     Tomorrow                                                 Joseph Anthony                                       1972

5)     Colors                                                       Dennis Hopper                                         1988

6)     The Godfather                                         Francis Ford Coppola                              1972

7)     To Kill A Mockingbird                             Robert Mulligan                                       1962

8)     The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid  Philip Kaufman                                         1972

9)     The Apostle                                              Robert Duvall                                          1997

10)   Tender Mercies                                        Bruce Beresford                                      1983

He rarely made a bad performance. Often, as in Apocalypse Now and The Betsy, he gave by far the best performance in the film. I want to stress the above rankings are not based on the overall quality of the film. Tomorrow is a poor film and I've never been too thrilled by either To Kill a Mockingbird or Tender Mercies. However, the sheer volume of his varied film work rivals any of his contemporaries, even Gene Hackman. I especially enjoy his work in The Chase, True Grit, The Rain People, MASH, Joe Kidd, The Outfit, The Godfather 2, The Killer Elite, Network, True Confessions, Rambling Rose, Geronimo..., Something to Talk About, Sling Blade, Assassination Tango, Thank You for Smoking, and The Road. 

There was a chameleon quality to his work and he never suffered typecasting. He was not sought out for romantic leading man roles, but his turn in Assassination Tango showed he could command oodles of charm if need be.  After he had established himself in Hollywood, he was often called upon for villainy at which he was adept: his Jesse James is the most vicious in film history and Duvall was also quite pungent in True Grit, Joe Kidd, The Killer Elite, and Network. His death scene in Colors is a model of his realistic understatement.

   

Quick Takes: February 2026

Mirjami Kuosmanen

Erik Blomberg's The White Reindeer is a 1952 Finnish fairy tale film set in a gorgeously glacial Lapland. Mirjami Kuosmanen stars as a Sami maiden cursed with a legacy of pagan gods and witchcraft. The horror elements of the film are mild and predictable, but the ethnographic documentary aspects are stunning in their beauty. There is a little animal cruelty, reindeer are lassoed and wrassled like steers, but children would be entranced by the sequences featuring the reindeer both in the wild and harnessed to sleighs for races. Currently streaming on Tubi.

Robert Day's The Initiation of Sarah is a mildly horrific exploitation film made for ABC television in 1978. The direction is indifferent and the story is a Stephen King ripoff: mostly Carrie and the maze out of The Shining. Kay Lenz stars as a college freshman with telekinetic powers who gets involved in sorority shenanigans. The California Institute of Technology locations are attractive and the cast is way above average. Ms. Lenz offers a sensitive performance and Morgan Fairchild is delightful as the head mean girl on campus; a role that led to her being typecast forever as a conniving bitch. I also enjoyed the efforts of Tisa Farrow, Shelley Winters, Tony Bill, Kathryn Crosby, Morgan Brittany, Robert Hayes, and Talia Balsam. What a cast for a throwaway piece of crap!

François Ozon's When Fall is Coming is an ironic melodrama set in Burgundy and spanning a decade or so. The tone is subdued, especially for Ozon, and autumnal. The focus is more on a decades long friendship between two seniors (Hélène Vincent and Josiane Balasko) than on the more feckless younger generation. The film contains three deaths, sins of the past, poison mushrooms, and a ghost. I could have done without the ghost but found When Fall is Coming droll and arresting. The cast is sublime and the production design, costumes, and cinematography unostentatiously gorgeous.

Howard Bretherton and William Keighley's Ladies They Talk About, from 1933, is a subpar Barbara Stanwyck vehicle from the Pre-Code era. The plot, in which mob moll Stanwyck falls for milquetoast evangelist Preston Foster, is tommyrot with one of the worst finales I've ever seen. Ladies They Talk About was originally a play, but passed through the hands of many scribes before reaching the screen: too many cooks, etc.  The chemistry between Stanwyck and Foster is nil, but at least Stanwyck ends up in prison, San Quentin, twenty minutes into this 69 minute flick. The prison depicted is the cushiest jail I've ever seen in an American film, it even has a beauty parlor. Stanwyck is well cast and wonderful, but the picture is haphazard, veering from crude to punchy. This is one weird film. Lillian Roth is a welcome sight as Stanwyck's best bud in stir. She even gets to warble a love song to a studio portrait of Joe E. Brown, then a Warners contract player. The picture's racial humor is particularly offensive.

Kogonada's A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is a miss, but not the debacle some have declaimed. Kogonada's Bressonian distance doesn't ever mesh with the twee romantic fantasy penned by Seth Reiss. I loved Benjamin Loeb's cinematography and the performances of Kevin Klein, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Hamish Linklater, and Lily Rabe. Rabe, who is 42, plays the mother of Margot Robbie, age 35. The appeal of Robbie continues to elude me. Colin Farrell's charming performance is the reason to see this flick, particular when he gets to relive his character's high school performance of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.

