Sea Devils

Sea Devils is a relative clunker from Raoul Walsh. The film is based on a minor Victor Hugo novel, but Borden Chase's screenplay takes many liberties with Hugo, history, and geography. The film is set around 1800 as a state of war exists between the British empire and Napoleonic France. Napoleon and his chief cop, Fouché, figure in the threadbare espionage plot which binds together smuggler Rock Hudson and British agent Yvonne De Carlo. They are chiefly responsible for the void at the center of this picture. Hudson is terrible, but Yvonne De Carlo is really terrible. I was a fan of The Munsters when I was a tot, so I won't belabor the point, but it is puzzling since she is quite good later on in Walsh's Band of Angels. Anyway, Hudson has more chemistry with Bryan Forbes, playing Rock's wingman, than he does with Ms. De Carlo.

Hudson functions best when he gets to display courtly gentility towards his leading lady. In Sea Devils, Rock kidnaps and gags his leading lady. This is a role for Errol Flynn not Hudson. Hudson never seems at ease in action films, even as late as 1969's The Undefeated he looks uncomfortable in the out of doors. Rock was more adept, both vocally and physically, indoors, as in the tavern brawls in Sea Devils, urbane flirting with Doris Day and with the late, lamented Susan Saint James on McMillan and Wife. On balance, he was also not a good fit for period roles. Despite the film's title, the picture spends little time at sea. Most of the picture is salon intrigue with gorgeous sets by Wilfred Shingleton (Great Expectations) shot in sublime Technicolor by Wilkie Cooper (Seven Men From Now). A good drinking game for this flick would be to have a shot every time Rock takes off his shirt.

Rock Hudson and Yvonne De Carlo

The exteriors for Sea Devils were shot in the Channel islands and France. That coupled with the all UK supporting cast lends one to think that this was a case of the fading RKO channelling European profits into a European production. The supporting players are certainly better than the leads, especially Jacques Brunius as Fouché, Maxwell Reed, and Denis O' Dea. Bryan Forbes said he was "ludicrous in a ludicrous movie", but he was only half right. Perhaps producer David E. Rose wanted to recapture elements of such recent Walsh triumphs as Captain Horatio Hornblower and The World in his Arms, but this is a pale facsimile. One interesting echo is a carrier pigeon sequence lifted straight out of Walsh's Desperate Journey. I find it more of an example of Hollywood as an echo chamber than as proof of the auteur theory.  

Ashkan, The Charmed Ring and other stories

Sina Razani

I feel that Shahram Mokri's Ashkan, The Charmed Ring and other stories is one of the more impressive feature film debuts of the 21st century. This 2008 release has had very little imprint in the US. It even lacks a Wikipedia page. The picture's IMDB page incorrectly lists it as a color film. It was shot digitally and then rendered into black and white with a few splashes of red. It is a discursive mystery with absurdist humor. The look of the picture matches the tone of the film which seeks to move beyond the then prevailing neorealism of Iranian cinema. The deadpan absurdist tone and manner of Ashkan was influenced, as Mokri has acknowledged, by the films of Hal Hartley and Jim Jarmusch. He has also cited the influence of Quentin Tarantino on Ashkan's script which, like Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, plays with time and points of view.

The film leaps about, focusing on a myriad of strange characters whose tales intersect including two blind jewel thieves, two medical students trying to deal with a room full of cadavers, a representative of the police, and a winged sculpture. The titular Ashkan doesn't show up until halfway through the flick. That he is seeing his therapist denotes how Western the film is. Islamic fundamentalism is significant in its absence. The film has a hard bop soundtrack courtesy of Abuzar Saffarian and employs what sounds like a Farsi version of The Windmills of Your Mind for the conclusion. Ashkan is seeing his therapist after his fourteenth suicide attempt. His doc, understandably, terminates their professional relationship. Such is the warped and askew humor that permeates this film. Unlike some absurdist comedies, there are actual laughs that prevent the film from falling prey to artiness.

