All the Moons

Haizea Carneros

One of only a hundred or so movies in the Basque language, Igor Legarreta's All the Moons is a vampire flick that spans seventy years of Spanish history from 1876 to 1936. It eschews many of the tropes of cheesier vampire flicks, like fangs and stakes through the heart. Though there is a little body horror, the film hews closer to magical realism than outright gore. The young Haizea Carneros plays Amaia, a prepubescent girl who we first meet living in a Church orphanage. Soon, as a result of a stray cannon ball produced by the Third Carlist War, Amaia is buried under rubble and looks like a goner. Amaia is saved or, rather, changed into an immortal by a middle aged female vampire (Itziar Ituño) desperate for a daughter. She acts as a surrogate mother and schools Amaia on the diet and nocturnal proclivities of her fellow vampires. Madre and daughter are soon separated by the requisite angry townsfolk with torches. 

Amai lives alone in the forests of Northern Spain for a time, slowly ameliorating the physical limits of her vampiric state. However, she reconnects with humanity in the form of a kindly dairy farmer named Candido (Josean Bengoetxea). Amaia steps on a wolf trap set by Candido to protect his flock, but ends up living with him until his inevitable demise. Amaia is introduced to his fellow villagers by Candido and initially embraced, but the two have to head for the hills after Amaia upchucks the Host during Mass. Anyway, at film's end, Amaia confronts her cave dwelling Madre who is all too willing to sacrifice all for her gal.

The Spain of this film is one where all relationships have been upended by civil unrest.There is not an intact family in the flick. All the Moons has gorgeous photography, but Leggarreta gives the film a palpable tang. From having Amaia peel off her dead skin to ending the film with her first period, Leggarreta foregrounds the physicality of this fable. This prevents the film from seeming too genteel or picturesque. All three leads are superb, particularly Ms. Carneros who is in every scene of the film. It is a testament to Mr. Leggarreta's skill with his players the he could get such a memorable performance from one so young. All the Moons was released in Spain in 2020, but was never released theatrically in the US. I viewed the Shudder disc and it is a handsome product. A good but not great film, All the Moons is available on many streaming platforms. 

              

Quick Takes, April 2026

Masaki Suda

One of the better thrillers released in the US in 2025, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cloud is the story of Ryôsuke (Masaki Suda), a small-time chiseler who resells dubious goods on the internet. Karma strikes back at Ryôsuke in the form of disgruntled buyers who unite online and then proceed to stalk him. The aura of paranoia and distrust is conveyed through the queasily sick grey/blue palette employed. As in classic noir, no one is to be trusted. When Ryôsuke finds an ally at the end of a classic finale, it is with the shared knowledge that they both are damned.

Jalmari Helander's Sisu: Road to Revenge is a worthy sequel to the 2022 film. This film is a pared down action and chase film, more akin to a graphic novel than to the mythos of the the first film. Jorma Tommila is back as the resilient protagonist. Stephen Lang, as Tommila's Soviet nemesis, lends his grizzled visage to the proceedings and is a snug fit. Like the original, this film is almost totally devoid of dialogue.

Given its subject matter, Paul McCartney and Wings' musical adventures in the decade following the break-up of The Beatles, Morgan Neville's Man on the Run is a relatively brisk and entertaining documentary. Neville wisely doesn't get bogged down into a rundown of the minutiae of Macca and company's various albums. No sane person wants the whole story on Wild Life or Red Rose Speedway or London Town. Instead, we see more of McCartney and the various iterations of his band onstage or frolicking backstage and in the studio. Despite inane lyrics and some of the worst haircuts of the 20th century, the doc does provide a good portrait of the pleasant, if dippy cute Beatle. Even though this is an authorized biodoc, I was happy that discordant notes were allowed, particularly Nick Lowe's putdown of Marry Had a Little Lamb; McCartney's second worst single.

I was a fan of the series, but the new film, Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man is a slight disappointment. Tom Harper's direction is spirited enough, but show runner and screenwriter Steven Knight seems bereft of new ideas. Cillian Murphy is always great as the stone-faced Tommy Shelby, but too many interesting characters are now dead and the new ones are not as memorable. Only Barry Keoghan as Tommy's Gypsy son strikes any sparks with Murphy. Rebecca Ferguson is disastrously cast as a palm reading Romani, but Knight's female characters have almost always been under drawn. The mystical aspects of this installment are beyond Mr. Knight. The film attempts to retell the pagan ritual of the new king dispatching and displacing an old one, but the tale is not as grounded as in previous installments. Start with the old episodes instead.

