The Films of 2023

[DarkImbecile]

Before Netflix shelled out big money for it, Chloe Domont’s Fair Play was hyped as an erotic thriller in the classic ‘90s mode, but I don’t think that’s exactly right. Those films were often otherwise conventional thrillers padded with a few nude scenes to draw prurient interest, but they were only rarely about sex. Domont’s feature debut shows plenty — and verbalizes even more than it shows — but the psychosexual dynamics between Alden Ehrenreich’s Luke and a stellar Phoebe Dynevor as Emily are not at all secondary. The provocations Domont serves up may be just as calculated as those in a 1996 Sharon Stone vehicle, but they’re not at all secondary to her thematic interests, making them substantially more satisfying.

Luke and Emily are colleagues at a high-end Wall Street firm carrying on a secret relationship in defiance of company HR policies; when their professional power dynamic undergoes a radical shift, the consequences for their personal lives are even more extreme. The high-stress finance milieu is a nice parallel to the interpersonal one, and Domont avoids most of the stereotypical complications one would expect from story featuring an ambitious woman in a high-testosterone industry. Eddie Marsan is excellent as Campbell, a calculated, controlled executive whose industry-typical sociopathy never tips over into exaggerated caricature.

While incisively dissecting the unspoken assumptions around gender roles built into relationships, Domont’s script doesn’t feel like a polemical essay on the topic. Instead, these issues and Luke and Emily’s responses to them, as recognizable as they are, feel baked into these specific characters and express themselves idiosyncratically (if not always surprisingly).

The film nails the clean, corporate slickness of these types of films, with selectively deployed tight closeups and handheld shakiness for the scenes with more intense passion or anxiety — I was surprised to see that cinematographer Menno Mans has only a few other features given the assured consistency of the visuals.

I imagine given the response thus far that this film will continue to be a topic conversation throughout the year, and I’d be shocked if Domont isn’t given several opportunities to build on the talent on display here.

[Walter Kurtz]

François Ozon's new drama with Isabelle Huppert
Michael Rozek's new drama with Isabelle Huppert
Élise Girard's new drama with Isabelle Huppert
Dario Argento's new drama with Isabelle Huppert

What better way to celebrate the Year of Huppert than with a preorder of this fantastic-sounding tome -----
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1474479839/?c ... _lig_dp_it

"Performative Opacity in the Work of Isabelle Huppert" is about to arrive!

Finally we get a dissertation on Huppert's amazing technique! Finally a scrum of scholars will elucidate what the estimable J. Hoberman called her "genius to distinguish 47 varieties of blankness." Will there be ivory blankness and off-off white blankness and opaque blankness as well as blank opaqueness? We hope so! (Just remember... Crayola had a blue-green color as well as a green-blue color!) The street date is only four months away so mark you calendars.

Only $110.00. And free shipping!

[DarkImbecile]

Kenya Barris’ You People is objectively mediocre, a largely harmless bauble doing a half-assed job at both romantic comedy and culture clash social commentary — but I find myself being more irritated with it than it probably deserves because the comedic potential of a cast led by Eddie Murphy, Jonah Hill, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus is so tantalizing. Instead, Murphy is barely allowed to be funny at all as the hard-assed straight man, Louis-Dreyfus has to abandon her acerbic intelligence in favor of dim-witted naïveté, and Hill’s cutting sarcasm is largely neutered by his character’s amiable meekness.

Hill is a bored, loveless finance drone and aspiring culture podcaster who falls for Lauren London’s costume designer — I use her job as a descriptor because the script offers little else to characterize her — but both find their engagement challenged by their respective future in-laws. This story has the opportunity to actually be as dangerously funny and cutting as it pretends to be, but it regularly veers away from its sharper edges: for example, despite the prominence of Louis Farrakhan and Kanye West to the narrative, the film never gets around to actually addressing antisemitism in favor of a “white guy surprisingly can play basketball” scene.

There are set-ups that made me laugh — a red hoodie-wearing Hill noticing the blue dress code in the barbershop Murphy brought him to, Louis-Dreyfus claiming their Guatemalan housemaid doesn’t view working for her as a job — but there are rarely any payoffs to the situational humor that aren’t obvious, clichéd, or watered-down enough to keep any laughter rolling into the next scene. All that said, and for as much as I have enjoyed his more dramatic work of late, it was good to see Hill find an outlet for his substantial comedic talent; hopefully his next effort on that front will have a bit more bite.