Ashkan is off-putting in its preposterousness and ramshackle in its production, but I could be describing Breathless. Ashkan is so efficiently shot and cut that its polyphonic saga whizzes by. My mouth was often agape at its visual simplicity and audacity. Unlike some adepts of post-modern clutter, Mokri injects enough heart along with the cleverness to engage the viewer emotionally. Like Godard, he is a devoted cinephile and that permeates his work. Mokri was initiated into the mysteries of the cinema by his father in a country where it sometimes dangerous to pursue that passion. As a lad, Mokri had his head shaved by the local authorities for possessing a VHS copy of a ninja movie. A long dialogue about Melville's Le Samouraï provides a bonding mechanism for two hoods and a way to invoke Mokri's father's favorite actor, Alain Delon. The cast of Ashkan, almost all of them theatrical veterans, enliven the film with arcane riffs and expert beats.

Fish and Cat

Ashkan, The Charmed Ring and other stories is part of a new box set by Deaf Crocodile entitled The Time-Bending Mysteries of Shahram Mokri. It incudes his three subsequent features: Fish & Cat, Invasion, and Careless Crime. Biff assures you all that this is one boffo box. Fish and Cat, from 2013, is a serial killer film that ignores the dictates of the genre. There is little gore and the killings around a vacation lake occur offscreen. Instead of an 85 minute quickie it is a discursive and circuitous 2 hours and 14 minutes. Time and perspective are played with as long tracking shots follow the twenty or so characters; mostly hip young students from Tehran. A difficult, but rewardingly immersive picture. The same could be said for Mokri's next feature, Invasion, a Sci-Fi picture of sorts with a vampiric alien feasting on humans. Earth, or at least Iran, is enveloped in darkness and smoke in this 2017 release.The compulsive and repetitive drama is enclosed, occurring almost entirely within a large building that is part college structure, part industrial maze. Invasion functions as a comment on the interiority of gaming. Once again the film is an endless series of tracking shots. As in Fish & Cat, the narrative loop becomes a Möbius strip. To further obfuscate, the characters are played interchangeably by the players. While this jibes with Mokri's absurdism, it also harkens back to Persian ritual dramas known as ta'ziyeh, which Mokri invokes at various points. There is an air of theatrical frivolity that contrasts with the dystopian plot. Invasion will reward multiple viewings.

Careless Crime was released in 2020. The schisms of Iranian life that were undercurrents in the previous films come to the fore as bumbling fundamentalists plot to torch a movie theater. Once again time and perspective shift continually. The action shifts from 2020 to 1979 and back. Yet, the song remains the same as the past is prologue to the future. There are films within the film within the film. Sometimes the satire is half baked, as in the fake feature within Careless Crime, but the cinephilia of the picture won me over. We visit a movie museum and even view an Edison short. Careless Crime is Mokri"s most conventional and mature work and bodes well for Black Rabbit, White Rabbit.

Tuner

Havana Rose Liu and Leo Woodall

Daniel Rohrer's Tuner is a promising first fictional feature. It attempts to affix a crime subplot to a romantic comedy with mixed results. Leo Woodall stars as Niki, a piano tuner apprenticing for an aged mentor named Harry Horowitz, played by an indulged Dustin Hoffman. The duo putter around the tri-state area in a bespoke van servicing the underused pianos of the rich and indolent. Niki is afflicted with an "audio allergy" which enable him to hear pitch perfectly, but also makes him painfully sensitive to ambient noise. He meets cute with a budding composer named Ruthie (Havana Rose Liu) and after initial misgivings they are canoodling in a musical montage set to Dean Martin's version of Almost Like Being in Love. The film's action is mostly set to jazz standards from 1950s by such luminaries as Oscar Peterson, Dave Brubeck, and Charles Mingus. Complications arise when tragedy strikes and Niki is forced to earn major scratch by applying his specialized skills to safecracking for a motley crew of Russian gangsters.

It is here that the flick goes off the rails a bit. The portrayal of the Russians is cartoonish (surprising for the director of Navalny) so that when they bare their fangs, the results are not believable. However, this is primarily a genre exercise, so implausibilities abound; as many as in, say, Golden Boy. The film is able to coast along on the charm of the performers. Ms. Liu makes her character enough of a control freak to be believable and Woodall plays interestingly against the heroic mien of a character with a disability. Best in show is Tovah Feldshuh as Harry's no nonsense spouse. Jean Reno is somewhat miscast as a maestro, but it is always a pleasure to see him. Rohrer directs with a pleasing attention to dramatic convention, tempo, and characterization, but, hopefully, his next script will be less derivative.                            