Danny Huston's Mr. North, from 1988, is an adaptation of Thornton Wilder's last novel, Theophilus North. North seemingly has the gift of healing and entrances Newport society of the 1920s. Huston captures Wilder's magically realistic tone, but also his vapidity. The result verges on Merchant/Ivory light, pleasant, but in no way memorable. Huston is most at sea in his direction of a comic chase sequence. However, he assembled a crack cast: Anthony Edwards, Robert Mitchum, Harry Dean Stanton, Angelica Huston, Virginia Madsen, David Warner, and Katharine Houghton. Acting laurels go to Mary Stuart Masterson. The booby prize goes to Tammy Grimes. The film includes rare appearances by Christopher Durang, Cleveland Amory, and Marietta Tree.

Pierre Morel's The Gunman, from 2015, is a feeble action film with Sean Penn as a contract killer. The picture is very loosely based on Jean-Patrick Manchette's The Prone Gunman, an icy and compact noir. Three listed screenwriters, including Mr. Penn, have added international settings and a romantic triangle. The bloat reduces this to a flashy vanity project. A good cast is largely wasted: Ray Winstone, Jasmine Trinca, Javier Bardem, Mark Rylance, and Idris Elba.

Cédric Jimenez's The Man with the Iron Heart is the umpteenth and worst rendition of the 1942 assassination of SS Gruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich in Prague. Based on Laurent Binet's superb novel HHhH, the film offers a cursory and jumbled version of fascinating historical events. Key incidents, like the Night of the Long Knives, are presented without context or proper explanation. A fine cast is stranded in a waxworks. The story is fascinating, but interested parties are advised to read Binet's book or view such previous cinematic versions as Hangmen Also Die! or Anthropoid. The most compelling aspect of The Man with the Iron Heart is Stephen Graham's performance as Heinrich Himmler.

Cloud

The Housemaid

Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried

Paul Feig's The Housemaid, adapted by Rebecca Sonnenshine from the best seller by Freida McFadden, is a superior thriller, easily Feig's best film since A Simple Favor. As in that film, Feig is able to draw out the class and feminist themes in the material without distracting his audience from the technical pleasures of the yarn. The two leads, Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried playing, respectively, maid and employer, have rarely been better. The film has a strong ensemble with Brandon Sklenar, Elizabeth Perkins, Michele Morrone, and Indiana Elle all offering good turns. Feig delivers a well judged and taut thriller that is one of the least flabby Hollywood flicks of 2025.

The Housemaid was a hit, but I think it is the type of trashy seeming commercial product that is underrated by critics and the Academy. Part of this also is due to the fact that this is a "women's picture", the kind of picture that has always tended to get dismissed critically as such even when they were directed by John Stahl and Douglas Sirk. However, The Housemaid has as much to say about the way we live now as One Battle After Another does. One thread I'll pull is the film's invocation of Barry Lyndon, seemingly a distinctly different flick. However, the thematic concerns between the films are quite similar: namely the marshaling of domination via political, class, and sexual means. Like Jack Torrance in The Shining, the male monster of the id in The Housemaid is reduced to a frothing beast trapped in the labyrinth of his own design. 

Time of Roses

                 Ritva Vepsä                   

Risto Jarva's Time of Roses, from 1969, is a curious Sci/Fi mystery from the Finnish director. The film had a New York release in 1970, but has gone largely unseen in the US since. The folks at Dead Crocodile have rectified this situation by releasing a spiffy looking disc. The film is set in the far off future of 2012 and concerns a documentary filmmaker named Raimo played by Arto Tuominen. Raimo is obsessed with a long deceased model named Saara (Ritva Vepsä) whose life was embroiled by scandal. Raimo is further intrigued when he encounters Saara's doppelgänger, an uninhibited nuclear engineer named Kisse, also played by Ms. Vepsä. Raimo cajoles Kisse into participating in a film about Saara, but, as viewers of Vertigo already know, the past cannot be recaptured and, thus, the film ends tragically.

Time of Roses is as uneven a film as I've seen in some time. The best parts match the sublimity of Alphaville, the cheesy bits reminded me of Logan's Run. The decor and look of the film point not to the future, but to the pop ethos of 1969; plastic furniture and all. The score is third rate, ranging from tepid cocktail jazz to a faux raga for the (fully clothed) orgy sequence. However, some of the intimations of future shock are prescient: including "mood pills", a form of the internet, cryogenics, and totalitarian surveillance. Indeed, there are genuinely moving scenes amidst the mod clutter: especially the deflating last shot and a sequence where a blind companion of Saara's touches the face of her doppelgänger.