[DarkImbecile]

I'm a bit of a sucker for blood-soaked habits and sinister choral soundtracks, so I was already inclined to see Consecration even before I realized that the writer/director was Christopher Smith, whose Triangle has developed a bit of a cult following around here (though I still haven't caught up with it myself). Throwing in Jena Malone in a lead role was enough to seal the deal, so I ventured out to check out the Thursday preview for this last night.

What starts off as a fairly standard supernatural religious mystery — right around the time she starts experiencing some odd visions and inexplicable happenings, Malone learns that her estranged brother has ended his time as a man of the cloth by stabbing another priest and throwing himself off a cliff — grows weirder and more complicated as she journeys to the isolated Scottish convent to investigate. It becomes clear that her brother was involved in the search for an ancient relic that the fundamentalist religious order is obsessed with, and that all this has something to do with a horrific episode they experienced as children. The flashbacks to this traumatic incident are the most effective horror element of the film, with Ian Pirie delivering quite a performance as Malone's father; much of the rest of the bloody and/or eerie elements are undercut by their familiarity, the limitations of the budget, or both.

Still, when Smith eventually lays all his cards on the table, it becomes clear that even the more blandly generic jump scares and character moments earlier on were given a little more thought than it first appeared, granting much of the rest of the film a retroactive bump to the upper edges of mediocrity. Malone does the standard "aloof skeptic gradually accepting an alien worldview" role well enough, as does Janet Suzman as the stern and mysterious mother superior; Danny Huston is a little more of an awkward fit as a Vatican priest sent to investigate the deaths and reconsecrate the church.

It's possible I'm being more generous to this than it deserves because you don't often see nunsploitation outside the faith-based possession sub-genre these days, and in my book a movie that kicks off with an elderly nun sticking a revolver in someone's face earns a longer leash for its failings than your average low-budget horror. There is also one nicely executed camera trick involving a mirror early on — which came as a surprise given the clearly limited production values Smith and a cinematographers are working with — that put me in a more receptive mood than I might otherwise have been, and the brisk pacing kept that feeling from fading too much before the climactic payoffs.

[DarkImbecile]

Charlie Kaufman’s 20-minute phone-shot short film Jackals & Fireflies

[DarkImbecile]

[*]A Gerard Butler action thriller set in and around a plane called — wait for it — Plane

I find this title even more amusing after seeing that it's called Mayday or Extreme Alert in much of the rest of the world, neither of which are good titles but still an order of magnitude more memorable.

On the one hand, as someone with some nostalgia for the simple pleasures of the half a dozen mid-budget, hard-R action movies we used to get every year back in my day, I actually enjoyed the straightforward simplicity of this screenplay: plane is flown by sensitive (because his wife died and he has a daughter) but tough (because Gerard Butler) pilot, plane has to carry an extradited fugitive (Mike Colter), plane gets struck by lightning, plane lands on island in the Pacific controlled by hostage-taking rebels, plane and pilot and fugitive save the day by killing a bunch of guys. This is a solid foundation on which to build a passable action movie.

The problem arises with the execution, from the late-90s CGI (why show the plane from the outside at all if you can't make it look any better than another Q1 studio tax writeoff from 25 years ago?) to the mostly limp action sequences (there's little less exhilarating in action filmmaking than cutting from medium shots of non-specific guys firing guns to medium shots of other non-specific guys falling down and back and forth for three minutes straight). Jean-François Richet, whose career has gone nowhere after the somewhat interesting Vincent Cassel-led Mesrine films, puts exactly two worthwhile kinetic moments together — one a long brawl early on, the other the use of a .50-caliber sniper rifle — amidst several more pedestrian sequences featuring assault rifles, sledgehammers, and RPGs.

To damn with faint praise, I liked this substantially more than most Butler vehicles — largely because it keeps its regressive politics deeper under the surface than the Has Fallen movies — but it's so insubstantial that even that minor victory doesn't amount to anything approaching a good movie, action or otherwise.

[DarkImbecile]

The meanest, nastiest, and dumbest entry of the series, Scream VI tries to break out in new directions alternately promising (slashering in New York!), half-baked (new rules for franchises!), and insipid

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(a new number of killers!).

None of these angles pay off — the primary use of the city comes in a bland, overly drawn out subway scene — and the methods and motivations of the killer(s?) are somehow both a retread of those in earlier entries and more asinine than ever.