Ghare Baire

Soumitra Chatterjee and Swatilekha Sengupta

Satyajit Ray's Ghare Baire (The Home and the World) is a historical film foregrounded by a love triangle. This film released in 1984 is based on the 1916 novel of the same title by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore also wrote song lyrics and some of these songs find their way into this film adaptation. Both book and film center on Nikhil (Victor Banerjee), a Bengali noble and his wife, Bimala (Swatilekha Sengupta). Nikhil is Western and progressive leaning, for 1907 and his wife follows suit. Their relative domestic bliss is ruptured when nationalist leader and longtime friend, Sandip (Soumitra Chatterjee) arrives to visit. Sandip is a charismatic speaker and ladies man who is agitating against British rule. Nikhil doesn't want Bimala to live a cloistered life and practically serves her to Sandip on a plate. She responds to his charms and events lead to a tragic ending.

The novel expresses Tagore's ambivalent attitude towards India's emerging nationalism. As pointed out by Andrew Robinson in his Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye, still the best book in English on Ray, the character of Nikhil articulates Tagore's qualms concerning Hindu ethnocentrism. In 1905, Lord Curzon had divided Bengal into Hindu and Muslim sections; the latter corresponding roughly to the present state of Bangladesh. This was a portent of the eventual partitioning of India in 1947, at which time Ray first wrote a screenplay adaptation of the novel. Sandip is shown exploiting this issue and stoking ethnic violence by calling for a ban on foreign trade, a measure which would hurt poor Muslim merchants the most. Nikhil sees Sandip for what he is politically and as an exploiter of women, for Bimala is merely a link on his chain of fools. Nikhil's apparent diffidence is a problem dramatically, but Ray, serene in his dotage, captures his peculiar aura of resigned fatalism. Ghare Baire is a studiously conducted chamber play in a languorous mansion full of wonders and wondrous kitsch. We do see scenes of the world outside Nikhil's mansion, but sparingly.

The deliberate pacing of the film and its political background may make this a hard film to get into. It reminds me of late Visconti in its decorous lassitude. What gave me an insight that opened up the film for me was Ray's direction of Gopa Aich, a neophyte cast as Nikhil's widowed sister-in-law. She wears white to denote her widowhood, a portent.The role is ridiculous. The woman is bored and not too subtly enamored with Nikhil. Ray directs the actress broadly, as if she were a diva in a comic opera. The film uses music throughout with songs in both Bengali and English. Ray shoots this chamber play as if it were an opera, again akin to Visconti. There are duos and trios and the usual tra-la-la triangle. The three leads make their characters sing. Ray had a heart attack while filming, his place was taken by his son, Sandip, who followed his father's instructions. This circumstance has led to Ghare Baire being treated as a lesser effort in the Ray canon, but I found it to be a fully integrated masterpiece.

Ghare Baire has just been released on disc by Criterion as part of its Eclipse series in a set entitled Late Ray. The other two films in the set are two other late Ray entries, An Enemy of the People and The Stranger. An Enemy of the People is dull and tired, an overly earnest and static attempt to transpose Ibsen's play to 1989 India. Why Ray tacked on a Frank Capra style ending onto the material is beyond me. The bedraggled Steve McQueen version is more interesting. Ray's final film, The Stranger, shares many of the same players as An Enemy of the People, but is a appreciably livelier film. There is color, song, dance, and even a few exterior scenes. Ray's screenplay is reminiscent of Ghare Baire: an interloper temporarily upsets an established domestic balance. In this case, the stranger of the title is a long lost uncle of dubious provenance. The intrigue is slim, but The Stranger has its modest charms. 

You Can See Everything

 Amanda Seyfried       

Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's You Can See Everything is, ostensibly, a documentary about the now imprisoned Theranos executive Elizabeth Holmes. The filmmakers were invited to film Holmes, her husband, and two small children in a beachside house they rented in San Diego for the last month or so before Holmes was scheduled to begin her sentence. Mr. Fielder appears onscreen throughout as the couples' interlocutor. I would argue that we learn more about his character than that of the shifty couple. Since I think objectivity in film documentary is a crock, and has been since Nanook waved at Robert Flaherty, Mr. Fielder's presence makes this a more personal picture than the usual talking head fests. The filmmakers were smart enough to know that seeking truth in such a complex and thorny case as this is foolhardy, especially when you are dealing with such slippery customers as Ms. Holmes and her hubby. However, the two are so cluelessly cocooned in their delusional bubble that they help make You Can See Everything the funniest American comedy of 2026. The ellipses of Ms. Holmes' non-answers provide perfect comic beats.