Jarva was a politically committed filmmaker who made both documentary and fictional films. He died prematurely in 1977 at the age of 43, after the premiere of his last film The Year of the Hare, in an auto accident. Time of Roses has more than a fair share of political allegory. Kisse's comrades at the nuke plant are planning a wildcat strike and even hijack the state TV station to announce it. This despite the regime's claim that "class boundaries have been abolished." Raimo represents the detached and feckless bourgeoisie who are more interested in slugging down Scotch and practicing free love that in pursuing social justice. 

Dante's Inferno

             

Henry Lachman's Dante's Inferno is a structurally saggy vehicle for Spencer Tracy, his last film for Fox, that has some mitigating moments. This 1935 flick benefits from casting Tracy as a heel, a carnival barker who becomes an entertainment titan.Tracy was much more interesting as a rounder and a bounder, as in Up the River, than as the models of masculine virtue he was cast as at MGM. We first meet Tracy's character, Jim Carter, working as a coal stover on a cruise ship. Fired for malingering, Carter takes a debasing job, in blackface, at a carnival. That doesn't last long, but the kindly Henry B. Walthall, playing Pops the owner of the titular attraction, takes a shine to Carter and hires him as a barker. Carter excels at the job and soon has the suckers streaming to the sideshow. The fact that Pops has a comely daughter named Betty, played by Claire Trevor, helps induce Carter to stay on in the job.

Betty and Jim soon marry and, a dissolve later, have spawned a nauseatingly cute male moppet. The domestic scenes are the biggest drag in the picture, static episodes extolling domesticity and morality while Carter pursues wealth through amoral means at work. Ms. Trevor is wasted in a vanilla role and if you are a fan of her work, you know she is much better with a little sulphur. The surreal carnival scenes work much better. The sets are gaudily magnificent and Lachman employs tilted angels for surreal notes. The uses of grotesque backdrops recalls 1934's The Scarlet Empress. Cinematographer Rudolph Maté (Vampyr) employs filters, gauze, and vaseline to delirious effect.

The scope of this production is breathtaking. Not only do we get to witness the destruction of the carnival set, but there is a fire aboard an ocean liner that takes the character of Carter full circle. Before the conflagration, there is even a sizzling dance number featuring a young Rita Hayworth, then billed as Rita Cansino. However, the most memorable sequence of this over stuffed turkey is a fifteen minute wordless sequence which is meant to illustrate Walthall's sonorous reading of Dante's text. Owing much to Gustave Doré's engravings of Dante, the sequence is a supreme example of Hollywood bad taste, but at least has a sense of bold vitality. This sequence, like best parts of Dante's Inferno, harkens back to the vivacity of the late silent era in contrast to the placidity of Production Code Hollywood. 

Henry B. Walthall and Spencer Tracy

Suzhou River

Jia Hongsheng

Lou Ye's Suzhou River, from 2000, is a disjunctive noir set in Shanghai. The film is purposefully hard to follow for a number of reasons. Foremost is that Mr. Lou shifts the film's point of view, from the first person POV of a videographer (Zhang Ming Fan) to a third person POV of a motorcycle messenger (Jia Hongsheng), about a quarter of the way through this 83 minute picture. The lives of these two characters intersect. Furthermore, Lou employs a hand held camera in a way that further obfuscates who is who and what is what. There is a time leap in the plot and, to cap things off, the two lead female characters are played by the same actress: the sublime Zhou Xun. 

However, the plot, which I will not reveal, is consistent with the often labyrinthian nature of mysteries and noir. The hand-held technique jibes with the gritty portrait of Shanghai's decayed industrial riverside. The performances are exemplary, particularly the doomed Mr. Jia who succumbed to inner demons in 2010. Suzhou River is a film that fully explores the fatalism inherent in the noir genre. A masterpiece that repays repeated viewings.  

One Man's Way

Don Murray

Denis Sanders' One Man's Way, from 1963, was not quite as terrible as I thought it would be. That said, it is still pretty terrible. The film is a biopic of Norman Vincent Peale, a (then) famous Protestant minister and author of the best selling The Power of Positive Thinking. As a hagiography, the film is slightly better entertainment than the equally ass kissing JFK flick of that year, PT 109. What value the film has comes not from the anodyne script or Sanders' pedestrian direction, but from some interesting performances. Don Murray stars as Peale and his committed performance is the main reason to see this flick. Murray provides a engaged portrayal of spiritual struggle and is very strong at delivering Peale's sermons. The film also contains memorable bits from Diana Hyland (in her film debut), William Windom, Virginia Christine, Carol Ohmart, Veronica Cartwright, Butch Patrick, Tom Skerritt, and Bing Russell.