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A major plot point requires you to believe that non-independently wealthy characters were able to buy a large building in Manhattan and fill it with evidence from previous serial killings; another requires buying into a faked death and swapping of corpses in the midst of an active crime scene.

Even those poor screenwriting choices wouldn't have totally ruined the experience were it not for something I didn't realize was so vital to these films until it was gone: not specifically Neve Campbell's presence but the vulnerability and raw response to trauma she delivers in these films, which helps balance out the sadism and cruelty in a way that is sorely lacking here. None of the actors here (and/or the writing of their characters) elicit anything close to the sympathy Campbell does in the best of these films, and that lack of personality dulls the whole experience into a noisily pointless cacophony of ridiculous killings.

Probably time to put this series to rest for a decade or two until David Gordon Green picks it back up.

[Fiery Angel]

The movie was shot in Montreal, not NYC--even the subway scene.

[DarkImbecile]

Yes, I neglected to mention how obvious it was that the only actual footage of the city were the drone shots of bridges and skylines

[Toland's Mitchell]

After enjoying Scream 4 and 5 as passable horror entertainment, I realized those movies worked because of their 10-year gap after their previous installments. Despite the fact they didn't venture very far from the established franchise formula, they felt justified in their 'updating of the rules' to reflect the changing trends in the horror genre. Thus, when Scream VI was announced as an immediate follow-up only a year after 5, coupled with the loss of Neve Campbell, I had my skepticism going into this newest entry. However, when VI opened to even higher praise than last year's Scream, I thought maybe it really did pull off the difficult feat of one-upping its predecessor. Unfortunately that was not the case. DI is right. These new sister characters, the Sidney Prescotts of the last two films, don't evoke the same level of sympathy. This is not to say it's completely absent. It's there, but too sparse to be memorable (especially in the franchise-record 120-minute runtime) while the performances are weak compared to Campbell's. But I think what bugged me most about VI was how overly safe it felt. As I mentioned, 4 and 5 seemed like contemporary updates that lightly tweaked the Scream formula to see fit, but VI never had the space nor desire to take one step off the beaten track. This resulted in multiple scenes feeling like less interesting rehashes of what we saw in earlier films. The most egregious example was after the second killing, when the group gets together and one of them makes the predictable speech: 'This is where we're at in the movie, these are the ground rules, and these are the suspects.' Not only was this scene a dull retread, but it was completely pointless because it concluded with 'nobody is safe and everybody's a suspect.' So why even have the scene in the first place? I suppose it's simply too embedded in the franchise to leave out. I will commend VI for having an interesting opening, and maintaining my interest with some well-shot suspense sequences. But in the end, it was too formulaic and too safe for my liking,

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exemplified by the very ending when three characters had life-threatening abdominal stab wounds, but all three miraculously survive. For one, that seems near impossible to believe. And two, I thought the 'rule' was legacy characters were now disposable? Apparently not.

[DarkImbecile]

For 25 years now, Guy Ritchie efforts have consistently (barring a single Madonna-driven outlier) bounced back and forth between two distinct tracks: A) modest, dialogue-heavy crime movies that at their best (like 2020's The Gentlemen) can be enjoyable showcases for actors enjoying a mix of loquacious tough-guy posturing and dorm-room dark humor, and B) mediocre-to-shitty big budget studio hackwork. His latest, the unfortunately-titled, long-delayed bomb Operation Fortune: Ruse de guerre, is an attempt at combining the two by bringing some of his recurring players (Jason Statham, Hugh Grant, Eddie Marsan) into a B-grade riff on a globe-hopping spy movie.

After a nebulous MacGuffin is stolen from a South African research lab to be sold on the black market, a freelance spy agency run by Cary Elwes and led by superagent Statham is contracted by the British government to chase it down with, inexplicably, a movie star played by Josh Hartnett, resulting in a series of frictionless heist/action setpeices in handsome villas, luxury yachts, and tech industry compounds across the world. There's basically never any real threat to any of the protagonists — particularly Statham, who I don't think any of the numerous henchmen ever lay so much as a finger on in the half-dozen fight sequences and shootouts — and the film barely cares about its own stakes, so any enjoyment has to be gleaned from the largely sedate banter between the cast, which also includes a wasted Aubrey Plaza and Bugzy Malone.