I watched the film at a sold out matinee and and was amazed at the number of gasps, guffaws, and belly laughs the picture elicited. The film is visually monotonous, mostly enormous close-ups of faces, but I and the rest of the audience were largely riveted. The filmmakers seem at sea when Ms Holmes enters the hoosegow, but an entertaining fiction saves the project. Amanda Seyfried, who played Ms. Holmes in a Hulu movie, and Christopher Abbott are enlisted to play versions of Holmes and mate. A pre-filming meeting that displays the dynamics between the couple is reenacted, as is a prison visitation resulting in a documentary film that plays around with the form. You Can See Everything does not attempt to give us facts in a Joe Friday fashion, but gives us much to chew and ruminate on. 

Scenes from a Marriage

Erland Josephson and Liv Ullmann

In certain cases, I have reserved a few works of art to contemplate in my dotage. I just read Proust for the first time and was underwhelmed. He reminded me of Virginia Woolf in his self-absorption. There are always a few Dorothy Dunnett and Tom Sharpe novels that I am saving for my deathbed because I love their prose so. Scenes from a Marriage was in this category partially because I am a recovering Bergmaniac. When the shortened film version was released in the US in 1974, I was deep in the throes of my adoration of the Swedish Ubermensch. I grew up in Baltimore where we were able to receive Washington D. C. stations if we pointed the rabbit eared antenna a certain way. WETA ran a series of Bergman films from the Janus collection with commentary from the young Roger Ebert and I was hooked. I was able to see everything from Summer with Monika through Winter Light as a teen and it helped me glom onto cinema as an art form. Scenes from a Marriage had gotten huzzahs from the American critics, but, being the contrary budding aesthete I was, I vowed to wait and view the real deal.

It was worth the wait. The six part (or scenes), 297 minute 1973 television series has a breadth of vision that eclipses the film version which omits two hours of footage. The length of the series opens up our understanding of Marianne (Liv Ullmann) and Johan (Erland Josephson), the married and then divorced but always a couple the film chronicles. The series was filmed in color by Sven Nykvist, but the baroque expressionism of Cries and Whispers (an alleged masterpiece I find over wrought) has been discarded. Scenes from a Marriage recalls The Rite, also lensed by Nykvist, in that it is a chamber play, almost entirely shot in interiors. What exteriors that exist in the series usually show the characters tearing around the countryside in a Volvo. They are usually there for a reason, though. Bergman repeats a shot of a parked vehicle at the couple's summer cottage to express what has been lost in the passage of time.  The first instance is when Johan is telling Marianne that he is leaving her. The second is when the couple, now divorced and married to unseen others, arrive at the cottage to rekindle their romance. They are able to do so, but only by leaving that cottage and escaping the ghosts of the past.

The majority of the series focuses on interior duologues between Johan and Marianne. These scenes start out in long shot, establishing the perimeter of the field of marital combat, but they always end in tight close-ups. Sometimes of someone in anguish, usually Marianne, but more often with the couple having found a rapprochement, cuddling. There are a lot enormous close-ups, like the one above, of the couple together as a unit, her yin to his yang as it were. Johan is the rational male side, more self centered and sarcastic. Marianne is the masochistic female empath. As has been pointed out, Bergman's sympathies lie with the distaff side even though Josephson's character, as in After the Rehearsal, can be looked at as a Bergman stand-in. However, I detect glimpses of hope within the usual Bergman battle of the sexes. We get plenty of the hell is other people schtick, particularly in the dinner party with Bibi Andersson and Jan Malmsjo, and Ibsen and Strindberg get the usual shout-outs, but the protagonists display personal growth. Johan becomes a little more empathic or "softer" as Marianne puts it and Marianne becomes more independent and sure of herself.

Ms. Ullmann's performance is one of the greatest of the last century, but the care and the skill of the other performers is not far behind. Wench Foss, Norwegian like Ms. Ullmann, is especially memorable as Marianne's mother in a scene snipped from the film version. The scene, in which Marianne blithely tells her mother that she will not be attending her father's interment, is a signpost of Marianne liberating herself from the rituals and unspoken rules of the previous generation. Liberation is not a concept generally found in the claustrophobic world of Herr Bergman, but it is there in Scenes from a Marriage.