John Sturges' The Law and Jake Wade, from 1958, is an average Western from MGM. Surges handles the action scenes well, particularly the opening in which top billed Robert Taylor busts old pal Richard Widmark out of jail. Robert Surtees' cinematography makes stunning use of the Death Valley exteriors. The production design stands out, especially the ghost town in the finale where a bag of loot is buried. However, the script is an assemblage of cliches. Studio shots mesh poorly with magnificent exteriors. Widmark is outstanding, as are Robert Middleton, Henry Silva, and DeForst Kelly. Unfortunately, Robert Taylor is a black hole at the center of this picture. Any Western associated leading man would have been better, but he was MGM's (aging) boy. 

Claude Sautet's Max et les ferrailleurs (Max and the Junkmen) is a genuine sleeper, a film that lingers. Max (Michel Piccoli) is a divorced robbery detective with a wintry heart who is getting heat from his superiors. He needs to take down a crew and, to his dubious fortune, finds a patsy in the person of an old Legionnaire buddy named Abel (Bernard Fresson). Abel and his small time hood pals strip precious metals from abandoned buildings and construction sites in the suburb of Nanterre. However, Abel has a prostitute girlfriend named Lily (Romy Schneider) who turns tricks in Paris and thinks Abel should ditch his penny ante career. Max becomes fixated on her. Posing as a wealthy banker, Max manipulates Lily into convincing Abel that a local bank is easy pickings. Things end badly for all concerned in this 1971 flick.

Max... is a low key, almost humdrum police procedural. It is more of a character study than an action film. The Nanterre cafe that serves as the clubhouse for Abel's gang is dappled with the pop colors of the era. The police stations are a putrid blue, grey, green. Max's fake love nest, a study in beige. The characters' cigarettes are matched, also: Marlboro for Abel, Kool for Lily, Gitanes, bien sûr, for Max. The story all told in a flashback as distant as Max who prefers to tinker with clocks instead of schtupping Lily. Sautet may not be a master, but he directed many fine films and has received insufficient attention in the anglophone world.

 

Send Help

Rachel McAdams

Sam Raimi's Send Help is genuinely exciting cinema, his best film since Spider-Man 2. As usual, the pulpiness of Raimi's style has led him to be underrated; as Hitchcock was in his day. Yet, history will show that Raimi is just as expert a craftsman as Hitch with an equally mordant sense of humor. Raimi, however, is devoid of Catholic guilt. The screenplay, by the team of Mark Swift and Damian Shannon, swiftly engineers a battle of the sexes on an uncharted desert isle. The combatants are office mouse Linda Little (Rachel McAdams) and her odious nepo baby boss Bradley Preston (Dylan O'Brien). Linda is a hardworking grinder, who talks to her pet bird and eats tuna fish salad sandwiches at her desk. Raimi has frumped up Ms. McAdams as much as one can and dressed her in tones of beige to make her as dorky and unappealing as possible. Bradley doesn't prefer the image she projects and passes Linda over for a long overdue promotion. She objects and her moxie gets her a ride on the corporate jet to Thailand where Bradley plans to jettison her.

Of course, the tables are turned after Raimi provides us with one of the most hair raising plane crashes in cinematic history. The duo are stranded on a small island in the Gulf of Thailand. Bradley has an injured leg and is as helpless as a baby, a whiny and entitled one at that. The casting, McAdams is a decade older than O'Brien, plays up his lack of maturity. Linda, a Survivor fan, is in her element. She thrives in this environment where survival is a true battle of the fittest and Daddy's riches can't bail one out. Bradley becomes a mouth to feed in a film in which the central motif is what is going into and out of people's mouths. The level of gore and effluvia is high. Raimi really emptied his amniotic sac on this one. That the film champions women as the stronger and more resilient sex should be no surprise to fans of the director who has broached feminist themes since Xena. 

I admired Dylan O'Brien's performance as Dan Ackroyd in Saturday Night and he does equally good work here in tamping down his natural charisma to play a spoiled and aging adolescent. Bradley is never able to countenance that Linda could be an equal partner and that helps bring about his downfall. Thus, McAdams has the plum role and she delivers a gutsy and memorable performance. Raimi has said that he felt he under utilized McAdams talents in Dr. Strange in The Multiverse of Madness, but this role makes up for that neglect. I have been a big fan of the actress since I first spied her on the wonderful first season of Slings and Arrows and am glad she gets to strut her stuff in a good genre film as she did in Wes Craven's Red Eye. You don't get an Oscar for appearing in pulp horror that open in February, but McAdams has already racked up enough great performances for a lifetime achievement award in, let's hope, forty years.