The film's lone bright spot is Hugh Grant leaning into his sleaziest, smarmiest tendencies as a criminal broker playing all sides. In addition to getting most of the best lines, Ritchie favors him when the climax finally rolls around — for all of Statham's largely boring traditional heroics, it's Grant who gets the standout loquacious tough-guy posturing scene. There's obviously not a chance in hell for a sequel to this, but the only version that could even halfway work is one centered around Grant and dropping the rest.

[DarkImbecile]

Without a shred of news in 27 months, I'm not holding out hope for The Brutalist any more, at least not with the same cast/crew

This has apparently finally started production, and indeed with at least several different cast members

[DarkImbecile]

Scott Beck and Bryan Woods' 65 feels like a bit of a throwback to the genre trash of the '90s, mid-budget calendar-fillers anchored by a single recognizable star and designed to be easily consumed and just as easily forgotten by 13-year-old boys. Adam Driver is as committed to bad material as one can be, but the direction is so flat and indistinct that no matter how intense the physical and emotional strains they pile on him, none of it generates much investment or interest. A high concept idea like this — an interstellar astronaut crash lands on Earth in the twilight moments of the era of dinosaurs — should be able to distract the audience from its more implausible and contradictory notes, but the script and direction instead can't seem to help but draw attention to its weakest points.

Deeply disappointing that such a disposable sci-fi thriller wants to indulge in the lamest kind of audience manipulation — from plinking piano notes underscoring trite emotional moments to uninspired jump scares to piling on the kind of weak suspense that relies on everything happening at the... exact... last... possible... moment — but can't even deliver the cheap pleasures you'd expect from those. Also deeply disappointing to learn that highly advanced civilizations on the other side of the galaxy also have brutally capitalist health care systems.

[J Wilson]

Renfield seems better suited to a SNL-type five minute skit than a feature length film, given its premise of Renfield finally realizing he's in a toxic work relationship with his boss, who happens to be Dracula, and going to support meetings to commiserate with others like him. While at least getting things over and done with in 93 minutes, it does stretch its premise too far, with its mishmash of elements never coming together. Being a Universal film, we get Nic Cage and Nicholas Hoult re-creating shots from the 1931 Browning Dracula, which is one of the highlights, minimal as that might be. Cage doesn't have a ton to do, as Dracula isn't much of a character beyond being a murderous bully, but he seems to be having fun doing it. One of the movie's conceits is Renfield's bug eating gives him short-term super-strength (the script is by comic book writer Robert Kirkman), so we get several scenes of him annihilating various people (lots of CG heads and limbs being punched or ripped off), including a couple dozen cops during one set piece. Aside from Awkwafina's stridently honest Officer Quincy, every single cop in the movie is in bed with the mafia, which gives us the eye-rolling scene of

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the chief cop refusing to work with the mafia any longer once they ally themselves with Dracula, as if that's a step too far. And then he gets his head ripped off.

[hearthesilence]

During the UK's second lockdown in late 2020, Ralph Fiennes decided to memorize T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets and then stage a one-man show on it. Kino is now distributing a filmed performance of it directed by his sister, Sophie Fiennes. (And Jesus, what an accomplished family they have, perhaps more impressive than even the Van Dorens).

They showed a preview yesterday at IFC and it kind of shows the challenges of filming poetry over an extended period of time. I got the impression creating a cinematic work based on a theatrical interpretation of a literary masterwork seemed to compound the challenges twice over. This was especially apparent in the sequences where we cut away to the outside world - although Eliot's words are always the primary focus, they also demand great attention and concentration, at least to fully appreciate them (especially since you're not reading at your own pace and given the luxury of pausing or doubling back to really absorb their carefully-crafted lines), and I have to say the outside footage either diminished the effect of those words or simply drew enough of your attention away from them that it was arguably distracting. Regardless, it's great to hear this poetry in a performance, but I often found myself looking away from the screen and simply listening.

[DarkImbecile]

Like most, I enjoyed John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein's Game Night quite a bit back in 2018 — the mix of humor and style felt promising, as did their deft management of an eclectic group of actors — so I wasn't particularly reluctant when my kids asked to see their new film, which seemed to bring a similarly witty, dialogue-heavy sensibility to a playful take on fantasy tropes. Those elements are there in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, but the humor feels less lively and character-based and more perfunctory, the kind of generically sarcastic banter you'd get in a Marvel movie without any edge or weight.