Virginia City

Guinn Williams, Alan Hale Sr., and Errol Flynn

Michael Curtiz's Virginia City is an amiable enough Errol Flynn vehicle, but it is also the least interesting Flynn/Curtiz collaboration Warner Brothers released in 1940, the others being Santa Fe Trail and The Sea Hawk. Flynn is a Yankee Captain during the Civil War who we first view attempting to break out of the infamous Libby prison in Richmond. The commandant of that prison is Randolph Scott who is improbably roped into a plot, by dancehall gal/spy Mildred Hopkins, to move five million dollars in gold from the titular town east in order to prop up a tottering Confederacy. After busting out of the hoosegow, Flynn is tabbed to thwart the rebel plan. A troupe of banditos, headed by a mustachioed Humphrey Bogart, lurks on the periphery threatening mischief at every step.

I'm not referring to the characters in this picture because they hardly exist. The flick has a cobbled together feel with various writers contributing different elements to the formulaic stew. There is a pinch of Gone With The Wind and more than a dollop of Stagecoach. Flynn gets to display his good natured dash, but other familiar elements lack brio. Guinn Williams and Alan Hale are along to provide comic relief as Flynn's cohorts, but the material they are given is feeble. Curtiz's gifts did not include comic raffishness. His exterior scenes lack the dynamism and thematic integration employed by Walsh and Ford, though the scenic vistas, mostly in Arizona, are gorgeous. The most memorable sequences are interior: the Sazerac dancehall where Ms. Hopkins plies her trades and the opening sequences inside and below Libby prison.

Humphrey Bogart

The weakest and most embarrassing element of the film is Bogart's performance as a Mexican bad man. It is among the more ludicrous miscastings in Hollywood history, right up there with Bogart's turn as a vampire in The Return of Doctor X, but it belies the fact that Bogie had not reached the status of an A player, yet. It did not have to be since Bogart was playing a real figure, the outlaw John Murrell, who was, in fact, not a Mexican. Of course, the real Murell died in 1844, but Virginia City is not encumbered by historic fact. I rolled my eyes when a Virginia City town crier announces the simultaneous fall of Southern strongholds Vicksburg and Atlanta; events that were separated by some fourteen months. What is more objectionable than the picture's slipshod treatment of history is its even-handedness to the Union and Rebel cause; a sop to the Southern box-office. Flynn and Scott are both honorable dudes who are just staying true to their cause. Slavery is unmentioned. The ulterior motive for this is that, two years before Pearl Harbor, Hollywood wanted to play down partisan and regional divisions in the US to cement the unity needed to combat the Axis menace.

There are some things I like about the flick. Hopkins and Scott were both Southerners and their accents are nicely relaxed. Compare them to Ward Bond who appears as a Confederate soldier early on. Bond's efforts aren't bad, but pales besides the real things. The songs Hopkins is saddled with are weak, even Dietrich would have flailed with them, but she is a trouper. I kind of like Flynn putting the moves on an older woman for once instead of jailbait like Olivia de Havilland, as was his wont in his surreal life.

Cold Storage

Georgina Campbell and Joe Keery

Jonny Campbell's Cold Storage is a blend of comedy and horror that failed to ignite at the box-office when it was released in the US in February. With loads of goofy gore, it is an amiable formula film that will not stick in one's mind's eye for long. David Koepp's screenplay posits that a chunk of Skylab containing an invasive and toxic fungus dropped to Earth in Kansas and has been sequestered by the government ever since. However, the Feds dropped the ball and the deadly fungus bunker in now a public storage facility whose security staff includes Cold Storage's two leads, Joe Keery and Georgina Campbell. While they hide from creatures affected by the green goo, two retired guv'ment agents ride to the rescue. 

That these parts are played by Liam Neeson and Lesley Manville belies the saving grace of this unpretentious little film: superior acting. The timing and nuance of the crack cast lift this just above standard fare. Best in show is Vanessa Redgrave whose extended cameo shows that the old gal has still got it. Based on her recent credits, Georgina Campbell is a real comer. That she can play a character ten years younger than herself here is a triumph of acting rather than make-up. Joe Keery kind of bugs me. He overdoes the wrong side of the tracks schtick here, but he is more than competent with his movements and timing. I guess I think he is more of a Jughead than an Archie. 