Of course, this portrayal of Peale's life is pure bunkum. What I objected to the most was the portrayal of Peale as force for ecumenical unity and toleration. We see him playing nice with a Jewish gentleman, urging him to visit his rabbi. In fact, Peale was a narrow minded right-winger who courted controversy with his political views. He came out against the presidential candidacy of Adlai Stevenson in 1952 because of Stevenson's divorce. Stevenson responded "I find Saint Paul appealing and Saint Peale appalling." During the 1960 election, Peale spearheaded a movement to oppose the election of John Kennedy because his allegiance to the Pope allegedly outweighed his allegiance to his nation. Peale was widely criticized for his stand and never really regained his public standing. Even reactionary Papist William F. Buckley Jr. repudiated him. Though a national figure in the 1950s, Peale is largely forgotten today. One Man's Way did little to burnish his reputation. It opened a month after JFK's assassination and was a box office bomb. 

Pompei: Below the Clouds

               

Gianfranco Rosi's Pompei: Below the Clouds is an elegant portrait of Naples. Unlike Rosi's previous documentaries such as Fire at Sea, Rosi shot this documentary in black and white. The high contrast beauty of the photography lends itself to the theme of timelessness in the film. A modern city under the shadow of Mount Vesuvius, the environs of Naples boast some of the world's most storied ruins and Roman antiquities and Rosi conveys the manifold glimpses of eternity the city contains. The film has no narration, but follows a disparate group of people as they work, relax, and learn. We visit a 911 call center and a study hall monitored by an aged tutor. We see a team of preservationists tunneling below the surface of the earth to witness ancient sites where antiquities have been looted by thieves. We witness a team of Japanese archaeologists excavating a site. We see a team of Syrian sailors offload a shipment of Ukrainian grain from a gigantic hold in their ship; another of the film's many excavations. 

Rosi takes us to an abandoned cinema where films, that range from Rodolfi's The Last Days of Pompeii to Rossellini's Voyage to Italy, are projected that allude to the famous eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE and its aftermath. The gorgeousness of the imagery in ...Below the Clouds left me so stupefied that it almost upended my critical facilities, but Rosi also manages to show that Naples is a gritty modern day seaport with its attendant problems. This bifurcation enables the film to take its place alongside such trenchant excavations of Naples as Curzio Malaparte's The Skin and Peter Robb's Street Fight in Naples: A City's Unseen History. 

Dust Bunny

Mads Mikkelsen

Bryan Fuller's Dust Bunny, his feature film debut, was released in the US on December 5th on four hundred screens and was pretty much out of theaters by Christmas. Lionsgate must have felt it was too quirky for a big market success, but Lionsgate's marketing strategies for all their 2025 were extremely misguided. Furthermore, Dust Bunny is an R rated film that will appeal best to perverse ten year olds. Maybe it will be a cult film one day, on the level of Buckeroo Banzai or Labyrinth, but it is too weird to be a blockbuster. Fuller, the show runner of Pushing Daisies, Hannibal, and American Gods, already has betrayed the hallmarks of an auteur in his television work. The mordant humor and surreal touches of his television work are much in evidence in Dust Bunny.

The film is a fable with the moral that we all carry a monster within. The titular monster emerges each night from under the bed of Aurora, an eight year old in New York City played by Sophie Sloan in deadpan Wednesday Addams mode. After losing successive sets of parents to the dust bunny, Aurora hires a unnamed hitman (Mads Mikkelsen) who lives in her apartment building to eliminate her problem. The hit man has problems of his own, Aurora has witnessed him killing a dragon (of sorts) in Chinatown, and is disinclined to believe her. Between action sequences, Aurora and the stone faced assassin work out their problems and gain mutual trust. Young Ms. Sloan is fine, it is almost always a good idea to direct young performers towards the deadpan, but Mr. Mikkelsen carries the film. A major film star of this century, Mikkelsen carries on the heroic tradition of stoic machismo embodied by Wayne, Eastwood, and Max von Sydow. 

Dust Bunny is visually vigorous for a film primarily set in a New York apartment. Every effort has been made, by CGI and practical effects, to highlight the fairytale nature of the project. The apartment building is baroquely appointed with rooms decorated in bold colors. The view of New York from Aurora's room is a tribute to the old fashioned art of matte painting. The unreality of the film allows us follow the childlike logic of a fable. We know, as we did when we were little tots, that such tales involve peril, but that the protagonist will emerge triumphant in the end. I also enjoyed Isabella Summers' score and, particularly, the use of Sister Jane Mead's recording of The Lord's Prayer. This 1973 hit, it reached number four, I had blissfully forgotten, but Fuller uses it to full comic effect in a scene in which Aurora steals a brimming collection plate  from a church in order to pay the hitman. Whether Dust Bunny is a one-off or a start to a film directing career, I salute Fuller's audacity. The picture is slight, but lovingly crafted. Dust Bunny also features Sigourney Weaver, David Dastmalchian, and Sheila Atim.