There's an overstuffed, potential franchise box-checking quality to the film as a whole — have to make sure each character archetype and game function gets a moment onscreen, of course — that crowds out the unexpected turns that made Game Night feel fresh. Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Hugh Grant, and company are all fine at delivering the jokes and playing out the action sequences, but their characters are so broad that none of them pop the way Rachel McAdams or Jesse Plemons did.

When they're not being played for laughs, the fantasy and action elements are mostly cheap-looking and not particularly thrilling, while the primary villain is the standard boring evil sorcerer who needs a magic bauble to achieve their monstrous plan and can only be defeated with other magic baubles... and the power of teamwork. The result is a blandly agreeable, extremely forgettable, and unavoidably disappointing absorption of a pair of promising comedy directors into the lower tiers of the franchise factory.

[soundchaser]

Conversely, I thought this was perhaps the worst performance I've ever seen Hugh Grant give. "Blandly agreeable" is how I'd describe the rest of it -- which feels at odds with the source material's method of allowing things to take wild narrative turns. I've only played a handful of sessions, but there was nothing here that felt "D&D" rather than "generic fantasy."

[brundlefly]

I don't know, having exposition yelled at you for two hours may be a little like reading a D&D manual. "Overstuffed" is definitely the word I'd reach for, and though I want to be charitable toward the enterprise and say that a sequel, having established characters etc., might be more appealingly breezy in tone, that's not the inclination here. At some late point they revisited some backstory element to add a twist and all I remember about any of that is the groan I let out. Compounding the busywork of it all is the non-stop camerawork, an occasional element of Game Night that is here aggressively desperate. But then there it felt like they had more confidence to sit back and watch the ensemble.

Weirdly the only one I thought who came out of this shiny was the Bridgerton dude, perhaps because his character served his purpose, didn't add to the quip factor, and got out when he could. But some gags stuck (enjoyed the Pythonesque march through the graveyard), and at least the whole Plan A/B/C/D of it led to a solidly used (though telegraphed)

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variation on the Silence of the Lambs-style cross-cut misdirection.

[dekadetia]

Thought I'd throw in some quick capsules of a couple of recent watches in the festival circuit:

Slow (Marija Kavtaradze):
Sensitive, candid, intentional filmmaking is the stock in trade of Marija Kavtaradze's Slow. Deploying a style that takes its cue from Joachim Trier's Oslo Trilogy while turning its lens with pinpoint precision on the topic of asexuality, Slow pulls no punches and offers no easy answers, but every beat feels earned and genuine. The film's motif of imperfect corporeality is driven home by physically visceral performances by Greta Grineviciute and Kestutis Cicenas and high grain, textured cinematography. Every difficult subject deserves this sort of patience and care.

Chronicles of a Wandering Saint (Tomás Gómez Bustillo):
There's a lot going on in Chronicles of a Wandering Saint's 85 minutes: the audacious expression of a first-time filmmaker, the poised minimalist performance of a veteran actress, flights of humorous and absurd surrealism, and genuine emotion and empathy are all coursing and colliding in a picture that defies easy categorization but works surprisingly well. Imagine a mashup of Petite Maman and Uncle Boonmee with a dash of The Bishop's Wife and you're part of the way there. Modern Argentinian cinema has so much to show us, time and again; I can't wait to see what Tomás Gómez Bustillo has next in store.

Midwives (Léa Fehner):
Where many filmmakers might be compelled to make the action rise to some specific dramatic catastrophe, Léa Fehner keeps her delivery room drama Midwives grounded in the work. Thus our narrative isn't an arc as much as an accumulation of stressors which overwhelm in their multitude and ceaselessness. Excellent, naturalistic performances abound, and newcomer Khadija Kouyaté is excellent. Midwives is a simultaneously inspiring and dispiriting story about systems gone rotten with apathy and of people so driven that they sacrifice self-care to make up the difference.

[therewillbeblus]

Darla in Space

I was lucky enough to catch the world premiere of this surreal gem at IFF Boston this evening. An impressive directorial debut from Eric Laplante and Susie Moon, the film is centered around the insanely talented Alex E. Harris, who gives a multifaceted performance that could best be described as a mesh between Kristen Wiig, Aubrey Plaza, and Andy Kaufman - animated, introverted, hilarious, sad, with lived-in authenticity and theatrical absurdity. This extends to the narrative and tone as well, which can be best described as if Peter Strickland and Quentin Dupieux adapted Her, only shot with a loose, formal intimacy - and instead of a lucid soft meditation on love with AI, the human lead exploits a pancake of sentient kombucha mother resembling HAL from 2001, for its superpower to provide mind-blowing orgasms in order to to pay off her IRS debt.