Mr. Campbell has primarily worked in television. He is a Brit and I guess that explains the preponderance of thesps from the UK in the cast. He works well with the ensemble, but seems not to be a distinctive visual stylist. Believers in the auteur theory of screenwriting should note that Mr. Koepp recycled the satellite surveillance trope from Cold Storage in the Black Box script. 

Fearless Frank

Good titles, bad movie

There is not much written about Philip Kaufman's Fearless Frank because there is not much to write about. It is a feeble superhero parody that might have made a good fifteen minute Second City comedy troupe skit, but becomes tedious when expanded to the length of a feature flim. Kaufman adds Felliniesque digressions and vaguely narcotic curlicues as padding. Kaufman partisans would just as soon forget about the film, but since I've never championed his work, I will admit that I got a few laughs out of it; more than I laughed at After the Fox or The Producers.

The main reason for the laughs is the topnotch cast who tower over the thin material. A good chunk of the cast came from Chicago's aforementioned Second City. Second City's Severn Darden and Anthony Holland were in Kaufman's first film, Goldstein, and return for Fearless Frank. Fellow comic troupers Joan Darling and David Steinberg joins them for this one. All four would soon be familiar faces in Hollywood films and television. Jon Voight is the titular Frank, who is reanimated by mad scientist Darden into a superhero. All the leads do what they can with much scenery chewing and mugging. Nelson Algren, who also acted in Goldstein, appears as one of the bad guy's henchmen with the sobriquet, "Needles"; a tribute to Algren's The Man with the Golden Arm. Monique van Vooren appears as eye candy and Frank's dream girl, another character aptly named: Plethora. Cult musical figure Ken Nordine delivers droll narration.

Jon Voight

As one can surmise from this plot summary, Kaufman is borrowing a little from Mary Shelley, but the primary source of this parody is the then popular Batman TV series. This is most obvious when Kaufman punctuates Voight's defloration of Ms. Darling with mod titles of "Wham" and "Pow", but, alas, there is no "Biff". However, it is hard to parody something that already verged on self-parody. The film was first shown at Cannes in 1967 and, unsurprisingly attracted no interest. It was eventually released on a double bill with an obscure Dustin Hoffman B picture after the success of Midnight Cowboy in 1969. Kaufman got a deal with Universal Pictures which eventually released his next picture, the far superior Western, The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid. Fearless Frank, at times looks good enough to be a Hollywood feature, but in some sequences, like a superimposed Frank flying over Chicago, it is strictly amateur hour. Kaufman never really evolved into a first rate visual stylist, but his next film would show a quantum leap. Too much of Fearless Frank's widescreen frame contains wasted negative space, meaningless visual clutter that distracts from the players.

I also feel the sophisticated Europhile Kaufman had a rather leaden feel for comedy. There are some amusing bits in ...Northfield and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but he totally muffed Tom Wolfe's satiric jabs at Americana and the space program in The Right Stuff. I find that highly lauded film and his acclaimed The Unbearable Lightness of Being, to be gaseous, over long bores. I do like The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Henry and June, and Quills. The White Dawn and The Wanderers are watchable and the rest is dross; including Fearless Frank.

Resident Evil

Austin Abrams 

Zach Cregger's Resident Evil is a deserved hit with both the critics and the public. The youngsters and gamers seem to like it. My ticket taker gushed that "it was by far the best in the series even if it didn't have Mila." The audience was young and entranced by the sheer gallop of this genre exercise par excellence. I was worried after the polyphonic breakthrough of Weapons that Resident Evil would be monophonic in its adherence to the project's gaming heritage, but it is more than a rollercoaster ride. It is agitatedly, but rewardingly monophonic in following the adventures of dispatch delivery agent Bryan (Austin Abrams) as he encounters carnivorous alien creatures while he tries to deliver the film's MacGuffin to a lab. It does not end happily, but the film's themes are suited to the rat in a maze structure. Cregger leavens the material with sick humor which the cast delivers sublimely.