Art College 1994

          
Liu Jian's Art College 1994, from 2024, is an animated drama that looks at the intersecting lives of college students. The main characters are feckless art student Zhang Xiaojun and his best bud "Rabbit". Most of the film is taken up with ruminative BS sessions between the two in their dorm room and on the quad. The two indulge in navel gazing while they drink beer and smoke cigarettes. Zhang flirts with a shy piano student, but their furtive relationship eventually evaporates. Liu juggles over thirty speaking parts, some impersonated by noted figures in Chinese music and cinema like the director Bi Gan, to create a broad picture of academia that is both warm and mildly satiric. 

The only classroom lecture shown in the film, which the students largely ignore, lays out the twin poles of artistic influence that the students must individually confront. The shifting perspectives of Eastern art is contrasted with the single fixed point of view which the lecturer says categorizes Western art. The mise en scene of Art College 1994 reflects this bifurcation. Nearly all of the conversational scenes in the film resemble the rotoscoped animation used by Richard Linklater in A Scanner Darkly and Waking Life. Art College 1994's hand drawn animation is cruder than those films, but captures their first person immediacy. Between these scenes of digressive dialogue are snippets that focus on nature: a butterfly floating above the quad, bugs and lizards negotiating rocks. These are the moments that reflect Asian art's influence upon Liu Jian, reminiscent of Eastern landscape painting and the films of Hayao Miyazaki. Zhang Xiaojun ultimately rejects traditional Chinese painting and embraces Western experimentalism, bringing an end to his academic career.

The funny and frank dialogue redeems the more aimless sections of the film. It is hard to capture the puffed up bubble of academic life without indulging in the rabbit holes of digression. Art College 1994 often feels jejune, but it is true to the limited scope of its youthful characters. 

Broken Rage

Takeshi Kitano

Takeshi "Beat" Kitano's Broken Rage has languished all 2025 on Amazon Prime with little notice. It is an odd film, divided in two discrete parts, the former a crime drama, the latter a comedic parody of a crime drama, à la Jerry Lewis. Kitano plays Mouse, a hit man who lives anonymously and follows an almost ritualistic existence. We follow him as he executes two jobs, but he is then apprehended by the cops who put the screws to him. Mouse agrees to infiltrate a yakuza mob who control the heroin market. Mouse helps brings down that gang and struts off, presumably to enter the witness protection program. The tone is tossed off and minimal, like the protagonist. The comic second half of this very short film, 67 minutes, has the same narrative, actors, and situations as the first half; with the addition of pratfalls and very broad humor. 

Broken Rage is certainly a self indulgent film, but it is an accurate reflection of the bifurcation of Kitano's career. He is best known in the US for directing and starring in hard boiled action films like Sonatine and Fireworks. Kitano had a brief vogue here in the 1990s, but has fallen off the map critically in America during this century. In Japan, he is best known as a comic performer and that has been his bread and butter in his homeland. Thus, Broken Rage displays the poles of his talent: half Jean Gabin, half Leslie Nielsen. Broken Rage barely qualifies as a feature, but it has structural integrity and strong performances. It further establishes Kitano as a minor director, but a major performer.

He Who Must Die

Pierre Vaneck

I've been itching to see Jules Dassin's He Who Must Die (Celui qui doit mourir) since I read Peter Wolf's memoir, Waiting on the Moon. In it, Wolf recounts his being taken to the film by his parents whereupon he eventually falls asleep on the shoulder of the woman next to him. That lady was named Marilyn Monroe who was there on a date night with her husband Arthur Miller, just two everyday New York intellectuals paying homage to one of Joseph McCarthy's victims as Wolf's parents were. The movie is a French language wide screen version of Nikos Kazantzakis' 1948 novel Christ Recrucified. Both works are set in a Greek village under Ottoman rule in the year of 1921. Refugees from a town sacked by the Turks arrive, are spurned by the town's ruling class, the Church and bourgeoisie, and flee to the hills. The village people are rehearsing their version of the Passion Play which they put on every seven years. However, events spin out of control and Christ's sacrifice recurs after a class war erupts. The battle rages on as the film ends. 