Yes, you read that right. In some ways this functions as your typical 'indie offbeat love story complementing personal empowerment' about realising one's potential, and coming to realize that feelings, connection, and finding one's passion and purpose are more important than introverted preoccupations with societal expectations. It's also a pretty novel (anti-)social satire, that extends to the capitalist value in commercializing vehicles that provide quasi-spiritual experiences via relief. The filmmakers don't take the expected position of shaming this route, though, and allow the personal growth to coexist without negating the value in this system of alleviating loneliness and providing pleasure (despite the plot description, this is not meant to be restrictively 'sexual' in nature, and the filmmakers confirmed this in the Q&A).

Eric Laplante, Susie Moon, and Alex E. Harris were in attendance for a post-screening conversation, and while they deliberately approached the project “light on regencies,” they did list a few that offered insight into the intended style. For instance, Being John Malkovich was a reference point, because it was 'a realistic look at capturing unrealistic content', The Man with Two Brains for the human/non-human interplay, and, unsurprisingly, they cited Deerskin as pivotal for inspiring them to make this (which originally was written as an “expensive version” that would never have been funded) since Dupieux demonstrated that one could make an idea like this work on a minimal budget.

So far there's really no information on this out there, but I hope it gains traction and more people get the opportunity to see it soon. Also, if I haven't sold it enough already, you get to see Thomas Jay Ryan, Henry Fool himself, have a ball playing his own version of Dougie Jones like four times.

[therewillbeblus]

Without a shred of news in 27 months, I'm not holding out hope for The Brutalist any more, at least not with the same cast/crew

This has apparently finally started production, and indeed with at least several different cast members

Production reportedly wrapped on May 5th according to crew members' social media accounts

[tenia]

The problem arises with the execution, from the late-90s CGI (why show the plane from the outside at all if you can't make it look any better than another Q1 studio tax writeoff from 25 years ago?)

I saw the movie a few days ago and still chuckle thinking about these shots. The movie has a terrible digital look more often than it should (including its grading at times, which a shame considering most of it is supposed to take place in a very sunny jungle), but these shots of the (literally titular) plane are something you'd expect to see in the cheapest made-for-TV-in-the-90s sequel of The Langoliers's.

Jean-François Richet, whose career has gone nowhere after the somewhat interesting Vincent Cassel-led Mesrine films, puts exactly two worthwhile kinetic moments together — one a long brawl early on, the other the use of a .50-caliber sniper rifle — amidst several more pedestrian sequences featuring assault rifles, sledgehammers, and RPGs.

There's a very interesting interview with Richet in the French BD's extras where he clearly exactly knows what he's doing with these 2 sequences :
* for the brawl, he explains that there are just too many Hollywood movies in which fist fights are too cut, so they all resemble each other, so he thought that not cutting into it would make it more memorable, and shooting it close to Butler would make the viewers feel closer to the intensity of the fight. He thinks that it did succeed, and I think he's right.
* he also says that it's his job, as a director, to illustrate quickly but efficiently what is happening, while balancing the level of graphical violence just before it becomes impossible to sustain for the viewer. With the .50 rifle, he explains how he does it : first, shooting the car to explain why this rifle is special, then showing it one 1 guy, and then the movie can go faster on the next bad guys because it's OK, the viewers have understood what it does, though Richet chose to make it much less impactful than what is says happen IRL with such a rifle.

It makes all the more surprising how pedestrian and predictible and uninspired is every other action sequences in the movie (save for what I felt was an effectively-shot use of the sledgehammer).

The meanest, nastiest, and dumbest entry of the series, Scream VI tries to break out in new directions alternately promising (slashering in New York!), half-baked (new rules for franchises!), and insipid

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(a new number of killers!).

I read a tweet from someone stating how "The best horror is ALWAYS good drama first : Black Phone tackled abuse, Barbarian cancel culture, Smile depression and Megan adoption.", to which I pointed out these might be bad examples if thinking about "best horror", and got flooded with responses like "I'm sure you didn't like Scream 5" (yup that was bad) followed by "Scream 6 is wonderful but you'd probably hate it too since it's clear you just hate movies" (yup, I wrote "I don't think Black Phone, Barbarian, Smile and Megan are good movies" and got told "you just hate movie").