Some have objected to the prevalent visual schema of slime, often toxic, that fills the screen during the last act. This is silly because the film's sense of horror is that of human putrefaction. The hero, a modern Ichabod Crane, is trying desperately to outrun the onslaught of mortality. The unease of COVID and whatever the heck happened in Russia pervades the air. What mysterious strain will cause us to putrefy? Thankfully, Austin Abrams gives a sly, visually elastic performance that brings out the absurdity of Bryan's plight. The supporting players whizz by before getting slimed. I was most amused by the efforts of Paul Walter Hauser and Zach Cherry. 

I was reminded of a similar genre exercise that traded off then current fears, Spielberg's Duel. The villain stalking Dennis Weaver is a kin to the good old boys that shot up Captain America and Billy in Easy Rider. The villain of Resident Evil is harder to pin down, something more mysterious in the air. Guns and rifles of many varieties do seem easy to find in this film's version of America. It posits that if life is a First-person shooter game then, soon, we will all be dead.

This is for Carla, a horror aficionado and connoisseur of onscreen putrefaction.

The Devil's Bride

Groovy!

Arunas Zebriunas' dotty film The Devil's Bride is a Lithuanian rock opera released in 1974. Mr Zebrunas was assisted in constructing this slice of counterculture kitsch by composer Vyacheslav Ganelin and poet Sigitas Geda who penned the libretto. The plot is loosely based on the folklore fantasy novel Whitehorn's Windmill by Kazys Boruta. The good people at Deaf Crocodile have released this film on a beautiful disc which contains a host of extras in addition to the 76 minute feature. Ten minutes into this picture, you'll feel as if someone has given you a few shots of mead and a dark rye crust with ergot clusters. 

An agent of the dark lord spreads mischief amongst the inhabitants of a lakeside village. Men sell their souls and brides are left waiting at the altar. The thorough composed score drives the frenetic, cartoon like action. The film hurtles along. If you don't like one tune, here comes another. The tone is akin that of Ken Russell in this period, if Mr. Russell had liked people. The invocation of national myth, Catholic imagery, and pagan folklore stands as a finger in the eye of staid, godless Communism.

As with most rock operas, the score for The Devil's Bride is not rock and roll, but a listenable mishmash. Because of his background in jazz, I'd group Mr. Ganelin with jazz composers who went all in on baroque pop when the commercial opportunity arose, like John Barry, Quincy Jones, and Burt Bacharach. Ganelin injects some fuzz-tone guitar whenever Satan's minions cut loose with orgiastic impishness, but he can't compose around an electric guitar like Morricone. The Devil's Bride is much more engaging than such visual atrocities as Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell. And don't get me started about the 1973 Lost Horizon, an all time turkey that put the kibosh to the Bacharach/ David partnership. It was a bad era for musicals, rock opera or not, The Devil's Bride is colorful and kooky fun. The flick is currently streaming on Tubi.

The Love That Remains

Saga Garoarsdóttir

Hlynur Pálmason's The Love That Remains strikes me as one of the more original and impressive pictures I've seen this year. The film repeats the man as a single grain of sand vibe explored in Godland, but adds a depth of characterization that lifts this work to a higher plateau. The film is ostensibly focused on the ongoing separation between artist Anna (Saga Garoarsdóttir) and her mismatched mate, Magnús (Sverrir Guonason). The pair share a teenage daughter named Ida and a set of ten year old twins. Magnús has not quite processed that Anna has given him the heave-ho. He slinks into his former household like a wary sheepdog and is usually graced a meal or a beer. However, he cannot reignite a spark with Anna who is clearly bored and irritated by her more simplistic spouse.

Magnús works on a fishing trawler. He is gone for weeks at a time as it is herring season and is bored and down in the dumps. The fish harvesting sequences alone would make this worth seeing, but The Love That Remains contains multiple strains and themes. Anna is an artist who weathers her work. Not in a random way, but deliberately so that it is infused with the elements of Iceland. The film traces the arc of the seasons from spring to winter. The fractured family joins together to pick wild berries and forage mushrooms. Among Ann's art pieces left out in the open is a Joan of Arc figure affixed to a stake. Her children use the figure for archery target practice, but the figure also stands in contrast to the ever changing face of natural Iceland. Ann's work grounds her to her land. In contrast, Magnús ends the film, literally, at sea.