In his review in The New Leader, Manny Farber detected the "tang of propaganda" in the film's images and I concur.⛨ However, I don't think this was necessarily a problem since Kazantzakis was fellow traveler if not a doctrinaire Communist. I am not so sure about Jesus. The film reminded Farber of Steinbeck. Nevertheless, Dassin's allegorical groupings of the lumpen rural proletariat results in stasis rather than movement, posturing rather than acting. This is social realism at its most ham-fisted, turning an ambivalent and questioning book into a Marxist fresco. There are endless shots of the choreographed peasantry happily warbling or intoning their dignity. I, unlike Peter Wolf, did not fall asleep, though. Enough of Kazantzakis' dialogue remains and I especially enjoyed the readings by Jean Servais and Fernand Ledoux as the film's good and bad pharisees. However, the film's performances are all over the map. Melina Mercouri has a bad case of the cutes as the picture's Magdalene figure and Pierre Vaneck is hopeless as the film's creeping Jesus. The film's Pilate figure is the most broadly drawn, a Turkish Snidely Whiplash avec catamite. A pretentious curiosity, all in all. 

⛨ Manny Farber, The New Leader, Three Art-y Films, pg. 26.

Who by Fire

Noah Parker

Philippe Lesage's Who by Fire (Comme le feu) is a Canadian drama than conveys the claustrophobia of intimacy from first shot to last. It is a long film, over two and a half hours long, and a slow burn that unspools at its own pace. It is set at a remote lakeside lodge in Northern Quebec owned by Blake (Arieh Worthalter), a maverick filmmaker. The film chronicles a troubled reunion he hosts with his former collaborator, Albert (Paul Ahmarani). Albert brings along his two late adolescent children and, crucially, a friend of one of them named Jeff (Noah Parker). Jeff is the main witness to the various entanglements that ensue, the only character given point of view shots by the director. 

Jeff's awkwardness and essential estrangement mark this film as a coming of age drama and, indeed, we do detect some growth in his compassion by film's end. The film has its outdoor sequences which contain more than a whiff of danger, hiking, hunting and canoeing through rapids, but the real battles occur indoors over many bottles of wine as the temporary housemates share meals around a table captured by the largely fixed gaze of Lesage's camera. Despite the many stunned onlookers, which includes Blake's staff and the odd film star (Irène Jacobs), Albert and Blake partake in verbal sparring, taking the opportunity to trade recriminations and old resentments. The backbiting gets so vicious that the film becomes a nightmarish dreamscape of bourgeois neurosis. The frantic party mood, highlighted by a conga line to "Rock Lobster", quickly devolves into bleary disenchantment. The constant petty humiliations and lengthy harangues that dot Who by Fire recall Dostoyevsky who Lesage's script alludes to. So too does the final scene which highlights compassion to a beast allegedly dumber than a man. 

The film does reach discordant heights, but it is far from perfect. The scenes of canoes maneuvering through white water are unconvincing. Some of the motivations for actions by the characters are sketchily motivated. Still, there is a sense of unease in Who by Fire that I found unsettling and memorable. The cast is outstanding, delivering the high falutin dialogue mellifluously.

The Whip and the Body

                

Mario Bava's The Whip and the Body, from 1963, is so much more accomplished than the average exploitation flick from this period that it threatens to be art. The film's narrative is a Poe pastiche (mostly Usher and The Premature Burial) which opens with prodigal son, Kurt (Christopher Lee) returning to the family castle on the shores of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Kurt is so despised by the castle's inhabitants that we wonder why he bothered to return, but the plot really kicks into gear when it is revealed that Kurt had a previous relationship with his brother's fiancee, Nevenka (Daliah Lavi). Their relationship is revealed and rekindled on the beach as Kurt brandishes and unleashes his whip. Nevenka says she despises Kurt, but after more than a few hearty lashes, she becomes aroused and yields to him; a sub to his dom. Even after Kurt is mysteriously murdered, Nevenka follows his ghostly bidding and accomplishes Kurt's revenge. Bava lets this S/M relationship unspool to its illogical conclusion with eros and thanatos irreparably linked. Doom awaits us all.

The Whip and the Body was made for peanuts as a co-Italian and French production designed to have its dialogue post-synced so it could be released in at least those two markets. So, the dialogue is an afterthought for this flick, which, fortunately, is largely silent for most of its 87 minutes. The best sequences of the film contain no dialogue per se: the funeral ceremony (above) or Nevenka pacing through the labyrinthine castle unable to sleep because she hears the snap of Kurt's whip. Bava and cinematographer Ubaldo Terzano give the film an appropriately dark palette: blue, green, black and purple with occasional spots of light. The film exudes a whiff (or is that a whip) of the exotic perfume of transgressive beauty. Lavi writhes amusingly and Lee is perfect for a stone cold ghost in a film that would probably be PG-13 today. Out of the ten or so Bava pictures I've seen, The Whip and the Body along with Black Sunday ranks at the top. I kind of wish that Bava got the chance to direct an A production like The Leopard, but that was not his fate.