This prompted me to check by myself if Scream 6, which got quite a good critical feedback in the States but really not in France, and no surprises it's awful.
What surprised most are :
* how incapable it is to apply to itself the "rules" it spends its time repeating again and again. It's striking how it's supposedly meta about how slashers are formulaic and predictable, yet it's one of THE most formulaic and predictable recent slasher I saw, to the point the revelations at the end were no revelation at all.
* how crually brutal it is. Scream's franchise always walked a fine line between graphic violence and showing it in a gratuitous and complacent way : this clearly felt gratuitous and complacent. The attack in the flat mid-movie and the fate of one of the characters not only requires you to accept

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the character gets pretty much her belly open on 25 centimeters but still go ahead with the rest of the scene barely limping, but then gets predictably disposed - I guess the script realised at some point she should die anyway - but in a brutal crual fashion, with the garbage-dump-bump at the end of the drop followed by the gory shot of her smashed face because it seemingly wasn't enough.

Everything else is just a franchise running on fumes but hey, it still makes money so if people are dumb enough to ask for more, why not ?
This, and how "supposedly in NY but clearly not so spends 99% of its time trying to hide this" the movie looks. Some of the shots reminded me of Satan's Blade, in which some shots are just close-ups of walking feet in order to hide where it's actually shot.

[Mr Sausage]

Weird how film twitter has decided horror films need some conceptual apparatus to be good. Is this Ari Aster’s influence? His first two films are good because they’re allegories for concepts like mental illness or toxic relationships. But Smile and Barbarian? While I did ultimately like them, their underlying concepts were the weakest part. A haunting passed on to witnesses is not a good analogue for depression, and the cancel culture stuff in Barbarian sticks out less for being good than for not being integrated into the surrounding film. Also neither of those latter two are good dramas (well, maybe the latter’s opening third, but definitely not Smile). But that’s ok, because horror films work when they approach the state of nightmare. It Follows, the movie Smile most wanted to be, does have a conceptual apparatus behind it, but tries not to make too much of it because the reason its so effective and horrifying is due to how inexplicable a nightmare it seems.

[tenia]

Weird how film twitter has decided horror films need some conceptual apparatus to be good.

In some respect, I understand what he meant, which was that it rarely hurts horror movies to have a proper writing too, with fleshed out characters and, why not, a backstory offering for relatable subjects.

However, indeed, these examples seemed very far-fetched or over-analysis to me as, except probably Black Phone, they only very superfically deal with their supposed "deeper drama". Megan and adoption ? Please : the movie is a lazy studio-tentative to modernise movies like Child's Play. Orphan First Kill probably deals more with such a subtext, but it's also a quite bad movie (I'd argue it's a more interesting one than Megan though, as it at least often seems aware of how dumb it is), so I guess that's why it wasn't chosen to illustrate the original take. And Barbarian tackles cancel culture for what feels like 2 minutes and a half.

It also shows how that's not easily correlated, and actually, my original point was... these aren't "best horror" to begin with, but mostly mediocre movies. I found Megan to be quite bad (in a "very generic studio tentative of doing a mainstream horror movie on what is a fatigued trope), I disliked Black Phone which felt way too long (and not that smart), and Barbarian definitely felt way less surprising that what people told me it'd be (though it probably is the best from those 3) (from Disney Star, I preferred Fresh, though it's far from a masterpiece either).

That's what I realised during this discussion : I was told as a counter-argument that there were all those great recent horror movies, but then, the list I was given included Halloween Kills and Ends, Scream 5 and 6, TCM 22, Firestarter, Studio 666, Paranormal Activity Next of Kin, Spiral and Forever Purge, and I was wondering what the hell was happening in the US that someone would try and tell me I'm the issue because look at all those great recent horror movies like FREAKING SPIRAL (which is laughably awful, but really, it got me laughing more than plenty of- bad - comedies).

It made me think of all the MCU movies that are scoring 8.5/10 on RT in the US but are mostly getting 3.2/5 in France.

[Mr Sausage]

Funny, as there are recent horror films that fit their bill, like The Night House and Resurrection, where the strength of the acting and drama is well above the requirements of the genre and, at least in the case of the former, superior to the actual horror elements. Yet your twitter compatriots seem unaware of them. Even Ti West’s last two horrors, tho’ I know you didn’t like them, have more going on in them than any of the films mentioned in your list.