Pálmason punctuates his narrative with surrealistic asides that amplify the film's themes. Some of these are dropped matter of factly. Some with flashy effects like split screens and whip pans. However, Pálmason never allows his film to be overcome with effects and uses them judiciously. Most of the surreal moments display an aptly unconscious tug. The exception is Magnús' dream of himself being menaced by a giant rooster. This is in response to his having killed a misbehaving cock at Ann's request. The dream is a too literal illustration of guilt, but it pays off when Ida tells off Magnús because of this foul deed and his subservience to his ex. The killing was played for laughs, at Magnús' ineptitude, but it hinges on one of the film's central themes: Are we instinctual beasts preying upon each other or can we deny or self-interest for the common good? The film's humor is predicated on the unease with which we regard out ambivalent state. There are no easy answers or good guys or bad guys in the film.

Ida's animal rights stance and the children's overall attitude towards sex and violence signals another of the film's themes: shifts in generational perspectives. The arrows into Joan of Arc and the recovery of World War 2 mines show that violence is an ever present reality even in peaceable Iceland. Ambivalence, the hallmark of maturity, is in evidence even in the film's appreciation of ugliness and beauty. Even the spectre and reality of death has its strange beauty in The Love That Remains. Brilliantly acted and memorably filmed, this is surely one of the best features released in the US in 2026.

                          

Disclosure Day

Emily Blunt

I was somewhat disappointed by Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day. Technically, the film is superbly wrought, no surprise, and the contributions by longtime Spielberg collaborators John Williams and Janusz Kaminski are noteworthy. This is one of Spielberg's best casts and I enjoyed the efforts of Josh O'Connor, Eve Hewson, Colman Domingo, and, especially, Emily Blunt. Spielberg's direction has not curdled into aged lassitude. He can still direct a train wreck as well as anybody. However, the presence of an elaborate train wreck in the middle of already overly complicated conspiracy film about UFOs seems gratuitous, as if old Steve signed on so he could recreate the train wreck from The Greatest Show on Earth for the umpteenth time.

David Koepp's script is a mess. The picture involves a lot of cross cutting and chase scenes, yet generates little suspense. From the title of the film, we already know the cache of UFO footage held by Mr. O'Connor's character will be eventually released despite the desperate attempts by corporate titan Colin Firth to suppress "the truth". Firth's motivation for this is shaky, the usual old saw about people not being able to handle "the truth". Regardless, the picture is not named Non-Disclosure Day, so the audience knows in which way the picture is heading throughout. Koepp plunges us into the plot with nary a character sketch or motivation. To start the film, Mr. O'Connor is at a pro wrestling match to trade his alien footage to the corporate baddies who have kidnapped his missus (Ms. Hewson). We eventually get the back story, ad nauseam, but this opening sequence lacks suspense because the audience has no bearings. Spielberg color codes the wrestling sequence in red (capped), white, and blue, but this faint slap at MAGA is the only bit of attempted cultural relevance in Disclosure Day. 

I was also bugged by the film's whole mind melding schtick. Heck, if Colin Firth can read the minds of the good guys, then I think he should be easily able to thwart their plans. Koepp and Spielberg do get some yuks from Ms. Blunt's mind reading capabilities, but this is mostly due to Ms. Blunt's skill at having her face and posture convey what she is thinking. The film's other attempts at humor fall flat, particularly the character of Ms. Blunt's hapless musician boyfriend. While Mr. Koepp is responsible for some of the faults of Disclosure Day, the ultimate responsibility lies with the director. The disclosure footage show provide the director a good opportunity to strut his stuff, but the results are underwhelming. The footage of Nixon showing Jackie Gleason alien remains is botched. How could a scene like that be unmemorable? The CGI bits lack the bite and flair of even Ready Player One. In addition, we get B movie level footage of Roswell and Close Encounters redux. Are we still stuck on little green men after all these years?

As with super heroes, I admit to being less than fascinated with the subject of UFOs. If our alien overlords have not deigned to contact us, I'm sure they have reasons, but I'm not waiting to be enslaved or turned into a cosmic butterfly. You might as well wait for Godot. Though if any alien overlord is reading this and contemplating putting me in their zoo, please take Biff circa 1985 and pair him with a cloned Mary Astor. The fascination with UFOs seems a hallmark of the second rate mind. That is the nature of Steven Spielberg, a first rate film technician who does not possess a rigorous intellect.